The Last Train to London Read online

  Dedication

  FOR NICK

  and in memory of

  Michael Litfin

  (1945–2008),

  who carried the stories of the

  Kindertransport to my son,

  who carried them home to me,

  and

  Truus Wijsmuller-Meijer

  (1896–1978)

  and the children she saved

  Epigraph

  I remember: it happened yesterday, or eternities ago. . . . And now that very boy is turning to me. “Tell me,” he says, “what have you done with my years, what have you done with your life?” . . . One person of integrity, of courage, can make a difference, a difference of life and death.

  —Elie Wiesel, from his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, delivered in Oslo on December 10, 1986

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part I: The Time Before

  At the Border

  Boy Meets Girl

  Rubies or Paste

  Candles at Sunrise

  Searching for Stefan Zweig

  The Man in the Shadow

  A Little Breakfast Chocolate

  Chalk on Her Shoes

  The Liar’s Paradox

  The Most Massive Typewriter Ever

  Seeking

  Klara Van Lange

  Through a Window Glass, Darkly

  Self-Portrait

  Bare Feet in Snow

  Exhibition of Shame

  Along the Quay

  Diamonds, Not Paste

  Motorsturmführer

  Choices

  The Mathematics of Song

  Kipferl and Viennese Hot Chocolate

  A Fumbled Code

  Typing Between the Lines

  Chaos Theory

  Empty Dance Cards

  The Anschluss

  Part II: The Time Between

  After the Refusal to Dance

  Choices

  Cleaning Day

  The Card Index

  The Problems You Fail to Anticipate

  The Shame Salute

  Intertwined

  Hitler

  Truus at the Bloomsbury Hotel

  The Gates of Hell

  Removal

  The Jewish Question in Austria

  At the Ferris Wheel

  Letting Go

  Friendships Come and Go

  Reading

  A Kindness

  Confession

  Pretending

  The Simplest Thing in the World

  Chrysalis

  Raised Hopes

  The Cost of Chocolate

  The White Sheets of Death

  At the Border

  A Distraction

  The Servants’ Floor

  Release

  Old Friends

  —Sara—

  Raid

  One is Always Greater Than Zero

  Kristallnacht

  A Night Out

  Papa

  Waiting

  The News

  The “Ave Maria”

  Fighting Fires

  No Escape

  Abandoned

  Nothing More Than a Name

  The Twins

  Begging for Papa

  Searching for Papa

  The Boy With Chocolates in His Pocket

  Princess Power

  Bloomsbury, England

  A Woman of Vision

  Polished Boots

  Empty Drawers

  The Westminster Debate

  Exit, No Visa

  Viscount Samuel’s Appeal

  Wishes Big and Small

  Otto

  Searching for Stephan Neuman

  The Cloak

  The Dagger

  All the Ink

  I Promise

  The Leopoldstadt Ghetto

  Vienna

  Not Within Our Purview

  A Very Good Boy

  Walter

  The Hotel Bristol

  No Way Out

  At the Canal

  Hiding in Shadow

  The Cell

  The Interrogation Begins

  The Promise

  The Interrogation Continues

  And Now, Your Skirt

  Arranging the Last Laugh

  The Shape of a Foot

  An Entertainment

  A Woman From Amsterdam

  Any Child Who is in Danger

  Our Different Gods

  Paper Trail

  Binary

  Though Banish’d, Outcast, Reviled

  Even Apart

  Packing

  Leave-Taking

  Numbers

  Necklace

  A Seventeen-Year-Old Jewish Boy

  The Other Mother

  Five Hundred

  Damp Diapers

  Tjoek-Tjoek-Tjoek

  Disappearing Twins

  Children, Unnumbered

  The Eichmann Paradox

  Hiding Infinity

  In Another Direction

  Carl Füchsl

  Together

  Dismantling

  At the Hotel Metropole

  The Lights of Harwich

  Harwich

  Dovercourt

  An Exit Visa of Another Kind

  Part III: The Time After

  Rabbit Number 522

  Nineteen Candles

  The Unchosen

  Another Letter

  On the Beach

  Just a Baby on a Train

  Brothers

  The Kokoschka Paradox

  At the Prague Train Station, September 1, 1939

  Newnham College, Cambridge

  London Liverpool Street Station: September 3, 1939

  Paris: May 10, 1940

  Ijmuiden, the Netherlands: May 14, 1940

  Part IV: And Then . . .

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Meg Waite Clayton

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Part I

  The Time Before

  DECEMBER 1936

  At the Border

  Stout flakes softened the view out the train window: a snow-covered castle on a snow-covered hill ghosting up through the snowy air, the conductor calling, “Bad Bentheim; this is Bad Bentheim, Germany. Passengers continuing to the Netherlands must provide documents.” Geertruida Wijsmuller—a Dutchwoman with a strong chin and nose and brow, a wide mouth, cashmere-gray eyes—kissed the baby on her lap. She kissed him a second time, her lips lingering on his smooth forehead. She handed him to his sister then, and pulled the skullcap off their toddler brother. “Es ist in Ordnung. Es wird nicht lange dauern. Dein Gott wird dir dieses eine Mal vergeben,” Truus responded to the children’s objections, in their own language. It’s all right. It will be only for a few moments. Your God will forgive us this once.

  As the train heaved to a stop, the little boy leapt to the window, shouting, “Mama!”

  Truus gentled his hair as she followed his gaze out the snow-dirty glass to see Germans in orderly lines on the platform despite the storm, a porter with a loaded luggage cart, a stooped man in a sandwich board, advertising a tailor. Yes, there was the woman the child saw—a slim woman in a dark coat and scarf standing at a sausage vendor, her back to the train as the boy again called to her, “Maaa-maaa!”

  The woman turned, idly taking a greasy bite of sausage as she gazed up at the split-flap board. The boy crumpled. Not his mother, of course.

  Truus pulled the child to her, whispering, “There there, there there,” unable to make promises that could not be kept.


  The carriage doors opened with a startling clatter and hiss. A Nazi border guard on the platform reached up to help a debarking passenger, a pregnant German who accepted his help with a gloved hand. Truus unfastened the pearl buttons on her own yellow leather day gloves and loosened the scalloped cuffs with their delicate black accents. She pulled the gloves off, the leather catching on a ruby solitaire nestled with two other rings as, with hands just beginning to freckle and crepe, she wiped away the boy’s tears.

  She tidied the children’s hair and clothes, addressing each again by name but working quickly, keeping an eye on the dwindling line of passengers.

  “All right now,” she said, wiping the drool from the baby’s mouth as the last passengers disembarked. “Go wash your hands, just as we practiced.”

  Already the Nazi border guard was mounting the stairs.

  “Go on, go quickly now, but take your time washing up,” Truus said calmly. To the girl she said, “Keep your brothers in the lavatory, sweetheart.”

  “Until you put back on your gloves, Tante Truus,” the girl said.

  It was necessary that Truus not seem to be hiding the children, yet nor did she want them too close for this negotiation. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, she thought, unconsciously putting the ruby to her lips, like a kiss.

  She opened her pocketbook, a more delicate thing than she would have carried had she known she’d be returning to Amsterdam with three children in tow. She fumbled inside it, removing her rings as the children, now behind her, traipsed away down the aisle.

  Ahead, the border guard appeared. He was a young man, but not so young that he might not be married, might not have children of his own.

  “Visas? You have visas to leave Germany?” he demanded of Truus, the sole adult remaining in the carriage.

  Truus continued rooting in her bag as if to extract the required papers. “Children can be such a handful, can’t they?” she replied warmly as she fingered her single Dutch passport, still in the handbag. “You have children, Officer?”

  The guard offered an unsanctioned hint of a smile. “My wife, she’s expecting our first child, perhaps on Christmas Day.”

  “How fortunate for you!” Truus said, smiling at her own good fortune as the guard glanced toward the sounds of water running in a sink, the children chattering as sweetly as bramble finches. She let the thought sit with him: he would soon have a baby not unlike little Alexi, who would grow into a child like Israel or dear, dear Sara.

  Truus fingered the ruby—sparkling and warm—on the lone ring she now wore. “You have something special for your wife, to mark the occasion, I’m sure.”

  “Something special?” the Nazi repeated, returning his attention to her.

  “Something beautiful to wear every day, to remember a most special moment.” She removed the ring, saying, “My father gave this to my mother the day I was born.”

  Her pale, steady fingers offered the ruby ring, along with her single passport.

  He eyed the ring skeptically, then took the passport alone, examined it, and glanced again to the back of the carriage. “These are your children?”

  Dutch children could be included on their parents’ passports, but hers listed none.

  She turned the ruby to catch the light, saying, “They’re more precious than anything, children.”

  Boy Meets Girl

  Stephan burst out the doors and down the snow-covered steps, his satchel thwacking at his school blazer as he sprinted for the Burgtheater. At the stationery store, he pulled up short: The typewriter was still there, in the window display. He pushed his glasses up on his nose, put his fingers to the window glass, and pretended to type.

  He ran on, weaving his way through the Christkindlmarkt crowds, the smells of sweet mulled glühwein and gingerbread, saying “Sorry. Sorry! Sorry,” and keeping his cap low to avoid recognition. They were fine people, his family: their wealth came from their own chocolate business established with their own capital, and they kept their accounts always on the credit side at the Rothschild bank. If it got back to his father that he’d knocked down another old lady on the street, that typewriter would remain nearer the light-strung pine tree here in the Rathausplatz than the one in the winter gallery at home.

  He waved to the old man tending the newsstand. “Good afternoon, Herr Kline!”

  “Where is your overcoat, Master Stephan?” the old man called after him.

  Stephan glanced down—he’d left his coat at school again—but he slowed only when he reached the Ringstrasse, where a Nazi pop-up protest blocked the way. He ducked into a poster-plastered kiosk and clanged down the metal stairs into the darkness of the Vienna underworld, to emerge on the Burgtheater side of the street. He bolted through the theater doors and took the stairs by twos down to the basement barbershop.

  “Master Neuman, what a great surprise!” Herr Perger said, raising white eyebrows over spectacles as round and black as Stephan’s, if less snow-splattered. The barber was bent low, sweeping the last of the day’s hair clippings into a dustpan. “But didn’t I—”

  “Just a quick clip. It’s been a few weeks.”

  Herr Perger straightened his back and discarded the hair into a trash bin, then set the broom and dustpan next to a cello leaning against the wall. “Ah well, memory doesn’t fit as readily into an old mind as into a young one, I suppose,” he offered warmly, nodding to the barber chair. “Or perhaps it doesn’t fit as well into that of a young man with money to spare?”

  Stephan dropped his satchel, a few pages of his new play spilling out onto the floor, but what did it matter, Herr Perger knew he wrote plays. He shucked his blazer, settled in the chair, and removed his glasses. The world went fuzzy, the cello and the broom now a couple waltzing in the corner, his face in the mirror above his tie anyone’s face. He shivered as Herr Perger draped the cape around him; Stephan despised haircuts.

  “I heard they might be starting rehearsals for a new play,” he said. “Is it a Stefan Zweig?”

  “Ah, yes, you are such a fan of Herr Zweig. How could I have forgotten?” Otto Perger said, mocking Stephan somehow, but kindly, and anyway Herr Perger knew every secret there was to know about the playwrights and the stars and the theater. Stephan’s friends had no idea where Stephan got his inside scoops; they thought he knew someone important.

  “Herr Zweig’s mother still lives here in Vienna,” Stephan said.

  “Yet rarely does he advertise his visits from London. Well, at the risk of causing disappointment, Stephan, this new play is a Csokor, 3. November 1918, about the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. There has been quite a lot of whispering and intrigue as to whether it will even be performed. I’m afraid Herr Csokor must live with his suitcase packed. But I’m told it is going forward, albeit with the publicity to include a disclaimer that the playwright means no offense to any nation of the former German empire. A little of this, a little of that, whatever it takes to survive.”

  Stephan’s father would have objected that this was Austria, not Germany; the Nazi coup here had been put down years ago. But Stephan didn’t care about politics. Stephan only wanted to know who would play the lead.

  “Perhaps you would like to guess?” Herr Perger suggested as he turned Stephan toward him in the chair. “You are quite clever at that, as I recall.”

  Stephan kept his eyes closed, involuntarily shivering again even though, mercifully, no bits of hair landed on his face. “Werner Krauss?” he guessed.

  “Well, there you are!” Herr Perger said with surprising enthusiasm.

  Herr Perger turned the chair back to the mirror, leaving Stephan startled to see—blurrily, without his glasses—that the barber was not applauding his guess but rather addressing a girl emerging like a surrealist sunflower sprouting from a heating grate in the wall below Stephan’s reflection. She stood right in front of him, all smudged glasses and blond braids and budding breasts.

  “Ach, Žofie-Helene, your mama will be scrubbing that dr
ess all night,” Herr Perger said.

  “That wasn’t really a fair question, Grandpapa Otto—there are two male leads,” the girl said brightly, her voice catching somewhere inside Stephan, like the first high B-flat of Schubert’s “Ave Maria,” her voice and the lyrical sound of her name, Žofie-Helene, and the nearness of her breasts.

  “It’s a lemniscate of Bernoulli,” she said, fingering a gold pendant necklace. “Analytically the zero set of the polynomial X squared plus Y squared minus the product of X squared minus Y squared times two A squared.”

  “I . . . ,” Stephan stammered through the blush of shame at being caught staring at her breasts, even if she didn’t realize he had been.

  “My papa gave it to me,” she said. “He liked mathematics too.”

  Herr Perger unfastened the cape, handed Stephan his glasses, and waved away the cupronickel Stephan offered, saying there was no charge this time. Stephan stuffed the script pages back into his satchel, not wanting this girl to see his play, or that he had a play, that he imagined he might write anything worth reading. He paused, puzzled: The floor was completely clean?

  “Stephan, this is my granddaughter,” Otto Perger said, the scissors still in hand and the broom and dustpan beside the cello untouched. “Žofie, Stephan here may be at least as interested in the theater as you are, if somewhat more inclined toward tidy hair.”

  “Very nice to meet you, Stephan,” the girl said. “But why did you come for a haircut you didn’t need?”

  “Žofie-Helene,” Herr Perger scolded.

  “I was sleuthing through the grate. You didn’t need a haircut, so Grandpapa Otto only pretended to cut it. But wait, don’t tell me! Let me deduce.” She looked about the room, at the cello and the coatrack and her grandfather and, again, Stephan himself. Her gaze settled on his satchel. “You’re an actor! And Grandpapa knows everything about this theater.”

  Otto Perger said, “I believe you will find, Engelchen, that Stephan is a writer. And you must know that the greatest writers do the strangest things simply for the experience.”

  Žofie-Helene peered at Stephan with new interest. “Are you really?”

  “I . . . I’m getting a typewriter for Christmas,” Stephan said. “I hope I am.”

  “Do they make special ones?”

  “Special?”

  “Does it feel queer to be left-handed?”

  Stephan considered his hands, confused, as she reopened the grate from which she’d emerged and climbed on hands and knees back into the wall. A moment later, she poked her head out again. “Do come on then, Stephan; rehearsals are nearly over,” she said. “You won’t mind a little dirt on your ink-stained sleeve, will you? For the experience?”