The Last Train to London Page 10

  Truus handed the baby to Klara and took the girl up in her arms, then stooped to her brother’s level. “Sheryl, Jonah,” she said, meeting each child’s gaze directly so they could see that she was being honest. “I know it’s frightening to be separated.” I know how frightened you must be, she’d thought to say, but that wouldn’t have been the truth; she could only imagine how terrifying this must be for a child who’d already lost her parents. She might just take them home with little Adele Weiss, her rare little flower, but Joop was right: if they started taking in orphans, it would be difficult to continue her trips to Germany.

  Perhaps this would be her last trip anyway, though, with her own country’s border now closed, no more entry visas to be had.

  She removed her intertwined ring and separated its two bands. “This ring was given to me by someone I love as much as you two love each other,” she said to the siblings. “Someone I can’t bear to be separated from either. And yet I have to leave him sometimes, to help those who need my help.”

  “Like us, Tante Truus?” the boy said.

  “Yes, wonderful children like you and Sheryl, Jonah,” she said.

  She took the girl’s hand and put one of the bands from the ring on her thumb, a reasonably good fit, then placed the other on her brother’s middle finger—a bit loose. She said a quick prayer that the ring bands wouldn’t fall off and get lost, this gift from Joop that she never could wear comfortably after losing her first baby and yet couldn’t bear to take off and put away. Hope was such a fragile thing.

  “When I come to collect you to take you to your new home—and I promise I will find a family to take you both—you must give this ring back to me, all right? Now then, go on and find your bunks.”

  As they set off, she reached in her coat pocket for her gloves, feeling oddly exposed without her ring. She was just pulling one on when Klara van Lange rejoined her. She had not realized, as focused on the siblings as she was, that Klara had gone off.

  “Well, they’re all being settled,” Klara said. “I had half a mind to take that little Adele home with me.”

  Truus pulled on the second glove. She carefully fastened the pearl buttons, buying time to gather herself. “They’ve taken Adele too?” she managed.

  “Who wouldn’t love such a beautiful child?” Klara said, her voice perhaps as unsettled as Truus’s own heart. “But then the time would come when I would have to hand her back over to her mother, and I couldn’t bear that, to let go of a child I’d fallen in love with. Could you, Truus?”

  Hitler

  Stephan climbed a streetlamp to better see. People everywhere—on the streets and in the windows and on the rooftops, on the Burgtheater steps and filling Adolf-Hitler-Platz, the newly renamed Rathausplatz—waved Nazi flags and offered Nazi salutes, all of Vienna throbbing with cheering as church bells pealed. Hitler stood in an open car, holding the windshield and waving. Two long lines of cars followed him up the Ringstrasse as soldiers, some in sidecar motorcycles, held back the crowd. The car turned in at the Hotel Imperial and Hitler stepped out onto a red carpet, greeted a few people, and disappeared through the fancy doors. Stephan watched—the empty car, the closed door, the shadow-men moving into a well-lit second-floor suite—all the while clinging to the lamppost, above the throng.

  HITLER SAT ON a couch in the Royal Suite’s high-ceilinged main room, its red drapes and white and gold furniture in a bit of disrepair. There were finer places to stay in Vienna, but he wouldn’t have them.

  “In the days I lived here, the Viennese had a sentimental way of saying, ‘And when I die, I want to go to heaven and have a little hole among the stars to see my fair Vienna,’” he said as his inner circle settled around him and Julius Schaub knelt before him to remove his shiny black boots. “But to me, it was a city going to decay in its own grandeur. Only the Jews made money, and only those with Jewish friends or willing to work for Jews made a decent living. I, and a lot like me, nearly starved. I used to walk past this hotel at night when there was nothing else to do and I hadn’t even money to buy a book. I’d watch the automobiles and the coaches drive up to the entrance and be received with a deep bow by the white-mustached porter. I could see the glittering lights of chandeliers in the lobby, but even the porter wouldn’t deign to speak to me.”

  Schaub brought him a glass of warm milk, and Hitler took a sip. Others ate. They were welcome to all the food and drink they wanted, so long as no one smoked.

  “One night after a blizzard, I shoveled snow just for money for food,” he said. “The Habsburgs—not Kaiser Franz Josef, but Karl and Zita—stepped out of their coach and grandly walked over a red carpet from which I had cleared the snow. We poor devils removed our hats every time aristocrats arrived, but they didn’t even look at us.” He settled back into the sofa, remembering the sweetness of the women’s perfumes even in the frozen air as he’d shoveled snow. He’d been nothing more to those women than the slush he cleared.

  “This hotel hadn’t even the decency to send out hot coffee for us,” he said. “All night long, each time the wind covered the red carpet with snow, I’d take a broom and brush it off. And each time I’d glance into this brilliantly lit hotel, and listen to the music. It made me wish to cry, and it made me angry, and I resolved that someday I would come back to this hotel and walk over the red carpet myself, into the glittering interior where the Habsburgs danced.”

  * * *

  The Vienna Independent

  * * *

  BRITAIN MOVING TO CLOSE ITS DOORS TO JEWISH IMMIGRANTS

  * * *

  Most other countries have already limited immigration

  BY KÄTHE PERGER

  March 15, 1938 — Amid the collapse of the London Stock Market on the news of Germany’s seizure of Austria, the British prime minister has asked his cabinet to impose an entrance visa requirement for all citizens of the Reich.

  The British Council for German Jewry, with the support of the Rothschild and Montagu banks, has long provided a financial pledge to allow Jewish refugees to emigrate to England without the threat of becoming a financial burden on the British public. But with the German occupation of Austria comes the fear of millions of arrivals, for which financial support would not be feasible.

  Britain has also suspended immigration of all Jewish labor to Palestine until economic conditions improve. By order of William Ormsby-Gore, the British secretary of state for its colonies, no more than 2,000 Jews of independent means will be admitted to the colony in the next six months.

  Truus at the Bloomsbury Hotel

  As Truus and Joop entered an office marked “Central British Fund for German Jewry” in London’s Bloomsbury Hotel, an impeccably dressed woman rose to greet them. “Helen Bentwich,” she said, her voice smooth with wealth softened by social responsibility. “And this is my husband, Norman. We don’t stand by formalities in this work, unless you insist.”

  Truus, in no position to insist on anything, responded, “This is my husband, Joop. What would we do without them?”

  “Quite a bit more than we do with them, I suspect!” Helen said, and they all laughed.

  Yes, Truus thought, instantly comfortable in this elegantly just-this-side-of-decay office with its improbably well-used Rococo writing desk and table, its worn tapestry chairs: this Helen Bentwich was, like dear Mr. Tenkink at The Hague, someone who would never say no to those who needed help if there was any possibility of yes. Helen’s family, the Franklins, were bankers like Joop, only more so, part of the Anglo-Jewish “Cousinhood” of Rothschilds and Montagus that included not just powerful men—heads of banks and businesses, barons and viscounts, members of Parliament—but also women of influence. Her mother and sister had been prominent suffragettes, and Helen herself, who’d worked as the Manchester Guardian’s Palestine correspondent when her husband was the colony’s attorney general, was now an elected member of the London County Council.

  “You don’t have to persuade us of the need to find homes for these children,�
� Helen began as she cleared a chair of papers and invited them to sit. “But we’ll need to move quickly.”

  Norman had just been part of a delegation received by the prime minister and home secretary to consider the plight of the Reich’s Jews—a delegation that included Lionel de Rothschild and Simon Marks, the Marks & Spencer heir.

  “No one doubts the benefits of admitting immigrants like their fathers,” Norman said. “Without Marks & Spencer, where could we buy British-made-only gifts our wives can always exchange for their own better choices?”

  He and Joop chuckled.

  “But with this new flood of refugees . . . ,” he continued. “It’s a devil’s choice: how to remain as humane as possible without . . . Well, we must be realistic. We can’t risk an anti-Semitic response here in England.”

  “But these are children,” Truus said.

  Norman said, “The government fear that if children come, their parents will follow.”

  Truus said, “But these children are orphans,” feeling the queasiness again, the fear that she would fail them.

  Helen, with a discreet hand to her husband’s arm, said, “There are thirty?”

  “You’ve changed your mind, Truus?” Joop asked with the same hopefulness he’d shown the night he’d given her the intertwined ring, the hope for the baby she might have borne if only she’d eaten one thing or not another, or stayed in bed, or been more careful.

  Truus said reluctantly, “There are thirty-one.”

  Helen tapped a single finger lightly on her husband’s arm, a gesture so small that Truus might have missed it if Norman hadn’t immediately stood and asked Joop to join him outside for a cigarette, saying, “As my Helen says, the ladies accomplish quite a bit more without us.”

  The two left, appearing a minute later on a terrace, where they settled at a charming little wrought-iron table amid bare branches, tired grass, and brown flower beds, the blooms of Bloomsbury not evident this early in the year.

  “The thirty-first child is a baby without papers,” Truus told Helen. “Her mother was one of the women who delivered the children to us in Germany.”

  “I see,” Helen said. “And you are . . . considering adopting the child?”

  Truus watched through the window as Norman offered Joop a cigarette, surprised to see her husband accept.

  “I meant to go back to Germany for the child’s mother,” she said, “but Joop says—Joop says rightly—that if Adele’s mother could leave, she would have. That if we keep the child . . . It’s a ‘devil’s choice,’ as your husband says: I can help rescue more children, or I can mother this one, but it would be unfair to risk leaving her motherless again even if I could bear the possibility. And she does have a mother.”

  “One who loves her enough to give her away,” Helen said.

  She set a hand on Truus’s, the gesture so filled with understanding that it made Truus wonder why she hadn’t thought to touch Adele’s mother this warmly, to understand.

  Truus stood and went to the window, beyond which Joop and Norman chatted easily as they smoked. When she turned back, she noticed atop some papers on Helen’s desk a lovely snow dome inside of which was an empty Ferris wheel and, beside its ticket booth, a snowman. She lifted the glass globe and turned it upside down, setting off a little snowstorm.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, realizing her presumptuousness.

  “I have forty-three of them at our house in Kent, many of them Wiener Schneekugels from Vienna, as is that one,” Helen said. “A bit of an obsession, I’m afraid.”

  “And yet you keep only this one here in your office,” Truus said.

  Helen smiled sadly, a concession that this snow dome held special meaning, leaving Truus to wonder what it might be.

  “My mother had one of the first ever made, with the Eiffel Tower inside. From Paris—1889,” Helen said. “My father didn’t like us to touch it, but my mother used to let me, and it would make me giggle every time to promise not to tell.” Again, the sad smile. “Truus, I know it isn’t my business, but . . . You look as queasy as I felt when . . . Well, I don’t have children, but . . .”

  Truus tasted the ruby at her lips as she touched her belly with her other hand, the one that still held the snow dome—realizing only as she did so that Helen was right, she was again expecting. Or had she known already, really, or suspected? Could she not face it alone, with no one to tell? Amsterdam was a smaller city than one might imagine, and even the most discreet of friends might inadvertently spill the secret to Joop.

  “Then keeping this German child, Truus . . . ,” Helen said gently. “Isn’t your devil’s choice already made for you?”

  The tears sprang at her name spoken so gently. It was something, always, to be addressed by name so comfortingly. Her name and the trying not to think of that: a child growing up without her mother to feed her, to bathe her, to read to her from her favorite book and sing her to sleep.

  She dabbed with her handkerchief, saying, “I’ve never . . . Oh, Helen. But I can’t possibly tell Joop, can I? He couldn’t bear to lose another baby.”

  Helen Bentwich stood and joined her, setting a steadying hand on her arm again as, outside, Joop knocked the growing ash from his cigarette.

  “Believe me when I say I know how heartbreaking it is to lose any child,” Helen said.

  Joop’s voice drifted up through the closed window, his laughter.

  “Joop would have us keep Adele,” Truus said.

  They watched together as their husbands stubbed out their cigarettes and turned back to the door.

  “I’ll find a safe place for this little Adele,” Helen said. “I can promise you that.”

  Truus said, “I don’t think it’s the child’s safety Joop would mean to preserve in keeping her.”

  The Gates of Hell

  Stephan slipped through the crowded Heldenplatz, Žofie-Helene’s hand solidly in his lest the two of them get separated in the mob. The palace grounds were more crowded even than when Vienna mourned the death of Chancellor Dollfuss, men in hats like any decent fellow from Vienna might wear, and women too, circling from the horseman statue out as far as you could see. “One People! One Reich! One Führer!” The words might well echo through Stephan’s head for the rest of his life. Only the road under the arch and into the palace grounds was cleared, the crowd held back there by soldiers as Stephan pulled Žofie along to the statue of Hercules and Cerberus, then cupped his hands to give her a boost. She scrambled up the stone and over Cerberus’s three heads to straddle Hercules’s neck, her thighs pressing into the hero’s beard and stone shoulders, her shoes dangling in front of the massive stone chest. Stephan climbed up behind her and sat in the crook between the highest of the beast’s raised snouts and Hercules’s shoulder. If he leaned toward Žofie, he could see around the bus in the midst of the crowd to the balcony where Hitler was to speak.

  Žofie reached down, her hand inadvertently brushing Stephan’s thigh as she stroked one of the stone beast’s three snouts, her mouth close to Stephan’s ear now, so that when she said, “Poor Cerberus,” it was painfully loud.

  “When you’re this close, you don’t have to shout,” Stephan said more measuredly into her ear, inhaling the scent of her—something grassy and fresh. “And poor Cerberus? He’s a flesh-eating beast who keeps the dead trapped in the underworld, Žofe. Eurystheus ordered Hercules to capture the creature because he couldn’t possibly succeed at it; no one had ever returned from the Underworld.”

  Žofie said, “I don’t think you can blame a mythical creature for being what the plot of the myth calls on him to be.”

  Stephan considered this. “Or them? Is Cerberus a him or a them?”

  He drew out his journal from his coat pocket and made a note about mythical creatures serving plots that needed them. He’d like to have written about the smell of Žofie-Helene, and the way his palm in hers fit like a jigsaw puzzle, but he only fixed them in his mind to note later, when she wasn’t there.

  She s
aid, “This is one of the best bits of our friendship: the things I say going into your journal to show up later in a play.”

  “You know no one else says things like that, Žofe?”

  “Whyever not?”

  Her face was close enough that he might stretch his neck up like the beast underneath him, and kiss her.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  He used to think he knew so much, before he met Žofie-Helene.

  She sat up straight again, to observe, and Stephan did too, but always with one eye to her. He was making notes in his journal—about the day and the crowd, the Nazi flags flapping in the stiff breeze, the old Austrian heroes honored in stone statues now surrounded by what seemed to be all of Vienna crowded into the square—when a motorcade entered the plaza through the arches from the Ringstrasse. Hitler stood in straight-armed salute in an open car, the sharp echo of his shadow following along beside him. The crowd surged, exploding into straight-armed salutes and a great roar of joy, which settled into a chant of “Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!” Stephan watched silently, a fear bubbling in his chest as the car circled the stone Prince Eugene and came to a stop. As the führer entered the royal palace, Žofie watched as silently as he did, through smudged lenses.

  “We don’t say those kinds of things because we aren’t as sure as you are that we’re right, Žofe,” he said quietly, his voice too low for Žofie to hear over the chanting crowd. “We say what everyone else says, or we say nothing at all, so we won’t look like fools.”

  “What?” Žofie-Helene responded, the single inaudible word discernible from the movement of her lips as Hitler stepped up to the microphones on the palace balcony and began, “As führer and chancellor of the German Nation, I report before history the entry of my homeland into the Reich.”