The Last Train to London Read online

  “Stop it, you fool,” Eichmann commanded, but the boy had given over to his lust.

  “Dieterrotzni!” an older boy yelled.

  The younger boy turned, still with the pistol pointed. The older boy took it from him.

  “You nearly killed me, snot nose,” the older boy said.

  The boy shrugged, then lifted a metal chair and began to beat the machine with it.

  One is Always Greater Than Zero

  Žofie-Helene was at the breakfast table with Mama, Grandpapa, and Jojo when the stomping of boots filled the building’s stairway. Mama quietly stood, went into the bedroom, and lifted the little rug at the end of her bed. With the rug came the floorboards beneath it, fashioned on an invisible hinge. She climbed into the narrow space between their floor and the ceiling of the apartment below.

  “You don’t know where your mother is, you understand?” Grandpapa said to Žofie and Jojo as Mama pulled the hiding place closed. “She’s out covering a story, remember, just as we’ve practiced.”

  At a rap on the apartment door, Žofie looked in alarm at her mother’s coffee cup and porridge bowl.

  Her grandfather answered the door to a swarm of Nazis.

  “What can I do for you gentlemen?” he asked.

  Johanna sat, terrified, at a table that now had only two settings. Žofie stood filling the sink with water, suds just covering her own and her mother’s bowls, still full of porridge, and her mother’s coffee mug.

  “Käthe Perger,” a man in a greatcoat demanded.

  The German shepherd that had come in with him sat at the doorway, perfectly still.

  “I’m sorry, Käthe is out, Obersturmführer Eichmann. May I be of help?” Grandpapa answered calmly.

  Johanna began to cry for their mother. Žofie hurried to soothe her, her hands dripping soapy water across the floor.

  The Nazis swarmed the apartment, opening closets and searching under beds, while Eichmann interrogated Grandpapa, who continued to insist that Mama wasn’t there.

  In Mama’s bedroom, a Nazi stepped onto the rug.

  “Grandfather Perger,” Žofie said.

  Otto glanced toward her. She had never in her life called him Grandfather Perger, although of course that was who he was. She blinked back at him, willing him to see the Nazi so close to her mother, to do something to stop the man lifting the rug.

  “I tell you, she is out, covering a story!” Grandpapa shouted at Eichmann—shouted so loudly and disrespectfully that even the dog turned. “She is a journalist, one of the keepers of the truth. Do you not care for your country enough to want to know the truth of what happens here?”

  Eichmann put a pistol to Grandpapa’s temple. Grandpapa stood as perfectly still as Žofie-Helene did. Even Jojo didn’t move.

  “We are not Jews,” Grandpapa said quietly. “We are Austrians. Loyal members of the Reich. I am a veteran of the war.”

  Eichmann lowered his pistol. “Ah, the father of the dead husband,” he said. He turned to see everyone watching him. He seemed to like that, the power of being able to do whatever he wanted while everyone looked on.

  He met Žofie-Helene’s gaze and held it. She knew she was meant to look away, but she couldn’t have done so even if she wanted to.

  He sheathed his pistol as he approached her. He reached out and touched Johanna’s arm, brushing hers as well.

  “And you must be the young daughter who studies at the university?” he said to Žofie.

  Žofie answered, “I’m enormously talented at mathematics.”

  The man laughed an irregular nonagon of a laugh, all sharp angles and unmatched lines. He reached out for Johanna’s cheek, but she turned away, burying her face against Žofie’s chest. Žofie wished she were as young as her sister, that she could bury her face in someone stronger. She had never missed Papa more.

  Eichmann touched Johanna’s hair more gently than Žofie would have imagined he was capable of.

  “You will be as pretty as your big sister,” he said to her turned head, “and what you may lack in intelligence, you will perhaps make up with a modesty your sister lacks.”

  He leaned closer to Žofie, uncomfortably close, and said, “You will give your mother a message for me. You will tell her that Herr Rothschild is happy for us to use his little palace on Prinz-Eugen-Strasse. He assures us the Jews are as interested in leaving Vienna as we are in helping them to do so, and he is content to have his home used by the bureau for Jewish emigration. He has, he finds, more homes than he needs. While he appreciates your mother’s concern, he wishes to assure her that further press on the matter will not benefit him—or her. Nor will it benefit you or your sister. Can you remember that?”

  Žofie repeated, “Herr Rothschild is happy for you to use his little palace on Prinz-Eugen-Strasse. He assures you the Jews are as interested in leaving Vienna as you are in helping them to do so, and he is content to have his home used by the bureau for Jewish emigration. He has, he finds, more homes than he needs. While he appreciates Mama’s concern, he wishes to assure her that further press on the matter will not benefit him, or her, or Johanna or me.”

  The man laughed his ugly laugh again, then turned to the door and said, “Tier, I believe we may have met your match.”

  “ŽOZO, I DON’T like that man,” Johanna said as Otto watched through the window, needing to be sure the Nazis were good and gone. He watched them pile into their cars, an aide holding the door for the dog, and drive off around the corner. And still he watched, sure they would return.

  Finally he pulled the curtain, turned out the light, and lifted the rug in the bedroom. Käthe emerged from her hiding place and, without a word, wrapped her arms around Žofie and Jojo.

  “Käthe,” Otto said, “you must give up your writing. Really you—”

  “These people are being stripped of everything, Otto,” Käthe interrupted. “They’re being left with nothing but exit visas and the hope that someone from overseas will pay their way to Shanghai, the only place left with doors open to them.”

  “I can support you and the girls. I can give up my apartment and move in here. It would be easier and I would feel—”

  “Someone has to stand up against the wrongs, Otto,” Käthe said.

  “You can’t win this alone, Käthe!” he insisted. “You’re only one person!”

  Žofie-Helene said quietly, “But one is always greater than zero, Grandpapa, even if zero is more interesting mathematically.”

  Otto and Käthe both looked at her, surprised.

  Käthe kissed the top of her daughter’s head. “One is always greater than zero. Yes, that’s right,” she said. “Your papa taught you well.”

  Kristallnacht

  Another of the chilly little room’s lightbulbs flared and went dark as Stephan contemplated his last pawn, afraid to look across the chessboard to his father trying to ignore the chaos raging outside. They’d done their best to restore the room’s door to functioning, securing the wood frame with the retrieved bent nails and wedging old newspapers into the gaps, but still the stomping of boots downstairs on the main floors reached them through the crushed doorframe, while the outside came in—the noise and the cold—through the single thin window of the servants’ sitting room.

  He glanced up to see Mutti in her wheelchair, huddled under a blanket as she had been since the noise outside began, not long after four that morning. “Mutti,” he said, “why don’t you let me move you to the chaise, or even to bed?”

  “Not now, Stephan,” she answered.

  Stephan rose from the table, removed his gloves and set them beside the chessboard, and put another coal in the brazier, a lame attempt to make a dent in the chill. It was no warmer in his parents’ bedroom, the next-door servant’s room, from which they’d removed the door trim to make the passageway wide enough to accommodate Mutti’s wheelchair. There was not enough coal to light all three braziers, or even enough, really, to do more than keep this one very slightly aglow.

  “I’m
just going to make sure we closed the window in Walter’s room,” he said.

  “Our room,” Walter said. If his little brother didn’t love their new accommodations any more than Stephan did, still he was thrilled that they now shared a bedroom.

  “You just checked it,” Papa said.

  But already Stephan was in the little room, from which the door trim had also been removed. He took another quick look out the window, to riotous young men smashing storefronts, with no one stopping them. A man across the street was hauled out of his building. Stephan thought it was Herr Kline who used to own the newsstand, although he couldn’t be sure with the mob around him. They loaded him into an open truck already filled with men.

  Stephan felt more than saw Walter appear beside him.

  “Hey, Wall,” he said, lifting his brother before Walter could see what was happening.

  He returned to the sitting room and its shade-drawn window, to the table and the chessboard where, without giving it much consideration, he moved his last remaining pawn forward one square to threaten his father’s rook. His father slid his queen on the diagonal, capturing the pawn and Stephan’s last chance to replace his lost queen. He knew he ought to concede. He could see he was defeated, and his father had taught him that if you could see how a game would end, whether you would win or lose, you should end it; chess was not about winning or losing, but about learning, and if you knew how a game would end there was nothing left to learn. But to end the game would be to return to the chaos outside and the stomp of boots now on the palais stairs. It made Stephan nervous, the sound of all those Nazis in rooms that used to be theirs. He would have said he’d grown used to it, but there was so much activity tonight, so many voices rising up to the servants’ floor.

  “Herman, Stephan, out on the roof quickly!” his mother whispered in alarm just as he registered the boot steps not just on the main floors now, but rising toward them.

  Stephan opened the window, scrambled out onto the ledge, and, using the caryatid beside the window for a foothold, hoisted himself up onto the roof. He leaned back over to give his father a hand. His father teetered, losing his balance.

  “Papa!” he said in hushed alarm, pushing his father back toward the tired little servant’s room so he wouldn’t fall. “Papa, here, take my hand,” he said more calmly, urging his father to regain his balance and try to climb out through the window again.

  “Go!” his father said. “Go, son!”

  “But, Papa—”

  “Go, son!”

  “But where?”

  “If we don’t know, we can’t say. Now hurry! Don’t come back unless you’re sure it’s clear, you must promise me. Don’t put your mother at risk.”

  “I— Hide, Papa!”

  “Go!”

  “Play the ‘Ave Maria’ when it’s safe for me to come back. It’s on the Victrola.”

  “It may never be safe,” his father said, pulling the window closed, inadvertently leaving it open a crack.

  “Herman!” Mutti urged.

  Stephan, hanging over the roof’s edge with his head upside down, watched through the window as his father climbed into the wardrobe. Walter closed the door behind their father—Walter who was far too young to have any idea what was happening and yet, despite all their attempts to shelter him, already did.

  After just a second, his father opened the wardrobe and pulled Walter in with him.

  As Mutti wheeled her chair over—thankfully, she was still in the chair—and secured the wardrobe’s door, Stephan reached down and nudged the window farther open. If the Nazis followed him out onto the roof, he might get away. If they opened the wardrobe, his father was doomed.

  Doomed. Stephan touched his lower lip, the unevenness where the split had healed imperfectly. Yes, he knew what these men were capable of.

  He lay listening to the banging on the door, the invading of the apartment, the demanding, “Your husband, where is he?” He didn’t think the Nazis would take a boy as young as Walter; they wouldn’t want the trouble. But again and again, the Nazis went beyond what he could imagine they would do. Still, he couldn’t help Mutti if he too was taken, and Mutti would not survive without help.

  He scampered quietly across the roof toward the tree outside his old bedroom window and looked down through the tree branches. On the sidewalk below, a soldier patrolled with an ugly beast of a dog. It wasn’t the dog’s fault, though. The dog was only trying to please its owner. That was what dogs did.

  A Night Out

  Truus sat with Klara van Lange at the check-in table at the Groenvelds’ house on Jan Luijkenstraat, where they were holding a fund-raiser for the Netherlands Children’s Refugee Committee, the small sort of gathering often being hosted these days—although less often now that the weather had turned and a garden party was out of the question. The bins for donations sat behind them in the entry hall, heaped with clothes. The last couple had now been checked in. The dinner preparations seemed to be going along without incident, leaving Mrs. Groenveld free to stand by the check-in table, greeting guests. Truus watched as the youngest Groenveld boy was carted back to bed by his father, in this house where she so often brought the children from Germany. Somewhere in a drawer or a cabinet here was the comb they had used to remove lice from the hair of that little Benjamin (what had his surname been?) before deciding finally just to shave his head. Really, there had been nothing else to be done.

  Dr. Groenveld returned to join his wife and Truus herself and Klara, who was visibly with child now. The good doctor began telling them of some boy named Willy Alberti, whom the Groenvelds had heard sing somewhere. Joop joined them too as they were hearing of the accomplishments of the Groenvelds’ oldest son at the sport of fierljeppen, as if an ability to vault over a ditch using a long pole were something a young man ought to spend time practicing. But everyone was laughing at the story Mrs. Groenveld was telling about a vaulter ending up in the water at some past contest—which was apparently the fun of watching the sport.

  Joop, beside Truus, was laughing and laughing, and Truus was laughing too. It was good for the soul, to laugh with friends.

  When the story was ended, Joop, who was known for his enthusiastic, if less than elegant, dancing, said to Truus, “Well, my bride, at the risk of making myself tonight’s sport amusement, would you perhaps dance with me? I promise to try not to vault right into the water, and I apologize in advance to your toes.”

  A waltz was playing, and Truus always did love a waltz.

  “Do go, Truus,” Klara said. “You’ve been doing nothing all evening but working while everyone else is enjoying themselves.”

  Papa

  Stephan lay flat on the roof, watching and listening, too shocked to be cold. All around the city, flames rose up into the sky, buildings burning, and yet there were no sounds of sirens, no fire trucks. How was that possible? Some blocks away, in the direction of the old Jewish neighborhood, a new flame leapt up and, with it, a cheer so raucous that Stephan could hear it even from this far away.

  On the street below, a truck waited, its open bed filled with silent men and teenage boys. Rolf, who now opened the palais doors for Nazi visitors and, in inclement weather, held his umbrella over their heads, bowed to the Nazi thug who climbed from the truck. It seemed a lifetime before three Nazis emerged through the doors Rolf held open for them. Papa was not with them.

  The Nazis joined the driver, lighting cigarettes and laughing together.

  Rolf again opened the door.

  Papa emerged first this time, followed by a Nazi holding a Luger to his head.

  The soldier with the dog opened the back gate of the truck, and two of the men in the truck bed reached down to give Papa a hand.

  Papa turned to the soldiers. “But you don’t understand,” he said. “My wife, she is sick. She is dying. She can’t—”

  A soldier raised a club overhead and brought it down on Papa’s shoulder. Papa fell to the sidewalk, the dog barking angrily at him as the soldier sw
ung the club at his leg, and again at his arm, his stomach.

  “Get up,” the soldier demanded, “unless you want to see what dying really is.”

  The whole world seemed overcome with silence, the soldiers and the men and boys in the truck and even the dog seemingly suspended in that moment, while Papa lay unmoving.

  You must do what they say, Papa, Stephan thought as hard as he could, as if he might move his father to do so out of sheer unspoken will. You can’t give up like I did in the park. Realizing only as he thought it that it was true. Ashamed of his own willingness to give up. Would he even be alive if that old couple hadn’t helped him?

  Papa rolled over onto his side, screaming in pain. The dog, barking fiercely now, lunged toward him, stopped only by the length of his leash.

  Papa brought himself up to kneeling, then slowly crawled toward the back of the truck. When he was close enough, two of the men reached down again, each taking one of Papa’s shoulders. They hoisted him to his feet and held him upright. A third man reached out and put his arms around Papa’s waist and dragged him up into the truck, others crowding back to give him room. Papa lay faceup, unmoving in the truck bed.

  Stephan fought the urge to climb to the roof’s edge so that his father might see him, to call out to Papa that he must not fight them, he must just survive.

  The soldiers slammed the truck closed again, penning in his father, who disappeared from Stephan’s sight now among the boys and men. The driver climbed back in, and the engine sputtered to a start.

  Stephan watched silently as the truck headed down the long arc of the Ringstrasse, toward the canal and the river. It slipped in and out of sight behind trolleys and trucks and kiosks, finally disappearing altogether. Stephan watched the emptiness of the chaos left in its wake, the flames around the city and the cheering crowds, the impossibly mute fire trucks.

  Waiting