The Last Train to London Page 18

  Abandoned

  Walter startled awake to silence and dawn light. He climbed from Mutti’s lap, cranked the Victrola to restart the music, and retrieved Peter Rabbit from the floor.

  Nothing More Than a Name

  Stephan watched the palais from the shadows near the newsstand, which now offered copies of Der Stürmer sporting a big-nosed cartoon caricature of a black-bearded man lifting the tail of a cow on a World Bank pedestal, around which money bags were littered. The chaos had settled into a bleak morning, the thugs no doubt sleeping off their foaming rage. Still, he moved carefully, guardedly, wondering where Herr Kline was and whether the newsvendor might be with Papa, until finally Walter emerged from the palais.

  Stephan followed a half block behind him, keeping close to the buildings and with his cap low, comforted just to see his little brother walking to school. At the wide stone steps, Walter was shunned by the other boys, but at least they weren’t tripping him and laughing when he fell, at least they weren’t swarming around him, chanting, “Jew. Jew. Jew.” Stephan watched and listened, knowing there was nothing he could do to help Walter, knowing he ought to back away lest he be drawn into defending his brother. That would do neither of them any good.

  A Nazi at the top of the school steps stopped Walter at the door.

  “But it’s my school,” Walter objected.

  “No Jews.”

  Walter, confused, studied the man frankly. “We celebrate Christmas just like you do,” he told the man, words their mother might have used.

  “Tell me your name, boy,” the man demanded.

  “Walter Neuman. And your name, sir?” Walter said politely.

  “Neuman, the Jew chocolate maker.”

  Walter took a step back, and then another, as if from a rabid animal. With surprising dignity, he turned and patiently descended the steps. Stephan, feeling ashamed at his own cowardice, slipped back into the shadow of a building until his brother reached the corner.

  “Wall-man,” he whispered.

  Walter’s face lit like the chandeliers in the main entryway of the palais that had been their home, that would be their home again, Stephan told himself. He wrapped his arms around Walter, pulling him out of the vile Nazi’s sight, saying, “It’s okay. It’s okay.” His brother had never smelled so sweet.

  “We played the music, but you didn’t come home,” Walter said. “Dieter put the Victrola back up, and after he left, we played the music.”

  “Dieter did?”

  “He said not to tell anyone,” Walter said. “That man said I couldn’t go to school. Mutti would want me to go to school.”

  He pulled his brother to him again, this boy who had been so young just two days before. “She would, Wall. You are such a good boy.”

  Walter said, “Do you think Mutti would wake up if we brought her something to eat?”

  “How long has she been sleeping?” Stephan asked, working to keep the alarm from his voice. What if it wasn’t sleep?

  “She couldn’t get into the bed and I’m not big enough to help her out of the wheelchair. I got Rolf to help move her this morning. It made him grumpy.”

  “Don’t worry about Rolf, Wall. He’s always grumpy.”

  “He’s more grumpy now.”

  “We all are. Listen, Walter, I want you to do something for me. I want you to go back home to Mutti. Don’t tell Rolf or anyone else that you’ve seen me. Whisper to Mutti that I’m okay, that I can’t come back in daylight but I’ll be back tonight, I’ll come up the tree and through the window. Tell her I’m going to get Papa a visa. Tell her I’m going to get us all visas.”

  “You know where Papa is?”

  “I’m finding out.”

  “What is a visa?” his brother asked.

  “Just tell Mutti,” he said.

  “I want you to tell her.”

  “Shhhh!” Stephan said, looking around nervously.

  “I want to go with you,” his brother said more quietly.

  “All right,” Stephan said. “All right. I could use your help today anyway. But first I need you to go tell Mutti I’m okay. Don’t admit to anyone else you’ve seen me, but tell Mutti. If anyone else asks you, tell them you forgot something you need for school.”

  “My new pencil?” Walter said. “I was saving it for you, Stephan, in case you needed it to write a new play.”

  “Your new pencil,” Stephan agreed, hugging his generous little brother to him, thinking of all the pencils he’d forgotten at all the café tables where he used to order coffee and a pastry without a thought.

  He watched surreptitiously as Walter walked past Rolf and into the palais. He kept watching, as if he might be able to do anything if his brother was questioned. He barely breathed the whole time, afraid that Walter wouldn’t return, that the Nazis in the palais would come out and arrest him, that Walter would return to say he couldn’t tell Mutti because Mutti wouldn’t wake.

  When Walter emerged, looking for all the world like a young boy on his way to school again with a new pencil in hand, Stephan pulled his brother to him.

  “I whispered to Mutti,” Walter said, “and she woke up and she smiled.”

  THE LINE, WHEN they reached the American consulate, was impossibly long, but Stephan couldn’t risk taking Walter home and returning again. He could barely risk standing in this line, but there was no alternative.

  “All right, Wall-man,” Stephan said. “Hit me with a word quiz.”

  “Peter Rabbit is better than me at English,” Walter said.

  “But you’re awfully good at it too, Wall,” Stephan assured him. “Go ahead.”

  IT WAS DARK outside the consulate windows when Stephan, holding a sleeping Walter over his shoulder, took a seat across the desk from a gourd-headed American with wire spectacles. Mutti would be worried, but there was no choice; they couldn’t put to waste all that time standing in line just because it had been the end of the school day, or late afternoon, or dinnertime.

  “I’d like to apply for a visa for my father, please,” he said.

  The consulate employee frowned at him. “Not for yourself and your—”

  “My father has already applied for us.”

  Patience, he told himself. Patience. He hadn’t meant to sound so abrupt.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Sorry.”

  “And your mother?” the man asked.

  “No, I . . . She’s sick.”

  “It takes time. Perhaps she’ll be well—”

  “She won’t be. She won’t get well. That’s why we haven’t left before, because Papa wouldn’t leave Mutti. But now he has no choice.”

  The man took off his spectacles and studied Stephan. “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I . . .”

  “My father, he needs a visa immediately. We can wait, but he’s been sent to a work camp. We think he’s been sent to a camp. And if he has a visa, they might let him leave Austria.”

  “I see. Do you have family in the United States? Anyone who could give you an affidavit of support? It goes much faster if you have family to vouch for you. Otherwise it can take years.”

  “But my father can’t leave if he has nowhere to go.”

  “I really am sorry. We’re doing the best we can, working until ten every night, but . . . I’ll take your information. If you can find someone to vouch for you, come back and I’ll get it added to your file. It can be anyone.”

  “But I don’t know anyone in America,” Stephan said.

  “It doesn’t have to be family,” the man said. “People . . . We have telephone books here from New York, from Boston, from Chicago—all over America. You can use them anytime. You can note the addresses of people who share your name and write to them.”

  “To strangers?”

  “It’s what people do.”

  * * *

  THE VIENNA INDEPENDENT

  * * *

  NAZI VIOLENCE AGAINST JEWS

  * * *

  Synagogues burned, Jewish businesses vandalized, thousa
nds arrested

  BY KÄTHE PERGER

  November 11, 1938 — Some thirty thousand men throughout Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia have been arrested in the last twenty-four hours simply because they are Jews. Many were severely beaten, and several have reportedly died. The men have, apparently, been transported to labor camps, although the details of this are not yet known.

  Women have also been arrested, although in fewer numbers, and indications are that the women arrested here in Vienna are all being held somewhere in the city.

  More than 250 synagogues throughout the Reich were destroyed by fire. All Jewish businesses have been shuttered, if they still have shutters, if they haven’t been smashed to bits . . .

  The Twins

  Truus knocked a second time at the door in the Alster section of Hamburg, having come by overnight train in response to a frantic letter received by the committee. A Dutch Jewish family had written on behalf of relations that two babies were in danger from the Gestapo in this beautiful house in this lovely neighborhood. How Mr. Tenkink had managed to get Dutch entry papers for these twins despite the ban, she didn’t know. She supposed the children’s relations must be well connected, although not so well connected as to have obtained German exit papers too. How they got out of Germany was in Truus’s hands.

  She tapped the brass door knocker a third time. It was opened by a sleepy-eyed nurse still in her nightclothes. Truus introduced herself and explained why she had come.

  “For the babies?” the nurse said.

  Had she come to the wrong address?

  “The missus doesn’t receive anyone before ten in the morning, and certainly the babies are too young to receive visitors on their own,” the nurse said.

  Truus stuck her boot heel in the threshold before the woman could close the door. “I have come from Amsterdam at the request of your mistress’s relations, to rescue the babies.”

  “To rescue them?”

  “You’d best get your mistress for me.”

  Truus held the nurse’s gaze until the nurse opened the door.

  “I WAS QUITE frightened when I contacted my aunt,” the twin’s mother explained to Truus as they sat together, finally, in the library. “If I exaggerated, it was from real fright.”

  Truus allowed the silence to grow uncomfortable. She rose then and pulled from the shelves two volumes she’d seen while she waited for the woman—stories by Stefan Zweig and Ernest Hemingway—and placed them firmly in front of the woman. “If you are so very frightened,” she said, “you might start by taking the precaution of at least hiding that which would bring the wrath of the Gestapo down on you.”

  “Oh, well, they’re only books,” the woman said.

  Truus smoothed the skirt of her navy-blue pinstripe suit and, with it, her anger. “The children have not been mistreated by the Gestapo?”

  “They have not,” the mother said unapologetically.

  “You might ask yourself if they’re safe with a mother who will, in a moment of fear, invent for her children a horror other children are truly experiencing, wasting resources that would save other children’s lives.”

  “You must not have children, or you would understand! None of us are safe here,” the woman wailed, her composure gone and in its place the same pleading expression Truus had seen on the face of Adele’s mother at the train station, the same expression she felt in her own guilty heart.

  Truus turned away, to the empty space on the bookshelf. “You must see the position you have put me in,” she said softly. “I’ve come on an overnight train with permission to bring two abused babies to safety on an emergency basis. If I show up at The Hague with two perfectly healthy children who have suffered no harm, I will lose my credibility. And if I lose my credibility, that will be the end of my ability to help any child.”

  “I’m sorry,” the mother said. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t imagine . . .”

  “We don’t always, do we?” Still thinking of Adele, and of her own lost children, still thinking of what she would have done to save all the babies she’d lost even before they were born. “I’m sorry I cannot help you, I truly am,” she said. “Your nurse might be able to get your babies to safety in Switzerland. People seldom question a nurse crossing a border with children who aren’t hers. They can’t imagine a mother would want so desperately to get her children to safety that she would turn them over to someone else’s care with the possibility that she will never see them again.”

  OUTSIDE AGAIN, TRUUS searched in her handbag for the address of the Dutch consul-general in Hamburg. She no longer needed this Baron Aartsen’s help getting the twins out of Germany, but she was here, and dressed for Hamburg too in her suit and her blue pumps, her yellow gloves and a flamboyant hat she wore because even the Gestapo tended to be daunted by a woman in a flamboyant hat. She might as well salvage something of the journey by introducing herself to the man. He might prove helpful somewhere along the way.

  “ARE YOU HERE AT LAST?” the baron asked without so much as a greeting or introduction when she was shown into his office.

  His words so startled Truus that she turned to see if someone else might be behind her. But it was only the two of them, Truus and this friendly-faced, prematurely gray-haired aristocrat.

  “I’ve been waiting for you,” he said.

  Truus touched a gloved hand to her hat, as if her balance might be found in its brim. There had been no safe way to alert him that she was coming to collect the babies, and no point in it. She’d been given his address and told to contact him if she had trouble getting the babies across the border, without any assurance that he could help if she did.

  “But however did you know I would come?” she asked.

  “It was high time for a good woman from the Netherlands to come help us out here, wasn’t it? Do come with me.”

  Truus, tamping down her astonishment, fell in beside him, chatting amiably as he led her to the chancellery. There, the waiting room was overrun with Jewish mothers and their children, all waiting to appeal for papers to the Netherlands.

  He called for the attention of the mothers, most of whom had already turned toward them.

  “This is Geertruida Wijsmuller,” he said. “She’s come from the Netherlands to fetch your little ones.”

  He chose six youngsters as surely as if he had been expecting Truus to arrive to fetch them: five boys and a girl, all of the eleven-to-thirteen-year-old variety Truus most adored—old enough to see the world with some intelligence, and young enough still to have ideals and hope. The baron had already arranged paperwork from the Germans allowing them to travel, or what he said was proper paperwork. He also had, inexplicably, seven first-class tickets for a train to Amsterdam.

  “You leave at two forty-five,” he said, checking his watch.

  “You have visas for them to enter the Netherlands?” Truus asked.

  “If I had, I wouldn’t need you, Mrs. Wijsmuller, now would I? I’m afraid you’ll have to change trains at Osnabrück, to one coming from Berlin and bound for Deventer, but there will be a carriage reserved for you.”

  Truus thought it inexcusable to spend so much money for first-class tickets, but the baron declined to change them for cheaper fares when they arrived at the station.

  “I assure you, you will be glad for the arrangements,” he said. “It is so difficult to get out of Germany these days.”

  “And it’s easier for those who travel in first class?” Truus asked, wondering how she would be expected to get these children across the border and into the Netherlands if the consul-general himself couldn’t arrange it.

  Begging for Papa

  Uncle Michael sat in Papa’s chair, turned sideways from Papa’s desk, his eyes closed and his hands rubbing Anita’s bottom under her skirt, as Stephan stood frozen, trying to blot out the memory of the sound of them as he’d hidden under the couch. Was that only yesterday? He tried not to think of the glimpse of Žofie-Helene’s thighs in the tunnel that first time, and still the
memory stirred in him as he watched Anita’s face, the pleasure in the tilt of her jaw and her hair falling down her back the way Žofie’s did. Stephan had always written his female leads to be played by Žofie with her hair loose, free of her usual braids or bun.

  Anita opened her eyes. “Oh!” she said, meeting Stephan’s gaze with her own startled blue.

  “See, you want a little more too,” Uncle Michael said.

  The woman moved his uncle’s hands away, saying, “Michael, you have company.”

  His uncle turned toward him. For the briefest moment, Stephan imagined he was still somehow the Uncle Michael who would pull a butterscotch candy from his pocket and say, “A sweet for my sweet son” or, as Stephan grew older, ask about the play he was writing or the music he liked.

  “What are you doing here?” his uncle demanded. “You can’t be—”

  “They’ve arrested Papa,” Stephan said as the secretary scurried past him and out the office door.

  “You have to go. You can’t be seen here,” Uncle Michael said. He glanced out the window. At the bank across the street, a long line of people waited, although the bank was closed. “I’ll get you money, but don’t—”

  “Papa needs a visa,” Stephan said.

  “I— What do you think, that I can just ring up some official and say my ex-brother-in-law needs a visa?”

  “You promised to take care of us. I can stay in Vienna with Mutti, and Walter can too. But Papa has been arrested. Papa needs to leave.”

  “I’ll get you money but I can’t get you a visa. I can’t be seen asking for visas for Jews. Do you understand? You can’t be seen here. Go on, and don’t let anyone see you go.”