The Last Train to London Page 19

Stephan stood staring at his uncle sitting in Papa’s chair, the Kokoschka of Aunt Lisl with her scratched cheeks now hanging above Papa’s desk at this business Stephan’s grandfather had built from nothing at all when Uncle Michael’s family had had every privilege. He wanted to go back home and crawl into bed, as he had late the prior night, but it was too dangerous for Mutti and Walter to have him seen coming and going; there was little to do but climb the tree and slip in through the window late at night, and sleep a few hours, and slip back out before sunrise.

  His uncle said, “Go on. Leave. I’ll get some money to your mother somehow, but you need to turn for help to your own kind.”

  “My own kind?”

  “You’re a Jew. If I’m caught helping you, I’ll be sent off to a camp too. You are a Jew.”

  “You’re my uncle. I don’t have anyone else to turn to.”

  “They’re helping Jews at that Jewish community center, the place just down from the apartment your grandfather lived in while he was building the palais.”

  “In Leopoldstadt?”

  “While he was building the palais, I said. Listen to me, for God’s sake. The one on this side of the canal. Now go on, before anyone sees me helping you.”

  Searching for Papa

  Stephan kept close to the damp walls as he made his way through the underground darkness. He came to the crypts behind the locked gate under St. Stephen’s Cathedral; he’d made a wrong turn somewhere. He retraced his steps and headed toward the Talmud school. He peeked up through a manhole cover, closer. He carried on to another manhole cover and peeked out onto the narrower streets and older, shabbier buildings of the old central city where the Stadttempel and the IKG offices were. He could see the door to the Jewish center, but two SS there watched as Hitler Youth taunted women and children, pelting them with stones.

  Stephan ought to help the mothers and children. He knew that. But he only waited until the SS left. He gave them several minutes, to make sure they weren’t returning, before pushing up the heavy grate and hurrying across the street and into the IKG offices himself.

  Inside, in an entrance hall with worn stone floors, a line of people several deep rose up the open stairway to a warren of offices. Unmatched baskets labeled A–B, C–D, and on through the alphabet sat on tables along the back wall, all heaped with index cards. A hush fell over the crowd as the fact of Stephan’s presence registered with them. Most Jewish boys his age had been arrested with their fathers, and he didn’t wear a skullcap.

  “I’m trying to find my papa,” he said.

  Slowly, cautiously, people came out of their frozen stillness. An organizer helping people fill out cards returned her attention to the woman she was helping, who couldn’t fill out the card herself because she couldn’t write. As the organizer wrote, others questioned her, but she kept her attention focused on the illiterate woman who was hoping to find a loved one who, like Papa, had disappeared in the raids.

  “Please, everyone, we are doing our best,” the organizer called over the din. “Herr Löwenherz was also arrested again. We don’t yet know where anyone is. You can wait in line here if you need help, but it would be easier for all of us if you would take a card and fill out the information for whoever is missing. Name. Address. How we can reach you. Put the card in the pile with the first letter of the missing person’s surname. We’ll let you know as soon as we know anything.”

  Nobody left the line.

  Stephan took a card and, with a pencil from his satchel—Walter’s new pencil—wrote down his father’s information.

  A younger woman was saying to an older one behind her, “He said just go to Shanghai and he would find us. That was the last thing he said: just get the children out of Austria. You don’t need a visa for Shanghai, you can just go. But there are no passages to be had.”

  “I heard you can get Cuban visas for a price,” the older woman said, “but the Nazis have taken everything we own.”

  Stephan finished filling out the card for his father and placed it in the M–N basket, and turned to go as another organizer emptied the I–J basket into a larger bin. A card spilled to the floor, unnoticed, to be trampled as the line moved ever so slightly forward.

  Stephan retrieved the card he’d filled out for his father and waited.

  The organizer reappeared and emptied the K–L basket into the bin, and disappeared again. When she appeared once more, for the M–N basket, Stephan placed the card for his father directly into the bin in her hands.

  She stared at him, surprised.

  “Neuman. Herman Neuman of Neuman’s Chocolates,” he said, hearing in his own voice his father’s. 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.

  The Boy With Chocolates in His Pocket

  None of the newspaper staff but Käthe Perger herself and her assistant editor, Rick Neidhardt, had shown up for work in the aftermath of the chaos. Fear had flooded every corner of Vienna. Anyone seen to help a Jewish neighbor was defying the new Nazi laws, with “help” so broadly defined that simply reporting the truth in a newspaper could land you in jail or worse. How could Käthe ask her staff to continue working? She might as well ask them to stand in line to be beaten and imprisoned.

  “So how are we going to do this with just two of us?” Rick asked her.

  She studied the task list they’d made, the only sound Rick’s clearing throat.

  “All right, Rick,” she said, “why don’t you—”

  She looked up from the list and stopped short, startled by the cloud of fright in Rick’s face as he stared away from her, toward the door.

  She gave a small gasp herself before she recognized the boy who stood inside the office. She would have sworn she’d closed the office door—and it was closed—but the boy stood there, waiting. The boy, who was almost a man now.

  “It’s okay, Rick,” she said, resisting the urge to bolt to Stephan and wrap him in a hug of her own relief. “It’s Žofie’s friend.” Žofie’s friend, not a friend of Žofie’s, but one is always greater than zero.

  “I’m sorry to bother you,” Stephan Neuman stammered, “but I’m . . . My father . . . I thought you might know where they’ve taken the men they arrested?”

  Käthe said, “But you’re not . . . ? Most of the older boys were arrested with their fathers.”

  The boy waited. He was a smart boy, unwilling to give up his secret to avoiding arrest.

  She said, “Our best information is that some have been taken to a German labor camp outside Munich, near Dachau, so not too far away. But others may be in transit to Buchenwald, or even as far as Sachsenhausen. We’re doing what we can to find out.”

  “I heard the Nazis might allow my father to return if I can arrange papers for him to emigrate. I don’t know what to do,” the poor child said, his eyes welling.

  Käthe approached him slowly, so as not to alarm him, and put an arm around his shoulders. “No, of course not,” she said. “Of course not. No one does, Stephan. I think . . . I’ll find out what I can, I promise. Can your mother—” Lord, the boy’s mother was confined to a wheelchair, and dying; it had been Käthe’s small obsession, to keep track of this only friend of her daughter, even if the friendship had not survived this awful time. “No, I’m sorry, of course not,” she said. “And your aunt, she’s gone to . . .”

  “Shanghai.”

  Rick said, “Maybe the consulates?”

  Käthe squeezed the boy’s shoulder reassuringly. She returned to her desk and began writing addresses on a piece of paper. “Start with the Swiss, the British, the Americans.”

  “I spent all day yesterday at the American embassy. They will do nothing.”

  Rick said, “The American backlog is horrendous.”

  “Go to the others, then,” Käthe said. “Apply for a visa for your father, but also for the rest of your family. Tell them your father has been a
rrested. It will . . . They may give his application special attention. Apply everywhere, quickly. I’ll find out what I can about your father. Telephone me—”

  “We no longer have a telephone,” the boy said, his voice cracking, as if he believed the shame of this to be his and not that of all of Vienna who happily claimed as their own the Jewish homes seized all over the city while the proper owners were made to cram into tiny, dark apartments on the island of Leopoldstadt. How could their world have changed so drastically in so little time? At the start of the year, Austria had been a free country, its leader and its people resolved to remain such. And how could she have been so impossibly wrong about her neighbors? How could she have failed to see this hatred under the surface, waiting for the excuse to express itself that Hitler offered?

  “It’s okay, Stephan,” she said as Rick opened the office door, trying, she could see, to hurry the boy’s leaving without appearing to do so. “It’s okay. Come see me, then. If I’m not in, I’ll leave a note about whatever we’ve learned here on the desk, with your name on it.”

  Rick sputtered, “Not . . . We’ll . . .”

  He glanced out the door to the Linotype machine, functioning again but scarred from its recent Nazi battering. The thing sat silent, a reminder of the impossibility of their own task to which, Rick was right, they needed to return. You could help one, or you could help many, but there wasn’t time to do both, even if you could stomach the risk.

  Käthe opened a desk drawer. “I’ll tape it to the underside here. If I’m not in the office when you come, pull the drawer out and reach under it, okay?”

  Stephan, dejected, turned to leave.

  “Stephan . . . Just for a little bit, stay low,” Käthe said. “You aren’t in a Jewish neighborhood, that’s good; the most brutish among them seem to be concentrating on the Jewish neighborhoods.” Perhaps that was what had saved him from arrest? “And don’t tell anyone about this, for their safety. Do you understand? Don’t tell your mother. Don’t tell Žofie-Helene. Don’t tell anyone.”

  Please don’t tell my daughter, she thought as she watched the boy leave. Please don’t put her in danger. Which was ridiculous, of course. This boy who had befriended Žofie could not possibly put her in more danger than her own mother’s self-righteous certainty already had.

  As the boy slipped out of the office and back onto the street, Rick turned to her, his fear rotting to unspoken accusation.

  “I know. I know, Rick,” she said. They could not allow themselves to be distracted by a single victim; they had too much to do. “But that boy . . . He was just a boy with chocolates in his pocket only months ago. He was Žofie’s first real friend, the first child who didn’t see her as a freak. And because he didn’t, his friends didn’t either.”

  “He just appeared like a specter,” Rick said. “Did you even see or hear him enter?”

  Käthe smiled just a little, despite everything. “I expect you can blame Žofie for teaching him that. She likes to imagine herself Sherlock Holmes.”

  Princess Power

  At the Hamburg station, as Truus waited in line with the children to exchange German currency for Dutch, she tried to imagine what Baron Aartsen had meant to do if she hadn’t come to see him. He might have taken the children himself, but it was one thing for a simple Dutchwoman to be caught taking children across the border on forged German orders, and quite another for that person to be a Dutch diplomat. It was of course possible that the orders were real. Truus appreciated the baron allowing her a plausible claim to believe they were—or at least the ability to state truthfully that she did not know they were forged.

  “I’d like to exchange sixty reichsmarks for guilders,” she told the customs officer when her turn came.

  “For whom?” the clerk asked.

  “For the children,” Truus said. Each German was allowed to take ten reichsmarks from the country, and Baron Aartsen had thought even of this, giving her the money for each child. But in her experience, German border control was far more likely to seize reichsmarks they could easily pocket and spend unnoticed than to seize Dutch guilders whose exchange would have to be recorded and explained.

  “These children are your children?” the clerk demanded.

  They weren’t her children, of course. The travel orders for each of the six identified them as Jewish.

  “Jewish children don’t need money,” the clerk said, and without further attention to her, he moved to help the next person.

  Truus intertwined her gloved hands, tamping down her fury, before stepping away from the window. There was nothing to be gained by arguing with him.

  She walked over to the ticket counter with the children. “I need a ticket for Amsterdam for tomorrow, please,” she said.

  She in fact had all the tickets she needed, but she could change the extra ticket in Amsterdam and receive her refund in guilders, effecting the currency change in a roundabout way. She felt rather proud of her resourcefulness as she shepherded the children onto the train.

  AT OSNABRÜCK, THEY transferred to the train to Deventer, boarding the reserved carriage, which was, it turned out, one of two right next to each other, the second carrying the Dutch princesses Juliana and Beatrix home from a visit with their grandmother on her estate in Silesia. The train, because it was carrying the princesses, would not stop in Oldenzaal, just over the border, but rather would continue nonstop all the way to Deventer, where, it being far from the border, Dutch border patrol were not likely to be present, or to be attentive if they were. This was why the baron had been so intent on her being on this, the princesses’ train.

  The baron had not, apparently, counted on Dutch border guards entraining in Bad Bentheim, two men appearing at the front of Truus’s carriage to check papers. Truus turned to the children and said calmly, and loudly enough for the guards to hear, “Go wash your hands, children, and then I’ll comb your hair.”

  “But it’s the Sabbath,” objected the oldest boy, a pill of a child who had nearly made them miss the train for his wailing over a ring his father had given him for his bar mitzvah, which he’d somehow lost. See that you do not despise one of these little ones, for I tell you that in heaven their angels always see the face of my Father who is in heaven, Truus reminded herself. She tried never to judge the children harshly—they were always in difficult straits—but sometimes they did test her patience.

  Out the window, there might or might not have been a sliver of sun still up behind the clouds.

  “The Sabbath is over,” she said. “Now, go on.”

  “You can’t make the Sabbath be over just because you’re bored of it,” the boy said, words Truus imagined the boy’s father meant for requests to go out and play and not for a journey to save his life.

  “I can, actually,” Truus said, with another glance out the window. “But fortunately for us, the sun really is down, young man.” Saving me the role of playing God, she thought.

  The boy looked dubious, but his gaze went up the carriage aisle to the men.

  Truus continued for the guards’ benefit, “You are riding in the carriage next to the princesses. We may need to go with these two nice gentlemen to ask the princesses if you ought to be allowed to continue on to the Netherlands. So go on, wash up.”

  Taking advantage of the border guards’ uncertainty as the children headed off in the opposite direction, she said, brooking no resistance, “These children are going to Amsterdam. They’re expected at the Jewish hospital there.”

  “Madam—”

  “Your names,” she said as if she were the guard and they the passengers.

  As they gave her their names, she pulled from her bag a pen and a small notepad. “It’s Saturday, sirs,” she said, repeating their names for effect. “The Hague is closed, so you cannot inquire on our behalf today, nor can you tomorrow, as it will be Sunday. But rest assured that if we are made to disturb the princesses, Mr. Tenkink at Justice will know all about it first thing Monday morning.” She removed her yellow g
loves and took up the pen in earnest. “Now, you’ll spell your names for me, please.”

  They stepped back to allow the children to return to their seats, then bowed and left, apologizing for disturbing them. As they closed the carriage door behind them, Truus set a comb to the oldest boy’s head as gently as she imagined his mother would have done.

  Bloomsbury, England

  Helen Bentwich slid a new page and the triple carbons into the typewriter carriage and continued typing. She was a lousy typist, but she’d sent Ellie home at three in the morning, after her poor assistant had crossed over to being an even worse typist. At least she’d had the foresight to have Ellie set up the carbon stacks before she left. That took a lot of time, building stacks of four pages and three carbons, but it could be done even while asleep on one’s feet.

  “It’s time, Helen.” The voice was Norman’s, but still it startled her. There had been nothing but the sound of typewriter keys striking paper for hours, that and the occasional gong that might or might not have been Big Ben, a good mile away.

  Out the window, morning was dawning the usual gray of London wintertime.

  Norman hung a suit bag from the doorknob, then came up behind her and stroked her hair so gently that she longed to close her eyes and sleep. She made a mistake, perhaps because of the interruption or perhaps because she was a lousy typist. With no time left, she back-slashed over the error.

  “Appearances matter,” Norman said.

  She finished the page and pulled the sheets from the typewriter, set one in each pile, and tossed the used carbons in the trash bin. The last copy was barely dark enough to read, but it was what it was at this point. She fed in another set of blank pages.

  “I’m not a typist, Norman,” she said, “It’s the content that matters, anyway.”

  Norman said, “I meant your appearance, not the plan’s.”

  Helen, striking the keys as hard as she was able, typed in capital letters on the clean new page: MOVEMENT FOR THE CARE OF CHILDREN FROM GERMANY.