The Last Train to London Read online

  Rubies or Paste

  A pearl button popped off Truus’s scalloped glove cuff as, with the baby in one hand, she reached out to catch the boy; he was so fascinated by the massive cast-iron dome ceiling of the Amsterdam station that he nearly tumbled from the train.

  “Truus,” her husband called up to her as he took the toddler in hand and set him on the platform. He helped the girl too, and Truus and the baby.

  On the platform, Truus accepted her husband’s embrace, a rare public thing.

  “Geertruida,” he said, “couldn’t Frau Freier—”

  “Please don’t fuss at me now, Joop. What’s done is done, and I’m sure the wife of that nice young guard who saw us across the border has more need of my mother’s ruby than we do. Where is your Christmas spirit?”

  “Good God, don’t tell me you risked bribing a Nazi with paste?”

  She kissed him on the cheek. “As you can’t tell the difference yourself, darling, I don’t imagine either of you will soon know.”

  Joop laughed despite himself, and he took the baby, holding him awkwardly but cooing—a man who loved children but had none, despite their years of trying. Truus stuck her hands, no longer warmed by the baby, into her pockets, fingering the matchbox she’d all but forgotten. Such an odd sort, the doctor in the train carriage who’d given it to her. “You were sent by God, no doubt,” he’d said with a fond glance at the children. He always carried a lucky stone, he’d said, and he wanted her to have it. “To keep you and the children safe,” he insisted, opening the little box to show her a flat gravelly old stone that really could have no purpose if it weren’t lucky. “At Jewish funerals, one doesn’t give flowers but rather stones,” he said, which made the thing somehow impossible to turn down. He would collect it from her when he needed his luck back, he assured her. Then he’d debarked at Bad Bentheim, before the train crossed from Germany into the Netherlands, and now Truus was in Amsterdam with the children, thinking there might be some truth to his claim about the ugly little stone’s luck-bringing charms.

  “Now, little man,” Joop said to the baby, “you must grow up to do some extraordinary thing, to make my foolish bride’s risk of her life worthwhile.” If he was troubled by this unplanned rescue, he wasn’t going to object any more than he did when her trips to bring children out of Germany were planned. He kissed the baby’s cheek. “I have a taxi waiting,” he said.

  “A taxi? Were you given a raise at the bank while I was away?” A gentle joke; Joop was a banker’s banker, frugal to the core, albeit one who still called his wife of two decades his bride.

  “It would be a sturdy walk to their uncle’s place from the tram stop even without this snow,” he said, “and Dr. Groenveld doesn’t want his friend’s niece and nephews to arrive with frostbite.”

  Dr. Groenveld’s friend. That did explain it, Truus thought as they walked out into the snow-lace of tree branches, the dirt-stomp of paths, the hard white frost of canal. It was the way so much of the help of the Committee for Special Jewish Interests was doled out: nieces and nephews of Dutch citizens; friends of friends; the children of friends of business partners. So often, accidental relationships determined fate.

  * * *

  THE VIENNA INDEPENDENT

  * * *

  HITLER’S BIRTH HOME NOW A MUSEUM

  * * *

  Relations between Austria and Germany remain strained despite the summer accord

  BY KÄTHE PERGER

  BRAUNAU-AM-INN, AUSTRIA, December 20, 1936 — The owner of Adolf Hitler’s birth home here has opened two of its rooms as a museum. The Austrian authorities in Linz have permitted the public display on the condition that only German visitors, and not Austrians, be allowed. In the event Austrians are found to be given entry to the museum or it becomes a demonstration site for Nazis, the museum will be closed.

  The museum is made possible as a result of the Austro-German Agreement of July 11 to return our nations to “relations of a normal and friendly character.” Under the agreement, Germany recognized Austria’s full sovereignty and agreed to regard our political order as an internal concern upon which it will exercise no influence—a concession by Hitler, who objects to the imprisonment by our government of members of the Austrian Nazi Party.

  Candles at Sunrise

  Žofie-Helene approached the snow-dusted hedges and the high iron gate of the Ringstrasse palais with trepidation. She put a hand to the pink plaid scarf Grandmère had given her for Christmas, as soft as her mother’s touch. This house was bigger than her entire apartment building, and far more ornate. Four tall columned stories—the bottom floor with arched doors and windows, the upper ones with high, rectangular French windows opening onto stone-railed balconies—were topped with a more modestly sized fifth floor decorated with statuary that seemed to be holding up the slate roof, or guarding the servants who must live up there. This couldn’t be anyone’s real house, much less Stephan’s. But before she could turn back, a doorman in greatcoat and top hat emerged from a guardhouse to open the gate for her, and the carved front doors were flying open, Stephan running down steps as clear of snow as if it were summertime.

  “Look! I’ve written a new play!” he said, thrusting a manuscript out to her. “I typed it on the typewriter I got for Christmas!”

  The doorman smiled warmly. “Master Stephan, you might like to invite your guest inside?”

  THE MANSION’S INTERIOR was even more daunting, with chandeliers and intricately geometric marble floors, an imperial staircase, and everywhere the most extraordinary art: birch trunks in fall with the perspective all wrong; a seaside village climbing a hill, improbably flat and cheerful; a bizarre portrait of a lady who looked very like Stephan, with his same sultry eyes and his long straight nose, his red lips and almost imperceptible chin cleft. The painted woman’s hair was pulled up from her face, and her cheeks were scratched bright red in a way that was both disturbing and elegant, more beauty and blush than wound, although Žofie couldn’t help but think of the latter. Bach’s Cello Suite no. 1 spilled from a large salon where guests chatted beside a piano, its graceful gold-leaf top propped open to reveal a dramatic white bird with a trumpet in his claws painted even there, on its underside.

  “No one else has read it yet,” Stephan said in a low voice. “Not a word.”

  Žofie eyed the manuscript he again thrust to her. Did he really mean for her to read it now?

  The doorman—Rolf, Stephan called him—prompted, “I trust your friend had a happy Christmas, Master Stephan?”

  Stephan, ignoring the nudge, said to Žofie, “I’ve been waiting forever for you to get home.”

  “Yes, Stephan, my grandmère is well, and I had a lovely Christmas in Czechoslovakia, thank you for asking,” Žofie-Helene said, words rewarded by an approving smile from Rolf as he took her coat and her new scarf.

  She read quickly, just the opening page.

  “It begins wonderfully, Stephan,” she said.

  “Do you think so?”

  “I’ll read the whole thing tonight, I promise, but if you really insist that I meet your family, I can’t carry a manuscript about with me.”

  Stephan looked into the music salon, then took the manuscript and bounded up the stairs. His hand skirted a statue at each turn as he continued up past the second floor, where doors to a library stood open to more books than Žofie had ever imagined anyone might own.

  A fashionably flat-chested woman in the salon was saying, “. . . Hitler burning books—all the interesting ones, I might add.” The woman looked very like Stephan, and like the scratched-cheek portrait too, although her dark hair was parted in the middle and hung in loose curls. “The vile little man calls Picasso and Van Gogh incompetents and cheats.” She fingered a pearl necklace that looped once around her neck, like Žofie’s mother’s did, but then looped a second time all the way down to her waist, spheres so perfect that surely if the strand ever broke, they would roll true. “‘It is not the mission of art to wallow in filth for
filth’s sake,’ he says—as if he has any idea what the mission of art is. Yet I’m the hysterical one?”

  “Not ‘hysterical,’” a man answered. “That’s your word, Lisl.”

  Lisl. That would be Stephan’s aunt, then. Stephan adored his aunt Lisl, and her husband, his uncle Michael, too.

  “Freud’s, actually, sweetheart,” Lisl replied lightly.

  “It’s only the modernists who set Hitler off,” Stephan’s uncle Michael said. “Kokoschka—”

  “Who of course got the place at the Academy of Fine Arts that Hitler imagines ought to have been his,” Lisl interrupted. Hitler’s drawings had been judged so poor that he wasn’t even allowed to sit for the formal exam, she told them. He was left to sleep in a men’s shelter, eat in a soup kitchen, sell his paintings to stores needing something to fill empty picture frames.

  As the little circle laughed at her recounting, a door slid open at the far end of the entry hall. An elevator! A boy not much more than a toddler hopped down from a chair inside—a beautiful wheelchair (not his, obviously) with elaborately scrolled arms and a cane seat and back, the annuli of its wonderfully concentric brass handles and wheels perfectly proportioned. The boy wandered into the entry hall, dragging a stuffed rabbit on the floor behind him.

  “Well, hello. You must be Walter,” Žofie said. “And who is your rabbit friend?”

  “This is Peter,” Stephan’s brother said.

  Peter Rabbit. Žofie wished she hadn’t already spent her Christmas money; she might have bought a Peter in a little blue coat like this for her sister, Jojo.

  “That’s my papa by my piano,” the little boy said.

  “Your piano?” Žofie asked. “Do you play?”

  “Not terribly well,” the boy said.

  “But on that piano?”

  The boy looked to the piano. “Yes, of course.”

  Stephan loped back downstairs, empty-handed, just as Žofie noticed the birthday cake in the salon, ablaze with tapers lit at sunrise and left burning all day, an inch an hour, in the Austrian custom. Beside it sat the most glorious tray of chocolates she had ever seen, some milk chocolate and others dark, and all different shapes, but each one decorated with Stephan’s name.

  “Stephan, it’s your birthday?” Sixteen candles for his birthday and one for luck. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Stephan ruffled Walter’s hair as the cello piece wound to a stop.

  Walter exclaimed, “Me! I want to do it!” and shot off toward their father, who pulled a stool up to the Victrola.

  “. . . and now Zweig has fled to England and Strauss composes for the führer,” their aunt Lisl was saying—words that drew Stephan’s attention. Žofie-Helene did not believe in heroes, but she allowed Stephan to pull her into the salon, to better hear about his.

  “You must be Žofie-Helene!” Stephan’s aunt Lisl said. “Stephan, you neglected to tell me how beautiful your little friend is.” She pulled a few pins from Žofie’s bun, and Žofie’s hair cascaded down. “Yes, that’s better. If I had hair like yours, I wouldn’t cut it either, never mind what’s fashionable. I’m sorry Stephan’s mother isn’t up to greeting you, but I’ve promised to tell her all about you, so you must tell me everything.”

  “It’s very nice to meet you, Frau Wirth,” Žofie said. “But do continue your conversation about Herr Zweig, or Stephan will never forgive me.”

  Lisl Wirth laughed, a warm, tinkling ellipse, with her chin tilted slightly toward the impossibly high ceiling. “This is Käthe Perger’s daughter, everyone. The editor of the Vienna Independent?” She turned to Žofie, saying, “Žofie-Helene, this is Berta Zuckerkandl, a journalist like your mother.” Then, to the others, “Her mother who, I must say, has more courage than Zweig or Strauss.”

  “Really, Lisl,” her husband objected, “you speak as if Hitler were on our border. You speak as if Zweig lives in exile, when he’s in town this very minute.”

  “Stefan Zweig is here?” Stephan asked.

  “He was at the Café Central not thirty minutes ago, holding forth,” his uncle Michael said.

  LISL WATCHED HER nephew and his little friend shoot off toward the front doors as Michael asked why Zweig had abandoned Austria, anyway.

  “He isn’t even a Jew,” Michael said. “Not a practicing one.”

  “Says my gentile husband,” Lisl chided gently.

  “Married to the most beautiful Jew in all of Vienna,” he said.

  Lisl watched as Rolf stopped Stephan to hand him the girl’s tired coat. Žofie-Helene looked so surprised when Stephan held it for her that Lisl nearly laughed aloud. Stephan surreptitiously breathed in the scent of the girl’s hair when her back was turned, leaving Lisl to wonder if Michael had ever snuck a whiff of her hair like that when they were courting. She’d been only a year older than Stephan was now.

  “Isn’t young love glorious?” she said to her husband.

  “She’s in love with your nephew?” Michael answered. “I don’t know that I’d encourage him to take up with the daughter of a rabble-rousing journalist.”

  “Which of her parents do you suspect of inciting mobs, darling?” Lisl asked. “Her father, who we’re told committed suicide in a Berlin hotel in June of ’34, just coincidentally the same night that so many of Hitler’s opposition died? Or her mother, who, as a pregnant widow, took over her husband’s work?”

  She watched as Stephan and Žofie disappeared through the doorway, poor Rolf hurrying after them, waving the girl’s forgotten scarf—an improbably beautiful pink plaid.

  “Well, I couldn’t say whether that girl is in love with Stephan,” Lisl said, “but he’s certainly smitten with her.”

  Searching for Stefan Zweig

  Ah, mein Engelchen with her admirers: the playwright and the fool!” Otto Perger said to his customer. He hadn’t seen his granddaughter since before Christmas, but they could hear her coming down the stairs at the far end of the hallway now, chattering with young Stephan Neuman and another boy.

  “I do hope she prefers the fool,” the man replied, tipping Otto generously, as always. “We writers are no good at all in love.”

  “I’m afraid she is a little sweet on the writer,” Otto said, “although I’m not sure she realizes it herself.” He paused, wanting to delay his client long enough to introduce him to Stephan, but the man had a driver waiting and the children’s progress had stalled, as children’s progress does. “Well, I’m glad you enjoyed your visit with your mother,” he said.

  The man hurried off, passing the children in the hallway. He was halfway up the stairs when he looked back and asked, “Which of you is the writer?”

  Stephan, laughing at something Žofie was saying, didn’t seem even to hear, but the other boy pointed to Stephan.

  “Good luck, son. We need talented writers now more than ever.”

  He was gone, then, and the children were spilling into the barbershop, Žofie announcing that it was Stephan’s birthday.

  “All good for birth day to you, Master Neuman!” Otto said as he hugged his granddaughter, this child so like her father that Otto could hear his son in the rush of her voice; he could see Christof in her obliviousness to her smudged lenses. Even the smell of her was the same—almonds and milk and sunshine.

  “That was Herr Zweig,” their friend said.

  “Where, Dieter?” Stephan asked.

  Otto said, “Master Stephan, what have you been up to while our Žofie was away?”

  Dieter said, “He was sitting right by us at the Café Central before Stephan got there too—Zweig was. With Paula Wesseley and Liane Haid, who looks very old.”

  Otto hesitated, oddly reluctant to admit that this big lug of a boy was right. “I’m afraid Herr Zweig was running for an aeroplane, Stephan.”

  “That was him?” Stephan’s dark eyes were so full of disappointment that, with his hair on end at the crown despite all Otto’s best efforts, he looked like a toddler. Otto would have liked to assure him he’d have another chance
to meet his hero, but it seemed unlikely. All they’d talked about—or all Zweig had talked about, while Otto listened—was whether even London would prove far enough away from Hitler. Herr Zweig knew how Otto’s Christof had died; he knew Otto understood what a flimsy thing a border was.

  “I do hope you’ll heed Herr Zweig’s words for you, Stephan,” Otto said. “He said we need talented writers like you now more than ever.” Which was something, anyway: the great writer encouraging Stephan, even if the boy hadn’t heard.

  The Man in the Shadow

  Adolf Eichmann showed his fat new boss, Obersturmführer Wisliceny, around the Sicherheitsdienst Jewish Department, ending at his own desk, beside which sat Tier, the most beautiful slope-backed German shepherd in all of Berlin.

  “Good God, he’s so still he might be stuffed,” Wisliceny said.

  “Tier is properly trained,” Eichmann responded. “We would be rid of the Jews and on to more important matters if the rest of Germany were half as disciplined.”

  “Trained by whom?” Wisliceny asked, taking Eichmann’s own chair, asserting his superior rank.

  Eichmann took the visitor’s chair and snapped his fingers once, quietly, calling Tier to his side. He had assured Wisliceny that “the ropes” of SD Department II/112 were quite tidy, but they were in fact as thin and frayed as any rope Tier might have chewed. They operated out of three small rooms at the Hohenzollern Palace while the Gestapo, with its own Jewish office and far more resources, took pleasure in undermining them. Eichmann had learned the hard way, though, that complaints reflected most negatively on the complainer.