The Last Train to London Read online

  She stood and turned over each of the four stacks of pages beside her typewriter so that they were facing up, then pulled the title pages from the typewriter carriage and set one neatly atop each stack.

  “Dennis will meet us there,” she said. “You have the summer camps arranged?”

  She took the jacket off the hanger he now held out to her.

  “You don’t want the blouse?” he asked.

  She flipped the Ferris wheel snow globe over and righted it, the gentle float of suspended snow ever soothing as she set it back on this desk that had been her grandmother’s. That was something she would never be, a grandmother.

  “There are so many things I want, Norman,” she said, “if only there were time.”

  “I still think you ought to speak yourself, Helen,” he said. “Viscount Samuel does as well.”

  She smiled and kissed him on the cheek. “Darling, I only wish the committee would put as much faith in a woman’s words as you and my uncle do.”

  He took the copies of the plan and squared the edges of each into neat stacks, which he placed in folders. “These are your words, whoever delivers them,” he said.

  She shrugged on the fresh jacket. “Do keep that to yourself,” she said, “if we’re to have any hope of success.”

  A Woman of Vision

  When Helen Bentwich entered the Rothschild dining room, the men around the table all stood: the Executive Committee of the Central British Fund.

  “Norman, we’ve saved you the head of the table,” said Dennis Cohen, who had helped Helen formulate the plan but had slept the night while she and Ellie committed it to the page, which was just as well; Helen really could do things faster without the men involved, without the need to grant each of their suggestions more consideration than it deserved.

  Rothschild asked Simon Marks if he might move down a seat to make room for her, and before she could object, the Marks & Spencer heir was holding the chair for her.

  Even as, with Helen seated, the men resumed their seats, Norman began, “The proposal sets forth the plan we described to Prime Minister Chamberlain by which we will bring children of the Reich to safety here, asking nothing of the government beyond that they provide British entry visas.”

  How the meeting with the prime minister about this plan had come about still surprised Helen. When the Cabinet Committee on Foreign Policy met to consider what might be done in light of Germany’s night of violence, it had seemed the answer they reached was “not a blessed thing”; Foreign Secretary Halifax said that any British response could provoke war, and Prime Minister Chamberlain that Britain was in no position to threaten Germany—or so Helen heard from Norman, who heard it from Rothschild, who heard it from someone in the government. Helen had watched from the gallery herself when the matter came before Parliament. The chamber had devolved into squabbling, Colonel Wedgwood demanding of his peers, “Have we not been discussing these refugees for five years? Cannot the government show the feeling of this country by attempting to do something for the victims of this oppression in Germany?” and MP Lansbury shouting, “Are we not Great Britain? Is it impossible to say to the world that Great Britain will take them and find them a place to start life afresh?” The Earl of Winton and the home secretary, though, had babbled on about the dangers of provoking an anti-Semitic response in Britain, and the prime minister pointed out that even the Dutch were accepting only refugees who were assured passage on to other countries. “This is not a matter for the British government, as the right honorable gentlemen realize, but I have no doubt we shall be taking into consideration any possible way by which we can assist these people,” the prime minister concluded, leaving Helen to wonder exactly for whom it was “a matter,” if not the British government. But where Helen had heard naysaying in the prime minister’s words, Norman had seen an opening, and soon enough yet another delegation—Jews and Quakers together this time, led by Helen’s uncle and Lionel de Rothschild—were meeting with Chamberlain at No. 10 Downing, proposing in concept the plan now presented in tidy stacks of paper before them.

  “Prime Minister Chamberlain brought our proposal to the full twenty-two-member Cabinet yesterday,” Lionel de Rothschild was now telling the committee. “The home secretary expressed concern that the greater need was for elderly Jews, and the foreign secretary banged that drum too, but our offer of financial support is for the children, of course, and the prime minister assures me he made that clear. Now, the plan calls for the rescue of five thousand? And how much of the need does five thousand address?”

  “We think sixty to seventy thousand German and Austrian children under the age of seventeen need to be brought to safety,” Dennis Cohen answered.

  There was a long silence as this was digested.

  Norman said, “We expect the greatest number will be under the age of ten. We’ve confirmed that two summer camps in Harwich can be opened to receive those we can’t send directly to foster homes, with the idea that the children would then be placed in private homes as promptly as possible. The Inter-Aid Committee for Children from Germany would arrange placements. The expertise they’ve gained finding homes for almost five hundred prior to the recent violence—”

  Simon Marks interrupted, “It’s a long way from five hundred, half of whom were Christian and came over the course of years, to five thousand in just a few weeks.”

  “They’re the best we have,” Norman said. “They haven’t, of course, our fund-raising capability, so that will be on us.”

  “We’re certain we want to ask only for the children?” Neville Laski asked. “I continue to believe if we brought whole families—”

  “There is too much fear that if we bring whole families, they’ll never leave,” Lionel de Rothschild insisted. “We will state publicly that we mean to bring the children on a temporary basis, until it’s safe for them to return to Germany. But the prime minister understands that we must be prepared to accept the possibility of permanent unofficial adoption of younger children and permanent residence for girls who might enter into domestic service or marry British boys. He expects they would require older boys to re-emigrate.”

  Norman began, “Mrs.—,” but caught Helen’s look, or just caught himself, mercifully. “Several of us,” he began again, “have been discussing how to fund such a large undertaking. We’ve already used the prod of publishing contributor names in the Jewish Chronicle ad infinitum. We feel it’s necessary to consider an appeal in the non-Jewish press.”

  “To the public at large?” the chief rabbi asked with a hint of alarm.

  Dennis Cohen said, “Even if we could raise the money, finding homes for five thousand children—”

  “We’re proposing to house Jewish children in gentile homes?” the chief rabbi demanded. “But what about their faith? Their religious training?”

  Everyone stared at him, perhaps as stunned as Helen felt.

  “Rabbi, do you not understand the emergency we face?” she said, surprising even herself. “Would you prefer five thousand dead Jewish children, or some portion of those five thousand tucked into extra beds in Quaker and Christian homes?”

  Dennis Cohen said soothingly, “Our preference of course will be for Jewish homes, Rabbi, but I for one will be grateful for anyone of any faith who will help. The public at large will be invited to offer accommodations, with the minimum standards of the London County Council for foster homes for British children to apply.”

  “We might put them in guest houses or in schools rather than in gentile homes,” the chief rabbi suggested.

  “Where these young children—already torn from their families—will receive no affection whatsoever?” Helen demanded.

  Dennis Cohen said, “We’ll rely on the Reichsvertretung in Germany and the Kultusgemeinde in Vienna to select the children based on vulnerability.”

  “It will be the older boys who are most vulnerable,” Helen cautioned, “and the youngest girls whom the British will want to take in.”

  Norman sa
id, “We’ll bring those we can, and trust God to provide.”

  “Trust God,” Helen muttered; that was a big ask, given all that He had already denied.

  Lionel de Rothschild said, “As time is of the essence, may we have a vote on whether to present the Bentwich-Cohen plan to the government?”

  Polished Boots

  Käthe Perger looked up, startled to see a Nazi in a long, dark coat and polished boots striding through the newspaper office with his German shepherd, headed directly toward her open office door. A gang of SS trailed him, several already surrounding the Linotype, considering how best to load it onto their truck, which, Käthe saw, waited on the street.

  The dog stood perfectly still as Adolf Eichmann, in her doorway now, said, “You are Käthe Perger.”

  Käthe met his gaze. As his words had not been a question, she didn’t feel he required a response.

  “And your staff are not here this evening?” he asked.

  “I have no staff left, Obersturmführer Eichmann,” she said. It was close enough to the truth.

  “You will come with me, then,” he said.

  Empty Drawers

  Even in the dim light, Stephan registered the smashed desk and the scattered and broken remains of drawers. He righted a drawer that was still more or less intact. There was nothing inside. There was nothing on paper anywhere in Käthe Perger’s newspaper office, which was covered with signs prohibiting entry. Everything had been carted off as evidence.

  At the sound of voices approaching outside, he hid under the largest bits of the desk as best he could, just as a flashlight beam shone from the doorway, bobbing quickly around.

  He listened to the two men entering, talking and laughing, the chhhh and wooop of a match striking and leaping to flame, the smell of cigarettes.

  “That crazy bitch who used to be forever poking into other people’s business, she got what she deserved,” one of them said.

  Stephan breathed shallowly, holding himself so still that his entire body ached, as the two chattered in the bored way of men trying to convince themselves they aren’t as vile as they actually are. They left, finally, and still Stephan stayed under the smashed desk, waiting, his heart slowing to something closer to normal.

  When it seemed they must be lounging in some other wreckage, smoking another cigarette and laughing at another misfortune, he climbed out and quickly flipped over the bits of drawers in the darkness, running his hands all over each. He tried his best to be methodical in the chaos, setting each piece of drawer aside after he’d examined it so as to mark it as searched.

  His fingers caught on splinters but found nothing.

  Just as he was despairing, his fingers brushed a small slip of paper taped to the underside of a mostly intact drawer, tucked away in the corner. It might be nothing more than some kind of furniture tag.

  He felt more carefully, using his nail to edge up the tape. When he had it free, he pulled out his flashlight.

  He froze—voices at the window again. He hadn’t heard them coming.

  He remained perfectly still. The voices carried on down the street, fading.

  He tucked the freed bit of paper, whatever it was, securely into his pocket lest he drop it, and finished the search in the darkness, too afraid now to turn on the flashlight. He found three loose scraps of paper, which he tucked away as well before slipping out of the office and, as quickly as he could, into the underground.

  He ought to wait until he was back in the palais that night, but he found his legs were weak, he found he needed to know the truth himself before he took it to Mutti and Walter. He crouched at the edge of the tunnel, hiding behind a pile of debris. He unfolded the first slip of paper he’d found, the one that had been attached to the drawer.

  He flicked on his flashlight. A circle of light fell on the words.

  He died in transit to Dachau. I’m so sorry.

  The Westminster Debate

  It was half seven, and Helen Bentwich, in the gallery, was already exhausted from the long day of speechifying when Parliament finally took up the refugee question. Philip Noel-Baker in his passionate if long-winded way began to make the case with the awful specifics: a man and his family burned to death; a boarding school at Caputh utterly demolished at two in the morning; patients driven from the Bad Soden home for consumptives wearing nothing but their nightshirts; the inmates of the Jewish hospital at Nuremberg forced to line up on parade. “If these acts had been the spontaneous excesses of the mob, the German government might be expected to punish the offenders and make reparation to the victims,” he said. “Instead, the German government completed the dreadful business by issuing a decree blaming the Jews themselves for the destruction and imposing upon them an eighty-four-million-pound fine. Most sinister of all, the German government have begun to arrest all Jewish males from the age of sixteen to sixty.” He wouldn’t “pile up horrors,” but the House must understand that men and boys in labor camps were made to work seventeen-hour days on rations that wouldn’t feed a child, and were subject to tortures he would not specify. Helen didn’t want to know the details of the tortures either, but she’d heard them, and she couldn’t imagine why the members of this chamber were so delicate that they ought to be spared as they made decisions that would save lives, or not.

  It was ten at night before Home Secretary Hoare moved specifically to the Kindertransport proposal. “Viscount Samuel and a number of Jewish and other religious workers came to me with an interesting proposal,” he said. “They pointed back to an experience during the war, in which we gave homes here to many thousands of Belgian children, playing an invaluable part in maintaining the life of that nation.”

  Helen whispered to Norman, “Those children were brought with their families, when they had families.”

  Norman put his lips so near her ear that she could feel his breath, and whispered, “It’s easier to persuade a man to do what he believes has precedent.”

  “This delegation believes,” Hoare continued, “that we can find homes in this country for a large number of German children without harm to our own population—children whose maintenance could be guaranteed by the delegation’s funds or by generous individuals. All the Home Office need do is grant necessary visas and facilitate their entry. Here is a chance of taking the young generation of a great people, and of mitigating the terrible suffering of their parents. Yes, we must prevent an influx of undesirables behind the cloak of refugee immigration. The government therefore must check in detail the individual circumstances of adult refugees, a process bound to involve delay. But a large number of children could be admitted without individual checks.”

  The discussion was excruciating: Would the British taxpayers not be encumbered with financial responsibility for the children? Ought the number be limited? What about the Czechs? What about the Spanish refugees? Mr. David Grenfell insisted, “The large and powerful nation of Germany cannot be allowed to strip its Jews of everything and dump them over the frontier, to say, ‘I do not want the Jews in my country; you must take them.’” But the question was eventually put: Would this House, in view of the growing gravity of the refugee problem, welcome a concerted effort among nations, including the United States, to secure a common policy for the temporary immigration of children from the Reich?

  “A ‘concerted effort’?” Helen said to Norman. “But there are no other nations with which to concert.”

  “All in favor . . .”

  Exit, No Visa

  Stephan, hearing footsteps on the stairs, sprang from bed, grabbed his coat and shoes from the chair beside the bedroom window, and scrambled out to the roof while Walter—who had also been sleeping fully clothed on account of the cold rooms and the need to be ready for anything—clutched his Peter Rabbit tightly and scurried silently into Mutti’s room, Mutti’s bed, just as they’d practiced. The thugs burst in, not even slowed by the shabby door, their flashlights so bright that the window now below Stephan shone as if the lamps inside were lit, even though
the men were still in the center sitting room.

  “Where is the boy?” a deep voice demanded.

  They must be in Mutti’s room then, as Mutti could not so quickly have gotten out of bed and into her wheelchair, even if she’d had Stephan’s help.

  Stephan crouched as motionless as possible, his coat and shoes in his hands and the roof cold against his stockinged feet as the thin layer of ice on the roof melted into his socks.

  “We’re happy to take the little one in his place,” the man said.

  Even the Nazis wouldn’t harm a dying woman and her little boy, Stephan told himself as he reached down to close his bedroom window as silently as possible, shutting out the sound of his mother two rooms over saying she did not know where he was, that she assumed he’d been taken to the camps—his mother putting herself at risk so that he could get away while Walter said nothing, the poor little guy terrified, or brave, or both. It was all Stephan could do not to climb back in and demand that Mutti and Walter be left alone, but he had promised Mutti this. They could not survive without him, she had insisted. She needed him to find a way to get them out of Austria. She couldn’t do that herself, and Walter couldn’t do it, so Stephan must save himself first. Walter had said he and Peter could take care of Mutti. He was such a little boy, but he was determined. He could empty a bedpan. He could help Mutti change clothes. He could do so many things a five-year-old ought not to be asked to do.

  Stephan scrabbled silently across the slippery roof toward the tree by his old bedroom window, the way down to the street.

  A soldier patrolled with a dog on the walk near the tree. The dog’s ears perked as they passed through the golden glow of the streetlamp, his shadow so long that he looked like a creature from another world.

  Stephan backed slowly away from the roof’s edge and ducked behind a chimney, where the sound of his breathing might not reach the dog’s hearing. He tucked up against the brick, the slight warmth of it, the protection of its shadow.