The Last Train to London Read online

  The book. Why hadn’t she brought it for him? Next time, she would bring him Kaleidoscope.

  She returned the pen to its place, exactly as she’d found it. She braced herself against the darkness, pulled the string, and climbed back down the ladder. She tied the bread package and, reluctantly, the candle and matches back up into her scarf, which she again tied to the ladder rung. She groped in the darkness until she found the low tunnel, crawled through to the underground, and groped her way the short distance to the rubble pile and the circular stairs. At the top of the stairs, she pushed one triangle of the octagonal manhole cover up and peeked out. Not seeing anyone, she slipped out onto the street as fast as she could and headed home.

  The Cloak

  Truus poured tea for Norman and Helen Bentwich and offered them biscuits. She offered the silver box of cigarettes, too; it tended to put a man at ease to allow him to smoke.

  “This is awfully cloak-and-dagger,” she said. “Joop will be devastated to be left out.”

  Helen responded, “We thought you might like time to consider our proposal on your own.”

  Truus understood that by “we,” Helen meant “I.”

  Norman said, “Several agencies now operating together under the umbrella of the Movement for the Care of Children from Germany have persuaded our Parliament to allow an unlimited amount of temporary immigration from the Reich into England.”

  “Unlimited!” Truus said. “That is amazing news!”

  “Unlimited in number,” Norman Bentwich said, “although limited in scope. The children will be accepted only as transmigrants—”

  “A grudging welcome,” Helen said, “and a ridiculous stipulation, given that there is no other country to which the children will be able to emigrate. The requirement seems to be window dressing without any actual immigration drapery required. They urged us that it would be in everyone’s interest that the children be widely dispersed rather than concentrated in cities like London or Leeds. ‘It will behoove none of us to create a conspicuous Jewish enclave,’ was the way it was put.”

  “We’re handling the British end of things,” Norman said. “Arranging sponsors for as many as possible, and temporary housing and support in Britain for the rest. The Reichsvertretung have already begun the selection of children in Germany. But the effort in Austria is more complicated. The head of Germany’s Jewish Office there, a man named Eichmann . . .” Norman tapped his cigarette in the ashtray. “He poses a particular challenge, apparently.”

  Helen said, “The Kultusgemeinde and the Friends Service Committee helping them feel that someone from the outside might be more effective in persuading Eichmann to allow Austrians to leave. A Christian.”

  “We hope to be able to fund and accommodate perhaps ten thousand children,” Norman said. “And given how many children you’ve rescued—”

  “Ten thousand children and their parents?” Truus said.

  Norman, with an uncertain glance to his wife, extinguished his half-smoked cigarette. “The prime minister believes children might more easily learn our language and ways. They might, without their families, integrate more easily into our society. I understood that the children you’ve rescued have been unaccompanied?”

  “‘The prime minister believes’ there is room in England for children but not their parents?” Truus replied, astonished. “‘The prime minister believes’ parents ought to turn over their precious children to strangers?”

  “Do you have children, Mrs. Wijsmuller?” Norman demanded.

  Helen, as startled at the question as Truus was, or more so, said, “Norman! You—”

  “Joop and I have not had that blessing, Mr. Bentwich,” Truus said as evenly as she could manage, blinking back the image of the beautiful wooden rocking cradle, the linens, the snowman embroidery she’d found in the attic one day when Joop was at work.

  “I assure you,” Norman Bentwich said firmly, “that no child will be taken whose parents do not freely send him. We are not barbarians.”

  “No, there are no barbarians in the world anymore,” Truus said. “None that anyone will call out as such. Appeasers everywhere, but no barbarians.”

  Bentwich said indignantly, “I don’t believe you are in a position to lecture Britain on the extent of its generosity. You Dutch allow across your own border only German Jews with visas in hand to settle elsewhere.”

  “But separating families? Surely . . .” She turned to Helen, remembering little Adele Weiss dying in that crib at Zeeburg, without even her mother to comfort her. “Helen, cannot the mothers be found positions as domestics? Or . . . We hear rumors of allowing more Jewish immigration into Palestine? Surely you have some influence in that, given the years you two spent there.”

  “Unfortunately, Palestine is seen to be too politically sensitive to offer a solution,” Norman answered.

  Seen to be. So he didn’t agree, but there was nothing he could do about it.

  Helen said gently, “The government have agreed to grant bulk visas so children can be brought quickly. It is something, Truus. These children are in dire circumstances. The council are concerned for their lives.”

  Truus said, “But not for the lives of their parents.”

  Norman Bentwich stood and went to the window, to the bright, unseasonably warm winter day. It was what Joop too did when he was angry or frustrated. What she herself did.

  When he turned again to her, the backlight from the window made his face impossible to read.

  “These parents will do anything to save their children,” he said. “They are happy for the generosity of strangers to keep them safe until this horror finds an end.”

  Helen set a hand gently on Truus’s own, saying, “I would do the same, Truus, and you would as well.”

  Truus took a careful sip of tea. She selected a biscuit from the plate, but found she couldn’t stomach it. The face of Adele’s mother kept coming to her: yes, she’d wanted Truus to take her child, and she hadn’t at the same time. Why hadn’t Truus simply pulled the mother onto the train too? Why hadn’t she thought to bring the mother, to count on her own resourcefulness to somehow get Adele’s mother out of Germany?

  “Helen,” she said, “I . . . You’ve never done this. You have never taken a child from her mother’s arms. I cannot imagine there exists a more horrible task on this earth.”

  Norman Bentwich stepped toward her, emerging from the silhouetting effect of the bright window light, demanding, “Can you really not?”

  The Dagger

  On a bridge over the Herengracht, a father held a child over the rail so she could poke with a long stick at a gaily colored toy sailboat stuck in the middle of the canal. The child’s coat wasn’t even buttoned, and she was held so precariously that Truus had half a mind to scoop her up before she could fall into the cold water. She had half a mind to push the father over the bridge. Really, what was the man thinking? So many parents took their children for granted, assuming no harm would ever befall them. But a gaggle of parents watching him from nearby cheered as the bright little wooden boat was dislodged and set back on course to the far quay, where their own children poked with sticks at their own bright little boats, occasionally scurrying across the bridge to Truus’s side to send a boat back across.

  “I admire the work Helen and Norman Bentwich are doing,” Joop was saying to her. “But really, Truus, to Vienna tonight? With no planning whatsoever? Without so much as an appointment to see this Eichmann character?”

  Joop wasn’t a man who allowed passion to show in public, which was the reason she’d chosen to discuss the Bentwich proposal out here, along the canal. There had been planning involved, of course, not by Truus but by Helen Bentwich, who had persuaded the men of the committee that Truus was the woman for the job they thought ought to be left to a man. Her friend Helen—a funny way to think of someone she’d met only once before, but there it was.

  “It’s one thing to bring a few children out through a border crossing you know is weak,” Joop
said, meeting her gaze directly, “but you’re talking about multiple trips—not just five minutes over the border but all the way to Vienna.”

  “Yes, Joop, but—”

  “Do not defy me on this.”

  The force of his words startled her. He meant them. He meant the words he had so often said he would never mean. He meant them not because he was determined to control her, but because he was afraid for her.

  She smiled reassuringly to the group of parents now watching from across the canal, the father again with them while his child poked her sailboat along the shore.

  “I would never defy you, Joop,” she said gently. “It’s one of the many reasons I love you, because you would never put me in the position of having to.” The gentlest of reminders, with a sweetener of humor to help it go down.

  His expression softened to something like apology. “But really, Truus.”

  They watched as the girl, whose boat was again out of reach, appealed to her father. He was too involved in conversation to take notice. The girl appealed to an older brother, who abandoned his own boat to shepherd hers back within reach.

  “What would you have me do, Joop?” Truus answered, again in the subdued voice, the soothing voice. “It’s fine to save three children or it’s fine to save thirty, but I shouldn’t try to save ten thousand?”

  “The Gestapo will know everything you do, Geertruida! Where you go. How and with whom you spend every minute. There will be no room for misstep.” He hesitated, then said, more gently, “Never mind that the doctor advises against traveling any long distance.”

  Truus brushed back the pain of that—the doctor who had saved her life but not their baby’s. Their last chance, she supposed. Her last, unexpected chance.

  She took Joop’s gloved hand in her own. “The fact that I make light of risk doesn’t mean I take it lightly, Joop,” she said. “You know that.”

  They stood together as, on the far side of the canal, the little boy’s and girl’s father joined them. He used his daughter’s stick to haul in her boat, held it until the bulk of the water had drained from it, then repeated the process for his son. The brother took his little sister’s hand, and she said something that made them all laugh. The father picked up the boats and sticks, and the three walked off toward the bridge and over it.

  Truus looked up through the bare trees to the barren sky, now tarnishing with evening.

  “Joop,” she said, “imagine if these Austrian children I’m being asked to collect were our children—”

  “They aren’t, though! They aren’t ours, and no amount of saving other people’s children will replace having our own. You must stop imagining it will!”

  People again turned in their direction. Truus just kept staring across the murky canal, her hand in the anchor of his. He didn’t mean the words, the hurt. It was just the sense of loss bubbling out. He too might be visiting with other parents if only she hadn’t failed him. He too might teach a child how to swim before she was taught to launch a toy boat into the water, a child he never would have allowed to tie on an ice skate and wobble out onto a canal until it had been frozen for at least a week. He too might button a top button, kiss a bruised elbow, laugh at something that was funny to a toddler, and perhaps to an adult.

  Joop pulled her to him, wrapped his arms around her, kissed her hat at the crown of her head. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Forgive me. I’m sorry.”

  They stood together like that as parents called for their youngsters and the little boats were brought in, water streaming from their gaily painted wooden hulls, and the boaters disappeared in threes and fours and fives back into their homes, to have dinners together around family tables, the little boats left to dry in bathtubs after their final voyage before winter set in. A train whistle sounded in the distance, sharpening the quiet of the now-gray sky and the gray water, the gray buildings, the gray bridge. The sun set so quickly these days.

  “Perhaps this is why God chose to deny us children, Joop,” she said gently. “Because there would be this greater need, this chance to save so many. Perhaps He’s saved us the burden of having to choose to risk leaving our own children motherless.”

  All the Ink

  Stephan, with Žofie’s pink scarf around his neck and a blanket over his shoulders, watched from behind a pile of rubble as the shadow that was Žofie-Helene paused in the underground passageway. Žofie, Stephan wanted to say, Žofie, I’m right here. But he said nothing. He only watched the shadow turn and crouch, and disappear into the tunnel to the cocoa cellar.

  He put the scarf to his nose and breathed in, watching and listening. Water dripped in one direction and another. A car clicked over the octagonal manhole cover at the top of the circular stairs Žofie had come down. He didn’t know how long he waited. He no longer had any sense of time.

  “Stephan?” she said, her voice startling him.

  He stood watching the shadow of her, which he could make out now that he knew she was there. He didn’t move or say anything. It was for her safety, yes, but for his dignity, too. He didn’t want her to see him like this: cold and dirty from living underground, unable to bathe; relieving himself closer to the sewer so as not to soil the place where he slept or to give anyone an idea of his whereabouts; so hungry that he might eat bread his mother might need to stay alive.

  The shadow of her moved, her footsteps pattering almost inaudibly toward the stairway, then climbing the metal steps. Light filtered down as she opened the manhole cover at the top and disappeared, leaving him alone again.

  Finally he crawled through the low tunnel. Only when he was well inside did he flick on his flashlight. He squinted against the brightness, giving his eyes time to adjust.

  She’d left a new supply of bread and butter. She’d brought him a notebook and a pen too, and Stefan Zweig’s Kaleidoscope.

  BACK IN THE underground stables, he settled in the safest spot, between the two tunnel openings. He pulled the horse skull toward him and set the flashlight there, pointed at himself. In the splash of light, he could read the writing on the bread wrapper. A Leopoldstadt address where Mutti and Walter now lived.

  He opened the bread wrapper and put his nose to it, to inhale the yeasty smell. He sat there for a long time, imagining the taste of it, before wrapping it back in its paper and tucking it into his pocket.

  He tilted the light to better shine on the book: the second volume of Stefan Zweig’s collected stories, which he’d given to her even though he didn’t really have a second copy, he just liked having her have it. He sat staring at the cover. Zweig’s books were banned by Hitler. Žofie ought not to have kept it.

  He opened the book and flipped the pages by memory to his favorite story in the collection, “Mendel the Bibliophile.” He again adjusted the flashlight, then read the first few pages, to the line he loved about the small things that jog to memory every detail about a person—a postcard or a handwritten word, “a sheet of newsprint faded by smoke.”

  He opened the exercise notebook—a graph-paper journal of the kind in which Žofie did her equations—and let his fingers linger on the page. He wished the book weren’t blank. He wished she’d left a note for him. He wished it were one of her own exercise books, with an old equation in her sprawling writing on the page.

  He took off his gloves and took the pen in hand, smooth and cool. All the paper he’d taken for granted. All the ink. All the books he’d been able to pull from the shelf any time he wanted. He adjusted the flashlight yet again and repositioned himself so that the spot of light shone on the blank page. He tucked his face deeper into Žofie-Helene’s scarf and wrote, You don’t show it to your friends, but you’re showing me, so logically I’m not your friend.

  He wrote at the top of the page, centered for a title, The Liar’s Paradox.

  He wrote, Her braid hanging down her back as she left Prater Park.

  He wiped his nose with the back of his wrist, remembering Walter’s little face looking back at him over Žofie’s shoulder,
Walter seeing his big brother reduced to goose-stepping for the Nazis. He wiped his nose again, and his eyes. He nestled his face back into the soft cashmere of Žofie’s scarf, and wrote, The pure white skin at the nape of her neck. Her smudged glasses. The smell of fresh bread. The smell of her.

  I Promise

  Truus carefully folded a blouse and placed it neatly in the overnight clutch, a lovely soft leather bag that had belonged to her father. He’d owned a drugstore in Alkmaar, where he sometimes gave his customers medicine they needed but could not afford. He had never hesitated simply because their skin was a different color or their God some version other than his. And yet she supposed he would be expressing the same worry Joop was now.

  “Worry isn’t the same thing as failure to value what you do,” Joop said. “And if I ever thought I could do it in your place, or that anyone else could, I saw in Germany how wrong that is.”

  She turned to him, listening as closely as her parents had always listened to her. It was an honor, to be listened to closely, to be heard. One could honor someone without agreeing with them.

  “But you can’t ask me not to worry,” Joop continued. “I won’t ever stop you from doing what you must. I knew who you were when I married you. I believe I knew who you were even before you knew yourself.” He put his arms around her, pulling her head to his chest so that she heard the impossibly slow beat of his heart. “You must trust me to be as strong as you are,” he said. “Even if I am a much poorer liar.”

  He tipped her chin up. Her eyes crossed in her attempt to focus on him, as surely as they had the first time he’d kissed her, so many years ago now. He was such a good man. What a different woman she would be but for the good people in her life.