The Last Train to London Page 25

  Yes, quite a shame.

  After leaving Huber ample time to stew in the possibility of a mistake where there was none, as well as the real threat of bad press, Truus continued, “Perhaps you might like to check with Herr Eichmann? Or I might call and wake him myself?”

  Huber begged Truus’s leave and stepped outside the room to consult in a whisper with his men. When they returned, the arresting soldiers all bowed to her, a courtesy not previously offered.

  “Do forgive these boys for this mistake, Frau Wijsmuller,” Huber said. “I will personally make sure that the calendar error is rectified to include your meeting with Herr Eichmann. Now let me send an officer with you to see you safely back to your hotel.”

  And Now, Your Skirt

  Truus stood waiting, watching silently, as Eichmann wrote at his desk in his office at the Palais Rothschild, a room that once must have been a salon for receiving guests, given its size and its floor-to-ceiling windows, its statuary and art. The man hadn’t acknowledged her presence even when his clerk announced her arrival. The dog sitting beside his desk, though, had yet to move his gaze from her, as surely as she had yet to move her gaze from his owner.

  Eichmann looked up, finally, annoyed.

  “Obersturmführer Eichmann, I am Geertruida Wijsmuller. I come on urgent—”

  “I am not accustomed to doing business with women.”

  “I’m very sorry that I’ve had to leave my husband behind,” Truus answered without a hint of sorrow about the matter.

  Eichmann returned his attention to his work, saying, “You may leave.”

  Truus took a seat, the dog’s ears perking in alarm despite her careful movement, not so much on account of the dog as in an effort to keep her knees from view. Really, what had Joop been thinking, substituting for her perfectly respectable second skirt this shorter fashion? As if her calves might prove as useful as Klara van Lange’s.

  Eichmann, without looking up again, said, “I have given you permission to leave. It is not an advantage I afford everyone.”

  “Surely you won’t mind hearing me out,” she said. “I’ve made quite a journey to speak with you, to arrange for a number of Austrian children to emigrate to Britain—”

  “These are your children?” he demanded, now meeting her gaze.

  “These are children Britain would—”

  “Not your own children?”

  “I haven’t been blessed with—”

  “You’ll explain to me, I am sure, why a respectable Dutchwoman troubles herself to come all the way to Vienna to arrange that children who aren’t even hers might travel to a country she is not—”

  “Sometimes it’s what we cannot have, Obersturmführer Eichmann, that we most appreciate.”

  The dog sat slightly more forward at her interruption, words she hadn’t thought until she spoke them, and yet they were the truth.

  Eichmann said, “You are, I am sure, quite experienced at helping the chaff of humanity?”

  Truus, working to tamp down the anger that mixed with her sorrow into something explosive, said, “It’s been my family’s practice to help others for as long as I’ve been alive. We took refugee children into our home during the Great War, children who would be your age now. Perhaps you were similarly kept safe?”

  “You’ll know then that you need certain documents to effect your purpose. You’ll have brought them for us to consider?”

  “I have an undertaking from the British government to issue—”

  “Nothing in hand? And how many children do you mean to take?”

  “However many you will allow.”

  “Frau Wijsmuller, be so kind as to let me see your hands,” Eichmann said blandly.

  “My hands?”

  “Remove your gloves so that I can see them well.”

  Hands, Aristotle’s tool of tools. He is at my right hand, I shall not be shaken.

  She hesitated but unfastened the pearl button on her left glove and loosened the scalloped cuff with its delicate black accent, then the creamy yellow French leather. She pulled the soft protection from her blue-veined wrist, her square and sturdy palm, her fingers as freckled and crepey as the backs of her hands.

  Eichmann nodded for her to remove the other glove, and she did so, thinking Blessed be the Lord my strength, which teacheth my hands to war, and my fingers to fight . . .

  Eichmann said, “And your shoes.”

  “Obersturmführer, I don’t see—”

  “You can tell a Jewess by the shape of her feet.”

  Truus wasn’t in the habit of baring her feet, not to anyone but Joop. But then, she wasn’t in the habit of revealing her calves either. She removed first one shoe, then the other, leaving only her new sun-beige winter stockings for cover.

  Eichmann said, “Now walk for me.”

  She wondered how she had let it get this far, one step after the next as she walked slowly the long length of the room and back again. It was the fault of the skirt, perhaps. If the skirt she’d traveled in had not been filthy from being worn not just all night on the flights to Vienna, but again all a second night, in the cell and through the awful interrogation, she might have donned it again this morning and just told Joop a little white lie. But it did bolster her confidence, truth be told, that Joop still imagined her a woman who could distract a man with a short skirt and a show of calf.

  Eichmann said, “And now you will lift your skirt over your knees.”

  Truus glanced at the dog, remembering Joop’s words, that she must trust him on this skirt. She gathered Joop’s confidence and her own sense of dignity together, and she raised her skirt.

  “Unbelievable,” Eichmann said. “A woman so pure and yet so crazy.”

  She glanced at the dog, whose expression suggested he might agree with her: Unbelievable. A man so crazy and impure.

  Eichmann called toward the open door, “Let the Jew Desider Friedmann come in.”

  A man with large eyes and a healthy mustache in a small face entered, turning the kettle curl of a black felt homburg around and around in his hands as he watched the dog. He was, Truus knew from Norman Bentwich, one of the leaders of the Kultusgemeinde, the Jewish community organization that was to help select the children if Eichmann could be persuaded to let them go.

  “Friedmann,” Eichmann said to him, “do you know Frau Wijsmuller?”

  Friedmann, with a quick, nervous glance from the dog to Truus, shook his head.

  “And yet you happen to be here at my office this morning, just as she has shown up.”

  Friedmann only looked again from the dog to Eichmann.

  Eichmann said, “Frau Wijsmuller appears to be a perfectly normal Dutchwoman. She comes to collect some of your little Jews for Britain. Yet she brings no documents to suggest this request is well considered.”

  Eichmann reached over and petted the dog’s head, the pointy ears and pointy snout. Pointy teeth too, Truus was sure, although she had yet to see them.

  “Let’s make a little joke of this, shall we, Friedmann?” Eichmann continued. “By Saturday, you’ll arrange that six hundred children will be ready to travel to England.”

  “Six hundred.” Friedmann practically gasped the number. “Six hundred. Thank you, Obersturmführer.”

  “If you have six hundred by Saturday,” Eichmann said, “Frau Wijsmuller may take them away. Not one child short of that.”

  Friedmann stammered, “Sir, I—”

  “And Frau Wijsmuller must take them herself,” Eichmann continued. “She will stay here with us in Vienna, to take them herself.”

  Friedmann, unfathomably terrified, managed, “But it isn’t possible in so few days—”

  “Thank you, Obersturmführer,” Truus interrupted, still standing in her stockinged feet, with her yellow gloves in her hands. “And after this first six hundred?”

  Eichmann laughed—the large, mean laugh of a man used to being denied what he wanted, yet wanting the world to think otherwise.

  “After this f
irst six hundred—but no less, not five hundred and ninety-nine, my pure and crazy Frau Wijsmuller?” His gaze raked her, from her face to her bare hands, her calves, her unshod feet. “If you have arranged for Vienna to be rid of six hundred, perhaps I shall be happy to leave the removal of all our Jews to you. Or perhaps not. Now you may go.”

  As Desider Friedmann bolted for the door, Truus resumed her seat in the chair across Eichmann’s desk from him. With slow deliberation, she replaced her shoes on her feet, and tied them. Just as deliberately, she pulled on one yellow glove, carefully buttoning the pearl button at the scalloped cuff, then donned the other glove, all the while ignoring the dog’s perplexed gaze.

  She stood easily and walked to the door through which Herr Friedmann had already disappeared.

  “One suitcase each,” Eichmann called after her.

  She turned back to him. He was writing again, paying her little attention, or purporting to. “Nothing of value,” he said without looking up. “No more than ten reichsmarks for each child.”

  She stood waiting until he did finally look up at her.

  “Should you ever find yourself in Amsterdam, Herr Eichmann,” she said, “do come have coffee with me.”

  Arranging the Last Laugh

  As Truus left the extravagant palais with Friedmann, who had been waiting outside Eichmann’s office for her, she was already beginning the mental list-making. She had come to Vienna to arrange the transport of the children, but with no notion that she would be immediately bringing them herself. She waited for Friedmann to speak first, though. He’d experienced so much of the vile man’s capabilities, and she so little. And she felt bad for having interrupted him in front of Eichmann, although she didn’t regret it. Sometimes a weakness can be a strength.

  Friedmann spoke only after they’d walked down the U-shaped drive to the street and rounded the corner onto the Ringstrasse, the palais well out of sight. “It’s not possible to arrange so quickly for six hundred children to leave Vienna,” he said, “much less to house them in England.”

  Truus waited for a trolley to pass—a trolley this Jewish man was perhaps now forbidden to ride.

  “Herr Friedmann,” she said as the rumble faded, “you and I will have the last laugh at Herr Eichmann’s ‘little joke,’ although we’ll have to be quite circumspect about it, of course.” She crossed the road at a brisk pace now, Friedmann beside her. “Britain will require no visas or German travel documents,” she explained. “The Home Office will need only two-part identity cards, color-coded and prestamped, which will serve as travel permits. One half of each will be retained by the Home Office, with the other to accompany the child, personal data and photograph attached. We need submit only a nominal roll for a group visa.”

  “The task of gathering so many children, though, Frau Wijsmuller.”

  “Of course you must begin this moment to get the word out however you can,” Truus agreed. “Let people know they can get their children to safety but cannot change their minds or they’ll put others at risk.” Thinking it through as she spoke. “As many older children as you can manage, children who won’t need tending and can help tend. No child younger than four, not for this train, not with so little time. Nor older than seventeen. Six hundred, and as many more as you can manage, just in case—but again don’t allow the possibility that any parent may back out once committed. We’ll need doctors for medical exams, to ensure the children are healthy. Photographers. Good people of whatever kind you can gather to explain and record. A space in which to process, with tables and chairs. Paper and pens.”

  Friedmann pulled up short, causing Truus to have to stop and turn back to him.

  “I tell you, it would be impossible in any event,” Friedmann said. “But to travel on the Sabbath? Observant Jews—”

  “Your rabbis must persuade them otherwise,” Truus interrupted. “Your rabbis must persuade parents how precious their children are.”

  The Shape of a Foot

  Truus peeled off her coat and hung it in the hotel room closet as she waited for the operator to place the call, wondering despite herself about the shape of the elegant Helen Bentwich’s hands and knees and feet. When the telephone rang, she lifted the receiver with her gloved hand, reluctant to bare her fingers even with Eichmann now half a city away. She thanked the operator and explained his proposal to Helen, who listened in steady silence. Only when Truus had finished did Helen ask, “Are you all right, Truus?”

  “Six hundred children to leave Vienna by Saturday. Can you be ready when they arrive?”

  “I assure you,” Helen said, “that if the children were this minute to knock on Britain’s door, I would tear it off its hinges, if that was needed.”

  Truus placed a second call. As she waited for the operator to ring back, she watched out the French doors. On the Ringstrasse below, a mix of Sunday strollers and troops marched by.

  “I need you to help me arrange transportation for six hundred children by Saturday,” she explained at Joop’s “Hello.”

  “On less than a week’s notice, Truus? But—”

  “That’s all the time I’ve been given.”

  “A full train and two ferries? You can’t get six hundred people on one ferry.”

  “Children, Joop.”

  “You cannot get six hundred children on a single ferry.”

  “Two ferries, then.”

  “Six hundred children and their minders? You can’t bring this many children across the border on your own, much less get them to England.”

  “Adults from Vienna will be allowed to accompany the children.”

  “What if they don’t—”

  “The adults have families here,” Truus said. “They know that if anyone fails to return, not only will no further children be allowed to leave, but their own families will be at risk.”

  “But this Eichmann fellow can’t mean to hold you to this impossible deadline. You have bargaining power too, Truus: a place to send some of his Jews.”

  “Joop, I can organize the children to be ready to leave as soon as the transportation is available. I can do that. This man, he . . . He maintains his power through intimidation. He cares more for his power than for anything. I have no doubt that if we’re one minute late or one child short, he will cancel the transport. The threat was no doubt some sick pleasure in the making, but now that he has made it, his power depends on seeing it through.”

  After they hung up, Truus walked into the bathroom and, with her gloved hand, turned the tub faucet. She watched the stream from the tap, the steam filling the bathroom. Only when the tub was full and the tap shut off again did she return to the main room and begin to undress.

  Still with her gloves on, she untied her shoes and removed them, and set them aside. She unclipped one sun-beige stocking, rolled it down her thigh, over her knee, down her calf and over her heel, off her foot. She folded it carefully, and set it on the hotel room’s little writing desk. She did the same with the other stocking, her blouse, the shorter skirt Joop had bought her, that Eichmann had made her lift, and even her handkerchief, smoothing the fabric precisely before adding them one by one to the tidy pile on the desk. She took off her brassiere and her corset too, but set them aside with her shoes. She had only the one brassiere, the one corset. She removed her underwear last, carefully smoothed the cotton and folded it, and set it atop the rest. Just as carefully, she placed the stack of clothing into the trash bin beside the desk.

  She removed her yellow gloves from her hands only then, and set them beside the corset. Now naked but for her two rings, she returned to the bathroom, and climbed into the tub.

  An Entertainment

  Otto brushed the hair clippings from the SS officer’s shoulders as the man said, “It is a joke, of course. Obersturmführer Eichmann is giving us all an entertainment: scurrying Jews! If only this crazy woman would take the Jew parents as well.”

  Otto chuckled falsely as he removed the cape. There was nothing to be gained in challenging
these men. “You must tell me where this is, so I too can have a laugh,” he said.

  “On Seitenstettengasse. The synagogue where they had to extinguish the fire, the one hidden within other buildings that might have burned with it.”

  As the customer left, Otto turned the sign on the door to “Closed” and picked up the telephone.

  A Woman From Amsterdam

  Otto entered the bleak little room reluctantly. Frau Neuman sat in her wheelchair, as thin and white and frail as the sugar sculptures in the tea shop windows that seemed about to crumble with the next breath on them, but never did. Walter sat reading a book to his stuffed rabbit, whose little blue coat was askew—such a young boy, and already he could read. The room was overfull with furnishings, but the bed was neatly made, an attempt at dignity. It would have been little Walter who made it, Otto supposed. Little Walter who cared for his mother, although here at least they had the help of neighbors.

  “Frau Neuman,” Otto said, “I have word that someone here in Vienna—a woman from Amsterdam, I believe—is organizing an effort to . . . to place Jewish children with families in England, where they can go to school and be . . . and be safe until this dreadful time can pass. I thought of Stephan and Walter. I thought that, if you would allow me, I might take them to sign up. They—”

  “You are a godsend, Herr Perger,” Frau Neuman interrupted, leaving Otto startled at the ease of her concession to letting him take her sons away for what she must know would be the rest of her life. He’d spent the tram ride from the Burgtheater marshaling arguments, searching for words that would be both gentle and persuasive.

  “But you must find Stephan,” she continued. “He isn’t—”

  “Yes,” Otto agreed. “I thought I could take Walter—”

  “Without Stephan?” Tears pooled in the poor woman’s sunken eyes, the words clearly a struggle, and not just on account of her health. “But of course one child safe, that would be better—”