The Last Train to London Read online

  “I spent whole days riding across countryside like this,” he told Hagen. He’d ridden mostly with Mischa, who’d taught him how to spot deer tracks, how to make all sorts of bird sounds, how to put on a condom long before Eichmann thought the idea of putting his penis inside a girl anything but preposterous. He could still call up the scorn in Mischa’s voice at the name of Eichmann’s Wandervögel scout pack: Griffon? It’s a bird species that died out before our grandfathers were born, a vulture that lived off the flesh of the dead. Mischa had been jealous, of course—unable to join the older boys for whole weekends hiking in their uniforms and carrying flags, because he was Jewish.

  Eichmann began to put a new point to the pencil. “I’m a keen horseman,” he said. “I learned to shoot in woods like those with my best friend, Friedrich von Schmidt. His mother was a countess, his father a war hero.”

  Friedrich had invited him to join the German-Austrian Young Veterans’ Association, and they’d attended its paramilitary training together. But Mischa had remained the better friend even after Eichmann joined the Party—April 1, 1932; member 899,895. He’d remained close if increasingly argumentative with Mischa until Austria closed its Nazi Brown Houses, and the Vacuum Oil Company fired him for no reason but his politics. He’d had to pack his uniform and his boots, then, and cross the border from Austria into Germany, to safety in Passau.

  Hagen said, “We’re not funding Palestine with German capital, not even German Jew capital.”

  Eichmann turned from the view back to his report and wrote: As the aforementioned emigration of 50,000 Jews annually would in the main strengthen Judaism in Palestine, this plan cannot be a subject for discussion.

  Self-Portrait

  Žofie-Helene, with Stephan and his aunt Lisl, stood at the first painting in the Secession Building exhibit room, Self-Portrait of a Degenerate Artist. It left her uneasy, the painting and its title.

  “What do you think of it, Žofie-Helene?” Lisl Wirth asked.

  Žofie said, “I don’t know anything about painting.”

  “You don’t have to know about art to have a feeling about it,” Lisl assured her. “Just tell us what you see.”

  “Well, his face is weird—so many colors, although they’re beautiful and they all do sort of blend together to seem like skin,” Žofie said uncertainly. “His nose is big and his chin is awfully long, like he’s painting his reflection from a distorted mirror.”

  Lisl said, “So many painters have become almost analytic in their abstraction. Picasso. Mondrian. Kokoschka is more emotional, more intuitive.”

  “Why does he call himself degenerate?”

  “It’s ironic, Žofe,” Stephan said. “It’s what Hitler calls artists like him.”

  Žofe, not Žofie. She rather liked when Stephan called her that, like her sister calling her ŽoŽo.

  They moved on to a portrait of a woman whose face and black hair formed nearly a perfect triangle. The woman’s eyes were different sizes, her face was blotched with red and black, and the way she held her hands was frightening.

  “She’s rather ugly, and yet somehow beautiful as well,” Žofie said.

  “She is, isn’t she?” Lisl said.

  “This one is like the portrait in your entry, Stephan,” Žofie-Helene said. “The woman with the scratched cheeks.”

  “Yes, that’s a Kokoschka too,” Lisl said.

  “But that one is of you,” Žofie-Helene said. “And it’s more beautiful.”

  Lisl laughed her warm, tinkling ellipse of a laugh, and she set a hand on Žofie’s shoulder. Papa used to put his hand on her shoulder like that sometimes. Žofie stood there, longing for that touch to last forever, and wishing she had a portrait of Papa by this Oskar Kokoschka. She had photographs, but photos were somehow less true than these paintings, even though they were more real.

  Bare Feet in Snow

  Truus and Klara van Lange sat across a cluttered desk in Mr. Tenkink’s office in The Hague, with Mr. Van Vliet from the Ministry of Justice as well. Tenkink had on his desk an authorization to allow the children from the Webers’ woods to stay in the Netherlands—one Truus had drawn up, which wanted only Mr. Tenkink’s signature. She’d found that the more easily you could arrange for a thing to be swallowed, the more likely it was to get down the throat.

  “Jewish children?” Tenkink was saying.

  “We have homes in which to place them,” Truus responded, ignoring the look from Klara van Lange. Klara had a higher regard for the absolute truth than Truus did, but then she was awfully young, and not long married.

  “It’s a tough situation, I see that, Mrs. Wijsmuller,” Tenkink said. “But half the Dutch now sympathize with the Nazis, and most of the rest of us simply don’t want us to be a dumping ground for Jews.”

  Mr. Van Vliet started, “The government wants to appease Hitler—”

  “Yes,” Tenkink interrupted, “and stealing a country’s children is not exactly the neighborly thing to do.”

  Truus touched Van Vliet’s shoulder; Tenkink was a man who responded more positively to women. So many men were that way, even good ones. She wished now that she had brought the children along—so much harder to deny dark curls and hopeful eyes than to deny the idea of a child, or eleven. But it seemed cruel to drag the poor exhausted dears out of bed and off for the long train ride from Amsterdam to The Hague just to trot them out for a man who ought to be able to make the right decision, who always had been able to be persuaded to do so.

  Truus said to Tenkink, “Queen Wilhelmina is sympathetic to the plight of the Germans who wish to free themselves from Hitler’s fury.”

  Tenkink said, “Even the royal family . . . You must understand the magnitude of this Jewish problem. If Hitler makes good on his threat to annex Austria—”

  “Chancellor Schuschnigg has Austria’s Nazi leaders behind bars, Mr. Tenkink,” Truus said, “and there isn’t a city in the world more dependent on its Jews for prosperity than Vienna. Most of its doctors, lawyers, and financiers and half its journalists are Jewish by birth if not by practice. Can you honestly imagine a coup succeeding against Austria’s money and its press?”

  “Mrs. Wijsmuller, I’m not saying no,” Tenkink replied. “I’m simply suggesting that it would be easier if the children were Christian.”

  Klara said, “I’m sure Mrs. Wijsmuller will remember that the next time she spirits children out of a country that has already made their parents disappear.”

  Truus suppressed a smile as she reached for a framed photo propped amid the piles on Mr. Tenkink’s desk: a younger Tenkink with a soft wife, two sons, and a chubby-cheeked baby girl. Klara’s surprisingly quick tongue was part of the reason Truus had requested her company for this visit.

  “What a lovely family,” Truus said.

  She sat back in her chair, trying not to show her hand as she indulged Mr. Tenkink in the proud fatherly soliloquy she had, after all, invited. Patience was one of the few virtues she could claim.

  She handed the photo back to Tenkink, who smiled affectionately.

  “One of the German children is a baby, even younger than your daughter is in your photo, Mr. Tenkink,” Truus said, using “German” rather than “Jewish,” shifting the focus away from the characteristic that most troubled the man and moving to make the point while he still held the photo of his own child. “Surely even the coldest of hearts might warm to a baby?”

  Tenkink looked from the photo to the authorization on his desk, then to Truus. “A boy or a girl?”

  “Which would you prefer, Mr. Tenkink? One can never tell with babies when they’re all wrapped up for the press to admire.”

  Tenkink, shaking his head, signed the authorization, saying, “Mrs. Wijsmuller, when the Nazis invade the Netherlands, I hope you’ll vouch for me. It appears you can talk anyone into anything.”

  “The good Lord forbid it,” Truus said. “But in that event, He will surely vouch for you. Thank you. There are so many children who need our help.”

>   “Well, then,” Mr. Tenkink said, “if that’s it—”

  “I understand that it’s impossible,” Truus interrupted, “but I have news from the German Alps of thirty orphans forced from their beds into the road in their pajamas by a gang of SS.”

  “Mrs. Wijsmuller—”

  “Thirty children standing in their pajamas in bare feet, and in a thick layer of snow, while the SS set fire to their orphanage.”

  Tenkink sighed. “What happened to ‘only eleven’?” With a glance at his family photo, he said, “And these thirty are all Jewish too, I suppose? Do you mean to save every Jew in the Reich?”

  “They’re being housed in Germany by non-Jews,” Truus said. “I don’t have to tell you what the Nazis do even to Christians who defy their prohibitions against helping Jews.”

  “With all due respect, Mrs. Wijsmuller, the Nazi prohibition against helping Jews does not have an exception for Dutchwomen crossing the border to—”

  Truus glanced meaningfully at his family photo.

  “Even if I could help,” Tenkink said, “word is, we’ll pass this law closing our border within weeks, or perhaps even days. Without the information in hand already, I don’t see how—”

  Truus handed him a brown file tied with green straps, all the information he would want already collected and packaged, an easier swallow.

  Tenkink, shaking his head, said, “All right. All right. I’ll see if I can arrange to accept them on a temporary basis. Only until homes outside the Netherlands can be found for them. Is that clear? They have families elsewhere, in England or in the United States?”

  “Yes, of course, Mr. Tenkink,” Truus answered. “That’s why they find themselves standing in bare feet in the snow outside a burning Jewish orphanage.”

  Exhibition of Shame

  Lisl Wirth stood beside her husband at the Entartete Kunst exhibit at the German Institute of Archeology in Munich, cubist and futurist and expressionist works purged from Germany’s museums for failing to meet the führer’s artistic “standards” displayed and priced here in a way meant to provoke visitors to mock. Anyone with any art sense could see that the other exhibit here in Munich, the Great German Art Exhibition at Hitler’s squat new Haus der Deutschen Kunst, was all incompetent landscapes and boring nudes by comparison. Really, how could anyone make nudes so dull as that “great” German art? And this was the “degenerate art”? This Paul Klee was gorgeous in its simplicity—the jaggy lines of the angler’s face, the graceful reclining S-curve of his arms, the charming extension of a fishing pole over a blue as varied and evocative as the sea. It made her think of Stephan, although she couldn’t say why. She didn’t suppose her nephew had ever fished.

  “Do you like it?” she asked Michael, surprising herself with the question. Until the past few weeks, she would have been sure he would love it, if only because she did. “The Klee, The Angler,” she said, having to identify which one, exactly, because the paintings were all jumbled together, a disrespect made blatant by the words ringing them on the walls: Madness becomes method.

  In the face of Michael’s silence, Lisl focused on the words.

  Laughter burst out behind her, the small-minded conforming to expectation.

  She lowered her voice and said to Michael, “I thought Goebbels was a fan of the modernists.”

  Michael glanced about uneasily. “That was before Hitler gave his little speech on degenerate art undermining the German culture, Lis. Before he promoted Wolfgang Willrich and Walter Hansen.”

  Two denouncers—failed artists, but accomplished denouncers—in charge of which art was to be applauded and which vilified.

  Michael said, “This exhibit was Goebbels’s idea, and a politically smart one.”

  Lisl turned from the Klee and from Michael. When had he become someone who valued political cunning over artistic expression?

  Even Gustav and Therese Bloch-Bauer were blasé about the Nazi assault on culture, though, everyone too wrapped up in their own families and their own lives to see the politically darkened clouds piling up on the border between Germany and Austria. Everyone thought Hitler was a passing German fad, that it couldn’t happen to Austria, that Austria had weathered the assassination of Chancellor Dollfuss and the attempted Nazi coup three years ago, and they would weather this, and anyway people had businesses to run and children to raise, parties to attend and portraits to sit for, art to buy.

  Lisl pretended interest in another painting, another sculpture, until she was in an entirely different room from her husband, admiring a Van Gogh self-portrait, Chagalls and Picassos and Gauguins, an entire wall devoted, unflatteringly, to the Dadaists. It was only when she reached the room she would come to think of as “the Jewish room” that she felt her own precarious position. “Revelation of the Jewish racial soul” was written on one wall. Lisl thought the paintings extraordinary; she hoped whatever it was they revealed reflected something about her own soul.

  But she was a Jewish woman wandering alone among an unfriendly gathering in Germany.

  It was ridiculous, this sudden fear. Munich was barely across the border. In little more than an hour she could be back in Austria.

  Still, she went in search of Michael again.

  She caught sight of him standing before an Otto Dix of a pregnant woman, her belly and breasts so distorted that it left Lisl almost relieved that she could not bear a child. Michael’s face as he considered it, though, was full of longing. He’d always said he didn’t need an heir, that Walter could take over her family’s chocolate business and Stephan his family’s bank—a bank that had only survived thanks to her family money anyway, not that Lisl would ever say so. Michael was a proud man from a proud family that had fallen on hard times, as had so many after the financial markets crashed, and Lisl would never do anything to jeopardize her husband’s pride, any more than he would hers. Stephan was a son to Michael, her husband always said, and Walter too. But even before this moment, this revelation in his expression, Lisl had sensed something gone amiss, Michael less and less enamored of the university education and intellectual charms he’d always said were the reason he’d fallen in love with her.

  She asked a question of a stranger so that Michael might hear her voice and have time to compose himself. When he had, she rejoined him, taking his arm and saying, “We might buy that Klee,” just to have something to say. But they wouldn’t buy it, not here or anywhere else, and not just because it was so outrageously overpriced.

  Along the Quay

  The overcast sky threatened more snow, a welcome freshening for the filthy crust of the walkways and the canals dulled with scraped ice. Truus, walking with Joop, passed three boats iced into a Herengracht already frozen so solidly that Amsterdam buzzed with speculation that the Elfstedentocht might be skated for the first time since 1933. Near the bridge across to their apartment, a small group of adults visited in the center of the canal, children skating around them, or simply sliding in their little boots. This was Truus’s favorite part of the day—she and Joop walking home together the way they had when Joop first courted her, when she was a newly minted graduate of the School of Commerce and had just begun a job at the bank where he worked.

  “I’m not saying no, Truus,” Joop was saying now. “I’m not forbidding it. You know I would never forbid you something that was important to you.”

  Truus settled her gloved hands more deeply into her coat pockets. Joop didn’t mean to be picking a fight or demeaning her; it was just the casual way even good men like him inadvertently spoke, men who’d come of age at a time when women hadn’t yet even gained the right to vote—when, indeed, only men of wealth had that right.

  They watched as a toddler boy, new to skating, nearly took down his sister.

  Truus said, “Nor would I forbid you something that was important to you, Joop.”

  He laughed warmly, put his own gloved hands on her elbows, and slid them down to ease her hands out of her pockets and take them in his.

  “All
right, I deserve that,” he said. “It ought to have been in our wedding vows: love, honor, and don’t even think about trying to forbid you anything, whether it’s important or not.”

  “You don’t think saving thirty orphans left by the Nazis to stand in the snow in their pajamas is important?”

  “I didn’t mean that, either,” he said gently. “You know I didn’t mean that. But do think about it. The situation in Germany seems to me to be escalating, and I worry about you.”

  Truus stood beside him, watching the skaters, the sister now helping her brother up from the ice.

  “Well, if you mean to go,” Joop said, “I wish you would get it over with before things get any worse.”

  “I’m just waiting for Mr. Tenkink to arrange the entrance visas, Joop. Now, you said you had something you wanted to tell me?”

  “Yes, I received the oddest call at my office this afternoon. Mr. Vander Waal—you know him—one of his clients is quite certain that you have something of value that belongs to him. Something you brought for him from Germany?”

  “Something I brought? Why would I have brought anything across the border for an absolute stranger?” She frowned, something nudging at her as she looked out at the skaters, the little boy’s and girl’s father joining them, taking the boy’s hand. “I limit my precious cargo to children; I promise you that.”

  “That’s what I said,” Joop said. “I assured him you wouldn’t have had anything to do with it.”