My Family for the War (19 page)

When it was Walter’s turn to find us, I was standing behind a tree peering at him, when out of nowhere someone grabbed me from behind and a dark flash streaked before my eyes. Instantly I saw the world in black and white, something raced through my body like a strange energy and exploded. Someone was holding on to me by my jacket. They ran two or three steps with me, and then I was loose, running past the pond, jumping over other people’s picnics, dashing across the cricket field.

I didn’t come to my senses until I reached the entrance to the zoo. I had bolted across half of the park, and my jacket was gone. Panting, I looked around and tried to remember where I had come from. The memory only returned slowly. Gary’s birthday. Hide-and-seek. The tree. What on earth had happened to me?

Confused, I crossed back over the lawn. The Shepards met me halfway across, Gary holding my jacket in his hand. “Frances, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you, I wasn’t thinking…”

Gary was white as a sheet. He gave me my jacket back, and I saw that the buttons had been ripped off. Bewildered, I turned the jacket over and over in my hands, inspecting it, until Amanda draped it around my shoulders and led me back to our blanket.

Walter, who had kept watch over our things, pressed the buttons he had gathered into my hand. “This never would
have happened with a zipper,” he said, and I laughed so loud that the Shepards went another shade paler.

“This has got to stop!” Gary declared in a strange voice that didn’t sound like his own. “Being afraid all the time, running away, waiting for everything to calm down by itself. We have to start defending ourselves! I’ll probably never find a better time to tell you this. Mum, Dad… I’m not going to Oxford. I’m enlisting in the Royal Navy—this summer.”

I held my breath. Gary’s parents stood utterly still, thunderstruck. Then Uncle Matthew said, “Now, I can understand how a young man might have such thoughts. But I hope I don’t have to tell you, Gary, that spur-of-the-moment decisions seldom make for good results in the long term.”

“This isn’t a spur-of-the-moment decision. I’ve passed the entrance exam.”

“Entrance exam? Are you saying that you’ve already arranged everything behind our backs?” Uncle Matthew asked quietly.

I watched Amanda with growing concern. Several emotions crossed her face in rapid succession—disbelief, shock, fear, rage. “There’s no need to even discuss this!” she gasped.

“Like your parents, Mum? I have different plans for my life than you do, and we don’t even need to discuss it?” Gary countered. Amanda flinched. “Come on, I know you won’t do that to me,” said Gary nervously. “Of course I don’t expect you to say yes, but I do expect you to support me, because
you know
what it’s like!”

“And what if there’s a war?” Amanda snapped at him.

“Then I’ll go to war, and then I’ll come back, and then I’ll go to university, Mum,” Gary added emphatically. “I wouldn’t enlist if I thought I could
die
!”

She lurched as if someone had hit her, turned around as she staggered backward, and ran off across the lawn. “Dammit!” Gary cursed in despair and ran after her, followed by Uncle Matthew. Walter and I stayed alone with the picnic basket, the blanket, and a handful of buttons.

In the distance, we could see Gary and his parents arguing. “He’s a bit naïve, isn’t he?” Walter said, shaking his head. “He doesn’t know much about war, and nothing about death.”

“We hope you’ll visit us at home soon, Walter.” Amanda was the last to offer him her hand as we dropped him off in front of the theater. She sounded tired. In the three hours since Gary’s announcement, mother and son had tried so hard to interact normally that they were completely drained, and I began to find that worse than the argument itself. Gary didn’t stick around very long after we got home either. He packed his things in the beautiful new suitcase, and Uncle Matthew drove him back to school.

I closed the front door behind them and started upstairs to my room. My heart felt like a heavy weight I was dragging around.

“Frances?” I turned around. Amanda stood in the doorway to my room. “You knew about it, didn’t you?”

Suddenly I was scared. “Gary knows a secret about me too,” I whispered. “I’ll tell you if you want.”

I sat on the bed. Amanda smiled weakly. “Not necessary. We have a treaty with Germany—there won’t be any war. Hitler has high regard for England, and Chamberlain has no intention of provoking the Germans. Hard to believe, isn’t it? Suddenly we’re counting on Hitler.”

I didn’t answer. The pressure to tell her about my secret afternoon missions mounted and urgently wanted to be told, but the moment passed.

“Excuse me, do you need a cook or gardener? Any kind of domestic help?”

I thought back to the speech full of mistakes that I had recited mechanically in the spring, and was surprised at how different it felt to stand on strangers’ doorsteps now. Friendly and confident, I looked the lady of the house in the eyes and realized immediately that she was impressed.

“Are you Jewish?” she asked.

“Yes. I’m asking for my parents, who are still in Berlin. I arrived in January on one of the kindertransports.”

The word
kindertransport
always made a good impression. Many people had read about them or heard about them on the radio. “Goodness. How old are you? Do you go to school here? Of course you do, my children wore the same uniform! Would you like to join me for a cup of tea?”

“That would be nice.” I followed her into a large, bright house, and we sat in the kitchen.

“I’m Mrs. March,” said the lady. “I already have help, of course, but I do know someone…”

“You do?” I asked excitedly.

“Mrs. Soderbergh. The poor thing just had a stroke. She can’t afford a nurse, but I’ve heard that her maid Grace is quite overwhelmed.”

I set down my teacup.

“I don’t know if she would mind if I sent you to her, but if
you were to tell me where I can contact you, I could find out myself,” Mrs. March suggested.

“That would be… that would be…” My voice failed. I tore a piece of paper out of a notebook, wrote my address with a trembling hand, and gave it to Mrs. March.

She studied it for some time and then looked at me with surprise. “You’re staying with the Shepards?” she asked.

“Um… yes,” I admitted after a brief pause.

Suddenly I realized she was scrutinizing me more closely and, I thought, more sternly. “Does Amanda know what you do during school time?”

My head sank. “No,” I confessed meekly.

“Good heavens,” Mrs. March mumbled. “And she always seemed to have her household in such good order. Aren’t the houses that take you children in screened?”

“There are too many of us—they haven’t been everywhere yet!” I was beginning to find Mrs. March not very nice at all anymore.

“Well, Frances”—she threw a reevaluating glance at my address—“I will see what I can do. You will hear from me!”

A moment later I was standing on the street. I didn’t know if I should be happy or afraid. What would she do—help my parents, or betray my secret to the Shepards? At any rate, I certainly didn’t want to visit any more houses. I had to talk to Amanda before Mrs. March did!

I had hardly pushed my bicycle into the front yard when my foster mother approached me.
Oh no!
I thought, horrified, when I saw how pale she was.
She knows already!

“It wasn’t like that at all!” I implored.

And then I saw that she had a letter in her hands—in
both hands, as if it were too heavy for just one. “Frances, dear, something arrived for you…”

But she made no move to give me
the letter. Finally I simply took it from her, and was about to open it when I realized that I knew the envelope. It had my own handwriting on it.

My most recent letter to Mamu and Papa. But the address had been crossed out and a stranger’s hand had written something next to it. It said “Addressee unknown.”

I remember a few things about the following sixteen hours: me lying in bed shivering, Amanda cradling me like a baby, Uncle Matthew on the phone to Germany, trying to reach Theodor Todorovski, a friend of my parents’ who had still had a telephone when I left. The Liebichs hadn’t had one for ages, Aunt Ruth and Uncle Erik had never had one—and even if they had, it would have been of little use to us, since they must have disappeared with my parents. Otherwise they would have accepted my letter.

Disappeared. My head, my chest, my stomach—everything consisted of just this one word.

The letter came the next morning. Mamu’s handwriting, a foreign stamp. “They’re in Shanghai,” I whispered. “In Shanghai, and they didn’t tell me!”

“That’s not Shanghai, that’s Holland!” Amanda hastily tore open the envelope and showed me two pages filled with writing that immediately blurred before my eyes. “Oh, Frances, how wonderful! They made it—they got out!”

I looked at the pages in my hand and tried to push away the memory of the previous night to make room for what the letter meant. My parents hadn’t disappeared. They were safe. They were in the place where newcomers were welcomed with baskets full of chocolate.

And: They were only letting me know now. They hadn’t waited to come to me. They were in a different country.

Amanda was sitting with a lady in the living room. I heard their voices in the hall and thought twice about going in, but they had already heard me.

“Frances? Would you come here… ?”

If Amanda’s bolt-upright posture was any indicator, this couldn’t be all too pleasant a visit. “Hello, Franziska,” the lady greeted me. “I am Mrs. Lewis, from the Refugee Committee.”

“Good morning,” I answered, surprised that the committee would make an unannounced visit before noon, as I would normally have been in school at this time.

“You look so pale,” observed Mrs. Lewis. “Are you all right?”

“Frances received a letter today from her parents. They’ve fled to Holland,” Amanda said nervously. “But otherwise you’re quite well, aren’t you Frances?”

Disconcerted, I kept silent.

“There’s been something of a misunderstanding,” she continued. “Mrs. Lewis believes that, instead of being in school, you spend the afternoons calling at strangers’ houses hoping to find positions for your parents. I’ve already assured her that she must have you mixed up with another girl.”

She looked at me with an expression that said: “Please say she has you mixed up with another girl!”

“It wasn’t every afternoon,” I whispered.

That backstabbing Mrs. March! She didn’t call Amanda
with her news—she ran straight to the committee!

Before my eyes, my foster mother seemed to turn to stone. “It was only a few weeks in March and the last three days!” I cried in despair. “I couldn’t tell you because…”

“Why didn’t the school notice anything?” Mrs. Lewis demanded.

“I don’t really go to school,” I defended myself. “Until the summer holidays, I’ve been placed in the first grade, where I help some with the little ones. But the teacher doesn’t mind if I leave early.” I looked to Amanda again, who had begun to breathe deeply, in and out. “I couldn’t tell you,” I repeated mournfully. “At first because I didn’t know you, and then because it was too late.”

“Was that the secret?”

I nodded.

Amanda slumped against my arm. “If you plan to take Frances away from me, I will have to go into hiding with her,” she said dully to Mrs. Lewis.

“Take me away!” I was horrified.

Mrs. Lewis smiled reassuringly. “I don’t think that will be necessary. You’re not the only girl who has been trying to do something like this for her parents. But no more secrets, understood? Your parents in Germany are relying on us to make sure you’re all right.”

“My parents in Holland,” I corrected her, and was surprised at how nice that sounded. Amanda showed her to the door.

When she returned, I was still sitting on the armrest.

“Honestly now,” she said seriously. “Is that it, as far as secrets are concerned?”

“Well,” I said hesitantly, “there’s also Professor Schueler…”

“Oh, Frances.”

“. . . but only once a week, and not at his house, but at the Café Vienna, on Tottenham Court Road,” I quickly admitted, trying to play it down.

“Wait just a moment. You’re telling me that you’ve been riding into the city all this time, to a pub, and I haven’t noticed anything?”

“On Mondays,” I affirmed, noticeably quieter. “That’s when you’re…”

“At the nursing home.”

“And it’s not really a pub, it’s a café,” I hastened to add.

Amanda grabbed me by the arms and shook me. “Frances, I trusted you!”

“I’m sorry! I didn’t want this to happen,” I cried. “I didn’t know they’d send somebody here.”

“No, you didn’t,” Amanda said grimly. “But Iris March, that scheming old witch! Don’t cry, it’s not your fault. Tell me instead why you gave her our address.”