My Family for the War (33 page)

Book Three

Returning Home

1941–1945

Chapter 18

At least it had stopped raining. The branches and remaining brown autumn leaves still clung to the trees despite the tremendous amount of rain that had fallen in recent days. The grave, in accordance with Jewish tradition, had just been dug that morning. In the past forty-eight hours I had been amazed by the calm, fitting way the burial society of the Jewish community marked the coming and going of Malach ha-Mavet, the angel of death. From the prayers at the deathbed to the vigil, from the cleansing and ritual purification of the body to the symbolic sack of earth from the Holy Land, these men had quickly yet respectfully seen to everything necessary to take leave of life on this earth.

And now that Matthew had spoken a brief but heartfelt tribute to the earthly endeavors of the deceased, the cantor had sung a last shalom for him, and each of the mourners had tossed three handfuls of soil down onto the coffin and prayed the Kaddish, I could rest assured that everything had been done to provide a worthy farewell for Professor Julius Schueler, seventy-four years old, from Munich, Germany.

It would take a while for me to adjust to not finding him in his room, looking up expectantly as soon as I walked through the door: “My young friend! What’s going on out there in the world?” The fact that he was bedridden and grew steadily weaker despite daily exercises was puzzling in contrast to his face, which grew happier, more animated, and younger the longer his illness lasted. This last year in the nursing home, he confided to Amanda shortly before his second and fatal stroke, had been the happiest he had known since 1933!

Arm in arm with my foster mother, I walked to the gate of the cemetery, lost in thought, past unadorned graves topped with collections of small stones. “It’s too bad Jewish people don’t share a meal after a funeral,” I said.

“You would have liked to treat his friends at the Café Vienna, am I right?” Amanda pressed my arm.

“That would have been nice,” I agreed. “It’s funny, isn’t it? I went there for my parents and got nowhere, but in the end I gained a grandfather.”

“What’s so strange about that? You have a talent for gathering a family for yourself, that’s all. A family for the war, as your friend Hazel would say.”

Just for the war?
I thought, but didn’t say it out loud. There was a brief moment of tension between us, as happened so often recently when our conversation touched on the future.

I was thirteen, almost fourteen. I had been with the Shepards for almost three years—not so long in terms of a lifetime, but the years prior to that seemed infinitely distant, and faded a little more each day. My foster parents had always made it perfectly clear from the beginning that I was
“borrowed,” so I’d be given back at some point. Mamu had always been a presence in Harrington Grove. And yet it was Amanda who had formed me. I looked to her, talked like her, took on her mannerisms. I had become her daughter.

When I finally told her about my theory, Amanda’s short, astonishingly simple answer was proof of something I had known for a long time. “We aren’t blood relatives. If we die when we’re not together, I might not find you again in heaven,” I explained when she wondered why I didn’t join the Girl Guides like the other girls in my class. The Girl Guides took part in all kinds of activities for the war effort. But joining them would have meant being away from home quite often.

Surprised, Amanda listened to my rationale, then finally raised one eyebrow as only she could do and responded: “I wish you had told me about your theory earlier. I could have told you a long time ago that you overlooked something important.”

“And that would be?” I asked, puzzled.

“
I
will find
you
!” she said simply.

Being at the funeral had put me in a reflective mood, and I thought about the previous months. Belonging to the Girl Guides and “making my contribution to victory” had made me proud. We gathered materials that could be reused and collected money for the “Spitfire Fund,” made bandages from old sheets, and quite enjoyed playing the “victims” in civil guard drills. Our exercises included first aid, recognizing poisonous gases, and putting out firebombs. The older girls served as messengers between the Home Guard and
air-raid protection posts, since the phone lines were often down during attacks.

Walter was finally a volunteer now too. The Germans had only allowed us a few chances to catch our breath, and by the end of December half the city stood in flames and the rescue crews were entirely overwhelmed. After that, no one asked whether new volunteers were British anymore! In addition to his work in the ammunition factory, Walter assisted the volunteer fire brigade, which he thought was perfectly fitting: “During the day I put together missiles, and at night I help clean up the mess they make!”

When the air attacks let up for a longer stretch in January, the Elysée opened for business again, and my foster parents and I held daily “breakfast conferences.” Would Matthew come home after the evening show, or did he have Home Guard duty? Did I have Girl Guide activities, or would I go help out at the theater and take care of our shopping? Did Amanda have a day shift or a night shift in the nursing home? During that time, there was never a single day when each of us didn’t know exactly where the other two were. Being able to rely on each other was the only thing we could depend on; it made everything else bearable.

In April we experienced the heaviest attacks on London yet. I spent “Blitz Wednesday” in the basement of the nursing home with its thick walls and its own small airtight shelter. Three days later, Amanda, Matthew, and I were at home—how could we have known that this particular Sabbath would become infamous?

When the air-raid sirens started up, the usual routine was set into motion: Shut off the gas and water, turn out all the lights, gather blankets, gas masks, thermos bottles, the first aid kit, and the box containing essential valuables, and then single file into the shelter. It was too early to sleep, so we sat on two of the cots and played cards.

“There’s an awful lot of action in the air tonight,” Matthew said at some point.

The thundering and booming from impacts near us would not quit, the ground shook and rocked, and the loose upper bunk rattled so hard I expected the bed to fall on my head at any moment.

“I win,” said Amanda, with her reading glasses on the tip of her nose as she played her last card.

Just then, a gust of wind blew the blanket away from the entrance and scattered the cards, and we immediately threw ourselves to the ground as stones and clumps of dirt rained down on the corrugated metal with violent force. A few moments later we heard a sound through the din outside, a sound I hadn’t heard at such close range before: a weak, human sound, calling, screaming, and crying.

Matthew went to the door. “Oh, no,” he said, “it’s the Godfreys! Stay here, don’t move!” He reached for his steel helmet and slipped out. Amanda and I looked at each other in terror. Voices made their way to us, questions and short answers being called out, and already the piercing stench of fire penetrated the blanket in front of the entrance. Now nothing could hold us back, and we jumped up to look out.

Dense smoke immediately filled our noses, lungs, and
eyes. In the blue-white light that bathed the yard next door, shadowy figures were moving around. The crying had stopped, and someone staggered toward us—it was Mrs. Godfrey with her two young children. The three of them were covered in filth. “Your husband sent me. Could the little ones come into your shelter?” she said in a raspy voice. Only then did I notice that the fence between our yards was gone.

As I helped our neighbor and her children into the shelter, the crackling of the fire grew louder; it was apparently finding fuel quickly in the Godfreys’ house. “The garden hose,” I said to Amanda, “is it working?”

Without another word we both climbed out. While I unrolled the hose, Amanda ran into the house and turned the water on again. Of course the hose didn’t reach all the way to the neighbor’s house, so she brought tin buckets that had been standing at the ready in our kitchen. A small bucket brigade quickly formed—the two of us and Matthew, Mr. Godfrey, and other neighbors—while from the street we could hear the fire truck approaching. Directly overhead another plane droned and I automatically began to count to six, the usual number of impacts, but we were lucky: There were two blasts very close by, but the rest of the bombs fell a good distance away.

The extent of the catastrophe on Harrington Grove was revealed the next morning. Between protruding remains of walls were mountains of debris, roof tiles, window frames, and some items surprisingly unscathed; trees were charred, utility poles toppled, and a wire still throwing sparks twitched in the street. The Godfreys’ house was an eerie, windowless
ruin. The force of the blast had shattered all our windows too, and we lived with wooden boards over the openings for weeks.

Making things worse, the second year of the war supplies were noticeably more difficult to come by, and the government had no choice but to ration food. Clothing also had to be purchased with coupons, for which a point system was established. For hours my foster parents and I would plan, laying out the sixty-six points we were each allotted like a card game on the table: ten for a coat, six for a pair of pants, four for a blouse, three for a sweater, two for new underwear.

The rationing made it especially worthwhile to have your own vegetable garden. Amanda waged a bitter battle with caterpillars and beetles for her cabbage and lettuces, and grew potatoes, peas, beans, carrots, leeks, and herbs. On the weekends we would take trips to the forest to gather wild herbs that we dried and steeped when tea was rationed. “Shepard’s Delight,” our new variety, was such a success that soon my entire Girl Guides troop was traipsing through fields and pastures in search of herbs.

In the fall, Amanda, Matthew, and I had taken up mushroom collecting, which meant getting up at dawn on gray, drizzly days and taking the train out to Surrey. There was a small restaurant on the way where we treated ourselves to a late breakfast once our work was done, our backpacks full of field mushrooms that the waitress looked at covetously.

“If you give me your mushrooms,” she said the third or fourth time we were there, “you can have a few chicks.”

“Chicks… !” I must have exclaimed with such longing that my foster parents broke out into laughter. That day we rode back to London with empty backpacks, but with a small cardboard box on my knees instead that went “peep, peep, peep.”

“I hope for your sake there’s a rooster in the bunch,” grumbled Matthew, who would rather have kept the mushrooms. “Otherwise there won’t be any eggs and we’ll have to butcher the ladies.”