My Family for the War (6 page)

“That didn’t help any last night,” I muttered.

“Ziska, what are they going to do with us?” Bekka asked fearfully.

It was the question everyone was asking themselves. But I had never heard anyone dare to speak it out loud. “We have to get out of here,” I said, instead of answering.

“And go where?” Bekka’s voice sounded tired and hopeless.

I looked at her with surprise. “But, you’re all going to America!”

Bekka started to cry again. She shook her head violently. “No, we’re not. I wanted to tell you. Papa’s cousin denied us.”

“What do you mean, denied you?”

“Last month. She doesn’t want to have to sponsor all of us. Papa wrote back that she should just bring Thomas and me over, but she doesn’t want to do that either. She wrote that to separate the family was against divine law.”

Bekka sobbed. I sat there speechless. The Liebichs weren’t going to America, and all their efforts to learn English had been for nothing.

Then suddenly an idea occurred to me that was so wonderful, I forgot everything else going on around me. “Bekka! Come with us to Shanghai! You don’t need a visa, just the passage for the ship! We could stay together!”

“Do you think?” Bekka already had the hiccups from crying, but there was a flicker of hope in her eyes.

“Absolutely! No visa, no sponsors! They don’t have anything against Jews in China,” I assured her excitedly. “Oh, Bekka, just imagine, the two of us in China!”

“Well, I… I can talk to my parents!”

Through a veil of tears Bekka could smile again and you could tell she was embarrassed that she had cried in front of me in the first place.

The women did not come back alone. They had Herr Liebich and Thomas with them, and you could tell by looking at the men what they had been through. The left half of Thomas’s face was red and swollen; he had been slapped over and over again. Herr Liebich held one arm tightly with the other. His forehead was beaded with sweat and his teeth were clenched together. “Broken,” was all he said. With a tremor in her voice, his wife made phone calls to find a doctor who was willing to treat a Jew. Our family doctor, Dr. Fruchtmann, was still locked up on Hamburger Straße, just like my father and Herr Grün.

I was so happy to see my mother that I almost knocked her down with my hug. It was as if our quarrel had never
happened. She wrapped me in her arms. “Ziska, my little Ziskele,” she murmered tenderly into my hair.

I pressed myself against her, felt the warmth of her skin… and all of a sudden happiness and courage and power I never dreamed I had flooded through me, and the terror of the previous night already began to fade.

Mamu and I had each other again, we had survived the worst of it, and everything would be okay! If Thomas and Herr Liebich were released after only half a day, then maybe we could pick up my father tomorrow. Considering how many men they had rounded up, we couldn’t expect that they could confirm Papa’s innocence in just a few hours!

Before my father came home, Mamu and I would have the apartment cleaned up. I would tape together the torn files, sort all his books. He would never notice that anyone had touched them! The furniture that couldn’t be salvaged, we would just throw away. We wouldn’t be able to take much with us to Shanghai anyway.

We were together, and that was all that mattered. And we would never be separated again, that much was certain.

Chapter 4

“Mama!” Evchen screeched, and swept past me and out of the room like a fat, triumphant dwarf. “Ziska’s being mean to me again!”

I rolled my eyes. When the voices in the living room grew louder, I could parrot their words, I had heard this routine so often in the past few weeks.

“Margot, if you can’t make sure that your daughter leaves my little one alone, then I’m sorry, but you’ll have to leave!”

“If you could manage to occupy the little one for a couple of hours so that Ziska could work in that room…”

“In Evchen and Betti’s room, mind you! I took you in out of sheer generosity, but this is still my apartment, and if Evchen wants to go into her own room, then I wouldn’t think of stopping her!”

I stuck my fingers into my ears so I wouldn’t have to hear how Mamu and her sister egged each other on. We had been living under the same roof for exactly twenty-nine days. This was probably just what the Nazis had in mind when they took our apartment. One of the cleverer ones probably had
the idea: “Let them move in with their relatives. They’ll finish each other off and make less work for us.”

There was no chance of concentrating on math homework, at any rate. I sighed and took my fingers out of my ears to figure out how far along they were in their argument.

“I’m not even talking about gratitude anymore! As if you would ever have done anything for me!” my aunt screamed.

Oh, Jesus,
I thought in desperation.
It’s not that the apartment is gone, or that Papa is still locked up in Sachsenhausen… Don’t even think about it. The tickets for the ship to Shanghai arrived today. Now they have to let him go. But what have we done to deserve Aunt Ruth?

The door opened and Mamu came in. She looked distraught and I instantly regretted having fought off Evchen’s assault on my math book. I sat down next to Mamu on the mattress where I slept at night, between the beds of my two younger cousins, and put an arm around her. A few days ago she had been forced to turn in all of her jewelry, which I knew had been a hard blow for her.

“I’m sorry,” I muttered dejectedly. “I try to control myself, but every time I see Evchen, a switch flips inside me.”

“I know the feeling.” Mamu rested her head on my shoulder. “Oh, Ziskele. Let’s hang on for just a few more days, then Papa will be with us again and we can get out of here.”

“Are you totally, completely, a hundred percent sure that you have everything this time?”

With a furrowed brow she counted on her fingers, “Passports, identification cards, the exit permit, a receipt for the emigration taxes, the tickets for the ship. The last time, they turned me away again because I didn’t know they wanted to
see the exit permit
and
the tickets.” She looked at me with a worried expression. “There isn’t anything else they could want to see, is there?”

“No, definitely not!” I assured her quickly. But the regulations changed constantly and we usually only found out about it when we got there and were turned away yet again. In the meantime, our three names were not only on the list of Jews wanting to leave for Shanghai, but also for Cuba, Argentina, Palestine, Venezuela, Uruguay, and Paraguay, not to mention the USA, Sweden, and England. Mamu had met more Jews waiting in various lines than in all the rest of her life combined, and had been infected with the widely shared view that we should be on as many lists as possible, just to be on the safe side.

“Please try not to get into an argument while I’m gone,” my mother begged me. “These visits to the Gestapo take every ounce of my energy. There’s nothing left for Ruth when I get back here.”

“It’s better if I go to Bekka’s,” I said, contrite. “Then I don’t have to see the three of them at all. Can’t you tell Aunt Ruth she should have that ugly wart above her lip taken off?”

“Me, tell her that? Are you crazy?” Mamu replied, but there was a twinkle in her eyes again.

“It wouldn’t help much, anyway. I don’t think there’s anything pretty about Aunt Ruth. It’s hard to believe you two are sisters.”

“That’s the root of the problem,” Mamu said. “She was always jealous of me.”

In the corner of the room there was a bang, the door of the wardrobe flew against the wall, and my cousin Betti
rolled out like a billiard ball. She was five, a year older than Evchen, and had the same thick, sullen face, which at the moment was displaying a mixture of triumph and lust for revenge in the wake of her successful spying. “I’m telling, I’m telling!” she sang, and danced past us out of the room.

“Oh, God,” Mamu muttered, “now this too. Come on, Ziska, let’s get out of here!”

Surpressing a giggle, I grabbed my jacket.

The one advantage of our arrangement with Aunt Ruth was that I was living practically around the corner from Bekka. Under normal circumstances I would have asked if I could just move in with her, but unfortunately, the mood at Bekka’s was also very somber—not as charged as at our place, but not any better. Just bad in a different way.

When I broke the news to Mamu about my fabulous idea that the Liebichs could come with us to Shanghai instead of going to America, she just looked at me sadly and explained, “Ziskele, if no one pays the travel expenses for the Liebichs, they can’t go anywhere at all. Bekka’s father lost his job at City Hall right after the Nazis took power. That was almost six years ago, and their savings are gone. Don’t tell anyone else, but they’ve been seen in the soup kitchen.”

“Then we have to lend them some money!” I asserted.

“Us?” Mamu replied slowly. “We don’t have enough for all of us.”

“But what can they do, then?” I cried, appalled.

“There are other possibilities, Ziska. It’s better if we don’t talk about it, but I imagine they have something planned.”

Something planned? No matter how much I badgered her,
my mother wouldn’t give anything away, and even worse, she made me swear that I wouldn’t under any circumstances ask Bekka or anyone else about it. I obeyed her, but my imagination was working overtime. What could the Liebichs have planned? Did they have enough money to escape to another country not so far away? Would they be smuggled across one of the European borders? Did they want to go underground?

A shudder ran down my back, a combination of terror and envy. I had heard of people who had simply disappeared when the Nazis wanted to arrest them. Underground—the very word sounded so promising! The longer I thought about it, the more convinced I was that the Liebichs could go into hiding at any time. It made sense to me that I wasn’t allowed to ask Bekka about it. It wouldn’t really be going into hiding if other people knew about it!

Like I did every day, I asked myself if they would still be there as I ran around the corner to their block of apartments. But Bekka opened the door immediately after I quietly knocked a certain rhythm and called “Ziska here!” It was better to avoid normal knocking or ringing the bell so as not to scare people to death.

“Our tickets for the ship have finally come. Mamu is already on her way to the Gestapo. And a week from today…” I gushed.

I cut myself short. Even if the Liebichs probably had something much more exciting in mind than us, I still felt vaguely uncomfortable around Bekka now that I knew that unlike us, they didn’t have enough money to get themselves to safety. But today I was in for a surprise. A relieved, radiant smile lit up Bekka’s face, a smile I hadn’t seen in a long time,
and she pulled me into her room. “Ziska!” she said ceremoniously. “Can you keep a secret?”

But Bekka didn’t take the time to let me answer. “Just imagine, Thomas and I are going to England!” she said with a little chuckle in her voice.

“To England? You and Thomas?”

“With a kindertransport! My father found out about it at the Jewish Community Center. They’ve already moved hundreds of children out of Berlin, Vienna, and Munich! We’ll live with foster families and it doesn’t cost us anything!”

She looked at me expectantly. “In foster families?” I echoed. “And your parents?”

“When we’re in England we’ll find jobs for them, and then they can follow us!” Bekka replied with glowing eyes. “You know Silke Weinstein, right? She’s already there and she got a domestic permit for her mother!”

Only one thing had reached me loud and clear. “You want to go to England without your parents and live with strangers?” I repeated, horrified. “You can’t just go off by yourself to live with people you don’t know!”

“Why not? Ziska, they’re taking us in, they volunteered to do it! They must be good and nice and absolutely wonderful,” Bekka raved.

I listened and tried hard to give the impression that I was happy for her. But a single thought ran through my head the entire time: If Mamu wanted to send me to England alone, I would run away and hide until the train had left without me! Nothing in the world could make me leave without my parents! Bekka’s enthusiastic description almost brought tears to my eyes, I felt so sorry for her.

At least she didn’t have to leave right away. She would still have enough time to think it over. For now, her parents had only put Thomas’s and Bekka’s names on the waiting list, and I knew all too well about waiting.

“Bekka is going to England,” I announced that evening to distract my mother from the fact that even though she had presented our ship tickets, she still hadn’t been able to take my father with her right away. “With a kindertransport. Just with Thomas and without her parents. Isn’t that awful?”

“A kindertransport?” Mamu repeated. Since she had returned from the Gestapo, she had been sitting perfectly still, staring off into the distance, but now she lifted her head and I explained everything to her in detail. Even Aunt Ruth and Uncle Erik listened, though my aunt usually cut me off as soon as I opened my mouth.