Authors: Lois Ruby
After that, as Erich slowly recovered, he, Father, and I grew together, crowding one another like bulbs planted too close. Our lives gradually improved as a thin stream of foreign money reached the ghetto. Our bellies less hollow, I dared to believe the war would grind to an end soon and we could all go home. Not home, really. Enough news from Europe had seeped through the filter of the blockade to convince us that we Jews would not be returning to Austria. America was the home Erich and I allowed ourselves to dream about again.
Erich was still too weak to pedal Peaches to work, even though there was a demand for his services now that more food was reaching us in Hongkew. I'd been running his route. It was easy toting the fifty pound sacks of rice and flour because I'd been lifting my brother all the weeks of his illness.
We lived on nearly nothing. Father no longer showed even a twinge of guilt over bringing in no money. I wondered: When the war ends, will he be able to reclaim the life he's so carelessly shed? Will he even want to find another violin that fits him so perfectly as the one he's given up?
And then another question plagued me: When Mother comes home, and Father begins acting like a working father again, can I give up the power I've inherited from them and slip back down to being the dutiful daughter? Do I even want to?
We heard that an internment camp was hit by an errant U.S. bomb, rousing Father from his lethargy long enough to cry, “My God! Is your mother all right?” Frantic for news, we urged the Russian refugees on the outside to hound all the consulates for information. Word trickled down to us in Hongkew that it was Pootung Internment Camp that was hit, not Mother's.
So I was sick with relief, then ashamed at how low I'd sunk. I no longer cared if everyone in Pootung had been blown to bits so long as Mother's camp was spared.
The pass system loosened a little, and we visited Mother the first of every month. We told her we were plumping up, staying dry in the June deluge, cool in the heat of July. Stoic soldiers, each of us. We didn't tell her that Father sat for vacant hours staring at the wall, with The Violin's absence a
presence
that filled the room like fog. We didn't tell her that Erich had barely survived Ward Road Jail or about my humiliating visits to Ghoya's office. And especially, we did not tell her that she had left a deep crater in our lives; that we walked around its rim, afraid one of us would stumble and fall, and drag the other two down to the bottom of the canyon.
She lied to us, also: Life in the camp was easy, she said. So friendly everyone was, and they all had meaningful jobs, soft beds, plenty to eat. During our July visit she shooed Father and Erich away for a moment. “Go take a walk. Someone said there is licorice at the canteen today. You love licorice, Jakob,” she said with a brittle smile. As soon as their backs were to us, she whispered, “The International Red Cross smuggled in a letter from America. Don't tell your father yet. Michael O'Halloran is trying to arrange for me to go to the United States after the war.”
The buried anger flared, surprising me that its shallow grave in my soul was so close to the surface. “
You
? What about us?” I cried.
She seemed stunned by my question. “All of us, Ilse, all four. We are a family. Do you forget that? We will all go to America.”
I expected Mother's news to fill me with joy. Well, it didn't. Long ago, feasting on American movies and magazines, I'd thought of that country as pure heaven. The one thing I knew for sure after struggling through nearly six years of war was that no nationânot America and not even our beloved Austriaâwas a perfect paradise.
I sensed Erich getting more and more restless as his strength came back. One morning he left the apartment with such iron determination that I just knew where he was heading, and I followed.
When Gerhardt opened the door for him, I pushed my way in as well.
Gerhardt shouted, “You two should never have come here!”
“I have to talk to you,” Erich said.
“You're marked, Shpann. The Japs are onto your scent, and you're leading them right to our nest.”
“I'll risk it.”
“What gives you the right?” He turned angry eyes to me.
“Gerhardt, leave my sister alone and listen to me for a second. You think you and Rolf and the rest of you are the liberators of the Free World with REACT's mischief-making? Let me tell you, some of those men I knew in Ward Road Jail were deeper into this than we ever were, Gerhardt. We're rank amateurs compared to them. Want to know what they told me?”
“No.” But he listened.
“Germany surrendered. Hitler's defeated.”
“Why are you the only one who knows this?” Gerhardt asked with a sneer.
“Believe me, I have this from people who are in a position to know.”
“Jailbirds,” Gerhardt muttered.
“Some of them did a lot of damage before they landed in Ward Road. Major damage. They say Japan's kept the news from us, but the fact is it's all over for Hitler, and the Japanese can't hold out much longer. They're hanging by a hair,” Erich said. “They'll fall to the Allies in a month, six weeks at the most. But before that, they're going to come down hard on us as a last blast before it all ends.”
I watched the fight drain out of Gerhardt. He rubbed his face with both hands, dragging his lower eyelids down to show bloodshot eyes. He needed sleep, and something else was bothering him while Erich talked.
“There will be tighter ghetto restrictions, no passes, more blackouts, mock food shortages, more political prisoners, brutal tortures, shootingsâ”
I nudged Erich in the middle of his tirade and flashed him a signal:
Look at him
.
Gerhardt sank to the bottom step and hung his hands between his knees. “Word's filtering in from Europe about the camps.”
“The concentration camps? Yeah, we know about that,” Erich said impatiently.
Gerhardt's eyes blazed. “Extermination camps where people are gassed to death.”
“You mean at Chelmno?” I remembered Dovid talking about that years earlier.
“Chelmno was a small operation. I'm talking about death on a huge scale. Mass graves. Ovens. Ashes floating out of the chimneys.”
I grabbed Erich's arm. “Where is this happening?”
“All over,” Gerhardt said gruffly. “Germany, Poland, the Sudetenland.”
“How many have died this way?” Erich asked.
Gerhardt stared up at the ceiling two stories above. “Maybe a hundred thousand.”
“A hundred thousand? Gerhardt, that's just impossible,” I cried.
He turned his eyes to me, and what I read in them wasn't the gleam from the day he'd found me under the stone bench. No, this time it was grief, shock, horror, as he said, “Some reports from the West say a million. A million Jews exterminated like vermin.”
We heard a rustling behind Gerhardt, and then a small figure materialized, still shrouded in shadows.
Madame Liang! Or at least the motorcycle girl I'd met in Hangchow. She wore a blue sash across her chest, tied in a knot at her waist. I couldn't make out the Chinese characters on the sash.
“He's right,” she said in her precise British English. “Far more dead than from the massacre at Nanking. A million, maybe more. Hitler had a most efficient killing machine, but he's through. Here, the Japanese are still pawing the dirt before they simper off when the rest of the world gets word of the atrocities.”
I was swaying, reeling from shock upon shock. I braced myself on Erich's arm and stared at the girl until she said, “Your mouth is gaping open, Margaret Loeffler. Ah, you thought I was merely a figment of your imagination. I assure you, I'm real.” As she came into the light, I saw a fresh wound across her cheek and the trek of tiny black stitches.
I stammered, “I thought you were in Hangchow.”
“You've never seen me in Shanghai? Think. Remember the day you visited our dear Erich at Ward Road?”
“You were a prisoner in the cell with him?”
“Me? No, I'd swallow cyanide first! I was the cackling old woman in the courtyard, the one creating the distraction with the pigeon so you could get away without betraying all of us with your blithering sentimentality.”
“It was my brother's life!”
Erich said, “Yeah, a month ago I thought I was dead. Surprise. I woke up alive one morning, and I like breathing in and out on a regular basis. It's habit-forming.”
“Indeed, it is,” the girl said. “We've all put our lives on the line for years; we've done courageous work. Now we're too close to the finish to risk it all.”
A strange look passed from her to Erich. Did they have some history between them? She said, “Now hear this, mates: Our work is through, and we're closing up shop.”
Gerhardt's rage seemed to be reenergized, and he jumped to his feet, pumped with adrenaline. Turning to the girl, he said, “You, of all people, you're saying we should give up? Sit here and wait for the bombs to fall and the Yanks to lead the Japs away with their hands behind their heads? A million Jews dead in Europe, and we do
nothing
? That's Shpann's style, not mine.”
“I'm not the hero you are, Gerhardt. Neither's my sister. We're out of this operation.”
“Wait a minute!” I protested.
Erich clapped his hand over my mouth. “For once, Ilse, hold your tongue.”
“Good advice,” the girl said with a sardonic smile that obviously stretched and pained her wound. “Remember, I call the shots, and I say we rein in Rolf and the rest of them because in two months the war will be history, and I intend to be alive.” She put her arm around Erich's waist and hooked her thumb into the back of his beltâa familiar gesture that obviously made him uncomfortable in front of me.
He slid away from her. “Yuming is right. We've got to stay out of jail. Another day at Ward Road, and I'd have been food for the rats. Is that what you want, you and Rolf and all of us dead before the war's over?”
Gerhardt was not giving in gently. He pounded the railing, which clanged and echoed through the empty warehouse. “I say we fight until the last Jap falls. Give them something to remember us by. Make their last days in China a fiery hell.”
Erich yanked me toward him. “I'm out of it, and my sister's out of it, starting right now, and if you had any sense, you'd listen to Yuming.” He pushed me toward the door, opening it a crack to make sure no one was watching us. I spotted Liu, who quickly rolled down the bank toward the river, out of sight. Erich looked back at Yuming, and we shut the door behind us.
Walking home, I leaned on my brother like a crutch and thought about Beehive day again. The man in the park, the heap of his broken bones. A beautiful sunset was wasted on me as I tried to imagine what a mountain of bones from a million corpses would look like.
In my dreams that night, I was smothered, crushed under an avalanche of those bloodless white bones fighting one another for breathing space.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
1945
Gerhardt's wish came true. The last days of the occupation
were
a fiery hell, but no thanks to REACT. On July 17 American bombers missed a Japanese target. Some reports said they'd aimed at an airplane factory; others, that the Americans meant to destroy a radio transmitter that controlled Japanese shipping lanes. What difference did it really make? The bombs hit the fringe of our neighborhood instead. Home alone, I watched out the window as buildings burned to cinder or exploded into piles of wood and glass that flew everywhere.
It was stupid to go out into that flaming terror, but stupid to stay in as well. What if the fire leaped to our house? I couldn't risk being trapped in a burning building and charred alive. Rooted to the floor, I cried out, “Mother, what should I do?” and was answered by silence.
The Japanese made my dilemma easier by somehow sparing our lane, except for broken windows and wall cracks and cascading plaster.
When the barrage was over, I ventured out to help, though I wasn't sure just where I was needed.
Mr. Kawashima happened to be out for his daily stroll when the first bomb fell. He'd ducked into a store and escaped the worst injuries from the blast, but a dagger of glass from the store's shattered window impaled his cheek, a millimeter below his left eye.
I found him laid out in a vegetable garden amid dozens of other victims, a four-inch blade of glass sticking out of his face. He lay with his hands folded serenely over his chest, but the wound must have hurt terribly and frightened him even more.
“Oh, Mr. Kawashima! What can I do for you?”
He opened and closed his eyes, afraid to speak, afraid to move his face too much.
Erich showed up, along with Tanya. We did what little we could to help the doctors and nurses frantically treating five hundred wounded victims in courtyards and gardens without any catgut for sutures or sulfa for infection, and painkillers were a godsend we also didn't have.
What a daylight nightmare of scorched skin, severed limbs, pools of blood, the patient weeping of the wounded and the last gasps of the dying. It was way too much for a girl my age to see and hear. My head told me, “
Run! Run away from this horror
.” My heart whispered a different command, so I stayed, even after Tanya gave up and went home shaking. I kept my hands busy easing what little I could of the misery all around me.
The exhausted medics had no time for Mr. Kawashima's minor injury. Erich knelt beside Mr. K and started to pull the shard out, but a doctor zoomed by and shouted, “Don't touch. Nerve damage. Lose an eye.”
“I'll bring Mrs. Kawashima to you,” I murmured. Nothing else to do. That's what she'd told me when Erich was burning up with fever. “Nothing else to do.”
Mr. Kawashima turned out to be one of the lucky ones. After two days of his lying in the garden, a doctor from the Japanese hospital was finally able to extract the glass properly. Mr. K.'s cheek drooped after that, as if he'd had a stroke, and he needed to keep wiping saliva from the corner of his lips, but at least he didn't end up with a dark hole where one eye should have been.