by Bodie Thoene
Three children stood tearfully in a half circle around Frau Marta. The oldest was a boy of eleven or twelve who raised his chin manfully and bit his lip to control his tears. Two little girls wept openly as Frau Marta daubed their tears with her apron and smoothed their long braids.
“There, now, no need for tears. When this is all over, as it surely must be soon, you will come back and stay for as long as you like and help Papa Karl milk Gerta and Zillie.”
“We will miss you,” sniffled the smaller of the two girls. “Who will sing to us and pray with us at night?”
Marta pulled the child close. “Everywhere there are those who love to sing with children and pray with them, too. In Italy you will be with a priest for a while; such prayers you will hear!”
“Can he bake good roggenbrot?”
“You have become an admirer of Tyrolean rye bread, eh?” Marta paused dramatically. “No one bakes it as I do.” She clucked her tongue. “But I have sent fresh loaves in your packs.”
“Mama”—Franz held the horses by their reins—“we have to go. Come, children. We have a long journey. Come, we must hurry.”
Wrapped in her quilt, Leah watched the sad children mount their horses and follow Franz into the woods. Their heads were turned to stare back longingly at the farmhouse until they could no longer see it.
When they were out of sight, Leah heard the soft voice of Frau Marta as she stood gazing after them. “Grüss Gott! May our Lord go with you, little lambs!”
After a long time, Marta wiped her eyes and turned to look up at the crucifix that hung above the door of the house. She made the sign of the cross and entered. There were others still to care for. The rest was in God’s hands.
2
Fire and Water
The expression on the face of Ernst vom Rath was grim and worried. He did not act the part of a young, carefree German diplomat out to see the sights of Paris. A strong spring wind whistled through the steel skeleton of the Eiffel Tower as he followed Thomas von Kleistmann up the steep metal steps of the structure.
Thomas glanced over his shoulder as if to encourage Ernst in the arduous climb. Ernst held up the small box camera in response as the tower elevator whirred quickly by them. The lift was crammed with tourists peeking out through the iron grid. As the eyes of strangers peered down on Ernst and Thomas, the two men paused on a landing. Ernst snapped a picture of Thomas with Paris in the background. Then Thomas took the camera from him and vom Rath posed, but he did not smile. He had not smiled since Le Morthomme, known as the Dead Man, had been shot dead in the bookstall. An absolute silence had fallen. No word of instruction from Berlin. No attempt at contact from agents of Britain or even of the French government.
Thomas leaned against the rail and gazed pensively over the city. “Well, what do you suggest we do now, Ernst?” The wind tugged at his overcoat and mussed his thick black hair.
Ernst looked through the viewfinder and snapped another photo. “The consummate tourists, eh?” he said solemnly. “Followed by the Gestapo, we wander through Paris. Visit the cabarets and cafés and hope for some encouraging word.”
“And if we are contacted?” Thomas looked at the empty steps above and below as if he were examining the structure. Satisfied that they had not been followed this time, he sighed with relief. “How can we know that the contact is not one of Himmler’s men? Gestapo in sheep’s clothing?”
The frown on vom Rath’s brow deepened. “Just so. How can we know?” He met von Kleistmann’s gaze. “What have we gotten ourselves into?”
“Much too late to wonder that now.” Thomas changed the topic with a wave of his hand. “They say the Führer is furious at the accusation that he might have had an eye on invading Czechoslovakia.” He smiled. “Goebbels is very adept at propaganda, is he not? Creating the image of innocent Hitler, slandered and indignant before the world?”
“That is what worries me.” Ernst buttoned his coat against the wind. “Perhaps the British do not believe—”
“And if they do not believe?”
“They will not attempt to reestablish a link with the German High Command.”
Thomas clapped him on the back. “If that is the case, then we will no longer be conspirators against the Reich.”
“Then there will be war.”
“That may be so anyway. We have done what we could to stop it.”
Ernst looked angry. “You sound relieved that it might be over.”
“I am only saying that there is nothing we can do.”
“You might return to speak with Churchill,” Ernst argued.
“What is there left to tell him?” Thomas said logically. “What? He announced our rearmament figures in Parliament. ‘Yes, quite. The Reich is jolly well working toward building an air force that can decimate Europe?’ This is not news. The American flyer, Charles Lindbergh, has already told the world that the German Luftwaffe is unbeatable.”
Thomas gazed up through the metal at a crisp blue sky as though he could already see German airplanes there. “I am afraid, Ernst, that all the facts and figures we have passed along at risk to our lives have only caused the English government to cower in fear and beg for peace. Perhaps they have come to doubt that my warnings are truly from the German High Command. Perhaps they believe that I am being sent with this information at the bidding of the Führer. Surely it is no longer any secret that he wishes the whole world to fear him.”
Vom Rath almost smiled at the irony of the British response to their information. “Warned about plans for Czech invasion . . . ” He faltered, then began with a new bitterness in his voice, “And they buried their heads deeper in the sand. Now the Führer screams against the lies that accuse him of plotting such an invasion, and Chamberlain seems quite sympathetic and sorry for all the fuss.”
Silence fell as the footsteps of a man and a woman sounded on the stairs above them. Ernst pretended to fuss with the camera as a young couple passed them. When they were out of earshot, Ernst spoke. “Again I ask, Thomas, what are we to do?”
The most sensible conclusion, it seemed to Thomas, was to do nothing. He was convinced that Hitler’s grand plan for the Greater Reich could not have been altered in spite of the ravings over the radio. “I am due for a leave. Berlin.”
“You will speak with Admiral Canaris, then.”
Thomas did not reply. The mention of Canaris’ name made him suddenly nervous. He stared angrily at Ernst. To speak that name was to somehow risk that the wind would hear and carry it to the ears of a thousand enemies. Thomas himself had been forbidden to mention Canaris in connection with this operation. How did Ernst know that the chief of the Abwehr had anything to do with this?
“No, Ernst,” he replied at last, “I am simply going home. No matter what it may have become, Germany is still my home. There is nothing left for us to do, you see? I think the English gentlemen are quite full of information about the state of German military readiness. And as for the Czechoslovakian question, it seems obvious that the British have no real interest as long as England and France are not affected.”
He gripped Ernst’s arm. “I am telling you that there is no one on that side of the Channel who cares what Germany does or who is at the helm. You see, Ernst? We are quite alone. I feel homesick for what my life once was.” Thomas inhaled and continued to look out over the gardens and rooftops of Paris. He thought of Elisa and of her family. He thought of his own betrayal, and of this failed attempt to somehow make it right again.
“Yes, alone,” Ernst replied glumly.
“To tell you the truth, I think I would not have minded so much if the fellow had shot me instead of Le Morthomme. If there is another war, I will not want to spend my tour of duty in the Abwehr. No, I will go to the front. I will look for an honorable way to end what has turned out to be a life of dishonor. There will surely be someone with a rifle on the other side who will rejoice to kill a German officer; don’t you think so, Ernst?”
“Perhaps it will not come to tha
t.”
Thomas laughed, denying vom Rath’s hope for peace. “There is nothing left for us here, Ernst. No doubt the Führer is drawing up his plans for eliminating the Czechs right now. I am going home. To Berlin. I will request transfer to the regular army. The Czechs are good fellows, I hear. I want to be in the front of the unit when the Wehrmacht crosses the border.”
***
An unseasonably cold wind blasted in from the North Sea and swept upriver sixty-three miles to the teeming port of Hamburg. Some citizens raised their eyes to the leaden sky and proclaimed that they had seen such a wind bring snow. Tiny gray flakes, soiled by the smoke from the steel plant, swirled earthward and dissolved into sooty puddles the instant they touched the cobbled streets. No one seemed surprised or alarmed by the occurrence. Some even joked that now that the Führer had the steel plants working at full capacity, their heat would warm all of Hamburg—perhaps all of Germany—until the snow would never stick again.
Inside the Thyssen Steel Works, the furnaces of the Reich fumed and hissed with the heat of molten metal and white-hot fires that seared away all thought of the cold wind outside. These fires, which created steel for tanks and ships and guns, were fueled by the flesh of men. Furnace doors radiated an unearthly light, illuminating the shining bodies of convicts chosen from the living dead at Dachau for their strength and size. Weary arms lifted heaping shovels of coal to the thrumming rhythm of machines and the clank of metal against metal as the production of armor plate for the battleship Bismarck continued relentlessly.
Like cymbals and kettledrums, the factory boomed out a symphony to hell, devouring the bodies and souls of those who fed the inferno for the Reich.
Shimon Feldstein had worked his shift for sixteen hours, taking the place of a man who had collapsed and died in front of the open mouth of the furnace. His sense of his own pain had long been dimmed as he dug his shovel into the black heap and tossed coal back to the insatiable fires.
Boom! Dig. Crash! Swing. Boom! Dig . . .
Sometime his shift must end. Sometime. If it did not, then he would die like the man who had fallen and convulsed at his feet. Then the heat would stop. The thirst would be quenched. Someone else would take his shift. There was an unending supply of labor for Hitler’s Four Year Plan. Shimon would not be missed. Not be mourned except by Leah.
The thought of her helped him lift his arms once again as it had a thousand times over the months. The image of her face stirred his heart with a will to survive.
Overhead, the giant kettle of molten steel swung from the fire toward the machine that would hammer it into plate metal for the pride of the Reich—the battleships being built in Hamburg’s shipyards.
Sparks flew up from the glowing yellow liquid as the kettle rocked a bit in its ominous transit above their heads. At this point the sweating Nazi foreman on the catwalk above them always stepped back behind the shelter of his glass cage. Eyes protected by dark goggles, he would watch with pleasure as yet another stream of refined steel spilled from the lip of the receptacle to be counted in the day’s twenty-four hour quota.
The plant never shut down. The fires never ceased to burn. The steady cadence of his convicts was seldom broken. Even in the event of heatstroke or death, the foreman had trained his workers that the movement of the kettle above them was what they lived for. Interruptions would not be tolerated. A delay in production meant beatings, extra shifts, less food. His methods had worked well thus far. Tonight Shimon remained for an additional twelve hours as an example of a worker who mistakenly stopped to look for a fallen comrade. The big sweating Jew had knelt and called for help and begged water to touch the lips of a convict already dead. Others in the unit would think twice before they broke the momentum again.
The boom arm holding the hissing steel trembled and groaned as it supported its burden. No one looked up at the noise. The foreman had shot workers for less. The roar of the blasting furnaces was numbing. There was never silence here. The moaning of a hook or the quavering of the container were not matters for contemplation.
It was not the deafening roar that caused the men below the molten river to look up for an instant to see their own death pouring from the beams above them. It was the light—blinding, brilliant, beautiful in its horror. Screams were lost in the din, and oxygen was sucked from seared lungs as the flesh was consumed from brawny backs.
Explosions followed as the liquid metal touched the heaps of coal and ignited them instantly. In a fraction of a heartbeat, Shimon caught sight of the limp body of the foreman as he tumbled from his catwalk cage and fell headfirst into the leading edge of a second fierce explosion.
Raging agony clawed Shimon’s back as he was lifted off his feet and hurled spinning into the air. The artillery of careless haste turned the mighty steel factory into a crematorium within seconds after the first flowing metal touched the coal. There had been no chance to run. Few of the workers who died in those brief moments even knew what force consumed their lives.
The lights from cars and fire trucks and ambulances seemed dim as they remained a block from the searing heat of the blaze. Sirens were drowned out by the noise of the roaring inferno and the groaning of twisted metal as the factory fell in on itself.
Reich industry officials shouted their replies to questions from dozens of reporters who gathered at the scene. “Causes will be thoroughly investigated . . . widows and orphans compensated . . . No doubt the work of Jews and foreign saboteurs . . . Steel production will be delayed only a short time. A matter of days.”
It was common opinion that no one could have survived the blast. Besides the handful of loyal Nazi foremen who were lost, the rest had only been common criminals anyway. The Reich had been fortunate in that way. “Survivors? The devil himself could not live through that hell! Heil Hitler!”
***
Shimon clung to the piling of the dock a hundred yards from where the demolished factory burned. The fires lit the dark night like daylight. Fragments of the building, blown with him into the river, now burned on top of the water.
The pain that raced up and down Shimon’s neck and back caused him to scream again and again, but his voice went unheard or unheeded. He longed for death. Such agony was too great for him to consider the miracle of survival. He did not ponder how he had come to fall in the water as the world all around him had disintegrated. Had he been blown free of the building? Had he crawled to the pier and thrown himself in the cool water? Had some gracious hand lifted him up and shielded him?
It did not matter. Yet another explosion shook the night. Shimon ducked his head as a shower of metal fell into the water around him. The air itself was charged with heat and fumes that almost choked him. Death would be merciful.
The air was torn by a series of blasts. With his last strength Shimon slipped beneath the water and held his breath as another shower of debris crashed into the waters. Only his hands remained exposed as he gripped a rusty iron spike protruding from the splintered wood. To let go of that spike would be to let go of life, to slip away forever and inhale the cold waters of the Elbe River into his tortured lungs. And yet, Shimon could not let go. Again and again his thirst for air thrust him to the heated surface where he gasped and shouted Leah’s name before he submerged himself beneath the waters once more. “Leah! Leah! Dear God—”
All through the terrible night he gripped the spike until at last the fires blended into the daylight and died away. As dawn broke he heard the exclamations and curses of his Nazi masters as they prowled the boards on the dock above him.
“The work of Jews and saboteurs. Two hundred dead inmates, more or less. A small factory—not much loss to the Reich, after all.”
***
The skies above Hamburg were still black with the smoke of last night’s explosion. The sidewalk was covered with soot. But the old woman did not seem to notice the mess.
In spite of her seventy-eight years, Frau Trudence Rosenfelt carried herself with a certain dignity and determination that ma
de the crowds in front of the Hamburg Office of Immigration part when she approached. Perhaps it was the cane that made the people step back for her and the little entourage that followed after her. She held the cane high and in front of her face, like a drum major leading a band in a Fourth of July parade back home in New York. Her diminutive form was dwarfed by heads and shoulders all around, but there was the cane, clearly visible even to the smallest of the seven Holbein family members who followed quick-march behind the grandmother they called Bubbe.
Frau Rosenfelt’s granddaughter, Maria, was seven months pregnant and waddled after Trudence like a duck. Maria’s five daughters followed like stair-step ducklings, kept in line by their father, Klaus, who protected the rear of the procession. Tall and gangly, Klaus could easily spot Bubbe’s cane as they snaked through the throngs of frightened Jews who had gathered outside the Reich office in hopes of obtaining precious exit visas.
“Stay close, children!” Bubbe Rosenfelt called in a high-pitched voice. “Link hands!” she ordered in English. Often she spoke to her family in a muddled combination of English and Yiddish, the mother tongue of her old New York neighborhood. In more recent times, however, she had taken to weeding out the Yiddish from her vocabulary and concentrating strictly on proper English sentence structure.
Since Hitler had passed the Nuremberg Laws against Jews, and the family porcelain factory had been confiscated by the Nazi state, the old woman refused to converse in German. “So teach the children to speak good American, Maria,” she often admonished her granddaughter, named for an old Italian-Catholic friend who still wrote from the Bronx. “To speak German? That language they need like a Loch in Kopf! Like a hole in the head, nu? I’m telling you, we are going home to New York!”
