by Bodie Thoene
It was reassuring.
Choirboy John pointed toward the nearest one and said to Angelique, “Destroyers. Here to protect us.”
“How best to describe them?” Lindy wondered aloud. “They look and move like greyhounds.”
“Greyhounds,” Betsy said, nodding.
“That’s good,” I agreed. “But more threatening. Wolves?”
Cedric Barrett, the playwright, also stood at the rail, but his face was pallid and he was not smiling. Still, he tried to contribute to the discussion. “The subs are the wolves. The destroyers are our…” He put one hand over his mouth and the other to his stomach. We heard a muffled “Pardon me,” as he stumbled into Newcastle’s interior.
“I think he was going to say ‘sheepdogs,’” Lindy ventured. “You know, maybe Mister Barrett will write about us when he gets to Hollywood. Heroic British youth escape from bombing to adventure on the high seas. What do you think?”
“I think Mister Barrett doesn’t think much of the high seas,” Nan observed.
“He’ll be better soon,” I offered. “But if our adventure is merely about how well they feed us, there may not be much to write about.”
As the destroyers shuttled back and forth, encouraging the laggards, we sailed up the east coast of the Isle of Man. I overheard Lindy say to Angelique, “You’ve had it quite rough, getting here. Much rougher than me. Tell me about it.”
Angel spoke and Lindy’s pencil traced her notebook with the artistry of words.
AT SEA
NORTH ATLANTIC
AUTUMN 1940
My music class for the CORB agency consisted mostly of singing. First lesson on my curriculum was folk songs from different nations representing the nations of the passengers on board. Raquel sang a gypsy tune with her girls. The choirboys were called to the front to teach the tunes and lyrics of American folk songs. Connor played his Irish whistle and I, my violin. I was awkward and stiff with the folk melodies. The surprise of the day came when Mariah asked to try out my “fiddle” and, for the first time, revealed that she was an accomplished Celtic fiddle player.
To my delight, Mariah fiddled while Patsy clapped and taught us all to sing “Whiskey in the Jar,” an Irish rebel’s song.
Miss Pike, wide-eyed and ashen, entered the gym and listened long enough to hear fifty happy children belt out, “There’s whiskey in the jar-o!”
Charging to my side, she hissed that my allotted music hour had passed and was over. “And further, such dubious ballads are not what we at CORB expected from a concert violinist. I will speak to you later about this shocking display.”
With admiration for Mariah’s unknown talent, I returned my violin to its case and turned the class over to a recreation specialist on staff of the Newcastle.
The afternoon wind was crisp, stinging my cheeks as I walked briskly around the promenade deck with Raquel and Mariah. Lindy, Betsy, and Angel followed after us like impatient puppies. Simcha and Yael remained behind with the organized children’s activities in the gymnasium. Patsy peeled off with her two little ones to nap before supper.
Lindy carefully transcribed the lyrics of “Whiskey in the Jar” onto the pages of her notebook as Mariah dictated. “Please, Mariah. Repeat it slowly, please.”
Mariah sang the tune at half tempo and then Connor’s Irish whistle joined in from behind us.
“Musha rig um du ruma da,
Whack for the daddy-o,
Whack for the daddy-o,
There’s whiskey in the jar.
“I counted out his money, and it made a pretty penny.
I put it in my pocket and I took it home to Jenny.
She said and she swore, that she never would deceive me,
But the devil take the women, for they never can be easy!”9
Connor and John, flanking the austere playwright Cedric Barrett, jogged up beside us.
Barrett, whose color looked a bit better than the first day, eyed my violin case. “You are more than CORB bargained for.” Then he quipped, “I surely must have the choirboys sing this Irish robbers’ song in my movie!”
I said to Mariah, “I heard Miss Pike discussing how best to throw you overboard, personally.”
Barrett concurred, “‘Keelhaul the Irish woman,’ Miss Pike said to the chief steward.”
Mariah replied, “I’ve never learned to swim.”
Barrett gestured at the flotilla of convoy ships surrounding us. “There’s only about a thousand sailors who would love to pluck you out of the water.”
“Only if it helps morale, Mister Barrett.” Mariah smiled and batted her thick eyelashes.
Lindy tugged at my sleeve and gestured first to her notebook and then to Barrett. I understood her unspoken question and introduced Lindy to the great author.
“Mister Barrett, I would like to introduce you to a very talented young writer who is a part of my contingent. This is Lindy Petticaris.”
He removed his pipe from between his teeth and, amid a cloud of exhaled pipe smoke, bowed gallantly. “Miss Petticaris. A fellow scribe, eh?”
Lindy blushed. “Very…pleased to…to…meet you. I know your name from the plays on The Children’s Hour.”
This both surprised and delighted the writer. “You say what? My dear child, no one ever knows the writer.”
“I do,” Lindy declared. “You are Cedric Barrett. THE Cedric Barrett who wrote the Christmas Pantomime and Beauty and the Beast.”
He thumped his chest in mock amazement. “A clever girl. A brilliant girl! You will most certainly one day be a famous writer, Miss Petticaris.”
Emboldened by his praise, she smiled and held up her precious notebook. “Would you…would you read my story? tell me what you think?”
“I would be honored.” He took it as if it were a Pulitzer Prizewinning manuscript.
Lindy, delighted, declared, “A serious critique, mind you. One writer to another.”
He held his pipe aloft as if to promise. “I will most certainly.”
The seas kicked up once again, and the ship began to roll as we paraded up the deck and down again. Barrett let his pipe die. He pocketed Lindy’s precious notebook and shoved his Homburg hat low on his forehead. His complexion turned sallow once again. Eyes darted frantically for a way of escape as seasickness swept over him.
“You’d better go,” Lindy, ever observant, said to him quietly.
“In…deed!” He sprinted off down a corridor to his quarters just as Miss Pike chugged toward our group with fire in her eyes.
“Missus Murphy!” she demanded. “A word in private, if you please. A word about your music curriculum.”
Mariah leaned close. “Don’t let her throw you to the sharks, now, darlin’.”
Miss Pike crossed her arms over her chest and stood to one side as my pleasant companions pressed on into the wind without me.
“What is it, Miss Pike?”
“You know very well what it is!”
“No. Sorry.” I feigned ignorance.
“Inappropriate! I have received a full report of the foreign songs in this morning’s music class. Foreign songs, and this is an English ship!”
“More precisely, it is an American vessel.”
“Certainly not Irish. English speaking. English music.”
“Like Mozart and Bach?” I nodded slowly.
“You know precisely what I mean. I want you to know I intend to report to the board that you and your Hollywood friends are a bad influence on the morale of…of…”
“Only you, Miss Pike. Yours is the only face without a smile. Oh, and except for poor Mister Barrett, who is terribly seasick. You might as well know that we have a talent show planned. Like an American Andy Hardy movie. We intend to feature a song from every homeland. That is twelve different nationalities, Miss Pike, who are now under the jackboot of Hitler. The songs forbidden by the Nazis we will sing freely.”
“This is serious business, this voyage. And I want you to know I intend to report your frivolou
s music instruction personally. You are most unqualified to shepherd these children to America.”
“Is that all?”
She pushed her spectacles up on the bridge of her sharp nose. “Indeed. That is all.”
As she stormed away to the telegraph office, I knew Miss Pike had declared war upon me personally.
Jesus called them to Him, saying, “Let the children come to Me and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God.”
LUKE 18:16 ESV
VIENNA, AUSTRIA
MIDNIGHT, CHRISTMAS, 1937
Leah is alive! When I returned to my apartment, she was there. There had been a premonition in the Judengasse that something evil was coming, she said, so she had escaped before I made my ill-fated attempt to seek her.
Nor was she alone. With Leah were three Jewish children: two boys, about seven and eight, and a little girl no more than five. Leah wants to help them get to Palestine. I made the children hot chocolate and had them sit in my kitchen while Leah and I reviewed the horrors of the night.
I told her not to try to go back to the Judengasse. From looking at the state of my clothes and the dried blood on my head, I know she understood why, without my giving those details.
When she saw me with Rudy’s violin case, she also understood what must have happened to him. “He told me to take it to you,” I said as I concluded the story of his tragic end.
From that moment on, the revelations all came from Leah. She showed me the secrets of the Guarnerius case: five passports and other papers in a false bottom, diamonds concealed within hollow tuning pegs.
Leah waved the passports sadly. “None of these will work for my three Liebe Kinder in there.” She nodded toward my kitchen. “And I don’t think Vienna is safe for them. If they were found, some officious bureaucrat would insist they be sent back to the Reich, and you know what that would mean.”
Among the papers was something that touched me directly—the description of why and when my father had been arrested and his transfer to Dachau. “Your father is a hero,” Leah said. “Seven hundred! That’s how many false passports your father provided the funds to purchase. Seven hundred German Jewish children.”
My father had kept his involvement in smuggling children a secret from me, when my best friend knew the truth? Was I hurt? Was I angry? No.
More than anything I wanted to find a way to free my father.
But that wasn’t all. Tonight was the night the course of my life changed forever. Because I can pass as a non-Jew, with my blond hair and Aryan stage name, I have been on the sidelines far too long. I pretended that everything would be all right again if I simply closed my eyes to the truth.
What has happened to Rudy, what is still happening to my father, destroys that notion once and for all.
“I want to help,” I said. “My papers say I’m Aryan, and I am a violinist. I am good friends with an American newsman. The Nazis will fear to trouble me again. I want to help.”
“You already have,” Leah insisted.
“No, I mean, I really want to help. And not only carrying papers, either. Let’s start with your three babies. I know a place in the Tyrol where they will be completely safe. I want to be the one to take them there…and all the ones who come afterwards.”
9 “Whiskey in the Jar,” a famous Irish traditional song
12
AT SEA
NORTH ATLANTIC
AUTUMN 1940
At twilight of our third day at sea a rising wind chased the setting sun into the west. Third Officer Browne passed by where Mariah, Patsy, Raquel, and I stood at the rail lifting our chins to the breeze. “Enjoy it, ladies,” he said. “There’ll be a storm before morning, and tomorrow should stay rainy all day.” Tipping his hat, he continued toward Newcastle’s bridge.
“Isn’t he a fine figger of a man?” Mariah suggested, watching Browne disappear.
“And a gentleman,” Raquel added.
We four appreciated a moment’s tranquility. Tonight was the children’s talent show for which we had been preparing. The practice sessions had often been wild affairs. A few minutes ago Lindy and Betsy had volunteered to take little Moira and Michael to the playroom until time to dress for dinner.
I had fifteen minutes with no one asking me to help them find their sheet music or accusing a bunkmate of borrowing their favorite stockings without permission. Fifteen minutes without Miss Pike accusing me of treason and sedition.
It was bliss.
As the skies purpled overhead, signal lanterns began blinking rapidly from the escorting destroyers, replied to by the strobes of the passenger and cargo ships. “How can they be havin’ so much to say to each other?” Mariah wondered. “What’s it mean?”
The answer came when the destroyer that was the leading sheepdog of our seagoing flock peeled off in a wide turn to port. She heeled sharply with increasing speed, and the curve of her new course brought her across our bow. The lean, dangerous vessel was pointed back toward Ireland. Moments later I saw the flanking warships do the same. Like opening a banana, the convoy’s skin of protection peeled down the sides, leaving the core of civilian craft headed toward America.
“What a comfort that is,” Raquel declared.
Patsy looked a question at her.
Raquel continued, “It means we’re safe now. The British navy would never leave us until we are clear of any threat, isn’t that so?” Her last observation was directed toward me, but I deferred the question to Officer Browne, hurrying back toward us with a sheaf of yellow radio transmissions in his hands.
“Out of danger?” I asked him, pointing at the departing destroyers.
“Eh? Oh, quite. We’re beyond the war zone now. Next stop, New York.”
I felt a rush of relief. No more sleeping dressed and in life jackets. It had taken days of travel and uncomfortable nights, but at last the purpose of this voyage was realized: we had escaped from the war.
We and the refugee children were out of harm’s way.
I would see my own children again soon.
My cheerful vision was interrupted by a foul stench. The pleasant salt air was tainted with a vicious smell.
The Polish diplomat, Podlaski, had ignited one of his vile cigars upwind of us. Cedric Barrett, unable to escape completely, still stood as far to one side of Podlaski as politeness allowed.
Like the noxious fumes, the Pole’s words also floated down to us on the breeze. “Criminal,” he said. “Leaving us defenseless here like this.”
“The destroyers have to escort an inbound convoy full of supplies,” Barrett said reasonably. “We’re safe enough now.”
“Safe enough?” Podlaski retorted, waving his cigar for emphasis. “They should remain with us all the way to New York. Even after seeing what the Nazis did to Poland, and after fighting them in France, the English still do not know them as I do.”
Mariah sneezed. “Sure and it’s time to go in, I’m thinkin’.”
“I agree,” I said. “Time to see who’s ripped her costume and who can’t find her left shoe.”
“I feel sorry for whoever shares a cabin with that man,” Raquel said, gesturing toward the diplomat. “I can’t imagine being cooped up with Mister Podlaski in any space smaller than…than Spain! And even then, I’d want to be upwind!”
We had done all our practicing in secret. A relay of Lindy, Angel, John, and James had kept tabs on Miss Pike’s whereabouts. Whenever she got too close to one of the clandestine rehearsals, each of the sentries would strike up some impromptu heeltapping and hand-clapping, as instructed by Raquel. These antics generated some strange looks from the grim chaperone, but our surprise had remained undiscovered.
We also had to roll out our production at top speed.
After all, we had invited Captain Doyle to our dining room for the third night at sea. The performance commenced immediately after the supper dishes were cleared away. I sat at the table with the captain, Mr. and Mrs. Snow with Robert, and Cedric Barrett, now r
ecovered from his seasickness. Also at my table was Podlaski. His cigars formed a single point of agreement between myself and Miss Pike: they were foul!
Mariah acted as mistress of ceremonies. “Your worship, Captain Doyle, sir. Miss Pike, and the rest of youse ladies and gentlemen, thank you for attending our little theatrical endeavor. It’s in your honor, Captain dear, but truth to tell, it’s also me friend Connor’s birthday. Now what d’ya think of that? So without further eloquence, let’s begin.”
I stood at the side of the platform. The five Westminster choirboys trooped to center stage. At a nod from Connor I raised my bow and began a slow, dramatic introduction of sliding scales and glissandos, ending with a note picked up by Connor on his flute.
At which moment of high expectation the boys began to sing:
“’Twas midnight on the ocean.
Not a streetcar was in sight.
I went into a boxcar, to get myself a light.
The man behind the counter was a woman, old and gray,
Who used to peddle shoestrings on the road to Mandalay.
I said, ‘Good morning, sir.’
Her eyes were bright with tears.
She put her head between her knees,
And stood that way for years.
Her children, six, were orphans, except one tiny tot
Who lived in a house across the street
Upon a vacant lot!
Oh, ain’t we crazy? Oh, ain’t we crazy?
We love to sing and dance the night away.
Oh, ain’t we crazy, oh, ain’t we crazy?
We’re gonna sing and dance all night today!10
By the end of verse two the entire dining hall was singing along with the chorus, “Oh, Ain’t We Crazy!” Of course, long before the end of verse one, Miss Pike’s complexion had gone from pink to scarlet and was well on the way to purple.
When the number concluded to thunderous applause, Mariah introduced Connor again and borrowed my violin. I rejoined my table while avoiding Miss Pike’s glower.
