The Stone Crusher

by Jeremy Dronfield

  When the time had come to sail, it was apparent that the thirty‑eight other children weren’t going to make it. Somehow they’d been trapped in the bureau‑

  cratic tangle of emigration. So at three in the afternoon of Monday, March 17, Kurt, Karl, and Irmgard were taken to the dock with just one another for company. There was their ship, tall as an office block, fixed to the dockside with great ropes and gangways.

  SS Siboney wasn’t the largest passenger liner afloat, but she had a certain elegance: two slender funnels and upper decks lined with covered promenades like arcades. Along the hull, partly hidden by the dock and the gangways, were identification markings to protect her from German U‑boats: ameri‑

  can ‑ export ‑ lines in giant white letters, flanked by Stars and Stripes the size of buses.

  Kurt handed his papers to the officer at the foot of the gangway and went aboard. There were many familiar faces from the train journey among the passengers; by far the majority of people aboard appeared to be refugees, with a few returning tourists and commercial travelers among them. Kurt and Karl went in search of their cabin, following directions along a maze of corridors and down flight after flight of steps. Eventually they found it, right down in the depths of the ship, where it was unpleasantly stuffy and the engines could be heard throbbing loudly. There was a bunk bed; Kurt claimed the top bunk while Karl had the bottom. Having staked out their turf and disposed of their luggage, the two boys left the cabin and rarely went back to it.

  Along with most of the other passengers, they watched from the rail as Siboney pulled away from the dock and, with engines thundering, turned her bow westward. The port rotated around them, then receded, Lisbon shrank 294265XGB_STONE_CS6_PC.indd 107

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  to a smear, then Portugal to a sliver, then all of Europe dwindled and sank beneath the horizon.

  Kurt remained on deck for three hours after sailing, looking out across the expanse of the ocean. Out of sight, beyond the northern horizon, convoy after convoy of merchant ships dragged slowly eastward toward Britain with Royal Navy escorts circling like nervous herdsmen; in the east, German U‑boats slid out from their pens and cruised the vast ocean with torpedoes couched in their tubes. All Siboney had for protection was the set of painted markings on the sides. Kurt descended to his cabin that night tired and replete with new sensations.

  That first night was unpleasant in the noisy, overheated cabin, and the next day was marred by seasickness (all Kurt could keep down was fruit).

  Reluctant to spend another night in the cabin, after dark Kurt and Karl took their blankets and sneaked up on deck. There was nobody to stop them; Nurse Sneble, a compact middle‑aged woman from New York, was supposed to look after the children, but she was so busy with the elderly passengers she scarcely had time to cast a glance at them.

  It was chilly in the night air, but wrapped up and reclining in deck chairs, the two boys were warm enough. They luxuriated in the quiet and the fresh air. Kurt watched the stars overhead and wondered at this new situation and the place he was going to. He knew a tiny smattering of English from school; under Nazi rule, English had been on the school curriculum, even in the Jewish charity schools. But Kurt hadn’t picked up much; he could say hello, yes and no, and OK, but that was about all. His class had learned the rhyme “Pat‑a‑cake, pat‑a‑cake, baker’s man” by rote, but in Kurt’s mind the words had little meaning. To his ears, the Siboney’s American crew and passengers just spoke gibberish.

  Somewhere back there, beyond the horizon where the eastern starfield met the black line of the ocean, were his home and family. He no longer had the harmonica his mother had given him. The train had stopped somewhere in France, and while he and the other kids were waiting to change trains, some German soldiers had stopped and spoken with them, and played with them a little. Kurt had shown them the harmonica. They took it and wouldn’t give it back. When he boarded the train again, he left behind his last link with his mother and home.

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  A cloud lay over Europe, roiling black and flickering with lightning. Some‑

  where in mid‑Atlantic, Siboney steamed out from under it and into a bright American dawn.

  Kurt and Karl, asleep on their deck chairs, were woken by a dash of cold spray. Jumping up, they realized that it wasn’t sea spray but a splash from the mop of a sailor swabbing the deck. Gathering their blankets, they retreated indoors.

  Somehow Nurse Sneble found out about their night al fresco, and her gaze finally fell on the two boys. They were reprimanded and ordered to sleep in their cabin from now on. Cowed, they obeyed, but together with Irmgard they continued to have the run of the ship all day long, exploring, playing games, making friends with the sailors. This rich environment of new experiences helped to distract them from thoughts about what they had left behind and the uncertainty of where they were going.

  Day by day the weather grew warmer as Siboney steered a southwesterly course. The days passed with island‑spotting, lifeboat drills, watching sharks cruise by the ship. It was an idyll that seemed set to last forever. On the eighth day they reached Bermuda, where some of the passengers disembarked. It was announced over the ship’s loudspeakers that in two days they would reach New York. Siboney turned her bow northwest and left the warm tropics behind.

  Kurt sensed a changed atmosphere aboard; the cruise was done, and people were preparing for the most momentous arrival of their lives.

  Around noon on Thursday, March 27, 1941, with every man, woman, and child lining the rails, Siboney passed between Staten Island and Long Island and steamed into the Upper Bay. Kurt pressed between the others to watch the gray waters and distant shores slip by. Then he saw it, off the port bow, the glittering outline of the Statue of Liberty growing and growing from a little spike until she towered above the ship, pale green and magnificent.

  Siboney steered into the Hudson, past the skyscraper skyline of Manhattan.

  Around Kurt, children and adults exclaimed and pointed as they picked out the sights, talking excitedly, wreathed in smiles. Many children had been given little American flags, and they held them up, fluttering in the wind, tiny, fragile offerings of hope.

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  Seventh Avenue was a cascade of noise and color. Canary‑yellow taxicabs with flared black wings stuttered at the curbs and barked their way angrily into the streaming, halting, screaming traffic of automobiles and buses, disputing the Forty‑Second Street intersection with bell‑ringing trams. Broadway and Times Square were like the innards of a racing engine with the throttle wide open.

  Kurt’s senses were drowning. He clutched the hand of the lady from the aid society like a lifebelt as they waded through the dense sidewalk traffic of skirts and overcoats, swinging umbrellas and canes, bobbing hats, flapping newspa‑

  pers and flying cigarette ash, all flashing past his face too rapidly to register.

  He had been in New York for one day, and it wasn’t enough to even begin getting used to it. Kurt was a city boy to his bones, but this was nothing like Vienna. The old place had its feet in the twentieth century but its heart had never caught up. New York was a city of modernity from foundations to sky, a town built out of automobiles and gasoline and glass and concrete and people and people and people and still more people who themselves seemed more of the modern world than any in Europe. Kurt and his friends were aliens in every way.

  When Siboney had docked at the pier, Kurt, Karl, and Irmgard had been released from its charge with their papers stamped. There was a medical inspec‑

  tion, during which they were prodded and scrutinized and tested. Kurt had been fine, the doctor noting only that his eyes were mismatched: one brown, one hazel. But Karl gave cause for concern; the doctor frowned and wr
ote on the form that he suspected pituitary disease, as well as defective vision.4

  After going through customs, they had been met by a lady from the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, which partnered with the German Jewish Children’s Aid in helping refugees. She took them to a hotel.

  There was a lot to arrange for all of them. They were immigrating to the United States, not merely for the duration, and they needed to be settled. Of the three, only Kurt had definite arrangements in place. Karl and Irmgard had no friends or relatives in America; their only point of contact was the Children’s Aid, which had arranged places for Irmgard here in New York and for Karl in distant Chicago. After a night in the hotel the time came for them to part.

  Kurt would never see either of his friends again.5

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  The bell rang and “Sixth and West Thirty‑Fourth Street!” yelled the con‑

  ductor as the bus jolted to a halt. The aid society lady took Kurt’s hand, and they joined the knot of people spilling from the bus onto the sidewalk and into another maelstrom of traffic and indifferent, noisy humanity. Kurt looked upward. And there it was—the mythic epicenter of New York’s ultramodernity, climbing up and up, impossibly, inhumanly high: the Empire State Building.

  Kurt, humanly tiny and insignificant, gazed up at it in wonder. Of all the sights he saw in New York, the visit to the Empire State Building left the clearest impression. Then there was another bus, heading for Pennsylvania Station and an unmissable appointment with the eastbound train.

  The strange place names ticked by, stop by stop, meaningless to Kurt’s Austrian eyes but replete with the culture of a previous wave of religious immigrants who yearned for their home towns in England: Greenwich, Stamford, Old Lyme, New London, Warwick. The train had left New York behind, tracing the coast right through Connecticut and all the way to Providence, Rhode Island. There the main line ended.

  When Kurt disembarked, accompanied by the lady from the aid society and the suitcase that had traveled with him all the way from Im Werd, they were met by a woman Kurt had never seen before. She was about his mother’s age, but more expensively dressed. To his surprise, she greeted him familiarly in German. This was Mrs. Maurer, his mother’s old friend from Vienna. Waiting with her on the platform was a middle‑aged man accompanied by a woman, both regarding him with reserved benevolence. In respectful tones, Mrs. Maurer introduced the gentleman as Kurt’s sponsor, Judge Samuel Barnet.

  Judge Barnet was around fifty years old—almost exactly the same age, in fact, as Kurt’s father, but in every other respect as different as New York from Vienna. Samuel Barnet was rather short and stocky, with gray, receding hair, a large, fleshy nose, and thick, bushy eyebrows beneath which were set a pair of deceptively sleepy‑looking eyes.6 At first sight, he had a rather grave demeanor, even a little frosty. The lady with him, who wasn’t much taller than Kurt himself, was the judge’s sister, Kate; she was small, neat, and stolidly built like her brother.

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  Mrs. Maurer, who had taken responsibility for housing Kurt, explained that he wouldn’t be staying with her. She and her husband, George, who was a cotton mill inspector, weren’t very well off and rented a small apartment in a town house;7 instead, she had arranged accommodation with Judge Barnet himself. It didn’t seem to make much sense that he be housed with a stranger rather than with the only person in this new world of Kurt’s who actually knew Vienna, was friends with his mother, and spoke German. But much of this passed right over Kurt’s uncomprehending head.

  Leaving the aid society lady to head back to New York, they climbed into the Barnets’ automobile. From Providence they drove into Massachusetts, crossing a seemingly endless succession of rivers, bays, and inlets. Eventually they reached their destination: New Bedford, a large town on the bank of the Acushnet River estuary. This southeast corner of the state was a dense little patch of immigrant England whose traces were visible on almost every road sign for miles around, from here to Boston by way of Rochester, Taunton, Norfolk, and Braintree.

  It was all meaningless to Kurt, and New Bedford was even less like Vienna than New York had been—a town of river ferries and broad streets, small, genteel public buildings, cotton mills, and long, straight avenues of subur‑

  ban homes of gray shingle and white clapboard, where automobiles hummed, children played, and sober citizens went about their business with decorum.

  Judge Barnet’s house was on Rotch Street, one of a grid of quiet, leafy suburban avenues between Buttonwood Park Zoo and the center of town. As a Special Justice of the District Court of New Bedford and a pillar and key‑

  stone in the town—especially its Jewish community—Samuel Barnet might well be expected to be of titanic proportions, intimidating and mighty, living in an imposing mansion on the edge of town; instead, the car turned in at the driveway of a regular clapboard home standing shoulder‑to‑shoulder with others almost but not quite identical to it.

  Kurt’s reception into Judge Barnet’s home was warm but, in keeping with the man’s demeanor, reserved. Communication was near‑impossible. Yes and no weren’t really sufficient, and “Pat‑a‑cake, baker’s man” would be of no use at all in this situation. Once Mrs. Maurer had left, an invisible barrier settled between them—a barrier which the judge was determined to break down with‑

  out delay. Fortunately, he wasn’t alone in this endeavor.

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  Samuel Barnet had been a widower for more than two decades, his wife, Mollie, having died in the 1919 influenza epidemic when she was only nineteen years old. They’d been married in 1915 when she was sixteen and he was a young and ambitious attorney.8 They had no children, and Samuel had never remarried. But his house was neither a widower’s mausoleum nor a bachelor’s den; with him lived his three sisters, aged between thirty‑eight and forty‑three, and like their brother all resolutely unmarried.

  The sisters were Kate, Esther, and Sarah, and they had already appointed themselves aunts to the new arrival. Sarah, the youngest, had trained as a dental hygienist but hadn’t had work for several years. Esther, bespectacled and lean and a little flustered‑looking, taught chemistry at the City High School. And Kate, the eldest, who had come to the station at Providence, had a matronly air; she kept house and worked for Samuel as a clerk in his office downtown.9

  There was a fourth sister, Goldie, who was married and lived in Brockton.

  They welcomed the bewildered Kurt and showed him where he would sleep. His arrival had been long‑expected, and a bedroom had been prepared for him on the first floor. Exhausted, he slept his second night on American soil in his own bed in—for the first time in his life—his very own room.

  The next morning he woke to find a strange presence in his room. A tiny boy aged about three, dressed in a little camelhair coat, was standing at his bedside, gazing at him in wonder. He opened his mouth and spoke—and out poured a stream of the same incomprehensible English gibberish that Kurt had been hearing since boarding ship at Lisbon. The tiny boy seemed to want or expect something, but Kurt had no idea what it was. The boy’s face fell in disappointment, and he burst into tears.

  He turned to an adult standing behind him, and wailed, “Kurt won’t talk to me!”

  The little boy, Kurt learned, was a member of the family. His name was David, the son of Judge Barnet’s younger brother, Philip, who lived right next door with his much younger wife, Roberta, and their two children. Together they made up one large, extended household.

  As they grew accustomed to one another, Kurt was assimilated into the household and the family—much more rapidly than could ever have been expected. Judge Barnet—or Uncle Sam as Kurt quickly learned to call him—


  belied his somber appearance and proved as warmly welcoming as any guest could wish, and Kurt would never be allowed to feel out of place.

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  The family were Conservative Jews,* a concept unfamiliar to Kurt. All he had known were his family’s lightweight religious observances—in which synagogue and Torah played little role—and the strictly Orthodox who were common around Leopoldstadt. Conservatives—who were not necessarily politi‑

  cally conservative—were somewhere in between; they believed in preserving ancient Jewish traditions, rituals, and laws, but departed from the Orthodox in recognizing that human hands had played a part in creating the Torah and that Judaic law had evolved to meet human needs. So they were both conservative and progressive. Also unlike the Orthodox, they didn’t follow any traditional dress code. As Kurt got to know New Bedford, he would discover that the Barnets were leading lights in a large and active Jewish community, within which he was welcomed as readily as he had been in the Barnet household.

  Spring came to New Bedford along with Kurt, and the trees lining Rotch Street turned green. If you squinted along it, you could almost imagine that you were in the Hauptallee in the Prater, and that none of this had happened—the Nazis coming, the family split and sundered. As strange as this place was, Kurt could already sense that, but for the lack of his mother and father, and of Fritz and Herta and Edith, and the thousands upon thousands of kilometers that lay behind him, he had found something that felt like a home.