by Louise Fein
‘Push,’ yells Dr Kaufman, ‘push as hard as you can!’
I push and push, and Dr Kaufman pulls and suddenly, in a bloody gush, the baby slithers out.
For a beat, the room is still. The baby lies on the bed between my legs, a thick, twisted purple cord joining us together. Dr Kaufman cuts the cord.
‘It’s a boy,’ someone says.
Then silence.
Dr Kaufman is slapping the baby on his back. He’s a red-purple colour, like raw steak.
Time ticks.
He turns the baby over, wipes his nose and mouth.
‘Come on, come on,’ he says to him.
We all stare.
The silence is more than I can bear.
He coughs. A tiny movement. Then a bigger one. At last, a small cry, then a full-on howl. The tension in the room breaks and suddenly everyone is smiling, laughing, crying. They wrap him in a towel and Dr Kaufman hands him to me to hold.
‘Thank you,’ I whisper, ‘thank you, thank you.’
He delivers the placenta and cleans me up, stitching the cuts to my flesh. I barely notice, though, because for the first time, I’m staring into the face of my baby boy.
And suddenly I know love like I have never known it before.
1 August 1939
His head is covered in downy hair, so fair it is almost transparent. He smells of warm milk and biscuits. He has deep blue eyes and already he focuses them so meaningfully into mine. We are one, he and I. It’s as though he can read my mind and I his. He wants to know me. His eyes trace every contour and line of my face with such avid attention that his little mouth forms an ‘o’ shape as he pants with excitement and his arms and legs thrash about.
I examine every centimetre of his body, over and over. I never imagined I was capable of producing anything so perfect. His hand wraps itself firmly around my finger and he grips with surprising strength, but he doesn’t yet know how to let go. When I lift him, his legs scrunch up and his back curls over as though he doesn’t realise he has all the space in the world to stretch out. And when I feed him, his fingers reach and grab at my skin, just as a tiny kitten would knead its mother as it suckles.
He is a thing of extraordinary wonder.
And more precious to me than anything in the universe.
I can hardly bear to sleep, because when I do, I’m not conscious of his presence. Time moves too fast and each night that falls, each day that dawns, brings the dreaded parting closer. I kiss his forehead and gently wipe away the wet of my tears which land on the soft down of his head.
Under the sloping eaves I imagine this is a safe and cosy nest. That the steady marching boots which tramp outside through the streets of Leipzig, Berlin and all the other towns and cities of Germany, cannot get to us. If only we could hide up here forever…
We need to come up with a name for this tiny human. Time is running out to register his birth before the inevitable day of our separation.
George. Henry. William. Edward. The names of English kings. You can’t get more English than that.
No. I want something simple. A name so he will fit, that other English children might have. I need to get this right because I shall play no other part in his life, for how long, who knows? All I can give him is a name, so it had better be a good one.
A distant memory of being with Mutti and Vati in Berlin a long, long time ago. I must have been around seven or eight years old. A hot day and I was dangling my hands under a refreshing stream of water falling from the mouth of a strange mythical stone creature at the top of a fountain. Nearby, a street café with tables and chairs outside on the pavement. A little boy, younger than me, kept climbing down from his seat and running towards the fountain, his mother in pursuit. Vati tut-tutted at the lack of discipline the English have over their children. Stanley, the mother had called after him repeatedly. Stanley. The lady spoke fast and firmly to the little boy, but I could only pick out a few words as it was all in English. I understood ‘sit’ and ‘father’ and ‘now’ but the rest was lost on me. To my amazement, the little boy ignored his mother and laughed. That’s why I remember, because in my young life I had never witnessed any child so openly disobeying. He ran around and around that fountain and laughed and laughed as if everything in his life were pure, sweet joy.
I stare down at the little boy nestled in my arms, sleeping peacefully now. I lie him in the empty drawer, lined with soft blankets and padding. I could leave him a while and join Erna and her parents in the sitting room, but I don’t want him to be all alone.
Instead, I take out Walter’s letter, the one he sent the moment he heard of the birth, and read it for the thousandth time.
My Darling,
I’m scribbling this note in dreadful haste. I received the telegram this morning from Erna with the news of our son’s birth and I’m in such torment. I am of course relieved and overjoyed to know you are both well, but thinking of you bearing this alone and soon having to part with this baby, I know how this must be killing you. I have walked the streets of London all morning, tears pouring down my cheeks, thinking of you.
It’s not been easy at home. I suppose I have been rather difficult to live with. Anna knows how I think of you. If she is jealous, she never says, and she is handling this situation with fortitude and bravery. I admire her more than ever. And I can tell you, she will shower our baby and my poor cousins with such love. We will do our very best to make them feel at home here. I know that is little consolation. But in my heart of hearts, I’m sure that one day it will be possible for you to be a proper mother to our son. I hope and pray to God that that day will come sooner than we all think.
Stay strong, my darling Hetty. Things will get better – and please know that I love you more than ever before. This will never change.
You are in my heart, now and always,
Walter.
‘Hetty?’ Erna pokes her head around the door. ‘Are you okay?’
‘He’s asleep,’ I say, folding the letter and putting it away. ‘I didn’t want to leave him.’
She sits next to me and smiles at the baby asleep in his nest of blankets. His two little fists are clenched and stick straight up above his head.
‘Oh, Hetty,’ she says, ‘isn’t he just perfect?’
I look at my friend in wonder. She’s seen me at my lowest, she has watched me give birth, has cleaned up my blood, is risking her life for me. How can I ever repay such a person?
‘I’ve thought of a name,’ I tell her. ‘He is going to be called Stanley.’
18 August 1939
For three weeks and two days, the sun rises and sets. Very early in the morning of the twenty-fourth day since Stanley was born, I am wide awake and stand at the little dormer window in Erna’s attic room.
I watch him sleeping, cuddled in close to my chest. His eyes flicker beneath the pale lids, dark lashes delicately curled. His chest rises and falls, calm and gentle, and he breathes through partly opened lips. Every now and then his little brow furrows, as if he knows what is to become of him. As if he is struggling to understand it all.
But why are you sending me away?
Because I love you too much to keep you.
Erna and her mother will be here soon, to take him from me. We’ve all agreed it’s better that I stay behind. They will travel with him, together with Josef’s children, Lena’s boy and five others – ten in all – to Berlin, where the children alone will board a train to Hamburg. Then onto Rotterdam and to Harwich. They will be in the company of hundreds of other lost and confused Jewish children, sent away by desperate parents, bound for the safety of England. Walter will meet them at Harwich and take the five children to their new home.
If only I could go with them and never come back.
But the doors to the rest of the world have been slammed shut, and only a trickle of children are allowed to dash through the last tiny crack before England’s door closes too. Stanley must go now, and I will have to take my chances here.
&nbs
p; I’ve written his name and his father’s name on the label to go around his neck, like a parcel to be sent in the post. His papers are prepared, stamped and waiting with his little case of clothes, nappies, tins of evaporated milk and bottles, and a cardigan of mine which will smell of me. It might help calm him if he becomes agitated. I wonder how Stanley’s fifteen-year-old cousin, who has never met him, and who is to care for him on the journey, will cope.
I must have faith that all will go well.
Because faith is all I have left.
There is one more thing which must go into the case. I open the drawer and take my journal, filled to the very last page with my neat handwriting. I place it carefully beneath the clothes. If the worst should happen, and I am never reunited with my son, this is his story. Everything is here, the best and the worst of me. It will be up to Walter and Anna if they ever decide to share it with him.
There is a knock at the door.
‘Come in,’ I say, not taking my eyes off Stanley.
‘Hello,’ Erna says, and comes to stand next to me. ‘It’s time,’ she says quietly.
I nod, but don’t move.
‘My father is waiting outside the front. We must meet the other children at the station in half an hour, if we’re to make the first train to Berlin,’ she adds. ‘I’m sorry, Hetty, but we really don’t have much time.’
‘Yes. I know,’ I say. ‘Just give me one minute. I’ll bring him down.’
She nods and closes the door behind her.
‘Well. This is it,’ I tell Stanley. ‘I want you to have a good life. And I want you to know that I love you, and always will. I hope that somehow this awful prospect of war will go away, and that, very soon, I shall find a way to come for you. And I will come for you, my darling boy. I promise you that. I will come for you.’
Cuddling him close, I plant a kiss on his forehead and drag my eyes away to look out of the window. It is a glorious view. Higher than most of the surrounding buildings, I look eastward out over rooftops, trees and squares. The sun has not yet appeared over the horizon and the clouds, drifting away from the pool of yellow light are lit red, then pink; fading to deep purple and charcoal where the rays have not yet reached.
The light in the sky grows quickly, becoming ever more intense and changing the colour of the clouds as I watch. They become paler, pink and fluffy, then white where the light is strongest. Suddenly, the top of the sun appears, a brilliant curve of shimmering gold, its rays finally penetrating the very edges of darkness in the sky. It grows above the horizon with incredible speed until the whole sky is lit for a moment, like a pool of yellow fire.
The birth of a new day.
Epilogue
June 1994
My Dear Walter
I realise that this letter will come quite out of the blue, so I hope you are sitting down. It has taken me almost five years to trace your whereabouts. Well, and two years of thinking about it and not really knowing where to start, if I’m completely honest. It’s been a long story of false starts and dead ends, but I’m persistent, if nothing else, and with the aid of – can you believe it – a Jewish charity in America, I’ve found you at last.
I thought long and hard whether to send this. Whether to risk trying to find out what happened to you, my first love and, of course, to my son, who I knew only for the first three weeks of his life. Suffice to say, not an hour of any day in the last fifty-five years have gone by without thought of him. I have lived the bulk of my life with a piece of my heart severed and, hopefully, living a happy life in England. After the war, life under the Soviets was indescribably hard. Every day, a battle for survival. I wanted to try to find you, but as time went on, it became impossible and I also came to believe it would be for the best for you and Stanley, if I stayed out of your lives. But I am getting older every day and I do not want to go to my grave not knowing what happened to my son, and of course to you, dear Walter. And so, here I am.
There is no quick or easy way to sum up the last fifty years. For the most part, I suppose, one just gets on with the day-to-day business of living and working. I try not to think of the war years, full as they were, of terror and hardships and the communication restrictions. I try not to think of the horrific years that followed, and the trauma rendered by our Russian occupiers – a conversation for another time – but once that passed and life became tolerable again, I did, you will be pleased to know, go back to finish my education. Unlike the Hitler years, the communists allowed us women some modicum of equality of opportunity, even though it was more a question of necessity, than a true vision or openness of spirit.
But it did mean that, after some years, I was able to realise that dream of becoming a doctor. Not quite the type I once envisaged, no, but one rather desperately required. I became a doctor of psychotherapy, now retired. I worked all my life with children, trying to put back together the pieces of broken minds. In so doing, I went someway to nurse my own. And one other thing I achieved, of lesser importance but no less meaningful: I overcame my fear of water! I used to swim every day during the summer. Each time I did, I thought of you and how you would have been proud. It made me smile to think of it.
I never had any more children of my own. My marriage to Tomas was short-lived and not a happy one. He was sent to the front before the end of our first year together and did not see his twentieth birthday. I had no interest in remarrying then. I focused first, on survival, and second, on my work. But, much later in life, long after I’d given up on ever again finding personal happiness, I met Max, an older, uncomplicated man, with the gentlest of hearts. We married and we were happy. He died twelve years ago.
And what of the others? Vati committed suicide when Berlin fell. Mutti never stopped believing in the Nazi dream, nor in the greatness of her husband. Eventually, she too died, of a broken heart. I’m so grateful that Karl never saw the horrors which were to come. I never knew what became of Hilda and little Sophie. After the war, I moved away to a small town far from Leipzig.
And your family, Walter? I think of them often. I know they were all, in the end, sent to Buchenwald and from there, I suspect, on to Auschwitz or Theresienstadt. I cannot imagine the pain and suffering they must have gone through. It haunts me to this day.
But most of all I remember Erna and her parents, without whom I would not be sitting here today. All three of them, beacons of goodness, perished in a camp. One day in the autumn of 1942 I went to their flat and they were gone, the place turned upside down. There was no warning and not a day goes by when I don’t think of my wonderful friend, Erna, and her halo of auburn hair, destined to be forever young in my memory.
Nor shall I ever forget the day I had to send Stanley away. I think of the thousands of other mothers who did the same, feeling their pain as they sent their own precious children into the unknown, desperately entrusting them to strangers. And I think of the countless parents who were unable to save their children’s lives.
And never for one day will I forget what I once was, when I was one of the believers. It was you, dear Walter, who first turned my head and made me see that people are people, regardless of anything else. It was you who made me understand that we all have immense capacity for both good and evil, that we must stand up and speak out against those who preach hate. Every day that I live I wish the Nazis had never come to power, that the camps had never existed. Every day I live with the shame and guilt of the part I once played and will do so until my dying day.
Walter, I hope this letter hasn’t come as too much of a shock. I should dearly love to know my son, just a little. If it is only to know he is alive and well. It might be too much to ask of him, and you and your family, but I dream that one day I may be able to meet him in person. You might never, of course, have told him anything of his past, and if you would prefer for me to stay away, then of course I shall honour your wishes.
At present, I could not possibly afford a trip to England, so for now, I would be incredibly happy just to hear from you.
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With love and best wishes,
Herta Roth (Heinrich)
Summer 1995
London
For the third time I check the address on the crumpled piece of paper in my hand, then look again at the number over the door of the café. This is definitely the right place.
I take a deep breath and push open the door. A little bell jangles somewhere out the back as I enter the warm, coffee-scented room. A couple sit holding hands in the corner next to the window. The only other customer is an elderly man reading a newspaper, its pages spread all over the wooden table in front of him. I read, The Sunday Times, in large letters on the discarded front page. I should have done that, brought a newspaper. It would have been something to do, something to make me look less conspicuously alone. And good practice for my English.
I’m forty minutes early. But better this way than to be late. I’d been so afraid of getting lost, or something going wrong, I barely slept last night.
A young girl appears behind the counter. She looks at me expectantly.
‘Can I help you?’ she asks.
‘A black coffee, if you please.’ I speak carefully, trying hard with my pronunciation.
‘Sure. Anything else?’ she asks.
There is a huge array of cakes and pastries arranged on display behind the glass counter. My mouth begins to salivate at the sight of them.
‘And I take one of those too.’ I smile at the waitress and point to a twisted pastry with blanched almonds on the top and something that looks deliciously sweet and creamy oozing from the middle. ‘And how much is the cost?’ I hope I’m using the correct English grammar.
‘Don’t worry. Take a seat and I’ll bring it all over. You can pay at the end, when you’ve finished.’ She nods towards the tables.
