A Master Plan for Rescue: A Novel

by Janis Cooke Newman

  The person shouting was a dark-haired man of close to fifty who appeared to be wearing a larger man’s suit, or maybe he had only been shrunken and put back into his own. He was standing before the desk of the square-headed Gestapo officer who had taken Rebecca’s photograph of the woman with the shriveled leg, and spit was flying from his mouth as he ranted. “I am telling you this was no accident! No random mishandling of luggage. This was the deliberate work of the Gestapo!”

  What I heard in the shrunken man’s voice was something I had never heard in a human voice before—the sound a mechanical thing makes when it is near to breaking. When all the other parts of the machine are compensating, so it is functioning in a fashion, but you can tell it will not be for long. I am thinking that the man’s wife heard it as well, for she had her hand on the man’s knobby shoulder and was whispering into his ear, like that might be a kind of fixing.

  “Herr Loesser,” the square-headed officer was saying, his tone full of condescension. “The Gestapo takes no interest in your family’s luggage.”

  “Yes, yes, yes, yes.” The shrunken man moved his head up and down as if a spring in his neck had come loose. “That is what you always say. The Gestapo has no interest in you, Herr Loesser, but we will put you on our watch list. The Gestapo has no interest in you, Herr Loesser, but we will put you on our arrest list. The Gestapo has no interest in you, Herr Loesser, but we will put you on our death list.”

  Herr Loesser’s wife turned pale and gripped the sleeves of his too-large suit, bunching them like curtains. Beside her stood a thin-shouldered boy of twelve or so. But it was the girl at his side—Herr Loesser’s daughter, I supposed—who caught my attention. She was a dark-haired girl of sixteen or seventeen, and there was something about the clear-eyed way she was watching the interaction between her father and the square-headed officer that made me think of Rebecca. This, I thought, is what she was like when she still believed in the dream of Paris, in the time when she knew nothing about her heart.

  “Why do you bring up arrest lists, Herr Loesser?” the square-headed officer asked. “No one has said anything about arrest lists. I have only informed you that one of your family’s trunks has been mistakenly sent to Shanghai.”

  “My husband has been unwell,” Frau Loesser murmured to the officer.

  The square-headed officer gathered all of the Loesser family’s documents in one large hand and rose. “We will look into this mention of arrest lists.”

  Herr Loesser’s daughter stepped close to the square-headed officer and gazed up at him with dark eyes. “My father was a lawyer before the Reich Act.” Her voice was low. “I fear he sometimes forgets himself.”

  The officer looked down at the young Jewish girl. She held his eyes, then only slightly lifted the corners of her mouth—not enough to be called a smile.

  The square-headed officer set down the Loessers’ documents.

  Later, when I saw the family sitting on the wooden benches, I noticed Herr Loesser’s daughter wiping her hands on her skirt, as if she had touched something unclean.

  The Germans made us wait inside the dim dampness of Shed 76 long enough for us to stop believing in the St. Louis, to grow certain we had done them the favor of traveling to Hamburg to prepare for our own deaths. Only then did the doors at the front of that bleak building slide open to reveal—like a floating city—the beautiful ship. Its hundreds of windows sparkling in the sunlight, its flags—covered in swastikas—snapping in the wind off the ocean.

  A man in the spotless white uniform of the ship appeared in the open doorway.

  “Might I have your attention, ladies and gentlemen?”

  We sat stunned, for it had been so long since anyone had called us anything but Jew.

  “You may now board the SS St. Louis.”

  Then, as if to stun us further, the man in white gave a small bow.

  Music began to drift through the open doors—“Vienna, City of My Dreams”—and as we stepped through the open door into the light, we saw that it was coming from an orchestra playing on the ship’s deck.

  First up the gangplank was a tall woman whose traveling clothes consisted of a fur wrap and beneath it, an evening gown. It was the kind of gown a Hollywood actress would wear, made of shimmering fabric that caught the light as she stepped through the doors, reflecting it back into Shed 76, into the eyes of the Gestapo officers examining the documents of the latecomers, letting them know that Jews could dress like Hollywood actresses. But this woman—Babette Spiegel, the wife of a doctor—was more interesting than any Hollywood actress, for above the shimmering gown and the fur wrap, she wore a perfectly round monocle tucked into the crease of her left eye.

  Babette Spiegel began to walk up the gangplank as slowly and grandly as any Hollywood actress. She did not turn her head to see if her husband, handsome in a white dinner jacket, or her young daughters, dressed identically in dresses I recognized from the shops on the Kurfürstendamm—where Jews had not been allowed to shop for some years—were following her.

  A photographer stood beside the gangplank, and spotting him, Babette Spiegel stopped walking and rested one long-fingered hand on the metal railing, and put the other on her shimmering hip. She lifted her chin, as if she knew how the sunlight would catch the golden edge of her monocle.

  But the photographer moved the camera away from his face.

  “Is the light not quite right?” Babette Spiegel asked him.

  The photographer did not answer her, and before she could ask him anything else, a small and disheveled man pushed his way through the crowd and came running up the gangplank behind Babette Spiegel.

  I had smelled him before I saw him, and he smelled like a hundred dead animals, like rot and decay and death. His face looked bruised and the back of his hair was matted with blood. His clothes were shabby and it appeared that he had slept in them, but worse, they seemed to be stained with entrails, as if he had come to the dock straight from butchering animals.

  Later, once we were at sea and away from Germany, he would tell me that his name was Aaron Rosner, and that for the nine days before boarding the St. Louis, he had hidden himself from the Gestapo among the animal hides outside a tannery yard near Hamburg. When I knew him better, he would tell me that he had been arrested a block from his house during Kristallnacht and sent to Dachau.

  “Every morning after roll call, they hung somebody and made us watch,” he would tell me. “And every night after evening count, they drowned somebody in a vat of water and made us watch that, too.”

  After six months, with no explanation of why he had been arrested or why he was being let go, the Nazis released him and told him he had fourteen days to leave Germany. His wife and family sold everything they had to buy him a tourist-class ticket on the St. Louis. They could not raise enough money to buy tickets for her or his two children.

  “I try not to think about them anymore,” he told me.

  But on this day, Aaron Rosner—smelling horrible and with blood in his hair and the guts of animals on his coat—was so eager to leave Germany, he was rushing the gangway, pushing ahead of Doktor Spiegel and his daughters, stepping on the train of Babette Spiegel’s shimmering gown.

  The photographer put the camera back to his face and waved at Babette Spiegel to move out of the way. But the sight of the long lens of the camera being aimed at him halted Aaron Rosner, made him hunch his neck into his shoulders and shift from one side of the gangway to the other.

  “Keep still!” the photographer snapped.

  “What are you doing to this poor man?” demanded Doktor Spiegel.

  “I am from the Ministry of Propaganda,” the photographer said without removing the camera from his face.

  These words stopped us all as surely as if that camera had been turned into a rifle. Babette Spiegel was so still, her dress had ceased to shimmer. Her husband and daughters appeared as if frozen on the
gangplank. I stood behind the Loesser family, not daring to take a breath. Only poor Aaron Rosner, who had shut his eyes and clenched his fists, could not stop himself from shaking.

  The photographer shot several pictures of Aaron Rosner, the clicking of the shutter sounding in the crisp air like gunfire. Then he waved his hand and released us.

  Herr Loesser began the climb up the gangplank.

  In the bright of day, I saw how unwell the man looked, how deep-set and haunted his eyes. The photographer could not have missed it either. He stopped Herr Loesser with a raised hand and put his camera close to the man’s face, shot two or three pictures. As the camera’s bulbs flashed—bulbs which seemed unnecessary, as the day was so bright—Herr Loesser flinched as if he had been struck across the mouth.

  Herr Loesser’s dark-haired daughter—that girl so much like the Rebecca I had never known—had gone ahead, but seeing what was happening, she turned and came down the gangplank, put her hands on her father’s shoulders and spoke softly into his ear.

  “Ruth,” Herr Loesser said, in that voice of something near breaking.

  “Another,” the photographer demanded. Again he brought the camera close to Herr Loesser’s face. Again the bulbs flashed.

  Herr Loesser, like a cornered animal, began to back into me.

  “Be still!” the photographer said.

  But Herr Loesser would not be still. The back of his too-large suit was pressed against my chest, and I knew if those bulbs went off again, he would run, or worse.

  Herr Loesser was shaking his head, saying, “Nein, nein, nein, nein, nein,” although everybody knew you did not say nein to the Ministry of Propaganda. Not if you wanted your family to keep walking up that gangplank, not if you didn’t want to end up in one of those camps we had only recently learned the names of—Dachau, Sachsenhausen, and Buchenwald.

  “One more for the Ministry.” The photographer brought the lens of the camera within inches of Herr Loesser’s face.

  The gangplank beneath my feet began to vibrate with footfalls. A man in a white uniform had come out of the ship and was walking toward us with deliberate steps. He pushed himself between Herr Loesser and the photographer’s camera, as if stepping between a firing squad and its victim.

  “Get away from my ship,” he demanded.

  The photographer did not move from his spot at the side of the gangplank. “These photographs are to be rushed to Berlin at the request of Minister Goebbels.”

  “I do not care if Adolf Hitler wishes to view them. I will not have my passengers harassed.”

  The photographer smirked at the man in the white uniform. “I do not believe the captain of a pleasure vessel has the authority to override an order from Minister Goebbels.”

  The photographer again pointed his camera at Herr Loesser.

  With one quick motion of his arm, the captain knocked the camera out of the photographer’s hands, clattering it to the dock.

  “If you do not immediately remove yourself,” he said, “I will kick you and your camera into the sea. And I believe we have just emptied the bilge.”

  The photographer looked from his empty hands to the foamy water at the base of the ship.

  The captain turned toward Herr Loesser and made a small bow. “I am Captain Schroeder, and on behalf of Hapag Cruise Lines, I apologize.”

  Herr Loesser, the Loesser family, and I stood on the gangway without moving.

  Captain Schroeder put his arm out. “Madam,” he said to Frau Loesser.

  Herr Loesser’s wife placed the very tips of her fingers on Captain Schroeder’s white sleeve and allowed him to lead her onto the ship. Ruth Loesser took hold of her father’s arm in such a way to make it look like he was leading her. I gave Herr Loesser’s back a nudge. “Maybe we should follow,” I said to him quietly. “Before anybody has his mind changed.”

  • • •

  The St. Louis sailed from Hamburg harbor on May 13, 1939. Germany was not yet at war with any country, and even we Jews did not know for certain what was happening in the camps. Not unless we had been in them ourselves, and very few of the people who went into the camps came back out to tell their stories.

  In 1939, most of the world did not know about the camps, or very much about what was happening to us in Germany. But the photographer who stood beside the gangway and insisted on photographing Aaron Rosner with entrails on his clothes and Herr Loesser hunted and shrunken in his suit—choosing them to represent us rather than Babette Spiegel in her shimmering dress—made me understand why the Nazis would allow nine hundred Jews to board a pleasure boat bound for Havana.

  Joseph Goebbels wished to turn us into the real-life representations of the Eternal Jew—the exhibit Rebecca had read to me about on that unusually clear autumn day. We were to be the exhibit’s hook noses and thick lips made into flesh and blood. The personifications of the Jew who had mocked Jesus and was condemned to wander the earth until Judgment Day. The Jew who would have considered it a favor to be put out of his misery.

  Goebbels would show the world the photographs of Aaron Rosner and Herr Loesser—and a hundred other miserable Jews boarding the St. Louis—the Jews the Nazis in their compassion were permitting to sail away from Germany in the luxury cabins of a pleasure boat. And once he had shown us to the world, who in it would criticize Germany for not wishing to keep us? Who in it would criticize them for anything they decided to do with us?

  I understood all this before I had reached the top of the gangplank, had absorbed this truth before I watched the Loesser family—with that daughter so like Rebecca—disappear down the ship’s corridor. Yet once I was shown to my first-class stateroom, I forgot everything that had happened on the gangplank and fell into a kind of dream world, a spell cast by the sparkling ship itself.

  I did not think Herr Gloeckner had bought me a first-class ticket because he valued my services so highly. I believe he bought it because it did not occur to him to buy any other kind. I had never seen luxury of this sort before. Everything in my stateroom gleamed and shone with a brilliance that spoke of money. The bed linen was an unnatural white and had been pressed to the smoothness of marble. Even the air inside the cabin seemed softer, as if the staff of the ship had whisked it, so it would be easier to breathe. I could not think of hanging my rumpled trousers and frayed shirts on the shining wooden hangers, certain the closet would spit them out the second I turned my back.

  This dream world persisted when I left my stateroom, for I walked on polished mahogany decks and thick carpets, ate at tables draped with starched cloths. And even if this luxury had vanished, if my stateroom were magically turned into my flat in the Kruezberg, I—and every passenger on the St. Louis—would still have imagined we had entered a place of fantasy. For as long as the white-uniformed staff—the German white-uniformed staff—continued to call us sir or madam, continued to bring us cold drinks and warm tea and fresh linens for our rooms, for as long as they did not suddenly stop and put a gun to our heads and call us Jew, and demand we begin waiting on them, we would remain in this dream state.

  Thus for the first days of our two-week journey, I—and the other nine hundred Jews—floated about the St. Louis like people under a spell. Mornings, we played shuffleboard under an open sky on A deck. Late afternoons, we waltzed across the checkerboard floor of the tanzplatz on B deck. Evenings, we toasted each other with champagne in the Schanke Bar on C deck. We traded our real money—what little we had of it—for shipboard money, buying postcards with photographs of the glittering ship. I do not know what the other nine hundred Jews wrote on theirs, or to whom they addressed them. I wrote, I am well, but somehow I think that you know that. Come and find me. Then I tossed it into the sea.

  Under the spell of the St. Louis—and maybe also the presence of Herr Loesser’s daughter, whose existence alone seemed to promise a second chance for Rebecca—I invented a future I knew better than to believ
e in, but believed in anyway. On the afternoon Doktor Spiegel said over a game of cards that he had heard the Nazis intended to move Jews into ghettos for the purpose of making it easier to round them up—Doktor Spiegel always knew a lot about what the Nazis were planning, I do not know how—I dreamed up a story in which Rebecca did not fall into their hands. If I had not done this, it would have been the same as if the Nazis had sent me to one of their camps and were exterminating me piece by piece.

  I leaned against the bright brass railings of the St. Louis and saw Rebecca’s story inside my head as if it was an elaborate machine I intended to fix. She would use her French to fool the Nazis and stay out of their ghetto, meet instead some French journalists traveling in Berlin, drawing them to her with her Leica. Journalists who would help her get to France, take her all the way to Paris. Because this was a dream, and where else could I send her?

  Beneath the spell of the St. Louis, this story seemed plausible. More than plausible, it seemed true. Something that had already happened. And I passed days wandering the sparkling ship, my head filled with pictures of Rebecca in Paris, doing all the things she had told she would do those many evenings in our flat in the Kruezberg.

  • • •

  There was only one of us nine hundred Jews who was not seduced by the dream world of the St. Louis. And I did not think of him until one evening, when his voice—sounding like the thing inside him had moved closer to breaking down—startled me from behind a low wall near the ship’s swimming pool.

  “They are here, but they will not find me. They are here, but they will not find me.”

  Herr Loesser was repeating this phrase in the cadence of davening, as if the narrow space behind the wall where he had hidden himself was a synagogue, and he was there to petition God for protection.

  One of the white-uniformed crewmen was at the far end of the deck, coming toward us with his arms full of towels, and I feared that if the crewman came upon Herr Loesser crouched behind this wall, davening like a madman, he might change his mind about all of us, maybe change the minds of the rest of the crewmen, and they would stop treating us like passengers and begin treating us like the refugees we were.