A Master Plan for Rescue: A Novel

by Janis Cooke Newman

  It was not that I had not known Rebecca would die before her time. I had learned to live with that knowledge. What I could not live with was the idea that it would be the Nazis who would kill her.

  I wrapped my hands around the burning railings, set a foot onto their top.

  Herr Bergmann—who had come from where to stand beside me?—grabbed me by my shoulders. “It is a dangerous distance. And crewman Meier has already gone.”

  I looked down into the sea. Crewman Meier surfaced through the bloody water, his head and shoulders stained red.

  Herr Bergmann pulled me back from the railings.

  Max Loesser thrashed about in the bloody water, fighting crewman Meier’s efforts to save him. One of the circling police boats had to come and help, the Cuban policeman pulling Max into the boat, working with crewman Meier to tie tourniquets above his wrists. But the moment he was let go, Max Loesser clawed at his wrists to open the wounds, bit at the tourniquets with his teeth. It required two policemen to hold Max inside as the boat sputtered toward Havana Harbor, the rest of us watching from the sunstruck deck, wondering if we, too, should slit our wrists and throw ourselves into the sea.

  Some hours later, Captain Schroeder informed us that Max Loesser was in a Cuban hospital and was expected to live. He had radioed for permission for Herr Loesser’s family, or at least for Frau Loesser, to be allowed ashore to visit. No such permission had been granted. When I later saw Ruth Loesser standing at the railing before sunset, she did not offer me even a half-smile.

  • • •

  On Wednesday, Josef Joseph—a lawyer from Berlin I had hardly spoken with the entire voyage—asked me to be on the Suicide Patrol. The Suicide Patrol was the idea of Captain Schroeder, the consequence of Max Loesser’s bloody leap into the sea, and the fact that the ship’s doctor had run out of sedatives. That night, as I took my two-hour shift, walking the upper deck in the roving light of the police boat search beams, I wondered what I would do if I encountered one of my fellow passengers teetering on the railings. Push him, most probably, then follow him into the black water.

  • • •

  On Thursday, the reporters and news photographers came, ferried out in fishing boats. We had been anchored outside Havana Harbor for nearly a week, and news of the nine hundred Jews nobody wanted had begun to spread. A few of these boats held sightseers who wanted to see for themselves what we eternal wandering Jews looked like up close.

  On Thursday, too, we saw the notice, placed on all the boards where before had been placed notices about concerts and fancy-dress costume balls.

  The Cuban government has ordered us to leave the harbor.

  We shall depart at 10 am Friday morning.

  Captain Schroeder ordered the full Suicide Patrol on watch for the entire night.

  • • •

  By the time Friday, June 2, dawned, bright and hot, the whole world knew our story. Knew how Captain Schroeder sailed the St. Louis three miles out from Havana Harbor, and then for two days sailed us in circles while a Jewish humanitarian organization in New York negotiated with the Cuban government—a government that was now demanding a sum of five hundred dollars for each of us.

  Once it became clear that raising such a sum for Jews nobody wanted was not possible, the negotiators turned their hopes toward America.

  Captain Schroeder turned the St. Louis toward America as well, sailing us on Sunday near enough to the Florida coastline, we could see the hotels lining the beaches of Miami. American fishing boats carrying news photographers skidded across the waves to shoot pictures of us. I stood at the railings, trying not to look like a miserable, wandering Jew as the photographers shouted at me in a language I didn’t understand. Their clicking cameras were Speed Graphics, which reminded me of Pietr, and made me wonder what kind of truth I represented.

  But Jews, it turned out, were not very much more popular in America than they were in Nazi Germany, and Franklin Roosevelt did not wish to have nine hundred of them spilling onto the beach in Florida.

  On Monday, we got word that Governor Brú had again changed his mind. He would grant us permission to land in Cuba if we remained on the Isle of Pines. Captain Schroeder turned the St. Louis back toward Havana.

  But on Tuesday, after reading the morning newspapers, which revealed Cuban sentiment to be against this plan, Governor Brú had yet another change of heart. Captain Schroeder informed the Hapag Cruise Lines of Governor Brú’s decision. The cruise line sent the captain a three-word message.

  Return Hamburg immediately.

  At eleven-forty on Tuesday, June 6, we turned from Cuba and set a course for Germany. Max Loesser was still in the hospital in Havana. His family remained aboard the St. Louis.

  What the whole world does not know is how different the journey back to Europe was from the one we had made leaving it. “For the safety of the crew,” Steward Schiendick ordered a ban on all social intercourse between the crewmen and the passengers. A ban which did not prevent the crewmen from buying up the bits and pieces of jewelry we had hidden from the Nazis—things we sold for money to send cables begging President Roosevelt to reconsider taking us in.

  None of us played shuffleboard on A deck. None of us drank champagne in the Schanke Bar. The ship’s orchestra, when it played, played to an empty room, for none of us wished to waltz across the checkerboard floor of the tanzplatz. Once, one of the crewmen left a shortwave radio tuned to a German station and a few of us heard the voice of Joseph Goebbels telling the rest of the country, “Since no one will accept the shabby Jews on the St. Louis, we will have to take them back and support them.”

  But none of us believed the Germans meant to support us for very long. Indeed, one afternoon as he passed me, Officer Closterman mumbled something that sounded very much like, “These are your last free days.”

  On Saturday, after we had been heading back for four days, helmsman Heinz Kritsch was found hanging from a beam in the locker room, another suicide. Some of us found comfort in the fact that the ship had started killing Germans. Others imagined Kritsch had had some hidden Jewish blood. For a brief instant, I wished that I had had the courage, but by then, I had repaired the mechanism of the story of Rebecca saved in Paris. Maybe it was that it had been too long since I had fixed anything. Maybe it was that I could not bear to look at Ruth Loesser, sitting on a deck chair that never faced in the direction from which we had come, as if that tropical place no longer existed. Maybe it was only that I was a doomed Jew on a boat full of doomed Jews, and I had already lost too much.

  • • •

  But Joseph Goebbels would have to wait a little longer to take back the shabby Jews nobody else wanted. Due to the efforts of the Jewish humanitarian organization, on Wednesday, June 14, the St. Louis was allowed to dock at Antwerp. I was put on the freighter Rhakotis along with more than five hundred other passengers of the St. Louis. The Rhakotis possessed cabins for only fifty-two passengers and I spent the night on a wooden chaise on the upper deck. Even after it began to rain, I stayed on the upper deck. It did not matter how soaked I got. I was off the St. Louis.

  The Rhakotis arrived in Boulogne at dawn. I stood at its rusted railings and gazed at the French coastline, telling myself I was looking at the country where Rebecca lived.

  Two hundred and twenty-four of us were to be chosen for France. I pleaded with the official issuing visas, did my begging in French, imagining that would sway him, telling him I had a connection in Paris, a fiancée.

  “Do you have some proof of this person?” he asked me.

  I dropped to the floor in front of his desk and removed my shoe, peeled off my wet sock.

  The official did not touch the photograph in my hand.

  “Do you have evidence that this person is in Paris?”

  In the end, I went with the group that was sent to England.

  Kitchener Refugee Camp was situated in the green Kent coun
tryside. It held close to five thousand Jewish men, all of us hoping to emigrate to Palestine or South America or the United States. We slept in crowded barracks and worked in the piggery or on the land, and if we were lucky, we were taken on supervised outings to Ramsgate and Margate and Sandwich.

  But we were not free, and as I had no money and no relations in any of the places the British government could send us, I knew I would stay in Kitchener until England went to war with Germany, and I was declared an enemy alien and imprisoned in a more obvious way.

  But high-ranking officials everywhere have a fondness for temperamental vehicles. I repaired the misfiring engine of an MG Magnette Coupe that belonged to a mid-level official in the London Home Office, who occasionally visited Kitchener. Mr. Simeon was much like Herr Gloeckner, except that he hid his dislike of Jews behind better manners.

  At first, I considered asking Mr. Simeon to help me cross into France. But after I had been off the St. Louis for some weeks, I began to think more clearly and remembered my promise to Rebecca to leave Europe. In the end, I asked for an American visa.

  “The Americans have had their fill of Jews,” Mr. Simeon said. “Best I can do is Canada, and that will be temporary. When it runs out, make yourself invisible.”

  I went to Quebec, but could not blend in with my German-accented French. When the time came to make myself invisible, I slipped into the United States at a spot in the woods where nobody knows or cares where the border is. I went to the Lower East Side because I speak Yiddish, and because everybody there is from someplace else.

  One of the first things I bought was a radio. A broken one I found in a pawnshop—like the shortwave radio I had found in the shop in the Kreuzberg to bring France into our flat in Berlin. I fixed it, then spent as much time as I could listening to it, repeating everything that came out of its speakers. Between that and a German-English dictionary, I learned to speak English.

  Later, I fixed a printing machine for a man whose name I never learned in exchange for some papers that would allow me to work. They could be better, but now that it is wartime and so many men are off fighting, nobody looks too close at the papers of someone who can fix things.

  I changed my name also, but only my last name. My first name I kept the same. Maybe that was not a good idea, but I could not bring myself to change the name Rebecca had called me.

  Twelve

  Over the past hour, I’d begun to see Jakob, the chalky blue light of dawn near the ocean seeping through the open doors, lightening the space between us. At some point during his story—I couldn’t remember when—the clanging of metal on metal had stopped, the electrical hum whirring down. And now that he’d finished, there was only the distant card-shuffling sound of the tide coming in.

  Jakob looked at his watch. “We are between shifts.”

  In the blue light, his face was full of shadows, as if all the sorrowful parts of his story had settled there.

  “The picture in your code-o-graph. It’s Rebecca?”

  He pushed a piece of hair out of his eyes. “You took it?”

  “I also let your pigeons go.”

  He shrugged. “They came back. It is what they do.”

  “Who are you sending messages to?”

  He stood, wrapped the scarf back around his neck.

  “Her.”

  “But where do the birds go?”

  “That is a good question.”

  “And you put them in code?”

  “What I have to say is only for the two of us.”

  I considered asking him whether he believed his pigeons could fly to France, or whether he’d ever gotten a message back; instead, I asked him if he wanted to come uptown with me and get his code-o-graph.

  “I would,” he said. Then I got up, and Jakob helped me climb out from under the subway car.

  In the flat blue light of the dawn, the floating subway cars looked dreamlike, almost as magical as I’d first believed them to be. Jakob stopped to pick up a green metal toolbox, and the two of us walked out into the salted cold.

  The wind cut right through my T-shirt. I wrapped my arms around my ribs, and Jakob asked me if I’d had a coat.

  “Lost it,” I said.

  He set down the toolbox and unzipped his jacket, dropped it over my shoulders. It held the warmth from his body and smelled like cloves and the bottom of the subway car, the black grease from the wheels, maybe.

  We walked through the still-sleeping streets of Coney Island. Only the gulls and the factory workers were moving, only the restless ocean and the wind from it, blowing onto us, stiff with salt and brine. I’d been awake all night and everything had the sheen of unreality—the pale salt-blasted houses, the poster-ed fronts of the sideshows advertising the Real Human 2-Headed Baby, the Georgia Peaches, two normal-sized girls with heads the size of baseballs.

  From the elevated subway platform, I watched the light at the top of the Parachute Jump wink out—the only light left on at Coney Island since the war had started. A light at the top of an amusement ride, too small to be of any use to the German U-boats floating off the coast, but bright enough to warn ships at sea where the shore was.

  Jakob and I stood in the ocean-chilled wind waiting for the train to open its doors.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. For taking his code-o-graph, for thinking he was a Nazi, for keeping his jacket in all that biting wind.

  Jakob shook his head as if it didn’t matter, as if so many regrettable things had already happened to him.

  When the doors opened, we got onto a Manhattan-bound subway train along with a couple of people on their way to factory jobs. Once we started moving, time seemed to shift onto icy tracks, speeding up and slowing down of its own accord. It was probably the lack of sleep, but the journey from Coney Island to Dyckman Street—which should have taken an hour or more—was over in an instant, and I had no memory of it, except the warmth of Jakob’s clove-and-grease-smelling jacket.

  Sunlight was slanting across Broadway when we came aboveground, making it feel later than I wanted it to be. I tugged Jakob’s shirtsleeve, pulling him through the tide of winter-bundled people pouring down Dyckman Street, dragging him to our building.

  I gave him back his jacket and left him in the hallway with the rows of mailboxes. Told him I’d only be a minute.

  I ran up the stairs, telling myself I would only be a minute. Because surely it was still early, surely my mother was still asleep. But the moment I creaked open the door to the apartment, my mother was on the other side, pulling me against her, her collarbone pressing against my cheek, her heart beating beneath my ear—a steady fluttering, the most steady thing about her now.

  The point of her chin rested on the top of my head, and here time must have hit a slow section of track, because I cannot remember my mother ever holding me for so long.

  When she did finally let me go, she said there was a man waiting in the kitchen to see me.

  I looked around her. A man wearing some kind of uniform was sitting in one of our kitchen chairs.

  My mother has sold me to the Gestapo, I thought. That is why she stood here and held onto me so long.

  It was a ridiculous thought, but my head was still filled with bits and pieces of Jakob’s story.

  “Go on.” My mother put her hand on my back.

  I stood in the hallway, thinking about Jakob downstairs with the mailboxes. Jakob waiting for me to return the code-o-graph with the photograph of Rebecca he’d managed to save from the Nazis, but not from me.

  “I have to do something first,” I said.

  “I think you’d better go see about this.” My mother’s hand pressed more firmly into my back.

  I let her lead me into the kitchen.

  The man at our table was older, maybe fifty. And once I got closer, I saw that his uniform was nothing more than a gray suit and a badge. A badge that had
the words New York City Truant Officer pressed into it.

  My mother pulled a cigarette out of her pack and used it to point to the seat across from the truant officer. I sat in it.

  “Tell my son what you told me,” she said to him.

  The truant officer looked at me and smiled. His teeth were yellow. “Our records indicate that Jack Quinlan has been absent from P.S. 52 for forty-six consecutive school days.”

  He shifted his gaze to my mother. “You do know,” he said, “that in the State of New York, it is illegal for a child to miss school?”

  “She didn’t know anything about it,” I told him.

  The truant officer turned back to me. He leaned across the table, brought his face near to mine. I smelled licorice and whiskey on his breath.

  “You then,” he said, “do you realize that truancy is against the law in the State of New York?”

  He was so close, his breath was fogging up my glasses.

  The truant officer and I sat face-to-face across the red table, staring at each other. I was trying to decide if it would be better or worse to admit I didn’t know truancy was against the law. Trying also to figure out how to get back downstairs with Jakob’s code-o-graph.

  In a puff of smoke, my mother’s voice drifted over us. “Are you planning on arresting my son?”

  I had not heard this tone—the tone of a bootlegger’s daughter—in a long while. I took my eyes away from the truant officer. My mother was leaning against the sink, the cigarette between her fingers, the gap between her front teeth visible.

  “Because if you are,” she continued, “I’ll go pack him a suitcase now.”

  The truant officer sat back in his chair, waved his hands around as if trying to erase something that existed in the air in front of him.

  “No, no,” he said. “I’m only here to take him back to P.S. 52.”

  My mother blew smoke into the air above his bald head.

  “Then why don’t we let him go change out of his Mass pants?”

  • • •