The Prosperous Thief

by Andrea Goldsmith

  Holding tightly to each other, she and Willi join the other Kinder in one area of the vast hall. In another area are the English people: the sponsors, relatives and strangers who have volunteered to look after the German children. In front, seated at a table, are the English officials, none in uniform, with their pens and piles of paper and booming English voices. The children are quiet, so too the guardians. Alice looks at them, trying to guess which of these strangers might be Hannah and Jonathon Moser. She makes sure her identification card is clearly visible so the Mosers can find her, then changes her mind just in case they don’t like the look of her and slip away before her name is called. She holds on to Willi with both hands now: if the Mosers take him then they’ll have to take her as well. He, too, is searching the crowd of English people; he, too, has covered his identification card.

  ‘I wouldn’t want that family in the corner,’ he whispers to her.

  Alice looks across the room. The man is dressed like a storm-trooper; the woman also wears a uniform, and the boy is dressed in the brown shorts and shirt of the Hitler Youth. And while later they will identify these people as members of the scouting movement, for now they are afraid the Nazis are here too, and England no safer for Jews than Germany.

  The officials start calling the children in alphabetical order. The names toll so slowly and Alice passes the time perusing the English people and choosing those she would like to be Hannah and Jonathon Moser. By the time Willi Friedman is called, all of Alice’s choices have been snapped up. Willi stands, he has to prise his fingers from hers, and an old couple with absolutely no chance of ever making Alice’s preferential list come forward. Both of them look so peculiar, the man with a huge unkempt beard, dressed in a jacket which resembles a rug, and the woman with a bizarre grass-green beret Alice’s mother wouldn’t be seen dead in. These can’t be the ones, Alice is saying to herself, surely these aren’t the ones. She hears an official ask:‘Professor and Mrs Moser?’ Then sees him check the papers, utter a few more words before handing Willi over.

  They look better, younger, when they smile, Alice decides, but still a far cry from what she would have chosen. She watches them withdraw to the other side of the room, Mrs Moser with her arm linked through Willi’s, and the Professor carrying Willi’s knapsack and suitcase, watches as they keep walking – towards the exit, she suddenly realises, and is on her feet. They’re going to leave without her! She’s about to shout and run after them when they stop and turn and say something to Willi who points her out.Now they are smiling and waving; Mrs Moser in her green beret actually blows her a kiss. Alice sinks back in her chair and swallows her tears.

  In the time before her name is called she concentrates on composing herself, not just for the next few minutes but for all the time she has to stay in England. She puts her mother’s voice inside her head, her mother saying that soon she and Vati will come for her and take her back to Germany, her mother’s voice telling her to be good and grown-up. When at last she is called she is quite calm. She weaves her way through the chairs to the front and walks the long strip across no-man’s-land to the table.

  The worst was over, Alice told herself during that long, lonely walk. But she was wrong. Six years later she was still waiting for her parents to turn up at the door, then waiting for any news of them, and finally waiting for them not to be dead.That was the worst of times, and she’d only been a child. But she managed. Then last year when her husband died and she was again alone in the world, still she managed. Compared to what she had already experienced, being here at these London archives, with her orphaned status about to be verified fifty years after the fact, should be easy.

  She checks her watch and at the same time a woman appears. It is the archivist. She introduces herself and apologises for being late, then guides Alice towards the office on the opposite side of the hall.

  The archivist is a short, attractive woman aged anywhere between fifty and seventy. She is also very English with a nice collection of cut-glass vowels which issue from a perfectly symmetrical English mouth. Her hair is reddish and cropped, and her manner that of those no-nonsense English women with whom one could easily fall in love if one were so inclined, which Alice is not.

  The archives area is small, cluttered and colourless. One wall is lined with squat grey filing cabinets, another is covered with shelves from floor to ceiling. All horizontal surfaces – shelves, tables, tops of the filing cabinets – are stacked with books and paper.

  ‘A little more colour in here and it’d be just like home,’ Alice says.

  The archivist doesn’t laugh, doesn’t even smile, but neither is her face impassive; in fact, it is quite clear she is trying to fathom whether Alice is one of those rare Americans with an appreciation for irony. Alice smiles to allay any confusion and the archivist follows suit. Then it is down to business. The archivist clears the end of one of the tables and opens a file.

  ‘The fundamentals are as you outlined them in your letter,’ she begins.‘Your father escaped into Holland in 1941, and was trying to get your mother out of Germany when he ended up in Westerbork. He was transported from Westerbork to Bergen-Belsen mid-1944, included at the last minute to make up the numbers. He contracted typhus April 1945, and died in or near Belsen around the time the British entered the camp on the fifteenth of the month.’ She pauses for the information to settle, then continues in her blunt, pragmatic way.‘Your mother was one of a large group of Jews, mostly factory workers actually, who were rounded up in Berlin and deported on the twenty-seventh of February 1943. She died in Auschwitz, early November 1943.’ The archivist pauses again, but this time is watching Alice closely. ‘As you see, nothing to add to the fundamentals. But,’ another short pause, ‘we do have additional details about your mother’s death. New information which emerged when the archive was put on microfiche. Because of the additional cross-referencing,’ she explains.

  The archivist sits back, she has said what needed to be said and now waits for Alice’s response. More information about her mother’s death, and Alice tries to read the woman’s face for clues. Surely if her mother died a hero, there’d be a smile, and if not a smile, a softening of expression. Or if there were further horrors to be revealed, the face would show a glimmer of concern. But there is nothing. Alice weighs it up. If there are horrors, they could be no worse than those she already knows, and if there are heroic acts, she wants to hear them.

  She nods to the archivist, ‘Please,’ she says.‘Go ahead.’

  The archivist lays out two sheets of paper on the table and starts to talk. She keeps her gaze on Alice, making no reference to the pages in front of her.

  ‘The additional information came to light only recently from a woman who was in the camp with your mother.’ Then, anticipating a possible query, adds, ‘Some survivors have kept silent for so long, it’s only when they recognise their time is running out they finally decide to speak. Of course, some take their knowledge to the grave.’ She shrugs that very particular Jewish shrug with the outspread hands, palms upwards, head cocked to the side, the quizzical eyebrows.

  Information from a woman who was at Auschwitz with her mother and survived, and Alice knows with absolute certainty that what she is about to hear will show that if not for some quiver of fate her mother would have survived too. She already knows that with slightly altered circumstances her father might have lived. A different barracks, another workbench, a little less typhus or simply a little more luck and both her parents might have survived. Sitting here in this archive with the information about to spill, Alice is not sure she wants to know how close she came to not losing both mother and father.

  It would still be possible to wind up this meeting, return to the hotel and tell Raphe there was nothing more to learn, still possible not to know how close she came to a normal childhood. And yet she stays in her seat in this grey room recalling stories of the strong, lively woman who was her mother, a woman who would never shy away from the truth, a woman of principles, ac
cording to Willi. He often told of the time when Renate first heard about Jews being forced to their hands and knees to clean public monuments with their mouths.

  ‘I’d refuse,’ Renate had said.

  ‘For your life you would lick,’ Dora had replied.

  But Renate was adamant she wouldn’t.

  In the end, according to the information in the archivist’s file, Renate Lewin had died by her principles. Long after she had given up saying things couldn’t get worse, long after she had dispensed with hope as the right arm of humiliation, Renate’s strength and determination had killed her. Marching off to work one day she fell out of line. A guard about half her age slammed his baton into her, causing her to stumble. She regained her balance and rejoined the line, but only briefly before she swerved again – not through physical weakness, according to the woman who was witness, but deliberate non-compliance.Again the guard beat her, but this time Renate held her ground. When she straightened up she placed herself firmly in his path.

  The archivist now paused, leaning in closer and shaking her head. ‘I don’t think we’ll ever understand why – or when or how – some people reach their limit,’ she said. ‘I don’t even think we can ever know for sure what that limit actually is. It might be tolerance, or fear, or courage, or simply that too much of what one values is being destroyed. I really don’t know.’

  She shrugged and sat back in her chair. For a while neither said a word, then the archivist glanced down at her notes and continued. Evidently Renate had remained standing in front of the guard, staring into his face and goading him to hit her. ‘Hit me while I’m watching you,’ were her actual words. Her face was all hollows, she was little more than a sack of bones, yet suddenly in a single slick movement she lunged for the baton. The guard yanked his arm back; plastering his face was an icy smile. Renate apparently was unfazed. Still holding his gaze, she asked whether he believed in God. The German nodded in spite of himself.

  It was Renate’s turn to smile.‘He’s got your number,’ she said.

  Again she lunged, and this time – perhaps it was the mention of God – the guard was taken by surprise. The bar was in her hand, she was quick, had to be quick, and swung a calculated arc into his kidneys. It was a bull’s-eye hit and it brought the German to his knees. Other guards came running. Apparently the bullets hit her just a fraction of a second after the baton slammed into the man’s head.

  This was how Renate Lewin died, spared the knowledge that her act of defiance ended the lives of eighteen other Jewish women.

  ‘Your mother could not have guessed,’ the archivist now says, watching Alice closely. Then more firmly, ‘Your mother was not to know.’

  Alice is stumbling in her own mind. Everyone knew what brutes these Nazis were, her mother must have known there would be terrible consequences. And yet if she had known, surely she would she have acted differently. Surely she would have complied and thereby prevented those eighteen women from being killed. And surely she would have continued to comply and so lived out the war. Surely. Surely. Surely. Alice has heard so many stories that expose these impossible dilemmas, but nothing she knows will show her what to do.

  ‘Admire her,’ the archivist says. ‘Admire your mother. Hers was an act of extraordinary courage.’

  ‘And the woman who told you?’

  ‘She knew all too well that you had to be strong to survive the camps.Your mother’s courage helped her. It made her stronger.’

  Alice fights a sense of righteousness, a sense she would have behaved differently in the same circumstances. But would her different behaviour have been better? And who is fit to judge in these matters anyway? Such questions are the stuff of Talmudic exegesis, but this is the real thing, and besides, the Talmud has never been an option for her. She shakes off the questions, best to keep it personal, she decides. So does this new information cause her to feel differently about her mother? And she finds herself smiling, for the truth of the matter is it does.

  The archivist responds to the smile.‘And I haven’t told you the good news yet.’

  The smile quickly disintegrates. There’s more? Please God, let there be no more.

  ‘Nothing distressing,’ the archivist quickly reassures. ‘Just a possible connection. In Melbourne, Australia. There’s a Henry Lewin living there, a German Jew like your parents. He arrived in 1951 with his wife and young son. A daughter, Laura, was born later. We learned about him through one of the Kinder who’s a second cousin of his wife. It’s just possible he might be a distant relative, it’s also possible he knew your father. He’s originally from Berlin, but like your father he ended up in Westerbork and later was transferred to Belsen.’ She pushes back her chair. ‘It’s up to you to decide whether to contact him.’

  With that she hands Alice a copy of her file, including the contact details of Henry Lewin in Melbourne, Australia. She leads her to the stairs, shakes her hand and wishes her a pleasant stay in London.

  The day had darkened when Alice found herself in the street again. It was tempting to read something symbolic in this given she’d only been upstairs for forty minutes, but more likely, she told herself, to be nothing other than a typical London day in October. And took comfort in so Phil-like a response, particularly with her nerves so gnarled and thin.

  There was still an hour to fill before she was due to meet Raphe, an hour to digest the information and determine what to do. She had expected nothing new from her visit to the archive, this being her customary way of facing life ever since the end of the war when her parents had failed to appear. In a single afternoon all those years ago, the impossible chasm between hope and expectation had been cruelly exposed, and she was determined never again to confuse the two. But as she headed south through the Bloomsbury streets, she realised that for the first time in years she had lapsed and allowed herself far too much in the way of hope.

  Her parents were gone, long gone, and she had always known it, yet the loss was as fresh as if the deaths had only just occurred. A great gaping channel had opened within her and she didn’t know what to do.

  Her mind was all wind and wasteland; automatically she negotiated the lumpy pavements, automatically she avoided other pedestrians. She noticed nothing. Several minutes must have passed before she was aware of a voice, quiet at first and indistinct, emerging from the blustering in her head. Go home, it said. Then louder and more insistent: Go to all your homes. And once established it would not retreat, a huge, bristling imperative to reconstruct the past: to go back to Germany and put the pieces together, properly this time, then to Oxford and lastly to America. Relive and remake her whole life without any lurking hopes.

  It was a flash of brilliant illumination, clear and so evidently right. Then a moment later it was gone and Alice no longer knew why she wanted to revisit her past. No longer knew anything at all. She stepped back from the footpath and leaned against a wrought-iron railing out of the way of other pedestrians. She reminded herself of the facts: she was in London, she was on her way to meet her son, and her parents were dead as they had always been. Cold, hard facts, no illuminations, just a harsh empty landscape with the unknown figure of Henry Lewin in Melbourne, Australia, lurking in the distance. She shook him off, looked about her, could find no familiar landmarks, latched on to a street name, consulted her map, couldn’t make sense of it. In the end she entered a small park and sat on a bench in a sheltered alcove. There she found herself longing for her husband – not her parents, her long-dead parents, but Phil, alive again and helping her decide what to do, Phil helping her as he had always done.

  When Phil Carter first made his feelings known all those years ago in his peculiarly American invitation to ‘go steady’, Alice’s inclination had been to resist.You don’t know me, she had said, and you don’t know people like me. He had met every one of her arguments with precise and practical counter-arguments entirely in keeping with the engineer he was. But it was his coup d’état – ‘I make a career out of supporting buildings,’ he
said,‘so supporting you should be easy’ – which had decided her. It was only after they were married that she realised how ridiculous his statement was, the type of support she required being of a vastly different kind to struts and concrete. Yet in his own stolid way he had stood by his word, certainly the support he gave her was no less reliable than that he cemented to buildings in trembling San Francisco. Now as she lingered in a Bloomsbury park she thought that if Phil were here he’d know what to do. Although, and more to the point, if Phil were still alive she would never have visited the archive in the first place.

  ‘It’s the past,’ he would have said. ‘And it’s over.’

  It was Hannah Moser who had introduced Alice to Phil. The Mosers had known Phil’s parents for years, almost since their arrival in San Francisco. It was an acquaintance difficult to explain as the two couples had little in common. The Carters were people bereft of imagination, the wife as much as the husband: he owned a company which manufactured spare parts for vacuum cleaners and she did the books. They were reliable, predictable people who were confident of themselves and their values. Any crisis which required even a modicum of creative action would have sorely tested them, but in stable, affluent America they were ideally adapted to their environment. And their son was cut from the same cloth. One day Hannah invited the Carters for afternoon tea, and although Alice had made a prior arrangement to go to the movies, Hannah wanted her to meet Phil and insisted she change her plans.

  Phil was exactly what Alice needed, so much so that Alice was forced to revise certain long-held opinions of her guardians, convinced as she was that they had engineered the match. Hannah and Jonathon had always seemed in a parallel universe when it came to parenting. Some parents are gauche, others are inept, but the Mosers simply did not acknowledge children as children – or so it had seemed to Alice.