by Dennis Bock
HE AWOKE HOURS LATER to the sound of a woman’s voice. At first he wondered if he was dreaming. The voice was familiar to him, barely above a whisper. At night when the world is quiet our voices rise to the heavens. His mother had said that once. This is why we pray at night when the world falls still, so God can hear us better. The voice kept on, at prayer, he imagined. With his right hand he could have touched the woman, she was that close, and then her name came to him. He listened a moment longer, and then he said her name in a whisper and told her that he was the man on the ship over from Rotterdam who’d fed her and her daughter imaginary spoonfuls of medicine.
He felt her hand move. Their fingers touched.
“Is she here?” he asked. “Is she here beside you?”
When she said nothing he closed his hand over hers, both of them trembling and silent for what remained of the night.
IN THE WEEKS THAT followed they choreographed their days around the chiming of the church bell that rang as a clarion call to their misery and loss. He did not ask about the young woman’s daughter after that first night. When they became separated during the day—the blind lost among the blind—the sounding bell led them back to the last arch of the north transept where they met again, and there, wrapped in blankets, they huddled for warmth and comfort and spoke in whispers in this threatening sea of English.
They needed each other absolutely, they both knew this, each the other’s last hope. There were no words that would shake Rosa from feeling that her daughter’s death had been her doing, if only for the fact that the child had died instead of her. He’d known religion in his youth and prayed often as a boy that God would strike down his father. Now he prayed for that same God to ease her suffering. Finally she told him of her first days after being brought ashore and how they’d found shelter that first night in the shell of a building and how, as they wandered the streets looking for food and water, she’d covered her daughter’s eyes again and again when they came across bodies burned and twisted. Soon they’d learned to sleep in the open. They’d heard the crash of buildings coming down in the middle of the night, like the dull roll of thunder a street over. They drank what water they could find, drawn up from the Thames, and when the dysentery came it found her daughter quickly, weakened as she was. After she died her mother sat with her for a full day trying to understand why she should not take her own life, then carried her to the pyres.
NOW, IN THE MONTHS leading into winter, a small city of tents and work stations grew up around the Parish Church as more evacuees arrived. They came by truck and car and on foot, the blind and the sighted, the hungry and half-frozen, all drawn by faint hope and the need to escape the pestilence and starvation and desperate to know that something of England stood beyond the circle of ruins.
BY EARLY DECEMBER SHE knew she was pregnant. She did not share this news with him, half-convinced and hopeful that she’d lose the child naturally. It would be cruel and cowardly of her to bring the pregnancy to term, and so she carried on in her silence, living within the confines of the rope maze that guided the blind through the church and out into the churchyard, where the mess tents and the cleaning stations and the latrines were ever busy. Something would go wrong soon, she hoped, but the pregnancy did not let up, and she knew she’d have to summon the courage to end it by her own hand.
On her way to the latrine one morning she almost tripped over something blocking her path. She reached down and felt along its seat and handlebars and wheels, like a child exploring a Christmas present through heavy wrapping. She moved the bicycle off the path, then she clasped the rope again and continued on.
She came to find it later that day when she understood what she had to do. It was where she’d left it. She crouched and ran her hands over it again, exploring it more carefully. It was beaten up, useless now to anyone but her, the spokes loose and dangling from the wheel rims. She turned and twisted one of the spokes until it gave way and slid it into her sleeve and carried it with her to the latrine. She waited in line, holding the single spoke against her arm. When it was her turn she entered the outhouse and hiked up her dress and leaned back against the clapboard siding and thought of the debts and deprivations the world would claim on a newborn in a place like this. She imagined the misery it would suffer, if it survived at all, and how she could not bear losing a second child. She would never forgive herself if she let it be. It was better off unborn than murdered or starved to death or taken by disease. This would be the one good act left for her to perform. She prayed for the strength to come as she held the thin sharp spoke in her hand below the raised dress, but her courage failed her that day, and when she finally knew this she straightened her dress and stepped out of the privy, something gone in her heart now, and followed the rope back in the direction of the church.
HE TOOK TO SLEEPING with his hand on her abdomen after she told him what she’d almost done. He understood her. He knew she was right. But on that first night after her confession he felt something rising up from where his hand rested against her warmth. It travelled along the length of his arm and touched his heart. He felt surprised and frightened. He wondered if he hadn’t gone mad now with this fire burning in him, feeling something for this doomed child. Rosa was asleep, cowled in her blanket, when he recognized this as the currency of life that it was. It came to him as if discovered for the first time, wholly and perfectly new and alive. This was their hope and future, the one best reason to push on.
Teams arrived to begin processing evacuees to be boarded on transport ships bound for India, Australia, Canada, and South Africa. The blind and the sick were of no use to anyone here. Berlin wanted them gone, rotten and dying as they were. Repurposed cargo ships, steamers, and clippers from across the Commonwealth put in at ports along England’s southeast coast, and in early April, Georg Elser and Rosa Bauer boarded the hospital ship Llandovery Castle at Barrier Gardens Pier and embarked on the journey that would finally deliver them to Mercy House on the other side of the Atlantic.
1960
The punishments meted out to me for leaving the bench without permission after my strapping went on for the rest of that school year. I didn’t tell my parents about it. Thomas did what he could for me during recess, but these battles were mine. He had his own to fight, and we were helpless against Principal Crouse’s hatred of me. I was to be made an example of whenever and wherever the opportunity arose, which it did almost every day in the schoolyard. The yard monitors looked away when the bullies came for me for their fair share of retribution, taking it again and again, to the point that I believed I had nothing left to give.
On one of the few afternoons I was spared that spring—this was two weeks or so after the strapping—I entered the drugstore on Main Street, gloomy and fearful as I often was, hoping to disappear into the fantasy of Doctor Atom for but a few moments to help forget the torment that followed me around all day.
Three schoolboys entered the store. A new bolt of fear shot through me. I moved into the next aisle over to avoid being seen, behind shelves of tinned vegetables and cereal boxes, and overheard them talking about something they called the Rademacher Wave. I didn’t know what that was, but I knew the name Rademacher well enough. He was the German foreign minister and architect of the European Clearances whom my father referred to as a venomous reptile. He shook his head in disgust every time he saw that name in the paper or heard it spoken on the radio. He cursed the Red Scare hysteria that made Washington cozy up to a criminal like that. It was a crying shame, he said, to see the way those politician-cowards were willing to shake hands with one devil to keep another devil at bay. Yet as I stood there in ambush that afternoon, fearful that another beating was coming my way, the connection between the foreign minister Rademacher and this “wave” the boys were talking about was still unclear to me.
“They’ll be coming over on whatever floats,” one of the boys said. “We’ll be flooded with ’em—those Jews that’ll want to come up here from America before it’s too late.”<
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“They’ll drown before they get here,” another boy said. He turned and saw me through the shelving. “A good number of them, anyway. But that suits you just fine, doesn’t it, Teufel? Maybe they should ship all you Krauts over to Africa instead. See how you like it.”
Thomas was shooting baskets in the driveway when I got home five minutes later. I’d come as fast as I could, convinced I needed to tell him right away what I’d heard. But he didn’t react as I’d thought he would. Instead a smile grew over his face, as if he’d just learned there was ice cream for dessert today. He sank a free shot and captured the ball and put it under his arm. I asked him if he wasn’t afraid. He smiled and attempted another basket, this one missing.
The films we’d watched in history class showed railcars being loaded with Jews and travelling over vast European flats, and later cargo ships on the voyage through the Suez to the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. Our teachers made sure we understood the European Clearances for what they were and not as they’d been represented in the German propaganda of the time. It was the forced deportation of a people and not the settling of a colony in Madagascar, the island nation off Portuguese Guinea. Afterwards, the teacher in charge of these films liked to direct his questions at me and the two other German boys in class. Do you see what your people have done, Mr. Koehler? Can it be any clearer than this, Mr. Heilbronn? Perhaps you have something to say, Mr. Teufel? Unable to speak, we hung our heads in shame.
Once, as my family and I watched the latest Hitchcock at the Playhouse on Main Street, the projector jammed and the film seemed to melt on the screen before our very eyes just as Eva Marie Saint passed the stolen German nuclear codes to the British agent in Sydney. The audience began to protest, calling for the projectionist to save the moment or to go hang himself. It was a lively group. We’d all been looking forward to seeing those nuclear codes being turned against Berlin. The projectionist put on an old The World in Action reel—the first thing to come to hand, I suppose—while he tried to fix the problem. These reels had been common enough years earlier but were no longer shown. This one, a short by Leni Riefenstahl, jumped to life before us.
We saw smiling families—played by actors, my father told us later—escorted from their battered homes to the safety of modern trains and passenger liners that carried them to the glittering shores of the new Eretz Israel. I saw the name of the ship when the camera panned its length. It was the St. Louis, the one that had carried my mother to the Azores. When the shot cut from the bow to the upper decks, where men and women lounged and played badminton and children skipped rope, my father stood abruptly and announced that we were leaving.
This was nothing but filthy propaganda, he said. He helped my mother into the aisle and marched his sons in the direction of the lobby. As he did so I managed one last look over my shoulder and saw travellers, wearing expressions of gratitude and joy, descending a gangplank as they were received into the heart of the new Jewish Homeland.
We found the manager in his small office just off the lobby. My father threatened to report the man and his cinema to the authorities for showing the garbage we’d just seen. The manager, unaware of what his projectionist had done, practically tripped over himself as he bolted from the lobby and up the narrow set of stairs to the projection room. I don’t know if my father ever did report the infraction, but the Playhouse continued to operate after that. We never returned as a family. The point wasn’t lost on me. The truth could be told in different ways. I understood my father’s outrage. What had been an ugly and vicious reality had been portrayed as the exact opposite. Families delivered to a land of bright sunlight and widened opportunity. He made sure as we walked home that evening to tell me and Thomas the truth about the European Clearances, already more than a million souls displaced and housed in camps that made Little Berlin, north of our town, look like a playground.
Now, with America planning a similar clearance, my brother seemed unfazed. He took this news with a calm shrug, basketball in hand, then sank another free shot.
“Swish,” he said.
I tried to grab the ball as it landed. He was too fast for me.
“Jesus Christ,” I said, eager to make myself understood, but our mother tapped at the window overlooking the driveway right then and waved us in.
I wanted to tell my parents what I knew but I was afraid this would upset my mother, just as that strapping had upset her.
It was well into the evening, after my father had beaten me in chess three games in a row, that I found Thomas down at the lake, standing ankle-deep in the water as he stared at the horizon. His shoes and socks were up on the stone beach, neatly side by side. The light was tinged with a soft evening glow that made the world seem much more peaceful than it really was, the glint coming off the water shimmering against his legs and face. Over Hamilton the sky burned the deep red and yellow of the smelters and blast furnaces that would throw their light higher and deeper as dark fell.
I wondered if he hadn’t understood what I’d told him.
We’d be flooded with refugees before the summer was out, that’s how bad it was over there, I said. Again, he met my disbelief with a smile.
“And that’s where you’re wrong, little brother,” he said finally, reaching into the water for a stone. He skipped it over the surface. “What do you think’s going to happen when everyone at school finds out that the Teufel brothers rescued a boatful of God’s chosen?” The stone sank after its fifth skip.
I shrugged.
“The Devil brothers become angels. We’ll be heroes. No one’ll ever bother us ever again.”
OUR FOCUS ON MERCY House blurred in the following weeks as we prepared to receive the wave of Jewish refugees we expected to be washing ashore from America any day now. They would be safe in the sanctuary states that had been established after the Secessionist Crisis gripped that country at the end of the war. But the strip of land we saw from here was sanctuary to no one. The counties of northwestern New York—Niagara, Orleans, Monroe, and Wayne—had accepted the executive order that would remove the Jewish population from the U.S. economy. Cities and counties in states from California to Maine had rejected the Decree for the Reporting of Jewish-Owned Property, but too many had chosen to walk in lock-step with President Thurmond, who kept a residence outside Berlin and spoke often of his dream of returning America to its former glory.
We visited the lake as often as we could after devising our plan, stashing various supplies we might need—a flashlight and length of rope, blankets, a bag of candy bars and apples—refreshing the perishables every few days. Drinking water was hidden in three different locations. We had maps to offer our new friends by which they’d situate themselves on this foreign shore. On them we’d drawn a red X over our town and a straight line charting the forty-two miles between here and Wilson Beach, New York, which we thought would be the likely launching point of the fugitives we’d receive. We sketched out the steps we’d follow once we got our refugees safely to shore. We’d deliver them to our home, where our mother would provide them with immediate care, if required, and from there we’d make the telephone calls that would bring the authorities and newspaper reporters who’d spread word of our good deed. It would all go according to plan if we stuck to it, which we believed we’d be diligent and thorough enough to do.
Into the first week of our vigil a small party of Jews was rescued near Kingston, fifty miles east, helped to shore by a man who’d been tossing sticks into the lake for his dog on a Sunday morning. The paper showed the newcomers smiling grimly for the camera on the front steps of a local hospital hours after coming to shore, not quite starved after four days on the lake but dehydrated, weary, and relieved. They spoke to the Whig-Standard of the roving gangs that visited certain neighbourhoods in Rochester carrying baseball bats and axes, and of the rising anti-Semitism that grew from the decrees of an increasingly nervous and xenophobic White House.
Two days later three rafts were towed to shore near the Scarborough B
luffs, closer to us but still too far west for a couple of kids on bikes to do anything about it. The outer edge of the Rademacher Wave seemed intent on landing everywhere but where we needed it to. We didn’t give up hope, though. We fuelled our waiting with fantasies and daydreaming. Our mission would be compared to the one that had rescued fugitive slaves travelling via the Underground Railroad a hundred years earlier. Instead of 169061-4 painted on our front door there’d be a plaque bearing our family name in honour of our good work.
The stretch of shoreline we focused on was practically as familiar to us as our own backyard. It became more familiar still as we moved into the early days of that summer. We’d been exploring and skipping stones and building driftwood forts there for as long as I could remember. We didn’t go to Mercy House anymore but, like a stubborn memory, it was never far, often visible, and always no more than a short walk from where we scoured our shoreline.
In previous summers the lakeshore had never failed to provide something that occupied us for hours at a time—a carp rotting at water’s edge; the dead sheep we’d studied for days with undiminished pleasure as it succumbed to the heaving mass of maggots that colonized its hollowed shell; we’d found a man’s wallet once, emptied; a broken baby carriage; and, unaccountably, a length of rope tied in a hangman’s noose. There was a long line of single shoes, broken umbrellas, deflated soccer and beach balls; a life jacket; buoys and bottles; and even once a ray-gun, its plastic yellow-and-red handle tinged with green algae. One summer we’d spent days scraping fool’s gold from the rocks at the bottom of Jones Avenue. In winter we’d jumped onto an ice floe in the shallow bay, almost floating out into open lake before we managed to paddle back to shore using the hockey sticks we’d carried with us.
