Danzig Passage

by Bodie Thoene

  She was angry with him now, of course. She believed that he had destroyed their one chance of getting out of Berlin without having to climb ropes or scale walls or run for miles. But today she was proven wrong.

  All the gear was packed and ready for the escape, stowed away behind stacks of Communion plates in the cupboards behind the baptistery. Jamie and Mark were playing checkers on a homemade board in the choir loft. Lori was sulking in her father’s study. Jacob was studying maps.

  Then the chains on the doors of New Church began to rattle. A terrible groaning sound reached their ears; the wooden planks nailed across the entrance were being pried loose.

  Mark and Jamie were first into the bellows. Jacob waited at the top of the stairs and prayed for Lori to come soon. She slid to the base of the stairs. Clutching her shoes in her hand, she half-crawled, half-stumbled up toward Jacob. He pulled her up, dragged her to the bellows and into their cocoon just as the entrance doors swung back with an explosive clang.

  Then, far away, they heard the echoes of footsteps and voices resounding throughout the building.

  “They said not to waste anything . . . ”

  “You take that side of the building. I’ll inventory the offices and storage.”

  “Wilhelm, take a look at the pipe organ! Mein Gott! We should be able to pull it out and install it in that new ice skating rink planned for the—”

  “Nein! The Reichskulturbund has put their stamp on it for the new opera building. Such a fine instrument! What a waste it has been in this place.”

  They were taking inventory—finding out what was usable in New Church before they knocked down the walls. Lori swallowed hard and tried not to cry. It seemed like the autopsy of a loved one. She found herself trembling with sorrow rather than fear as the fellow with the harsh lowlander accent examined the massive organ. Then the unthinkable happened. He switched on the motor that powered the bellows. The wooden support above them began to move down. Jacob raised his hands and braced himself hard to hold it up. His face grimaced with the strain of it; then the agony as wood cut into his hands and finally broke into splinters at his resistance.

  Lori could hear the clicking of the mechanism and the tapping of key and pedals. A terrible wheezing sound groaned from the pipes as the right bellows worked to do the job of both. Dust filled the space. Lori pulled her collar up and squeezed her eyes shut tight.

  Just as suddenly, the storm ended. The electric motor whined off. The clear voice of the attacker called to his comrades from the other side of the partition. “Someone will have to look at this. I think there is something wrong with the bellows.”

  Mark coughed. Not a big cough. A strangled, garbled cough. Jacob clamped a bloody palm over his mouth. He coughed again.

  “Listen to that, will you?” called the workman. “The thing sounds like it is dying!”

  “They’ll go through it next month,” someone shouted up. “Just take a photograph and describe what you see. You’re no Bach, anyway!”

  For three hours the workers combed the building. When they finally left, Jacob rushed down to see if their supplies were still intact. They were there, tagged and moved to a larger pile labeled MISCELLANEOUS.

  The boom of the wrecking ball against the stones of New Church seemed very near.

  ***

  All day the Wallichs practiced the things Otto had taught them. When to bend the knee and cross oneself, how to clasp hands properly and kneel and stand and kneel again, the simple Christmas carols they had known before. Such songs were always being played this time of year by the Beidermeier bands on the street corners. Before the world had fallen apart, Peter had seen his mother pass by a cold group of shivering musicians and drop coins into the open empty case of a trumpet player. The songs were the best part of the complicated ritual of Otto’s Holy Catholic Church.

  “St. Stephan’s,” Otto had remarked cheerfully as he left them this morning. “We will hear the Vienna Boys’ Choir. Don’t be nervous. It is not so very different from the synagogue.”

  It was going to be quite different, Peter was certain of that. His mother and Marlene practiced the lessons of Gentile worship with some enjoyment. For Peter, the requirements of passing for a Gentile rankled him to the core. He hated it all. He often considered striking out for the border on his own and slipping through the Nazi patrols into Czechoslovakia.

  Relieved when Otto finally set the date for their departure from Vienna, Peter only regretted that he must now play out this charade of Christmas in St. Stephan’s. It was easier for him to raise his hand and say “Heil Hitler” to an SS man and his bimbo than to bow the knee to the Gentile God. He hated their Christ. He detested the sign of the cross and all it represented. Such things, he believed, had taken his father. The sky had shattered on Kristal Nacht, and there was no God, no heaven there when he looked up. He learned the catechism like the pages of a survival book he would discard once they crossed the border of the Reich.

  Peter eyed his sister with disgust as she primped before a mirror. “Uncle Otto” had brought her a new dress to wear to Mass. Her stringy brown hair was plaited and pinned like snail shells over her ears. She looked too fat, as usual, as she batted her eyes at herself and rehearsed the curtsey she must perform to priest and plaster saint alike. But Peter kept his mouth clamped tight. To tell her what he thought would be to call down upon himself a storm of wails and sobs and then the wrath of his mother.

  “Didn’t Uncle Otto buy a pretty dress, Peter?” she simpered, not turning away from her reflection.

  He grunted a reply and turned away. Needing some moment of pleasantness, he scooped up Baby Willie, who had crawled beneath the coffee table to chew on something.

  “What have you got now, little street sweeper?” Peter sank down on the sofa and pulled a gooey slip of paper from the tight fist.

  Willie tried to put the paper back in his mouth and squealed an indignant protest when Peter wrenched it from him.

  “What is it?” Karin looked up from her studies at the dining table.

  “Nothing. Paper. He could choke.”

  Karin nodded, then sank back into concentration over the Mass book.

  As Peter wadded up the paper to toss it at Marlene, one word caught his eye. JEWS. The ink was smeared a bit, and yet here was Peter’s true identity shouting back at him. He unfolded the paper, careful not to let the dampness smear any more letters.

  JEWS.

  YOU MUST LEAVE THIS FLAT IMMEDIATELY OR BE ARRESTED. YOU ARE DISCOVERED. GRUSS GOTT.

  A FRIEND

  Peter stared hard at the words as the blood drained from his face. The baby reached out for the paper with sticky fingers.

  “No!” Peter shouted. He was shouting at the note, but Willie thought the harshness was meant for him and puckered his face to cry.

  “What now?” Karin asked. “Peter, really, he is just a—” Karin’s words stuck in her throat. The look of stark terror on Peter’s face passed to her. She rushed to take the note from her silent, frightened son.

  She read the words once, unbelieving, then again, then a third time as realization of their peril filled her. “Oh, dear God! What are we to do? What?”

  Peter sprang to his feet.

  Marlene finally turned away from her reflection to gape at her panic-stricken mother and brother. “What has happened?” she cried. Real tears filled her brown cow-eyes. She could cry at the drop of a hat; this seemed more like the drop of the sky.

  “Get your things,” Peter ordered, looking at the door. Were the Gestapo even now entering the building? Did they climb the stair or ride the elevator?

  “But . . . but . . . ,” Marlene stuttered. “But . . . ”

  “What about Otto?” Karin took Willie and held him to silence his crying. The room filled with terror, an electric spark that flicked from one person to the other and back again.

  “He is probably already arrested,” Peter said, grimly evaluating everything in the room to decide what to take and where they co
uld run—tonight, of all nights.

  “What?” Marlene stamped her foot and screamed.

  Peter turned on her angrily. “I’ll tell you what! Those people you let in! That’s what! You stupid little brat! You’ve hung us all, and your precious Uncle Otto in the bargain!”

  His words were too cruel for Karin to stand. She stepped between them and ordered them to gather their things quickly. Now!

  “But what about Otto? What about Christmas at St. Stephan’s?” Marlene whimpered.

  “No Christmas.” Peter rushed past her to throw his clothes into a suitcase. “We are Jews again.”

  Ten minutes later the little family had managed to cram all their belongings into two small suitcases.

  “What about Otto?” Marlene asked again. “We should warn him they are coming.”

  “He knows already,” Peter said, wanting to strike her for her stupidity.

  “But, Mother,” Marlene whined. “He will wonder where we have gone!”

  “Your brother is right,” Karin said. “It is no doubt too late.”

  They switched the lights off. Karin placed the rumpled note into her pocket. They would dispose of it far away from here.

  Marlene threw herself at her mother, grabbing her around the waist, begging to leave some word for poor Uncle Otto who had been so kind.

  “Shut up!” Peter slapped Marlene across the head. “We are going outside! Out of here! Do you know what that means? Only Jews weep in the streets of Vienna. Now shut up.”

  “Go wash your face,” Karin instructed her daughter with a voice so weary that it was barely audible.

  Marlene suddenly fell silent, as if Peter’s warning had finally turned off the spigot of her hysteria. She hurried to the bathroom, closed the door behind her, and switched on the light while the others waited in impatient fear.

  Marlene looked again at her own reflection—the sad brown eyes, the perfect hair now mussed by Peter’s slap. The face was more angry and defiant than heartbroken. Marlene raised the note she had stolen from her mother’s pocket. She read the pretty handwriting and then, so Otto would know why they left, she tucked the note into the frame of the mirror.

  “Hurry!” Peter called to her.

  Marlene splashed water on her red face and smiled as she emerged.

  ***

  There had been no time to formulate a plan, yet Peter and his mother said the same name at the same instant: “Frau Singer!”

  The corset maker’s house was just across the street, a few quick paces from Otto Wattenbarger’s door. Where else could they go?

  Karin hesitated, aware of the danger in which they might place the old woman.

  “There is no place else,” Peter whispered as he took his mother by the arm and decided the issue. “You take one suitcase and Marlene. Go! I will bring Willie and follow by a different route.”

  The plan evolved just that quickly. Karin and Marlene slipped out the back door of the building. Peter, lugging his bundled-up brother and a satchel full of baby things, left by the front door.

  He stopped outside on the sidewalk and tugged Willie’s cap down around his ears. The baby shuddered and looked surprised by the cold air against his cheeks. Peter dawdled a moment longer, glancing nonchalantly along the shadowed facades of the buildings for some sign of a watcher. He saw no one, and he hoped that his mother and sister were not being trailed as they left the alley.

  For just a moment, he considered walking directly across the street and into Frau Singer’s shop. The green car of an Austrian Schupo passed by, and Peter thought better of it.

  He tried to look lighthearted. Big brother taking his baby brother out for a stroll to look at the Christmas lights of Vienna.

  “It is cold, isn’t it, Willie?” Peter remarked, and the words rose up in frosty puffs as he walked carefully over the icy sidewalk.

  As if in agreement, Willie tucked his head against the warmth of Peter’s coat and gazed in wide-eyed wonder at the sights and sounds of the street. It had been so long since Willie had been out, Peter wondered if he even remembered the outside.

  Peter talked constantly to Willie, pointing to this shop and that building as if the infant could somehow comprehend Vienna. The baby tried to suck his thumb through his mitten and got a mouthful of coarse wool for the effort. Only then did he begin to fuss. Peter tugged off the tiny mitten and let Willie have the precious thumb as they rounded the corner onto the broad Ringstrasse.

  A brass band on the street corner played Christmas carols. Lights shimmered everywhere. In the windows of a thousand apartments candles were lit on the Christmas trees.

  It was beautiful, but Peter was not part of it. He could not think of the beauty, only the danger he felt pressing at his back, threatening Baby Willie—perhaps snuffing out their lives as easily as the candles on these trees would be extinguished. Stronger than any desire he had ever felt, Peter wanted to protect Willie from such a thing.

  Peter stopped as a streetcar rumbled by on shiny wet tracks. He put down the satchel and shifted Willie’s weight, kissing him on his ruddy cheek. Willie smiled up at him without ever taking the thumb from his mouth. The baby did not know, could not realize, the desperation and love behind that kiss. Peter looked back to see if anyone followed them.

  Beyond the enormous public buildings of the Ringstrasse, Peter could make out the spires of the churches of Vienna. Distant church bells began to clang joyfully, announcing the first services of the evening. Peter hefted the satchel again and hurried through the last-minute shoppers as he made his way back toward Frau Singer’s shop. So much for the Mass book. So much for Marlene’s Christmas dress and her dream of being one of them!

  He had walked far enough. If they were being trailed, Peter had not spotted their pursuers. He exhaled a long, relieved breath and turned down the first side street. The noise of traffic at his back, he walked faster, in a hurry to be inside, to see if his mother and Marlene had made it safely to Frau Singer’s flat.

  ***

  There were churches somewhere, Lori knew, where families stood side by side together in the pews and sang Christmas songs without fear of who might be watching or listening. Echoes of her own memories played in her mind as the shadows of evening dissolved into the darkness of deserted New Church.

  No lights shone this year—no garlands, no manger scene or clumsy church pageant. No choir sang songs of praise and joy. Only four small voices whispered the soft melody of “Silent Night.”

  In memory of Christmas past, each of them had chosen something small from New Church to carry away. They wrapped their own gifts and laid them on the dusty altar. Lori read the Christmas story, and each of them prayed for their mothers and fathers and all the others who were not at New Church tonight.

  The service completed, they opened their gifts. Jamie had chosen his father’s silver filigreed letter opener, the one Pastor Karl had brought home from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem ten years before. He held it up in the gloom. A faint glimmer of light struck its dagger-like blade. Jamie had always admired it, he explained, but Papa had never let him touch it. His prayer was that by next Christmas he could give it back to his father.

  Mark had searched the church from top to bottom for something—anything—that might make a present for himself. He came across a packet of twelve yellow pencils and a box of clean white stationery with envelopes. It seemed an elegant gift to give himself from New Church.

  Lori found her father’s hidden Bible, the one that remained whole with both Old and New Testaments intact, even after the huge bonfires in which every vestige of the Jewish Scriptures had been taken from the churches and burned. As Papa had explained, the Old Testament held all the prophecies about the coming of Christ. Without them, the story was only half told, and told incorrectly at that. Lori was uncertain if any complete Bibles remained in Nazi Germany. But this last one she would take with her so she could read the words in her own language.

  Jacob took the red velvet altar cloth, the one with the emb
roidered gold letters on it: HIS FAITHFULNESS WILL BE YOUR SHIELD AND RAMPART. Jacob did not say that tonight, especially, he felt need of a shield and rampart, even though that was the reason he had removed the cloth and folded it carefully. He said he liked the color of the velvet and he could not think of anything else to take. A nice memento, he explained gruffly. He would not allow any sentimentality to creep into his voice, although he was as homesick and heartsick as the others.

  They sang one more carol, then sat in silence on the floor in front of the altar. Images of shining lights and roasted turkeys and Christmas trees played in each mind.

  “Well,” Lori said feebly. “Merry Christmas, then.”

  Jacob cleared his throat too loudly, the sort of sound that announced he had something to say. “One more present.” He reached out for her hand and laid a small oval paper-wrapped something in her palm.

  “But we weren’t supposed to—”

  “This is for you to use here.” Jacob sounded strangely shy, like a little boy—maybe even hopeful that she would not throw the thing back in his face.

  “Here? But we are leaving tonight.”

  “Well, I have been so . . . strict . . . difficult about certain things,” he stammered. “Open it.”

  She held it up to her cheek. A faint floral smell escaped the wrapping. She tore open the paper and felt the smooth, round surface of a new cake of soap. Not just any soap, but the guest soap her mother had kept in the basement by the sink in the bathroom at home.

  “Mama’s soap!” she cried with delight. “But how . . . ?”

  Jacob shrugged. She did not see the gesture of embarrassment. “I remembered it. From when I visited.”