Isabel’s War

by Lila Perl

  And, on top of that, President Roosevelt recently announced that coffee is going to be rationed. Starting on November 29, three days after Thanksgiving, Americans will be limited to one cup of coffee per day. It isn’t because of a coffee shortage. There’s plenty of coffee in Brazil. And also there’s plenty of sugar in Cuba. It’s because of the scarcity of ships—which are needed to carry soldiers and weapons abroad—that are available to bring these luxuries to American tables.

  Sibby and I don’t drink coffee, so we couldn’t care less. I do think, though, that my mother isn’t going to be too thrilled with Leona Simon’s contribution of creamed onions and cauliflower au gratin. We usually have candied sweet potatoes and buttered green peas for vegetables on Thanksgiving.

  “What, by the way, is cauliflower au gratin?” I ask Sybil.

  “You don’t know?” she clucks. “It’s French. Guess you’ll have to ask your boyfriend, Billy.”

  I hate it when Sibby teases me about Billy Crosby, whom I sincerely detest. “Never mind. I’ll look it up.”

  “Oh, don’t bother. It’s just breadcrumbs and cheese sprinkled on top of the cauliflower. You know Leona. She’s always trying to make vegetables taste better. She says we all have to plant Victory Gardens next spring because meat rationing is going to get even stricter.” Sibby sniffs. “Can’t you just see us trying to grow dinner in a window box here in the Bronx?”

  I really must dash off a letter to Ruthie before the holiday weekend. I know that Helga doesn’t want me to tell anybody about her hardworking life on the chicken farm, about the weirdly silent Rathbones who wouldn’t let her go to school, and about poor slobbering but loving Tim who died when he was only eleven. But I owe it to Ruthie to answer her questions, especially the ones about Helga.

  Dear Ruthie,

  How are you? No, of course, I’m not mad at you. Are you at me? I have so much to tell you. But I waited to be able to give you the whole story about Helga and the chicken farm, which I found out happened in England, not in Germany.

  I’m going to write Helga’s story in the form of a composition—or I guess you could call it a biography—on a separate piece of paper attached to this letter. It starts with when she left her family in Germany and went to England with a bunch of other Jewish refugee children on something called a Kindertransport. You’ll understand everything when you read it.

  Now for a surprise. “Do I ever see or hear from Helga?” She’s been living with us here in the apartment since school began! She also goes to my junior high, where she has mostly ninth-grade classes but not all. Her Aunt Harriette, Mrs. Frankfurter (I call her Mrs. F.) took sick after they got back from Shady Pines and had a serious operation.

  We’re better friends now than we were up at the hotel, but Helga is still hard to know really well. She says mysterious things about telling lies and having to be punished for them. I don’t understand.

  Arnold joined the Air Force and he came home on furlough for two days when he was transferred from New Jersey to Massachusetts. He looks so handsome in his uniform. Helga had a letter from Roy telling her he was on a ship in the Pacific. That’s all I know on the romance side.

  This will be Helga’s first Thanksgiving. We’re having company—my friend Sybil and her mother from the building and Helga’s aunt and uncle now that she’s feeling better. Have a Happy Thanksgiving.

  Love, Izzie

  P.S. A boy in my French class likes me. He stares at my chest all the time and asked me to go to the movies with him. It’s a war movie, of course… The Commandos Strike at Dawn. I actually hate him. What do you think I should do?

  Fifteen

  “To our absent loved ones,” my father declares, raising his wineglass in a toast as we all sit down to Thanksgiving dinner in the crowded dining space in our apartment. Everybody joins in, including Sibby and me who, instead of wine, are drinking ginger ale with maraschino cherries, otherwise known as Shirley Temples.

  Each of us, of course, has special absent loved ones in mind. My parents and I are thinking of Arnold, who now writes that he might soon be shipped overseas. This makes no sense to us because he hasn’t had his Air Force training yet and what if they send him to North Africa before he even learns to fly a plane?

  Sybil and Leona are surely thinking of Mr. Simon somewhere in the submarine-infested waters of the stormy North Atlantic, trying to steer a ship loaded with war supplies to a safe harbor in England.

  And Helga, what is she thinking about? There’s Roy, of course, somewhere in the Pacific, where the war against the Japanese still isn’t going well. But she has more absent loved ones than any of us…her father, last known to have been in the German prison camp of Buchenwald, and her mother and two sisters hiding out in fearfully dangerous German-occupied Holland.

  I would have thought that Helga’s non-Jewish Mutti would have been able to save herself and her daughters. “But marriage to a Jew, or having one Jewish parent,” Helga has told me, “is a black mark. In the case of a child, of course, Jewish blood runs in the veins.” And I’m reminded again, at our festive and abundant Thanksgiving table, of the Hitler Youth song, And when Jewish blood spurts from the knife…

  But in spite of everything, I try to think of today as a cheery occasion. For one thing, it’s the start of a four-day school holiday. Already, Mrs. F. has invited Helga and me to visit her in Westchester this weekend. “And Sybil must come, too,” she adds. “You girls can have a lovely time. There’s skating, horseback riding, hiking in the woods.”

  Mr. F. places his hand on Mrs. F.’s ring-studded fingers in a cautioning gesture.

  “Oh,” she laughs, “Herman thinks I’m not well enough yet. Of course, I wouldn’t be able to do any outdoor sports with you girls. But we’d still have fun. And the housekeeper is there to take care of meals and laundry.” Her black-rimmed eyes look around the room anxiously.

  As soon as Mrs. F. came in the door, I couldn’t help noticing how much thinner she looked than before her operation. It had been hard to tell how much weight she’d lost when I saw her in the hospital, wrapped in her bedazzling dressing gowns and cuddly blankets.

  Today, though, her normally full cheeks look sunken and her chin seems to have become rather pointed beneath her—as usual—expertly applied makeup. She is beautifully dressed, however, in a honey-toned mink coat and matching hat, worn over a dressy suit of amber-colored velvet studded with a gleaming gold brooch.

  “You never told me how glamorous she was,” Sibby whispered after she’d been introduced. “She could be a movie star, one of the older really dramatic ones who scratch out the eyes of the men who’ve wronged them.”

  Now, as my father carves the turkey and my mother passes the laden plates around the table, Mr. F. and Leona Simon find themselves talking about the special Day of Mourning and Prayer that is to take place in New York City just about a week from now. Its purpose is to call attention to the Jews who are trapped in Nazi-dominated Europe and have no hope of being able to escape to any other country. Synagogues, radio stations, and stores and factories will have special services.

  Mr. F. thinks this is a good way to awaken Americans to the fact that Jews all over Europe are being rounded up and thrown into labor camps. But Leona thinks it’s too late to do much good. “If you read the teeny, tiny little reports that are tucked away in the corners of the newspapers,” she tells Mr. F., “you’ll learn that the Germans have built at least half a dozen new camps this year in Poland alone.”

  Leona pauses and glances around the table, noticing that Helga and Mrs. F. are busily involved in some sort of private conversation. “And,” she adds confidentially to her listeners, who now include my parents as well as Sibby and me, “they don’t call them labor camps anymore. Or prison camps. They call them concentration camps.”

  “What,” I pipe up, “are they concentrating on?”

  “Oh, sweetie,” Leona replies, in a completely different tone of voice. “Here come our plates of delicious food. Do you and
Sybil need refills of your Shirley Temples?”

  Without waiting for an answer, she snatches our glasses off the table and disappears into the kitchen.

  Why didn’t Leona answer my question? I jump up and follow her. I have a hunch she was about to say something important and dreadful that would be very upsetting, and that she didn’t want certain people at the table to hear…especially Helga.

  Leona is busily pouring ginger ale and adding bright red cherry juice and extra cherries to our glasses.

  “You didn’t answer me in there, about the…the concentration camps.”

  “Isabel, you shouldn’t be in here. This isn’t a good time to talk. The concentration camps are connected with something the Nazis are doing now to the Jews in Germany. It’s called the ‘Final Solution’.”

  “The Final…Solution?” I’m getting the idea that this has nothing to do with the algebra problems that have been giving me big headaches in Mrs. Deutsch’s math class.

  Leona gives me a shove and I return to my seat at the table. My mother raises her eyebrows questioningly, but happily she doesn’t comment on my brief absence. I’m not known for rushing into the kitchen to try to be helpful during meals.

  I dig into my plate of turkey, stuffing, sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, and Leona Simon’s creamed onions and cauliflower au gratin. Something seems to have taken the edge off my appetite. I poke away even at the good stuff. The creamed onions, of course, are terrible, the cauliflower not quite so bad, probably because of the French au gratin touch.

  Sibby takes a look at my face. Then she pokes my arm. “Hide the onions under a turkey slice,” she advises. “You’re not going to throw up, are you, Izzie?”

  “Shut up,” I whisper. “I’m not. And don’t try to give me ideas.”

  Everybody else at the table seems to be having a wonderful time, talking and eating and drinking. My father and Mr. F. are having a lively discussion about the American and British landings in German-controlled North Africa earlier this month, and they are predicting an invasion of Italy sometime next year. Mrs. F. is getting a little bit tipsy during a gossipy exchange with my mother. Leona is talking to me, Sibby, and Helga about Frank Sinatra maybe doing a holiday show at the Paramount. Even Helga looks happy.

  The meal ends with Mr. F. popping the cork on a bottle of champagne that he and Mrs. F. have brought to the party, along with a lavish assortment of holiday pies and desserts. “I think all the girls should have a sip as well,” Mrs. F. announces. “One day this terrible war will end in victory and our darlings will all grow up and have ‘champagne’ lives!”

  Champagne—the very name of this pale bubbly wine sounds so exciting. Skillfully, Mr. F. fills eight thin-stemmed crystal glasses and places one before each of us. Since we’ve already toasted our absent loved ones, my parents suggest we drink to Harriette Frankfurter’s continuing recovery and wish her a return to perfect health.

  Mrs. F. objects and begins to dab at her eyes with a lacy handkerchief. “Oh, no, not me,” she protests. “I’m well already. To all those everywhere who are suffering so much as a result of this war.”

  But we’ve already raised our glasses and are toasting the health of Mrs. F., whose eyeliner has begun to run in rivulets down her cheeks. I put my glass to my lips. The rim of it is so thin that it feels like, if I squeezed it too hard, it would shatter into a thousand tiny crystal shards. So this is champagne.

  I take a swallow, exploding bubbles go shooting up my nose, and my mouth is instantly filled with the stinging, acid flavor that comes from biting (once on a dare) into a dead June bug.

  “Isabel!” my mother exclaims. “Where are your manners? Leave the table at once!”

  My soaking napkin and I arrive in the kitchen, where I’m frantically rinsing my mouth with water when Sybil appears at my side. “Honest to goodness, Izzie, you’re so unsophisticated. Didn’t you know that champagne tastes like sour ginger ale?”

  “No,” I say, between gulps of water. “You could have warned me. And anyhow that’s a lie. It tastes much worse.”

  Poor Mrs. F.—by the time she and Mr. F. leave, she looks haggard from crying her happy tears and drinking too many toasts in wine and champagne.

  “Having the girls visit you this weekend, Harriette, is out of the question,” my mother states firmly, as Mrs. F. is being helped into her mink. “You’re exhausted just from the effort of being out for the day instead of getting your usual amount of rest.”

  Mrs. F., whose mink hat is sitting tilted a little too far to one side on her curled coppery hair, protests that she is “fine, just fine.” But Mr. F., standing directly behind her, shakes his head to indicate that he agrees with my mother.

  Then a last-minute decision is made. Helga will throw some clothes together and go home with the Frankfurters. It is, after all, her “real” home, and she can stay with her aunt and uncle until school opens on Monday.

  “No need to take anything but a toothbrush, dear,” Mrs. F. calls out, as I follow Helga into our bedroom to help her pack. “We’ll buy you an entire winter wardrobe on the weekend.”

  “Sounds like you’re going to have fun,” I say, as I watch Helga gathering pajamas and underwear to take along. “You really want to go, don’t you?”

  “Ja. It is good that I go. But she is very sick. You see that, don’t you?”

  “Um, well your aunt does look a lot thinner than before the operation. But that’s normal I guess…”

  My mother is at the door to hurry Helga up because Mrs. F. is waiting in her coat and Mr. F. has already gone to get the car. We walk Helga and her aunt to the elevator and wave goodbye. It would have been fun for Sibby and me to go up to Westchester with Helga for skating and horseback riding. But I guess it’s not to be.

  As the elevator door is about to close, I get a last look at Mrs. F. and Helga. Mrs. F. is leaning against the railing for support and suddenly appears to be in pain. Helga stands beside her, tall and willowy, suitcase in hand, her expression empty and forlorn.

  It’s the Saturday afternoon of the Thanksgiving weekend and Sibby and I are at loose ends. After having had a disagreement about which movie to go to, it looks like we’re not going to either. Sybil wants to go down to Times Square to see a romantic new spy thriller with Humphrey Bogart called Casablanca. I’m not sure we’ll be able to get in because it’s a first-run showing and Times Square is just overflowing with soldiers and sailors and everybody else who’s having a holiday fling.

  “So I suppose you just want to hang out in this boring neighborhood near home and see Judy Garland in For Me and My Gal. Or would you prefer something really juvenile like Bambi, the story of the adorable little baby deer?”

  “You don’t have to get nasty about it,” I tell Sybil. “Anyhow, what’s wrong with Judy Garland?”

  “She’s too sweet and sappy. And those big cow eyes.”

  “But she can sing, you have to admit that.”

  I make one last suggestion. “How about we just go shopping?”

  “With what? I don’t have any money.”

  “Window shopping. You know.”

  Immediately behind me, I hear a high-pitched voice mimicking my own. Window shopping, you know. Somebody taps me hard on the shoulder. I turn around and find myself face to face with Billy Crosby.

  “Uh-oh,” Sibby remarks. If she says the word boyfriend, I’ll kill her right here in front of the movie theater, where Judy Garland is grinning at us from a huge color poster.

  Billy’s lips are curled into one of his exasperating smiles. “Girls! Nothing on your minds but shopping. There’s a bunch of stuff you could be doing for the war effort.”

  “Who asked you?” I demand.

  Billy holds his ground. “Want a list?”

  “No thanks,” I answer freshly. “We already rolled bandages, collected scrap metal, made tinfoil and rubber-band balls, bought defense stamps, and served sandwiches at the USO. I even tried knitting a scarf for if and when we invade France. What else am
I supposed to do?” I poke Sybil. “Oh, and her mother is working at a defense job. In a shipyard.”

  “Gosh, Frenchy,” Billy says, hunching his soldiers, his glasses glinting, “you don’t have to be so mad about everything. What’s eatin’ you, anyway?”

  “You are. You act like you always know everything, like you’re ten miles ahead of everybody else. What makes you such a show-off?”

  Sybil is shifting her weight from one foot to the other, hands on her hips, and staring down at the sidewalk.

  “Honest,” Billy is suddenly pleading. “I’m not. I just thought if you wanted to get behind the war effort. But now I sorta see…”

  “Listen,” Sibby suddenly explodes at the two of us. “If the both of you are just going to stand around here arguing, I’m going downtown to see the movie I wanted to see in the first place.” And, without another word, she turns and runs off toward the subway station entrance at the end of the block.

  Before I can make a quick dash after her, Sibby is lost in the crowd. I stand there looking blankly in her direction.

  “Aw, let her go,” Billy advises. “She’s even more hot-tempered than you are, Frenchy. Anyhow, I got a suggestion.” Billy clears his throat. “Voulez-vous faire une petite promenade avec moi?”

  What am I going to do now? Sybil has done one of the worst things a friend can do. She’s run out on me and I’m stuck with Billy, who wants me to take a little walk with him.

  Hmm…une petite promenade. Amazingly, Billy got the sentence right. And his accent wasn’t bad either.

  Why, I wonder, does everything sound so much better in French?

  Sixteen

  “So what’s the story with the German girl?” Billy wants to know.

  We’re walking around and around the park, the one with the slimy fountain pond into which Sibby and I dipped our feet on that hot day when I’d just gotten home from Shady Pines, and where I told Sybil about Helga—and Roy.