Other People’s Houses

by Lore Segal

  The counselor’s thin face appeared behind the cold glass of the window. She opened the door and came in. Everyone was sitting down to lunch, she said, and they had sent her to look for me. I recognized the authentic voice of the exasperated grownup. I wanted to get her to like me. I kept chatting. I walked to the dining hall beside her, telling how I was writing to some people in London who were going to get a visa for my parents. I watched out of the corner of my eye to see if she was impressed. Her face was blue and her eyes little and wind-reddened. Her mouth was set in a grin; I could not tell if it was against the cold or if she was laughing at me. I wouldn’t talk to her ever again.

  To my surprise, she began to talk to me. She said people were saying that there were new persecutions going on in Vienna, that all food shops were closed to Jews, that Jews weren’t allowed to go into the streets day or night and were being fetched out of their apartments and taken away in cartloads. She said she was frightened because of her mother. I told her not to worry; there were so many Jews, they probably wouldn’t even get to her mother.

  After lunch, the camp leader addressed us through the megaphone. He said he had heard the rumors about new pogroms in Vienna, that he had no official word and we were not to believe them or worry ourselves. Now we would observe one minute’s silence and pray for our dear ones left behind. There was a shuffling, a scraping of five hundred chairs as we got to our feet, followed by such a thunderous silence that a little dog belonging to one of the kitchen staff could not bear it and set up a long, terrified howl. The faces of the children opposite me struggled to retain a decent solemnity, but laughter spread through the hall. I felt my face smiling and laughter coming from my own throat, and was horrified because I knew that the sin of my gaiety would be visited on my parents in the very disaster that I should have been this instant praying away.

  I borrowed a pencil and sat down on a bench against the wall and wrote a letter home. It was a letter in code, to pass the censor. I wrote, “Here are some questions that you must answer immediately. What did you have for dinner today? Did you have a nice walk this morning? Are you still living at the same address? Do you understand these questions? PLEASE ANSWER AT ONCE.” I wished there were someone to show my letter to—not a child but a grownup, who would appreciate it.

  The camp leader was still on the stage, talking to some people. I went straight up to him and I said, “How long does a letter to Vienna take, please?” He said it took about two days. I said that I was writing to my parents to find out if they were all right. He said that was fine. His eyes were looking sharply over my head at a new bunch of ladies in fur coats standing just inside the door, and though I knew very well that he was waiting for me to move on so that he could go to them, I still said, “I wrote a letter in code.” “That’s good,” he said. “Just a minute, now.” And then he turned me, not ungently, out of his path. I watched his back striding away, bowing and bobbing to the ladies. I thought, He doesn’t even know my name, and I walked away myself, but my shoulder felt for hours the pressure of his hand.

  I went back to the bench by the wall and sat. Outside, the dusk of an English winter day, which starts imperceptibly almost immediately after lunch, was settling over the camp, and it looked cold. I sat with my mittened hands inside my pockets, sinking every moment more deeply into my coat. My head kept nagging me to go and write another sponsor letter; it might be this letter I might be writing this instant that would save my parents. The lights came on in the hall, but still I sat. I tried to frighten myself into activity by imagining that the Nazis had come to the flat to arrest my father, but I didn’t believe it. I tried to imagine my father and mother put into carts, but found I did not really care. Alarmed, I tried imagining my mother taken away and dead; I imagined myself dead and buried in the ground, but still I couldn’t care anything about it. My body felt, for the first time in days, wonderfully warm inside my coat, while my eyes sportively attached themselves at random to a child and followed her across the hall to join the hora dancers, and watched their clever feet doing the steps. The music had become familiar, and I sang it in my head.

  There was a lady in a fur coat walking up to where I sat, and she spoke to me. She said, “Would you like to come and dance with the other children?” I said, “No,” because it did not seem possible that I could get up out of my coat. “Come along,” the lady said. “Come and dance.” I said, “I don’t know how,” looking straight before me into the black of her dress where her fur coat flapped open. I thought, If she asks me a third time I will go. The lady said, “You can learn,” but still it seemed to me she had not asked me in such a way that I could get up and go, and I waited for her to ask me the right way. The lady turned and walked off. I sat all afternoon waiting for her to come back.

  In the evening there was an entertainment. We sat in rows. The camp leader got up on the stage and taught us to sing songs in English: “Ten Green Bottles,” “Rule Britannia,” and “Boomps-a-Daisy.” Then he introduced a muscle man. The muscle man threw off his cape and he had nothing on underneath except a little pair of plum-colored satin trunks. He looked bare and pink standing all by himself on the stage, but he didn’t seem to feel the cold. He flexed his biceps for us. He could flap his diaphragm left side and right side separately, and wiggle each toe in turn. His head was small and perfectly round, like a walnut. Afterward, the camp leader went up to thank him. He said the muscle man was sorry that he could not speak German but that he had come all the way from London to entertain us. The muscle man stood smiling with great sweetness, but I knew he didn’t even know that I was there.

  At the end of the entertainment, the camp leader announced that we were to remain in hall after breakfast tomorrow to welcome the Mayor, who was coming to welcome us. The ceremony would be broadcast by the B.B.C. He asked for a show of hands from the children who spoke English. They were to be introduced to the Mayor. I raised my hand, stunned by the opportunity opening before me. I could tell the Mayor about the rose in the snow; I would ask him to be a sponsor for my parents. In bed that night, I asked the counselor how to say “growing” in English, but she didn’t know. She told us that a new transport of Jewish children from Germany was expected in camp. I understood from her that this was to be regarded as a calamity, because German Jews talked like Germans and thought they knew everything better than everybody else and would ruin the whole camp. I was surprised. At home I had learned that it was the Polish Jews who always thought they knew everything and were noisy and pushy in public and ruined everything for the real, the Austrian, Jews. I asked our counselor how to say “plucking,” as in “plucking flowers,” in English, but she said how should she know?

  That night I lay for hours in a waking nightmare. The more I worked on my speech for the Mayor, the fewer English words I seemed to know; the less I felt like speaking to him, the more I saw that I must speak or it would be my fault if my parents did not escape. I must have fallen asleep, for I woke in a thumping panic from a dream that a crowd of people had discovered my sausage. When I had calmed a little, I leaned out into the dark and felt under the bed. There was the paper bag. I brought it out and stealthily squeezed it well down into my rucksack, and I thought the crackling and rustling of the paper must be echoing from one end to the other of the sleeping camp.

  All the next morning we stood in rows waiting for the Mayor. He sent a message that he was going to be delayed. I had given up the preparation of my speech. I imagined that once I was face to face with the Mayor the words would roll from my tongue. I shifted my weight from one foot to the other and yawned. I had a fantasy: I was saying my sentences about the rose to the Mayor. His look was full of wonder. He asked me my name. He invited me to come and live with him in his house.

  At some point, I happened to look toward the stage, and there were some men standing with the camp leader. They were talking. I wondered if one of them might be the Mayor. Maybe it was the gray-haired man in the raincoat. He had a cold in the head and kept blowing his no
se and clapping the camp leader on the shoulder every time the camp leader clapped him on the shoulder. Or maybe it was the other man, holding a microphone and trailing a long wire. The camp leader was talking into the microphone, and then the man with the cold talked in English. I could not concentrate on what he was saying. There was a long queue of children filing past. I wondered what they were doing; they couldn’t be the English-speaking children being introduced to the Mayor, because if they were I would be among them. I could not understand what was happening, and I lost interest. Afterward, they were gone and I was sitting down again on the bench by the wall, and I was never sure that there was such a person as a Mayor.

  There seems to be only a certain amount of room in my memory. I cannot keep the subsequent days separate in my mind or remember how many there were. There was some attempt to keep us occupied. I remember English lessons going on in various corners of the hall. I remember a drawing competition that I either won or thought I ought to have won—I don’t recall which. The hora tune had become a hit. We hummed it while we dressed in the morning and the children walking by outside would be whistling it, too. There was always some group dancing, keeping warm in the hall. I think I might have been a week in that camp, perhaps a little more.

  One evening the youngest of my roommates and I were sent to go to bed and found four large boys in our cottage. They were heaving our belongings over the veranda railing into the snow. The little girl and I watched, holding the spokes, our eyes on a level with the big boys’ feet. They wore long wool socks and short pants, and, in between, their knees were knobbly. I thought they were lovely. I admired the energetic, devil-may-care way they told us the cottage was theirs and we should go and find out where we belonged. Then they went in and shut the door. “That’s those Germans,” said the little girl and began to cry, but I felt suddenly extraordinarily happy to think of the boys inside the familiar walls of our cottage; I had a sense of the camp and the cottages full of boys and girls—Austrians, Germans, and even Poles—and I hated the little girl beside me who had sat down on her suitcase and was howling dismally. She was intefering with my loving everybody.

  I don’t know how long we sat outside the cottage. Eventually, some person came walking by and found us sitting on our suitcases in the snow. The little girl was still wailing in a bored sort of way. This person asked us what had happened and was quite upset and took us along to the office, and the muddle was discovered. It seemed that we were part of the original Austrian transport slated to be moved to another camp, but not until the next day. And so it turned out that the Germans really had ruined everything. The little girl and I were put into a narrow room with bunk beds for the night. We cursed the Germans with heated indignation and excited ourselves. We talked far into the night. We told each other things and we became quite intimate.

  About the second camp I remember only that it was not a proper camp like our first camp. The assembly hall was made of brick; the cottages, instead of being wooden, were made of stucco. It was all wrong and strange, and before the newness of it could pass away I moved again.

  One evening I was sitting by one of the stoves, writing a letter to my parents, when two English ladies came up to me. One of them carried a pad of paper, and she said, “How about this one?,” and the other lady said, “All right.” They smiled at me. They asked my name and age and I told them. They said I spoke English very nicely. I beamed. They asked me if I was Orthodox. I said yes. They were pleased. They said then would I like to come and live with a lovely Orthodox family in Liverpool. I said yes enthusiastically, and we all three beamed at one another. I asked the ladies if they would find a sponsor for my parents, and watched them exchange glances. One lady patted my head and said we would see. I said and could they get a sponsor for my grandparents and for my cousins Erica and Use, who had not been able to come on the children’s transport like me. The ladies’ smiles became strained. They said we would talk about it later.

  I finished my letter to my parents, saying that I was going to go and live with this lovely Orthodox family in Liverpool and would they please write and tell me what did “Orthodox” mean.

  There were cars waiting early the next morning to take twenty little girls to the railway station. All day we traveled north. All day it snowed. I was trying to write a sponsor letter in my head about the little bushes outside stooped like old peasants under the heavy shawl of snow, but I couldn’t tie them in with Jews and Nazis. I had a nervous notion that while I looked out one side of the train the interesting things were happening on the other side, so I kept running between the compartment and the corridor, to look out there. After a while, the older girls clucked their tongues and said couldn’t I sit still for just one minute, and I said I had to go out, and did, and I didn’t dare to come back. I looked out of the corridor window until I was tired, and then I went along to the lavatory and messed with the soap. When I judged I had been away a reasonable time, I came back. I stopped stock-still in the doorway of my compartment. My rucksack stood on my seat; the brown paper bag had been taken out and torn open, and my guilty sausage lay exposed to the light. It was ugly and shrivelled, with one end nibbled off. The thing had lost the fierce and aggressive stench of active decay and had about it now the suffocating smell of mold; it thickened the air of the compartment. One of the English ladies was standing looking at it, her nose crinkled. The seven children were sitting looking at me, and I died there on the spot, drowned in shame. The waters closed over my head and through the thumping and roaring in my ears I heard one of the little girls say, “And it isn’t even kosher.” The English lady said, “You can throw it away in the station when we change trains.” Dead and drowned under their eyes, I walked to my seat. I packed up the sausage; I took the rucksack off the seat and sat down. After a while, I noticed that the other girls were no longer staring at me and that the lady, when she looked in to see how we were doing, smiled pleasantly. But still I had not the courage to get out of my seat, though now I really needed to go to the bathroom.

  In the station there was a large trash can and I dropped my sausage in. I stood and roared with grief. Through my noise and my tears I saw the foolish children standing around, and heard one of the English ladies saying, “Come on, now. Are you all right?” They both looked upset and frightened. “Will you be all right?” they asked.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Liverpool: Mrs. Levine’s House

  We arrived in Liverpool in the early evening. There were people from the Committee waiting with cars to take us to a great house.

  I remember that all the doors stood open. Lights were on in all the rooms and hallways, and many people were walking everywhere. Our rucksacks and suitcases stood on the landing. Some ladies took off our coats and caps and gloves and piled them on the beds. Someone asked me if I wanted to go to the bathroom, and though I did, quite badly by now, I wondered how I was going to find my way back, and I didn’t even know where it was. It seemed too complicated. I said I didn’t need to go.

  In a big room, a long table with a white cloth was laid as if for a party. On the far side of the room was a fire burning in a square hole in the wall. I went and stood in front of it. A tall gentleman stood looking at me. I told him I had never seen a fire in a wall before and that in Vienna we had stoves. He said how nicely I spoke English, and we chatted until a lady from the Committee came to show me to my seat. It seemed it was the first day of Chanukah. Candles were lit. Everyone stood still and sang a song I did not know. Then all the children sat around the table. We had cakes and little plates with colored jelly such as I had never seen before. If you poked it with a finger, it went on wobbling for a while.

  A Committee lady going about with a list of names came to stand behind me with another lady. The Committee lady said, “Here’s a nice little girl.”

  I turned, eager to charm. An enormous, prickly-looking fur coat rose sheer above me. An old woman looked at me with a sour expression from behind her glasses. She frightened me. She had
a small, gray, untidy face with a lot of hat and hair and spectacle about it. I had imagined that the family who would choose me would be very special, very beautiful people. I signaled to the lady with the list that I wanted to go with somebody else, but she didn’t see, because she was attending to the woman in the fur coat, who said, “How old is she? See, we wanted to have one about ten years old—you know, old enough to do for herself but not too old to learn nice ways.”

  I watched them talking together over my head, and I kept thinking that if I listened harder I would know what they were saying, but always it seemed that my mind wandered, and when I remembered to listen I couldn’t tell if I had to go with this person. I wasn’t even sure if they were still talking about me, so I said in desperation, out loud, “I’m not ten. I’m half past ten. I’m nearly eleven.”

  They looked surprised. The old woman in the fur coat grinned shyly at me and I felt better. She asked me where my things were and took my hand and we went and found my coat in the bedroom. There was a young man who carried my luggage out of the house to one of the cars in the snow in the street. He got into the driver’s seat. The old woman made me get in behind with her. I remember that as the car started up I looked back through the rear window in a panic moment to see if I could see one of the Committee ladies. I wondered if they knew I was being taken away. And if my parents would find out where I was. But I could not frighten myself for long. My childhood had not prepared me to expect harm from grownups. I think I rather felt I had a way with them, and as soon as we were settled in the car I started to tell the old woman how I had studied English at school, and privately as well, and that I always got A’s in my reports. In the half dark of the back seat, I could not tell if this stolid, fur-wrapped person beside me was properly impressed. I said, “And I can figure-skate and dance on my toes.” She said something to the young man in front that I could not make out. I was too sleepy to think up more English conversation; I decided to leave it all till later and I let my eyes close.