by Bodie Thoene
Rachel shrugged and smoothed the folds of her skirt.
Papa continued. “God promised Abraham only one son from Sarah! One son. One miracle. And through that son a covenant was made. The Eternal promised the nation of Israel. Promised the Messiah. Promised the redemption of all mankind. It only takes one! Can you imagine how that fact must distress God’s great enemy, Satan? For this reason, since that time the Evil One has sought actively to deceive and destroy every descendant of Abraham’s promised son. And that means you, Rachel. And Yacov. And David and Samuel as well!”
Rachel raised her eyes. A congregation of one, her attention had been captured by the great Rabbi Lubetkin. She opened her mouth in a soundless oh.
Papa nodded. “Every Jew who survives openly sanctifies the covenant God made with Abraham. Now is the time for the sanctification of life. Kiddush Hashem. Once when our enemies demanded our souls, the Jew martyred his body. Today, Rachel, if the enemy demands that you die, it is your obligation to defend yourself and preserve your life so that God’s covenant with Israel may be fulfilled at the coming of Messiah.”
He waited as this sermon settled on her. She nodded. Meekly.
“Do you understand why our children must live? Who the true enemy of every Jew is, Rachel? Not the goyim. No. It is the Evil One who is God’s enemy. It is Satan we must fight by remaining alive!”
Rachel did not like any of this. She wished she were wise enough to reply. “I know why I must stay alive. But if you were not . . . alive, it would be easier to die, Papa. Easier to die with us all together than to live alone like . . . like Peter Wallich!”
“But you are the daughter of Rabbi Aaron Lubetkin. The granddaughter of Rabbi Shlomo Lebowitz! It is important daughter of the seed of Abraham, that you live! Even if it means going to Jerusalem without us.”
She jumped to her feet. This was too blatant. It was no longer a discussion on living or dying and the obligations of being a Jew! Papa was talking about sending her away! Too much! “I will live wherever you and Mama are! I won’t leave you! Or my brothers! Because . . . because . . . Papa! Can’t you see my heart would no longer be alive in me without you? I would be sick for you all . . . I would.”
It was a terrible thing. She was losing the argument and all she could do about it was run into Papa’s arms and hold on tightly while she cried and cried.
After a minute he stroked her hair. He patted her back. “Well, now. It is not all that bad. You would never survive Yeshiva school if you cannot discuss a little thing like Kiddush Hashem. True? Of course true. Go on now. Wash your face. Stop this weeping. And no more singing of ditties beneath the window of important meetings.”
***
It was dark when Wolf awoke from his deep sleep. His head still ached—as if he had a night of too much schnapps. But the agony of the morning was past.
He sat up carefully, slowly swinging his feet to the floor. He was still slightly nauseous and decided that he had experienced a touch of food poisoning. He raised the shade and peered out over the quiet square. Here and there light shone in the windows of Jewish houses. The shops were closed tight. There was no sign at all that the Jewish holy man had come and gone in Muranow Square.
With a sigh, Wolf realized he had not eaten all day. He switched on the light and made his way to the kitchen. On the table was the open newspaper. The words emblazoned across the newspaper were the obituary for Poland: GERMANY DENOUNCES POLISH MOBILIZATION.
From the perspective of this Polish rag of a newspaper, this was called foolish propaganda. Germany had been rearming for years. No doubt London would also be crying foul as well. But for the Führer, Wolf knew, this was a necessary step. Now there would be opportunity to accuse Poland of aggression and increase Nazi demands.
Wolf read the accounts and then smiled down at the Jewish district of Warsaw. Soon there would be no holy man to stop what was coming on this place.
The Führer had set his sights on Poland. On Warsaw. On the Jews who took the living space that rightfully belonged to the German race.
Knowing this made his view of Jewish Warsaw seem like a very old silent motion picture. Wolf saw the movement of people in the square below him, but they seemed like gray apparitions of a people and a culture long dead. They did not know it, but the requiem had already been played for them. They were no more! The mind of the German Führer had decreed their end long ago. The headlines of today’s news simply confirmed what was written against them.
As the reel spun out before Wolf’s eyes, he watched the Jews with the fascination of one who knows the end of the story. Only the characters of this present scene seemed unaware that their destiny was already written.
***
The outlying English churchyards had been scoured for possible candidates for premature resurrection. Names were selected carefully for date of birth and gender. Lori joined her mother, Anna, and Elisa on these daily picnic excursions where identities were stolen from the dead so that they might save those condemned to die. Captain Orde had the new passport photos of Jacob and Alfie and Rachel Lubetkin. He had also chosen his own candidates for life from among those who had clamored to join his group of young Zionists. The criteria were simple: an Anglo-looking face and a passible grasp of the English language. Among the young men, only 157 fit those standards. At last word, the passport photos of that handful were on the way to London. If the photographs arrived before the powder keg exploded beneath Poland, then perhaps there was hope. But every day, it seemed, Germany and Poland moved more irrevocably toward confrontation.
The certainty of war struck terror in Lori’s heart for two main reasons—along with a host of smaller reasons. If there was a war and England did indeed take sides with Poland, she would probably never see her father again. If there was a war before Jacob got his passport and got out of Poland—well, she could not let herself think about it.
She wrote Jacob every day and included little notes to Alfie and Werner as well. Three times a week the mail steamer brought Jacob’s return letters to her. She read the newsy bits aloud to Mark and Jamie and her mother, but the other parts she saved for her own heart. She carried his love letters around in her pockets. When the day was too long or too slow or lonely, she would pull out a letter and read it over again until she felt that Jacob was right there with her.
If there was a war, the mail would stop. That realization evoked another kind of dread. She knew what it was like to live on without knowing the fate of the one you love more than your own life. She could see such brave grief in her mother. A hundred times a day Helen Ibsen looked off somewhere, and her eyes reflected the hope and memory of Karl Ibsen.
Please, God, Lori prayed. For her father and now for her own husband, this little unfinished prayer helped her get through the hot summer days in London. Let them come home!
Then a miracle happened. Lori waited beside the mailbox and took the letters from the postman. At last the passport of William Howard Johnson had arrived! Inside, the image of Jacob Kalner grinned out, daring anyone to challenge that he was a true Englishman!
Lori stood with one foot on the bottom step as she smiled back at Jacob. She wanted to shout for joy! She wanted to run into the little church across the way and blow kisses at the cross above the altar. She wanted to kneel on the weed-covered grave of the little boy who had lived only one short month in this life and say, “Thank you! Oh, thank you!”
In the midst of this miracle, Lori did not see the shadow of Doc Grogan at her elbow. She could not say how long he had been peering down at the passport before he finally spoke.
“William Howard Johnson. A good English name.”
“Oh!” Lori snapped the new passport cover closed and put it behind her back. “I did not see you.”
“I thought not,” he said with a wry smile as he stepped around her. “I understood his name was Kalner?” He walked lightly up the stairs.
It was the day for the Thursday excursion with Doc Grogan. Most of the refugee children wer
e settled in new homes. That left only Charles and Louis, Lori, Jamie, and Mark for today’s outing.
From the beginning, Doc Grogan called Lori “Missus Kalner!” He peered over her shoulder when she held baby Alfie and said, “He looks just exactly like your husband, don’t you think so, Missus Kalner?”
This usually made Lori blush, which was the purpose of the comment. He said he liked to see a little color on her wan and pale cheeks.
Wan was not a word Lori knew, so she looked it up in her English-German dictionary. It meant “pale.” “So my cheeks are pale and pale?” she teased him. “I will not ever understand how English has so many words for the same thing!”
Then Jamie chimed in, “For instance, the word Schwein in Deutsch can be said pig. Or swine. Or hog. Or pork. Or Nazi.”
At this, everyone dissolved into laughter. Doc Grogan pointed out how wonderfully pink Missus Kalner’s pale and pale cheeks were. And then how good it was to hear that she really could laugh. Mothers needed to laugh a lot, he admonished, so their babies could grow up hearing laughter. Then he made up a wild theory about how babies who don’t hear a lot of laughter never quite know how to talk properly.
Lori had long ago decided that she liked Doc Grogan. He was chubby, round-faced and jolly. His skin was also pale and pale, but covered with a fine frosting of freckles. He was Bavarian in character, she decided, rather than austere and dry like someone from Prussia.
The bottom line was that he reminded her of her favorite history teacher who had left Germany for safer places in the middle of Lori’s seventh-grade year. After that, school had been very dull.
On Thursdays Elisa shooed her out the door and told her to have fun. On this particular Thursday Anna and Helen took the babies while Elisa practiced her violin.
“Be sure you laugh a lot,” Mark called as Helen and Anna pushed the pram the opposite direction. They did not need to be told. They prattled on about the babies like two grandmothers should do.
Moments later, through the open window they could hear the high, fine soprano voice of Elisa’s violin as it played a Mozart rondo.
“There you have it.” Doc Grogan walked backward and waved his arms as though he were conducting. “As good as laughter, it is not, Missus Kalner? Ah! How lovely to see you smile for a whole minute at s time! I feared you had forgotten how since you came to jolly old England and jolly good Red Lion Square.”
“She is just Misses Jacob,” Jamie teased.
Lori silenced him with a look. For these ten minutes she was doing just fine. Smiling. Feeling almost like breathing. Fine. She did not want to be reminded that there were moments when she missed Jacob so badly that she could barely speak, that at night she lay in bed and ached from missing him.
“My mother was married younger than you,” said Grogan in a matter-of-fact tone. “Married ten days, and then he was off to the war. Spanish-American War. Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders. He came home and POP, there was the first of eleven babies. Just that easy.” They lined up to wait for the red bus. “Eleven children and imagine, none of them looked like him! Not like your little Alfie, eh, Missus Kalner?”
Jamie and Mark howled at this because they knew the real story about the baby. How big Alfie had shoved him into Lori’s arms and said, “Auf Wiedersehen! Of course they were not permitted to tell the truth of it, or the immigration adoptions people would be standing on the doorstep, demanding that the baby be given to some childless couple who ran a bee farm in Sussex or something. Murphy had warned them sternly. They could not even tell Doc Grogan the truth. Dangerous stuff, he said.
But they could laugh at Doc on Thursdays all the same. He took them here and there and made them speak like every educated Englishman should speak. Proper vowels and no making Ws into Vs, like old Hildy Frutschy. “Ve ist goinggg!”
Today, like every Thursday, they joked and laughed as they waited for the bus. He sometimes withheld their true destination from them until they had already passed it once. This made them pay attention, he said—made them use their imaginations as they wondered which place was worth seeing and which was only mediocre.
The dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral loomed ahead of them. Grogan did not bother to hide their destination from them.
“How would you like to see the place where the remembrance ceremony for your father will be held?” he asked Lori and Jamie.
Not even Charles and Louis had ever been inside St. Paul’s with Doc. And to see anything in London without him was like not really seeing it.
A chorus of cheers arose. The wind on the top deck of the bus blew through Doc’s thin hair. He looked hard at the dome in a very thoughtful way. “It will take us all day. You have your lunches?”
Five bagged lunches by Hildy were held up. She made wonderful bratwurst sandwiches, Hildy did—as long as the onions did not get warm. Then the bags made heads turn.
Grogan held up his own bag. “Good. We will eat at the top in the Golden Gallery at one o’clock, so we can hear the ringing of the Great Bell.”
He made it sound so wonderful. For just a moment, Lori looked down at her photograph of Jacob. Could she help it if she missed him? If she wished beyond anything that he were here?
“We will begin in St. Dunstan’s Chapel and then go on to the crypt, where they keep the old famous people in storage for posterity.”
Charles and Louis exchanged puzzled looks. Should they tell him they did not understand this big English word posterity?
In predictable Doc-like fashion, he knew they did not know. Possibly that was why he used the word. “Future generations; children just like you, only fifty years from now, who will wander through history. Depending on the teacher, they will see nothing in the crypts but marble, chiseled and cold. Ah!” He held up a sausage finger. “But if their teacher is like me, then they will hear the voice of Lord Nelson shouting to his men! They will hear the tap-dancing step of those who once were and those who have yet to be!”
29
Requiem for Poland
Warsaw was a vast city spread out along the wide banks of the Vistula. It was a tangle of narrow streets and broad, proud avenues that expanded into wooded parks or cobbled squares, or erupted into the towering spires of the Cathedral of St. John and a very tall skyscraper on Napoleon Square.
To this large and beautiful city Lucy Strasburg awakened. She had a view from the room where she was carefully nursed to recovery by Herr Frankenmuth’s widowed sister. At night the expanse of Warsaw seemed limitless. Lights spread like a carpet of jewels far into the late evening. Parts of the great city never slept. The heart of Warsaw glowed against the black sky, lighted by the neon marquees of theaters and clubs.
Lucy often lay awake with that view before her. She wondered about the fate of Peter Wallich. Had he found his mother, Karin, and sister, Marlene? Had they then struck out for some safer, more distant place than Warsaw? Would they one day be reunited with baby Willie in America and then perhaps travel on to Jerusalem?
Such thoughts made her happy that she had stumbled on the Wallich family. How fortunate she was in this one instance that something good had managed to come out of the darkness of her life. She felt no pride for her help to the Wallich family, only a sort of humble gratitude that someone so worthless could be used. Beyond that, she only hoped that the Walliches would manage to slip from Warsaw before the next apocalypse descended on them. She held no such hope for herself.
Sensing the presence of Wolf, even here, she had no illusions about her own safety. Lucy longed for only one thing: to know the fate of her baby. She had put her son into the arms of a stranger. Where had the child gone once he arrived in England? Did he have both mother and father, as children should have? Was he loved? Had he been christened in the satin gown as she dreamed a hundred times as the days passed?
These little details were the stuff that nourished Lucy’s broken heart. She could close her eyes and imagine her baby in a carriage, being pushed through a shady park in London. She awoke some
times to his cry. Her breasts filled again with milk as she reached out in the darkness, only to find that he was not there. But in those moments of fierce longing, she did not ask God if she might hold him once again. Such a prayer from one like her was doomed to go unheeded, she believed. No. Lucy did not pray for her own longing. She prayed that he was held when he cried. That he was fed when he was hungry. That he was loved all the time.
And then she asked that she might know that these small prayers were answered on behalf of her son. She showed the address Peter had given her to Frau Berson. Frau Berson had dug out a well-worn city map and dragged her bony finger along Niska Street to where the Jewish district of Warsaw began. It was the other side of the river, the other side of Warsaw—a different world, Frau Berson warned her.
Lucy had nothing to pay the good woman for her care. Frau Berson gestured toward the cross hanging above her corner table. The woman took no more credit for helping Lucy than Lucy took for helping the Wallich family. Instead, Frau Berson dipped into her coin purse and presented Lucy with tram fare across Warsaw. She made her a lunch and filled a canning jar with apple juice to drink because it was hot today and Lucy might need something cool to drink.
“You intend to stay with these Jewish friends of yours?” Frau Berson asked as though she doubted the wisdom of such mixing of cultures.
“Peter asked me to go with him to Warsaw. I should have done so.” That should have held all the regret she had ever felt. If I had gone with Peter, I would still have the baby. If I had gone with Peter, Wolf would not have—
She shuddered and stopped herself from thoughts that could not change anything at all.
“You might be back.” Frau Berson straightened her collar as though Lucy were her daughter going off to school. “You have not seen the way they live. It is not like the Jews in Berlin. Or the Jews in Danzig. They are a different people than you or I. A world in which we do not belong.”
