The Locket

by Evans, Mike

  After five days of searching, I succeeded in locating the bridge across the canal on the south side of the ghetto. I was rather certain I could get across without being seen, but getting inside the wall was a problem. To do that, I would have to enter through the sewer pipe and climb up the ladder to the manhole cover. After days of walking and little to eat, I wasn’t sure I could push the cover aside—and there was the problem of the rats. I hate rats.

  The Cathedral of St. Stephan stood nearby and I retreated to it to consider my options. Hiding in the lee of an alcove of the basilica, I realized my choices were few. I could continue to live on the streets of Vienna, eating scraps from garbage cans and sleeping in basements at night, or I could get myself across the river, through the sewer pipe and into the building where the jewelry box was hidden. Either way was risky. The only difference was, if I obtained the papers from the box, I had the possibility of a future. Without them, I had none.

  Late that afternoon, I returned to the canal. A park lay along the southern bank with trees and bushes. Using them as cover, I made my way beneath the bridge and climbed up into the steel structure. Then I walked carefully along a beam to the opposite side. From there I found the entrance to the sewer and went inside. To my amazement, it had not been blocked or sealed, but as I feared, the rats were still there.

  Using my memory as a guide I felt along the left wall of the pipe until I reached the ladder that led up into the service shaft. Rats ran over my feet, but this time, instead of squealing, I kicked them aside, took hold of the ladder, and started up. Gripping the rungs carefully, I pushed myself up with my feet and moved my hands from rung to rung. The access shaft grew darker with every step, but I kept going until I banged my head against the cover at the top. I paused there a moment, trying to listen for the sound of anyone on the ground above, but my arms were weak and I couldn’t hang there long. Finally, I moved my feet up one more rung, reached up with one hand, and pushed with my legs as hard as I could. Thankfully, the cover lifted up and I moved it out of the way. As quickly as possible, I scrambled out of the hole, replaced the cover, and walked away as if nothing were out of the ordinary.

  Twenty minutes later, I turned a corner on the north side of the ghetto, not far from where we had lived, and ran headlong into a group of refugees only just then arriving for placement. The soldiers were busy forming them into ranks, as they had with us months before, and when they saw me they shoved me in line with the others. I wanted to protest that I wasn’t with them, but what would I say? Instead, I kept quiet and tried to think of how this might work out right.

  In a little while a soldier appeared with a clipboard and began calling out names from a list. They’re assigning apartments, I thought. They will find me for sure. Panic seized me as I realized I had no assignment, but they called the family standing next to me. The soldier checked his list and from the look in his eyes I knew he saw that there were four names on the sheet, but only three people responded—a father, mother, and a little girl. I saw him counting and while his head was down, checking his papers one more time, I positioned myself shoulder to shoulder with the mother. When the soldier looked up, there I was and he had his four people. He was satisfied and they seemed not to realize what was happening. Then he motioned with his arm for us to follow, and we walked behind him to a building up the street.

  Once we were alone inside their apartment, the father turned to me. “Who are you?” he asked.

  “It does not matter who I am. You must remember to tell no one you saw me.”

  “They will kill us all if we do not report you,” the mother objected. “I have lived here before,” I countered. “No one will ever notice.

  Only, you must do one thing more.”

  The father had a questioning look. “What is it?” “You must not let them take you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “A month from now. Two months from now. They will come again with trucks and load you onto them. If you go, you will be taken to one of the camps, where you will die a horrible death.”

  The mother wrung her hands. “They told us we would be resettled.” “You will be exterminated,” I explained. “They are gassing women and children as soon as they come from the trains. I saw this myself. With my own eyes. Men who can work are worked until they die. Everyone else, they are killing.” I turned toward the door. “Whatever you have to do, when they come, don’t go.”

  The father looked grim. “They will shoot us if we refuse.”

  “It will be better than what awaits you in the camps. Tell everyone. Don’t go.”

  Before they could say anything further, I slipped out to the stairs and made my way to the basement. In the darkness below, I found a tunnel and followed it to the building next door. There I looked out on the street through the narrow windows and got my bearings.

  As best I could determine, I needed to move four blocks over, but doing that would not be easy. No tunnels ran in that direction. To get there, I would have to cross to the opposite side of the street in the open. With people still being settled by the soldiers, no one was out on the sidewalks. If I went out there now, I would be found and questioned by the soldiers.

  Instead of waiting, I continued through the tunnels up the street two more buildings away. I was moving laterally to the direction I needed to go, but I thought it was safer than staying in one location and waiting. Then I caught a break.

  The last building I came to stood on the corner. Not the corner where Stephan and Tomer gathered with their friends, but a corner just the same. From the sounds above me, I was certain the building was already filled to capacity. When I checked the cross street from the basement windows, I saw no soldiers. One or two men came from the next building over, and a young girl leaned out from the second floor. With the resettlement taking place farther down the street, perhaps the soldiers weren’t patrolling this section. I decided to take a chance.

  I crept from the basement to the first floor and stepped out to the sidewalk. With a quick glance to my left and right I saw I was in the clear. I scooted across the side street and walked back to the corner, in the direction I needed to go. Just when I was making real progress, two soldiers appeared at the next corner and came toward me. I ignored them, kept my head down, and walked to the left, once again making my way deeper into the ghetto and farther from the place I needed to be.

  Three buildings farther, I found an alley and made my way to the next street. Now I was only two blocks from the street where my parents had lived, but still many buildings to the left. To get there, all I had to do was cross the street, get into the basement of the first building I came to, and work my way back through the tunnels to the right.

  An hour later, I peered out a basement window at the entrance to the building I’d been searching for. Images of our arrival that first night flashed through my mind. Papa and Mama ahead of us. David walking beside me. Soldiers on either side. That night I was worried we would never return to Linz, but as they led us up to the apartment, I wasn’t at all afraid of the soldiers. Away from the group, on their own, they seemed to be merely doing their job, evil though it was. As I later saw, that first assessment was quite naïve. Now everyone was gone. Our entire neighborhood wiped out. Not a person on our street from home remained alive.

  As I watched through the window two soldiers passed by, but no other people appeared on the street and not a sound came from the building where I hid. From all I could see, no one lived in this part of the ghetto. That made it less likely that I would be found, but it also meant that if I crossed the street now anyone who was looking would know immediately that I wasn’t supposed to be there. With the last light of day fading away, I decided to sit and wait. The basement was dark and musty but not an unpleasant place to hide, and if I waited for nighttime I could dart across the street with the least risk of getting caught. Resigned to that, I found a spot below the windows and sat down with my back against the wall. In a few minutes, I was asleep.

&n
bsp; An hour later I awakened to find I was sitting in total darkness. Even from the windows above I could see only the faintest gray of reflected light from the guard towers in the distance. Fear crouched close at hand but I ignored it and crawled across the floor on my hands and knees. Moving carefully, I felt my way to the wall on the opposite side and then over to the left until I found the stairs. There I stood, placed my foot on the bottom step, and moved upstairs without a problem.

  At the top of the stairs I came to a door that opened onto the main hall of the first floor. I eased it open a few centimeters and looked out to see if anyone was there, then stepped out and crept toward the front, working my way alongside the staircase. Soft light filtered down from the open stairs above and through windows on either side of the front door, which made it easy to find my way. I paused at the entrance to check for soldiers, my eyes searching to the left and right. Seeing none, I gently opened the door and stepped outside to the sidewalk. Then I walked quickly to the building across the street and went inside.

  As I moved down the hall toward the basement stairs I caught a whiff of the smell inside, and once again images from the past flooded my mind. Mama and Papa, crushed by the loss of our home yet putting on a brave face in the hope that we would still find a future of hope and promise. David, playing the gallant older brother and doing it well. Stephan, the daring young man who won my heart long before we came to the ghetto. Seeing them in my mind filled my heart with sadness and my eyes with tears. They were gone and I would never see them again, never get to tell Papa how much I admired his bravery, or Mama how much her smile meant to me. I was the only one left. The only one to remember their story. By the time I reached the basement door my cheeks were wet. I wiped them with the backs of my hands, opened the door, and started down into the darkness once more.

  When I reached the basement I paused a moment, hoping my eyes would find even the faintest sliver of light. At first it seemed there was only thick blackness everywhere, but then from the far side of the building, a silvery glow filtered through the basement windows. As my eyes became accustomed to it, I saw the barest outline of the wall to the left with the furnace and the opening for the tunnel where Papa and the council had met. I crept toward the furnace, scooting my feet forward one at a time until finally I reached the handle on the firebox door. It felt cold against my fingers. The box hadn’t held a fire in a long time.

  With an outstretched hand I moved down the side and around to the pipes in back. They were smooth and round and I followed them to the place where they entered the wall, a rough and jagged opening in the bricks that formed the building foundation. Probably rats in there, I thought. Fewer people living here. And maybe they aren’t as desperate as we were, or as hungry.

  The thought of what might be in there made me shiver, but that box held the key to my future. I took a deep breath and slid my hand slowly through the opening. At first my fingers touched only the pipe, but as I went deeper I heard something and then felt the soft, furry skin of a rat. It hissed at me and I jerked back my hand. My heart raced at the horror of a bite from a rabid rodent, but I had to get that box.

  In frustration, I rapped my knuckles on the pipe. It made an awful noise that reverberated through the building, but as it did I heard the rat scurry farther into the hole. With it out of the way, I stretched out my arm again and felt with my hand deeper inside, this time almost to my armpit. And then I touched it.

  Back upstairs I knelt with the box on the floor and lifted the lid. In the soft light from the street I saw my papers from Spain were right where I put them in the top tray. Beneath them, the locket and chain were tucked into a corner. Other pieces that lay in the tray—earrings with a pewter setting, a ring made of oyster shell, and two bracelets of gold-colored metal—were the last bits of our life in Linz. Nothing else remained. Sadness swept over me at the thought of leaving it behind but I could not carry the box with me. It was a bitter choice but I had no option. With tears in my eyes, I put the papers in the pocket of my jacket, dropped the locket and chain into the pocket of my dress, and left the box right there on the floor, then I turned away and started for the door.

  For the remainder of the night I picked my way back through the streets, trying to return to the far side of the ghetto near the manhole that led to the sewer and the canal. My plan was to go back through the pipe to the canal at sunup and get over to the streets of Vienna early in the day. From there I could search for a way out of the country. German soldiers occupied Austria and the Sudetenland, an area previously part of Czechoslovakia, and they were charging across Poland. My only hope was to travel in the opposite direction—west toward the Swiss border— but to do that, I had to first get out.

  As the sky turned gray with the approaching dawn I finally located the manhole. It was early, and I was certain the pipe would be too dark to see my way through, but I didn’t want to wait any longer. I slid the cover out of the way, lowered myself into the access shaft, and started down the ladder.

  Two hours later, I was on the streets of southern Vienna. My face and hands were dirty. My clothes were filthy, but I didn’t care. Finding the jewelry box with the papers and locket inside filled me with a sense of accomplishment and optimism. I was on my way.

  For the next two days I wandered the streets of Vienna, hiding in basements and eating from garbage cans. I had no idea where I was or what I needed to do next. I just wanted to stay alive, get out of the city, and travel west. I kept walking in that direction as nearly as I could, but it was difficult to avoid German military patrols at the same time.

  Finally, late on the third day, I came to a railroad track. It seemed to lead west so I followed it until I came to a tannery. The smell was awful, but when I realized they were tanning animal hides I thought I might find something edible—a bone or a scrap of skin. Since the time I arrived again at the ghetto I had eaten almost nothing.

  Three sidetracks led from the main line to a loading area with platforms in between the tracks. Freight cars stood there in rows and as I approached, men were loading them with bales of tanned skins. Beyond the loading docks were a dozen large vats filled with putrid liquid.

  Sunset wasn’t far off. Only a few workers remained near the vats, and I wandered among them, searching for scraps of anything that looked good enough to put in my mouth. But when two men noticed me, I darted into the bushes and rested while nighttime slowly descended.

  When it was fully dark I emerged from my hiding place and walked among the freight cars. The doors were closed on the ones in the first line and I had no strength to open them. There was nothing there to eat and with every passing minute the temperature dropped lower and lower. I needed a place for the night that was safe enough to allow me to sleep and warm enough to keep from freezing.

  Then I heard approaching footsteps on the loading dock and people talking. I ducked around the corner of a car and watched as two men opened a boxcar and climbed inside. Moments later they emerged with one of them holding an animal hide. As they walked back among the vats, I heard them talking about the quality of the skin, the price they could get for each, and how many more they could sell.

  Once they were gone, I came back around the end of the car and climbed onto the loading platform. The men had left the door to the railcar open, so I climbed inside and saw that it was only half full with bales of hides stacked on one end. It smelled awful in there, but I was dirty anyway so I wedged my way between the bales and found a spot where I could sit. Then I pulled the corner of a hide free from the bail strap and poked it in my mouth. It wasn’t much but it was better than nothing. The pain of hunger was agonizing and my weight was down to less than a hundred pounds. Gradually the hide became wet and I tasted a hint of salt from the curing process. I chewed on it awhile but that only made me thirsty, so I stopped and rested my head against the bale behind me. Surrounded by the hides, I began to warm and soon my eyelids were heavy. Before long I was fast asleep.

  Sometime in the night, I was a
wakened by a thud against the freight car. I peered out from my hiding place to see workmen inside the car, loading it with more bales of freshly cured hides. They filled the opposite end of the car, then stacked more on top of where I sat. By the time they were finished, I was trapped with just enough room to turn on my side and barely enough space to breathe.

  Not long after that, the sound of a locomotive filled the air and the rumble of it shook the ground. Workmen shouted to each other and then there was a jolt and a rattle. “Oh no,” I gasped. They were connecting the cars to a train. I was worried about where the train might take me but trapped as I was between the bales of hides, there was nothing I could do.

  Then the train began to move slowly down the track out of the loading area and onto the main line. The car rocked gently from side to side. On most occasions it would have rocked me back to sleep, but mixed with the smell the motion made me nauseous. There was nothing in my stomach to vomit and no place to do it, so I closed my eyes and forced myself to remain calm as the train picked up speed.

  Somewhere along the way I fell asleep again, but after sunrise I was awakened by the sense that the air outside had grown even colder. I turned my head to the right and found that I could see along a gap in the stacks to the wall of the car. Through a crack in the wall I saw a white blur rushing past the train. “If that is snow,” I said to myself, “then we are in the mountains.” That meant we were still in Austria. From the look of the light, we were traveling toward the sun, which meant we were headed toward one of three places—Italy, Switzerland, or Germany. But I had no idea which.