by Lila Perl
I gave a final tug to my boot laces and shouted into the stillness, “This is for you, Helga!” There had been so many times in Germany when Helga and I had been driven off the ice, first with catcalls and later with stones. When we came home one time with bloody foreheads, Papa strictly forbade our leaving the house on Heinrichstrasse again.
As I glided toward the icy expanse before me, I could see that the lake had not completely over. Dark patches of ice, so thin that one could see the water beneath, were scattered about the spots that were covered with packed snow. I quickly mapped out a safe route, giving myself up to the joy of moving freely and lightly, as though I were disembodied. Magically, I was transported to a much earlier time, before Jews were forbidden to participate in leisure-time activities. Helga and I, as well as Mutti and Papa and Elspeth, were enjoying a family skating party. Papa was calling out, admiring our not very skillful leaps and jumps, and everyone was laughing as Elspeth fell down on her backside and kicked her little legs in the air, squealing like a piglet. How amazing! I could even hear their voices shouting, “H-e-l-g-a, H-e-l-g-a.”
What did they want with my sister? She was fine, skating in loops around me, here one moment, gone the next. It was something she liked to do in her innate teasing way. There had always been a dark, unknowable side to her.
“H-e-l-g-a,” again. A hoarse, urgent voice, not Mutti or Papa. And, with that, my reverie was shattered. I looked up to see Isabel struggling toward me across the ice, some of it so thin that a dropped coin would have cracked it into transparent shards. Behind her, on the shore, stood Ruth, trying to warn Isabel, as she staggered on in clumsy boots, that the lake surface was dangerous. Ruth, who lived up here year-round, knew these things. But Isabel was … Isabel. Even though I tried to wave her away, she continued her awkward pursuit. She wanted to talk to me. How did Isabel even know I was here? The answer came in a flash. While I’d been at Aunt Harriette’s, she had once again been snooping among my things. She had found Roy’s letter and read it!
Furious, I skated away from her. She was a ruthless busybody, who couldn’t keep her clutches off me or my things. Why did she even care so much? Why couldn’t she just …
A loud crash. Isabel had fallen on the ice and was scrambling to get up, slipping and sliding, and falling down again. Ruth was screaming instructions to her. But Isabel continued to flop like a panicked baby sea lion. Foolish and reckless as she was, I knew that Isabel was now in real danger. I hastened to her side. She looked at me with wide, grateful eyes as I helped her to her feet, and carefully escorted her in the direction of the shore. For once, Isabel had taken one of her compulsions too far, and I could see that she had truly been frightened.
“Oh, Helga, thank you. But why wouldn’t you listen to me before? How could you run away like that? Everybody is so worried, Helga …”
I glared at her, stone-faced. I had heard these admonitions so many times. Why could nobody allow me to suffer my guilt? Angry tears filled my eyes. It was time at last to spit out the truth, and take the consequences, whatever they might be.
“Listen to me, Isabel,” I declared firmly, “I am not Helga. I am never Helga. You must not call me that again.”
“If you aren’t Helga, who are you?” Isabel asked, startled.
“I am Lilli,” I answered “My name is Lilli. I am the elder sister of Helga … and I have done her a terrible injustice.”
Isabel, Ruth, and I sat at the kitchen table in the comfort of the Moskin home as Ruth’s mother—who cooked all the delicious meals at Shady Pines—warmed us up with hot tea and feed us her thick, buttery cookies, sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon.
Bitterly, I had thrust my Kindertransport “passport” on the table so that all present could witness my guilt. Isabel studied the photo of the real Helga, wearing a white Peter Pan collar, her dark hair cut short. “Well,” she commented, “the picture’s kind of muddy. But that could have been you back in 1939, before you grew your hair long. I still don’t understand, though.”
Painfully, I described Helga’s stubbornness and her flight that day from the Bayer house, my pursuit of her, and how it came about that I broke her arm and dislocated her shoulder. The words of understanding and sympathy that I received from my three listeners only sent me into a further paroxysm of weeping into the already-sopping handkerchief that had been proffered by Mrs. Moskin. I was grateful for their kind remarks, absolving me from any wrongdoing. “But,” I declared with fierce assertion, “when this war is over, I will go back to Europe, to Holland, to search for Helga and Elspeth and Mutti. I will never give up. I must find out what happened to them, and especially to Helga.”
“Of course, my dear child,” said Mrs. Moskin, placing her work-worn, yet surprisingly gentle hand over mine.
“Yes, you will,” added Isabel and Ruth, piling their hands on top of hers. “You will.”
Isabel and I sat in silence in the back seat of my uncle’s Cadillac. As soon as he and Mr. Brandt had been advised that Isabel and I were safe, they had set out for Harper’s Falls to collect us.
We had first driven to the bungalow colony, so that I could retrieve the belongings I had left there. “You know, miss,” Mr. Brandt reprimanded, “you could have been arrested for breaking and entering. Where did you get the nerve to—”
“Staying in the cabin was all right,” Isabel broke in hastily. “She knows the people who live there in the summer. They said it was okay to use.”
Mr. Brandt threw up his hands. “I never heard of such a thing. Where do you kids find these so-called friends? Where do you get your ideas?” Ever since his arrival, he had been in a tizzy as to whether to scold Isabel for her bold excursion, or to praise her for having tracked me to my lair.
Uncle Herman, on the other hand, displayed his usual calm exterior. I had the sense, though, as he embraced me on his arrival and patted my back reassuringly, that he and I would soon be having a serious talk about my future. How could I possibly return to live with the Brandts? There were years of schooling ahead, and how could Isabel and I make peace with each other? I was supposed to be grateful to her for having “saved” my life when I had been so ready to throw it away. Without mentioning the unmentionable (her having read Roy’s letter), Isabel tried to tell me that her nosiness about my private life was only for the purpose of understanding the war and the terrible deeds of Hitler. “I had to know all about your struggles getting out of Nazi Germany, so I could get the kids and teachers at Simpleton to feel ashamed of that awful ‘Sieg Heil.’ I learned so much from the things you told me. When you first moved in with us, I was such a stupid ninny …”
Isabel’s words trailed off. I knew she was trying to apologize for her coldness at Shady Pines, and for her ongoing snooping. As to her unwanted intervention that afternoon on the lake, it had at least given me a new resolve. I would, in every way I could, fulfill my vow to one day return to Europe and find whatever remnants there were of my family.
PART III
Summer 1946
Fourteen
On a bleak morning in late June, 1946, I step out of a lodging house in Amsterdam and venture into unfamiliar streets. Having arrived in the Dutch capital only yesterday afternoon, I still don’t have my land legs. In fact, in this city fortified with dikes and laced with canals, I can still feel the watery presence of my transatlantic journey from New York as a passenger on a large cargo vessel.
It was Karl who got me a place to stay here. After the war ended, he elected to remain in England. He now speaks and writes English well, and works for a refugee organization in war-battered London. His job consists of tracing the backgrounds of the Kindertransport children to see if they can be reunited with their families. It is discouraging work, Karl wrote shortly before I sailed for Europe. Even though the German government has started to open up the records of the Nazi regime, chances are miniscule that parents who sent their children to Holland or to England have survived. What will we do with all these orphaned survivors? What coun
try will take them? How will they make their futures?
Safely tucked away in my pocket is the address of the beauty salon where Mutti was working in the months before the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands. In one of her letters, Mutti had described Margreet de Jong, the woman who owned the shop, as a member of the Dutch underground resistance. I have set out with a map of the city that marks all the streets and canals. I am shocked by the glumness and chilled by the mist that wreathes the tall, narrow houses, a mixture of shops, businesses, and warehouses, with floors that tower above them for living quarters. I assume that, like the room I am staying in at the lodging house, these quarters are cramped and claustrophobic; many of them located in attics with sharply sloping ceilings. But, of course, my view is so distorted by my American life.
After Aunt Harriette died, Uncle Herman could no longer bear to live in the big house in Westchester. Instead of my staying with the Brandts and continuing my rocky education at Singleton Junior High, everyone agreed that living with Uncle Herman in a roomy apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and attending a girls’ high school in that part of the city, was a much better idea. Since I moved, Isabel and I see less of each other, but we seem to get along much better. Did it have anything to do, I wonder, with the revelation that I was fifteen-year-old Lilli instead of fourteen-year-old Helga?
As I progress through Amsterdam on this dreary morning, I become increasingly aware the war-ravaged the city around me. While Amsterdam was not bombed to rubble by the Nazi air force like the Dutch port city of Rotterdam, the streets are still littered with broken paving blocks mixed with sand and dirt. Along the canals are the crude stumps of trees that were cut down for fuel during the terrible “hunger winter” of 1944.
The few people that are out are poorly dressed, and I keep having the sense that someone is following me. When I look over my shoulder, I see no one. Yet I can’t help thinking that I am furtively being peered at from this or that doorway. Perhaps it’s my American clothing—a navy woolen pea coat, a beret, sturdy shoes with medium heels—the same outfit I wear on campus. Nothing showy, but I suppose it’s easy to recognize that I am from “somewhere else.”
With much anxiety, I finally reach the street where the beauty salon is located. Soon, I will enter the shop and meet Mrs. de Jong, to whom I had written from New York about my search for my family. Her answer was brief: When you arrive in Amsterdam, come to the shop. Someone will help you.
I now stand upon the very ground where Mutti and my sisters once walked. But, to my dismay, the “shop” is only a large solitary pane of smeared-over glass, making it impossible to see inside. There is no outward sign of this space ever having been a beauty salon. My heart sinks. I try the door, find it locked, and knock on it with a mixture of panic and dismay. I learned nothing from Margreet de Jong’s letter, and now I’ve come all this way, for … nothing?
Suddenly, someone taps me on the on the shoulder. I turn around. He’s an older man, unshaven, and shabbily dressed. I’ve seen several of his kind on the street. He speaks in Dutch, but the words are close enough to German for me to make out. “No good.” He shakes a finger at me. “It’s closed.” His fingers reach out to stroke my long hair. “You want to sell?” He rubs the same two fingers together. “Good money for that. Very beautiful. I can arrange.”
I shrink back in horror. Is this why he thinks I’ve come to the closed hairdresser’s shop? To sell my hair? The Nazis brutally cut off the hair of their victims.
But the war is over now … or is it? Its effects seem to still be everywhere here in Holland, where there is so much poverty and need.
I turn away from the man, prepared to bang harder on the shop door. But I find it open, and am now face to face with a tall young man of perhaps fifteen or sixteen. He has a thatch of white-blond hair, and long white eyelashes. His first words are in English: “You are Lilli Frankfurter. I am Margreet de Jong’s grandson, Pieter.” He tells me apologetically that he was in another part of the building when I first knocked. The man who had offered to buy my hair has, of course, vanished.
Pieter invites me into the “shop,” which I discover had indeed been a beauty salon at one time, as there are remnants of sinks and chairs for customers. It is also filled with mysterious cartons, as well as old brooms and mops. Were these what Mutti used when cleaning the floors littered with hair cuttings and spilled shampoo?
Pieter grins, while I stand there puzzled and helpless. “Don’t be alarmed. I am here to help you until my grandmother returns. She has instructed me to see to your needs. I can show you the city.”
“But … But when will she be back?” I stammer. My tongue has turned to cotton wool.
“In a few days,” Pieter says casually.
“No!” I cry out. All of the self-confidence that propelled me to undertake this journey has vanished in a flash. “I expected to see her when I arrived. I told her the exact date. There is so much I need to know. What shall I do now?”
Pieter seems only vaguely disturbed by my outburst. “Let us go have a coffee,” he suggests. He steps out into the street, and I follow. “May I take your arm?” he asks. “There are many broken walking places.” Again, that grin. “It is even possible to fall into a canal. The embankments have lost their guard rails.”
*
That night, alone in my attic room, I compose three letters: one to Uncle Herman, one to Karl, and one to Isabel that is also meant for her family (as well as Sybil, Leona, and Ruth.)
The letter to my uncle is one of reassurance, to let him know that I arrived safely and am in the care of Mrs. de Jong’s family. I say nothing about her peculiar absence, which I hope is only, as Pieter said, for “a few days.”
In my letter to Karl, I describe the awful ruin of the beauty salon and of Amsterdam itself, and reveal my discomfort regarding the absence of Margreet de Jong. She is, after all, a political person, involved for many years in a resistance movement that has many enemies. Even though the war has ended, Dutch Nazi elements may still be a threat to her. Or perhaps it’s something quite different, and she does not trust me?
I write to Isabel on a lighter and more optimistic note. “Here I go again, Lilli, but I want to know everything.” Isabel had implored me before I left. “Please, please write as soon as you get there.” So I tell her about Pieter:
He’s fifteen, very tall, and so blond and pale-skinned.
He grins a lot but in a nice way. I think you’d like him. Today he showed me around the city and I was very grateful. You see, I don’t care for Amsterdam very much. It’s cold here and unfriendly, even a little frightening.
For example, I had an unpleasant surprise on my way to the beauty shop this morning. I thought I saw a telephone booth, which was sort of unusual because the city has been wrecked by the war, and it’s incredibly different from New York in every possible way.
When I got closer, I noticed that the sides of the “booth” were raised above the ground and I could see a man’s feet standing on the pavement. At the same time, I was attacked by the most horrible reeking odor. The “telephone booth” was a street urinal! For men. (I don’t know if they also have them for women. I hope not.)
Pieter took me for coffee to a little hole-inthe-wall place that was really a bakery. The coffee was terrible. I think they use ground, roasted grain instead of real coffee, as they were doing in Germany when I left. But the freshly baked bread smelled good, and I treated us to a currant bun.
Pieter then gave me a tour of the city, and I tried to imagine what it was like before the Nazi invasion. Alas, the squares are now filled with rubble and the fountains are cracked and dry. The Rembrandt and Van Gogh museums are either closed or on short hours. The famous canal tours are not yet operating. What things Pieter told me! In the “hunger winter” of 1944, Amsterdammers sold their personal belongings for food, they ate tulip bulbs, and the ground was so frozen that the bodies of the dead had to be stacked in the churches. Nor was there any wood for coffins, as the trees
had been chopped down for firewood.
Well, I won’t go into any more horrors. Tonight my landlady gave me a supper of thick pea soup. It was hot and filling. Tomorrow, Pieter will come and take me to the post office to buy stamps and mail my letters.
I am thinking of all of you at home and send my love. Lilli
I go to bed sad and worried, after finding my way down a dark, narrow staircase to the floor below, where the bathroom is located.
I rise early, still feeling anxious. After a breakfast consisting of a hard roll with cheese and a nameless hot beverage in my landlady’s kitchen, I descend to the street with my letters. I look around, but there is no sign of Pieter. Perhaps I am too early? The few passersby in the morning gloom look at me with curiosity.
Several uncomfortable minutes that feel like hours pass until I see Pieter sauntering toward me. My relief is so great that I have to restrain my greeting. Pieter is grinning again. “I have good news,” he tells me. “My grandmother has returned. She will meet with you in the rooms above the beauty salon. First we will mail your letters. Have you eaten?”
Starved for information only, I nod emphatically. Twenty minutes later, we are back at the messy, disguised shop, mounting two long flights of narrow stairs to an apartment on the third floor, which appears to be the home of Pieter and his grandmother.
To my surprise, the parlor room into which I am led is comfortably furnished with old-fashioned warmth. A moment later, a fleshy, ruddy-faced woman, her blonde hair streaked with gray, enters. I have to quench my impulse to grasp her hands, hands that have perhaps touched those of my loved ones.
“Excuse me for my absence yesterday,” Margreet de Jong apologizes, almost gruffly. “This war,” she declares, “has been a never-ending disaster, for there is now no end of matters that demand repair.” She pauses to sigh heavily. “I hope you realize that your mother and sisters were among many, many refugees from Germany who came to me from 1939 on. But,” she adds in a softer tone, “sit down. I remember them and I will tell you what I know.”
