My Family for the War

by Anne C. Voorhoeve

  Walter’s amusing descriptions may have prepared me, but what we saw as we left King’s Cross station can only be described as shocking. I had never experienced Euston Road or the square in front of the station as anything but lively and colorful, with pedestrians rushing by, taxis honking their horns, buses sluggishly pushing forward during the day, and at night a steady stream of lights whizzing past. Now, once we got outside, there was nothing but gloomy, numbing darkness.

  “Blast!” muttered Amanda. “Fog—tonight of all nights, when we have to take a taxi. Give me your hand, Frances!”

  I don’t know why she thought it necessary to ask, since I instinctively grabbed her coat with our first step into nothingness. And now I knew why my blackout-experienced foster mother had brought an umbrella: Like a blind person, she tapped the ground to the left and right as we moved forward, making a clack-clack that was somewhat reassuring. We made our way along the station’s outer wall and quickly reached the taxi stand.

  I was quite dazed as we got off the train, but if I had needed anything more than the eerie scene at our arrival to wake me up, this taxi ride was it. I stared straight ahead with my eyes wide open, every fiber of my body alert, while Amanda and the driver debated—in the middle of the pitch-black hole that had swallowed us—whether we were passing this or that street.

  It was half past one when we finally arrived at Harrington Grove. We felt our way through the garden, I heard the searching scratch of a key on wood, then we stood bathed in light, and a voice with an unmistakable German accent enthusiastically exclaimed, “I knew you would make it back tonight!”

  Until that moment, I had totally forgotten that Walter would be at our house! After a few seconds of confusion it occurred to me that as of a few weeks ago, he lived here too. This surprise, along with the almost blinding light awaiting us inside, left me standing in the middle of the foyer, disoriented and blinking. “Hey, Ziska, I’m really sorry about your father,” said Walter awkwardly as he gave me his hand.

  He was wearing pants and a cardigan that had been Gary’s, and I remembered him being shy during his last visit to the house, but that had changed so drastically that I hardly recognized him. We went into the kitchen, where a small but complete evening meal was waiting, and for the first time in months I heard a blessing in Hebrew again. I’m back! I told myself, stunned, and let my eyes wander as we ate. Meanwhile, Walter told Amanda how his day at the movie theater had gone, and although I didn’t much feel like talking, I didn’t like it one bit that these two had obviously shared experiences that didn’t include me!

  It seemed like ages until Amanda finally noticed that I was at the table too, and said, “Poor Frances must think she’s invisible by now! Children, let’s go upstairs and sleep for a few hours.”

  “We can unpack tomorrow… and call Mrs. Lewis from the Refugee Committee. But first we’ll have to get you a ration book,” said Amanda as she climbed the stairs. “So, here we are. Do you remember it?”

  Apart from the heavy blackout curtains covering the window, this was indeed my old, beloved room. My mezuzah, my books, Gary’s model ships, the familiar bedspread, and the mobile hanging from the ceiling—all of it was still there. It looked like I had never left, as if the evacuation, Tail’s End, the last eight months, and even Papa’s death had never happened.

  I felt a wave of panic, a feeling like I had somehow fallen out of time. “Perhaps you’d rather… after all that’s happened… like to sleep with me tonight?” Amanda asked hesitantly.

  “May I?” I whispered, ashamed. I pictured how lovingly she had kept the room just as it had been so that I would feel right at home if I should ever return. Why was everything always more complicated with me than for other people?

  A few minutes later I was lying on Uncle Matthew’s side of the bed, filled with a pleasant mixture of unfamiliarity and closeness. Amanda slid under the covers next to me and turned out the light. I heard her sigh. “I don’t want to talk yet,” I said immediately.

  She rested her light, warm hand on my shoulder and left it there. That was all. Maybe she had understood.

  I closed my eyes. She quietly began our evening prayer, but my thoughts had already moved on. Where was Mamu right now? Where had she buried Papa? Once more I saw him as he had come to the beach on my birthday, in the brown overcoat that I now recognized, and with a smile on his face.

  But this time it didn’t just last a second. This time I could hold on to that image as long as I wanted! And I knew that in the future, whenever I thought about Papa, I wouldn’t see him as he had been the night he was arrested, his white feet, the bloody hand on the wall. From now on, he would always be standing on the beach in a country that had treated him decently, waiting for our thoughts to meet over the water.

  So that had been my birthday present: a different picture, a different moment with my father that was more powerful than everything the Nazis had destroyed.

  Unusually for me, I was the first to wake up the next morning. I opened the curtains to let Amanda know that it was time for breakfast, but she only mumbled and disappeared deeper beneath the covers.

  But someone else was already up and about. Walter had made tea and sliced some bread along with the last of Mrs. Stone’s cheese. The radio was on, and he sat at the kitchen table, reading the paper. It was almost scary.

  “Since when can you read English?” I asked suspiciously as I sat down across from him.

  He smiled. “It only looks that way. I’m still practicing.”

  “Aha,” I murmured, hoping that other words would attach themselves to these meaningless syllables, but none did me the favor. There sat Walter, who had sent me such wonderful letters at Tail’s End, and I had no idea what to say to him! He had grown considerably taller and thinner, enough that he would have caused a stir among my girlfriends in Tail’s End.

  “Why don’t we have breakfast in the garden?” I asked at last.

  “In the garden?” repeated Walter. “Come with me!”

  “Oh, no!” I gasped as he opened the kitchen door. “Oh no, no, no!”

  Finding bomb craters directly in front of me couldn’t have shaken me more deeply. I had left a blossoming, fragrant paradise in September, and now I stood on a wobbly stone slab in the midst of a desolate field dotted with small white paper flags displaying the rain-washed labels of the plants beneath them. The depressing impression was reinforced by a corrugated metal object the size of a goat pen that was sunk two feet into the ground and full of standing water. “Allow me to introduce our Anderson shelter!” proclaimed Walter. “It doesn’t look like much, but it will protect us from all but a direct hit.”

  Skeptically, I peered inside our private bunker. I wouldn’t have expected such a thing to look inviting, but I would have counted on a little more than four frighteningly narrow plank beds screwed into a metal frame with a small lake at the bottom! “Has anyone tried it out yet?” I asked gloomily.

  “No, we thought when the alarm comes would be soon enough!” said Walter cheerfully. “The neighbors’ children play in theirs… but I think theirs is sealed better.”

  I stood on tiptoe to look over the wooden fence and spied identical vegetable gardens and corrugated metal roofs as far as the eye could see. “Dig for victory!” explained Walter with pride. “Even Hyde Park is a vegetable garden now! Isn’t it fantastic how the English can make a collective sport out of the worst adversity?”

  We went back into the house, where the sound of Amanda’s voice reached us from the hall. The telephone must have woken her; in any case, she said little more than “Hmm,” and “Aha.” When she hung up and came into the kitchen in her dressing gown I could see from her angry red cheeks that the call must have been from Mrs. Lewis of the Refugee Committee.

  “I’ll tell you something!” Amanda said grimly. “Your mother no longer has a say in what happens to you. At least that’s Mrs. Lewis’s opinion. She came very close to accusing me of kidnapping you! If I had told her of my plans bef
ore I left, you would certainly not be here this morning.”

  “And now?” I asked, frightened.

  “We will get you a ration book and set you up in the family business.”

  “And school?”

  “Reduced to a minimum. Many schoolteachers are in the army, or are doing important strategic work. In some parts of London there’s no school at all anymore. I don’t want you alone in the house, so you’ll come join us in the city every day after school. We’ll eat there, you can do your schoolwork in the office, and you can help us at the Elysée. And after the last show, we’ll all drive home together.”

  “Work at the theater? Me? And school only in the mornings?”

  “Not so bad, this war, is it?” said Walter.

  Chapter 15

  Divided and United

  Apart from the fact that people were only allowed to shop in stores where they were registered as customers, I didn’t find the rationing all that bad. Butter, sugar, meat, cheese, and sweets could only be gotten with coupons, and eggs and milk weren’t always available. With full shopping bags we made our way back along Camden High Street and almost forgot that we were at war. During the day everything looked just as it always had: cars, taxis, buses, people were shopping, and store windows were full of lovely things. At most there were lines outside the supermarkets—and in front of our movie theater, the Elysée!

  Just catching a glimpse of the theater from a distance filled me with pride. I loved the wide red carpet in the foyer and how your feet sank into it without a sound when you walked, and the mirror and crystal light fixtures along the way to the theater itself. The ticket booth was Amanda’s territory, where she sold tickets and candy when she wasn’t busy in the office leafing through lending catalogs.

  My task was to sweep the theater between shows and check under the seats to see if anyone had forgotten anything. When I was done, I took my place at the entrance to tear tickets for the next film. The first sound that reached my ears was always the melody of the weekly newsreel: The Home Guard built tank barriers to the sound of cheerful music, a famous diva made a guest appearance in the West End, and the princesses visited a children’s hospital. As soon as the first images of the main film flickered on the screen I closed the door; anyone who came later was led to an empty seat with a flashlight.

  All of that was fine, but after several weeks I felt ready for more important responsibilities. What could be so hard about winding a strip of celluloid around two or three little wheels in the projector? Granted, the machine was big and I would have to stand on a chair to put the top film roll on its peg. But there was a chair there. The problem wasn’t my size; the problem was Walter. He wouldn’t let me so much as touch the film rolls, as if the movie theater belonged to him!

  Did he have to be such a showoff? He wouldn’t even let me get on the ladder to change the letters in the marquee above the entrance when the new films came.

  FRED ASTAIRE IN BROADWAY MELODY

  VIVIEN LEIGH AND CLARK CABLE IN

  GONE WITH THE WIND

  JUDY GARLAND IN THE WIZARD OF OZ

  I was supposed to stay on the ground and tell him if the spaces between the letters were even. The spaces between the letters! I wouldn’t even think of it. I hoped he would make some embarrassing spelling mistake, but he never did.

  I had become one of the most sought-after people in my new class after word spread that I owned a movie theater! Almost every afternoon kids I knew showed up, and I let them in for free. “Everyone at school wants to be friends with me now,” I wrote to Mamu in delight.

  “Would they want to even without the movies?” she wrote back.

  I liked to think they would.

  It was my second summer in England, and apart from being irritated by Walter, the loveliest time of my life. Only a quiet, reproachful voice seemed to want to make itself heard sometimes, one I was inexplicably convinced belonged to Bekka.

  Your father is dead, your mother in a different country, and you laugh!

  “My mother wants me to laugh,” I defended myself. “She writes that her only pleasure is knowing that I’m doing well!”

  But I bet she doesn’t have any idea how well!

  I tried to explain to Bekka that I could have the most wonderful day and still shed tears for my mother at night. Is it okay to enjoy life without one’s parents, Ziska?

  Fridays and Saturdays the Elysée was closed because of Shabbat. Walter visited his father while Amanda and I went for walks, read, listened to records, and of course the radio. Was I mistaken, or was she less strict than she used to be? It could have been because of rationing that things were more relaxed in the kitchen. After all, you had to eat what there was, even if the lettuce wasn’t quite so clean. We turned off the electric lights ourselves too.

  I continued to sleep in Uncle Matthew’s bed, and wondered if she had told him about that. They wrote to each other, but Amanda didn’t talk about it. We never talked about these things, and yet “it” was always there.

  And when it finally happened, that event we had been reckoning with for a long time, I was too confused to respond by changing the routine I followed every day. On May 10, Germany invaded Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France, and I didn’t have enough imagination to recognize anything but the immediate consequences: the end of exchanging letters with Mamu, and worries that Uncle Matthew’s portable cinema would now actually be at the front.

  How could I have known what else it would mean? I went to school, then rode to the Elysée. The newsreel we showed that day hadn’t been updated yet. That was reassuring: Anything we couldn’t see couldn’t be so terrible!

  That very day we got a new prime minister and a few days later heard for the first time the voice that would accompany us throughout the rest of the war: “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat… You ask, what is our policy? I can say: It is to wage war, by sea, land, and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalog of human crime.”

  “Praise be to God,” Amanda said softly with her ear pressed to the radio.

  “I feel sure,” said Winston Churchill, and I believed him on the spot, “that our cause will not be suffered to fail among men.”

  I recognized the pale, big man immediately, even though I had only seen Walter’s father once before. From my spot at the entrance to the theater I watched him pacing back and forth on the sidewalk outside the glass entrance door before he finally decided to come in.

  “Thank you… Enjoy the film…” Automatically I tore tickets and said my phrases, keeping an eye on the foyer. Walter’s father handed Amanda an envelope in the ticket booth, leaned forward awkwardly, and tilted his head as if he was listening to her. Then he lifted both arms in a broad gesture of resignation and let them fall again.

  The door to the ticket booth opened and Amanda came out, her face white as chalk. “This must be a mistake,” I heard her say, not once, but twice, then three times, as if it would only really be so if she repeated it often enough. She approached me with the envelope in her hands, but her gaze went right through me, and even before I saw her climbing the stairs to the projection room I understood that it must have something to do with Walter.

  When the newsreel began, Amanda came down the stairs with Walter. Walter held the envelope, looking completely stunned.

  “It’s true, my boy,” his father said awkwardly in German. “We’re being deported.”

  “I just can’t believe it!” Amanda murmured. “Please wait, Mr. Glücklich. I’m sure we can clear this up quickly.” She took the letter from Walter and ran into the office. The people who were waiting at the ticket booth exchanged concerned looks. Apparently they too had noticed that something wasn’t right. The Glücklichs stood there with sagging shoulders and looked at each other hopelessly. “What’s going on?” I asked anxiously. But no one answered. Finally, I couldn’t stand it anymore and f
ollowed Amanda into the office, where I expected to find her on the phone, energetically sorting out the matter, solving every problem, as always.

  But my foster mother stood like a statue next to her desk, one hand on the receiver she had just put back in its cradle. It was the first time I had seen her cry, and the sight made a deeper impression on me than anything that had happened to us in the previous months. “I am so sorry, Frances,” she whispered, and hugged me with a force that belied sheer desperation. “I apologize for my country…”

  Shortly thereafter, Walter and his father arrived at the train station with their meager belongings, where they joined a crowd of German and Austrian men, women, and children already climbing into waiting passenger trains. All across the country, these trains were headed for internment camps such as Huyton, Douglas, and Port Erin on the Isle of Man, but also to the pier in Liverpool, where the “enemy aliens” were crammed into the stifling cargo areas of ships. After torturous months at sea they reached Australia, Newfoundland, or Canada.

  At least the Glücklichs were spared that particular torture. On the Isle of Man they encountered conditions that must have seemed luxurious to Walter’s father by comparison to his lodgings in the East End. True, they had to work in a tailor’s shop there as well, but soon there was a small library, music, and art, and since there were quite a few intellectuals among the refugees, there were even lectures. The people held in the camps were allowed to receive packages and write two letters per week. If it hadn’t been for the high barbed-wire fence that held them captive side by side with some steadfast Nazis, the interned Jews might have been able to convince themselves that they were in some kind of sanatorium.