My Family for the War

by Anne C. Voorhoeve

  The boys in my class took up a new hobby: They collected shrapnel, bomb fragments. Some of them even boasted that they had stayed aboveground during the attacks to get the best bits when a bomb exploded! The boys didn’t even stop collecting after the home of a girl from our school was hit. Her name was Bernice; I had seen her at school, and just a few hours later, she, her parents, and her sister were dead.

  A few kids went after school to see the collapsed house from which Bernice’s family had been carried wrapped in blankets. They hadn’t been in the shelter, preferring to barricade themselves in the tight space under their stairs. Many of my classmates did exactly the same thing. Only a few of them spent the nights like I did, with their families in their Anderson shelters, in the basement, or in another dugout.

  At night, while the horror played out above us, the only way I could tolerate it was by convincing myself that I was in a safe shelter. When I passed a bombed-out house, I couldn’t bear to look at it, much less gather souvenirs. And I never went to see Bernice’s house, even though it wasn’t far from us.

  “You get used to it,” people often said. There was even a popular song with that refrain. But it wasn’t true for me. I hid it as well as I could, but my fear grew. I only prayed that everything would end as soon as possible: the terrible sounds at night; the uncertainty of whether we would live one more day, or still have a house; not knowing whether I would see Uncle Matthew on my way to school or have to wait until noon to find out if he was still alive. The exhaustion became a constant. I sometimes left food almost untouched, as if a fist were blocking my stomach. I never got used to it.

  It was October before Amanda and I went to downtown London again. The destruction wasn’t too bad where we usually went shopping—lots of broken windows, ashes and dirt everywhere, but only a few burned-out ruins stared at us through their blackened window openings. Our regular supermarket had been hit by an unexploded shell that hadn’t been removed yet, so the owner had simply moved his business out onto the street. There were even oranges at the makeshift stand under the poster proclaiming Hitler can’t beat us! We immediately supplied ourselves, if only because they might have been transported to England with Gary’s help!

  The Elysée was intact. We had protected the glass panes in the entrance with thick strips of tape as soon as the bombardments began. There was a lot of debris, and letters from the name of the last film had fallen down and lay in front of the building. While we cleared the sidewalk, neighbors came over to talk! I couldn’t remember ever seeing so many friendly, almost cheerful faces as when our street was half covered in rubble.

  The lively mood was so infectious that to my own astonishment I heard myself asking, “Can I go to Café Vienna and look for Professor Schueler?”

  Amanda looked a bit relieved—it was probably getting on her nerves to have me tag along with her day and night. “Just make sure you’re back in two hours,” she replied. “We have to be home in time for tea.”

  That, of course, had nothing to do with the hallowed British tradition anymore, but was due to the typical start of the air-raid alarms in the late afternoon. “Are you sure you don’t need me here?” I asked, having doubts.

  “Give him my best!” my foster mother replied with raised brows. If I wanted to maintain my dignity, there was nothing left for me to do but set off.

  The farther I walked into the center of London, the more disturbing the devestation was. Entire streets had burned and caved in on themselves, and smoke still rose from the ruins in many places. Other buildings had been hit by explosives; their roofs or exterior walls collapsed neatly, cleanly, without any fire at all. Undamaged furniture was on view for all to see. I saw a bedroom with colorful bedspreads that almost looked inviting—only there weren’t any stairs leading up to it. I quickly ran farther and looked away, and had to walk on the street because the sidewalks were buried in debris.

  Even more terrible than the destroyed buildings was finding Professor Schueler’s usual table at Café Vienna unoccupied. “Don’t worry,” said the waiter, who recognized me. “He’s doing much better!”

  “What’s wrong with him?” I spluttered.

  “Oh, haven’t you heard? He had a stroke. He’s at Saint Meade Hospital.”

  Saint Meade Hospital, I muttered over and over like a mantra on my way back. Just forty-five minutes after I had boldly left Amanda, I was back, and distraught.

  “We’ll go there tomorrow and visit him,” she reassured me. “If he’s had a stroke, he may not be able to take care of himself anymore.”

  “But he doesn’t have anyone else! His sister lives in Munich,” I protested.

  “Let’s just wait until tomorrow and see what he really needs, okay? Don’t worry. Now that we know what’s happened, we can take care of him.”

  At the Underground station, there was already a crowd of people with bedding and packed suitcases who descended into the tunnel every evening to spend the night there. It must have been anything but comfortable. The trains ran until the wee hours of the morning, the cement floor was hard, and the continual blasts of hot air that blew through the tunnel stirred up stenches and enormous swarms of mosquitoes.

  “We have to think of some alternative for the winter,” Amanda said a few hours later as we sat on the cots in our own shelter, freezing, and tried not to pay too much attention to the unnerving whine of the dive bombers.

  “I don’t want to go to the Underground,” I said quietly, burying my face in her shoulder.

  “And you won’t have to. The nursing home asked if I could help out again. They even want to pay me. Now that the Elysée is closed, we could certainly use the money, and if I work night shifts, they’ll let us both into the cellar!”

  Longingly I thought of the warm basement of the nursing home, where you could turn off the noises of the air battles with a single push of a button on the radio. “Say yes!” I begged.

  “I already did,” she admitted, “and I mean loud and clear, even before the head nurse had finished her sentence. I didn’t even ask Matthew! I start again on Sunday. Until then we have to make do here.”

  Four nights, and one of them half over. “We can do that!” I declared with renewed courage.

  Amanda’s connection to the Jewish nursing home turned out to be a blessing in another way too. Professor Schueler was paralyzed on his right side; he couldn’t get out of bed or even feed himself without assistance. The poor man was so ashamed that he started to cry the moment he saw us.

  “Why didn’t you let us know?” Amanda asked, and sat down on the edge of his bed. Victims of last night’s bombs lay next to invalids like Professor Schueler, who were only being kept here because no one knew where they should go. It was incredibly hot, and smelled of medicine and sweat.

  “Nah… make trouble,” Professor Schueler mumbled in a slurred voice.

  “You’re not making any trouble. The first thing we’ll do is get you out of here. I’ll arrange a lovely room in the home where I work, and Frances can visit you every evening. They have very good therapists there. You’ll be doing better in no time!”

  “You’re a saint!” he answered in Yiddish, deeply touched.

  I nervously shuffled from one leg to the other and desperately wished I could make some meaningful contribution too, but as always, I couldn’t come up with anything at all. “I’ll peel an orange for him,” I finally announced, and set off to find a knife. It upset me terribly to see my old friend in such a helpless predicament.

  When I finally returned with the orange, Amanda was combing Professor Schueler’s hair. He looked at me with embarrassment, but already seemed to be perking up. “Don’t know… can eat,” he said, regarding the orange.

  “Frances will help you,” Amanda said, to my amazement, and gestured to me to come sit next to her on the edge of the bed. “I’m going to talk to the head nurse about his discharge,” she announced.

  Well. I gathered all my courage and took a piece of orange from the plate and put it
in his mouth. “Does it taste good?” I asked a little too loud.

  Professor Schueler nodded. Again his eyes filled with tears; one rolled down his cheek into his beard, but I pretended I hadn’t seen it. “The waiter at Café Vienna told me where to find you,” I babbled. “Maybe it would have been more fitting to bring Sacher torte!”

  The one side of his face he could still move twisted into a grin that touched me deeply. “Yesterday was the first time we dared come into the city,” I said. “That’s why I didn’t find you sooner. But now we’ll see each other every day. I can read to you. I sing too! At night we’re all in the same air-raid shelter. It’s warm and pretty quiet, and it even has a radio!”

  The head nurse, who returned shortly thereafter with Amanda, said in a friendly tone, “Well, look here! Our patient is already on the road to recovery! Why didn’t you tell us that you have family, professor?”

  Professor Schueler’s English wasn’t very good, but he did understand the word family. “I’m an idiot,” he answered unclearly, “and didn’t quite believe it.”

  And the family grew! Just a few days later we received an ecstatic letter from Walter announcing his and his father’s release from the internment camp. Amanda and I waited for them at the Liverpool Street station—the same train station where Walter and I had been separated during the kindertransport, which seemed like fate to me. Nothing could have prepared me for the joy that filled me from head to toe when I saw Walter climb down from the train! I screamed his name at the top of my lungs, shoved my way through the crowd in a most impolite way, and threw myself around his neck with the full force of a surprise attack.

  “Uff!” he said, taken by surprise. “What a greeting! I should go away more often, don’t you think, Paps?”

  And just like that I was annoyed with him. Herr Glücklich put down their shared suitcase and shook my hand. He hadn’t lost his wheezing and cough, but after so many months on the Isle of Man, his face had taken on a much healthier color. Both Glücklich faces lit up even further when they spotted Amanda, and for the first time I keenly wished that she wasn’t quite so beautiful!

  At home the Glücklichs moved into Gary’s room and our recently abandoned shelter. “It’s only for a few days anyway,” Walter said to me. “We’ll look for work in a factory and try to find a room nearby. They need all the help they can get, I heard. I’d rather sign up for the Home Guard, but they don’t want foreigners. I can join the army as soon as I’m eighteen, but not for the home front—it doesn’t make any sense!”

  “The war will be long over by the time you’re eighteen anyway,” I chided him.

  “You think so? I wouldn’t be so sure. In our discussion groups at the camp we came to another conclusion.”

  “Discussion groups? Just wait until tonight, then you’ll see what’s going on!”

  “Hmm.” Walter didn’t let himself be swayed by my patronizing tone. “They won’t break us with their bomb scares! Göring has already lost a lot of planes and hasn’t gotten any closer to his goal. No, this war will be decided overseas.”

  “Where we’re losing one ship after another!”

  “But the Americans have offered to lease us an entire fleet! Sure, England is fighting alone, but the British Empire is still strong. Australia, New Zealand, Canada, India, even the Gurkhas from Nepal are fighting on our side! The Germans will have to dig deep,” Walter enthused more confidently than I had heard anyone talk about the war in a long time.

  “I hope you’re right,” I answered in a more conciliatory tone. “But it’s not as simple as a discussion group. Gary wouldn’t tell us anything when he was here. He was awfully nervous and smoked one cigarette after the other.”

  “I wanted to write to him anyway. I hope he’ll give me his honest opinion of me becoming a soldier!”

  Walter received a letter from Gary two months later. He carried it with him constantly in the wallet he bought with his first paycheck from the factory, and read it so often he knew it by heart.

  HMS Princess of Malta, 20 November 1940

  Dear Walter,

  I’m sure you understand that I can’t tell you where we are, just this: My second winter on the Atlantic has started and is rattling us through and through. But I’ve wanted to go to sea ever since I can remember. Just look at all the model ships in Frances’s room! Early on my parents taught me that the whole world was open to me; of course, they were thinking of something other than the navy, and until I was about seventeen, the idea of expanding my horizons through education suited me fine. The things going on elsewhere in Europe were disturbing, but somehow beyond my comprehension. They didn’t have anything to do with me until we took in a girl from Germany—my sister, Frances. She made us look more closely at the world. She didn’t talk about her past much, she just came alive while she was with us, and it was amazing to experience.

  So I actually had two reasons to join the navy: my old love of the sea, and watching Frances blossom, which gave me an entirely new idea. You may think I’m crazy when I tell you this, but I’m going to anyway: I want to play a part in making the world “come to its senses”!

  Please don’t think that I always have this lofty goal in mind while I’m on board here. When ships in the convoy are hit, burn, and start to sink, and we know there will be a torpedo speeding toward us at any second, I’m scared to death and can only think: Shoot, Shepard, hopefully you’ll get out of this alive somehow!

  Or when the waves crash down over us and we sail into a storm for days without sleeping, when nothing matters anymore, life or death, and you only wish it would finally be over, when after endless days like that you finally have a chance to think again, then I sometimes think, What in heaven’s name am I doing here, anyway?

  Evening, 22 November

  Walter,

  I have to thank you for asking for my opinion! The past few days have been one of those phases when I almost started to doubt my decision. But writing this letter to you has gotten me thinking about how I can best explain to you why I’m here, and it has made it clear to me again.

  Would I want to call it off and go home now? Definitely not! When this war has been won (and I don’t want to imagine anything else!), then someday we’ll forget that we once sat in the cold, filthy and shivering. All we’ll know then is that we were part of it when civilization was defended—and I’m not just thinking of us Jews or Brits or the other “good guys.” The more I think about it, the more I can imagine that even future generations of Germans will thank us someday.

  Does that help you with your decision? I can’t bring myself to say, “Yes, Walter, become a soldier! Try not to get shot and come home a hero!” If everything turned out well, of course, I’d pat myself on the back—but it might not, and before I have to blame myself for launching you on the path to disaster with patriotic slogans, I’d rather say “Sorry, pal, you won’t get a straight answer from me.”

  Walter, I’m curious what your future will bring! You still have just about a year to think about it. But when you decide, please let me know, and give my love to my three at home, Mum, Dad, and Frances!

  Your friend,

  Gary Shepard

  Book Three

  Returning Home

  1941–1945

  Chapter 18

  Lightfoot

  At least it had stopped raining. The branches and remaining brown autumn leaves still clung to the trees despite the tremendous amount of rain that had fallen in recent days. The grave, in accordance with Jewish tradition, had just been dug that morning. In the past forty-eight hours I had been amazed by the calm, fitting way the burial society of the Jewish community marked the coming and going of Malach ha-Mavet, the angel of death. From the prayers at the deathbed to the vigil, from the cleansing and ritual purification of the body to the symbolic sack of earth from the Holy Land, these men had quickly yet respectfully seen to everything necessary to take leave of life on this earth.

  And now that Matthew had spoken a brief but hea
rtfelt tribute to the earthly endeavors of the deceased, the cantor had sung a last shalom for him, and each of the mourners had tossed three handfuls of soil down onto the coffin and prayed the Kaddish, I could rest assured that everything had been done to provide a worthy farewell for Professor Julius Schueler, seventy-four years old, from Munich, Germany.

  It would take a while for me to adjust to not finding him in his room, looking up expectantly as soon as I walked through the door: “My young friend! What’s going on out there in the world?” The fact that he was bedridden and grew steadily weaker despite daily exercises was puzzling in contrast to his face, which grew happier, more animated, and younger the longer his illness lasted. This last year in the nursing home, he confided to Amanda shortly before his second and fatal stroke, had been the happiest he had known since 1933!

  Arm in arm with my foster mother, I walked to the gate of the cemetery, lost in thought, past unadorned graves topped with collections of small stones. “It’s too bad Jewish people don’t share a meal after a funeral,” I said.

  “You would have liked to treat his friends at the Café Vienna, am I right?” Amanda pressed my arm.

  “That would have been nice,” I agreed. “It’s funny, isn’t it? I went there for my parents and got nowhere, but in the end I gained a grandfather.”

  “What’s so strange about that? You have a talent for gathering a family for yourself, that’s all. A family for the war, as your friend Hazel would say.”

  Just for the war? I thought, but didn’t say it out loud. There was a brief moment of tension between us, as happened so often recently when our conversation touched on the future.

  I was thirteen, almost fourteen. I had been with the Shepards for almost three years—not so long in terms of a lifetime, but the years prior to that seemed infinitely distant, and faded a little more each day. My foster parents had always made it perfectly clear from the beginning that I was “borrowed,” so I’d be given back at some point. Mamu had always been a presence in Harrington Grove. And yet it was Amanda who had formed me. I looked to her, talked like her, took on her mannerisms. I had become her daughter.