My Family for the War

by Anne C. Voorhoeve

  When I finally told her about my theory, Amanda’s short, astonishingly simple answer was proof of something I had known for a long time. “We aren’t blood relatives. If we die when we’re not together, I might not find you again in heaven,” I explained when she wondered why I didn’t join the Girl Guides like the other girls in my class. The Girl Guides took part in all kinds of activities for the war effort. But joining them would have meant being away from home quite often.

  Surprised, Amanda listened to my rationale, then finally raised one eyebrow as only she could do and responded: “I wish you had told me about your theory earlier. I could have told you a long time ago that you overlooked something important.”

  “And that would be?” I asked, puzzled.

  “I will find you!” she said simply.

  Being at the funeral had put me in a reflective mood, and I thought about the previous months. Belonging to the Girl Guides and “making my contribution to victory” had made me proud. We gathered materials that could be reused and collected money for the “Spitfire Fund,” made bandages from old sheets, and quite enjoyed playing the “victims” in civil guard drills. Our exercises included first aid, recognizing poisonous gases, and putting out firebombs. The older girls served as messengers between the Home Guard and air-raid protection posts, since the phone lines were often down during attacks.

  Walter was finally a volunteer now too. The Germans had only allowed us a few chances to catch our breath, and by the end of December half the city stood in flames and the rescue crews were entirely overwhelmed. After that, no one asked whether new volunteers were British anymore! In addition to his work in the ammunition factory, Walter assisted the volunteer fire brigade, which he thought was perfectly fitting: “During the day I put together missiles, and at night I help clean up the mess they make!”

  When the air attacks let up for a longer stretch in January, the Elysée opened for business again, and my foster parents and I held daily “breakfast conferences.” Would Matthew come home after the evening show, or did he have Home Guard duty? Did I have Girl Guide activities, or would I go help out at the theater and take care of our shopping? Did Amanda have a day shift or a night shift in the nursing home? During that time, there was never a single day when each of us didn’t know exactly where the other two were. Being able to rely on each other was the only thing we could depend on; it made everything else bearable.

  In April we experienced the heaviest attacks on London yet. I spent “Blitz Wednesday” in the basement of the nursing home with its thick walls and its own small airtight shelter. Three days later, Amanda, Matthew, and I were at home—how could we have known that this particular Sabbath would become infamous?

  When the air-raid sirens started up, the usual routine was set into motion: Shut off the gas and water, turn out all the lights, gather blankets, gas masks, thermos bottles, the first aid kit, and the box containing essential valuables, and then single file into the shelter. It was too early to sleep, so we sat on two of the cots and played cards.

  “There’s an awful lot of action in the air tonight,” Matthew said at some point.

  The thundering and booming from impacts near us would not quit, the ground shook and rocked, and the loose upper bunk rattled so hard I expected the bed to fall on my head at any moment.

  “I win,” said Amanda, with her reading glasses on the tip of her nose as she played her last card.

  Just then, a gust of wind blew the blanket away from the entrance and scattered the cards, and we immediately threw ourselves to the ground as stones and clumps of dirt rained down on the corrugated metal with violent force. A few moments later we heard a sound through the din outside, a sound I hadn’t heard at such close range before: a weak, human sound, calling, screaming, and crying.

  Matthew went to the door. “Oh, no,” he said, “it’s the Godfreys! Stay here, don’t move!” He reached for his steel helmet and slipped out. Amanda and I looked at each other in terror. Voices made their way to us, questions and short answers being called out, and already the piercing stench of fire penetrated the blanket in front of the entrance. Now nothing could hold us back, and we jumped up to look out.

  Dense smoke immediately filled our noses, lungs, and eyes. In the blue-white light that bathed the yard next door, shadowy figures were moving around. The crying had stopped, and someone staggered toward us—it was Mrs. Godfrey with her two young children. The three of them were covered in filth. “Your husband sent me. Could the little ones come into your shelter?” she said in a raspy voice. Only then did I notice that the fence between our yards was gone.

  As I helped our neighbor and her children into the shelter, the crackling of the fire grew louder; it was apparently finding fuel quickly in the Godfreys’ house. “The garden hose,” I said to Amanda, “is it working?”

  Without another word we both climbed out. While I unrolled the hose, Amanda ran into the house and turned the water on again. Of course the hose didn’t reach all the way to the neighbor’s house, so she brought tin buckets that had been standing at the ready in our kitchen. A small bucket brigade quickly formed—the two of us and Matthew, Mr. Godfrey, and other neighbors—while from the street we could hear the fire truck approaching. Directly overhead another plane droned and I automatically began to count to six, the usual number of impacts, but we were lucky: There were two blasts very close by, but the rest of the bombs fell a good distance away.

  The extent of the catastrophe on Harrington Grove was revealed the next morning. Between protruding remains of walls were mountains of debris, roof tiles, window frames, and some items surprisingly unscathed; trees were charred, utility poles toppled, and a wire still throwing sparks twitched in the street. The Godfreys’ house was an eerie, windowless ruin. The force of the blast had shattered all our windows too, and we lived with wooden boards over the openings for weeks.

  Making things worse, the second year of the war supplies were noticeably more difficult to come by, and the government had no choice but to ration food. Clothing also had to be purchased with coupons, for which a point system was established. For hours my foster parents and I would plan, laying out the sixty-six points we were each allotted like a card game on the table: ten for a coat, six for a pair of pants, four for a blouse, three for a sweater, two for new underwear.

  The rationing made it especially worthwhile to have your own vegetable garden. Amanda waged a bitter battle with caterpillars and beetles for her cabbage and lettuces, and grew potatoes, peas, beans, carrots, leeks, and herbs. On the weekends we would take trips to the forest to gather wild herbs that we dried and steeped when tea was rationed. “Shepard’s Delight,” our new variety, was such a success that soon my entire Girl Guides troop was traipsing through fields and pastures in search of herbs.

  In the fall, Amanda, Matthew, and I had taken up mushroom collecting, which meant getting up at dawn on gray, drizzly days and taking the train out to Surrey. There was a small restaurant on the way where we treated ourselves to a late breakfast once our work was done, our backpacks full of field mushrooms that the waitress looked at covetously.

  “If you give me your mushrooms,” she said the third or fourth time we were there, “you can have a few chicks.”

  “Chicks… !” I must have exclaimed with such longing that my foster parents broke out into laughter. That day we rode back to London with empty backpacks, but with a small cardboard box on my knees instead that went “peep, peep, peep.”

  “I hope for your sake there’s a rooster in the bunch,” grumbled Matthew, who would rather have kept the mushrooms. “Otherwise there won’t be any eggs and we’ll have to butcher the ladies.”

  “Don’t you dare,” I said darkly and put my arms around my carton.

  Sadly, my first chick started to fail the very next day. It huddled in a corner apathetically and was dead and buried before I got home from school. When the second one took ill I was determined to fight, and carried it around with me so I could perform mouth
-to-beak resuscitation if it came to that—I even took it to bed with me!

  In early December two half-grown hens and a rooster moved into the garden shed, strutted around the few square yards of fenced in grass between the shed and the shelter, and eyed Amanda’s winter vegetables.

  To be honest, we were all pleased to have “Winston,” “Victory,” and “Queenie” out of the kitchen. We couldn’t walk into the room without getting tangled in the dried mushrooms hanging from the ceiling on strings or stepping on chickens. Eagerly anticipating the eggs, Amanda and I were already studying all kinds of recipes, since they had been a rare commodity for some time already.

  Walking arm in arm with Amanda after the funeral, my reverie was shattered when someone drove past us on the quiet side street laughing, honking, and waving although we didn’t know him at all. “Something must have happened!” Amanda exclaimed.

  “He looked pretty happy! Do you think we’ve won the war?”

  We looked at each other. “No,” we said simultaneously. The news we had been hearing for such a long time had been too awful! Still, when we reached the main road, there were cars honking, bicycle bells chiming, and people clapping each other on the shoulders.

  “What on earth is happening?” Amanda stopped a passerby to ask.

  “You haven’t heard?” the man exalted. “Great Britain is saved, ladies! The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor! The USA has declared war!”

  Amanda put a hand to her mouth. “Oh God, how wonderful!” she exclaimed. “Finally! Frances, run back, you have to tell Matthew right away! Our prayers have been answered!”

  I ran faster than I ever had before. Matthew and the men from the chevra kaddisha were startled and stopped working, asking if something had happened.

  “Yes!” I panted. “The answer to our prayers! An American lady was attacked and the USA is joining the war!”

  The men looked at each other, puzzled. “Who was attacked?”

  “Pearl Harbor,” I said. They broke out in cheers.

  I didn’t understand that Pearl Harbor was the Americans’ Pacific stronghold until I heard the radio broadcast that evening. It was the longed-for turning point in this war. For seventeen long months, Great Britain had fought the Nazis alone. Now the cards would finally be reshuffled.

  My fourteenth birthday came and went, though I didn’t feel the slightest bit more important. In England, fourteen meant the end of compulsory education, and I wouldn’t have minded working, if only for the change of pace, but the Shepards wouldn’t hear of it. “Your parents would want you to keep learning,” they said, and since I knew they were right there was no more discussion. I informed Mamu on one of the telegram-like Red Cross letters we exchanged every few months; from them I learned little more than that she and Aunt Ruth’s family were still living at the same address in Groningen, they were “fine,” and thinking of me.

  Shortly after my birthday we put the soldier Walter Glücklich on a train. To be a member of the Pioneer Corps in North Africa was certainly an honor, and after the long, dreary London winter I could surely understand when Walter said he was looking forward to the desert life in a Bedouin tent. But even this warm outlook couldn’t disguise the fact that our troops were suffering enormous losses at the hands of the Germans. This parting scared me.

  “Don’t let yourself get shot and come back a hero,” were my parting words to Walter, and a couple hugging their son good-bye next to us glared at me. They had no way of knowing that I was quoting a friend!

  Just as with Gary, it all went too fast. Amanda gave Walter a kiss and he hugged her. He shook Matthew’s hand and awkwardly patted his own father, who had tried to change his mind down to the wire, on the back. Then Walter boarded the train, appeared briefly among the other soldiers in the window to give us the victory sign, but when the train started moving we couldn’t see him anymore.

  Then the train was gone and we stood on the platform, lost in a small crowd of parents and families left behind.

  A few days later, a letter addressed to Miss Frances Shepard arrived from the camp where Walter was training for a few weeks before leaving for Africa. The return address listed W. Lightfoot. Why was Walter’s superior writing to me? Something had happened to him at training camp! I tore the envelope open right there in the foyer.

  Amanda, who had heard my cries, rushed out of the kitchen. I met her halfway and threw my arms around her neck. “They stole his name!” I sobbed.

  Astonished, she freed one half of herself from my embrace, squinted her farsighted eyes, and held Walter’s letter at arm’s length. “He wasn’t allowed to join the British army with a German name!” I wailed. “They gave him three choices and he picked Lightfoot. Lightfoot! What an idiot!”

  Suddenly I was enraged—Walter had done it again. “Is his English so bad that he thinks lightfoot is some kind of happiness?”

  Irritated, I pushed Amanda aside to blow my nose. “Well, he could hardly call himself Happy or Lucky,” Amanda replied. “Or Frolic, in case that was one of the choices.” With growing indignation I saw that she was having trouble holding back her laughter. “Honestly, I think Lightfoot has a certain charm, especially for a man of Walter’s stature. Just imagine how he’ll sweep through the desert with it.”

  “That’s not funny!” I protested, and took the letter out of her hand to skim it a second time. “That twit is practically delirious because he has an English name now!” I whispered in disbelief.

  As I looked up, I was met with the strangest look by far that Amanda, my friend, sister, and mother, had ever given me. It was teasing and tender, questioning and knowing, pleased and a little sad all at the same time, and I could only imagine one reason for such a look: Apparently she had just answered a question before I had even asked it of myself!

  “Why am I getting so upset, anyway?” I grumbled.

  “Bravo!” Amanda laid an arm around my shoulder and led me toward the kitchen. “That’s a very good question! Definitely worth thinking about sometime. But right now let’s go raise a glass to our old and new friend, Pioneer Walter Lightfoot, that he not fear the terror of the night, nor the arrow that flies by day, nor his light foot strike a stone—loosely according to the psalms.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “He can call himself whatever he wants. What difference does it make to me?”

  Chapter 19

  Lost

  On the day Gary’s ship went down, invisible trains traveled through Europe, supposedly unnoticed, and students in Munich who called themselves “The White Rose” distributed flyers urging resistance to Hitler. On the day Gary’s ship went down, the World Jewish Congress informed Western governments about a monstrous document that had been signed in a villa at Wannsee. On the day Gary’s ship went down, American troops landed at Guadalcanal.

  On the day Gary’s ship went down, we read A Midsummer Night’s Dream in school with different people speaking each part. Matthew mounted the letters GREER GARSON IN MRS. MINIVER above the entrance to the Elysée, and Amanda washed and fed old people. That was our seventh of August 1942, and two days later, when the Princess of Malta pulled us down into the depths as well, none of us could say what we had done at a certain time.

  I would never understand why fourteen-year-old boys were allowed to deliver those telegrams. As soon as they were spotted in the distance in their uniforms, a wave of cold fear preceded them; women who had just been standing at their garden gates chatting fled into their houses, where moments later there was movement at the curtains: Please go away! Please don’t come to our house!

  I had seen the telegram boy go to the Beavers’ in spring, the second house just past the Godfrey ruins. He looked serious and afraid. The Beavers were still hiding from him, because they had a second son at the front.

  We didn’t see our messenger coming. Amanda and I were cleaning up the rest of our lunch; I had vacation and wanted to visit Hazel, who had returned to London in August. When the doorbell chimed, Amanda dried her hands and walk
ed the few yards to the door with a perfectly light step. Amanda moved just the length of the hall, a few steps. The way back lasted almost a year.

  I didn’t hear a word. When she didn’t come back, I glanced into the foyer and saw the house door wide open, and a pale gray sky outside. When I saw her shoe on the bottom step I finally understood. She must have lost it when she crawled up the steps, where she sat halfway up, staring at a thin piece of paper with a furrowed brow.

  “Okay,” she said in a calm voice. “Now. Call Matthew. Cancel work at the nursing home. Inform the rabbi. They’ll let us know about the shiva.”

  “Amanda,” I whispered. “Mum!” Her name wasn’t getting through. “Letters to the Shepards, the O’Learys, and the Coles,” she continued. “They will want to know, even if…”

  She must have been trying to prepare herself for this moment for a long time, and gave the telegram another intent look, as if her next steps were written there. Carefully I took the paper out of her hands and set it aside. “Come, let’s go upstairs. I can call Matthew. You should lie down for a few minutes.”

  “But Ziska,” she answered, puzzled. “I can’t just go lie down now.”

  “Just for a moment. Please,” I pleaded. She had never called me Ziska. She didn’t even seem to be sure who I was anymore. “I’ll come with you. We’ll go together.”

  “Well, all right. I do feel a little…”

  “Give me your hand. It’s just a few steps.”

  There had been another time, in my other life, that I felt I had to be stronger than the person who gave me strength and security. Mamu’s confusion after Papa was arrested, when she was suddenly alone and had to make all kinds of decisions by herself, was suddenly so vivid that it might have been her I helped up the stairs and tucked into bed. But then the moment passed, and it was neither a dream nor a memory. With an abrupt and very real pain, Amanda balled up, dug her fingers into the blanket, and whispered, “Oh my God.” I stroked her cheek, her hair, murmured her name, hoped she would start to cry, but she couldn’t yet. I knew all too well how that felt.