My Family for the War

by Anne C. Voorhoeve

  “You’re not going to go back to work yet, are you?” I asked, almost giddy with relief.

  “No, not yet. These are the only two or three hours a day when I feel like I’ll make it through somehow.” She smiled a little ruefully. “I would just about get to the nursing home and back again. No, I… I’d rather get out of bed for you, Frances.”

  I choked up, and pushed my plate aside.

  “I’m sorry about last night… I can’t explain it. Probably the sum of eight nights without sleep, plus all the food from other people’s kitchens—or there were expired antidepressants in the soup!”

  For one brief, bright, light moment we smiled at each other, and the spell was broken. Spontaneously I stood up and sat down next to her. We held each other for a long time, without saying anything or crying. Finally she said, “I know that you and Matthew are grieving too. I know I’m only making it harder, but I still can’t do anything about it. I can’t even say if I’ll ever be sane again.”

  A little later, she asked, “Did you see it? The obituary was in the newspaper yesterday.” Silently, she put the page in front of me. I bent over it, and there it was, the answer to my most important, burning question, buried in their last tribute to their son.

  Midshipman Gary Aaron Shepard

  HMS Princess of Malta

  12 June 1920–7 August 1942

  Beloved son of Matthew G. Shepard and Amanda,

  née O’Leary, brother and best friend of Frances.

  Lost at sea.

  Chapter 20

  Revelations

  The thin thread that still connected me with Mamu—our exchange of brief notes, limited to no more than twenty-five words—was severed in October 1942 after the last Red Cross letter I received from her. My own letter was returned several weeks later, stamped with the message that the recipient was no longer at that address. Surprised and alarmed, I waited for her to send me her new address, but maybe there was no Red Cross wherever she was now. The months went by.

  In June of 1943, I met one of the heroes of El Alamein at the train station with a queasy stomach. I couldn’t stop thinking of all that had happened in the sixteen months since Walter and I had said good-bye at the very same place. Walter, whose unit belonged to the Eighth Army, had been smack in the middle of the nightmarish final battles of the desert war, from Tobruk to El Alamein to the ultimate victory over the German Afrika Korps in Tunis.

  Here with us, there was little to be happy about. His father lay in the hospital with lung cancer, and it was uncertain whether he would be able to leave the clinic again. And although Walter would stay with the Shepards, in Gary’s old room, I was sure he would be affected by the oppressive shadow of sadness that still had a firm grip on our house, even ten months later. No, I thought anxiously, if home leave was supposed to be a time for recuperation, these two weeks would be entirely wasted for him!

  When Walter’s train came to a stop, hundreds of soldiers streamed into the arms of their overjoyed wives, soon-to-be-brides, or mothers. Walter’s arrival committee consisted of a lone fifteen-year-old girl with a stomachache. In the crowd of faces and uniforms, I couldn’t even recognize him; he had to tap me on the shoulder.

  “Ziska?” I turned around and looked into a sunburned, expectantly smiling face. “I wondered if you would come!”

  “Hello, Lightfoot!” I said, feeling shy and overwhelmed. “It’s great to see you! I’m sorry I came alone this time.”

  Walter lifted his duffel bag to his shoulder, offered me his right arm, and I hooked mine through it as we walked to the exit, feeling happier every minute. “Actually, I was hoping you would,” he said. “Tell me honestly, Ziska, how are things at home?”

  “We’ve had a terrible year, as you probably have too.”

  “Do you think I should change out of uniform before… ?”

  “No, no. At least it’s not a navy uniform.” I looked at him from the side. “They’re very happy that you’re coming. They’ve hardly talked about anything else for weeks.”

  “Any attacks recently?” Walter asked as we reached the square outside the station.

  “You must have heard already. Now we’re reducing each other’s historic cities to ruins. Coventry, Canterbury, Exeter, Norwich, York, and on the other side Cologne and Lübeck, and the Ruhrgebiet. I am so sick of this war!”

  “It can’t last much longer. The time of German victories is over.”

  “And you? Do you know yet where you’ll go next?”

  “No idea. Right now it’s time for a holiday.”

  We rode down to the subway. “I hope it will be a holiday!” I murmured. “Your father so sick, and at our house, well, I wouldn’t exactly call it relaxing.”

  “I’ll go to the hospital tomorrow and see what I can do for Paps. I can only imagine what the Shepards have been through.”

  “I thought a broken heart was an expression, or something from a different century. But now I can imagine perfectly well how people die of a broken heart. All your energy drains away.”

  “How is she doing?”

  “Much better. She’s dealing with it really well, I think. Matthew fusses about her, but not as secretly as he thinks!” I had to laugh. “No, we’ll get through this. I’m sure of it.”

  “The two of them must be so happy to have you.”

  “They are. Not as a replacement for Gary, but as a reason to get up in the morning.”

  Walter smiled. “You’ve gotten awfully wise, Ziska.”

  “Don’t be so smug! You’re only four years older than me, Lightfoot!”

  As we sat in the subway grinning at each other, I noticed that my stomachache had given way to a new feeling, like someone was tickling me with a feather.

  Back at the house, while Walter unpacked his things I gently opened Amanda’s door. “Wake up, Mum! Walter is here!” I whispered.

  “And?” she answered sleepily. “Is he well?”

  “Looks that way. He seems so grown-up! I had forgotten how tall he is!”

  Amanda laughed quietly. “Do you fancy him?” she asked.

  “Yes!” I whispered conspiratorially; she gave me a crafty look and countered, “Well, then, I’d better get downstairs right away!”

  I put on water for tea and Walter went out in the yard to meet the chickens. He was still outside when Amanda came down, but just as she opened the door to go out and greet him, he pushed it open from outside and they stood face-to-face with a smile and a surprised “Whoops!”

  Amanda took a step backward. “So,” she said almost shyly. “Private Lightfoot!”

  She must have been worried about this first encounter; not everyone got along with her since Gary’s death. But Walter wasn’t afraid, neither of the misfortune that had befallen her nor of her pain. He simply opened his arms wide without a word, and Amanda practically disappeared in them.

  I stood there with my teapot, spellbound, wishing he would never let her go. In my whole life I had never seen a more comforting picture.

  The next days were healing. Big, friendly Walter exuded such energy that he brought a breath of fresh air to our entire household. Walter’s experiences in Africa captivated us. The hot, dry desert wind, the dust in their noses and eyes, the unfathomable silence when the weapons were stilled, the scamper of little feet and paws outside their tents at night, the glittering sky that seemed near enough to touch. He painted all of that for us, and for the first time in a long time, Amanda, Matthew, and I were in the same place again.

  Our recovery may also have had to do with Walter’s unabashed delight at being with us. We all remembered ourselves, and instinctively wanted to be near him: Matthew, whom Walter enthusiastically helped out at the Elysée; Amanda, with whom he took long walks and sat for hours; and of course me, who was robbed of sleep by new and confusing feelings. I had been in love with Gary for years and thought I knew all about it, but what I experienced now was disconcertingly different. Again and again I imagined how Walter had held Amanda and imagine
d myself in her place; my heart felt tight, my whole body hurt, I prayed that it would pass, and at the same time, I hoped it never would!

  Fortunately, I managed not to let it show. Admitting to Walter that I had fallen in love with him was out of the question; it would have destroyed everything that bound us together. He confided in me and shared his shock about his father’s cancer, and we treated each other as best friends. I wouldn’t have jeopardized that for the world.

  On Friday evening after we returned from synagogue, Amanda and Matthew made Walter’s induction into the family official by asking him to call them by their first names. Matthew said the prayer for all things new, and when he had finished it was quiet for a long time.

  I broke the silence by asking, “When you took me in, could you have imagined that you’d eventually have all my friends to deal with too? Professor Schueler, Walter, and Bekka too, if Hitler hadn’t invaded Poland.”

  I had wanted to lighten things up a little, but to my surprise, the laughter was extinguished the instant I mentioned Bekka. “That just shows you how much you’ve added to our lives,” Amanda said, but all of a sudden I had the disturbing, disorienting feeling I’d touched on something awful.

  Had there been a message about Bekka that they’d kept from me? I was so appalled by the thought that I didn’t dare ask, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it either. I began to keep my ears open so I wouldn’t miss out on what they talked about when I wasn’t around.

  I didn’t have to wait very long. The little wooden bench Matthew had set out near the kitchen door was directly beneath the master bedroom window. Amanda liked to sit there in the afternoon sun. Walter sometimes kept her company, and when I stood at the window ten feet above them, I could hear them perfectly well.

  “They have proof,” Walter said. “There are eyewitness reports, and documents that people have risked their lives to smuggle out of Germany. The Allied politicians say the evidence is ‘not conclusively genuine,’ while Hitler and Goebbels talk publicly about the extermination of the Jews.”

  “It’s hard to believe that, Walter. Those labor camps are terrible enough, but not that! No one can just make that huge number of people disappear. There are neighbors, the people who work on the trains and live near the camps…”

  “Fill them with fear and terror and they haven’t seen a thing. Amanda, you didn’t live with the Germans. You have no idea what it’s like.”

  What on earth were they talking about? I leaned forward a little and looked down on them. They sat peacefully in the sun with cups of tea in their hands.

  “There’s a new resident at the nursing home,” Amanda said thoughtfully. “He gets Red Cross letters from his daughter, who’s in Theresienstadt. So the Red Cross must have an eye on it.”

  “I hope they’re only rumors too. But the fact is that there were Jewish soldiers among the Free French and Polish troops in Africa who had specific details. The Resistance has helped too many Jews make their way to freedom to not know what they’re saving them from.”

  After a long pause Walter added, “The camps are spread over half of Europe. Germany, Austria, France, Belgium, Holland, Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, we know where they are. And another thing—can you explain to me why little children and old people are sent to labor camps?”

  I didn’t hear anything else, and even his last words weren’t very clear, not because Walter had spoken too softly or one of them had noticed me, but because a strange buzzing in my ears began as soon as I heard “Holland.” Within seconds, I couldn’t hear at all, the walls around me began to sway, and I had the sensation I was lifting off the ground. I slid down the wall until I sat on the floor, and tried to focus on objects in the room until my vision cleared. I broke out in a cold sweat. It lasted maybe two minutes, but when Amanda came into her bedroom a little later I was still sitting there. She glanced at the open window and knew.

  “I thought it was about Bekka,” I said as she knelt down in front of me without a word. “But it’s about all of them, isn’t it?”

  “We don’t know, love.”

  “But I want to know! I have to know! If what Walter said is right, then the whole world has to know about it, so that it stops!”

  “You’re right. And even if it’s not true it has to be made public so that we know for certain. We can’t let up until we’ve found out what’s happening.”

  “I’ve known for a long time that I’ll never see my mother again,” I muttered, as if calling up my deepest fear might lessen the horror.

  Amanda replied, “As long as we don’t know anything concretely, there’s no reason to lose hope. It could be that the Red Cross doesn’t know where your mother is because she’s gone into hiding.”

  “I have to talk with Walter,” I said. “He has to tell me everything he knows.”

  If you ask, you’ll get an answer. That simple saying proved to be true in the following days, and once we started to ask questions, it wasn’t difficult to find answers. It wasn’t the great secret I had thought it was that Jews were being transported throughout half of Europe, it just wasn’t talked about in public. The author Thomas Mann, who gave radio addresses for German BBC listeners from his Californian exile, had already talked about mass murder of Polish Jews a year earlier. In Holland and France, where Walter’s information came from, roundups of Jews were a regular occurrence; in Amsterdam they were taken to the main railway station in streetcars, right out in the open, where trains from the concentration camp at Westerbork awaited them. To single them out, Jews were forced to sew a yellow star onto their clothing.

  But what happened to the people after that wasn’t clear. There were lots of different claims: forced labor in labor camps, resettlement in ghettos, even deportation to some country in the South Pacific. We heard of camps where the prisoners were left to their own devices until they succumbed to disease, starved to death, or committed suicide.

  Other rumors said that entire families simply disappeared; they boarded a train but never arrived anywhere. There was talk of toxic gas. These rumors were so wild and unbelievable that many people we knew in the Jewish community didn’t want to talk about it at all. “We Jews shouldn’t make too much fuss,” people would say, and that Great Britain was already fighting against Germany—what more did we want them to do? We began to write letters to newspapers and members of the Houses of Parliament to draw attention to our questions. Response to our letters was limited. That summer the newspapers were full of grimly enthusiastic reports about the German collapse on the Eastern Front, and if anything was written about the situation of the Jews at all, it was generally preceded by the statement: “Jewish organizations report…” It sounded as if these things were only of concern to Jewish people, and no one but us had heard anything.

  Once I got over my initial shock, all this information had a sobering effect on me. I weighed everything I heard, hoped that none of it was true, and reckoned with the worst, or what I thought to be the worst at the time—hunger, sickness, mortal danger. I had been living with the loss of my mother for too long to think it impossible that she was dead. After all the fears I had overcome, I became calmer and more distanced, as if I was building armor to protect myself from that final bit of news.

  The one thing I couldn’t do was relate all of that to Bekka. A train had saved me, and transported me to a new life. Where did Bekka’s train take her? I pushed the question far away, because it hurt too much. It was unthinkable that something had happened to her, the one who should have been here safely in my place.

  Despite all the uncertainty, we celebrated Gary’s birthday, the twelfth of June, during Walter’s home leave. I had been dreading that day. Amanda had been slowly but surely improving in recent months, and I was afraid that milestone would set her back again. Helplessly I asked myself how to approach the day. Maybe it was best to just let it come and go.

  Finally, I decided to be the first to get up that morning and to set the table nicely for breakfast—not too fancy, bu
t enough to make it special. My foster parents’ reaction would show me what to do next.

  Secretly I got a little bouquet of flowers and hid it in my room so I could take them apart and use them for decorations. My search for special foods wasn’t as successful; after four years at war, the stores simply didn’t have anything. There wasn’t any honey or sugar, there were no canned goods, no onions, no fruit. By sacrificing all my meat coupons I was able to get several beef sausages.

  Amanda also got up earlier than usual, and barged in on my preparations just as I was taking apart my bouquet. “Oh, darn it!” I said, disappointed and a little embarrassed, which wasn’t exactly the greeting she was used to. To my relief, she laughed when she saw what I was up to, and let me look into the bag she held in her hand.

  The bag contained three small packages. I must have looked a little apprehensive when Amanda placed them on the table.

  “Frances, twenty-three years ago today my son was born. This will always be a day of celebration for me, and if I can’t give Gary presents anymore, then you’ll just get something instead,” Amanda explained. It was the first time in ten months that I’d heard her say Gary’s name out loud. She held out the smallest package to me. “Let me see if you like it.”

  Inside the blue wrapping paper I found a little jewelry box. “I thought that might go well with your cross necklace,” Amanda said, looking at me expectantly.

  I opened it—and resting on cotton was the most beautiful piece of jewelry I had ever seen. It was a tiny Star of David with a red-gold filigree band wound around the points. It was so delicate, I could hardly imagine that a human hand could create something so fine. It took my breath away.

  Amanda was pleased by my reaction. “There’s an Indian goldsmith in Camden, one of Hazel’s uncles. When I told him who I wanted a gift for, he asked me to come back a week later. He made it just for you. The star is quite unusual, don’t you think?”