My Family for the War

by Anne C. Voorhoeve

She stepped behind me, opened the clasp on my necklace, and added the star to the chain, which slid down to join my cross. The light, loving touch on my neck reminded me of Mamu and the day we parted, when she had given me the necklace.

  “Now I’m wearing both of my mothers around my neck!” I said, half joking, as we admired the perfect harmony of cross and star in front of the mirror.

  “Frances, I thank you for this past year. For your love, your patience, your courage. Did you notice that you started calling me Mum when I was least there for you? Instead, you took care of me. I don’t think you have any idea how strong you are.”

  Three days later the war continued for Walter: The Eighth Army landed in Sicily to join the Americans in opening a second front against the Germans. For a short time I managed not to think about what awaited him there, but then the weekly newsreels showed the first images of the invasion of Italy and I noted that love and worry don’t take orders.

  Herr Glücklich, who was too modest to want visitors other than his son, died in a London hospital in July, alone. At the same time, Hamburg was being bombed and the city was engulfed in a firestorm. I didn’t tend to sympathize with the Germans, but when I saw pictures of burned, disfigured bodies of people who had died in an inescapable inferno, I felt sick to my stomach. For the first time it felt like something had spun out of control, that now even the good guys in this fight had stooped to a level that corrupted them, and from which nothing just and pure could come anymore.

  Chapter 21

  Light

  The longer the war lasted, the harder it became to imagine that it would ever end. People were sick of the air-raid cellars, the sirens, the mountains of rubble lining the streets. Almost three years after the Blitz, the Germans renewed their attacks on London—in retribution for Nuremburg, Munich, and Berlin, it was said—and even if they didn’t have nearly the same destructive force of the first air battles, their impact was devastating. Maybe the day would come when we wouldn’t know how to manage in not-wartime, how to sleep through the night, shop for food and clothing without points and coupons, how to plan for the future—or even what London had looked like before the blackout.

  The weak lamp on my bicycle was the only light on the street that night. The streetlights had been dark for five years now, the curtains in the houses firmly shut. My eyes, long accustomed to finding their way at night, couldn’t remember it any other way. Not a bad quality for an air-raid messenger, I thought!

  Carefree, I stretched out my legs and let the bike roll down a small hill. Something darted across the street in front of me—a cat? The German bombers rarely had enough force for a second round of attacks, and as soon as I delivered my message to the office at the train station, I’d be able to go home.

  The sudden dull rumble behind me startled me. Immediately I thought of a dud bomb, instinctively ducked my head under my steel helmet, and pedaled faster, but as I turned around I gasped: An enormous, shapeless shadow sixty yards behind me sank to the ground very slowly, almost in slow motion, and disappeared into the asphalt without a sound.

  I stared and must have steered my bike quite a ways without looking forward. Although I immediately knew what I was dealing with, I couldn’t get it through my head that it was actually happening to me. In a few seconds I wouldn’t exist anymore! I didn’t feel fear, only surprise. A bright ball of light flared high into the sky and it was blindingly white, almost beautiful with its two shimmering violet and lavender circles in the middle. Then came the bang of the explosion, and with it a bloodcurdling rumbling and grumbling like a huge dog. Unbearable pain stretched between my ears like a tight rope, the world turned upside down, gray shadows spun around, then darkness.

  But how pleasant it was to be dead! I observed how the black surrounding me gradually gave way to a bluish light. Something moved, maybe a face? Before I could recognize it, it was gone, a comfortable exhaustion overtook me, and I fought in vain to keep my eyes open. When I opened them a second time, the face bent over me through the bluish fog, smiling, and my heart leaped. Mum! She had in fact kept her word and found me. Trusting her, I let my eyes fall shut again. We had arrived. Now nothing more could happen to us.

  Opening and closing my eyes was like a game: Each time a little more was revealed. At first there was only a face, then the lips moved, and finally I started to understand words. My name, for example, and that I didn’t need to be afraid, everything was going to be okay. When I noticed that my voice had returned, I asked, “What happened?”

  I was less concerned about myself than why Amanda was here too, but she only answered, “A parachute mine got you, sweetheart. You’ve been asleep for quite a while.” Then her voice cracked and she fought back tears, which shocked me; why would there be tears up here?

  “Asleep? You mean we aren’t dead?”

  “Heavens, no,” Amanda said with a shudder, and these two words spoiled everything. All at once I recognized that I was lying in a white bed surrounded by a curtain, and that the slightest movement sent shooting pains through my head and chest that until that very moment I hadn’t felt at all. At least as bad, though, was the sight of my left arm, which was covered with bruises and had a needle attached to a plastic tube sticking out of it!

  Amanda finally told me the whole story. My eardrum had burst but was healed, I had broken several ribs and my skull, and what I had thought was several hours of sleep had actually been almost six weeks!

  “Six weeks?” I gasped in disbelief. “Then it’s… ?”

  “The end of March,” Amanda replied, and a muscle in her face twitched. “But don’t worry, you’ll be perfectly okay! The doctor says you’re a miracle, and you’re getting a medal for bravery too.”

  “I didn’t even deliver my message!”

  Amanda laughed, pleased. I had almost forgotten what that sounded like. “So what? This country needs heroes, so be quiet and accept it!”

  “Is there any other news?” I asked nervously.

  “Not that I know of. At home the letters from Walter are piling up. I’ll bring them to you tomorrow. Matthew will be ecstatic when he hears that you’ve woken up! And Hazel asks about you every day.”

  “When can I get out of here?”

  “Well, you’ll certainly have to stay a few more days. They have all kinds of tests lined up for you—to see if you’re cross-eyed or see double, or whether the little steel plate in the back of your head can receive radio signals.”

  “Mum!” I protested indignantly.

  “Sorry. I’m just so happy, Frances. So unbelievably happy!” Amanda wiped her eyes. “And as far as your head… no, take your fingers away! Oh, sweetie. That’s no reason for tears. Your hair will grow back. Take it from me, I’ve been there.”

  It was mid-April before I was finally allowed to go home, and summer before the hair on the back of my head was long enough to cover the ugly purple scar from the surgery. I didn’t realize what had really gone on while I was unconscious until after I got home from the hospital. There were signs everywhere: the neglected garden, the dozens of books carelessly stuffed back into bookshelves after Amanda had read them aloud to me, hoping they would wake me up. Two small books about head injuries and traumatic brain injuries lay on the secretary. I didn’t want to think about what I had been spared.

  And yet, it soon became clear that I hadn’t come away quite as intact as we had hoped. I got tired very quickly, and suffered from vertigo and headaches if I wasn’t careful. I wouldn’t be the fastest runner anymore, since my head couldn’t take the jolting, and I had to wear a hat anytime I was outside to protect my head from the sun. Being healthy was the only thing I’d been able to take for granted in my life, and it was hard for me to accept that I was supposed to be impaired now.

  Of course, I tried to tell myself that all of that wasn’t important when I had almost died. I might not be able to run, but I could walk normally; I might not be a good student right now, but my brain hadn’t been permanently damaged. I could talk, think,
feel, I was loved; I had no right to complain! Matthew took me out to the shed several weeks later and showed me something covered with a blanket: a twisted, bent clump of metal and shredded rubber that I only recognized as my bicycle on second glance. “You’re allowed to be sad and disappointed and angry, as much as you want,” he said, “but when you can’t stand it anymore, just come out here and look at this.”

  “I know. And I don’t want to be ungrateful, it’s just that…”

  “Ungrateful! What do you have to be grateful for? That someone launched a mine at you and happened to miss?”

  I looked at him, confused. “I’d be bloody angry!” Matthew declared, a statement so out of character for him that I almost had to laugh.

  I watched as he spread the blanket over what was left of the bike. “There are a few things I’m grateful for,” I said. “That I’m allowed to be with you, for one.”

  “You can look at that another way too. If Hitler, cursed be his name, hadn’t become Reichskanzler, you would still have your own parents.”

  “True, but then I wouldn’t know that I’m Jewish.”

  “That wouldn’t even be a factor. At any rate, it’s not a reason to be grateful.”

  “Fine, how about this: I wouldn’t be me!”

  Matthew looked at me mischievously. “Now, that is a tough one!” he admitted. “Give me a few days, I’ll think of something!”

  “I doubt that,” I countered, and noticed that my dark mood had passed, at least for the day.

  Matthew held the door open for me, we stepped out into the sunlight, and I gave him a kiss. Suddenly he wasn’t laughing anymore. “We thought we had lost you.”

  “You didn’t, and you won’t either.” I said. “I’ll always love my mother. I’ll never stop hoping and praying until I find her again. But it won’t change anything anymore. My life is here, with you.”

  How simple and clear it was. For years I had tortured myself with this question. It had never occurred to me to make a decision before I knew if Mamu would return—or just to make the decision myself! I always thought it was her answer, her decision. I had always feared them both.

  It felt rather audacious not to wait for her permission. I imagined stepping up to her and announcing: “I don’t want my old life back, Mamu. I’d like for you to be part of my new life, and Amanda and Matthew are part of it too.”

  But that’s where my fantasy ended. I started to get butterflies in my stomach, and I couldn’t begin to imagine how she’d react. I only knew that this was all I had to offer her.

  In May the Germans surrendered Monte Cassino and retreated farther north, followed by the Eighth Army. The Allies invaded Normandy in summer, and within a few weeks, large parts of France and Belgium were controlled by the Americans, the British, and their allies. The Soviets advanced toward Poland. More German cities fell, including Berlin; after months of heavy bombardment it was little more than a ghostly hull of dead walls and half-buried cellars where starving, ravaged people found shelter.

  At home we prayed with renewed hope for a quick German surrender. It had to have been clear even to Hitler that he had lost the war. But he chose to let it drag on day after day and be responsible for yet more deaths, not to mention the intrusions into the lives of millions of people. An assassination attempt by his own officers failed, and instead of longed-for peace, there was a new threat for British civilians: remote-controlled rockets that could be launched at us at any time and without any warning, literally out of a clear blue sky. The only defense against them was not to think about it too much.

  And yet we began to make plans again, to think of the future. The blackout was lifted—one evening Matthew and I came out of the Elysée and stood in the light, speechless with joy. Mrs. Collins and the kids returned from Wales. I spent time with my books every day to make up the work I had missed, and two afternoons a week Mrs. Collins helped me. She had been the one to offer, and I happily accepted.

  She was also the one who planted an exciting new idea in my head.

  “Do you remember the foreign affairs conference last year?” I asked Amanda and Matthew excitedly. “When Molotov spoke, someone stood there and translated directly into English. Mrs. Collins thinks I could do something like that: interpret for German and English, and maybe another language too, that I could learn at college.”

  “A lot of young women are going to college nowadays!” I saw Amanda’s face light up as the idea took hold in her mind as quickly as it had in mine. “It’s not as unusual as it was when we were young, Matthew.”

  “You don’t have to convince me, dear. Frances as an interpreter would be logical after the last five years, don’t you think?”

  They looked at each other almost joyfully, then Amanda said, “We’ve been setting aside money for Gary’s education since he was born, and now it’s lying around in a bank account because we wanted to spend it for something really important. Something that would have meant something to him.”

  “That’s out of the question,” I protested immediately. “I won’t take money from you.”

  “You’re not taking it from us, it’s from him. You can’t refuse it, love. He was the first one who translated for you, have you forgotten?”

  I shook my head silently. “The lovely Mrs. Collins,” Amanda said, and stood up to pour us more tea. “That’s the best idea I’ve heard in a long time. I think I can finally forgive her for putting you in the first grade way back when.”

  “I can’t wait to hear what Walter will say about this!” I blurted out.

  But before I could share my news with him, something happened that overshadowed all these wonderful plans and made them fade into the distance. On July 23, 1944, the Red Army liberated the Majdanek concentration camp in eastern Poland. What the world had not dared to think was now thrown in our faces—in pictures that intimated far greater horrors than anything we could have imagined until that day.

  “It’s the immigration office…”

  “For me… ?” Hesitantly I took the receiver from Amanda. Yes, I confirmed, I am Ziska Mangold from Berlin.

  Did I know a certain Erik Bechstein?

  A sharp pain bore into the back of my head. Yes, I know Erik Bechstein. He’s my uncle. My uncle Erik.

  It was several days before we could pick him up. Illegal immigrants were usually sent back where they came from without further ado, but a Jew who had escaped from the Nazis and managed to make his way to England could certainly hope for generosity in the first months after the concentration camps were brought to light. And where would they have sent Uncle Erik?

  “You get the room where almost all of my friends have stayed,” I said as I led him up the stairs.

  We hadn’t said much to each other since we had found each other in the hallway at the immigration office. “They’re in a safe place,” were Uncle Erik’s first words. He knew, of course, that there had been only one thought on my mind since I had received that phone call: Where was Mamu?

  I had almost expected that we wouldn’t recognize each other after five and a half years, but I was wrong, although Uncle Erik was noticeably shocked when I stood before him—as if he had thought I’d be a ten-year-old Ziska after all this time! He didn’t look much different at all, just a bit slimmer, and very pale, as if he hadn’t seen daylight in a long, long time. As I soon found out, that was true.

  It wasn’t until I introduced him that I saw he was a different person; the man who shyly shook hands with Amanda and Matthew bore no resemblance to the cheerful, resilient uncle of my childhood. “. . . pleased to meet you,” he mumbled in heavily accented English. “Forgive me for being here.”

  “We are very happy to have you, Herr Bechstein,” replied Matthew emphatically. An hour later Uncle Erik set down his threadbare suitcase next to Gary’s bed. “Nice,” he commented as he looked around.

  “This was supposed to be Bekka’s,” I explained. Uncle Erik promptly looked like he wanted to cry again. “Evchen and Betti…” he started.<
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  The horror sliced me like a hot blade. I had never experienced anything like it; a premonition that almost threw me to the floor. “No!” I whispered.

  “They were in a convent in Belgium, about two kilometers away from me. I ran there just as soon as the Americans liberated our town. No one was there, not the children and not the nuns who had hidden them. Someone reported them in the spring and they were taken to Mechelen, the Belgian concentration camp.”

  “But the Americans…”

  “Too late. Mechelen was evacuated.”

  “Evacuated… ?”

  “Auschwitz. Gassed right after they arrived, like all the children.”

  Uncle Erik set his suitcase on the bed and started to unpack. I stood there without moving, almost without breathing. “And you?” he asked in a monotone. “Lots of destruction, I see.”

  “Gary is dead. My… my brother.”

  He looked up. I stared back, caught completely off guard and surprised that anything could shock him, after what he had just told me. He gestured toward the door. “Their son?” I nodded.

  Agitated, my uncle rubbed his chin and I heard his stubble bristle. “How terrible. Something like that shouldn’t happen to people who help the Jews!”

  “They’re Jewish themselves, Uncle Erik.”

  “Still. I have to tell them how sorry I am. Such kind faces! You learn to have a good eye for faces when you’re Jewish, Ziska.”

  I reached past him and gently shut his suitcase. “Let’s go outside. The sun is shining and Mum must have tea ready by now.”

  “That’s what you call her… Mum?”

  I blushed. “It doesn’t have anything to do with Mamu,” I started, but Uncle Erik shook his head.

  “It’s all right. It’s been more than five years. You had to find some way to survive too, didn’t you?”

  I looked at him, stunned. Stunned that he understood.

  A safe address: In the summer of 1942, that was the only thing Jews in occupied Holland could still hope for. When my mother found a safe address for herself and her sister in a house owned by two older women, there was no time to lose: Aunt Ruth and my young cousins had already received a deportation notice.