The Night Crossing

by Karen Ackerman

  Holding their breath, the family huddled motionless in the dark as the blade of the bayonet plunged down, first in front and then behind them.

  Finally the soldier turned away.

  But Mama’s stomach rumbled loudly from hunger, and each of them froze with fear. The soldier stopped and turned back toward the weeds, listening.

  They waited for him to call out to his fellow soldiers, waited to be caught and taken away like the others.

  But somehow the soldier changed his mind.

  “Ist nicht,” he called to the others. “It’s nothing.”

  When the patrol had finally gone, Mama broke down in tears.

  “It’s all right, Helen, it’s all right,” Papa murmured, holding her. “We’re all hungry, and empty stomachs don’t know anything about Nazi patrols.”

  Now Clara understood how dangerous their night crossing was—and they hadn’t even reached the slopes of the Alpine foothills yet.

  4

  The family continued to walk. Every mile was more difficult as they drew closer to the mountains. The air was thinner from the high altitude, and the steep angle of the path they followed was tiring. Clara’s feet had swollen over the tops of her shoes, and she’d had to remove them, which hurt terribly. Though she tried not to, she cried now and then from the pain.

  Finally, as dawn approached, they were able to stop and rest in a ramshackle goat shed, a hiding place that Papa had arranged for before they left Innsbruck. For a great deal of money, the man who owned the shed was willing to look the other way while they hid, in the cold straw among goat droppings, from the Nazi patrols.

  But the family had been in the shed only a short time when the man who owned it threw open the latched door and motioned angrily to Papa.

  The man spoke quickly and turned back toward his small house a few yards from the shed. Papa’s shoulders slumped as he turned to his family.

  “He wants more money—or he’ll turn us in,” Papa told them sadly. “He says the Nazi patrols have been searching his farm every now and then, and he won’t continue to risk his family without more money.” They all knew that the money Papa got for selling their valuables had already been spent.

  “We’re so close,” Papa murmured to himself, shaking his head with worry.

  Just then the shed door opened once more. It was a woman this time, likely the farmer’s wife, with a small basket of food covered with a checked cloth. She smiled briefly at them and held out the basket to Mama. But Mama stared down at the dirt floor, so the woman turned to Marta and offered her the basket instead.

  As Marta reached out, a slight clink sounded.

  Mama looked up desperately, certain that her candlesticks would be the price of their hiding place. But Marta was no fool.

  Quickly Marta jingled the links of a small moonstone bracelet on her arm. The bracelet was a present she’d received last Hanukkah from a classmate, and not valuable enough for Papa to sell with their other possessions.

  The early morning sun streamed through the reedy slats of the shed, and Marta purposely turned the bracelet a bit to catch the sunlight. The woman seemed to like the bracelet very much.

  “Ah,” she murmured with admiration as Marta took the basket from her.

  When she reached out to touch the bracelet, Marta pulled her arm away, taking a chance that a show of selfishness would make the woman want the bracelet even more.

  Though she had a safe home in Nazi territory, the farmer’s wife looked desperate and poorer than the gentiles in Innsbruck. Her weary face showed that life in the countryside was indeed touched by war.

  The woman stood straight, giving Marta an angry look, then turned and left.

  “Good, Marta—very good!” Papa exclaimed, giving his older daughter a hug. “When she tells her husband about the bracelet, he’ll know that a Nazi patrol wouldn’t let him keep it if he turned us in. So he will have to bargain with us, or his wife will pester him!”

  The family huddled together in the shed, and they waited. Then, as they had hoped, the man appeared at the door with his wife standing behind him.

  So a deal was made, and Marta’s moonstone bracelet was the price of hiding in the shed until sunset, when the family would continue on their night crossing.

  Once again they’d been lucky.

  5

  When darkness fell over the hilly path that led to the Swiss border, the family crept quietly from the goat shed and out into the cold.

  “The border is only two miles away,” Papa told them, but the icy winds of the Alps were making two miles seem like a hundred. Clara wanted to walk on her own, with swollen feet covered only by cotton socks, but Papa continued to carry her.

  Finally the path began to slope down toward the flatlands, and the night air seemed less chilled. Papa urged them on, tired but stern, snapping at Marta or Mama if they stumbled and fell. Finally they reached the base of the foothills, just a few hundred feet from the Swiss border.

  But Nazi soldiers were guarding the border gate with rifles slung across their shoulders.

  “We’ll never get past them with those candlesticks banging!” Papa whispered urgently. “Even with false papers, we won’t escape the racket they’ll make! We have to leave them behind, Helen.”

  But Mama whispered just as urgently, “Those candlesticks are all I have left, Albert! I won’t leave without them!”

  “Well, there has to be a better hiding place than Marta’s petticoat!” Papa snapped, though his expression softened as he began to look through the few belongings the family had with them. Still, nothing seemed as if it would do.

  Just then Clara knew where the candlesticks would be safe.

  “Will they fit inside Gittel and Lotte, Papa?” she asked, and she held out the dolls to her father. “They’ve made a night crossing before, and they aren’t at all afraid!”

  Papa stared at her. “I always knew the women in this family had the brains!” he said with a smile, and he took Gittel and Lotte from Clara.

  Mama removed the candlesticks from Marta’s petticoat, then made a hole in a side seam of each doll and emptied the straw filling onto the ground. She slipped a candlestick inside each doll’s body and stuffed the remaining straw back in to fill out its shape. With a sewing needle she’d packed in the satchel, she stitched the same thread back over the seams. When Mama had finished sewing, Papa picked up Gittel, then Lotte, and gave each doll a good shake. The candlesticks inside could not be heard or felt.

  “Are we ready, then?” Papa asked, and Clara, Marta, and Mama nodded. Then, looking down at Clara, Papa said, “You must carry the dolls, maydel, so the soldiers won’t suspect. Can you be very brave?”

  “Yes, Papa,” she answered, and put Gittel and Lotte into her pockets. Her father reached down, took Clara’s hand, and squeezed it. Then Clara and her family stepped out from behind the trees and made their way toward the border gate.

  One of the young soldiers at the border gate rose from his wooden chair and stepped toward the family as Papa took their false papers from his coat pocket. The soldier scanned the papers, looked at the family and scowled. Then he bent down to look in Clara’s eyes.

  “Wohin gehen Sie?” he snapped. “Where are you going?”

  Clara felt her father’s hand tighten around hers as she stared up at the soldier.

  “I’m going home, sir, after a visit with my cousins in Innsbruck, Austria,” Clara answered. “I’m a little homesick, although my cousins were very nice to me.”

  The soldier smiled and stood upright. He nodded and called to his fellow soldiers to open the gate.

  But he kept looking at the dolls in Clara’s pockets.

  Clara held her breath as the wooden gate rose. Just as the family was about to go through, the soldier called out “Stop!”

  He walked over and pointed to Gittel and Lotte.

  “Where did you get those dolls?” he asked Clara, trying to frighten her into saying something she shouldn’t.

  But Clara s
howed the same courage that her grandmother had when she’d made her own night crossing many years before.

  “Oh, they’re my old dolls, sir,” she answered sweetly. “I’ve got much better ones at home, but Mama won’t let me take them on trips because they could be ruined.”

  The soldier glanced at Mama, who wagged a finger at Clara and gave an insincere smile. Then he stepped back, signaled the other guards to let them pass, and allowed the family to cross the border into free Switzerland.

  Epilogue

  By 1940, the war in Europe was raging, and the family had made still another long journey, from Switzerland to their new home, in England.

  Clara’s father quickly found work at a British war plant that made timers for bombs, where his business skills were valued highly. Mama worked too, helping the families of British soldiers who went to fight the Nazis. The family had survived not only the Nazis in Austria but also the strict rationing of food and the Blitz, when Nazi planes bombed English cities.

  Eventually the war ended. Life became more like it had been before the Nazi terror began.

  But the family never again heard from Clara’s grandmother. She had stayed behind in Austria, along with aunts, uncles, and cousins who’d been taken away by the Nazis and had never come back. It seemed that almost every Jewish family had lost contact with relatives in Germany or Austria or Poland or France or Italy. The horrors of the Nazi concentration camps like Auschwitz, Dachau, and Treblinka began to appear in the English newspapers every day, sometimes with pictures taken by news photographers from England, America, or even the Soviet Union.

  Though their parents tried to shield them from the terrible stories, Clara and Marta began to understand what had truly happened to the people like Mr. Duessel, the kosher baker who’d disappeared. They knew that Papa had been right all along about the Nazis, and they admired his difficult decision to flee Innsbruck, but they still thought of their home now and then.

  Marta went to high school in England, where her marks were the highest in her class. Clara went to school, too, and though she made many friends, she couldn’t help but remember Hilde. Some of her new friends were Jewish and some were not, but Jews in England didn’t wear yellow stars on their coats to show the difference.

  Their new home was comfortable, and they slowly began to replace many of the things they had left behind in Austria.

  Still, the two silver candlesticks that stood on the mantel in the parlor were their most treasured possession.

  In the years to come, when the candlesticks were used for the Sabbath or on a holiday, Clara’s mother always propped up the two dolls, Gittel and Lotte, on a small chair near the table.

  “To freedom,” Clara’s father would toast, first holding his glass of sweet wine in the direction of the dolls and then to where his daughters sat, “and to the courage required to keep it.”