by Moya Simons
I bit my lip. I carried my own memories. The wardrobe; the make-believe world of meadows and farmlands and plenty of food. I was sure the other children had their own escape routes as well. I was trying to lay these memories to rest. I had to move on. Greta needed her dreams, though, as much as she needed food for her stomach.
The other children made fun of her fancy background. They knew the difference between fact and fiction. Most of them didn’t speak about their experiences, particularly those who had come from concentration camps. They carried a heavy silence with them. Eva and Mary, the Hungarian girls, plucked from Auschwitz at the end of the war, had talked quietly to each other before Eva left for America. But they’d put up a heavy stonewall if anyone asked them questions about that dreadful place.
At first there’d been a general tolerance towards Greta’s fantasy world. Then, as the children adjusted to English life, most of them yawned and walked away when she spoke.
Chapter Twenty-two
ENGLISH HAD BECOME my first language. In Hartfield House, where we talked English all the time, new words were being thrown at us and there was no choice but to ask what they meant and to start using them as soon as possible.
Greta meantime continued to talk about her fantasy life and finally Martha, worried about her, arranged for Greta to see a psychiatrist.
‘He says I know the difference between fact and fantasy and that for now I need my fantasies,’ she told me after the visit. ‘I really don’t need to see a psychiatrist, Rachel. I’m not crazy, you know.’
At school we were asked to write a poem for homework. The poem was to be about Hartfield. If you were a local child it was about the village, if you were a refugee then you wrote about Hartfield House.
Miss Wetherby liked my poem so much she asked me to read it to the class:
Hartfield House
When I came to Hartfield I could not even speak
I just did as I was told. I could not even weep.
I kept my bed quite tidy, had new clothes I could wear
I ate my food quite quickly and soon had shiny hair.
People come on weekends as if we’re on display
They look us over, study us, sometimes take us away
They become our parents, and we go to live with them.
I find this very scary; they could bring us back again if they don’t like us.
The class was silent after I read it. The Hartfield House children shuffled their books or looked awkwardly at each other. Even the English children seemed unsure of what to say.
Miss Wetherby clapped enthusiastically. ‘You expressed yourself with such honesty, Rachel. That’s hard to do. Well done.’
Awkward clapping followed. I felt embarrassed and exposed and was glad when someone else read a more cheerful poem.
‘SO, RACHEL, WHAT do you think?’
Tony and Timothy’s mum, Molly, had asked me for dinner.
‘You’d be our sister,’ Timothy called out across the table. ‘I’m nice. I’ll let you call me rude names all the time.’
‘We need another kid in this family. Then we’ll outnumber the adults,’ Tony added.
‘Shh,’ their father, Tom, said. His brown eyes were soft with goodness. Not Papa’s eyes, but kind anyway. ‘Here, pass the salt, Tony. Rachel, we’ve come to know you over these past many months, and we’re fond of you. We can offer you a home and a family. You can call us Ma and Pa, like the boys do. You will be treated just the same by us.’
‘We know you’ve lost your family, Rachel,’ Molly added sadly. ‘We can’t replace those you’ve lost, but this can be a new life for you. You won’t just have us, love. You’ll have cousins and a grandmother who comes to visit from London and regularly loses her false teeth down the back of her bed.’
Everyone laughed. It gave me a chance to catch my breath. Cousins? I had cousins already. Yes, they were dead, but their memory was alive and too fresh to be replaced with others. Parents? I had parents too. Miri? I didn’t want twin brothers to replace an irreplaceable sister.
Their kindness seeped through me, warming me. How could I tell them?
‘You’re so good to me,’ I finally said, stumbling over the words. ‘If I were to choose a new family, it would be you. But I can’t. I feel like I’m giving up on my own family. I just can’t.’
A tear trickled out of Molly’s eye. Tom took a deep breath then nodded.
‘You can change your mind any time,’ Tony told me.
‘We want you to be our sister,’ Timothy added.
I felt hot tears on my cheeks. I brushed them away and began to eat toffee pudding. It was hot and sticky and coated my teeth and I gratefully sucked in the sweetness of the pudding and the family around me.
NEW CHILDREN ARRIVED at Hartfield House as other children were adopted. There were some older girls this time, aged about fifteen.
Five were Hungarian. They’d been recovering in hospital from typhus and were thin with big eyes. Mary held their hands and spoke to them in Hungarian. The other children were French and there was one German girl. Two boys and one girl had been in hiding.
I watched them as they wolfed down food and explored the garden. Peter patiently translated for them and began to give them English lessons. Soon, they’d be at school. At fifteen it was doubtful they would be adopted, but the Red Cross would sift through their files trying to find any surviving relatives.
Greta and I and the twins had begun secondary school. I was thirteen. The original secondary school had been bombed by the Germans after the London Blitz. The new two-storey secondary school was bright and welcoming. The windows were large and the corridors wide. The assembly hall did not have the usual paintings of previous headmasters or headmistresses. They had been destroyed in the bombing.
We wore navy uniforms with pleats, belts and wide straw hats, which were not at all flattering.
At school, Greta showed exceptional ability in creative writing. The twins, who were slightly younger than us, were good at maths. I was one of those students who got by in most subjects. I loved art and music, and learned to play the clarinet, though not very well.
Sometimes a rabbi visited Hartfield House. He told Bible stories and taught us about being Jewish. If the weather was good we had these lessons under a large oak tree in the garden.
‘Where was God when the Jews were being murdered?’ one of the older girls, Gabi, asked. She was German, and had been in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. She had learned English at the hospital, and then at the refugee camp she’d been in after the war.
Here was a question that was in all our minds, but we’d been afraid to ask, and to ask a rabbi took special courage.
‘There are questions in life that cannot be answered,’ the rabbi replied sadly. ‘We do not always understand the ways of God.’ His face was covered with whiskers and his eyebrows definitely needed a trim. He wore a large black hat on his head.
‘Perhaps there isn’t a God,’ Gabi responded. Her voice was hard and sharp, like the crack of a whip. Some of the children gasped when she questioned the existence of God. You couldn’t say that to a rabbi. What if God was listening? One child stared anxiously at the sky as if awaiting bolts of lightning to strike us.
‘We cannot hold God responsible for such evil,’ explained the rabbi.
‘But why didn’t he stop it?’
‘God gave us free will. He always hopes that we shall love one another as he intended, but we have the free will to choose.’
Gabi shrugged. She sucked thoughtfully on a blade of grass before asking, ‘Is it true that the Jews are going to have their own country in Palestine?’
‘We hope so,’ replied the rabbi. His face was troubled. ‘Out of the ashes of the Holocaust, we may get a Jewish state in our biblical homeland, Israel. There are many countries who feel this is just. We shall know soon.’
I never found out about Gabi’s experiences in Bergen-Belsen, but once I caught her in the garden holding a rose that had fallen on
the grass. She smelt the rose for a long, long time, and stroked the red petals.
‘I think maybe God made the flowers, and the kind people and all those things in the world that are beautiful,’ she said to me.
‘I think God would be sad at the way things have turned out,’ I answered awkwardly, because I wasn’t really sure what I thought. ‘But remember we’re here. The family that loved me and hid me shared their food with me to keep me alive.’
‘Maybe the love they had in them was from God, and the Nazis were just plain evil,’ replied Gabi. ‘Maybe God doesn’t understand evil anymore than we do.’
She put the flower in her pocket and walked away.
How long was it since I had thought about God? I remembered the deal I’d made with God when Miri and Erich took off their Jewish stars and went out walking, all those years ago. I thought again about the emaciated child I’d seen at the hospital window. Was it wrong to blame God? I didn’t know.
I went to Martha’s office. ‘I want to read Freddy’s and Gertrude’s letter now.’
She smiled. ‘Well, that’s wonderful, Rachel. You do remember your German?’
‘Of course,’ I answered. ‘I don’t need to forget it like some of the other children here. I was saved by a German family. My family would have starved without food from a German woman.’
Martha went to her filing cabinet. She came back with a letter. I looked at the German postcode and the crisp handwriting.
I took the letter into the garden and crouched behind a rose bush, hoping that I wouldn’t be disturbed.
My silent Rachel,
Do you speak now? How do you manage without my wardrobe? Have you found another? Do you watch the birds that sit on your window ledge?
Do you remember when we crept down the staircase that night, when all the world was on fire and people did not know in which direction to run?
I think of you often. You must be about fourteen years old now. I am close to sixteen. Almost a man.
In Germany we all know what happened to the Jews. I feel the shame. I cannot believe that I did not want my grandparents to take you in. I was a child and I hope you forgive me for my lack of understanding.
When they liberated the concentration camps and we Germans saw what they had done in the name of racial purity, we said we could not believe it. I think, though, that many knew. Too many. Perhaps the world will change now.
If you write, use the address above. We are staying with my grandmother’s sister just outside Frankfurt. The Russians now occupy Leipzig.
I send you my greetings and hope you are well and happy.
One day when we meet again, please call me Freddy.
Always, your friend,
Freddy
There was a letter from Gertrude, too. She was old and ill and I remembered how she stroked my hair, risked her life for me in the air-raids, and told me that times would change. In the letter, written with the spindly writing of old age, she asked me to forgive her for taking my mother’s frying pan.
I replied that very afternoon, sitting at the table in the living room. Peter helped me with some of the German words I needed for my letter.
30 April 1947,
Dear Freddy,
You won’t believe this but I’ve forgotten a lot of my German. Everyone here speaks only English because we are all from different countries, so that’s all I hear all day.
I am in a beautiful orphanage for Jewish children in England. I go to school, and have lots and lots of friends. And Freddy, I can speak now. Yes, my voice is back. Everyone complains that I don’t stop talking!
I have already been asked once to be adopted but I said no. Any time now the right people will come along and want me.
I remember the night when all the world was on fire, and we sat on the steps and watched. But, Freddy, I try to forget things now. It is because of the stone in my stomach. I shall never forget you, though. Even if you were horrible to me at first, you will always be my friend, Freddy.
Tell dear Gertrude that she should keep using my mother’s frying pan. It’s what Mama would have wanted. Also, tell her that I love her.
I received news about my family through the Red Cross. They died.
From your friend,
Rachel
Chapter Twenty-three
‘WE ARE GOING on an outing,’ Martha told us over breakfast. ‘The bus is leaving at eight o’clock tomorrow morning. Breakfast will be at seven, no later, so anyone who is not ready misses out.’
‘Where are we going?’
‘We’re going to London. It’s months since we last went on an outing. You have not yet seen the capital of England. We are very lucky with all the fuel shortages to be given a bus by the local council to take you children out. We shall visit the Tower of London and see Buckingham Palace and—’
‘Hey,’ a boy said, nudging Greta, ‘you’ll get to see your relatives at Buckingham Palace.’ Everyone except Greta and me laughed.
On the bus to London we sang songs. The new group, just learning English, sang songs from their homelands. German rhymes, half familiar to me, were sung by one girl. Another boy from France sang a French lullaby. His voice was so pure, like an angel’s. Even Greta was silent for once.
As I heard more and more of the other children’s stories, I became increasingly curious about Greta. I’d gone along with her fictional life for so long and stuck up for her when the other children laughed about her royal connections. I’m not sure when it happened, but I’d left my own fantasy life and my need to curl up in a wardrobe. Yet the longest scarf in the world and Miri’s journal, still nestling under my pillow, gave me comfort.
Nobody teased me about them. Each of us had our quiet moments, our times of remembering. One girl wore a locket belonging to her mother. Another had a photograph of his parents which he kept in his pocket and took out to look at every now and then. Somehow it was different with Greta, and I wondered what had really happened to her.
Jacques had left Hartfield to join his aunt and uncle. It was an emotional, if quick, goodbye. He hugged everyone, winked at me then ran out the front door to a car that had pulled up in the driveway. His hair had been neatly brushed away from his forehead. He’d changed so much during the time we’d been together.
Greta, however, had not changed. She’d stubbornly refused to go a second time to the psychiatrist. Martha had spoken to her without success. No-one seemed to be able to break through the stories she’d set up around her.
On the bus to London, Alex pulled one of Greta’s plaits from the seat behind her. ‘Hey, Princess Greta, how about giving us a guided tour?’
Greta turned around and smirked at him. He smirked back. We watched the scenery pass by, the green pastures, thick forests and thatched cottages that were hundreds of years old. Occasionally Peter would point out a castle far in the distance, with turrets and probably dungeons too.
We passed through villages with cobbled streets and small shops with names on them like ‘Delicious Fudge’ and ‘Sweet Tooth Chocolates’, and old pubs with long chimneys and dark pieces of wood built into the stone in diagonal lines. Martha told us that these buildings dated back to Tudor times, when a king called Henry regularly beheaded his wives.
As we began the approach to London, the scenery changed dramatically. Here, and in other major towns, bombs had fallen leaving the charred remains of houses—small hills of broken bricks and mortar. Whole streets had been levelled. In some places rebuilding had started, but there was so much damage.
Arriving in London, all of us murmured to one another as we saw that while the war might not have hit Hartfield too badly, here the signs were everywhere. I shivered. It reminded me of Germany. Dust still rose like ash from cratered roads. We drove through the East End of London where many German bombs had fallen. The rubble of buildings stretched from street to street, like a vast cemetery. How many people had been lost, buried here?
Every now and then a building stood completely intact. Som
e streets were totally sealed off, too unsafe to drive through. In the quietness of Hartfield I’d forgotten that London was blitzed, as were other big cities. Even Buckingham Palace was hit, Martha told us.
‘Our Queen toured the East End after the bombing at Buckingham Palace and said she could now look her people in the eye, for finally her own home had been bombed. Our King George and Queen Elizabeth visited all the places bombed in London. They are really wonderful.’
‘What about the children living in London?’ I asked Martha. ‘Where could they hide?’
‘A million children were evacuated from London during the war. Most were sent to safer areas in the country; some were sent to Australia.’
‘I didn’t know any of that,’ I whispered to Greta. ‘I knew that the English were at war with Germany. I knew about the Blitz. Everyone knew about that. The wireless was full of it in Leipzig. Look how they suffered. I had no idea they’d been bombed so badly.’
I remembered the whistling sounds of bombs dropping and the terrible noise as our building was hit…Gertrude, Freddy and I struggling out of the gaping hole that had been the front door…The coughing…Heinrich left behind. I shuddered.
Finally the bus arrived at Trafalgar Square, where we clambered out and had our photographs taken with pigeons eating from our hands and sitting on our heads. Martha had brought some stale bread for the pigeons. A group photograph of twenty-five children and teenagers was taken and everyone smiled for the camera. Nobody looking at the photograph in the future would guess that each child’s survival had been some sort of miracle. A soldier had turned the other way, so I had survived in a cupboard and Gertrude and Heinrich found me and hid me. One child had been pulled out of a crowd at a railway station and effectively ‘disappeared’, saved by complete strangers. Another had crept out through a hole in the wall of the Warsaw ghetto at night, and someone took pity on him and hid him. Otto had slept in a barn at night and hidden in a hole dug in the earth on the farm by day. He was in the dark there, with only room enough to crouch. As a result, Otto’s legs were bent and he’d need surgery. The farmer who saved him had risked his life, but there were raids in the area, and he had no choice but to hide the child in this way. Yet Otto had come out of all this, and today his smile was broad.
