The Children of Willesden Lane: Beyond The Kindertransport: A Memoir of Music, Love, and Survival

by Mona Golabek

  Lisa kept smoothing her bed, finding it difficult to remember such an innocent time.

  “I remember standing outside for fifteen minutes— afraid that if I came in, you might stop,” Mrs. Cohen confessed, wiping away an uncharacteristic tear with her embroidered handkerchief.

  “Perhaps I have waited too long to tell you this, but we, I . . . owe you so much. You have inspired us all.”

  Lisa turned around and accepted her warm embrace. Then the matron smiled sadly and backed out the door.

  Sonia helped Lisa finish cleaning out her drawers, folding her dozens of scarves, and placing her costume jewelry in a velvet bag. Then, saving them for last, Lisa took her most prized possessions, the photos of her mother and father, and her grandmother’s silver bag, and laid them reverently on top of her clothes, shutting the lid on the large suitcase and on a long chapter of her life.

  Lisa left 243 Willesden Lane with her two suitcases and walked slowly down the road to Mrs. Canfield’s. The woman in black embraced her warmly when she arrived on the doorstep. “This house has been quiet for too long. It has missed thee.”

  As she had done years before, Lisa unpacked her things in the son’s room. His picture on the dresser now had a black ribbon tied around it.

  One week after Lisa’s departure, Mrs. Cohen received a call in the foyer of the hostel that brightened her spirits immensely. In the midst of the sea of disaster engulfing the community came a ripple of good news, a ripple that she knew would be a tidal wave for two of her “dear ones.”

  She hung up the phone, ran out the door, and went bustling down the block in her sensible shoes. She was out of breath when she made it to Riffel Road.

  “Lisa, Lisa! You must call Mr. Hardesty at once!” “What? What is it?” Lisa cried.

  “You must call Mr. Hardesty at once,” she repeated, picking up Mrs. Canfield’s telephone and dialing for her.

  Five long days later, an elegant Lisa and a well-scrubbed Sonia were picked up by Mr. Hardesty’s waiting car and taken to Liverpool station to meet the 2:22 train.

  Lisa and Sonia clung to each other and waited an eternity for the train to stop. When the doors opened, a group of weary refugees appeared, walking slowly down the stairs, their faces gaunt and haggard, exhausted by the trip and by misfortune. Lisa watched as they descended onto the platform and came toward her, disappearing and reappearing into the blast of steam that enveloped them. She strained to see into the approaching line of ragged people in heavy old world overcoats. She began to tremble, imagining she was seeing the ghostly apparitions of all her cherished neighbors from Franzenbrückestrasse.

  The more Lisa strained to see, the more she trembled, and Sonia had to put her arms around her shoulders to hold her up.

  After another eternity, they saw an outstretched hand waving in their direction and a familiar voice shouting from down the quay.

  “Lisa! Lisa! Sonia! Sonia!”

  Sonia pushed Lisa forward, and from inside the mass of the crowd came a thin, handsome woman, running as fast as she could. It was Rosie. It was Rosie at last. The three sisters flew into an embrace.

  They called out one another’s names, over and over, “Rosie, Sonia, Lisa!” reveling in each consonant and vowel, over and over again.

  When Lisa could finally pry her eyes off her sister, she looked up at Leo, who was waiting patiently for his turn to embrace them. She grabbed him around the waist and almost tripped on a beautiful four-year-old girl who was looking up at her in wonder.

  Lisa gasped.

  “This is our little Esther,” Rosie announced. “Isn’t she beautiful?” Then turning to the little girl, said: “Esther, these are your aunties, Lisa and Sonia.”

  Lisa’s eyes were so filled with tears she could barely see. Sonia knelt down and gave the little girl a kiss.

  They went to the same restaurant in the station where Lisa had been taken with Sonia so long ago. The intervening years of war had removed the white tablecloths, and the elegant teapots had long ago been melted down for airplane parts. It was now a dingy cafeteria, but no one seemed to mind.

  Leo was anxious to tell the sisters how he and Rosie had survived the last few years. Out spilled the story of their escape from Vienna as drunken tourists, the trip to freedom in Paris, then Paris fallen to Hitler, then running, and running some more.

  “We were always running!” Rosie explained.

  “Except when we were rounded up in a holding camp outside of Lyon,” Leo interjected.

  “Leo always found a way to escape,” Rosie said proudly. “It wasn’t just me, there were many people who hid us.” “Until I had the baby.”

  Lisa and Sonia were looking with such love and admiration at their older sister that they were speechless.

  “Then what happened?” Lisa begged.

  “When Rosie was nine months pregnant, no one would take us in anymore, so she had to deliver the baby on the streets of Marseilles. Then we kept running until we made it to the Swiss border.”

  “Leo had to lift me over the barbed wire,” Rosie broke in. “There were Nazis shooting at us from the French side. Just after he threw Esther to one of the Swiss guards, he got shot.”

  “Just in the leg,” Leo said.

  Sonia started to cry.

  “We never gave up hope that we would see you again,” Rosie whispered.

  Then the tables were turned—Rosie and Leo begged to hear all about Lisa’s and Sonia’s lives since their separation. When Lisa told of her scholarship, Rosie took her daughter’s hand and told her, “Your aunt Lisa is a wonderful pianist—just like your grandmother. . . .”

  Finally, Lisa had to ask the question they had all been waiting to ask from the moment her sister stepped off the train.

  “Rosie . . . do you have any news of Mama and Papa?” Rosie looked at her sister with tears in her eyes. “None of our letters were answered . . . I have heard nothing,” she answered, then sadly pleading: “So then, you have heard nothing also?”

  “Nothing,” Lisa said. “We have heard nothing.”

  They could not bear to discuss it further, it was too hard. Rosie looked at her two younger sisters. “Mama would be so proud of you two,” she said softly. “And Lisa, you know what your music meant to her . . . to all of us . . . look!”

  Rosie leaned over and parted the buttons of Esther’s coat. Around the little girl’s neck was the chain that held the tiny gold charm of a piano.

  “You have it?” Lisa cried, surprised.

  Sonia spoke up. “I gave it to Rosie when I left on the train, just like you gave it to me. . . .”

  Rosie put her arm around Sonia and said to Lisa, “And I never took it off, until I gave it to Esther.”

  Overwhelmed with the emotion of seeing the tiny charm around the neck of her new niece, Lisa felt the wall she had built up around her music beginning to give way. The forgotten promise she had made to her mother echoed in her heart.

  She returned to her practicing with a fervor that surprised even Mrs. Floyd. She practiced every day from the moment she awoke until the Royal Academy closed its doors at night, throwing all her energy and passion into her preparation. For how would the next generation know of the music, the music Malka so loved, if she didn’t honor her promise?

  26

  LISA SAT nervously at the mirror in the dressing room of the venerable Wigmore Hall, drumming her fingers on the countertop between the bottles of face paint, eyeliner, and rouge, and tried to sit still as her sister applied a bold brown stripe above her eyelashes.

  “Ooh, perfect! You look just like Rita Hayworth!” said Rosie, putting on the last dab and returning the brush to the table. Rosie then checked her own makeup in the mirror and wiped a smudge from above her red lips. Life and color had returned to her older sister’s face; she looked as sophisticated as Lisa remembered her.

  But it was Lisa who was the knockout tonight. She shimmered in her red gown as she stood up and straightened the dark seams of her silk stockings and tried
to calm her wildly beating heart.

  Sonia ran into the dressing room from the stage, where she had been peeking out from the wings at the gathering crowd.

  “It’s almost full!” she cried excitedly.

  “Don’t go out there! They’ll see you.”

  “No, they won’t!”

  “Yes, they will!” Lisa insisted.

  “Relax, the two of you, you’re making me nervous,” said Rosie intervening.

  The ornate turn-of-the-century hall, with its red velvet seats, was filling up quickly. Rosie had invited every person she met—people on the street, the butcher at the corner—every last soul in the beauty parlor. She knew instinctively it was important to have a packed concert hall for the full effect of this important night. And of course, the students and faculty of the Royal Academy would also be there.

  She had also insisted that Lisa invite the nice French soldier whose address she had come across in Lisa’s night table.

  “He’s probably in Paris, for heaven’s sake,” Lisa had said. “You said you’d invite him, so you have to invite him! I’ll pay for the telegram. You never know. People get around these days.”

  Lisa knew he would never come, she’d met him almost a year ago, but it didn’t hurt to dream.

  Mrs. Cohen had organized an early dinner for everyone at the hostel so they could get to the center of London at seven o’clock sharp. She didn’t want anyone’s stomach growling during the concert. She helped the youngest ones tie their ties and comb their hair, then clucked and scolded them out of the house at five-thirty, just in case the bus was late.

  Lisa’s mind raced as she adjusted the straps of her gown. She thought for a moment about how much had changed since her childhood fantasies of playing concerts for Viennese royalty. Instead of those adolescent dreams, she tried to focus on this audience, filled with the good people of England, the working people as well as the rich people, the friends as well as the strangers. There would be no dukes and counts, she chided herself.

  But this was just a speech she gave herself to calm down. It wasn’t working, however, and her heart started beating faster and faster. Her sisters wished her well one last time, and she was left alone. The hush was falling; the curtain was rising.

  Lisa walked elegantly onto the stage and was greeted by enthusiastic applause, as she sat at the nine-foot Steinway grand. Its ebony finish was polished to perfection; its lid was fully open, reflecting the gleaming inner workings of the strings.

  With a subtle adjustment of her posture, she brought a hush over the audience. Once all was silent, Lisa waited a few breaths until the air of expectation was almost unbearable, then took another deep breath and went inside herself. When she felt the audience disappear, she lifted her hands in a graceful arch and began.

  Her first chords were somber but eloquent; she was starting, as she had at the audition, with Beethoven’s Pathétique. This time, however, her opening was more confident and mature; she had the courage to start quietly, as her mother had often counseled. She began her story with the pianissimo that recalled the quiet despair of the agonizing separation from her family these past six years. The music deepened into thunderous chords retelling the years spent defiantly warding off the Nazi attacks. Lisa searched within herself and found the colors and shadings to express the depths of her longings and the heights of her triumphs.

  As the intensity began to build, she sent her prayer across the footlights into the hearts of the people who had gathered together. The beauty of the music entered their souls, from the refugee to the barrister, from the garment worker to the RAF pilot, from the Resistance hero to the dockworker, and helped to guide them through their deepest, inexpressible emotions.

  Mrs. Cohen’s eyes were shining and devout as she allowed herself to remember and mourn her husband and sister, surely lost. Hans listened with a joy that surpassed that of any moment he had spent with Lisa in the cellar, the music bringing warmth to his darkness.

  In the simple, dignified melody of the Chopin Nocturne in C-sharp Minor, Mrs. Canfield faced the loss of her son, John, reliving the images of his infancy and childhood and hearing in the music the heroism of his service as a medic. In Mrs. Canfield’s mind, Lisa imbued the regal tones with her son’s life story, one hand taking over from the other as she made the nostalgic notes evoke his life, lost but quietly remembered.

  Gina and Gunter held tightly to one another and felt the excitement of their future in the nocturne’s tender passages, their hearts rejoicing in the passion of Lisa’s playing.

  Mrs. McRae, Mr. Dimble, Mrs. Floyd, Mr. Hardesty, all of them in their way shared feelings they could never express in words. Lisa wove their stories through the Chopin and the Rachmaninoff, the music becoming the tale of so many in war-torn London.

  She relived her own joys and tragedies, her terrible journey to London, and her passage to adulthood. She mourned her lost parents in the tragic tolling of the bells of the Rachmaninoff prelude; then, from its majestic progression of chords, she built a hymn of gratitude—to her parents’ love, to their wise devotion, and to every mother and father who had the courage to save their child by saying good-bye.

  When enough tears had been shed in the audience, Lisa began the final piece, Chopin’s heroic polonaise. This was Lisa’s tour de force, and its thunderous exuberance raised the spirits of all assembled as row after row of shining eyes relived their proudest, bravest moments—their courage under the bombing, their unshakable resolve, their ultimate victory.

  There were many seconds of awed silence, then the audience erupted in tumultuous applause. Lisa stood up and the applause redoubled. She looked into the audience and took bow after bow before leaving the stage and the glory of the spotlight.

  The scene in the dressing room was utterly chaotic. The press of people included all the hostel children, shaking Lisa’s hand one by one, ten women from the factory, Mr. Hardesty and the staff of the Jewish Refugee Agency, Mrs. Canfield and five Quaker brethren, and, of course, Sonia and Rosie and Leo and Esther.

  Then came Mabel Floyd, towing a well-dressed impresario, who congratulated her profusely and spoke loudly to be heard above the din: “Your professor tells me you play a wonderful Grieg piano concerto!”

  Hans sat on a chair near Lisa and drank in the sound of the compliments, nodding his head in delight. Next to him stood Gina and Gunter. When Mrs. Cohen had finished escorting the younger children of the hostel through the informal receiving line, she asked them to stay back a minute while she said her own congratulations.

  The matron watched the gracious young woman in the red gown thanking the well-wishers for their compliments and pulled out her embroidered handkerchief. The beautiful vision was too much for her.

  “When did this happen? You are no longer children!” she exclaimed.

  Lisa, Gina, and Gunter took her by the hand. “But we are,” said Lisa. “We will always be the children of Willesden Lane.”

  At the stage door, behind another crush of well-wishers, stood a handsome French Resistance soldier wearing a discreet medal on the lapel of his uniform. He was waiting for the crowd to thin and was carrying a rare bottle of Mumm’s champagne and a dozen red roses.

  Rosie saw him first and, guessing who he must be, brought him over to her radiant sister. Lisa couldn’t believe her eyes; she had tried to forget the image of this handsome soldier, it seemed so unlikely that they would ever meet again.

  He put his hands over his heart, as he had before, to show how much he loved the music, then handed her the red roses with a card that read: “With fervent admiration, Michel Golabek.”

  Lisa clasped his hand and brought him into the group of well-wishers forming a tight circle around her. Through eyes brimming with tears, she surveyed the group that meant everything in the world to her, from Gina and Gunter to Hans and Mrs. Cohen, to her beautiful sisters, Sonia and Rosie, with Leo and Esther just behind, and now this handsome stranger who she instinctively felt would be part of her future.
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br />   Then, elated by the love and admiration surrounding her, she suddenly sensed an additional presence and was overwhelmed by a feeling of closeness to her mother. It was as if Malka were watching from above. Her heart filled with joy as she realized she had done it. She had fulfilled the promise she had made to her mother. She had held on to her music.

  Lisa Jura, 1947.

  Epilogue

  AARON WENT to America, married, and became a successful businessman. Gunter and Gina also immigrated to America, where they have lived together happily for more than fifty years. Hans remained in England, received his degree as a physical therapist, and went on to win numerous national chess championships for the blind. After closing the hostel at Willesden Lane, Mrs. Cohen lived with her son until her death at age seventy.

  In the fall of 1949, Lisa Jura received a visa allowing her to immigrate to America. Michel Golabek was awarded the French Croix de Guerre in 1945 and followed Lisa to the United States shortly after she immigrated. They were married in New York in November 1949. They moved to Los Angeles, joining Rosie and Leo, who had settled there, and were followed by Sonia and her husband, Sol. The sisters remained in daily contact the rest of their lives.

  In 1958, Lisa Jura was contacted by a long-lost cousin living in Israel, who wrote her the truth of what happened to Malka and Abraham. The cousin had received Abraham’s last known communication, a letter written in January of 1942, which had been rerouted around the world to Palestine.

  Abraham wrote of their pending deportation and implored the cousin with the words “We are lost . . . and beg you to look after our precious children.”

  On April 14, 1942, they were arrested by the Gestapo, taken from their home on Franzenbrückestrasse, and deported to Lodz. From there, they were sent to Auschwitz.

  Lisa Jura had two daughters, Mona and Renée, who grew up to fulfill their mother’s dream by becoming concert pianists.

  Lisa’s three granddaughters, Michele, Sarah, and Rachel, also play the piano. Her grandson, Yoni, plays the violin.