Stephan set Walter on the seat and took the dirty diaper into the toilet, which smelled worse than the soiled diaper. One of the little boys must have missed his mark as the train rocked, or more than one. The smell reminded Stephan of the underground, of his own shame. He rinsed the diaper in the toilet, then wrung it out and flushed, and rinsed again.
Back in the carriage, he draped the wet diaper over the arm of the seat beside Walter, then took the baby from Žofie, to give her a break. He sat next to a little boy who hadn’t spoken, who hadn’t even, as far as Stephan had seen, taken his thumb from his mouth.
“Number five hundred, even,” Stephan said to Žofie.
“We can’t think of him that way, as just a number,” Žofie said. “Even such a beautiful number.”
Stephan didn’t know how thinking of him as “thumb-sucking boy” was any better.
He tried to get the boy to tell him his name, but the boy only looked up at him, still sucking his thumb.
“Would you like to hold the baby?” Stephan asked him.
The boy watched him, unblinking.
Žofie squeezed in beside them, one of the bottles of milk from the baby’s basket in hand. “That was the last diaper,” she said, taking the baby back from Stephan, as if she needed the child’s warmth, or someone to care for.
“Walter and I have handkerchiefs we can use,” Stephan said. “And the other boys too, I bet.” He stroked the thumb-sucking boy’s brown curls. “Do you have a handkerchief, pal?”
The child only stared as, outside the window, the lights of a town reflected off a river. A large castle on a hill appeared. They passed through a station—Salzburg—but didn’t stop.
Stephan said to Žofie-Helene, “Stefan Zweig used to live here.”
She said, “We’re almost to Germany.”
The train grew silent, the children who were awake watching out the window.
“Do you really think I will, Žofe?” Stephan asked.
Žofie, jostling the baby to sleep, looked at him but didn’t answer.
“Write plays,” he said. “Like you said in the station.” When she’d kissed him, her lips smoother than the smoothest chocolate.
Žofie studied him, her straight lashes unblinking, her frank green eyes steady behind her eyeglasses, which were uncharacteristically unsmudged. “My father used to tell me that no one really imagines they’re Ada Lovelace,” she said, “but someone is.”
Out the window, troops marched on the road in the dark.
“Ada Lovelace?” Stephan said.
“Augusta Ada King-Noel, Countess of Lovelace. She described an algorithm for generating Bernoulli numbers that suggested that the British mathematician Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine might have applications beyond pure calculation, which was all Babbage himself imagined it might do.”
The sound of marching outside the window faded, leaving only the clack of the train and the quiet of the children’s fear. Germany.
“Maybe you really could meet Zweig in London,” Žofie said. “He could mentor you like Professor Gödel mentored me.”
She turned to the boy then, number 500. “Did you know Sherlock Holmes lives on Baker Street?” she asked him. “But I suppose you’re too young to appreciate his stories, aren’t you? Well, perhaps you would like to sing? Do you know ‘The Moon Has Risen’?”
The boy’s eyes over the hand to his mouth studied her.
“Of course you do,” she said. “Even Johanna knows it.”
She touched the baby’s cheek. “Don’t you, Johanna?” she said. And she began to sing softly, “The moon has risen; the golden stars shine in the sky bright and clear.”
Slowly, other children joined her. The little boy didn’t sing, but he leaned into Žofie. His thumb settled slowly from his mouth as he fell asleep, his placard with the beautiful number 500 still around his neck.
Damp Diapers
As the train arced around a bend, approaching the border between Germany and the Netherlands—approaching freedom!—Stephan pulled still-wet diapers and handkerchiefs off the seat backs, already searching for a place to hide them from the German border control check. It felt like he had been riding this train forever: all the long hours yesterday after they left, absorbing the unreality of leaving; the whole night trying to sleep on the seats, with forever one child or another needing comfort, even Peter Rabbit needing comfort, although Walter was otherwise heartbreakingly stoic; the long day today without even much food, most of what the children’s parents had sent already eaten. He opened a window to throw the diapers out, thinking surely someone would provide new diapers, real diapers, when they crossed into the Netherlands. Along the road beside the train tracks, helmeted troops marched all the way up the curved arc of track to the engine belching black smoke and a white jet of steam, and back as far as he could see in the bright light of this second day, all the way across the winter-pale rolling hills to woods that seemed impossibly far away.
He closed the window and turned to Žofie, who was trying to rock the baby to sleep. He was feeling the kind of panic now that the doctor must have felt in Zweig’s Amok before he threw himself on the woman’s coffin, dragging himself and the coffin to the bottom of the sea. Both of them dead on account of a baby. He remembered Papa’s voice as they sat together by the fire in the library back in Vienna, in his old life, Papa saying You’re a man of character, Stephan. You won’t ever be in the position of having a baby you ought not to have.
Papa had been a man of character, and now he was dead.
Stephan went to the other side of the train to throw out the diapers, but there were people along the tracks there too: a man in a leather cap, so close to the train that he startled Stephan; a sausage vendor with a customer standing beside his flat tin cart; a nurse walking a baby in a pram, a child no doubt wearing dry, soft diapers rather than thin handkerchiefs. He tried to imagine what his father would have him do, what a man of character would do.
He opened his own suitcase and stuffed the diapers and handkerchiefs in with his clothes, his notebook, and his book of Zweig’s stories. Perhaps the wet diapers would dampen the banned book beyond recognition, but then there would still be the diapers, the evidence of a baby they ought not to have.
Žofie was tucking the sleeping baby into the picnic basket.
Stephan closed his suitcase.
Žofie slid the picnic basket between the seats, making it as unobtrusive as possible.
“Now everyone remember,” Žofie said to the other children, “be very nice to the soldiers and don’t say a word about the baby. The baby is our secret.”
The thumb-sucking boy, number 500, said, “If we talk, they might take her away.”
“That’s right,” Žofie said, clearly as surprised as Stephan at the boy’s subdued but surprisingly certain voice. “Good boy. Good boy.”
The train jerked to a stop, the steam swirling outside the window cloaking them in what seemed suddenly like nothingness, like being alone in the world. But they weren’t alone. They could hear the voices of the soldiers they couldn’t see, German voices calling out to board the cars, to search every child and every suitcase, to make sure each child was properly documented.
“The numbers must match the identification,” a man was commanding over a megaphone. “They must carry no contraband, nothing of value that properly belongs to the Reich. You will bring any Jew who has defied us directly to me.”
Tjoek-Tjoek-Tjoek
Truus stood at the head of the carriage and called, “Children.” Then louder, “Children.” And finally, in a volume her parents had admonished her never to use with the children they’d taken in after the war, “Children!”
The carriage fell silent, all eyes on her. Well, there had never been more than a handful of children at home, and there were sixty here, and nine carriages more to address after they unsealed this one. Her first order of business, of course, must be to find Stephan Neuman who was not really Carl Füchsl before the Nazis did. He wo
uld be on the next carriage forward, with his brother and Žofie-Helene Perger; even in her first alarm after the carriage door was sealed off from all the chaos on the platform and Stephan Neuman was not there, she’d known that was where he was. Now she needed to get him on the carriage Carl Füchsl was meant to be on before unnecessary attention focused on him.
“I know it has been a long journey already,” she said more gently to the children. All day and all night and half the day again, with the hardest bit at the beginning, the saying goodbye. “We’ll be in the Netherlands soon, but we’re not there yet. You must stay in this carriage now, no matter what happens. Stay in your seats, and do what the SS ask of you, with your finest manners. When they have finished, the train will start again, and you’ll hear a change in the sound of the train. Its wheels . . .” She circled her forearm like a piston. “Here in Germany the wheels sound tjoek-tjoek-tjoek-tjoek. But when we get to the Netherlands you will hear tjoeketoek-tjoeketoek-tjoeketoek. Then you’ll be there. Until then, no one is to get off the train.”
Disappearing Twins
As the steam cleared, Stephan saw Nazis already boarding the other carriages, battering the children with their voices, and perhaps more. Stephan couldn’t see what was happening on the other cars. He could only hear children crying, but that might be simply from fear.
Two toddler boys—identical twins—appeared on the platform, escorted away from the train by the SS.
Walter said, “Where are they taking those boys?”
Stephan put his arm around his brother. “I don’t know, Wall,” he said.
Walter said, “Peter and I don’t want to go with them.”
“No,” Stephan said. “No.”
Children, Unnumbered
Truus stepped from the train to the platform, to an SS officer demanding, “No one is to get off the train.” Already, others in the station were watching: an attendant in a bright blue uniform with silver epaulets, a woman who must be the owner of the dozen matching suitcases on the luggage cart between them, a man on a bench behind them who lowered his Der Stürmer to better see.
“No one will get off, dear. I’ll see to it,” she assured the SS, even though she herself had just done so. “Now don’t you dare scare these children.”
She glanced forward to the next carriage, which hadn’t, mercifully, been boarded by the guards yet. If only she could make this fool of a man move more quickly, so she could get Stephan Neuman in the proper carriage before anyone realized.
“You have the paperwork?” the man demanded.
She handed him the folder, saying, “There is a packet inside for each car. They should be fairly well organized, but with six hundred children, it isn’t easy. One or two may be on the wrong car.”
She heard the woman with all the luggage say “Judenkinder” with distaste.
She glanced to the train again. SS, seen through the windows of one of the carriages, were tearing through luggage, dumping suitcases out, and making the poor children undress, for heaven’s sake.
“Your men are terrifying the children!” she said.
The SS leader watched his men on the train indifferently. The man on the bench folded his Der Stürmer, he and the others observing what could be seen through the train windows too.
“We are doing our duty,” the SS said.
“They are not doing their duty,” Truus insisted, refraining from saying “you” despite his identification of himself with his soldiers. Better not to reprimand him personally. “They are behaving very badly,” she said.
Frau Grossman hurried toward her, frantic. Truus signaled her with a bend of her wrist not to interrupt.
“Go on, then,” she said to the SS leader. “Right now, stop them before any more children wet themselves from terror, or your men will have to help us with the changing of six hundred children’s clothes.”
That did get his attention, and that of the onlookers, who turned startled faces back in her direction. She didn’t suppose the soldiers would actually help children change soiled clothes, but nor would he want to have to continue guarding the train while she and the other escorts changed the children themselves, with everyone in the station watching.
As the SS hurried off, calling to his men—“You will check the luggage but you will not frighten the children!”—Truus thought of all the things she ought to have done differently. She ought to have arranged for paid border guards to travel on the train with them rather than having to stop for this kind of fiasco; she might enlist Baron Aartsen’s help in arranging that for future transports, different guards each time, whom she would reward with gifts for their wives after the children were safe. She ought to have brought something to more easily call the children’s attention to her, perhaps her yellow umbrella she could raise high, more obtrusive than her yellow gloves, but with hundreds of children she could not be subtle.
“Truus,” Frau Grossman was saying frantically, and Truus turned to her now that the SS was taken care of.
“I’m sorry,” Truus responded, “but I have to get Stephan Neuman—”
“They’ve taken two of the boys, the identical twins!” Frau Grossman said.
“The Gordon boys? How did they get on this train? They weren’t in the first six hundred.”
“I don’t know. I was getting everyone settled and they sealed the door and the train left and they were just there, standing by the door identically crying!”
“The good Lord help us,” Truus said, balancing the need, hoping she was right about the Neuman boy’s instinct for survival. “All right, come with me. You’ll explain that they threw their numbers out the window. Boys will be boys. I’ll handle the rest.”
“But I . . . I was so terrified. They asked me why these children didn’t have numbers, and I told them they weren’t meant to be on the train.”
Truus could feel the color drain from her face. “All right,” she said. “All right.”
“The boys’ parents—”
“We’ll not be judging the parents,” Truus said. “We might do the same. Let me see if . . . No, come with me. Perhaps we can persuade the Germans to allow you to return with these boys to Vienna and let the rest of the train go along to the Netherlands. We can’t ask for more. We can’t risk the whole train. Thank God they’re a cute little pair.”
The Eichmann Paradox
The man pushed his way into Michael’s office, his dog beside him. Anita trailed behind them, trying to announce this guest arriving on a Sunday, when the office was closed. As Michael stood to greet him, the man eyed the portrait hanging behind the desk, the Kokoschka of Lisl. Michael had claimed the portrait as his own, although of course it had been painted before he ever met Lisl. It belonged to Herman and, as such, was valuable property of the Reich.
“I need six hundred chocolates for a gathering at the Metropole tonight,” the man said without personal address, introduction, or apology.
“Tonight?” Michael said, startled not so much by the short time he was being given on a day when his chocolatiers were not even there as at the fact that Eichmann had come on this modest errand. Michael was only there himself to see Anita. “Of course, Herr Eichmann,” he said, trying to recover. “It would be the pleasure of Neuman’s Chocolates to provide—”
“Neuman’s Chocolates? I was assured this was no longer a Jew business.”
“Wirth Chocolates,” Michael corrected himself, uncertain whether to admit the mistake or pretend it hadn’t been made.
The man was in a rage, and by all accounts had been since the train full of children left the station the prior day. Michael had seen Eichmann leaving Westbahnhof station with his awful dog after the train disappeared down the tracks. It was the last of a dozen times Michael had trod the same path that day, hoping for a glimpse of Stephan and Walter, wishing he’d arranged for them to go with Lisl to Shanghai. He might have done it even as late as when she’d left those few weeks ago. How much greater risk would it have been to have arranged for three passa
ges? But he hadn’t. Then, after the night of violence, there had been no passages to be had, and any non-Jew asking about tickets to Shanghai would have been eyed with suspicion if there were.
The boys were gone now, on the train somewhere between Vienna and the Netherlands. He hoped this man would hold to his word to allow them out of Germany, but he thought it as likely or more that some excuse would be found to stop the transit, and then what would happen to them?
He said, “Six hundred—yes, we can do that.” He glanced at his watch. He would call in the chocolatiers. They would have to skim a selection from the stocks meant to be delivered to customers. “Of course we would be honored to provide a selection of all of our chocolates for you this evening.”
“Six hundred decorated with a train,” Eichmann said.
“All six hundred?” Michael blurted. “Yes, of course,” he amended quickly, with no idea if his chocolatiers could produce that many chocolates in just a few hours, each tiny train hand-painted with a variety of frostings, but what choice was there? “Perhaps you’d like a sample box to take home to your wife and children?” Michael offered, made nervous now not just by his own blunder—questioning anything this man demanded—but also by the way the man again eyed the portrait.
“You have children, Herr Eichmann?” Michael asked, filling the awkward silence, thinking he ought to have left the painting in the closet with the other, to preserve a credible claim that they had been hidden there by Herman, to whom no further harm could be brought. “My—” My godsons, he’d nearly said. Stephan and Walter. “I don’t have children myself, but I believe we have little chocolates painted with the Prater Park Ferris wheel that are quite popular with—”
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