The Last Train to London

by Meg Waite Clayton

  “One of them bit me, Tante Truus!” the girl said.

  She showed Truus her hand—superficial bite marks. Truus reluctantly turned her seat and the baby over to the girl.

  “Hold her until I come back,” she said. “I’ll see about the boys.”

  Then to the sick child, “Come with me, dear heart. Let’s get you cleaned up.”

  And when she was done with settling the squabbling boys and cleaning up the child, she slipped back down to check on the children belowdecks. There were Stephan and his brother, Walter, fast asleep together with the stuffed rabbit. On the floor was the book—beyond saving. She tipped it to see its spine: a volume by Stefan Zweig titled Kaleidoscope.

  The end of a gold chain Stephan never should have brought with him dangled from his pocket. Truus ought to reprimand him for it. He’d put the whole transport at risk, bringing both a gold chain and a banned book on the train? But then he hadn’t expected to be on the train; the poor boy had come to send his brother off alone. And it was done now, and he’d gotten away with it somehow, and these boys had come from such wealth—not just material wealth, but wealth of family—and they were left with so little, not even this book that the boy had sacrificed for the baby’s sake.

  She tucked the chain more securely into his pocket and stroked his hair, thinking Joop would have liked to have a son like this boy. Joop would have loved to have a son.

  Harwich

  The air was cold against gloves and hats and coats buttoned to chins as the ferry floated in toward the dock at Harwich. A film cameraman and photographers recorded the children watching somberly from the Prague’s rail as waves splashed and seabirds circled and called. Truus’s heart broke for these poor dears now that they were in sight of the safety of England—safety without their parents, without their families or friends, in a country where so few of them knew the language, and none of them the customs. They would go to good homes, though, surely. Who but good people would take refugee children from another land and another religion into their lives for what might be years?

  Truus, seeing Helen Bentwich waiting on shore with a clipboard, left the lining up of the children by number to the other adults. She’d considered starting with the problem children first—the baby and Stephan Neuman—but decided in the end to bring the children down single file by number. It was what Helen had requested, and although some little piece of this niggled at Truus—these children with names and personalities and desires, with futures now, being reduced to numbers on cards hung at their necks—there was some benefit in having the process well under way before any explaining was required. She was relieved that it was Helen to whom the explanation would be made. Helen, the woman who never said no. There were so few of those in the world these days.

  Truus felt she ought to say something profound to the children, but what was there to say? She settled for telling them what good children they were.

  “Your parents are all so proud of you,” she said. “Your parents all love you so much.”

  The dock lines were thrown down and tied, the plank lowered to connect these children to the country that would be their new home. Truus took the hand of the first child—little Alan Cohen, with his number 1 card at his neck—and began slowly down the gangway. The children followed in frightened silence, the youngest ones clutching the single baby dolls or stuffed animals they were allowed to bring, as was Alan. Of course they were frightened. Truus was a bit frightened herself, now that it was done, now that she had been a part of separating these children from their parents. My God, my God, why have you forsaken them? But of course these children weren’t the forsaken ones; like Jesus, these were the children who would live again.

  She reached the bottom of the plank, she reached England, with little Alan Cohen’s hand holding tightly to hers.

  “I didn’t know you would be here, Helen!” she said. “What a treat, and a relief.”

  The two women embraced, with Truus still holding Alan Cohen’s hand.

  “I couldn’t resist coming, knowing you would be here,” Helen Bentwich said.

  “Heavens, I wasn’t sure I would be until this minute!” Truus said, and they laughed.

  “Mrs. Bentwich, may I introduce you to Alan Cohen?” she said, handing over the boy’s hand to Helen, who took it in hers and held it fondly, reassuringly. Truus said to the boy, “Alan, das ist Frau Bentwich.”

  Alan regarded Helen cautiously. Well, of course he did.

  “Alan is from Salzburg,” Truus said. The boy’s family had been moved to Vienna after the German invasion, to the Leopoldstadt ghetto in which the Germans were gathering Austria’s Jews until they could decide what to do with them, but his home was Salzburg, and Truus wanted to honor that, Truus wanted Helen to know that each child was an individual, not a number, even number one. “He’s five years old, and he has two younger brothers. His father is a banker.” His father had been a banker in Salzburg until his livelihood was forbidden him, but Helen Bentwich would know that. Helen’s family were bankers too, and Jewish, and well aware of the way Germany was depriving its Jews of everything.

  “Willkommen in England, Alan,” Helen Bentwich said.

  Truus could have wept at the sound of the boy’s name repeated, the child welcomed in his own language.

  As Truus took up the hand of the next child in line, seven-year-old Harry Heber, Helen gently stroked the head of Alan Cohen’s stuffed . . . well, it was hard to say what it was; it had been loved beyond recognition.

  “Und wer ist das?” Helen asked the boy. Who is this?

  Alan said brightly, “Herr Bär. Er ist ein Bär!”

  “Why he is a bear, isn’t he?” Helen said brightly. “Well, Mr. Cohen and Mr. Bear, Mrs. Bates here is going to help you onto the bus.” She pointed to two double-decker buses waiting a short distance away. “The other children will join you, but I’m afraid that as you are the first, it might be, for just a minute . . .”

  Truus eyed what seemed, despite the long distance the boy had already traveled, an impossibly long stretch of emptiness between them and the waiting buses. She said to the boy in his own language, “Alan, why don’t you and Mr. Bear wait here for just a minute while I introduce Harry and Ruth to Mrs. Bentwich, then Mrs. Bates will help the three of you. That way, you and Mr. Bear won’t have to wait alone on the bus. Would that be all right?”

  The boy nodded solemnly.

  Helen and Truus exchanged an understanding glance.

  “Mrs. Bentwich,” Truus said, gently squeezing Harry’s hand, “may I introduce you to Harry Heber?” Again handing over the boy’s hand to Helen. “And this is Harry’s big sister, Ruth. They’re from Innsbruck, where their family are drapers.” The poor father at the Vienna station had said a blessing over his precious children. “Ruth likes to draw,” she said. The girl had told Truus about the charcoal pencils in her suitcase; it was all the girl had now: a few clothes and her drawing pencils. But Ruth and Harry did have each other. A sibling was more than many of the children had.

  TWO BUSES HAD been loaded and Truus had said goodbye in her heart to more than one hundred of the children, the older ones bound for Lowestoft and the younger for Dovercourt, when Stephan Neuman reached the front of the line. He held in his hand only the single suitcase, freed of the soggy diapers and handkerchiefs, leaving only the one change of clothes, the soggy journal, and the ruined book.

  “Mrs. Bentwich,” she said to Helen, “may I introduce to you Stephan Neuman. Carl Füchsl had measles. We felt it better to substitute a healthy child rather than bring you a boatload of disease.”

  Helen said, “Thank you for that, Truus!”

  “Stephan’s father—” Stephan’s father had been a chocolate maker before he died in the awful night of violence against Germany’s Jews. “Stephan’s family have given the world some of its best chocolates, and Stephan himself is a fine writer, I’m told,” she said, remembering Žofie-Helene pleading the boy’s case at registration. “He’s seventeen, and his En
glish is excellent. Now, I know you are sending the older children who haven’t yet been placed with families to Lowestoft, but Stephan’s younger brother, Walter, is back in line with a friend of theirs who is also quite responsible. Perhaps you’ll send Stephan and their friend, Žofie-Helene Perger, with Walter to Dovercourt? I imagine you need some older children to help mind the younger ones, and one who speaks English would be such a help.”

  Helen crossed off Carl Füchsl beside number 120, inserted Stephan’s name and age in his place, and noted Dovercourt.

  Truus said, “You go ahead on the bus, Stephan.”

  “I promised my mother I would not let Walter out of my sight,” Stephan said in perfectly competent if accented English.

  Truus said, “But you weren’t even meant to be on the transport.”

  “I told her I was. I did not think she would let him go otherwise. And she is . . .” He swallowed back emotion. “And my mother is dead.”

  Truus put a hand on his shoulder, saying, “Tot, Stephan? Das habe ich nicht gewusst—”

  Stephan, flustered, said, “No, not dead. Is . . .”

  Truus, seeing that the word, whether he knew it or he didn’t, would not come to his mortified, exhausted tongue, explained to Helen that the boys’ mother was sick, not wanting to say precisely how sick but trying to convey in her expression that these boys would soon have no one but each other. How many of these children would face that prospect? But Truus couldn’t change that; she could only do what she could do.

  Helen Bentwich said, “Stephan, why don’t you wait by the bus for your brother, then. I’ll make sure you and he can stay together.”

  THE LINE WAS nearing its end when Truus, introducing each child to Helen by name, came to Žofie-Helene and the baby, with little Walter as well. The baby was quiet, perhaps sleeping. She was such a good baby. Who wouldn’t want to take in such a good baby?

  “Mrs. Bentwich, may I introduce you to Žofie-Helene Perger,” she said.

  “Helene, like my name, although mine isn’t so beautifully pronounced,” Helen said.

  “Žofie has been good enough to take care of this baby all the way from Vienna,” Truus said. “The infant was . . .” Good Lord, she was going to cry right here, right now, just when these children most needed her to be strong.

  Helen touched a hand to her arm, steadying her as surely as she had that first day they met, as Truus stood in Helen’s office with the snow dome in hand and allowed herself for just that moment to imagine a child who might look like Joop, who might someday build a snowman, or throw a snowball at her, and make her laugh.

  “The infant was put on the train by its mother,” Truus managed, still unable to fathom that, to imagine the depths of despair that would lead a mother to set such a helpless child in the hands of a girl not much more than a child herself, without so much as a name or any hope of being able to find her again. A mother who imagined she was giving her child over to be brought to safety when in fact the child might slip from a girl’s arms, she might fall over the rail of the ferry and into the sea. She might be put to bed at night by a woman who could love her as her own, only to die in a cold quarantine unit in a foreign country. She might die in a quarantine unit when she so easily might have lived with a childless couple who would have loved her, who might somehow have managed to free her mother, to reunite mother and child.

  Žofie-Helene said, “She is put on the train in a . . .” She turned to Truus. “How do I say Picknickkorb, Tante Truus?”

  “In a picnic basket,” Truus managed.

  Žofie said, “I do not know it was a baby.”

  Helen eyed the girl, doubt in her gaze. Well, of course it seemed an improbable story, and it was a different story than the girl had at first told Truus. Truus considered again the friendship between Žofie and Stephan, the boy nearly eighteen, and quite clearly in love with her, the girl not much younger, and sweet on him too.

  “Well, we have no idea who the child is,” she said to Helen. That much was true, for herself at least. “She’ll be the first to be placed, I wager: a baby with no claim to her.”

  Helen studied Truus for such a long moment that Truus had to fight every instinct to turn away.

  “What name shall I put for her, then?” Helen asked.

  “Johanna,” Žofie-Helene said.

  “Unnamed baby,” Truus said firmly. “Her new parents will be unburdened in their choice of names. I believe if you send them both to Dovercourt, Žofie-Helene will care for the child until she is placed.”

  Žofie stood silently as Helen checked off her name.

  “All right then, you may head for the bus,” Helen said.

  “Should I wait for Walter?” the girl asked in her own language, addressing Truus. “He was ahead of me. He’s five hundred and twenty-two, and I’m five hundred and twenty-three.”

  Truus smiled. The girl was a fine girl, and who was she to judge, given the life Žofie had been condemned to for the past year, her father dead and her mother God knows where and the family not even Jewish, the mother putting her own family at risk for the sake of others. And she believed the girl, actually. The simplicity of the picnic basket story had the ring of truth: a baby thrust at the last moment into the care of someone who could rescue her, given over only when the mother was left with no alternative and no time to change her mind.

  “Mrs. Bentwich, Žofie is going to wait while I introduce you to her friend Walter Neuman,” she said, taking Walter’s hand now. “He’s the younger brother of Stephan Neuman, who has been waiting so patiently all this time.”

  Helen Bentwich glanced to the bus, where the older Neuman boy was watching. She stroked the head of Walter’s stuffed Peter Rabbit. “And who is this fellow?” she asked. “Und wer is er?”

  “Das ist Peter,” Walter said, and went on to explain in his own language, “Žofie told me he didn’t need his own necklace, that he could ride for free on mine.”

  Žofie nodded encouragement. “It is a special number,” she said. “It has ten . . . we say faktoren? One, two, three, six, eighteen, twenty-nine, eighty-seven, Einhundertvierundsiebzig, Zweihunderteinundsechzig, Fünfhundertzweiundzwanzig.”

  Helen Bentwich laughed delightedly. “Willkommen in England, Walter und Peter,” she said. “You are both quite lucky, I see!”

  Truus watched as the three children joined the older boy, Stephan lifting Walter into his arms with such joy, and spinning him around, and kissing first the boy and then the stuffed rabbit while Žofie-Helene laughed and the baby woke; the baby made a lovely baby noise that wouldn’t bother a soul even if the child kept you awake all night.

  “An unclaimed baby, Truus,” Helen said.

  Truus looked away, to the steely water lapping against the side of the ferry that would take her home, alone.

  Helen said, “Have you considered taking her back to Amsterdam?”

  “The baby?”

  Helen gave her a look. “It isn’t too late,” she said, raising a hand to catch the bus driver’s attention, motioning him to wait. “Until the bus leaves, I can change the list.”

  Truus watched the children disappear into the bus, trying to imagine their lives here. The baby would be fine. Some kind woman just like Truus herself would long to have a baby. Some woman just like her would see the child as a blessing from God. Some woman would fall in love with the baby, and carry the guilt of secretly hoping no parent would ever come to claim her. What were the chances of that? What would Hitler do to his Jews if there was a war? “If”—as if there were any doubt war was coming, despite the whole world pretending otherwise.

  She looked to the short line of children still waiting on the plank, then to the ferry, to the long stretch of sea she would cross again, with no sick children to tend to on the return, nothing to keep her mind from its own painful path through what she had and what she didn’t, the family she and Joop would likely never have.

  “There are still a hundred children waiting in the Netherlands, another ferry
to arrange,” she said. “And so many children still in Austria.”

  Helen took her hand fully in hers just as Truus had taken each child’s hand before bidding them goodbye, sending them off to their changed lives.

  “Are you sure, Truus?”

  Truus was sure of nothing. Had she ever been? As she watched, unable to answer Helen, to say it wasn’t the baby that was so hard to set free, a light snow began to fall.

  Helen squeezed her hand, understanding somehow what even Truus herself didn’t quite understand, and she waved to the bus driver, and the engine coughed to life. A child was calling out from the bus, then—Žofie-Helene was calling from one of the upper deck windows, “We love you, Tante Truus!” And the bus windows, top and bottom, were suddenly filled with waving children calling out, “We love you, Tante Truus! We love you!” There was Walter, waving Peter Rabbit’s hand in goodbye. And there was Žofie-Helene, holding the baby up now, waving her motherless little fingers as the bus rumbled off, Žofie-Helene waving too.

  Dovercourt

  Stephan watched out the window, Walter on his lap, as the bus passed under a sign that read “Warner’s Holiday Camp.” They carried on down an entry road wet with the melt of the light flurry already ended, leaving the world looking colder and yet no more beautiful. The bus pulled to a stop at a compound with a long, low central building and worn, gabled cottages lining a windswept beach.

  “Peter is cold,” Walter said.

  Stephan wrapped his arms around his brother and the stuffed rabbit. “Don’t you worry, Peter,” he said. “Look, you can see the smoke coming from the fireplace in the big building. I think that’s where we’re going.”

  But the children from the bus ahead of them were carrying their suitcases to the little cottages, which had no chimneys at all. Only adults emerging from cars headed toward the larger place.

  A woman with a clipboard stepped onto the bus.