Gradually, their breathing became more even, but they still didn’t speak. Through Hanover and Bielefeld and Munster, they didn’t say a word, not to each other, certainly not to the others in the first-class compartment. Her father had decided that since they couldn’t take money with them, they ought to spend it on getting out. He was also betting that they’d be treated with more respect traveling first class. He’d been wrong, but it was too late to worry about that.
Through lowered lashes Meike glanced at the others. She didn’t want to meet anyone’s eyes. She didn’t want to call attention to herself. But she was trying to stay alert. She was trying to keep her wits about her.
A motherly looking woman—though motherly was a peculiar term under the circumstances; the woman, plump and deep-bosomed, looked nothing like their own svelte, chic mother—held a box of chocolates on her ample lap. The man beside her was nothing more than two large hands with dark hair at the knuckles holding open a large broadsheet. Next to him and across from David, a man in a dark double-breasted business suit sat erect, his shoulders barely touching the back of the seat, his feet planted several inches apart on the compartment floor. Though he was sitting, he gave the impression of standing at attention. She couldn’t turn her head to see the face of the man beside her in the window seat, but she managed to take in his short body and elegant clothes. The pale camel hair coat was immaculate. The pigskin gloves miraculously free of the soot of the railway car. His shoes were shined to a dazzling glow. Every now and then he reached inside his coat, drew out a spotless handkerchief, and mopped his brow. The car wasn’t that warm. He must be as nervous as she was.
Beyond the window, the fields lay hard and brown in the unforgiving winter sunshine. The train didn’t slow for the smaller stations but sped through in a whoosh of noisy vibration. The shudder of the car was jarring. The slowing of the train for no apparent reason was even more unsettling. Each time it did, she stiffened with fear, imagining every kind of trouble. David must have too, because once he took her hand. She squeezed his in what was supposed to be reassurance but was closer to shared terror. Then the train picked up speed again, and they let go of each other. She looked past the man in the polo coat to the quickly moving landscape. Each mile, each minute, was taking them closer to the border, nearer to safety. But not fast enough. The trip was supposed to take nine or ten hours. It felt like months. The sun set. Dusk closed in. Night fell.
The train was slowing again. She looked out the window into the darkness. Everyone in the compartment looked out the window as they glided into a blaze of illumination and came to a full stop. The platform was lit up like daylight. Men in uniform were swarming up and down, shouting orders, swinging up into the cars. She would have known they were at the border even without the signs. The Netherlands was so close they could sprint to it. But that was the one thing they couldn’t do. She felt the weight of the months of waiting, the more than a year of effort leading up to this moment pressing at her back, propelling her forward, and forced herself to remain still.
During the past year the whispered conversations she’d eavesdropped on through the grating in the floor had changed. Her parents no longer debated if they should leave, only how. Germany was tightening its stranglehold on those who wanted to emigrate. Other countries were finding ways to keep out those who wanted to immigrate. The Third Reich kept reducing the amount of money an individual could take out of the country until it was down to ten Reichsmarks, which amounted to four U.S. dollars. Other countries insisted on financial proof that the new arrivals would not become wards of the state. Sponsors were necessary. The list of obstacles grew and grew.
Her parents wracked their brains for relatives, no matter how distant, friends, no matter how tenuous, professional acquaintances. They wrote and rewrote, collaborating on the phrasing, fine-tuning every word. “Make sure they understand we won’t be a financial burden,” her father told her mother. “I’ll get work immediately. Any kind of work. I’m not proud.”
By this time the discussions were out in the open, and Meike saw her mother flinch at the last sentence. What was a man without pride?
“Do you think this sounds as if we’re begging?” her mother asked about another letter.
“We are begging,” her father replied.
The answers began to come back. Distant relatives had closer nephews and nieces, aunts and uncles to save. Friends described other demands and obligations. “The door is closing in our face,” her mother said. “Not as long as I have my foot in it,” her father insisted. Meike wondered if he was really that optimistic or merely keeping up a façade for the rest of them. Whichever it was, he refused to stop trying. That was how he came up with the idea of Russell and Lydia Bennett, though he admitted they were a long shot.
He’d met the Bennetts a decade earlier in Switzerland at a conference of the International Birth Control League. Lydia Bennett had gone to jail for the cause more than once. Russell Bennett was a magazine publisher who had bailed her out when necessary and run pieces supporting the movement and railing against a government that imprisoned women for trying to save the lives of other women and children. The Bennetts flexed their social consciences every chance they got, so perhaps they weren’t such a long shot after all.
Her father wrote the letter. Now there was a new twist. Meike had to put her ear to the register to discover it. The conversation had turned secret again, with good reason. If the Bennetts felt they couldn’t sponsor the entire family, her father had written, perhaps they could take one of them. Late into the night, Meike listened to the debate. If only one could go, her mother insisted, it should be her father. He would stand the best chance of finding work and bringing the rest of them over. Who knew how long that would take, her father argued. Hope lay in the next generation. They should save one of the children. Finally, her mother agreed. Meike did not have to hang over the hot grate to know which of them it would be. She was the eldest, but David was the boy. A boy carried on the family name. A boy was by definition more important. A boy was a boy. The flash of fury she felt was more scorching than the heat rising through the register. Then she told herself she didn’t have the nerve to start life in a new country on her own anyway.
As it turned out, her parents did not have to pit one child against another and she did not have to bank her rage and envy. The Bennetts, who had no children of their own, would sponsor all of them. The Mosbachs were a family again, not a Darwinian jungle.
Now all they needed were visas. Every weekday morning her father left the house so early that the milk wagons had not yet rolled through the darkness to break the nighttime silence. He was determined to be first in line at the consulate. He had a theory about that, two theories actually. Being first in line showed you were serious, energetic, hardworking, a potential good citizen. And the officials in charge were fresher in the morning, not yet exhausted by the folders full of financial statements proving the applicants would not become public charges, foreign letters pledging sponsorship, certificates attesting to good health; not yet jaded by hard-luck stories and tales of terror and appeals to their conscience, if they had a conscience. That was another variable. Some officials went by the rules, some bent them, and some tightened them like a noose around the applicants’ necks, insisting on the optional papers, which were really farcical demands. What Jew in his right mind would willingly walk into a Nazi police station to request a certificate of good character, or anything else? There was a rumor mill about the various visa offices. Some said Hamburg was the most sympathetic, others warned against the vicious anti-Semite in Stuttgart. Berlin was anyone’s guess. Getting a visa was like playing the roulette wheel in Monte Carlo, only for higher stakes. Yet somehow her father managed to get five of them. Only then did he take their savings and the funds that could be realized on what was left of her mother’s jewelry and purchase five tickets on the S.S. Statendam.
Now the waiting really began. Day by day, their number inched up. A hundred were ahead o
f them, then eighty-five, then thirty. The list moved in fits and starts. The still-unannounced but constantly rumored slamming of the gates loomed. What if their name didn’t reach the top in time? They didn’t speak of the possibility, but it stalked the house, sitting down to meals with them, following them about their daily comings and goings, haunting their sleep. Finally, they were only ten from the top, but ten was no better than a hundred if the Nazis closed off the escape routes. Then suddenly Mosbach was only three from the top. They were going to make it. They really were.
Her mother covered the long dining room table with a quilt—they couldn’t take the table with them, but that didn’t mean she wanted to scratch or chip it—and lined up the suitcases on it. She went back and forth, upstairs and down, gathering clothes and mementos and photographs, the Leica lenses their father had bought and the few pieces of jewelry she had left. She secreted those valuables in jars of creams and tins of talcum powder. Day after day, she put things in the suitcases, stood staring at them, took them out, weighing practical value against sentiment, a warm sweater or pair of boots against the lace she and her mother had worn to walk down the aisle. The choices were excruciating. The emotion was so overwhelming that sometimes she had to hold on to a chair or table to steady herself.
There were moments of contention. She couldn’t stop her husband from taking his Iron Cross, but she put her foot down when Sarah wanted to pack her teddy bear.
“It takes up too much room,” she said. “And you’re too big for a teddy bear.”
“But I can’t leave him here all alone,” Sarah pleaded, close to tears. What she meant was that she couldn’t go to a strange new home in a strange new country all alone.
Meike listened to the back-and-forth. Her mother was right. The bear would take up too much space in a suitcase. But Sarah was right too. She’d need something to hold on to.
“I have an idea,” she whispered to Sarah when their mother went off to decide which of their father’s suits he should take. “Can you keep a secret?”
Sarah nodded.
“I’ll sneak one of your hand puppets into my suitcase. But just one. You’ll have to choose.”
It took Sarah the better part of an afternoon to make up her mind. Did she want the schoolteacher or the ballerina, the clown or the puppy? In the end she decided on the puppy.
“Good choice,” Meike said. “We’ll need a pet in America.”
Finally their number crested. Her mother closed the suitcases. The click of the ten metal fasteners echoed through the stripped-down rooms. Her father handed out the passports, each bearing a large J for Juden, each stamped with the words Gut nur für Auswanderung. Good for emigration only. That was all right, her mother observed. Who would want to return? Her father said nothing, though Meike noticed he’d slipped his Iron Cross Second Class into his breast pocket. A few months earlier she’d had a crush on a boy who hadn’t known she existed. It occurred to her watching her father with his Iron Cross that her unrequited love for that boy had been nothing compared to her father’s for Germany.
She sat in the chill railroad compartment now, clutching the passport in her gloved hand. Meike Sarah Mosbach. J. Gut nur für Auswanderung. Beside her, David held his at the ready. David Israel Mosbach. J. Gut nur für Auswanderung. They each must carry their own, her father had insisted.
The opening and closing of compartment doors, the gruff demands for papers, the confident booming or terrified mewling replies were coming closer. The door to the next compartment slammed shut. The boots pounded the corridor. Did they have to march even on a train? The door opened. An officer stepped inside. Another remained in the corridor. The interior lights glinted off the oiled black surfaces of their weapons.
Meike kept her eyes on the floor, but she watched them, again through lowered lashes. The officer who’d entered the compartment took another step until he was standing over the woman sitting next to the window. He held out his hand. “Papers,” he demanded. His eyes cut to his colleague in the corridor, then back to the woman. His voice was reedy, his cheeks dotted with angry red pimples. He couldn’t be much older than David. Perhaps that would make him more sympathetic, or perhaps he’d be more desperate to prove himself. She’d noticed the glance toward his colleague when he’d demanded the woman’s papers.
Balancing the box of chocolates on her lap with one hand, the woman held her passport out to the officer with the other. He stood studying the document. Did he really think a plump middle-aged woman with a sweet tooth was a threat to the Thousand-Year Reich? Finally, he handed the passport back. The woman smiled, opened the box of chocolates, and offered it to him. He bent a little to get a better view of the assortment in the box. He really was a child. Then he must have remembered the officer in the corridor. “No, thank you,” he said and pivoted to the man in the middle seat.
The man had folded the newspaper and was holding his passport out in one of his hairy hands. Again the officer studied it for some time before handing it back. The man at the end, the one who managed to stand at attention while sitting, handed over his papers. This time the officer did not spend time studying it. He snapped to attention and thanked the man as he handed back the passport. Later she’d wonder if the presence of the man, whoever he was, had provoked the incident. Had both officers been showing off for his benefit?
The officer stepped toward the window again and loomed over the man beside Meike. He not only had his passport out, he’d opened it to the appropriate page. As he handed it over, she glimpsed the large J.
Again, the officer stood studying the passport. “Juden,” he said.
The man shrugged as if the condition couldn’t be helped.
The officer asked his line of work.
The man said he was a jeweler. This time he didn’t shrug.
The officer asked which piece of luggage was his. The man pointed to a worn but still handsome calfskin portmanteau in the rack directly over his head.
“Take it down,” the officer ordered.
The man stood and turned, but he couldn’t reach the rack. She hadn’t realized how short he was when he was sitting. A porter must have put it up for him. The man lifted his arms and jumped, but it was no good. The officer stood grinning as the man struggled. The other men in the compartment were watching, but none offered to help. Meike sensed David beside her watching too. He’d already had a growth spurt and could have reached the rack easily. She took his hand to keep him from moving.
The officer ordered the man to take off his coat. The man undid the buttons, slipped out of it, and held it out to the officer. He rolled it into a pillow and put it on the plush upholstery. “Now you can reach it,” he said, and half pushed, half lifted the man onto the seat. As he reached for the suitcase, Meike could see the sooty black prints his well-shined shoes left on the pale cloth of the coat.
The man wrestled the portmanteau, which he could still barely reach, out of the rack and, struggling not to drop it on the officer who was standing beneath him, climbed back down. He put it on top of the soiled coat. The officer snapped open the brass fittings, unfolded the mouth of the case, reached inside, and began pulling out the contents, a silk dressing gown, a pair of trousers, several shirts. One after another, he flung them to the floor of the compartment. Through downcast lashes, Meike saw the man flinch as each garment landed.
The officer reached in again, lifted out a traveling chess set, and tried to open it, but he couldn’t work the clasp. Meike noticed the flush creeping up his skinny pimpled neck. He held it in front of the man’s face and ordered him to open it. The man did. The officer took out a bishop and shook it. The only noise was the jeweler’s heavy breathing. He sounded asthmatic. By now the second officer had stepped into the compartment. He took the bishop from his colleague and shook it beside his ear. Still no sound. One by one, they began taking out the chess pieces, shaking them, handing them back and forth, and shaking them again. The silence in the compartment grew more ominous. The asthmatic breathing
heavier. A flush had crept up the younger officer’s neck to his ravaged face. Now and then the older officer glanced at the straight-backed man in the corner. Meike thought of her mother’s bracelet in the tub of cold cream in her suitcase, the Leica lens in the Vaseline jar in David’s. Her insides felt as viscous as those sticky substances.
The senior officer threw a pawn to the floor and brought his boot down on it. Perhaps he thought the jeweler would hide his most valuable items in the least valuable pieces. The younger officer bent to pick up the shards. He handed them to his colleague and together they stood examining them. They clearly did not like what they saw. The older one threw another piece to the floor and stomped on it. Again, the younger one stooped to pick it up. They went on that way through the pawns, rooks, knights, bishops, queens, and kings. With each piece they flung more violently and stomped harder. They were glancing at the important official more often now. They’d boxed themselves into a corner. Everyone in the compartment knew it. The jeweler knew it better than any of them. Meike could smell the sweat and fear coming off him. The senior officer muttered something to the younger one. Meike couldn’t make out the words, but she recognized the tone. They weren’t going to let some Jew outsmart them.
It took both officers to subdue the man. He was short and portly but desperate. As they frog-marched him out of the compartment and down the corridor, he continued to struggle. Meike glanced out the window to the platform. The man was still flailing. Then the blow from the butt of a rifle made him double over.
The Living and the Lost Page 9
