by Bodie Thoene
She shook her head and stamped her foot impatiently. The telegrams were addressed to him, the gesture said. Why was he wasting time?
Anna discreetly remained a few steps away as Murphy tore open the envelopes and began to read. Elisa pressed herself against his arm and had read through the first message before he finished.
“America!” she exclaimed. “So soon?”
Anna stepped nearer and stood tiptoe as she tried to see the message over Murphy’s shoulder. “From Trump, my publisher in the States,” he explained, then read aloud:
“Murphy Stop Most urgent you return States at once Stop You and wife booked with Kronenberger boy leaving Southampton the fifteenth on Queen Mary Stop Will meet you at dock in New York Stop Trump”
Anna sat down slowly on the piano bench. “The fifteenth? But that is only a few days. Oh dear! Leaving Prague so suddenly?”
Elisa seemed not to hear. She shook Murphy’s arm impatiently. “The other one, Murphy,” she urged. “Maybe it’s from Leah.” The thought of a trip to America had not yet penetrated her excitement.
Murphy grimaced as he read aloud the second wire. It was from Timmons and Johnson in Paris. Elisa groaned audibly in disappointment at the signature.
“Call Paris INS Office Sunday two p.m. Paris Time Stop News of kids family Stop Timmons and Johnson”
The kids referred to in the wire meant Charles and Louis. Timmons and Johnson had obviously come across some important news about the Kronenberger family.
Elisa could not muster any enthusiasm for that possibility. She turned away from Murphy and stood with her hand on her forehead. She was swaying slightly. Murphy laid the yellow telegrams back on the piano and put his hands on her shoulders. Tomorrow was time enough to consider a trip to the States and a phone call to Paris. For now, however, the weight of worry and uncertainty about Leah and Louis was almost crushing.
“No word.” She sighed. “Still no word.”
“They are all right,” Anna answered softly. “Karl and Marta Wattenbarger are capable people. Good people. If Otto reached the farmhouse with them—”
“Oh, Mama!” Elisa cried as she turned to embrace Murphy. “We don’t even know that much! Don’t even know if Otto got them out of Vienna. And if he didn’t, we won’t know . . . not ever . . . what has become of them! There is no way to get through to the Wattenbargers.”
Murphy stroked her hair. The white dress shimmered in the soft lamplight. This was not the way he had hoped to end the evening. “You can’t let yourself worry about it anymore,” he said gently.
“Not worry?” She drew back from him as though the words had burned her. “How can I not worry? Haven’t we been through enough agony when Papa was arrested? When will they leave us alone?” She pulled loose and sank down next to Anna on the piano bench. She began to cry softly as Anna put an arm around her.
Anna looked at her new son-in-law apologetically. For twenty-three years she had been comforting Elisa. It was a hard habit to break. “Your husband is right, Elisa,” Anna chided, but not unkindly. “There is a hope that heals and also a hope that can destroy you if you hold too tightly to it. Hope first in the same hand that delivered your father. God knows where Leah is, Elisa. Have you forgotten that?”
“Oh, Mama!” Elisa wept even harder now. Murphy looked helpless and unhappy. He picked up the telegrams and put them down again. Maybe it was better to let the women sort these things out.
“Anna,” he began, “Elisa—I’m going on to bed now.” He tugged at his tie as if to make that point. “You two talk it over. I . . . wish the wires had been what we were waiting for.” Elisa simply nodded. Anna gave him a reassuring wink. It would be all right. Elisa would pull herself together. Maybe tomorrow they could talk about something else. About a trip to America. About news of the Kronenberger family in Paris. But for tonight, Anna seemed to say in a look, Elisa needs time to cry. There had not been one tear shed since the night they had returned to Prague together. Perhaps loving Murphy had left no time for sadness and doubt about the fate of Leah.
“A good cry,” Murphy muttered uncomfortably in English. “My mother used to say every woman needs one sometimes.” He half smiled as Anna nodded. Then he gazed miserably at Elisa. He wished there were something he could say or do to cheer her up. When he made no move to leave she looked up at him. Her eyes were bright with tears. How can a woman look beautiful even when she cries? he wondered. It made his heart squeeze.
“I’ll be along later,” she croaked.
He was being dismissed. There were things he just could not take care of for her. “Yes. Then . . . Grüss Gott, Elisa.”
***
Elisa closed her eyes and listened as Murphy’s footsteps retreated down the hall. All the simmering worries about Leah and little Louis had surfaced with paralyzing intensity. She did not try to speak of it, nor did she need to. It was enough that Anna understood the silent grief of not knowing! Was there anything worse than this gnawing uncertainty? Why had she not heard from Leah? Obviously Leah had not yet been able to make her way to freedom. But was she safe? Had she been captured? Would there come a time when Elisa would be forced to tell Charles that his brother was dead as well?
Terrible images filled Elisa’s mind like the plot of a tragic play. She imagined Nazi SS and Gestapo agents pursuing Leah through the mountain passes. The victims in the Vienna Gestapo headquarters suddenly had Leah’s voice and Leah’s face! Louis whimpered in a dark corner; then he shouted as he had that last horrible night in the apartment in Vienna, “I cannot go anywhere without him. I want Father! I want my mother!”
Tonight the reasons they had not left Vienna together were forgotten. Guilt hovered above Elisa. She was safe, and Leah was not! Why had she consented to their separation? It had made sense that night. Now it made no sense at all.
“You will be together again,” Leah had promised Louis. She had not offered that comfort to Elisa. Leah had not said, “We will be together again.” No. The two friends had said their farewells. Both, perhaps, had sensed that it was forever. At least for this lifetime. Still, Elisa could not accept the finality of that parting—not tonight, when reality crowded out the carefree joy she had felt with Murphy.
“Oh, Mama,” she whispered to Anna, “tonight Murphy was afraid. I felt it in his hand. Saw it in his eyes, and suddenly I was terrified again.”
Anna chose her words carefully. There was so much to fear. So many things that played upon the mind and called out from nightmares. “I feel it, too. A hundred times a day it all comes to me—what we may be facing, what many are facing now.”
“How do we keep going?” Elisa shook her head in helpless frustration. “All around it is so dark.”
Anna nodded. There was no sense in making such feeling sound trivial. To deny such fear was to lie. It was real. The darkness was real and the fears were justified. “When I am most afraid I remember what my mother used to say: ‘Put on your hundred-year glasses, Anna, so you can see yourself a hundred years from now.’ Where will you be in a hundred years? Where will I be? And Papa? And Wilhelm and Dieter? And your Murphy? And Leah?” Anna had listed the most important people in Elisa’s life. In a hundred years they would all be together—somewhere besides Prague.
“A hundred years is a very long time to wait.” Elisa managed a smile.
“It will pass much more quickly than you can imagine. And be certain, Elisa, it will pass.”
“But in the meantime?”
“In the meantime you must finish your tea and wash your face and say your prayers.”
“And go to America?” Elisa asked painfully.
“For the sake of Charles. Yes. There is much the boy still must go through, and we must be strong for the sake of the children, Elisa. We must teach them to live now, but also to see their lives through those hundred-year glasses.” Anna frowned. “Such a point of view somehow makes each moment, each action, each prayer seem much more important, I think. Especially in such dark times as these.”<
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Just for a moment Elisa slipped into the dark room where Charles slept. The cello case was open in the corner. The child opened it each night before he went to sleep. Its dignified presence seemed to comfort him with the promise that he would indeed see his brother Louis and dear Leah once again.
Elisa let her eyes linger on the instrument. She pictured Leah sitting in the shadows behind it. If she listened carefully, she could hear music. Elisa smiled. A hundred years from now the old cello would probably still be around. Another generation of musicians would play the music of Bach and Schubert and Mendelssohn, just as others had played the songs before Leah and Elisa were born. The thought warmed away the chill of fear that had gripped her heart. She gazed tenderly down on Charles. His head was turned on the pillow as if he had been listening to music. His fingers curved as if he touched the strings.
Elisa stroked his forehead, smoothing back a lock of soft blond hair. He sighed with contentment and his cheek moved as if he would smile. Very soon you will smile, Charles. And very soon you will speak and sing like other children, she thought. What would this small, frail boy say? What gentle words must live in such a heart!
Charles opened his eyes and gazed up at Elisa in drowsy contentment. Those blue eyes smiled and spoke clearly to her. He reached up and slipped his fingers into her hand as if to say, “It will be all right. Do not worry, Elisa. You will see. We will be together again, all of us. And even a hundred years will not seem like a long time.”
***
It was an event that called for celebration in the city of Hamburg. Since early morning, busloads of Hitler Youth had been arriving on the docks to wave their Nazi flags and to shout obscenities as the Jews passed through the gauntlet of SS soldiers and Gestapo guards on their way to the freighter.
Most of the Jews were children, not older than those who cursed and spat on them from the sidelines. Some of the Jews were women, ringed by frightened little ones who clung to their skirts and trembled before the angry mob. A few, very few, were men who had managed to avoid arrest as enemies of the Reich. They all had one thing in common—they were the lucky Jews in Germany, the ones who had by some miracle managed to buy their way out of the country. They were eight hundred souls who were fortunate enough to be granted exit visas. They were leaving Germany with nothing but the clothes they wore on their backs. But they were alive, at least. They were indeed lucky.
“Filthy swine Jews!”
“Get out! Jews out! Jews out!”
“May you drown like rats!”
“Stinking . . . ”
“Christ-killing filth! Good riddance!”
Plank by plank the eight hundred climbed the ramp and crowded onto the deck of an ancient, rusted hulk that had never been built to carry human cargo. There was not room for even one hundred on the freighter, but eight hundred gladly crammed together in the cargo hold, the narrow corridors, on the steps, and in the galley. Small groups claimed a place beside a coil of rope or beneath a rust-streaked porthole.
The Gestapo still prowled among them, stepping over bodies, checking papers for the thousandth time. Here and there shrieks of grief and terror rose up as the state police chose one more victim to sacrifice, one more enemy of the Reich to tear from his family! And the numbers dwindled from eight hundred to seven hundred eighty-four. Eighty-three. Eighty. Seventy-nine. Seventy-six.
Below on the quay the Hitler Youth shouted for blood as Jewish criminals with ashen faces were led back down the ramp. “Kill the Jewish filth! Wipe them off your boots! Don’t bring them back into Hamburg alive!”
Truncheons and hobnailed boots motivated those who tried to cling to the rails of the ship. “So you thought you were safe! You thought you would get away!”
It was the living example of the child’s board game played happily by the Aryan schoolchildren of Hitler’s Reich—roll the dice and land on the proper square, and you chase the Jews out! It was an event of such joyous celebration that the brigades of Hitler Youth would remember the sight for a lifetime. They would someday tell their grandchildren: “I was on the docks cheering when we shoved the last stinking Jew into the water!”
Of course, these were certainly not the last Jews in Hamburg. But they were the last who would leave the country legally with an exit visa. No doubt the government had other things in mind for the Jews who remained behind.
As wives wept and watched their arrested husbands being dragged toward the waiting police vans, the mooring lines were cast loose even before the ramp was raised.
Applause and still more curses rose up to drown out a last farewell.
“Philip!”
“Daddy! Daddy!”
“Johann! Liebchen! Johann!”
A hail of rocks and bottles and spit flew upward onto the decks to christen the creaking hull with Aryan contempt and hatred. Seven hundred seventy-six lucky Jews were leaving the German port of Hamburg that morning. The free press would cover that departure. News and photographs would grace the back pages of several European newspapers as proof that Jews . . . some Jews . . . were indeed allowed passage out of Germany. The Führer encouraged Jews to leave, as a matter of fact. Had he not sent the legions of his youthful disciples to cheer the departure?
Yes. Jews could leave Germany if they so wished. If they paid their taxes and fines. If they took no more than twelve marks out of the country. If they were not considered potential enemies to the Reich. If they signed a release extolling the kindness and fair treatment of the German government. If they . . .
Slowly, slowly, the listing, rusty hulk of the SS Darien rumbled out of the port of the Elbe River toward the safety of the open sea. The Darien had charted no course for the journey. The captain of the ship, the crew, the passengers still did not know their destination. They had no distant harbor to look for, no future home. No nation on the face of the earth had yet granted the Darien permission to anchor. No government had offered haven to these homeless ones who crowded sun-cracked decks and searched the jagged skyline of the nation that had once been home.
The ocean swells were a more solid place to stand than the soil of Germany now. Those whom they had left behind were condemned to drown in a storm more violent than the North Sea could ever devise.
The SS Darien. Destination: unknown. Cargo: seven hundred seventy-six lucky Jews.
7
Training Ground
The terrorist training grounds of the Nazi SS were tucked into the hills a few miles beyond Munich. The barracks housed men from many different countries whose leaders had formed a common bond with the Third Reich.
More than languages separated the units. Racial barriers were a common problem in the training of these men. Those of Aryan blood from Czechoslovakia despised the Arabs who had come for training from Palestine. The Aryans from France likewise hated the Spanish terrorists who had been sent by Franco.
Stronger bonds united them, however. Each unit shared the goals of the triumph of fascism, the hatred of Jews, and the destruction of the Western democracies. Even in Germany, these things transcended the issues of race and German culture. Hitler himself was a leader who said that the issue of race was simply used to unify the masses toward one goal.
Thirteen Arabs had come for training at the request of Haj Amin el Husseini. The annihilation of the Zionists was his goal, and it bonded him strongly to Hitler. Today those dark-skinned Arabs stood in a semi-circle among a group of twenty-two Germans from the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia.
At the center of this group was an aging Mercedes with an open hood. Besides its right front fender stood Georg Wand, a man small of stature but great in his accomplishments for the Reich.
An observer looking over the tall stone wall of the compound might have mistaken this gathering for a lecture on auto repair. In fact, it was a demonstration of the ease with which an automobile and its occupants might be blown to pieces.
Georg held up the length of copper pipe for all the group to see. It was the most ordinary sort of pipe used i
n all modern plumbing, he explained through an interpreter. Sealed on one end, the pipe was then packed with explosives, and a spark plug was placed in the other end. To the spark plug a wire was attached.
Raising his voice as he pointed beneath the hood, he smiled benignly. “This is the distributor. You see these wires lead from the distributor to the spark plugs of the engine! So! It is a simple matter of unplugging one wire from the spark plug and attaching it to our little bomb. When the victim starts the car, the electric charge runs through the wire, and the spark plug ignites the explosives.”
He attached the device in seconds as a murmur of approval passed through the students. It was so very easy. One could do it by feel in the dark!
“And now, shall we demonstrate what happens?” The group followed him meekly into a concrete bunker. Dark glasses were handed to them as they took their places to peer out at the Mercedes. Georg Wand counted to three and turned the remote switch that started the car. In that instant a scorching blast tore through the metal of the machine and a cloud of fire consumed the interior, devouring the dummies that had been placed there for effect. The hood was shredded and sent flying fifty feet in the air, along with bits of glowing metal that would mow down anyone in the immediate area. Well-placed, a car bomb could be a device that might kill and maim hundreds!
The students applauded as the last chunks of metal fell to the ground around the burning skeleton of the automobile.
Georg Wand posed the question. “How might you use such a device in Jerusalem?”
Hands went up. He chose a young, rather Aryan-looking Arab to answer. “In the Jewish shopping district. Or perhaps at the motor pool of the British headquarters.”
“And what will be the effect of such devastation?”
“Terror!”
“To what end?”
“To frighten the government into accepting our demands.”
“Which are?”