by Bodie Thoene
There seemed to be no hint of sorrow now about leaving Germany. They had lost everything, given up everything for a place beneath the vent shaft. Life had been stripped bare of all illusions of what was important. Divested of all superficial worries, Klaus and Maria had found everything that really mattered—their family. To sit with each other and the five children beneath a vent shaft in the fog was the entire focus of all joy and thankfulness. They were alive. They were together.
Had there ever been a time when they had worried about bills? This moment drove that memory from their minds. Had Klaus ever longed for a radio for their apartment? He could not remember the longing. Was it true that Maria had once sat at the table and wept because all five children needed shoes at the same time? That all seemed so long ago. Another lifetime before this, perhaps.
Now silent tears streamed down Maria’s face and blended with the mist. Here was joy. Five tousled heads. Five sets of little feet. A husband beside her. No one missing. None had been lost. Soon they would join Bubbe in America. Boiled down to raw essentials, Maria and Klaus discovered that the only thing essential now was life itself. Neither of them tried to speculate on where they would spend the rest of their lives after they left the place beneath the vent shaft. Perhaps there would be a warm stove and a kitchen table and steaming cups of tea in their future, but they did not imagine that any place on earth would ever seem as wonderful as this place.
On the ship’s bridge, someone clanged the hour on a little bell. It was eleven o’clock. Nearly the end of The Day they left Nazi Germany. Despite seasickness and overcrowding and uncertainty, it had been a perfect day for them.
Here and there across the crowded deck there was soft weeping and muffled moans of grief from those who had not been so lucky as Klaus and Maria. There were those among the refugees who had first lost everything, and then had lost someone. To lose someone, Maria thought as she listened to the sobs of a woman beside the rope coil, that is to lose everything!
Maria rested her cheek against the arm of Klaus and closed her eyes as shadowed figures moved to comfort the woman whose husband had been arrested by the Gestapo that morning.
“Go to sleep, my Maria,” Klaus whispered. “We are together.” His words were a benediction that ended months of worry about travel papers and Gestapo raids. “All of us. Safe.”
Earlier Klaus had explained to the children that Noah had not known where the ark would finally come to rest. The important thing was to get on the boat, to escape the flood and destruction that would surely come. God would find a harbor for them. Somewhere there was a nation that would hold out the olive branch. Somewhere there was a Mount Ararat where this ark would rest.
***
Maria was not certain how long she had been asleep, or if, even now, she was not still asleep. The constant vibration of the ship had lulled her into dreams that stayed with her even after she opened her eyes. In counterpoint to each dull pulse of the giant pistons, she thought she had heard yet another faint thump and the voice of a man crying weakly for help: “Help me! For the love of God . . .”
Maria sat up beside the slumped form of Klaus. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and leaned close to him to see if perhaps he was crying in his sleep. His lips did not move. His breath was steady and even, matching the cadence of the ship’s internal rhythm.
A dream. You have been dreaming, Maria, unless the ship itself calls out. The thought made her shudder. She listened hard, scanning the sleeping shapes that littered the deck like discarded sacks. Had someone called? Was someone having the nightmare they had all lived through these last months?
“Help . . . bitte . . . help me!”
There it was again. Faint, but clear. Far away, as though it came from the bowels of the ship itself. “Bitte . . . help . . .”
Ghost ship. Coffin ship. So they had named the little freighter with its cargo of hated Jews. Did the souls of these now cry out as one to the night?
A cold chill of dread coursed through Maria. All the pleasant thoughts of a few hours ago disappeared. Each thump of the engine was answered by a sharp Clang, Thump! Clang, Thump! “Help . . . thump . . . me!”
This was no dream. The voice did not come from anyone on deck. Indeed, it echoed hollowly from the broad cone of the ventilation shaft—from inside the freighter!
Maria’s mouth was dry. She tried to swallow and then reached out to nudge Klaus awake. Deep in sleep, he moaned a protest and tried to brush her hand away.
“Bitte . . . for God’s sake . . . hilf mir bitte!” The words were followed by a groan.
“Klaus!” Maria hissed, pounding on her husband’s arm.
Irritated, Klaus sat up reluctantly, and three children protested the motion of their human pillow. “What is it, Maria?” His voice was sharp. “You want me to run downstairs for a cup of tea?”
“Shhhhh!” she insisted, putting her hand on his shoulder and raising her nose as if to sniff the air.
Thump. Clang. Thump. Clang.
“Just the engine.”
“No! Listen!”
Clang. Thump!
“It is the engine. You woke me to listen to—”
“Help, please,” the voice cried out again.
Now the eyes of Klaus widened.
“There, you see?” Maria was exultant. Yes! Klaus had heard the voice.
Klaus leaned forward, repeating the steps she had taken to determine where the plea was coming from. Not the deck. The voice called out again and Klaus placed his ear against the metal ventilation shaft. He gasped as the clanging sound rang out again.
“Here!” he cried, jumping to his feet. Children tumbled unhappily onto the planks, and the blanket shelter came loose and fell down over them.
“What’s going on?” shouted an angry voice from a few feet away.
“We are trying to sleep here!” protested a woman, struggling to sit up.
Klaus stood on his toes and peered down the curved horn of the giant shaft. “Is someone in there?” he cried.
Faintly the voice replied, “Please! Help . . . me!”
Maria struggled to her feet and stood at the elbow of Klaus. Others among the passengers stumbled to the shaft.
“There is someone down there!”
“You’re all dreaming!”
“No, I tell you—there! Did you hear that? A voice!”
As if strengthened by the presence of humans, the voice cried an urgent explanation. “Please! A rope, or I shall fall! The grid broke beneath my feet . . . ”
Klaus shouted to the woman by the rope coil, “Bring some rope!”
Two frail old men tottered to fetch the end of the thick braid.
“Please!” begged the voice in the shaft. “I cannot—”
“It’s a sixty-foot drop if he falls through the shaft,” someone muttered.
“What is he doing in there, anyway?”
“What are we all doing on this ship?”
His five excited children clinging to his legs, Klaus fed the rope down the shaft. “It is coming! Hold on! Tell us when you have it!”
“So dark . . . black down here.” The voice echoed. “Hurry.”
“It is coming!” Klaus reassured the man, trying to imagine how anyone might survive in the shaft that dropped straight down. Was the prisoner bracing himself with hands and feet? If so, how would he grasp the rope? Might it slide right down past him?
“Here! I . . . hold on to your end—”
A dozen passengers and two dozen excited children grasped the rope to brace it against the weight of the voice. Like a giant fish on a line, the voice became the weight of flesh and bone suspended in the middle of the vertical shaft.
“Pull him up!” Klaus grimaced at the weight and leaned against it as the group moved inch by inch across the deck in a tug-of-war. “More men!” Klaus groaned as the weight slipped back several inches.
Fortified by the addition of several scrawny adolescents who answered the call, the rope began to move up more qui
ckly.
“I see light!” the voice called loudly. “Thank God! Thank—” And then the voice emerged from the horn of the shaft. The face was blackened with soot. The face had no beard or hair. Large hands were caked with blood and dirt. The voice belonged to a huge man who had been stripped of every excess pound and who now was simply an enormous blackened skeletal frame. This strange apparition slid from the shaft and then, still clinging to the rope, shot out of the cone and crumpled down onto the place Klaus and Maria had chosen for their quarters.
A spotlight shone down from the bridge, showing that the man was completely naked and blackened not from soot alone but from burns that ran in a curved line from the back of his neck to the sole of his right foot. The festering wounds reeked. Their catch from the ventilation shaft was unconscious. Possibly they had rescued him only so he could die in the open air.
Children clung to Maria. “Mama! He is lying on our bed!”
“We need a doctor here!” Klaus knelt beside the injured man but was afraid to touch him.
“He is burned.”
“From being in the shaft?”
“No. This is a shaft for fresh air. Something else—”
“I am a doctor!”
“Let him through. Let the doctor through, please.”
“You think he escaped from the Gestapo?”
“What else? We have all escaped from the Gestapo, nu?”
After a few minutes of speculation and examination, the injured man was carefully moved belowdecks. He would probably not live, the doctor had muttered. How could such a battered creature survive?
Barely twenty minutes had passed since Maria had first heard the feeble call, and the excitement was over. The family had lost two precious blankets to the man from the shaft. On any other occasion she might have fretted over their loss. But not tonight.
***
Charles could not think why Anna and Elisa seemed so sad. As for himself, Charles was ecstatic at the thought of his first airplane ride. Theo, who now wore the uniform of an officer in the Czech Air Corps, had told him all about the way the wind would pass beneath the wings to hold the aircraft up. He had told him stories of daring pilots from Germany in the last great war. Charles had sat all evening on his knee and listened as he spoke about the young men he now trained to fly at the airfield just beyond Prague. Dieter was there now. He slept in a large barracks with fifty other cadets who were part of the program Theo worked in.
“Before you leave tomorrow,” Theo said, looking very brave in his uniform, “I will take you for a tour, Charles. Maybe Dieter can show you his bunk, and if there is time, perhaps, how would you like to go up for a ride in a training craft?”
Charles nodded enthusiastically. This was more than he had dreamed. Better than Leah’s promise of running through green grass or climbing a tree! When he saw his brother again, he would draw a picture to show him how Theo had taken him up in the sky. Much higher than climbing a tree!
Theo laughed and mussed Charles’s hair, then lifted him back onto the floor. “There’s a good boy, Charles! You will like flying, and I will take you up and have you back before Anna can say a word.”
Charles simply gazed at Theo. Always before Charles had thought that Theo was an old man, but now, in his dark green uniform with the insignia of an officer on his arm, he seemed not to be old at all. No, Charles decided, Theo was really a young man with silver hair and bright blue eyes that sparkled in a craggy face. His shoulders were broad and his posture as straight as any officer Charles had ever seen.
As for the limp Theo walked with, it was just another sign of what a great pilot he had been. Theo had let him touch the jagged scar of his war wound as he had told the story of what had happened in France. He spoke about the Red Baron and another pilot named Wilhelm von Kleistmann, who was killed in a crash. Also he talked about Hermann Göring, who had flown with his squadron. Göring had liked Theo very much; they had been friends once.
“Theo!” Anna scolded from the doorway. “What tales are you telling the child? Hermann Göring, indeed!”
“He likes my stories; don’t you, Charles?” Theo defended as Charles nodded his enthusiasm. “Besides, Anna, it doesn’t hurt the boy to know that even good men can go bad.”
“Hermann Göring was never a good man!” she said severely. “A greedy buffoon. Hungry for food. For women. And now for power. I never liked him.”
“You always were a better judge of character than I.” Theo reached for her playfully. “Now tell me what you are really angry about.”
“You. In that uniform. A volunteer, you said.”
“And so I am. Just a volunteer. But don’t you feel safer seeing me in a uniform again?”
“Last time I saw you in a uniform, we lost the war!” Anna pulled away and left the room.
Theo sighed. “Women. Beyond understanding, Charles. You know, she married me because I was so handsome in my uniform.” Then Theo told Charles of Anna and his first meeting. How he had gone back again and again to hear Anna play the piano concerto by Schubert. How he had waited outside the stage door because he had fallen in love with her so completely. “And she also fell in love with me,” Theo finished. “And she still loves me, or she would not be so angry. Do you understand, child?”
Charles shook his head in a solemn no. He wished Theo would get back to the war stories.
“Ah, well, I shouldn’t expect you to understand. You have to be Murphy’s age before it becomes important.” Theo gazed thoughtfully at his spit-shined boots. “Perhaps I should have a fatherly talk with Murphy before they leave tomorrow. No use letting the women in this family hold all the cards.”
***
After dinner Anna and Elisa cleared the table, washed and dried the dishes, and put them away, while the men talked in the music room.
Their faces were serious when the women entered. They had spent the hour discussing details of business and the possibilities of political events that might threaten them.
“The nation that controls the skies will also control the world—” Theo stopped short as Anna and Elisa entered.
Serious discussion was put away. Anna sat at the piano and Elisa produced her violin. Charles, sensing that such a gathering might also need a cello, grabbed Murphy by the hand and dragged him off to fetch Vitorio from the corner of his room.
Murphy marveled at the little boy’s sensitivity as he propped up the case and opened it, then pulled back the silk scarf that covered the gleaming wood.
The boy crossed his arms and gazed at the instrument with satisfaction. “There,” he seemed to say. “Now we have a trio!”
For a moment Anna considered the instrument, then absently said, “If you like, Elisa, we can keep Leah’s cello here for her. It would save you the trouble of—”
The pain on the face of little Charles stopped her. He groaned and shook his head wildly.
No, the cello must not stay here. He would not go without Vitorio! That was his only promise that he would see Leah again. And if he saw Leah, then he would also be reunited with his brother, Louis. Vitorio must go with them to America!
“No, Mama.” Elisa gazed sadly at Charles. “Do you hear me, Charles?” she asked, reaching out to touch his arm. “We will take Vitorio with us.”
“Along with your violins?” Anna seemed surprised. “You will look like a traveling orchestra.”
“The gangsters will think we are carrying very large guns.” Murphy winked at Charles now, which made him smile in spite of the scar. “Fellows like Al Capone carry their machine guns inside violin cases, see?”
“Well, we cannot leave Leah’s cello in Prague, Mama,” Elisa said. “Leah told Charles it is a magic carpet.”
“Yes,” Theo added. “Enough magic to keep the plane up even without wings. No doubt Leah will reach America before we do—”
Anna looked up at him sharply. He ducked slightly and concentrated on the floor.
“Yes.” Elisa appeared as if she might cry. Who could s
ay how long it might be before they were together again? “When Leah writes, you must tell her how to contact us.”
“If nothing else, we can give her the name of your bank.” Theo was serious. A small fortune was being transferred from their Swiss account to Chase-Manhattan on Elisa’s behalf. Until they were settled in, any urgent messages would also be passed through the bank in New York. More than simply a personal margin of financial security for Elisa, such a vast amount might have other uses, Theo had explained to Murphy. The uses were unspecified, but Murphy had no doubt that Theo was speaking of the black market trade for American visas and passports. If there was difficulty obtaining those precious documents through the legal channels in the States, then Murphy would find a way to purchase them—just in case the situation in Czechoslovakia deteriorated.
Murphy also understood quite clearly that the personal fortune of Theo and Anna Lindheim was still actively purchasing the lives of prisoners attempting to flee Germany and Austria. Here in the relative safety and comfort of the house on Mala Strana, a very quiet, personal battle was still taking place between Theo and the Nazis who had thrown him into Dachau.
Twice, in the delirium of his fever, Theo had mentioned the covenant. A priest. A cantor. A man named Stern. The strange reference of the Herrgottseck of Dachau. No one had asked him to explain these dark and frightening words. It was enough that he had been to hell and had survived. Could they ask him to speak of it? So much was simply accepted in silence that an explanation seemed somehow an invitation to destruction. The walls had listened in Germany. The walls had heard that Theo Lindheim gave funds to the dreaded Zionists. Here in Prague might the walls also hear and whisper tales of the covenant to those who walked in darkness beyond the Charles Bridge? And might not those enemies come here to the house on Mala Strana to quietly slit the throat of such a man?
Theo understood all of this quite clearly. The American bank account might serve many purposes. He would leave it to his son-in-law to choose the best purposes if things went badly in Prague.