Safe Haven

by Anna Schmidt

  Ilse took out a man’s shirt. It, too, was cotton, a muted green plaid with short sleeves. She handed it to Franz and smiled then looked in the box again. Quickly, she identified packages of new underclothes for each of them and some books for Liesl. At the very bottom of the box was a lavender pleated skirt that looked as if it would at last be long enough to meet Ilse’s standards in modesty and a white blouse with pearl buttons down the front and lace around the flat round collar and the cap sleeves.

  “There’s one more item,” Franz said as he took the box and started to break it down so that it would be flat. He handed Ilse an envelope. She opened it and unfolded the note inside, and as she did several bills in American currency floated down to the table. “Read it,” she said, handing the note to her husband:

  Dear Mr. and Mrs. Schneider,

  “Your nephew Theo Bridgewater is staying with me in my boardinghouse near the fort. I know that he is trying to find you, and I believe that he has arranged to make that connection at tomorrow’s reception. Although he has not yet been able to spot you through the fence, he also told me that many of the people in the shelter arrived barefoot, and he worries that you and your little girl have no proper shoes. The clothes were items I had here that I hope will do, but shoes must be fitted. Please use this money for that purpose or for any other need you may have. May God bless you and keep you safe.

  With best regards,

  Selma Velo.

  “How very kind of this woman,” Ilse murmured.

  “Mama, I’ll wear my new dress tomorrow for the welcome party, all right?”

  “Yes. We want to look our very best.” She turned to her husband. “Theo is here?” Her voice trembled; she couldn’t quite believe the news.

  “I’ll go to the administration building and ask if I can use the telephone to call this boardinghouse.” Franz put the letter back inside its envelope and grabbed his hat from a hook by the door. “Perhaps if Theo is there …”

  “Go,” Ilse urged, and she smiled at Franz. He was so excited, and after the weeks and months of his depression, she was anxious to encourage anything that might bring her husband all the way back to her. “Liesl and I will wash our hair, won’t we, Liesl?”

  “Who is Theo?” Liesl asked, and Ilse remembered that her daughter had been little more than an infant when they had all been together on the farm in Wisconsin.

  “Theo is Beth’s brother and your cousin.”

  “And he lives here?”

  “In America—yes.”

  “Will Beth be with him? And Josef?”

  “No, Liesl.” Ilse struggled for words to explain why without putting a damper on the child’s good mood. “But perhaps Theo will have news of them.”

  Ilse had thought so often of Beth and Josef—about her actions toward each of them especially in the early days when Josef had first come to live with them. She had been afraid of everything then and in particular of this former student of Franz whose father was a member of the Reich’s secret police. In her paranoia, Ilse was certain that the Gestapo officer had sent his son to spy on them. And when she realized that Beth was falling in love with the young doctor, she was also certain that their niece was doomed. But on that fateful day when they had made a run for the train to take them away from Munich, it was Franz who became convinced that Josef had betrayed him to the authorities. He was sure that Josef was the reason he had lost his position at the university and that they were forced to leave with only the clothes on their back and a small valise.

  Franz had sent Beth to retrieve something incriminating that he had left in his office. Later they learned that at that very hour several members of the White Rose resistance movement to which Franz had belonged had been arrested. Franz had admitted to Ilse that Beth and Josef had also been involved in the group, and when they heard nothing from her, they assumed she had been betrayed and arrested. Franz had never forgiven himself for sending her to the university that day. Now Ilse prayed that Theo would have some good news about Beth.

  CHAPTER 3

  Later that afternoon Suzanne was sitting at her typewriter, a blank sheet of paper rolled into the machine. How was she going to tell this story? She had once been known for the way she could take facts and present them in such a fashion that the people and places associated with the breaking news came alive for readers, meant something to them, stirred their emotions. But then she had gone too far and crossed that very thin line between the realms of journalism and fiction.

  “Theo,” Mrs. Velo shouted up the stairway. Suzanne startled at the unexpected noise, another part of living in a boardinghouse that she would have to learn to tolerate. “Telephone call for you,” Mrs. Velo added in that same raised voice meant to carry all the way to the attic.

  Suzanne listened for Theo’s steps. They told their own story. They were slow at first, hesitant as if he hadn’t heard Mrs. Velo correctly. And as if sensing his indecision, Mrs. Velo called to him again. “Theo, it’s for you.”

  “Long distance?” Suzanne heard Theo ask.

  “No. You gonna take the call or not?” Suzanne heard Mrs. Velo set the phone receiver down on the hard surface of the table. “I’ve got chicken frying that needs my attention.”

  He ran down the last of the stairs. “Hello?”

  Suzanne pictured him standing in the shadowy front hallway of the house where the only phone sat on a small table with a straight chair next to it. There was no privacy, and voices tended to carry up the stairwell and down the hall.

  “Uncle Franz?” Theo’s voice was almost a whisper, and then it rose to a joyous shout. “Uncle Franz!”

  To Suzanne’s surprise he conducted the rest of the conversation in German. She caught a word here and there.

  Ilse. Liesl. The wife and daughter, she recalled. And then a mention of “Beth.”

  When Theo’s voice became even more muffled, Suzanne realized that she had moved closer to the door of her room to hear him over the spatter of chicken frying and someone cutting grass next door. Her hand was wrapped around the doorknob. She actually leaped back as if she’d been burned.

  “Please tell me that you are not so desperate for a story, Suzanne Randolph, that you would stoop to eavesdropping on a private conversation.” She sat back down at her typewriter, determined to put words on the blank page. But her thoughts were still on the conversation in the hallway.

  She knew the exact moment when Theo hung up. Only seconds later she heard the heavy tread of Hilda Cutter’s large brown oxford shoes coming down the stairs. “Good news?” Hilda asked as if she hadn’t been listening at her door.

  “Yes,” Theo replied, but he said no more. The next thing Suzanne heard was the screen door creaking open and then shut.

  Certain that Theo was on his way for the reunion with his uncle and aunt, Suzanne grabbed her camera, her pocketbook, and key. She was halfway down the hall when she realized she’d left her notebook behind. She ran back for that and then hurried out the door. The secret to any good story was to take a large complicated event like nearly a thousand refugees coming to Oswego and bring it all down to a single family’s story. Possibly there were more interesting stories than that of Theo’s family, but at the moment she saw Theo as her link to getting close to the refugees. She was not going to miss this opportunity.

  Theo was already a block ahead of her when Suzanne emerged from the boardinghouse, having had to pause long enough to be sure that Hilda had wandered into the kitchen where she was giving Mrs. Velo advice on frying chicken in between pumping her for what the landlady might know about Theo and his family. When Theo reached the grounds of the shelter, he moved along the fence, hesitating now and then to stare at the people inside. But he was no gawker like so many of those who had come from town to stand outside the fence. Theo was looking for one man, and Suzanne knew the exact instant he found him.

  She edged along the fence, fingering her camera as she glanced around for some unobtrusive spot from where she could photograph the reunion.<
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  “Franz Schneider!” Theo shouted, and the man turned and began to walk slowly toward his nephew, his arms outstretched as if he might be able to wrap them around the fence.

  Suzanne stood near a cluster of trees and starting snapping the shutter of her camera.

  The older man reached the fence where Theo waited but dropped his arms as he stared at the barrier between them. Then Theo reached up and through the barbed wire that topped the fence, and his uncle reached up and clasped his hand. Both men had their faces pressed close to the wire. Both men were smiling, and she suspected both were crying, as well.

  She knew for certain that she was having a lot of trouble focusing the camera because her eyes were blurred with tears.

  “Your Tante Ilse will never forgive me for not coming to get her so that she and Liesl could share in this moment,” Theo’s uncle said, alternating between German and English as he and his nephew released their hold over the fence and clutched each other’s fingers through the wire.

  “We will have other reunions,” Theo assured this man who was not anything like the robust professor he remembered visiting the farm all those years earlier. Franz Schneider was only a shell of the man he had been. Not only was he gaunt and emaciated, but his eyes had a hollow, haunted look that Theo suspected might never entirely go away. “Are you settling in?”

  Stupid question.

  Uncle Franz smiled and shrugged. “It is very nice here,” he replied. “We have plenty to eat and a little apartment in that building over there. We can move around the camp—I mean the shelter—freely and they tell us that the fence was here long before we arrived. Once the quarantine is lifted perhaps …” He glanced over the buildings around them. “It is a pretty place, this part of New York—different from New York City where we got off the ship.”

  As suddenly as his thoughts had drifted, he brought them back to the moment at hand. “How is my sister? And tell me more of Beth.” He pinned Theo with a hard look—the one Theo remembered his mother calling her brother’s “classroom” look. “It means he wants answers,” his mother had told him. “And he wants them now.”

  “Mom is fine, and Dad as well. They are both anxious to hear that I’ve finally connected with you. I’ll call them tonight. Beth and her husband and daughter are in England. They are safe, Uncle Franz, and as soon as the war is over they will come home.”

  “So she made it.” The words were a whisper spoken more to himself than to Theo. He smiled with more relief than joy and looked at Theo again. “And she has married?”

  “A German doctor—Josef Buch—and they have a little girl named Gabrielle.”

  “She married Josef?”

  This news had upset Franz to the point that he was now shaking. “They are safe, Uncle Franz. I have a letter that Beth sent us to hold for you. I was in such a hurry to see you that I left the boardinghouse without stopping to get either that or the doll I bought for Liesl. She likes dolls, I hope.”

  “You will bring the doll and Beth’s letter this evening after supper. We will meet here again—this time all of us. And you will be at the program and reception tomorrow.”

  “No, Franz. That’s not open to the public, but I’ll be right here.”

  “You are not public, Theo. You are family.”

  “Still, those are the rules. Perhaps after the quarantine is lifted—”

  “Quarantine!” Franz spit out the word as if it were something foul he’d eaten by mistake. “If they are so concerned that we might carry some disease, then why are not the government people and those from town working here quarantined as well? They come and go as they please.”

  “Do you need anything?” Theo was beginning to feel as if he was upsetting his uncle and cast about for something more positive they might talk about. “I can shop this afternoon and bring you whatever you need this evening.”

  Franz patted his nephew’s hand and smiled. “Just come,” he said, his voice once again hoarse with emotion. “There will be time for shopping later. We need shoes—your landlady sent us clothes and money for shoes but we cannot go shopping.”

  “Draw patterns of your feet and bring them to me tonight. I’ll take them to the shoe shop in town. Surely they can figure out sizes.”

  “What a clever boy you are, Theo. Ellie always said that of all her children you were the brightest, and now I begin to understand why.”

  “Don’t let Beth hear you say that,” Theo warned, laughing.

  “I should get back,” Franz said, releasing Theo’s fingers. “Your aunt will wonder what has become of me. She worries, you know.”

  Theo remembered. “I’ll see you tonight, then—all of you—and I’ll bring the doll for Liesl and the letter from Beth.”

  They backed away from the fence, and Franz started walking back to the barracks, turning several times to glance back at Theo as if he could not quite believe his nephew was real. Theo raised a hand in farewell and felt a lifting of the responsibility he’d been given by his parents. He had found his uncle, later he would see his aunt and cousin, and after that he would call his parents and give them the good news. Of course he would wait for the long-distance charges to go down, but Wisconsin was an hour earlier than New York so he knew his parents would be awake.

  He heard a clicking sound and realized that it had been background noise the entire time he’d been talking with his uncle. He glanced around and saw a camera aimed at him.

  “Hey!” He started toward the woman holding the camera. He knew that the refugees had attracted a lot of attention and that there was even a news crew from Life magazine staying at the hotel in town, but still …

  The woman lowered the camera. Suzanne. She adjusted the strap around her neck and waited—for what? Did she expect him to attack? Rip the camera from around her neck and destroy the film inside?

  He walked toward her. “Look, Miss Randolph, I know you came here to get a story, but common decency would say you need to ask permission before invading somebody’s privacy.”

  “You have no proof that I was photographing you,” she blustered. “I was taking pictures for my article. The fact that you and your uncle just happened …” Her voice trembled with the weight of her lies.

  “Just don’t do it again. We are a quiet, simple people—my family and I. Perhaps it would be best if you find some other story to tell, after all.”

  He turned to walk away.

  “Wait,” she called, hurrying to catch up to him. He noticed that she had an athletic stride—not very feminine but at the same time very appealing. “I’m sorry, okay? I admit I heard parts of your phone conversation and I admit that I followed you here. Face it, I’m not all that different from Hilda Cutter.”

  She looked up at him with eyes that begged for forgiveness and pity, and he couldn’t help himself. He laughed. “You can cut the act. I forgive you, but my family is off limits—got it?”

  The wide-eyed innocent look shifted seamlessly into a frown of determination. “If that’s what you want. But don’t forget that it’s your family who is incarcerated behind that fence for all intents and purposes. You know what the ground rules are. When the war ends they will be sent back. Sometimes you have to make a little noise to get the powers that be to do the right thing. In this case—because most of the folks in there with your family are Jews—it’s going to take a lot of noise, but there are Americans who are sympathetic to their cause and willing to speak up for them.”

  “I don’t understand. I mean, I know there are people in town—like Hilda and others—who have their prejudices, but this is a government project and—”

  “And you think people who work in government can’t be biased against certain ethnic groups?” She did not wait for an answer. “This so-called shelter is nothing more than a token gesture. Do you think that rescuing less than a thousand people when there are tens—perhaps hundreds—of thousands just like them who got left behind makes anything like a real difference?”

  Her eyes flashed at him
, and she placed her hands on her hips.

  “Hey, I’m a Quaker,” he said, trying to disarm her. “Peace loving and not up for a fight with you, okay?”

  She looked a little surprised at this information. “You’re a Quaker? Your relatives in there, as well?” She jerked her head toward the fence.

  “Is that a problem? I mean, for your story?” He suddenly thought that with her fiery speech about the Jews, she was intent on telling their story. “How about this: I’m sure my uncle and aunt can introduce you to someone who would be right for your article. Why don’t you come here with me tomorrow after the program and reception? You can meet Franz and Ilse, and you can tell them what you’re looking for. I’m sure they’ll be glad to help out.” At least his uncle would. His memory of his aunt was that she was a tight-lipped, cautious woman with a permanent scowl of disapproval etched into her features.

  “I’m also a Quaker,” she said softly, seeming to ignore his offer to introduce her to Franz and Ilse. “Or I was once.”

  That explained her passion for making sure the refugees were treated fairly. He was about to quip, “Once a Friend always a Friend,” but something in the way she looked away made him abandon that idea.

  Somewhere in the distance a clock chimed, and Theo glanced at his watch. “It’s getting close to suppertime,” he said. “Mrs. Velo will wonder if she should set places for us or not.”

  “I think I’ll get something in town,” Suzanne said. “I’m not sure I can handle Hilda tonight.”

  “Okay. I’ll let Selma know. And if you change your mind about coming with me tomorrow after the program …”

  She smiled at him. “I never said whether I would come or not,” she reminded him.

  “Suit yourself.” He started walking away then turned back and pointed to her camera. “I want to see those pictures and show them to my uncle. We’ll decide whether or not you have permission to use them.”

  The frown was back. “If I decide to use them,” she bargained, “then you can see them. Otherwise …”