Safe Haven

by Anna Schmidt

  By the end of October, Theo’s work for the orchard had come to an end. Harry Walls had told him he would have work in the spring, but until then the POWs could take care of everything.

  “Dad, there’s really no reason for me to stay,” he said when he made his weekly phone call to his parents one Sunday evening. His mother had insisted that he needed to “see this thing through,” but he saw little he could do for his uncle and aunt, and certainly it would be at least spring before the war ended.

  “I was thinking,” his dad was saying, “maybe Mom and I would drive out for Thanksgiving. Would they let us do that? Spend Thanksgiving with Franz and Ilse and Liesl?”

  “Sure. I’ll ask Selma—Mrs. Velo—if she knows of a room we might rent for you.”

  “We can stay at the hotel, Son. Why don’t you see if that reporter you’ve told us about has plans? Your mom has been wanting to meet her.”

  Theo rolled his eyes. Just what he needed—his mom the matchmaker. “I’m pretty sure she’ll probably head down to Washington for the holidays.”

  “But you’ll ask her.” This was not a question.

  “I’ll ask her.”

  “Here’s your mom. Plan on us getting there on the day before Thanksgiving, okay?”

  “Got it.”

  There was a muffled exchange between his parents, and then his mother’s voice came on the line. “Now Theo, you let your aunt Ilse know that I’m bringing the makings for the dinner with me—everything we’ll need.”

  “Mom, their place is pretty small, and there’s not really a kitchen.”

  “Well, maybe Mrs. Velo would let me borrow her kitchen to prepare everything and then we could—”

  “I’ll ask her, but Mom, she’s running a boardinghouse and needs her kitchen so she can prepare food for her boarders, and—”

  “It never hurts to ask. Are you getting some rest?”

  Theo was used to the way his mother switched topics with no effort at some kind of transition. “I am, and yes, I am eating enough, and yes, I am going to meeting for worship with Franz and Ilse at the shelter.”

  “Don’t get smart, young man. What about that reporter? Susan?”

  “Suzanne. What about her?”

  His mother sighed with exasperation. “You know it wouldn’t kill you to think about settling down, and from the little you’ve told us she seems like a nice girl.”

  “She also lives in Washington,” he reminded her.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Theo, you said she was freelancing. That means she can work anywhere, and believe it or not, we have some pretty good newspapers right here in Wisconsin.”

  “Okay, how about the fact that we’ve known each other for less than three months?”

  “Your father and I knew we were meant for each other after one date.”

  It was an old story, and one she was fond of citing whenever she thought Theo was spending too much time alone. “You’re not getting any younger, you know.”

  “Practically ancient,” he replied and then decided to give her something that would make her smile. “Suzanne and I are putting together a Halloween scavenger hunt for the children and teens at the shelter.”

  “Oh, what fun! I wish I could be there to help. I could make a batch of my pumpkin bread and throw in some chocolate chips—all children love chocolate.”

  “Wish you could be here too, Mom, but you’re planning to come for Thanksgiving. That’ll be great.”

  “Don’t tell Franz and Ilse, okay? I want to surprise them.”

  “Sure. I’ve got to go, Mom. I’ll call next week, okay?”

  “Same time, same station,” she replied and blew him a kiss. “Love you, Theo.”

  “Love you back, Mom.”

  The morning of the Halloween party, a large carton arrived addressed to Theo. Inside were a dozen tin boxes filled with his mother’s pumpkin chocolate-chip bread made into cookies decorated with orange frosting.

  “Oh, that’s just perfect,” Suzanne squealed when she saw them. “The children are going to love them, and they go perfectly with the gingerbread and apple juice we’re serving.”

  The party was an enormous success. The shelter was filled with laughter and shrieks as the children worked in teams going from door to door in each of the barracks to collect the items on their scavenger list. Later the children gathered in the service club turned recreation hall to bob for apples and enjoy the refreshments while some of the adults entertained them with songs and skits. Suzanne had gotten merchants in town to donate items and gift certificates to be used as prizes for the best costume and for winners of the scavenger hunt, and Theo saw that some of the young people from town had also come for the party.

  As they walked home together, Theo removed the fistfuls of straw that Suzanne had tucked into his sleeves and the cuffs of his jeans in her attempt to create a scarecrow costume for him. The truth was the stuff had been scratching him all evening, and he was relieved to be able to throw it away.

  Suzanne had dressed up in an old evening gown that Selma had pulled from a trunk in the attic. It had puffed sleeves and a full skirt, and Theo had not missed the way the blue color made her eyes sparkle like Lake Ontario on a clear autumn day.

  “We did it, Theo,” she said. “The evening was a complete success. I was so sure that somewhere along the way we might do something that would cause someone to get upset.”

  “That’s very important to you, isn’t it? I mean, not making a mistake?” He was immediately sorry for asking because her high spirits plummeted at once.

  “Well, sure, I wanted everything to be perfect. That’s just normal.” She sounded defensive and wrapped her arms around her body as if she had suddenly felt a chill.

  “I didn’t mean it as a criticism. In fact, I sometimes wish I—” He waved off the rest of his statement and put his arm around her shoulders. “Are you cold?”

  “A little,” she admitted. “Wind off the lake.”

  “Yeah, well, it is almost November. Speaking of that, my folks are coming for Thanksgiving—they want to surprise Franz and Ilse. Do you have plans? I mean, don’t feel like you have to—”

  “I’d really like that. It’s sweet of them to include me.”

  They walked the next block in silence, but as they approached the walkway that led to the boardinghouse, she twisted her head so she could look up at him without leaving the circle of his arm around her shoulder. “What were you going to say before when you said ‘I wish’ but then let it drop?”

  “It was nothing.”

  “Wishes are never nothing. What do you wish for, Theo?”

  He stopped in the shadow of the large oak tree in the front yard of the boardinghouse and turned her so they were facing each other, his hands resting lightly on her shoulders. “I wish I could find something in my life that I was as passionate about as you are about your work, Suzanne. I wish I could have that certainty about what my life’s purpose might be.”

  “You do. Once this is all over, you will have the farm.”

  “What if I want more?”

  She reached up and stroked his cheek with her fingers. “Then go after it, Theo. Whatever it is, go after it.”

  Although Director Smart and his staff had planned a festive celebration for the refugees, Ilse was not feeling especially thankful when she awoke on Thanksgiving Day and wrapped herself in a blanket while she went to boil some water on the hot plate they were allowed so that she could make tea. Franz was still asleep, as was Liesl, and outside the skies were gray and heavy with the promise of snow.

  They had been here now for nearly four months, and while most everyone had gone out of their way to make sure the residents of the shelter had plenty of activities to fill their days and evenings, Ilse still felt an absence of anything approaching a normal life—a life with purpose.

  Of the three of them, Liesl was faring the best. Was that because she spent her days at school outside the shelter where she had made friends who came to play on the week
ends and who invited her to their birthday parties and to their homes—their American homes—to eat or play or study together? Liesl’s English was perfect. She spoke with hardly any accent at all, and she had picked up the language so quickly.

  Franz had been fluent in English before, but his was still tinged with the formality and inflection of his German heritage. Ilse had faithfully attended the English classes offered in the shelter and was improving, but she was still better with reading the complicated language then speaking it.

  And then there was this place—this apartment—that they called home. She had done the best she could to recreate the decor of their apartment back in Munich. Theo had brought them two comfortable chairs, a small side table, and an old radio that he had repaired, and these treasures crowded the small sitting room that also served as Liesl’s bedroom.

  In the boxes of donations sent by various charities over the weeks after they first arrived, Ilse had found a couple of colorful rag rugs along with the lace curtains and crocheted doilies that she had bleached white to set on the arms of the chairs. On the table that held the radio she had set an ashtray, a small humidor for tobacco, and a pipe stand for Franz’s pipe. She had been saving from her monthly stipend to buy him a new pipe for Christmas. But in spite of everything she tried, she could do nothing about the cold that seeped in through the outer walls and window frame or about the constant noise from the apartments next to and above them.

  And now winter was coming on with no sign of an end to the war. There had been no change in the government’s determination to send them back once the war ended—in spite of a visit by the president’s wife and her assurance that she would do all she could to make sure they could stay. Not that Ilse wanted to stay. She missed Munich, missed the beauty of the German countryside, missed the mountains where she and Franz skied in winter. And most of all she missed her sister, Marta, and wondered what had become of her and her family.

  When they had fled Munich, the plan had been to go to Marta’s home in Eglof, but when they arrived, Marta met the train with the car packed, telling them that her husband, Lucas, and the children had already left, and they needed to leave immediately to join them in the mountains. There they had spent a few weeks believing they were safe, and then one day Franz had awakened her and reported that Marta and her family were gone. There had been a cryptic note about a relative being ill but no information about where they had gone or when they might return.

  Franz, Ilse, and Liesl had stayed on in the mountain chalet for another week until Franz had gone into the village one day and heard the news that there were Gestapo agents in the area, searching for traitors. The cheesemaker confided that the agents were questioning locals about anyone who might have come to the village recently and stayed for longer than what might be considered a normal holiday.

  They had packed up and left that night, and she had had no word from her sister since. A single tear plopped into the cup she’d been holding while waiting for the water to boil. She wiped her tears away with the back of her hand and went to prepare Franz a cup of tea.

  “Mom?” Liesl rolled over in her cot and called to her. She now insisted that calling her “Mom” was the American way. “Did it snow?”

  “Not yet.” Ilse took a small bottle of milk that they kept stored between the window and screen now that the weather was cold enough to keep it from spoiling. She poured a glass for Liesl and placed it on the table. Then she poured tea into the cup and went to wake her husband.

  “Happy Thanksgiving,” she said, having practiced the words to get the inflection right. She forced a smile. “Here’s your tea. The floor is cold so put on your slippers.”

  Over the next hour they dressed, took their turn in the bathroom at the end of the hall, and put on their coats, hats, and gloves for the trek to the dining hall for breakfast. Ilse felt a sharp wind off the lake cut right through her coat to her very bones, and she shivered as they made their way back to their apartment following the meal. The day—a holiday—stretched out before them, and she wondered how they might fill the hours.

  “Oh my,” Franz said, his voice strangled with emotion. He was looking toward the gate where Ilse could see Theo and the reporter and another couple entering the grounds. “Ellie?” he whispered, and then he jogged and called out to the woman who was running toward them. “Oh, Ellie!”

  Franz had found his sister.

  Ilse had to wonder if she would ever again find Marta.

  PART 2

  WINTER 1944–1945

  HOPE FADING AND FOR ONE—HOPE GONE

  OSWEGO N.Y.—As the winter goes on and on—by many accounts the worst winter in memory for this part of New York—the charities that have sent supplies and volunteers and organized programs and pleaded the cause of the refugees have stopped coming. Perhaps like the birds and flowers, they will return in the spring, but in the meantime …

  The reporters with their photographers documenting each interview have also left. These days there are plenty of rooms available for rent in Oswego. The so-called fireside relatives—spouses, children, parents—of the refugees who are already living in America have had to abandon their vigil and return to their homes and jobs in other parts of the country. The war drags on, as does the debate in Washington about the fate of the refugees.

  Meanwhile the citizens of Fort Ontario struggle to stay positive. They must traverse icy alleys of six-foot drifts to reach the dining hall for their meals. They continue to stage concerts and show movies and create crafts with the children. The children bundled like stuffed dolls wait for the bus to take them to and from school and return to the fort to work on their English in the evenings. The shelter’s newspaper—the Ontario Chronicle—continues to report the news—often tongue-in-cheek. Shelter director Mr. Joseph Smart continues to try and rally spirits as he reminds the residents that the war is going well and that spring will come.

  But for Karoline Klein Bleier, with two children from her first marriage left behind in Europe and her new husband and their two children with her in Fort Ontario, the snow and the cold, the guilt she felt for leaving two of her children behind, and the lack of any real progress toward a day when she and her family might leave the shelter was more than she could take. Her husband, Geza, in an effort to lift her spirits, urged her to let him care for their children while she attended the movie being shown after supper that snowy, late-December night.

  Finally she agreed to go out. But she did not go to the movies. She did not go to sit with her friend two apartments down from hers as she sometimes did. She went out into the cold, swallowed a handful of pills and did not return.

  CHAPTER 8

  When Franz described how he and the other searchers had discovered Karoline’s body in snow that had drifted so deep she was nearly buried in it, Ilse felt the twinge of panic and deep-seated hopelessness that had once been her constant companions.

  The mere mention of those years when she had suffered often from debilitating depression and anxiety haunted her. Her problems were the reason that their niece Beth had left the relative safety of America to come and live with them after Liesl was born. Would Karoline’s life have found a different outcome if she had had the support and courage of someone like Beth at her side? Ilse now wondered.

  By the time Ilse and her family started the two-year odyssey that brought them to Fort Ontario, Beth had been with them for eight years. In so many ways she was like a second daughter or perhaps more like a younger sister. How relieved and thankful she and Franz had been when Theo told them that Beth had made it to the safety of England and that she and Josef had married and now had their own little girl. Had it not been for Beth caring for Liesl, Ilse could not imagine how she would have survived those early years of the war.

  But once she and Franz had been forced to flee and go into hiding, gradually Ilse had faced the realities of their situation. Over the months they had spent on the run, she and Franz had in many ways switched roles. Realizing that her only other
choice was to surrender, she rediscovered the confidence and strength that had been her trademarks as the young woman Franz had fallen in love with. She found ways to hold her own meeting for worship, although often she was the only attendee. She placed all of her faith in God to show them the way.

  Sadly, during this time Franz’s faith slipped dramatically, and while he did not suffer from the fear and anxiety that had once plagued Ilse, he did sink into periods of depression that she had feared might lead him to take desperate measures. So often when things seemed darkest he told her that if it weren’t for him she and Liesl would be fine. He was the one who had defied the Reich. He was the one who had placed them all in danger.

  Now dear fragile Karoline had taken her life. Ilse recalled the days the two of them had worked together in the children’s center. It was there that Karoline had told Ilse about her children from her first marriage. She had taken full responsibility for the fact that they had been the victims of that failed union, revealing how her love for Geza Bleier had destroyed her first marriage and how her punishment had been that her two children from that marriage had been taken from her. Her first husband had sole custody.

  When Karoline talked about her failure as a mother and her fears for those children left behind and for the two she had with her in America, Ilse tried to console her by talking of how overwhelmed she had been when Liesl was born and how her niece had cared for the child and in many ways been more of a mother to Liesl than Ilse could be in those years. “You will find your way,” she had assured Karoline. The woman seemed to take hope from that.

  But then Ilse recalled all the times that she had witnessed Karoline sitting alone, staring into space. So many times the young mother had declined invitations to do something with the other women, and her eyes always seemed to brim with unshed tears.