“Do you think so?”
“Papa said we should sell them when we needed money.”
Before I could answer Ruth had stepped inside, and the little bell tinkled as I followed her into the small, dim shop.
We stood at the cluttered counter until the man, wearing thick glasses, approached us. “Yes?”
Ruth held out her hand. “I want to sell my ring,” she said resolutely. “How much will you give me?”
“I’d have to look at it closely,” he said, smiling as if someone had made a joke.
His expression changed to one of astonishment when he examined the ring under his glass. He came toward us, shaking his head and saying soberly, “I cannot buy this. This is a real stone. You would have to have your mother’s permission.”
Ruth’s cheeks were flushed. “It’s my ring” she said.
“I’m sorry, Fräulein,” he replied. “If your mother agrees that you should sell it, I’ll be glad to talk to her about it.”
Outside Ruth’s face was still rigid with anger, and when I stumbled into a puddle she lashed out at me, “Now look what you’ve done! You’ll ruin your shoes. Why can’t you be careful?”
I didn’t answer, and she went on, nearly in tears, “If only he hadn’t taken my violin!”
“I know,” I whispered, taking Ruth’s hand briefly. Then, as we walked past another toy shop, I suddenly remembered. Tomorrow was Annie’s birthday, and we had nothing to give her.
“Of course I remembered Annie’s birthday,” Mother said later, when I mentioned it. “And we’ll do something special. We’ll all go to the park, and maybe we can take a ride on the funicular up to the Uetliberg. Frau Feldin says the view from the top of the mountain is wonderful, and it’s a thrilling ride.”
“I’ll go tell Annie,” I said, but Mother stopped me.
“No, let’s surprise her.”
“You think we might not be able to go,” I said. “It costs money, doesn’t it?”
“It does,” Mother said rather sharply, “but I’m going to manage it. Tomorrow morning we’re going to the agency. They will help us,” she said confidently, but the look of concern she wore so often was still there.
I saw that same look on nearly every face when we sat waiting at the agency office the next day. We were lucky to have found seats on a wooden bench, for the room was filled with people, some leaning against the walls, little children sitting on the floor, all in a hot, humid room filled with the sound of typewriters, the ringing of telephones and the low, constant babble of voices speaking in foreign languages.
After nearly two hours of waiting, our turn came at last, and we were led into a small room cluttered with books and papers.
A woman with bright yellow hair and dark-rimmed glasses looked up at us from behind her desk.
“May I have your name, please?” She was ready to begin writing.
“Margo Platt,” said Mother, “and my three daughters. We are here from Germany to join my husband in …”
“Wait until I ask you. I must fill out the form.”
The woman wrote rapidly, while Mother sat down and we stood beside her.
“Ages of your children?” Her voice tapped out the words like a machine. “Husband’s occupation? Present address?”
Finally the woman stopped writing and looked up at Mother.
“Did you leave Germany by your own choice?” she asked, blinking rapidly.
“Yes, of course,” Mother replied. “You know how things are for us there.”
“What is your problem, Frau Platt?”
“I have hardly any money left. We were allowed to take out only ten marks apiece.”
“Have you family in Germany?”
“Yes—my mother, my husband’s brothers. But you know they can’t send any money out.”
“Wouldn’t they help you if you were in Germany?” She fixed her eyes keenly on Mother, then glanced briefly at us, and by her look I felt that surely my hair was untidy, and that maybe I had forgotten to wash my face.
“If we were in Germany,” Mother said, breathing heavily, “we wouldn’t need their help.” She spoke slowly, distinctly, as if somehow this woman was unable to follow the point of the conversation. “We left all our money and all our possessions in Germany,” Mother explained. “I was told that this agency would help me.”
“Of course, there are funds for certain cases,” the woman said, still looking at Mother intently, “but you left Germany by your own choice. You were not driven out.”
“Not driven out!” Mother repeated.
“Many Jewish people are still living in Germany, and without harm.”
Mother’s eyes were wide, and I saw the tight grip of her fingers on the arms of the chair. “Don’t you know what is going on? Don’t you read the newspapers, the arrests, the beatings …”
“Frau Platt,” she said, as if she were reasoning patiently with a stubborn child, “I would suggest very seriously that you take your children back to Germany. You have no way to support yourself here. Since you left Germany by your own choice, there is nothing we can do for you.”
Mother’s knuckles were white from her grip. “I am not going back,” she said with soft fury, her eyes narrowing. “I’ll never go back to Germany. We have come this far, and we will stay, even if you will not help. Come, girls!”
Mother swept out of the office so quickly that Annie had to run to keep up, and she panted, “Where are we going, Mama? Where?”
“To the park,” Mother said, her voice strangely high-pitched. “To the park,” she repeated, pulling Annie along beside her, while Ruth and I rushed to follow, not daring to speak.
Mother sat down on the park bench and told us, still in that strange, high tone, “Go and play, girls. Leave me. I have to think.”
I didn’t want to walk away from Mother, even for a moment, but I went with Annie and Ruth to the swings. We pushed Annie higher and higher, until she giggled and squealed, and then we took her to play in the sandbox.
“We’ll have to sell our rings now,” I told Ruth softly.
“Mother probably won’t let us,” she replied. “I asked her last night. She said we have to save something for a real emergency.”
“And isn’t this a real emergency?” I demanded, but Ruth only shrugged. “Maybe we could get a job,” I said, “washing dishes or delivering things.”
“You always think everything is so simple!” Ruth snapped. “People can’t work in a country when they’re just visiting. If it were that easy, Mother would get a job.”
“What can we do, then?”
“Nothing.”
Ruth left me abruptly and went to help Annie build a sand castle. All around me children were laughing and shouting and playing on the bars, but I felt all alone, and I sat down on the warm grass with my eyes closed, wishing, pretending, half-praying, wanting to believe that the strength of my thoughts could reach out and make something happen, make somebody care.
I opened my eyes and swallowed hard. I had made a resolution. They wouldn’t make me cry. But as I looked toward the benches at my mother I saw, or I knew by the tilt of her body, that she was crying.
I ran to her. “Mother!” I sat beside her, my arms around her. “Please don’t cry, Mother. Don’t be unhappy.”
Mother tried to wipe the tears away. “I was so sure that the agency would help us,” she said, shaking her head. “I just don’t know where to turn.”
“Should we write to Papa? Can’t he help?”
“What help, child? Your father told me to go to the agency. If I only knew someone. If we had a friend or a relative.”
“Ruth and I want to sell our rings,” I said quickly. “We want to help.”
“No. We must keep something. If you want to help, just sit here quietly and let me think.”
I sat and looked all around at the trees and the lawns, past the playground and up to the hills. I thought of the psalm I had learned long ago, “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from
whence cometh my help …”
Softly I said to Mother, “I will pray.”
“Yes, child, do,” she murmured.
I might have prayed that something good would happen, but I had been taught that prayer is not for making wishes, but to seek strength and to praise God. “I will lift up mine eyes …”
“Lisa!” Mother said slowly, grasping my hand. “Maybe there is a way. At least I can try. Why didn’t I think of it before? I’ll go to a rabbi. He would know how to help. Ruth! Annie! Come, we’re going.”
At the rooming house Mother made a hasty telephone call, then she told us to stay and wait for her in the room. “Maybe I’ll have good news,” she said, with a faint light of hope in her eyes. “We’ll have your birthday treat another day, Annie,” Mother said, kissing her. “You’re a big girl now, you understand.”
“It’s all right,” Annie said gravely, and I thought how much she had grown in just a few months, until I saw her reach for her old, ragged blanket and rub it against her cheek.
New Faces
YOU DON’T HAVE TO GO,” Mother told us, “unless you want to.”
“We’ll go,” Ruth said quickly. She had nodded to me as soon as Mother mentioned the camp that the rabbi had suggested. It was just an hour outside Zurich, and we would be able to visit Mother and Annie sometimes.
“Do you want to go, Lisa?” Mother asked me, watching my face intently.
I didn’t want to go at all to this camp for refugee children, even though Mother spoke of having playmates there and said it was a chance for us to get away from our crowded little room.
“We’ll go,” I said. “It will be fun.”
“No it won’t,” Annie shouted, bursting into tears. “I don’t want you to go! I’ll be all alone!”
“We’ll come to visit you,” I told her. “Maybe we’ll come every week.”
“Lisa, don’t go!” Annie cried, flinging her arms around me. “Take me with you.”
“It’s just for older children,” Mother tried to explain. “Someday you’ll have a chance to go somewhere, too. Lisa and Ruth would like to make new friends and see other places.”
“Let Ruth go, then!” Annie cried.
“I want to go,” I told Annie. “And somebody has to stay with Mother to keep her company.”
“That’s right,” Mother said quickly. “Think how lonesome I’d be with all my girls gone. Now you’ll be the one to help me cook, Annie, and we’ll go to the park together where you can play with other children.”
“I don’t love them. I don’t want them. I want Lisa!” Annie sobbed.
I picked her up and put her on the sofa bed. “Lie down,” I told her, “and I’ll tell you a story. I’ll tell you Cinderella.” This time when I told of the wicked stepmother, Annie began to sob again, and I hurried through to tell about the king’s ball, the glass slipper, and the prince coming to take Cinderella with him to his castle, where they lived happily ever after.
“It’s not true,” Annie said drowsily. “Things like that don’t really happen.”
“Yes they do,” I said firmly. “Good things happen all the time. Now go to sleep!”
I wanted Annie to believe in the fairy tale, just as I wanted to make myself more cheerful, as I had promised Papa I would be. I glanced at Mother and saw for the first time how thin she had become, how loosely her dress fitted over her body. She was darning our socks again, patching our pajamas, making do.
The rabbi had told Mother that he would speak to the agency personally, that they must help us. But help would be slight; there simply wasn’t enough money for everyone. Mother just couldn’t afford to keep us with her, but I tried not to think of it that way.
“At least we’ll be together,” I whispered to Ruth, when we lay in bed. “We might each have been sent to a separate family.”
“I wouldn’t want to live with another family,” Ruth whispered back. “I’d feel like a stepchild.”
“I guess it will be nice at the camp,” I said.
Ruth didn’t answer. I realized how accustomed I had become to the little room. It was, in a way, home, and the thought of going to a strange place, sleeping in a strange bed, gave me a fluttering feeling in my stomach.
That feeling of dread was with me still in the morning when Mother took us to the agency office. This time we saw a different clerk, a pretty young woman who smiled and took Mother’s hand and told Ruth and me that the cook from the camp would come to the agency to meet us. “He’s a nice old man,” she said. “He used to be chief cook at the Hofstaader Hotel in Vienna.”
He came at last, limping slightly as if one leg pained him, but he was tall and stout and robust and wore a white shirt and white trousers. His head was completely bald, except for a few bristling white hairs along the back of his neck.
“What a sweet little one!” he exclaimed, seeing Annie, and he bent down close to her. He asked us our names, then nodded to Mother. “I’m Emil Wagner,” he said, “but the children all call me Pop. I’ve almost forgotten my other name,” he chuckled.
“Come along then,” he said, taking up our suitcases. “Two more for dinner. It’s a shame we can’t take this little one too, but …” he seemed to have forgotten his train of thought. “Come along. We must hurry. There is supper to prepare. Ah, there was a time when supper was truly an event—fourteen main dishes to cook, hot rolls, pastries, glazed fruits. Everybody who was anybody came through those doors at the Hofstaader Hotel—dukes, counts, even princes, yes.”
After we had said good-bye to Mother and Annie, and Ruth and I climbed into the cab of the battered old truck, Pop continued as if he had never left off remembering. “Six cook’s helpers in my charge,” he murmured, “and two underchefs. There will come a time again. Yes, it will be so again.”
We bumped along the streets through the city, then up into the hills. The truck swayed so violently that I could hardly speak. Ruth and I looked at each other, and suddenly we both began to laugh; I’m not sure why. Maybe it was the sudden freedom of a truck ride though the country. Maybe because, inside, we were lonely. And for reasons of his own, Pop laughed with us. At last he wiped his bald head with a handkerchief and mopped his face, sighing, “Ah, such memories!”
Ruth and I sat silent. The old man was, somehow, transported into another time. At last Ruth asked him timidly, “How is it at the camp?”
“You will see,” he replied. He did not speak the rest of the way, until after he had maneuvered the truck over a series of terrible ruts, he pointed past the trees to a small clearing. “There it is. We’re home.”
The air was sultry and heavy when we stepped out of the truck and hurried behind Pop, who carried our suitcases.
It occurred to me that travelers are always following their suitcases, always in fear that they will be lost or stolen. The suitcase is the last and only familiar thing.
But even as I hurried, I glanced about. There was only the one old wooden building, somebody’s forsaken barn, perhaps, but all around it stood huge pine trees, and I could smell a deep scent of sap and pine needles, mingled with the dust from the road and the odor of earth that is damp even before the rains come.
I’m not certain what I expected. I had read Jane Eyre, and perhaps from this I dreaded an institution of any sort, and expected severe mistresses and hard little cots all in a row, with lists of rules posted on the walls, and children marching uniformly to lessons or gymnastics.
We walked through a large hallway, and I could only make out dull brown shapes of furniture in a room to one side, the kind that people give away when it is long past use. On the other side was the dining room, with three long wooden tables, and again I had the feeling that this place must once have been a stable.
Pop put down our suitcases and pointed to a door. “Just knock,” he said. “Frau Strom is inside.” He disappeared through a swinging door that must have led to the kitchen.
“Who’s Frau Strom?” I whispered to Ruth, and Ruth replied, also in a whisp
er, “Probably the director.”
Ruth’s knock sounded loud and bold, and I wanted to crouch back into the shadows, but the door swung open. “Yes—yes, come in.”
The voice sounded hurried, flustered, and as we entered Frau Strom gave us only a darting glance and continued to patter back and forth, plucking up an object here and there, searching aimlessly and with “tss-tss” sounds of despair. And it was no wonder that she couldn’t find anything. I had never in my life seen such a mess, powder spilled on the dresser top, clothing draped over chairs, and every little space crammed with bottles and boxes and half empty cups of tea.
She snatched her curling iron from the hot plate, which was beginning to give off a bitter smelling smoke, and, holding a bit of hair tightly between the hot iron, she turned to us.
“So you are the new girls.” She turned to the mirror, released a tight little curl and gave it a pat. Her face was marked with ruddy places, from little blood vessels that had burst, and her eyes were never still, her tone a little breathless, as if she had been rushing all day.
“Did you bring sheets?” she asked.
I shook my head, and Ruth answered aloud, “No, we didn’t. We don’t have any.”
“Same old story.” She began another curl. “They said you would come at noon.”
“We waited for the cook,” Ruth explained.
“Now I’ll have to make out a new list,” Frau Strom said accusingly. “They want it alphabetical. Why does everything have to be alphabetical? What is your last name?”
“Platt,” I said.
“Our mother is in Zurich,” Ruth supplied, “and our father is in America.”
“I’ll show you your beds.” She went to the door and motioned for us to follow.
We went up the stairs, and I wondered at the silence. Where were the children? She led us into a room with eight beds, all different, but beside each was an identical unpainted low cabinet with half a dozen cubby holes where the children kept their things.
“You can sleep here,” Frau Strom told Ruth. “It’s the only bed available. Your sister will be in the next room. It’s just as well. When sisters are together they usually fight.”
Journey to America Page 5