A View Across the Rooftops: An epic, heart-wrenching and gripping World War Two historical novel

by Suzanne Kelman

Josef was surprised at how Michael’s words comforted him and gave him great solace in his darkest moments. Furthermore, he saw with true clarity now what Michael’s imprisonment had been like. And that, while he had been free to come and go, he too had been a captive, but of his own making; enslaved to the guilt of the past, invisible shackles restraining him from embracing any good things of this world. And somehow, the words of the young poet became the keys to him understanding the walls that had imprisoned him.

  That evening, something miraculous took place. Reading Michael’s poetry once more, the tears started to flow freely down his cheeks. Removing his spectacles, he wept openly: first with deep sadness of what he had lost, then with tears of overwhelming joy of what he had gained. Jumping to his feet, he bellowed out to the world through the cracked attic window pane, “I understand! I understand! Sarah, I understand! I know now what you tried to tell me and what I couldn’t hear. You were right. Music and poetry… That is the real formula.’

  He thought of his father and the pages and pages of poetic words committed to his own memory. Fresh tears rolled down his cheeks as he started to recite verses that he had heard his father utter with such reverence. And he realized that it had taken him many years, but those words he had read over and over again had finally completed their long, slow journey from his head to his heart.

  And as he gazed up through the glass pane toward the half-crescent of a new moon, he pictured Michael, hoping he was somewhere safe and warm. Now he knew for sure why he had been sent to his house that night so many years before. He had hoped that Josef would save him, when in fact Josef had been the one who had needed saving. When he’d taken in that young student so long ago, he hadn’t known it, but he was about to become the pupil and Michael was to be his teacher. Without Josef realizing it, the young man’s passion and enthusiasm for love and life had slowly worn down the bricks and mortar of his internment, like a relentless ocean on a seawall. Even in the confinement of an attic, Michael had drunk larger and deeper from the well of life than Josef ever had. He had taken all of his fearless vitality and lust for life and had honed it into his craft. And as Josef dwelt on this, it humbled him to realize how much of life he had been asleep to. Numbly moving through a world of hurt and sadness, he hadn’t taken even a moment to absorb anything of good around him. And there was so much good, even in the depths of a desperate war.

  All at once his thoughts turned to Hannah, her smile, her eyes, the thought of her body close to his. He realized with great surprise how desperately he needed to touch her and feel her close to him. For the first time as he thought on these things it was not coupled with guilt toward the memory of Sarah, but just a need to feel the passion and the love Michael had so often captured on the page, like his love for Elke, and indeed Josef’s love for Sarah. Hannah’s mother had just died so he wanted to be respectful and wait, the timing never seemed to be right, but he would tell her how he really felt, soon.

  Every morning he woke up with the hope of Michael returning, and every night he went to sleep feeling lonelier than ever. But in between those hours, he made a conscious effort to be thankful. Thankful for the life he had been given and thankful for everything he had learned. When his isolation threatened to overwhelm him, he turned to Michael’s poems, and the poetry Michael had loved. The words, so beautifully crafted together, somehow brought a stillness to his thumping heart and a feeling of comfort and relief as he was gently coaxed from his darkness.

  He had seen Hannah once since Michael had disappeared, and he ached to spend some time alone with her to confess his feelings to her, but as the Allies advanced on Amsterdam, her work in the Underground kept her busy. When he’d seen her for that fleeting moment, he had asked if there was any word of Michael, but there was no news. As far as she knew, none of the Underground had helped him or even made contact with him. The fear that he was dead was left unsaid. It was a thought that threatened to crush him. But he also had to trust in a higher power, the higher power that had kept the young man alive until now, from the inscription in the book of Rilke’s poems to the illness and their recovery, to his miraculous escape. Surely a person who had been kept alive by such unique twists of fate was destined for much greater things in this world?

  Chapter 55

  One morning, while walking down his road to take some exercise, Josef stopped to watch the migrating birds returning and noticed, with great joy, that the one tree left in his neighborhood where so many had been cut down for firewood was budding with the pink-and-white flowers of spring.

  As he approached his house, he noticed Mrs. Epstein’s piano was still outside. Tucked well under the eaves of her house, it had been spared from the worst of the weather, but still, it was a sad sight, pushed out onto the uneven pavement, bereft and impoverished. Stopping in front of it, he stared at it for a long moment, remembering all the beauty of the music it had brought to him. Now it was missing a wheel, and its highly polished mahogany veneer was cracked, smoky white in places. Sadness seeped from its every corner with no loving owner to take care of it.

  All at once, something bubbled up inside of him, something that compelled him. He went inside and arrived back a few minutes later, in his hand the crumpled sheet music he’d pulled from his bushes four years before.

  Tenderly, he lifted the lid and, placing the music in the music holder, seated himself on the piano stool. He paused for a moment to close his eyes in a silent prayer as Chopin’s spellbinding nocturnes and Mrs. Epstein’s lively piano concertos played in his thoughts. He thought of Michael’s last words to him in his note: “Find the man who used to play the piano.”

  Opening his eyes, he ran his hand along the smooth surface of the keyboard, gently caressing and sampling a few notes, and finding it miraculously still almost in tune. And as the reverberating sound rewarded him, he felt the joy of the resonance that pulsed through his fingers to delight him.

  Then, following Mrs. Epstein’s spidery handwritten script, he started to play her composition. Slowly and cautiously at first, wondering if his middle-aged fingers would remember and be nimble enough to find their place. But as they sank into their familiarity, he opened himself up to reckless abandonment, bringing life to the music on the page and playing her musical creation as though his heart was breaking. Its lively, dancing rhythm stretched fingers of warmth out into the chilly afternoon, filling every corner, every space of the dark and sadness with its love, light, and hope of a better tomorrow.

  Up and down the street, people couldn’t help but be drawn to their windows and open wide their front doors to huddle together on their doorsteps. Even on the street corner, the two soldiers paused from checking papers, their bleak faces lifted upwards in apparent remembrance; whisked back to a world beyond the bounds of war, a time and place where they all were neither hunted nor hunter, neither friend nor foe, but just human beings dwelling together in a world of beauty.

  Josef continued to play. After Mrs. Epstein’s composition, then every tune he could remember—Chopin, Mozart, Beethoven. Anything that danced its way from his heart to his fingers he delighted in, indulging himself until he was utterly spent. At the end, he was tired but overjoyed, and somewhere in between Mozart and Beethoven, he felt himself smiling.

  Resting his hands on the keyboard, he whispered to the piano, “Thank you, Mrs. Epstein. Thank you for your beautiful music.”

  Then he was struck by a thought. Even years after her death, she still somehow managed to reach forward into his present and once again give him a gift. It wasn’t lost on him that he was still powerless to give her anything back in return.

  With that thought, he gathered the music reverently from the stand and, closing the lid, ran his hands once more over the smooth veneer. Then, he gently mounted the steps to his home, stood on his top step, and turned to look out onto his street. “My Amsterdam!” he yelled out into the frozen air. “My Amsterdam!” he proclaimed again to the sky as he lifted his eyes heavenwards to smile at the two women who had
given and gone before him.

  Chapter 56

  May 5th, 1945

  One morning, Ingrid stumbled out of her bunk and moved toward the cell door. The jail had been silent overnight, which confused her. Usually, the echoing footsteps of marching feet down the corridor and slamming doors kept her awake, but the night before her world had been silent. As yet, no one had come to her cell with food, as the guards usually did in the morning. Though “food” was hardly what she could call it—a handful of rice if she was lucky, or a piece of stale, dark bread. The rations that even the party had known from time to time on the outside seemed luxurious to what they gave prisoners in jail.

  She placed her ear against the door, listening; all was silent. She put her fingers on the handle and noticed that it gave way underneath her grasp. Normally locked from the outside, now it was moving freely. Gingerly, she slid it to its fully open position and the creaking door swung open. Why had they not locked it?

  Looking tentatively down the corridor, she heard hasty footsteps approaching. Withdrawing back into her cell, she kept the door cracked a little so she could see the person coming, afraid to move out in case it was a guard. She had already found out first-hand what happened when she was disobedient, and her jaw still didn’t feel aligned after the slap she had received for answering back to one of her captors. But as she kept her eyes on the man approaching her, it was apparent this wasn’t a Nazi. He was dressed in disheveled civilian clothes, walking with a slight limp, and his bruised face had more than a day’s worth of beard growth. Hesitantly, she opened the door farther, so she could get a better view.

  Across his cheek was an angry, red scar, and when he caught sight of Ingrid, he smiled, showing two cracked teeth. He spoke to her in perfect Dutch.

  “Hello, fellow prisoner.”

  She opened the door a little wider, apprehensive. “Where are the guards?”

  “Gone.” He beamed. “Scampered like rats in the middle of the night, left us. At least they left the doors open. I’m guessing that the Allies have made their way to Amsterdam and they got out before they had to pay the price of their crimes.”

  Ingrid dared not to hope. Could she be free? Could she, at last, be free of this nightmare? She tried to figure out in her head how long she had been in jail. Was it a month? Was it six weeks? One day was the same as the next, and one week had turned into another. She was numb and cold after weeks of deprivation in squalor and the heartache of losing Heinrich and everything that she held so dear.

  Slowly making her way out of her cell, she noticed more people starting to filter out into the corridor, all looking as bewildered and disheveled as herself.

  “This way,” someone shouted farther down the hall.

  Straightening her dirty, creased clothes, she followed the group toward the open door.

  As Ingrid shuffled outside on her unsteady legs, she couldn’t believe she was free. Her eyes squinted as she came out into the sunshine for the first time in over a month. Her bones ached, and when she looked down at her body, she knew she’d lost a lot of weight. She couldn’t wait to get home.

  All at once she realized that she couldn’t go back home. Home had been Heinrich’s apartment. Where would she go? She didn’t know. Maybe she could go to one of her friends from where she used to live. Ingrid hadn’t seen them for a long time, but there was no one else. Vi was gone, and there was no Heinrich. Suddenly her world had become very small.

  Carefully she started to make her way down the street to the area she’d left so long ago. Maybe she could ask one of the women in the block of flats she had once lived in to let her in to take a bath. Halfway there, a woman she’d known from her old neighborhood recognized her.

  “Ingrid? Ingrid Held?” she said, the sarcasm strong in her tone. “Here is Ingrid Held,” she shouted to a group of women who were with her. “Ingrid Held loved the Nazis.”

  Ingrid was bewildered. Couldn’t they see she’d suffered at the hands of the Nazis too? She stood frozen as the angry mob moved to surround her. Too hungry and weak to run, she had no other choice but to await her fate.

  The woman grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her into the crowd. “Ingrid Held loved the Nazis. She even slept with one of them, said she was going to marry him.”

  The women surrounded her, shouting and screaming names at her and pulling at her body, pulling at her clothes, pushing her, slapping her. Ingrid couldn’t believe this was happening. She’d spent all this time in jail, and now that she was free, she was being beaten yet again.

  Suddenly she was thrust into a chair, and somebody came toward her face with scissors. What were they going to do to her? Were they going to cut her face? She closed her eyes tightly as the nightmare unfolding in front of her overwhelmed her. But instead of her face, the woman with the scissors grabbed hold of a chunk of her hair and started to cut savagely all the way to the root.

  Ingrid tried to scream again, but no sound came out. Nothing. She was too shocked. She waited in horror as she felt another woman take a razor to the back of her head. All the time they taunted her, screaming about their husbands, boyfriends, and children who had suffered at the hands of the Nazis while she had lived under their protection.

  “We shall color you orange, the color of the Resistance so everybody will know you are a traitor,” said another woman with an angry glint in her eye. “You, Nazi lover, you will be shown for who you really are.”

  A stream of hot, salty tears ran down her cheeks as she felt the weight of what she had done become real to her, and she watched in anguish as another woman approached her with a rusted can of paint.

  As he approached his home, Josef had been thinking of Hannah. With the war over there was nothing to hold him back from pursuing a relationship with her, or at least finding out if she had any feelings for him. He was in a jubilant mood, buoyant with the celebrations of the end of the war, marveling at the atmosphere all around him. The streets had been flooded with British and Canadian soldiers, and people from all over the city had come out to welcome them into Amsterdam. The Allies had been handing out food packages on the street, and he was excited to get home and eat something nourishing. But as he opened the front door, something didn’t feel right. Carefully, he walked into his house and closed the door. There seemed to be a draft. Where was it coming from? Maybe he’d left a window open, he thought, as he slowly moved about the downstairs.

  When he entered the kitchen, he realized what was wrong. A small window had been smashed and somebody had forced open his back door. At first, he was concerned about looters, but after a quick investigation of his house, nothing seemed disturbed. Not that the Nazis had left a lot to be stolen after they had raided his home the month before. He continued to move through his house hesitantly. Then a thought hit him. Michael. What if it was Michael? Hastily he raced upstairs to the attic. But only a hollow emptiness greeted him. With a heavy heart, he moved back down to the kitchen to prepare food.

  All at once, a thud came from behind him, and he noticed Dantes crouched down on the floor peering at the pantry in a curious way. With all of his senses on edge, Josef moved toward the door. Unlatching it carefully, he looked inside the darkened cupboard.

  Someone was there, he was sure of it now. He could see their outline and hear the sound of air rushing in and out of their lungs in short, hot spurts. It had to be his former student. Flinging open the door, he cried out Michael’s name. But his joy was short-lived as he flicked on the lights and realized he was wrong. The person cowering in the corner was not his dark-haired friend at all but someone he didn’t recognize. They looked terrified, painfully thin, their clothes ripped and smeared with mud, and their face a mass of cuts and bruises. But what was most shocking was their head. It appeared that where hair used to be there was now stubble that was painted bright orange.

  Suddenly, with a jolt, he realized who it was. “Ingrid?” he asked haltingly. “Is that… you?”

  Crouching down so as not to scare her, he held ou
t his hand, as if approaching a timid animal. In seeing him, she howled uncontrollably, reaching up for him to hold her. He took her in his arms and rocked her gently, the smell of paint almost overpowering him.

  “What happened to you? Where were you for so long?” he asked her gently. But she could do and say nothing in response but sob in his arms.

  He took her into the front room and placed her in the same chair Michael had sat in so many years before. Giving her a glass of brandy, he brought down a blanket to wrap her in. Even though the weather was positively balmy outside, she was shivering, so he lit a fire and prepared food, waiting for her to calm.

  She sipped at her brandy and tasted a little of the food. Her sobbing subsided. Then she started to tell him the tale of what had happened to her.

  Josef listened quietly to her story and thought about the sadness of her life, and compassion welled up in his heart. As much as she’d been stubborn and foolish following the Nazis, he could see that she’d paid a hard price for her decisions.

  She turned her watery eyes toward him. “And the worst of it all,” she croaked, “is Heinrich no longer loves me, and apparently, he has a wife and children in Germany that he has gone back to.” Her voice cracked with the sheer agony, and she crumpled forward, weeping into her hands again.

  Josef nodded. He had suspected something like that. Whenever they talked about Germany, a look had crossed that man’s face, and Josef had been aware of it.

  After she finished her drink, he decided to run her a bath. She struggled up to the bathroom and sat huddled next to him. As he poured in hot water, he noticed that there was a tear in her dress, and her elbow hung out of a gaping hole.

  He started to make his way out of the bathroom, but turned again to look at her. She seemed pitiful, smaller and more pathetic somehow as she sat staring at the water. She was not so different to how she had been when she was a little girl, with the same look of desolate abandonment on her face. Slowly he walked back over to her and tentatively picked up the corner of the torn fabric that hung down raggedly, exposing the skin at her elbow. He lifted it gently and smoothed the material across the gaping hole. He was suddenly transported back to the time when she was small and had just lost her parents, and he had placed her on a train with a similar hole in her dress. This time he couldn’t abandon her again. This time he would do the right thing.