Danzig Passage

by Bodie Thoene

  The porter opened the door a crack. “I am ordered to say . . . to tell all passengers . . . the train will be delayed another hour.” He gestured toward their windows. “You see?”

  A uniformed band filed into the station. Behind them came the Blackshirted security forces of the SS. They stood in long rows from the entrance of the Bahnhof to a smaller platform where a train with only four cars waited.

  “The Führer?” Lucy asked.

  “He will be coming soon,” the porter said. “The Ministry of Propaganda has told us to tell everyone in Bahnhof. The Führer has a political guest—some foreigner. We need to make an impression. If you and your nephews will join the crowd, bitte. There are flags provided.”

  Unconsciously, Peter touched his passport in his coat pocket. The door closed and Lucy made a face to show her distaste of these things. “Cheer loud, Peter,” she instructed. “Young men your age consider the Führer their hero.”

  Peter held Willie in his arms so that he would have a reason not to give the salute. One could not be expected to stand at attention and say those words with a baby in one’s arms.

  The railway official passed out miniature swastika flags at the turnstile. Hundreds of people came from out of nowhere, then thousands. The band began to play a military march. Peter was given two flags to wave, as though Willie could also hold one of them. Then in the jostling crush and the hum of excitement, they were somehow pushed forward to the front of the mob.

  As “Deutschland Über Alles” played, Hitler appeared, surrounded by an entourage of Reich officials. Goebbels and fat Herman Göring came behind the Führer, and even the brutal schoolmaster Himmler, the man Peter’s father called a butcher. All the men who had destroyed their lives.

  Peter raised his little flag and screamed Heil Hitler along with all the rest. The Führer reached out to touch the hands of his adoring people who had come to worship him. He came nearer down the line until, at last, horribly, he locked eyes on the sweating, frantic face of Peter holding Baby Willie.

  “Heil Hitler!” Peter managed to snap to attention in spite of the baby in his arms.

  “A fine example of young Aryan manhood!” the Führer said. He took Willie into his arms, and the bulbs of a hundred cameras popped to capture the tender moment.

  God! Oh, God! Help!

  “Heil! Yes. Heil . . . Heil . . . ” Peter stammered. The men around the Führer laughed with amusement at the young red-haired Aryan so overcome by the attention of his lord.

  “Your name?” the Führer demanded.

  “Peter . . . Ruger . . . Mein Führer.”

  More laughter.

  “This is your brother?”

  “Ja. My brother.”

  “You must both grow up to serve the Fatherland. Ja?”

  “Ja. Ja. Mein Führer.”

  All this was caught by the camera’s eternal eye. Someone scribbled down Peter’s name. The Führer returned the infant prop and then passed on to the next target of his attention.

  Peter could scarcely breathe as the ceremony ended with echoing chants of “Sieg Heil!”

  Lucy, ashen with fright, guided him back to their train. They were allowed to keep their flags, and all along the way people patted Peter on the back and rubbed Willie’s soft curls for luck as the Führer had done.

  He could barely answer questions during the document check, and when they were allowed back into their compartment a fellow in a black SS uniform filled the space across from him. It was still a long way to the border.

  ***

  From within their hollowed-out next among crates of chickens and cabbages, Jacob could clearly hear the voices of the young men who manned the roadblock.

  “We will have to take a look through your cargo.”

  Farmer Schöne replied with his usual flair. “EH? SPEAK UP! CABBAGES AND CHICKENS, THAT’S WHAT.”

  The youthful soldier replied with equal volume. “WE ARE LOOKING FOR FUGITIVES KNOWN TO BE HEADING THIS—”

  “NO! CABBAGES AND CHICKENS. YOU CAN LOOK, BUT THEY HAVE BEEN LOADED SINCE LAST NIGHT, AND YOU HAVE TO PUT THEM BACK.”

  The soldiers talked among themselves. “Himmel! Gottfried, will you look at that pile of crates? Like the Eiffel Tower with feathers. It will take us hours!”

  They addressed the old farmer again. “WE ARE LOOKING FOR TWO CHILDREN. A BOY AND A GIRL. TRAVELING IN A TAN CAR.”

  “EH? TWO CHILDREN? NEIN! WE HAVE EIGHT CHILDREN. THIRTY-THREE GRANDCHILDREN.”

  “The old fellow doesn’t even know what we’re talking about.”

  “AND ON THE TRUCK IS CABBAGES AND CHICKENS. YOU CAN LOOK, BUT PUT THEM BACK RIGHT, AND IN A HURRY. THEY ARE FOR THE GARRISON IN SCHNEIDEMUHL, AND THE GENERAL DOESN’T LIKE TO BE KEPT WAITING!”

  After a few seconds more of mumbled conversation, the guards waved the old farmer through the line without the usual Heil.

  ***

  The locomotive whistle howled farewell to the demons of Berlin as Peter leaned back in the corner of his seat and let weakness wash over him. The devil, clad in brown, had touched him and burned the energy out of him. He was exhausted.

  Lucy was already talking familiarly to the SS officer.

  “I loathe these stiff-collared tunics.” The officer unbuttoned the top button. Peter thought this round-faced man looked more like a shop clerk than an SS. “But there are times when duty dictates . . . ” He frowned. “I know you! Vienna! You keep company with a certain major . . . Wolfgang von Fritschauer!”

  Lucy giggled with pretended delight. “What a memory!” She leaned forward. “I confess . . . I do not remember you.”

  “I was not in uniform.” He snapped his fingers. “Your name is . . . Lucy. Lucy, is it? Who could forget you?”

  This was the penalty she paid for talking to everyone from railway porters to street peddlers. “What a mind! I don’t have any memory at all.”

  The officer extended his hand. “No matter. My name is Alexander Hess. Special investigations.”

  “Lieutenant Hess.”

  “Alex, please. We are old friends, although you do not know it.”

  She tilted her head slightly and brushed her hair back from her forehead. “And how far are you traveling?” she asked the lieutenant.

  “All the way to the border of Poland,” he replied, warming to the look in her eyes. “An unpleasant duty. Dealing with traitors.”

  “I am so relieved we will be traveling together,” she said in almost a whisper. “My nephew . . . I have worn you out, haven’t I, Peter?”

  Peter nodded. The words sounded as if they were coming from a deep canyon in the Alps, echoes in his head. He was too tired to be frightened of the skull-and-crossbones insignia on the uniform. The lightning bolts appeared harmless enough. Baby Willie had already drifted off to sleep on the padded bench beside Peter.

  Lucy laughed and tucked her arm beneath that of the officer. “You see? He can’t even keep his eyes open. I need a little company. I am best late at night.” Her smile dazzled the officer.

  “Ja? You are?”

  Lucy smiled patronizingly at Peter. “Just close your eyes and go to sleep, Peter. We won’t pay any attention to you, and you don’t pay any attention to us, eh?”

  As Peter leaned back against the seat and the train lurched forward out of the station, Lucy asked the lieutenant if he had any schnapps in that little silver flask of his.

  37

  The Angels’ Gift

  When Peter opened his eyes, the reading lamp was on above the head of the SS officer. Lucy was not in the compartment. Willie was gone.

  The SS lieutenant sat across from Peter. His tunic was unbuttoned; his boots off. His face was unshaven and his hair disheveled. He smelled strongly of schnapps. And he was staring.

  It was a hard, curious sort of stare, the kind of stare that asked, Haven’t I seen you someplace before? Someplace besides where you say we met? The look instantly sent a shot of adrenalin through Peter. He sat up, suddenly wide awake.

&n
bsp; “Where is my aunt?” he asked in a croaking voice.

  “Took your baby brother to the washroom. Change his diapers.”

  “Ah.” Peter focused his gaze out the window. The expression on the face of the officer did not change. Peter prayed that he would look somewhere else, or that Lucy would come back. No one ever looked at him when she was around. Why had she taken Willie out to change him? Why had she left Peter alone with this iron-jawed SS officer? Then Peter remembered. Willie was circumcised. One look at that, and the lieutenant would know everything.

  “So, what Hitler Youth unit are you in?” asked the officer, the smell of schnapps sour on his breath.

  “You mean Aunt Lucy didn’t tell you everything about me?” Peter wished now that he had not slept through her conversation. No doubt she had told this fellow all about Peter—details that Peter did not know.

  “No, she didn’t. So—”

  “Pardon, bitte. I have to use the toilet,” Peter said. He fumbled with the door, pushing against it instead of pulling.

  “Pull.” The man’s voice held an edge, even in that one word—some doubt he wrestled with when he studied Peter. Had he seen the photographs of the Wallich family? Was he trying even now to put the name and place to the face?

  Peter escaped the closeness of the compartment and leaned heavily against the wall of the corridor. Where was Lucy?

  The train rattled hollowly over a trestle bridge as Peter walked toward the washrooms. Why had Lucy left him there alone and given the officer time to look at him, time to think?

  The door of their compartment swung back and the officer emerged, following Peter. The corridor light glistened on the man’s close-cropped blond hair. Shadows emphasized the pocked skin. His blue eyes were bloodshot beneath a jutting brow. The train rocked off the bridge and settled into an even rhythm again just as Peter reached the line to the men’s room. It was a single compartment. Thank God! More Jews had been discovered and massacred in men’s rooms than any other place in the Reich.

  The lieutenant stood without speaking in line behind Peter. Peter grew more nervous as each man moved forward into the stall. He imagined the lieutenant breaking down the door after him, shouting to everyone that here was another circumcised Jew! Peter Wallich had been hiding at Otto’s so long that he had forgotten the terror of public toilets.

  “You want to go ahead of me?” Peter asked the officer.

  The strangeness of the question reflected in the man’s expression. “Not especially.” He smirked.

  “Well,” Peter bumbled, “it’s just that you had so much schnapps to drink, and . . . I thought maybe . . . ”

  The SS chin went up slightly in response to such stupidity. Peter felt the eyes of the man boring into the back of his head. If this fellow knew Wolf, did it not stand to reason that he had seen the photographs of Karin Wallich and her children? Maybe every SS officer in Vienna had seen them!

  Nauseated by the time he entered the stall, Peter threw up, then stared at the door for five minutes, fully expecting the hinges to come crashing in any instant. He left the stall without ever unbuttoning his trousers. He would wait to use the toilet until Lucy came back to preoccupy the officer. Then Peter would come back. Alone.

  ***

  There was a thirty-minute layover in Landsberg—time enough to stretch the legs and breathe a bit.

  But Peter did not wish to see the Bahnhof when SS Lieutenant Hess asked him. Nor did Lucy wish to accompany him for a quick snack. She would stay, she said, and feed the baby. The layover was just long enough to get the child settled for the long journey ahead to Danzig.

  Both Peter and Lucy gave an audible sigh of relief when the officer buttoned his tunic and stepped off the train. Lucy had done a magnificent job of talking and drawing attention away from Peter and Willie, but still she saw that same nagging something in the man’s eyes.

  The fact that he knew Wolf was terrifying to her. Wolf would find out where she had gone. Even without the note on the mirror, he would figure out who had sprung his prey from the trap!

  “We will not reach the border for hours yet,” Lucy said thoughtfully. “I will try to get him out of here—in the saloon car or the dining car—until then. When we come back, the light must be off. Pretend to sleep. I will hope it does not come to him where he has seen you before.”

  So there it was. She said it. It was not Peter’s imagination. “And if he remembers?”

  She looked at Baby Willie, who slurped noisily on his bottle. “He is getting off at the border station. After we cross the border into Poland, the train compartments will be sealed, locked on the outside, until we get to Danzig. We will be safe then.”

  “That is still a long way.”

  Lucy smiled knowingly. “I will do what I can to keep his mind off you and Willie. If it comes to it, the doors will not be sealed until we reach Poland. We might jump . . . but then again, it would be better if we stayed on the train and he left.”

  They were comrades in arms, indeed. Peter decided once more that he liked Lucy Strasburg very much. She knew exactly what she was saying; every word and gesture was calculated. Some other time, such ability might be despicable. Right now, it was admirable.

  “He asked me what unit I am with in the Hitler Youth.”

  “And?”

  “I told him to ask you.”

  “Good. And I told him . . . to ask you! You are a clever boy. I told him about your visit to Vienna—the same stuff—but you may write whatever autobiography makes you happy. You did well enough with Wolf the other night. All that nonsense about the SS motto. Very good. Be whatever you want to be. I did not tell this jackal anything. But it is better to stay out of his attention and sleep, ja?”

  For ten hours Peter would be cooped up in a very small cage with a hungry tiger. Yet Lucy seemed to believe they could manage even this, even if they had to boot the SS lieutenant out of a moving train. Peter had misjudged this woman the first night he had seen her at the side of Wolfgang von Fritschauer. Now he grinned at her as she fussed with the baby. Maybe Lucy was really an angel beneath her lipstick and rouge. For the first time in his life, the story about Rahab, the prostitute in ancient Jericho who hid two Hebrew spies, no longer seemed shocking to Peter. He found himself hoping that if and when the walls came down, Lucy Strasburg would be spared just as that harlot had survived long ago.

  “What are you looking at?” She colored slightly at his stare. Had she never been admired, one soldier to another?

  “You are a righteous woman,” Peter said simply. Then he excused himself and hurried to use the toilet before the tiger got back on the train.

  When Peter returned, the SS lieutenant was sitting next to Lucy. Her arm was draped over the back of the seat. She touched his face with her finger, and the man did not even look up at Peter as he entered.

  ***

  Lucy could only pray that the uncertainty she felt about their chances was not transmitted to the sensitive adolescent across from her in the train compartment. They must exude confidence, or this Nazi would smell their fear and know.

  Like Wolf, this SS lieutenant might be fooled for a while by sheer bravado, but if the façade of her courage ever slipped, the passage to Danzig would end in leg irons.

  Peter had not seen the SS officer enter the phone booth on the Berlin platform. The boy had been busy looking at Lucy, as if she was some sort of saint. Ah, well, if it made him feel better`.

  But from her position, she had been able to see the phone booth, watch the SS lieutenant flip through his little black book. She had seen his expression change from confusion and suspicion to a sinister pleasure at whatever news he had heard on the other end of the line.

  Had he called Vienna? Had he contacted Wolf and casually mentioned that Lucy Strasburg had not gone to church to pray after all, that the trip to Demel’s for a pastry was actually a journey to Danzig?

  She brushed her fingertips familiarly against the man’s cheek, playing for her life. But perhaps thi
s fellow was also playing a game with her. What did he have to lose, after all? It was a long way between here and the border; she was amusing company. He could simply have her and the children arrested at the crossing. Until then, she touched his cheek and made pleasant conversation to pass the hours.

  ***

  Inside Jacob’s head, the neon road map flashed: a hundred and ninety-seven and one half miles from Berlin to Firchau. Between farmer Schöne’s barn and this deserted spot in the woods outside their destination, the truck had been halted at seven different roadblocks. The Nazis had orders to search for other things besides Lori and Jamie, but not once was the cargo of cabbages and chickens inspected.

  “It was a miracle,” Alfie said without surprise. They stepped out of their hiding place like five feathered clowns emerging from a giant cake.

  It was dark. For once the old farmer was quiet as he spoke, and cautious, even apologetic that he could not get them closer to their goal.

  “Over there is the big new prison they are building—” He pointed to a rise. “They don’t want anyone to know it is there, but it is. And we do.”

  Jacob spread out his mental map and tried to take his bearings. Which way was the border? And where was the customs house where the train would pass through the gates into Poland?

  The farmer answered that question without waiting for him to ask. “Fifty yards through the woods is the railroad track. Follow it. Stick close to the wooded side. Straight on to Poland. You can’t get lost. Just don’t get found. They patrol with dogs, I hear.”

  With that, the old man passed them a sack of provisions and wished them godspeed. Patting each head, including Werner’s, he left them there to travel ahead on their own.

  ***

  “What are you trying to do? Get me drunk?” Peter could hear the coarse laughter of Officer Hess. “Oh well. A long way from here to Firchau. Time enough to sober up after a little fun!”

  The voices of Lucy and the lieutenant penetrated the door of the compartment. He reached up quickly and switched off the light, then leaned over and pulled his cap down across his eyes. Sleeping. He must be sleeping—just sitting there like a piece of luggage while Lucy and the SS officer talked around him and over him.