There was such a din at the train station that Emil trembled. It reminded him of the terrible commotion when he and Karl had scrubbed the pavement.
Storm troopers and policemen were herding everyone into the waiting room. Women and men embraced their children, weeping. Some women fainted and were left lying in the middle of all the chaos. Storm troopers kept pushing the children toward an open door, through which they could see a train with many cars.
Karl still held on to Emil with a firm grip. The storm troopers were now letting through adults, who had papers to show them. The soldiers examined their papers carefully, inspected their luggage, then gave them a shove or a kick and let them through to the train.
Emil and Karl now stood near the door. All at once Emil tugged on Karl’s sleeve. Karl looked around and saw that the last of the adult passengers to go through was the old man who had scrubbed the pavement with them. All at once the melody that the old man had sung to them then began ringing inside Karl’s head.
“Oy, yo-te-ti-di-day, daylom, daylom.”
He remembered the whole melody from beginning to end.
“Do you see? Zeyde’s also going away!”
Karl began humming the tune, as though he wanted the old man to be able to hear it.
“Be quiet,” Emil advised. “We can sing it later on the train.”
Emil and Karl could hear the old man explain to a soldier that his grandson was bringing him to America.
“Oh, to the Jewish President Roosevelt!”
“What?” the old man repeated, blinking his eyes.
“What!?” The storm trooper became enraged and hit the old man so hard that he fell to the ground.
He picked himself up, smoothed himself out, and started running toward the train, but then he stopped and went back.
“Hit me again!” he said to the storm trooper.
“Hit you again? Why?” the soldier asked, turning red.
“I want to be sure to remember this. You hit me too quickly. Give me another one. A present like that is worth remembering.”
The soldier raised his foot, but instead of kicking the old man he started shouting wildly. “Get on the train now, or else I’ll shoot you like a dog.”
The old man picked up his satchel and walked to the train.
All of a sudden there was a great deal of running and jumping about. The soldiers opened the door and let the children through. Mothers and fathers raced toward the open door, weeping. The soldiers went berserk. They kicked and shoved the children, who fled, panic-stricken, into the train.
Then all at once the conductors closed the doors to the cars of the train and shouted to the soldiers, “There isn’t room to breathe in there!”
“Push more of them in. So what if they choke.”
“Impossible!” the conductors gestured.
Then the soldiers raised their right hands in salute.
“Move on out!”
Karl broke away from his place. Frightened and impatient, he felt his entire body trembling, as if he were about to explode.
He shouted at the top of his lungs, but no one heard him in the midst of all the commotion. He tried to shout louder than everyone else.
“Emil! Emil!”
Emil was no longer next to him. He’d been pushed away and shoved into the train.
The train began to pant, like a huge dog. Huff-huff-huff. Karl watched the train, hoping at least to catch one last glimpse of Emil.
The cars of the train rolled by. They were dark; he couldn’t see anyone. It seemed as if the train had devoured them all.
About forty children and a dozen adults remained standing on the platform. They wanted to go back into the waiting room, but the storm troopers had shut the doors.
“Another train will arrive in three hours.”
Karl felt a sharp pang of hunger in his stomach. He gnashed his teeth.
It started to rain again. The adults moved the children under the narrow roof covering the platform. Karl fidgeted. He couldn’t stay in one place. A voice inside him kept shouting, “Emil! Emil!”
Three more hours in Vienna.
A thirteen-year-old girl with straw-blond hair, a pug nose, and bright blue eyes was eating an apple. She took another apple out of a paper bag and offered it to Karl. He bit into it.
“I’m sure we’ll get on the next train,” she said, with a grown-up expression.
“My friend left on the first one,” he said, and he ate the apple quickly, because he was afraid that otherwise he would start crying.
Karl put his hand in his pocket and discovered that he still had the two letters, the one from Emil and the one from Hans. This made him feel a little happier. It seemed as though he wasn’t completely alone, because he had his two friends with him.
He thought about Emil’s note, stained with teardrops. It was too bad—now it would be so easy for him to cover his letter to Emil with tears. It felt as though he would burst into tears any minute.
“We still have two hours until the train comes,” the girl with the bright eyes told him.
“Two more hours in Vienna!” Karl thought.
He imagined that his father’s picture had just fallen off the wall. The walls collapsed, the whole building crumbled. Emil’s building also fell down; all the buildings in Vienna had toppled over. All the people were buried under the stones that were falling everywhere, raining down on them from all sides, even from the rooftops. The only ones left were those few children and adults who stood there, waiting for the train.
“Will I really get on the next train?” he asked the girl who had given him the apple.
“You can be sure of it,” she replied. “Isn’t that right?” she asked an old woman who stood nearby.
The woman sadly nodded her head.
Afterword: About Emil and Karl
There have been many novels about the Holocaust for young readers, but this one is different. The others were written following the end of World War II, sometimes decades after the events they describe had taken place. Emil and Karl, however, was written about the experiences of European Jews and their neighbors living under Nazi occupation while these events were still happening. In fact, it is among the very first books written about the Holocaust for readers of any age and in any language. Therefore, it offers a special perspective on this chapter of history. The story of the author of this novel and of the children for whom it was originally written also helps us understand what is distinctive about this book.
Yankev Glatshteyn, the author of Emil and Karl, was born in 1896 in the Polish city of Lublin. In addition to studying in a kheyder, the traditional religious school where Jewish children learn to read Hebrew, Glatshteyn also received a modern education from private tutors. At the age of eighteen he immigrated to America, as did many thousands of other East European Jews. Glatshteyn settled in New York City, where he studied law. But instead of pursuing a career as a lawyer, he became a writer. In 1920, together with a circle of friends that he met in New York, he formed a group of writers who were dedicated to writing modern poetry and fiction in their native language, Yiddish. The group called themselves the Inzikhistn—the Introspectivists—because they thought it was important for authors to reflect their own inner, personal feelings and experiences in whatever they wrote.
At that time Yiddish was the first language of most of the millions of Jews living in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Argentina, England, France, Poland, Hungary, the Soviet Union, and other countries. Cities and towns on both sides of the Atlantic had neighborhoods full of Jews who spoke Yiddish with one another at work, on the street, and at home. They read Yiddish books and newspapers, listened to Yiddish on the radio and sound recordings, went to see Yiddish theater and movies, and joined political and religious organizations that were run in Yiddish. Many Jewish children went to schools and summer camps where they learned to speak, read, and write in Yiddish. Glatshteyn and other Yiddish writers treasured the language as an important part of their Jewish c
ultural heritage. At the same time, they used Yiddish as a modern literary language—a language for discussing all sorts of contemporary issues and for expressing their own ideas.
In 1934, Glatshteyn learned that his mother, who still lived in Lublin, was very ill. He decided to return to Poland to visit her. During this trip he saw how much Jewish life in Europe had changed in the twenty years since he had left for America. On one hand, there was much to be excited about; Jews were involved in modern cultural, social, and political activities in ways that had never before been possible. On the other hand, there was also cause for grave concern. Discrimination against Jews was a growing problem in many Central and East European countries. Polish Jews were increasingly the victims of economic boycotts and physical attacks; often their complaints to authorities met with little sympathy. In the Soviet Union, Jews were finding that the government’s early promise of support for Yiddish culture was now met with more and more opposition by the state. Most threatening was the rise of Adolf Hitler, head of the Nazi Party, to the position of Chancellor of Germany in 1933. Hitler’s regime was outspoken in its anti-Semitism, and it enacted numerous laws that denied Jews their rights as German citizens. The Nazis regarded Jews as a race, rather than an ethnic, national, or religious group. Moreover, Nazis considered Jews an inferior race compared to Aryans—whom they felt were the true “native” population of Germany—and they blamed Jews for causing Germany’s social and economic problems.
When Glatshteyn returned to America, he wrote about his trip and the observations he had made about Jewish life in Europe in two novels written for adults. At the same time he also wrote Emil and Karl, a book especially for younger readers. It was published in New York in February 1940. By then, the situation in Europe had worsened. Nazi Germany had invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, beginning the World War II.
Emil and Karl takes place in Vienna, the capital of Austria, some time shortly before the war began. In March 1938, Germany annexed Austria, claiming that it was doing so on behalf of the Aryans living there, in order to create a larger, more powerful nation for all “true” German people. Most of Austria’s Jews lived in Vienna at that time. Like the Jews of Germany, they too were persecuted by the Nazis. In fact, the Nazis enacted anti-Semitic policies much more swiftly in Austria than they had in Germany. Within a matter of weeks, Jewish organizations were abolished and their leaders were arrested, Jewish property was seized, and many Jews were forced to leave their homes. In addition, Jewish people were often publicly humiliated and physically attacked, both by Nazi officials and by Austrian citizens who sympathized with Nazi policies. Incidents described in Emil and Karl, such as Jewish shops being looted, Jews being forced to scrub Vienna’s streets with their bare hands and to act like animals in a public park, actually happened and were reported in American newspapers.
Most Austrian Jews tried to flee the country, but they found it increasingly difficult to do so. Even if they were able to get out of Austria, they often found no other country that would welcome them. As a result, many of Austria’s Jews were deported to concentration camps and, later on during the war, to death camps.
The Nazis also considered other groups of people besides Jews to be their enemies. Socialists, like Karl’s father and mother in this novel—as well as communists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, and Gypsies—were also persecuted. Some of those who were opposed to Nazism organized efforts to overthrow the Nazi control of the government and to encourage ordinary people to resist Nazi teachings and policies. Because Nazis tolerated no opposition to their ideas, this was a risky undertaking. Like Matilda and Hans in the novel, those who were against Nazism often organized in secret. Many of those who opposed Nazism or who simply were the kinds of people whom Nazis considered unfit members of society were arrested, tortured, and even executed.
Writing this novel at the beginning of World War II, Glatshteyn did not know the terrible fate that most of Europe’s Jews would suffer during the war. At that time, many people were hopeful that the majority of Jews threatened by Nazi persecution would somehow be rescued. Thousands of men, women, and children were, in fact, able to find new homes in other countries around the world, although as the war progressed this became less and less possible. As in this novel, some children managed to escape Nazi-occupied countries thanks to the special efforts of government agencies and private citizens committed to their rescue. Many of the millions of European Jews unable to escape the Nazis dedicated their lives to fighting Nazism with all their might, and some were able to survive the enormous effort that was made to murder them. Despite all these hopes and acts of courage, millions of Europe’s Jews lost their lives during this terrible period, as did many of the other people the Nazis had set out to destroy, before Germany was defeated in 1945.
Therefore, it is hard to say what might have happened to Emil and to Karl—if they had been real children—by the end of World War II. Nevertheless, their story is as important for us to read today as it was when Glatshteyn wrote it. Emil and Karl shows us how differently people responded to the hatred and intolerance that Nazism propagated. While many did nothing to resist it or even to question its principles, there were those who abhorred these atrocities. Some were too afraid to challenge Nazi authorities, but others fought against them, risking their lives.
Although German would be the language that Emil, Karl, and the other characters would have spoken to each other in Vienna, Glatshteyn wrote this book in Yiddish. Yiddish was not only Glatshteyn’s native language; it was also at the center of a modern Jewish culture that he had devoted his life to enriching through his poems and novels. Glatshteyn dedicated Emil and Karl to his children, Saul, Naomi, and Gabriel. The book was also intended for the thousands of other American Jewish children who knew Yiddish. Many of them read Emil and Karl while attending one of dozens of afternoon and weekend Yiddish schools that were located in major cities around the country. From this book they learned about the persecutions then being inflicted on Europe’s Jews—a subject most other American children didn’t study in school at the time. But Glatshteyn and other American Jews felt that their children needed to know what was happening to their fellow Jews, including youngsters their own age, across the Atlantic.
By writing a story about two boys—one who is Jewish, the other who is not—Glatshteyn also wanted his young readers to understand that what was happening to Jews in Europe had an impact on everyone living there, and that the future of Europe’s Jews depended on their relationships with their non-Jewish neighbors. And so those first readers of Emil and Karl learned from this novel—as we do today—of the importance of friendship, of tolerance, and of bravery.
Jeffrey Shandler
New York
About the Author
YANKEV GLATSHTEYN was born in Lublin, Poland, in 1896. Shortly after immigrating to New York City in 1914, he embarked on a career as a Yiddish writer and soon became one of the leading voices in modern Yiddish literature. Glatshteyn helped establish the literary circle known as In zikh (the Introspectivists), which dominated the Yiddish avant-garde in America during the 1920s and 1930s. Best known as a poet, Glatshteyn was celebrated for his linguistic virtuosity, formal daring, and vivid imagery. Over the course of a literary career spanning five decades, he wrote ten volumes of poetry, starting with his first book, titled Yankev Glatshteyn, in 1921. He was also one of the most probing of Yiddish critics, writing regularly about Yiddish literature and culture in America and Europe. During the 1930s, Glatshteyn began to address the mounting difficulties faced by Jews living in Europe in his poetry and prose, including articles he wrote for the New York Yiddish press. In 1934, Glatshteyn returned to Poland to visit his mother, who was very ill. His travels inspired two novels: Ven Yash iz geforn (When Yash Went Away, 1938), and Ven Yash iz gekumen (When Yash Returned, 1940). At this time, Glatshteyn also wrote Emil and Karl, his only novel for young readers, which was published in New York in 1940. He continued to respond to the persecution of European Jewry
under Nazism during World War II and afterward, writing some of the most compelling works of Holocaust poetry to appear in the early postwar period. Glatshteyn also co-edited Anthology of Holocaust Literature, one of the first such collections published in English, in 1968. His last book of poems, A yid fun Lublin (A Jew from Lublin), appeared in 1966. Yankev Glatstheyn died in New York City in 1971. You can sign up for email updates here.
About the Translator
JEFFREY SHANDLER is a professor in the Department of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University. He holds a Ph.D. in Yiddish Studies from Columbia University, and has been a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania and New York University. Shandler is the author of Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture (2005), a study of contemporary Yiddish culture, and While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust (1999), which received the Saul Viener Prize by the American Jewish Historical Society as being the most significant literary contribution to the field of American Jewish history during the years 1999–2000. Among other titles, Shandler is the editor of Awakening Lives: Autobiographies of Jewish Youth in Poland before the Holocaust (2002), which was a Koret Jewish Book Award finalist, and his translations of Yiddish literature also include Mani-Leyb’s children’s classic Yingl-Tsingl-Khvat (1986). Jeffrey Shandler lives in New York City.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
To the Reader
Emil and Karl Page 12