Nucleus

by Rory Clements

  An hour later, they had Arnold Lindberg in the car. The camp commandant had asked them to stay for lunch in the officers’ mess, but Baumgarten had tapped his watch and declined.

  There had been no time for greetings or explanations. They drove back to the woodland and collected their new outfits from the thicket. In the event, the car had not been searched, but better safe than sorry. Eva changed quickly and then, with great difficulty, persuaded her uncle to do the same. She had to help the shaking man to do up the buttons on his shirt. Then Baumgarten drove them to the station at Munich, handed them tickets to Innsbruck – and bade them farewell.

  *

  Lydia Morris clutched the grainy photograph, stared at it for a few moments, then raised her eyes and peered across the concourse of the railway station. There were so many children, all in coats and hats, despite the June warmth. Each carried a small box or case and each had a number and a name on a tag hanging by a string around their necks. Like so many parcels.

  Which one was Albert? She looked again at the photograph that the child’s mother, Eva, had sent her. It really wasn’t very good. One or two of the boys might fit the bill, but she wasn’t at all sure. A photograph is a dead, static thing, and these children were alive and moving.

  It was difficult to think with all the noise. The hiss of steam, the railway men’s whistles, the background murmur of men and women here to collect their new wards, the yelling of the newspaper sellers and the porters trying to outdo each other, the greetings and farewells of passengers, the common daily discourse of the railway workers and the echoing clatter of metalled boots on concrete. All this and the stench of oil and smoke and sweat.

  Lydia wove through the crowd of waiting adults towards the children. She felt very small beneath the soaring vaulted roof, all glass and steel. The children were silent and scared. Their journey from Germany by train and boat had been long and full of emotion. For some it had been an adventure with cheerful bouts of singing and gratitude for the gifts of food from the kind mothers of Holland when they crossed the border. For others it had been unutterable misery, nothing but tears, unable to eat. But now at Liverpool Street Station, they were all as one – exhausted and homesick, their faces drawn and wide-eyed yet trying to smile, anxious to please. Few of them had any real idea where they were. They were strangers in a strange land. Was this the end of their journey? Who would be meeting them? They all yearned for their mothers and fathers. When would they be joining them?

  She made a beeline for the most likely of the two boys she had spotted. Close up, however, he didn’t really resemble the boy in the picture. The only thing he had in common with the photographic image was the pair of round, metal-framed spectacles perched on his little nose. She glanced at his name tag: Blaustein, Isaac. Moving on, she approached the second boy. The child tried to smile, but his tears were very close to the surface. She smiled back and put a comforting arm on his shoulder. It wasn’t Albert.

  There were more girls than boys, which narrowed her search. She studied each of their faces in turn, took their labels between her fingers and examined them quickly. She smiled at each of the boys and said ‘Wie heissen Sie?’ – what is your name? Each of them pointed to their name tag and answered most correctly, with stiff shoulders, meeting her gaze as they had been taught to do by their loving parents and their strict schoolteachers.

  Lydia did not feel confident enough to engage them in conversation; her German was rusty from lack of use. She said the boy’s name in the form of a question: ‘Albert Haas? Do you know him?’

  They all shook their heads. The name clearly meant nothing to them.

  Bertha Bracey appeared at her side, large and comforting like a mother duck. ‘Not found him yet, my dear?’

  She shook her head. ‘There are so many of them.’

  ‘No more than usual.’

  No, of course not. Lydia had met several of these trainloads of children over the past three months and there had sometimes been twice as many as today’s quota, but this was the first time she was supposed to meet one specific child.

  ‘This is very different, Bertha.’

  ‘I know, my dear. But don’t worry, they’ll begin to thin out soon and then we’ll find the little chap. Whatever you do, keep that smile fixed to your face – let them know you’re friendly.’

  ‘Bertha, I have changed the habit of a lifetime and dressed up for this and done my hair, or perhaps you hadn’t noticed. Of course, I’ll smile.’

  The older woman laughed. ‘Yes, I had noticed the hair. Very nice.’

  Lydia raised an eyebrow. She rather thought that Bertha wasn’t at all impressed by her efforts: neatly brushed hair and a rather frumpy summer dress which she hoped would make her look more like a homely German Jewish Hausfrau than the slightly tattered bohemian Englishwoman which was closer to the truth.

  ‘Perhaps he’s still on the train. He might have fallen asleep and been forgotten, Bertha. I’m sure that’s happened before. I’ll just hop aboard and look.’

  ‘Do that – and don’t worry. We’ll find him. We haven’t mislaid one yet.’

  *

  Albert Haas wasn’t on the train. He wasn’t on the concourse of Liverpool Street Station. Something was clearly amiss. The two leaders who accompanied the children from Germany were already on the ferry home and had been replaced by English leaders at Harwich, neither of whom had any recollection of the boy.

  ‘He can’t have got on the train,’ Bertha Bracey said. She put an arm around Lydia’s shoulders. ‘Come on, my dear, let’s get back to Bloomsbury and call Berlin.’

  ‘But that’s not what the cable said.’ Lydia had seen the telegram from Miss Forster. It said quite clearly that Albert had boarded the Hook of Holland train with the other children at Berlin’s Zoo Station, in the Charlottenburg district.

  ‘There must have been some sort of mix-up. Those affairs can be pretty grim when they separate the children from their parents. We’ll sort it out.’

  Lydia looked at the small photograph of Albert once more. Behind the spectacles, she thought she detected intelligent, sensitive eyes. He wore a formal jacket over a white shirt with a white, lacy collar. Rather girlish and a little too serious, Lydia thought. Albert Haas looked as if he needed to get stuck in with some rugger boys. Toughen up. She tucked the picture into her jacket pocket, but she was reluctant to leave. How could Miss Forster have made such a fundamental mistake? He was either on the train or he wasn’t.

  Shafts of sunlight angled down from the cathedral heights of the station. The parallel beams cut through the glass and girders, the smoke and the vapour, and lit the heads of the children like so many angels.

  ‘Lydia?’

  ‘You’re right, something must have happened. Perhaps he was taken ill at the last moment.’

  ‘More than possible.’

  The terminus was almost clear of children now. Apart from two boys of about twelve and a girl of seven or so, they had all been paired off and most of them were beginning their onward journey, by train, bus or motor car, to their new lives in far-flung corners of England.

  Lydia had watched each of them go with their new guardians and felt a pang of envy; she should have been taking her own ward home today. Eight-year-old Albert was the only son of her old friend from Girton, Eva Haas, or Eva Grad as she had been then. Although they had never lived in each other’s pockets at college, Lydia had been very fond of Eva, and the two women had kept in close touch. When Eva married her fellow scientist Klaus Haas back in 1930, Lydia had been a guest of honour at the wedding in Munich. That had been the last time they had seen each other, but the letters never ceased.

  And now she wanted to take Eva’s little boy into her home in Cambridge and lavish love and comfort on him until Eva could get to England, or until the situation improved for Jews inside Germany.

  Her eyes were fixed on the last three children. They had, at last, linked up with their guardians and were being bustled away. Lydia’s eyes follow
ed them, all hope of meeting Albert vanishing with their receding figures.

  *

  Bertha Bracey’s dedicated band of Quaker volunteers, the German Emergency Committee, had moved from Friends House to Bloomsbury House four months earlier to coordinate their refugee work with all the other organisations trying to help Jews escape persecution in Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia.

  Bertha’s main task was to find pledges of £50 from sponsors willing to give a home to a Jewish child. Without the pledge of money and a home, it was almost impossible for the children to get a visa. The British government was willing to help, but insisted the refugee children should not be a burden on the public purse.

  As secretary of the Inter-Church Council for German Refugees, Bertha had a staff of a hundred people and was based on the third floor of the former Palace Hotel. They all knew what they were trying to do, and why, but no one would admit the whole truth. No one voiced the obvious point that if parents were willing to put small children on a train and send them to an unknown future in a strange land, they must have a powerful – and terrible – belief that the alternative of staying put would be a great deal worse.

  As soon as she reached her desk, Bertha picked up the telephone and put a call through to Berlin. Lydia watched her intently. She spoke quickly, in English, explaining the situation to Miss Forster, one of her Quaker contacts in the city. Bertha grimaced and shook her head grimly at Lydia.

  ‘And you’re certain he was put on the train?’

  Lydia could hear the response. ‘Yes, he was on the train.’

  ‘Well, something must have happened between Berlin and Harwich. Perhaps he wandered off when they stopped in Holland, or at the port while they were boarding the ferry.’

  They talked for another minute, and then Bertha said, ‘Well, thank you, my dear. As soon as your leaders return, do talk to them. And I’ll call you if I hear anything.’ She put the receiver down.

  ‘This is madness,’ Lydia said. ‘It doesn’t make any sense.’

  ‘There must be some sort of simple explanation. Go and get some food and rest, my dear, I’ll deal with it.’

  Lydia felt drained. ‘No. We need to talk to the other children on the train. One of them must know something.’

  Bertha picked up a square packet from her desk and handed it to Lydia. ‘Sandwiches. Corned beef. You’ve got to eat something.’

  She couldn’t help laughing. ‘Thank you, Bertha.’

  ‘And here’s the list of telephone numbers. Can you call them all yourself, Lydia? I must get on with other things.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Bertha looked at the younger woman for a few moments. ‘You know, my dear, it is not my business or my way to push religion down people’s throats, but I can’t help feeling that it would do you no harm to come along to the meeting house once or twice. Just for some quiet reflection.’

  Lydia shook her head. ‘I can’t, Bertha.’

  ‘Of course. I understand. But if ever . . . well, you were brought up in a Friends’ household, so you know the drill.’ Bertha turned back to her work.

  Lydia’s father had been a Quaker and she loved the Quakers and all they stood for, but she simply didn’t believe in a deity. Without enthusiasm, she began to eat the sandwich. Just half, then she reached for the handset of the black Bakelite telephone and began to call the numbers listed. After a fruitless hour, she leaned back in her chair and stretched out her arms. Poor little Albert Haas. Where was he? And poor Eva – how would she cope if something had happened to her boy?

  CHAPTER 4

  They had been walking for many hours, always uphill, into the mountains. Their journey had passed largely without incident, although once a rattle of gunfire had echoed across from the slopes of Madrisa on the border between the province of Ostmark – formerly known as Austria – and the freedom of Switzerland, halting them in their tracks. Eva Haas and Arnold Lindberg had stopped, scouring the peaks and paths ahead of them, before their breathing subsided and they moved on, closer to the high pass.

  Eva had a map in her head, a picture of this place from when she and her late husband Klaus had walked this route back in 1930. They had been on honeymoon and made love in the guest house and in the open air. They had laughed and splashed, naked, in a blue glacial lake.

  The Alps had been her joy in those far-off days. The smell of the grass, the heat of summer, the gasping cold of the streams, the touch of Klaus’s body. All within the soaring coliseum of the mountain peaks, in the lee of the Madrisa. Even the men and boys in the valley, sweaty in their leather shorts with their sickles, slashing at the long grass, had a sort of romance.

  But the romance was long gone. Now there was only fear.

  Eva pulled Lindberg up the last few feet onto the St Antönierjoch ridge. ‘Take one step forward, uncle,’ she whispered. ‘And you will be in Switzerland. This is the border. We are safe.’

  He did not even squeeze her hand in acknowledgement.

  ‘If only we had some champagne.’

  ‘Ach, I would prefer a beer,’ he said. ‘A cold stein of weissbier.’

  ‘Then soon you shall have it. We are free, uncle. You are free. You will sleep in a featherbed this night.’

  And soon, she thought, I shall be with Albert again. But first they must watch for Swiss frontier guards. If they were seen, they would be bundled back over the border without ceremony.

  *

  The last kilometres were harder than she had expected. The paths downhill were slippery and very hard on the knees. Once they spotted a Swiss border patrol a few hundred metres away and Eva forced her uncle to duck down behind a boulder. But the two uniformed frontier guards, guns slung across their backs like hunters, moved on.

  Her uncle stopped again. He returned to the same question he had been asking ever since he had left Dachau. ‘I don’t understand. How did you get me out of the camp, Eva? Who was that man, that Nazi with you?’

  She was losing patience. ‘That was no Nazi, uncle. He wore the uniform, but he was a Jew, like you and me.’

  Eva had been living in a modest apartment block in the working-class Prenzlauer Berg district of Berlin, having been dismissed from her research job at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Munich. When he first approached her outside her rundown block, he was wearing a black SS uniform that was obscenely tight across his Oktoberfest beer belly. She had thought she would die of fright.

  He introduced himself as Hauptsturmführer Baumgarten and she said nothing, merely trembled and waited to do what she was told. But then he laughed and confessed that he was no Nazi and that he wished to help her. ‘May I?’ he inquired, stepping forward towards her door.

  ‘Of course.’ She didn’t know what to think, but she didn’t seem to have much option.

  He made himself comfortable inside her apartment, pacing about as though he owned the place. He explained that he was a member of an ‘underground railway’, helping Jews escape the Reich. He had flaxen hair, Aryan features and spoke of Jewish friends who were talented forgers.

  He said the British wanted Arnold Lindberg out of Germany. They did not want a man with such a brain and so much scientific knowledge to be at the Nazis’ disposal. The same applied to her.

  Eva had already applied for exit visas for herself and Albert, but without success. This man Baumgarten was offering her a way out.

  ‘And this includes my son?’

  ‘You will go separately. He will be put on a Kindertransport. Have you heard of them? Trains full of children being shipped across to England each week. Their parents cannot go with them. You will have to join him another way.’

  She was not wholly convinced. ‘I will have to have proof that my son is safe first. I will not leave Germany without him.’

  ‘Then it will be arranged.’ Before he left, he had apologised for his SS regalia, but he had wanted her to understand that he had the means to do what was necessary.

  Two days later, Baumgarten arrived in civilian cloth
es and together they travelled with Albert by U-Bahn to the western suburbs, clutching his small box of belongings. In a grand house, close to the southern bank of Schlactensee, they met a Miss Forster, a Quaker, half-English, half-German, who promised that she, personally, would put little Albert on the train. There was a place available in three days’ time, she said. With great reluctance, Eva had entrusted her son to Miss Forster. She hugged him, but could not kiss his face for fear he would see that her own was awash with tears, and then she had turned away and left him in the Englishwoman’s care.

  Albert had been brave. He had not cried out or called to her, and she had not turned round to him as she went out through the high doors.

  *

  And now, at last, they were in Switzerland, although even here they were still not yet safe. It was not until they were a couple of kilometres further on from the border and they found themselves in summer pasture again, with cows grazing the lush grass, their bells clanging, that she began to relax. Oh for some bread and some fresh butter from these beasts! The very thought made Eva salivate. No one has really tasted butter who has not had it straight from the churn, high in the alps.

  Late in the afternoon, they came to the village she remembered, St Antönien.

  She put an arm around her uncle’s shoulder. He was so thin, she felt he would break. Not yet forty years old, but he had the demeanour of an old man. She pointed downhill into the village. Ahead of them was a small chalet hotel. Outside, a man sat alone at a table, engrossed in a beer and a newspaper. Something made him glance up and he gave them a cheery wave.

  His name was Philip Eaton and he was a member of the British secret services.

  *

  Lydia’s head was on her folded arms, eyes closed. Anyone walking into the room would have thought she was asleep, but when the telephone rang she was instantly alert.

  ‘Hello? Miss Bracey’s office.’ She blinked rapidly, trying to clear her vision.

  ‘Is that Miss Morris?’

  ‘Yes, yes it is. Who’s calling, please?’