by Robert Elmer
As I’m sure you can tell, God, we’re looking for some help. This hasn’t turned out right—this is awful. Another wave sprayed him straight in the face. Even with his heavy coat, he was already soaked, so he just winced and kept paddling. Maybe they were moving, just a little. I’m not sure, God, if you’re into making deals. But... Peter looked around at the blackness and the waves that didn’t stop. Another one hissed by, white foam on the top. But, God, like I said, we need some help, any kind of help. That was all he could think of. End of prayer.
“Are you talking to yourself?” asked Henrik from the front of the boat. He was curled up now, after bailing out most of the water.
Peter hadn’t realized he was talking out loud. Feeling embarrassed, he tried to play dumb. “Huh, what?”
“You were mumbling,” said Henrik. “Talking to yourself.”
Peter tried to think of something to say that didn’t sound stupid. Instead, he started rambling. “Don’t you wish we had a flashlight so we could find the oar?” he said. “I mean, if it were daylight, we’d have no problem seeing it. It’s probably just a few feet from us, floating around, but we can’t see any farther than we can reach.”
“Yeah,” agreed Henrik. “Of course, if this little trip was in the daylight, all the Germans would get a pretty good look at us.”
Peter kept paddling, wiggling the boat back and forth. Then Elise put her hand out to stop him.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“I think I hear something,” she whispered back. “Do you hear it, Henrik?”
Henrik paused. “Yeah, I hear it,” he answered from the front of the boat.
Peter listened, and he thought he could hear it too, in the distance. He wasn’t even sure which direction it was coming from, but there it was: a low rumbling sound, far across the water. He thought maybe it was coming from the direction of Denmark, but he wasn’t sure. It was slowly getting louder and louder, and it definitely wasn’t the ka chunk of a local fishing boat.
“It’s getting closer,” whispered Elise. They were back to whispers. “Think it’s Uncle Morten?”
Peter knew what it was now, and so did the others. He wished it were Uncle Morten, but it was the unmistakable, steady hum of a patrol boat. It was still a ways off, though, and the rowboat rocked in the swells. A piece of driftwood bumped into the side of their little boat.
“Hey, would you look at that,” Henrik whispered again, this time real low. Peter and Elise could see it, too, almost directly behind them. A red orange glow, now brighter, now moving just a little bit, kind of like a flag. A cigarette. And it wasn’t anyone on Uncle Morten’s boat, that was for sure.
“No cigarettes,” Uncle Morten had warned the house full of Jews the night before in the Andersen living room. Peter thought back. Was it just last night? Or last year?
“When it’s dark out there on the water,” the fisherman had said, “even the tiny glow of a cigarette acts like a lighthouse for German patrol boats. You think they can’t see it, but if it’s dark enough, even the Swedes can look out their windows and see you coming.”
The German navy patrol didn’t seem to realize that it worked both ways, though. Or maybe they didn’t care. Either way, the boat was coming their direction. Kind of slow, but coming their direction nonetheless.
The driftwood—Peter thought it must have been an old log—bumped the boat again, right beside where Elise was sitting. She reached down to the water, probably to push it away, but then she startled Peter by grabbing ahold of it instead. Excitedly she pulled the dripping piece of wood up into the boat next to the other oar. “Look what’s been banging against the boat for the past five minutes,” she whispered in Peter’s ear. Now they had two oars again!
Peter’s heart jumped—he could hardly believe it! He swiveled around to his old rowing position, mounted the oars in one silent motion, and dug in. This time he didn’t head straight to Sweden, but down the Strait. Any direction to get away from the oncoming boat. It was almost on top of them.
The powerful throb of the German boat’s engines turned into a steady roar as it got closer and closer. Peter was afraid to look up, thinking his face might shine like a mirror in the dim light. Elise and Henrik hunched down, too. Peter just lowered his head and pulled on the oars until he thought they would snap. He thought he could almost hear Henrik from behind him, cheering him on, only no one was saying anything. Stroke. Stroke. Stroke.
Brighter lights came out of the mist. Peeking up for just a second, Peter could see them in the middle of the boat—glows from sailors’ cigarettes on the bridge (the steering room) and from a couple of red lights on the stern. Any second now and they were either going to run the little boat down or snap on their big spotlight. Then that would be it. They could even hear some men laughing over the rumbling sound of the engine.
Thanks for the oar, God, Peter found himself praying again. This time it was a little easier. But there was no more time to think, or to pray. All he could do, one more time, was just keep rowing. He kept rowing, faster and faster, until he thought his lungs would burst and his arms fall off in pain. He thought of nothing else but rowing, pulling the oars, away from the patrol boat with the laughing men, as far as he could go. Each stroke turned into a prayer: Please, please, please...
It was Henrik who finally shook his shoulders. “They’re gone, Peter, they’re gone,” said Henrik. “Stop rowing for a minute.”
At first, it didn’t register, and then Elise reached over, stopping his rowing hands. “It’s okay, Peter,” she echoed Henrik’s words. “They’re gone.”
“How could they not have seen us?” Henrik whispered.
Peter finally understood, and he let the oars glide. Angels, right? All he could do was shake in his seat for a minute, then he just slumped down, feeling about as alive as a used dishrag. I’m the escaping Jew, thought Peter, the way I feel. Or I might as well be.
Then Elise spoke up, with that voice of hers no one messed with. “Here,” she said, “it’s my turn to row. You’ve been at it long enough.”
Peter didn’t argue; he was far past the point of being able to decide much anymore. He and Elise traded seats, and Peter took the bird basket. Henrik stayed where he was, bailing out a little water once in a while. After a few pulls, they picked up their speed again, this time in the right direction. Peter started to catch his breath.
“How long do you figure we’ve been out now?” he asked, after another half hour.
“Two hours maybe?” Henrik guessed. “No, maybe two and a half. We really ought to be in Swedish waters by now.”
At least the lights of Sweden were definitely looking closer. From his position in the back of the boat, he could see them clearly. If it were daytime, he would have been looking for houses, places to row toward, a safe harbor. In the darkness he was looking for a bunch of lights that meant a harbor town, a safe place to land. Any harbor town would do now. Every couple of minutes, as they neared the Swedish coast, they all checked to see.
“I think you’re going too far right,” said Peter, looking at the lights. “So row a little more to the left, Elise.”
“My left?”
“No, the boat’s left.”
Henrik said he thought they were heading toward a fishing village called Hillarp, a little ways down the coast. The big city of Goteborg was way off to the right, out of reach. The current had pushed them a ways, too.
“I’m almost sure there are a couple of harbors here that we can pull into,” said Henrik. He was still bailing out the bottom of the boat. And Number One was still faithfully sitting in the basket. At least, Peter thought he was; no one ever heard a sound from the bird.
As they got closer, Peter’s mind wandered again. He thought of his parents, who would surely have returned home by that time to find that Elise and Peter weren’t there. In his mind, Peter imagined them reading the note he had scribbled about going down to the harbor. But his parents would know, of course, that they had not made it in t
ime to catch Uncle Morten. How long will it take for them to find the missing rowboat and figure out what we’ve done? And how much trouble are we going to be in? Peter didn’t want to think about that part of it. But what else could we have done? I wish...
Peter’s thoughts were interrupted by the sound of another boat, way off in the distance. Not again! Elise stiffened at the oars. She stopped rowing, and they all listened. Were their ears playing games now? There was no sound.
Then they all heard it again, the sound of a boat engine. “Which way should I row?” Elise whispered frantically.
“Which way is it coming from?” Henrik whispered back. He swiveled his head around in a circle like an owl, trying to get a fix on the noise.
“I can’t tell,” said Peter, sniffing the air. “But it is getting louder.” And closer. In the back of his mind was the question he was afraid to ask. Elise asked it for him. “You don’t think they would come this far over, do you?” she asked.
Peter looked at Henrik. They both knew who “they” were. “They” were the ones that had been chasing them all night. “They” were the ones who wanted Henrik’s family. “They,” thought Peter, were going to give him nightmares for a long time to come.
And now it seemed that “they” were getting closer to the boat, one more time.
“I didn’t think they would,” whispered Henrik.
Elise still didn’t move her oars. “Listen,” she said, “that boat is getting awfully close again.”
And it was. All they could do this time was duck down into the boat once more, keeping their shiny faces from the light. It didn’t do much good, though, because even the little bit of foggy moonlight was enough to light up the boat as they bounced around in the waves. The clouds were mostly gone now. Never mind that the patrol boat had nearly run them down without seeing them. Peter wasn’t sure the angels would pull off the same rescue twice.
But he sneaked a peek to see. The dark shape of the boat was almost a soccer field’s length away now, but turning away from them in the dark.
“They’re going right by us,” said Elise into Peter’s ear as they crouched down. She had hardly said that when there was a shout from the boat, and it changed course, turning straight for the wave tossed rowboat.
“That’s it,” moaned Henrik, and Peter felt himself give up, too. Henrik’s right. It doesn’t matter anymore. There’s no getting away now. A searchlight from the boat hit them square in their faces as they tried to see what was going on. The sudden brightness hurt Peter’s eyes, and he snapped them shut.
Even though they were finally caught, Peter felt relieved—and a little guilty at the same time. I’m not supposed to be feeling like this.
“Can you see anything, Peter?” whispered Elise. Then a man behind the spotlight shouted as the boat pulled up closer.
“Danish? Jews?” boomed the voice, not in the German they had feared, but in a wonderful, musical Swedish. Peter tried to look past the light and saw what looked more like a medium sized Swedish fishing boat than a German patrol boat.
Henrik stood up and started waving. In his excitement he almost tipped the boat over. Then they all started flapping their arms, as if the Swedes were far away rather than right beside them. The deck above was lined with friendly, rough faces of fishermen.
“Yeah!” Peter and Elise yelled back as loudly as they could. Henrik joined in almost the same breath, so it sounded like a cheer after Peter’s soccer team scored a goal. No one would have trouble understanding. “We’re Danes!”
“So welcome to Sweden,” the man with the searchlight called back.
“We made it, we made it,” Henrik repeated as the larger boat nudged alongside. The men in the fishing boat hauled the three of them over the side, then tossed each shivering body a rough wool blanket. They even yanked the wonderful little grayish yellow rowboat up on the deck of their trawler.
Peter wanted to collapse into a corner and sleep, but they had to try and answer questions. Where did they come from? Who were their parents? Why were three kids out there alone? For a minute, they stood on the deck of the fishing boat, looked at one another, and about cried. Peter put his arms around his sister’s and Henrik’s shoulders. They had made it, but they weren’t home yet.
“My parents, Esaias and Ruth Melchior, came over on a fishing boat last night,” Henrik said to one of the men in half Danish, half Swedish. The man appeared to be the captain, the way he spoke to the others. Besides that, he had a salt and pepper beard and stood a head taller than anyone else.
“I’m not sure about your parents,” said the man, walking them toward the cabin. “But we can find out soon enough if they made it over tonight.” He raised his eyebrow at the three of them. “Lots of people are starting to come across, but what were you doing in that little boat? Shouldn’t you have been with your parents?”
They stepped into the warm cabin, where a younger man, maybe not too much older than fourteen, stood behind the wheel. The room was heated by the engine below, a welcome feeling. The noise didn’t matter so much.
“It’s kind of a long story,” Peter offered from under his blanket.
“What’s that?” the captain gave him a puzzled look. “A long book?”
Wrong word, obviously. They had all taken a couple of years of Swedish in school, but Elise knew the language better than Peter and Henrik. She came to the rescue and said the right thing. The captain smiled. “Your Swedish is fine,” he told Peter. “I think between the four of us, we’ll get along great.” Then he looked at Henrik again. “What was the name of the boat your parents came over in?”
“The Anna Marie,” Henrik replied. “It was full of people down in the fishhold, I hope.”
By now the Swedish captain was making them feel at home in the wheelhouse. They were drinking steaming mugs of something hot, kind of a weak coffee, and they snuggled under the itchy blankets. Already, the nightmarish row was fading into the past, where all of them wanted it to fade, and fast. The blankets, even though they smelled like a combination of fish oil, cigar smoke, and diesel fuel, were great. They were just starting to warm up when Captain Knut (they never learned his last name) gently brought his boat home to a pier. It was dark, and Peter had no idea where they were.
The captain leaned out of the wheelhouse, letting in the cold, early morning air. He called out a couple of commands in Swedish, too fast for even Elise to understand, and the deckhands jumped off each end of the boat, rope in hand. He shut off the engine, and everything fell quiet again. Peter felt a big hand on his shoulder.
“Well,” said the captain, “you’re a little light, but still a fine catch for a night’s work.” He winked at Peter, but Peter could barely make out the man’s face in the dim light of the wheelhouse. “I think my crew and I are going to be fishers of men and women and kids until you’re all safely over here. We’ve lost count how many we’ve seen already. But now, you have to tell me a little about yourselves. You’re related?”
Henrik looked at Peter and Elise with his famous grin. It was coming back.
“Yeah,” he said, “kind of. But we do have different parents. Theirs are back in Denmark, and mine are...” His voice trailed off, and Elise finished the sentence for him.
“His are the ones we told you about, the ones that were supposed to have come over on the Anna Marie. It’s my uncle’s boat. Henrik here was supposed to have been on the boat, too.”
Henrik, Elise, and Peter took turns from there telling the story—about all the running, the security guard, the drunk soldier at the pub, the idea to row across, the patrol boat. The captain listened thoughtfully, nodding his head and stroking his beard. Once in a while, he asked another question.
“And we thought your boat maybe was a German patrol boat, chasing us all the way over, or coming back or something,” finished Henrik. “I guess you know what happened after that.”
“Sounds more like a bad dream than real life,” said the captain. “If I hadn’t picked you up myself o
ut of the water, I might not have believed it.”
“But you really haven’t heard of the Anna Marie?” Henrik asked one more time. “My parents?”
“Like I said,” the captain repeated politely. “If they made it to somewhere close, we’ll be sure to find them as soon as we can.”
If, thought Peter. Right now that was the most terrible word in the dictionary, Danish or Swedish. “If” they made it.
“What do you mean, `If they made it’?” Henrik asked, fiddling with a spoke on the fishing boat’s large wooden steering wheel.
“I just mean,” the man looked down, “not every single boat crossing over from Denmark is going to make it over here, I’m sorry to say. Most are, though. You kids probably did a lot of growing up in a very short time out there, and you know all about the German patrols, from your story.”
They knew.
“But I can promise you this,” said the fisherman, his voice brightening. “I can help you find them tomorrow morning.” He looked at a little clock next to the steering wheel. One a.m. “I mean, later this morning. If they’re to be found, we’ll steer you in the right direction before I go out again fishing for real fish.”
Peter was pretty sure that’s what he said. His eyes were closed by then, and he was trying hard to listen, but he fell asleep standing up, leaning against the side of the boat. Captain Knut noticed him, smiled, and patted his shoulder.
“And you, little Dane, we’re going to have to get you and your sister back to Helsingor before your parents go absolutely crazy with worry.”
“They already have, I’m sure,” said Peter, feeling more weary than he had ever felt in his life.