by Lois Ruby
“Are you insane, Ilse? Keep your stupid mouth shut,” Erich warned.
I put my hand out to silence him. It glowed white under his flashlight. “I’m old enough to know what I’m doing.” Erich’s flashlight jumped around until it fell steadily on Rolf’s hip. A gun! I didn’t bargain for a gun!
Puddles pooled under my arms. Streaming through my mind at lightning speed were images of Vienna and the life we Jews left behind: our home and Pookie and Grete and her family, maybe dead by now. The scene changed violently to fierce Japanese guards booting and spitting on the Chinese whose country they’d taken, and stripping all of us of our metal, our cooking fuel, our gasoline, our bread, and our dignity.
In the split-second it took these pictures to cascade through my mind, my resolve hardened. “I want to help. I can. I’m quick and smart.”
“You think we need you? A snively girl who hides under a bench?”
“You do,” I said confidently. “I can’t blow things up, or drive a truck, or carry four hundred pounds of explosives, but I can sneak around and bring you valuable bits of information.”
Erich was shaking his head.
“Who’d suspect a girl?” Brave words. My voice wobbled. I couldn’t hold it together much longer, but in that one frantic moment, I knew I had to work for the underground.
Last chance. My eyes were fixed on that gun at his hip, as I stuck my hand out to Rolf. It branched out there, small and steady, totally alone.
He paused, considering the options. “Depends on what Gerhardt says.” Keeping his boot on my foot, he leaned over the railing and shouted down, “Hey, Gerhardt, better come up here.”
I moved only my eyes to watch Gerhardt run up the clanging steps. Spotting me frozen in Erich’s spotlight, he started laughing. “I knew you’d be back, Miss Shpann.”
Rolf’s shoulders went limp with relief. He stepped back, and I wiggled my foot. Nothing broken. Rolf swaggered a little, clearly trying to look much more important than he was. “Just yesterday you were telling us we needed somebody skinny to slip through the cracks.”
“Yeah,” Gerhardt said, “she’s a runt, all right.” I was surprised to see that my hand was still sticking out when he grabbed it in the big mitt of his own hand, shook it vigorously, and said. “Welcome to the team, Shpann Number Two.”
I was in! I glanced over at Erich and saw two messages in his eyes: You did a crazy, stupid thing, Ilse, along with, I’m proud of you, little sister.
Liu slid silently away.
CHAPTER EIGHT
1942–1943
Mother and Father were sitting at the table when I burst into the apartment, gasping for breath. Also, Dovid was there, which caught me by surprise. It wasn’t his time. I immediately smoothed my hair and bit my lips to give them some color. Odd that Father didn’t let go of Mother’s hand. Erich and I almost never saw them touch when they were awake, even though we knew they loved each other. But to be holding hands in front of a stranger? Unheard of. Something was terribly wrong.
Erich? I’d just left him with Gerhardt and the others. What could have happened in twenty minutes? “What is it?”
News far more urgent than our family troubles. Father said, “Hitler is gassing people in Poland. Dovid has heard.”
I jerked my head toward Dovid. “Gassing?”
“At deportation camps in Chelmno, Belzek, Sobibor,” Father said. “Hundreds of thousands already. Not only Jews. Gypsies, also.”
“Dovid?” I asked. “Your people?”
He shook his head, and Mother said, “No one knows.”
I sank into a chair. “Can’t anyone else escape?” I asked in a whisper.
Father pulled his hand away from Mother’s. “There’s no way to get out now.”
I looked from face to face. All three of them were stricken with grief. My head throbbed, but I didn’t how to feel. And then Father said, “Last month many Jews were sent … to camps.”
My breath was sucked out of me. “To Chelmno?” I gasped.
“We don’t know where they are.” Mother clasped Father’s hand again.
He said, “The Nazis want to erase Jews from the face of the earth. My God, Frieda, what are our people going to do?”
Stalling for time, I said, “They’ll do what we did, Father.” I turned to Dovid. “We took an Italian liner here. Can’t they do that?”
I watched anger, maybe disgust, cross Dovid’s face. He saw me as a spoiled brat, jabbering on about our sea voyage.
Father shook his head. “No ships, not since Italy entered the war. Those Jews are trapped in Europe, Daughter. Dead.”
“No!” I shouted. “Oh, I’ll never see Grete again.”
Mother’s hand flew across my face in a sharp crack. “Selfish child. You, it’s always you! Think about Grete and her family. Think about Dovid’s family.”
My cheek stung more from the embarrassment of being slapped in front of Dovid than from the slap itself. I ran into my closet, slammed the door, buried my face in my pillow. Father’s words echoed in my head. “Those Jews … trapped … dead.”
I heard the murmur of voices in the other room, then a chair scraping across the wood floor. In a minute a slice of light brightened my room and Mother knelt across my bed with her arms outstretched.
I followed her out and splashed water on my face. My eyes were probably bloodshot, my cheeks all stretched and raw from crying. Dovid was still rooted in his chair. I sat down in Erich’s place at the table and asked, “What about your people, Dovid?” My voice echoed tinny in my own ears.
Dovid splayed his beautiful fingers on our table and began. His English had improved so much—a tribute to Mother and to his own hard work.
“I am alive today because of soccer. Soccer and Sugihara. The ball game you know. Sugihara I will have to tell, but later.”
Father asked, in German, “Where is your home, Dovid?”
Dovid kept reaching for English vocabulary to tell us: “A small village sixty kilometers from Kraków. For five generations my mother’s and father’s families live in that village.”
A hundred questions tumbled out. Some he’d already answered on other visits, but now it seemed important to get every single detail. “You left when? How old were you? How did you get out? How long did it take? Where did you go?”
He went on with his story. “Nearly two years ago I leave, summer, nineteen forty. I am sixteen then.”
Perfect. A boy should be a few years older than his girlfriend. Quick, I asked another question so he wouldn’t see me blushing over that thought. “You went to school? That’s where you learned to draw?”
“Drawing, before I can read a word. But school, different. It is nineteen thirty-nine. Already the Jewish school is closed, but the soccer team at Saint Ignatz Catholic School is happy to let me play. The coach says, ‘You are a good goalie, for a Jew.’”
“The nerve!”
“Daughter, be quiet and listen,” Father said.
“One day Germans come by. How do you say it, the way they walk?”
“Goose-stepping,” Mother supplied.
“Yes. We are playing a game. We freeze, all of us statues on the field, watching.”
My heart seized.
“Our coach blows his …” Dovid pursed his lips to demonstrate.
“Whistle,” Mother said.
“Whistle. He shouts for us all to play again. I should go home right away.” Dovid closed his eyes; his eyelids fluttered sadly.
“But you didn’t know what they would do,” Mother said gently.
“Yes, yes, and so we play soccer. Poorly, no spirit, you can imagine. I don’t remember who wins. After, both teams go to drink beer. I never go with the boys. A Jew in a tavern with so many Catholics? Who hears such a thing? I start the long walk home. Everything feels—how do I say it?”
He reached for his teacup and gulped the last of the cooled water. He motioned for me to put my hand out, palm up, and then set the china cup on the flat of my hand an
d flicked the rim. Mother watched nervously, maybe afraid we’d break one of her two remaining cups.
“You hear?” Yes, I heard a faint ringing that lingered in the air. He flicked the cup again. “What is it you feel?”
“It’s vibrating, like it could shatter.”
“That is what the day feels like, like glass will shatter into many sharp pieces. When I am at my home, the glass is already broken. My father, my mother, my sisters, all gone, all the Jews in my village. Vanish like smoke.”
“No doubt to a concentration camp,” Mother said. “We must believe they are safe.”
Dovid raised his dark eyes to Mother’s face. “People say no one lives long in such a place. My mother, I don’t know the English word, she has the sugar disease. She needs everyday the shots. My sisters, Shayna and Beyla, are little.” He pulled his head back to have a good look at me. “Younger even than you.”
He thinks of me as a child! My heart sank like a stone.
“Any age is too young, also too old, for such a place,” Mother said.
Father was at a disadvantage with English, but he added, “Your father, Dovid?”
“He is strong. Maybe …” Dovid’s voice cracked. He didn’t need to complete the thought for me to understand him clearly.
Suddenly Dovid stood up. “Enough for today. Who needs another sad story?”
“Yet, we all need to tell them,” Mother said.
Dovid pushed his chair back and nodded toward Mother and Father. “Mrs. Shpann, understand, please. No more can I come for English. No money.”
“Starting today, lessons are free,” Mother said.
“You are kind, but I am shamed to take from you with nothing to give.”
Mother motioned around us. “We stare at blank white walls. Bring me the pictures you draw. In exchange I will give you words.”
“Not enough, Mrs. Shpann, a few drawings.” He seemed to search for some English words to leave us with. “Goodbye, farewell,” he said soberly, and quickly let himself out, leaving such a heavy cloud of sorrow in the room.
Never mind how Hitler had swooped up European nations as if they were no more than smudges on a map, or his plans for Jews. At that moment—petty, selfish girl that everyone accused me of being—the thing that stabbed at my heart was the fear that I’d never see my Dovid Ruzevich again.
CHAPTER NINE
1942–1943
Dovid played like a happy-sad movie in my mind while I waited for my first assignment from the underground. Erich wouldn’t discuss any of it. Days passed without a word, while he was sneaking out at night. When would it be my turn?
Now that the war in the Pacific was raging, every American, French, and British flag had come down, and up the poles had shot the flag of the Empire of the Rising Sun with its ugly, big ball of blood on a huge white bandage. There were troops and tanks all over the city and Japanese sentries outside the British and American consulates and the cable offices and newspapers. Every scrap of news was censored, so it was pointless to greet friends with the usual, “Have you heard anything?” because none of us could get word from the outside. It was like living on an island surrounded by shark-infested waters; no one could reach us except the sharks.
While I was walking home from school with Tanya one day, my frustration twisted around to an unkind attack: “How can you stand to have those soldiers visit your mother?”
“We eat; others don’t.” She thrust out one meaty hip; I was all skin and bones. “You don’t mind when we bring you oranges on Fridays.”
“I’ll never again take anything you buy with their money!”
“Starve, if that makes you happy,” Tanya said. “Anyway, I saw your father going into the bank.”
“Yes, but when Father went to draw out what little money he’d saved, our account was frozen. We’ve got nothing but small dribs my mother stashed away for living expenses.”
“So? My mama and I, we have no one to bring home pay. Nobody can buy the dresses she used to sew.”
“But Japanese soldiers? Honestly, Tanya.”
In hot silence we passed a beautiful hotel, its awning fluttering in the wind. The invaders had taken over all the finest hotels and foreign clubs, along with every thriving company in Shanghai. “Foreigners are tossed out like yesterday’s rubbish,” Father had said bitterly.
We’d reached our block, both of us mad, when Tanya pointed to the house across from us. “It’s gone. The Tiffany lamp. Mrs. Kazimierz must have sold it.” Suddenly Tanya burst into tears. “The only pretty thing in any of our windows, gone. Everything gone.”
I put my arm around her and let her tears soak my blouse. “Let’s not fight anymore, okay?” I felt her nod her head, her nose pecking my bony shoulder.
We were just getting used to all the new indignities when the Japanese began rationing cooking gas. Since our hot plate was electric, we were able to slip in one cooked meal a day without going over our electricity allotment. If we could find food.
Gasoline disappeared—shipped to Japan—so hardly any buses or streetcars ran. We didn’t have carfare, anyway. That meant hearty business for rickshaw pullers and pedicab drivers, whose fuel was their feet. Sometimes three or four coolies pulled gigantic wagonloads like a team of horses. Even the richest foreigners who used to have chauffeurs were now trundling bicycles, so we had to watch Erich’s Peaches more closely. Of course, she still drank oil, and there wasn’t much of that, so Peaches had a very dry, rusty winter. Her grinding sounds made my teeth ache.
Electricity rationing worsened. Mrs. Kazimierz wouldn’t have been able to turn on her Tiffany lamp even if it were still sitting in her front window. We were only allowed to light one room at a time—no problem for us, since we had only one room—but even that room was limited to a ten-watt bulb. You could hardly see your hand in front of your face, much less read. The wraithlike shadows in our apartment haunted me, awake and asleep. I saw them as Japanese soldiers looming over me; tree branches outside the window were their drawn bayonets. When lights of the occasional passing car slid across our walls, I imagined them as the headlights of a Japanese tank headed straight for our building. For my own protection I forced the hot-liquid fear in my belly to congeal into jagged-edged anger. How I wished that I had Erich’s courage to fight back, or that the underground would give me a chance.
Tanya came pounding on our door. “Did you hear? They’re making all Americans and British and Dutch here register with the Japanese police. Not so, Ukrainians, I am happy to say.”
“Or Austrians,” I added haughtily.
Tanya held Moishe with his head over her shoulder like a human baby. I heard his cat-motor running. As usual, he refused to turn around and look at me. We were sworn enemies. Tanya and Moishe came in and sat on the bed. “They’re called enemy nationals now. They’ve got red armbands with the initial of their country.”
I sat beside Tanya, so Moishe jumped away and hid under the table. “Dovid says in Europe, Jews must wear yellow armbands.”
“Yes, yes. Just like us Jews at home, now the enemy nationals aren’t welcome in restaurants or theaters. Not even in parks. Now their stores are being shut down. I love it! Finally, thank you, Emperor Hirohito, we Jews have it better, can you believe this?”
How could things change so fast? The winter of 1942–1943 was as bitter as horseradish. The piercing cold wasn’t helped a bit by the Japanese soldiers who burst into our apartment one day and yanked out our radiator pipes as scrap metal for their war effort. Without heat we froze, even with Molly O’Toole’s ugly wool socks, which we darned and saved from year to year, knobby in our thin shoes. The few pipes left in our building froze and burst, sending water streaming through the ground floor.
For once I was glad we didn’t have a kitchen or bathroom in our apartment. The people downstairs were squishing through icy water that oozed under their doors. The bathtub was useless, the toilets—well, I couldn’t even describe that part. Imagine the worst.
One day Mothe
r came home from the bakery pale and jittery. “They’re going to round up the so-called enemy nationals and send them to internment camps. Brits and Americans.”
Could they do that to Americans? To the rich Iraqi Jews, who were now British citizens? They’d practically ruled the foreign settlements before the Japanese came.
“At least we don’t have to worry about that,” Erich muttered. “One advantage to being a stateless refugee.”
“Erich, I have told you a hundred times, we are not—”
“Face the truth, Mother.”
I believe that day she finally did.
Tanya and I had patched up our argument, and I promised never to say another word about her mother’s Japanese visitors. In the winter our long walks to school were miserable enough without fighting. I rubbed my hands and stomped my feet to keep the circulation going, scared of frostbite as much as I feared the Japanese bayonets.
I longed for the hot, steamy days of July, seven months away.
At last winter began to give way to spring, and with spring would come more daylight and a few fresh vegetables. It was easier not to despise the Japanese as the weather warmed. At first we’d thought that since they were allied with the Germans, they’d hate us Jews; but they didn’t. They didn’t love us, either. We were just foreigners to them, like any others.
“We can live out the war this way,” I told Erich.
He spit out his response: “Like hell I will.”
CHAPTER TEN
1943
News! Erich used the cover of his screechy violin practicing to tell me all about my role in the Underground, called REACT. “I’m the go-between. It would look too suspicious for a girl to hang around down at the docks. Ask me, and I’d say you shouldn’t work with us at all, but Gerhardt says you’re plucky. God, my sister, plucky. He also thinks you’re useful for our purposes.” The bow slid back and forth across the remaining strings, and the sound was terrible.
“And what exactly are our purposes, Erich?”
“Simple. Doing anything, great or small, to flummox the enemy. Jam communication, supply lines, toilets, whatever. Smuggle food and supplies and, most important, information to our comrades.”