by Jana Zinser
“You’re required to go,” Tellis said.
“It’s too stressful to try to look cute,” Peter complained.
“At least you still have a chance. You look sort of English,” Stephen pointed out. “They seem to like that.”
“We’ve got to go, Lennie!” Tellis yelled.
Lennie picked up the ball and ran over. “See you tomorrow.”
“You want to play with us again?” Hans asked.
“Sure, why not?” Lennie said.
Hans and Stephen looked at each other. “We’re Jewish,” Stephen said.
“So?” Lennie said. “You’re good football players.”
Hans and Peter laughed.
“Then, I’ll see you tomorrow,” Lennie said.
“Okay,” Hans said. Stephen nodded.
Lennie ran across the field with the other local boys, waving.
“The people here are kind of odd,” Stephen said.
Hans nodded. “I like it.”
Bert, Helga, and Eva trudged in a crowded line, surrounded by the police guarding the Bockenburg Camp. Grundy watched Eva, as she waited in line for whatever food was available.
Eva held out her cup, and a kitchen worker poured in a splash of milk. She waited for more.
The woman pushed her away. “That’s all you get. This isn’t a fancy cafe!”
Helga and Bert followed Eva. They took their splash of milk and moved down the line, to get dried-out sausages and stale bread.
Helga snarled, “A work camp, they call it. That’s a lie. They round us up and force us to live like animals with bad food, bad plumbing, and bad manners. It is a prison of the worst kind.”
“At least we’re still together,” Bert countered. He glanced at Eva as he poured his milk into her cup.
“Sometimes, you die suddenly, and sometimes you’re killed little by little,” Helga said, “but it’s all the same in the end.”
Peter and the other Jewish refugees filed into the great room of the Dovercourt dining hall. The volunteers lined them up like they were preparing for an auction of children.
Peter stood awkwardly behind Stephen and Hans, trying to avoid the onslaught of eager foster parents hunting for a child to take home. Their stares made him feel uncomfortable. It was as if they were examining him for imperfections, and he knew he had many. He was sure they could see them all. It was too much to endure, so he hid.
Peter didn’t really want to leave Dovercourt. Although it was often cold and the food wasn’t very good, he enjoyed watching the boys play football. Dovercourt wasn’t bad. He had Hans and Stephen, and they made him laugh. His plan was to stay at Dovercourt until he could rescue Becca. Then they would find a place together.
The foster parents cruised the crowd and picked the smallest children, as Peter peered from his hiding place behind Hans and Stephen. He wanted this to be over, so he could go back to his cabin and read A Tale of Two Cities. He’d reached the part about the Defarges leading a band of revolutionaries using the code name of Jacques, or in German, Johan. That would be his code name, his new identity in England, Peter thought, Johan. Maybe he could leave the old Peter behind. There wasn’t much left of him anyway.
A squat, crusty man in farmer’s clothes hurried across the dining hall. He was wiping his rough hands on his pants, making a dust trail behind him. A plump woman scuttled and huffed behind him, her weathered cheeks rosy. They made a beeline for Hans and Stephen.
Peter’s stomach clenched tighter. Hans and Stephen couldn’t leave. What would he do without the entertainment of their football matches with the English boys? They were all he had left of his connection to home.
The man pointed his short, stubby finger at Hans and said, “You!” His voice sounded raspy and deep, like a storyteller mimicking a troll in a children’s fairy tale.
“Me?” Hans replied with a face of horror.
“No! The other one!” the man said.
“Me?” Stephen asked, as he gripped Hans’s elbow.
The woman stepped up. “No! The little one. You two couldn’t fit in the attic.” Her voice was shrill and grating.
Hans and Peter stepped aside, and Peter was fully exposed.
“Not me,” Peter said. “I’m going to stay here until I can find my sister.”
“Nonsense,” the man said. “I’m Emil, boy, and this is Maude. We’ve got a farm in Coventry. You’ll love it.”
He grabbed Peter’s thin arm and marched him over to Marla. “We’ll take this one,” the troll farmer said. Peter wondered if it was the same voice the man used when buying livestock. He looked back over his shoulder to Hans and Stephen, who stood ramrod stiff with panic.
“He doesn’t look too Jewish,” Emil observed.
Peter turned to Marla, shook his head, and mouthed, “No.”
Marla placed her hand gently on his shoulder. She looked as pained as he did at the farmer’s proposition. “Peter, you can’t stay here. We have to make room for the other kids. We have another trainload coming in tomorrow.” Her voice was quiet, and her smile looked forced. “You’ll love the countryside.”
Peter was not fooled. “I’m used to the city.”
“I’m sorry. It’s the best I can do.” Marla hesitated, meeting Emil’s eyes, looking for reassurance but finding none. “Go get your things,” Marla said, quietly, her eyes moist. She cleared her throat.
Peter stared at Marla, pleading with his piercing gray eyes. His head shook his request not to be sentenced to these two farmers.
Marla forced another smile. “It’ll be okay.” She turned to Emil and Maude. “Peter is quite a little musician.”
“Music is complete nonsense,” Emil spat.
Peter walked back over to Hans and Stephen. “I guess I’m going home with the Brothers Grimm couple,” he said quietly.
“I’m sorry, Peter,” Hans said. “Maybe it won’t be so bad.”
“The old man said music is complete nonsense,” Peter said.
“If we get to London, we’ll look for Becca,” Stephen reassured him.
“Tell her I’m in Coventry, and as soon as I can, I’ll come for her,” Peter declared, trying to sound brave.
“We will,” Hans said.
“London’s really big, isn’t it?” asked Peter.
Stephen nodded, his confidence fading by the minute.
They hugged Peter. He collected his things from the cabin. Then he trudged off to serve out his time in a farmhouse attic with his agrarian captors.
Late that night, at Bloomsbury House in London, which housed the children’s refugee offices, Marla paced as Sebastian sat in a ripped leather chair behind a desk. Marla threw an old January London Times down on the desk. On the front page was a photo of a horrified Becca and a seasick Peter, wobbling down the gangplank, as they disembarked at Harwich.
“I know I shouldn’t have let Peter go off with those people, but I have no other options. We have over a hundred more children coming in tomorrow,” she said.
“There was nothing
you could do.” Sebastian looked at her sympathetically.
“You should have seen his face,” she said. “It was not a good match.”
“But they chose him,” Sebastian reasoned.
“Because he could fit into their God-forsaken attic!” Marla gestured wildly with her hands, her blue eyes alive with anguish.
“He’ll be safe and well fed in the countryside, which is more than I can say for the children still remaining in Germany.”
“I know. I have to tell myself that to sleep at night, although I don’t do much of that anyway. I understand England is a small country, and we’re limited in the number of children we can bring in. But America is big, and I hope they’ll stand beside us and take in the Jewish children.”
“Well, unfortunately, they won’t.” Sebastian handed Marla a letter. “I didn’t want to tell you. It’s from America.”
Marla, her hands shaking, pulled the letter out of the envelope.
“Go ahead and read it,” Sebastian said.
Marla read the letter, and her hands shook from anger this time. “The Wagner-Rogers Bill to authorize the admission into the United States of a limited number of German refugee children has failed in committee with the fear it would overburden new social programs . . .”
Marla paused. “But it was supported by private funds.”
She read the letter again, “ . . . and take American jobs.”
Marla stared at the page in disbelief. “They’re children.” She kept reading. “Accepting children as refugees without their parents is contrary to the laws of God.”
She threw the letter down on the desk. “The U.S. senators think God wants the children to remain in Germany with Hitler? It’s over. No help from the Yanks. Cowards!” She crumpled up the letter and threw it across the office. “And Peter Weinberg will be milking cows, instead of playing music. Nothing makes sense anymore!”
“England had some of the same concerns at first, and the Americans did allow some children in.”
“Yes, but their State Department made it almost impossible to get visas.”
“We are not America. We are England.” Sebastian handed her a long list of names. “And here’s the list of children arriving tomorrow. Peter’s predicament will have to wait.”
At the Coventry farmhouse, Peter slept on a mattress on the floor, next to his violin. He was in the small attic room with the slanted roof and one tiny window, overlooking the barn and fields.
Emil stomped up the stairs to the attic, each step creaking under his heavy farm boots. He walked over to Peter and vigorously rang a cowbell near his ear. “Get up, German boy!”
Peter jumped defensively to his feet, uncertain of where he was.
“You’re in Coventry, plank,” Emil said. “We’ve got work to do. The cows won’t milk themselves.”
Peter rubbed his eyes. “I don’t know how to milk a cow.”
“You’ll learn,” Emil said.
Peter tucked his violin safely under his thin ragged blanket and put on a shirt. Through the small attic window, he could see it was still dark outside.
At the kitchen table, Maude set a bowl of lumpy porridge in front of him. Peter looked at it and stirred it around. “No, thanks. I’m not hungry.”
“You will be after your chores.” Maude laughed mockingly. “Not used to hard work, are you now?”
“I work hard,” Peter contradicted.
“With that ridiculous musical instrument?” Maude asked in her high-pitched, screechy voice.
“No, I am a butcher,” Peter said, defiantly.
“No use for a butcher here. We milk our cows,” Emil growled.
Peter spent the day at farm work. He milked the cows, as the evil one with a white face sneered and kicked at him. Then he fed the chickens, cleaned the stables, and chopped the firewood.
When he came in that night, he ate every unpleasant thing on his plate.
Maude sat back in her chair and smiled. “We’ll make an Englishman out of you yet.”
“I am German,” Peter said. “I don’t want to be English.”
Emil’s face wrinkled in anger. “Germany didn’t want you. You best take what you’re offered.”
That night, in the small attic room where he could see his breath in the cold, Peter looked at his raw, blistered English farmer’s hands. He angrily shoved the violin away and fell asleep, only to dream tortured visions of being trapped inside a burning wardrobe.
CHAPTER 20
NO BREAD
(March 1939)
At Stephen’s old house in Berlin, Sylvia rocked Baby Lilly and patted her back. Nora sat still as her husband carefully unfolded a letter from Stephen. They all huddled together as he read it aloud.
“Dearest Mutti and Vati, Hans is here with me at Dovercourt.”
Nora jumped up, clapped, and danced. “They made it! Praise be to God!”
Jacob smiled and continued to read. “It’s a summer holiday camp. The beds are hard. The food is bad, but we are fine.”
Sylvia leaned over and grabbed Jacob’s arm. “Where are Becca and Peter? Does he say?”
Jacob read again. “We wait for families to pick us. They want the little ones, like Becca. A family chose her right away, and she is living in London. Peter was with us for a while, but he was recently chosen by a farm couple in Coventry.”
“Becca and Peter are not together?” Sylvia asked incredulously. Shaking, she pressed her face into Lilly’s little body for the comfort of knowing she at least still had her baby.
Nora hugged Sylvia. “At least they are safe.”
Jacob went back to reading the letter. “We play football with the local boys who are our friends, now. Sometimes we win. The English boys don’t seem to mind that we are Jews. I think they might actually like us.”
Jacob’s voice quivered, and he stopped reading. “God bless the English children.”
He cleared his throat and took a deep breath, then kept reading. “Please, don’t worry about us. We hope all is fine at home and that you will have good news for us soon. I am sorry I was not a good son to you. Now I know that you sent me here to keep me safe, and I was not grateful. Please forgive my selfishness. Your loving son, Stephen.”
Jacob quickly wiped away a tear and folded up the letter. He looked at Nora sadly. “Our son is becoming a man without us.”
Bert, Helga, and Eva ate pieces of moldy bread outside overcrowded barracks at the Bockenburg Camp. A rat ran across the yard.
Eva screamed and dropped her bread. The rat grabbed it in its whiskery mouth. Bert chased the rodent away and slipped Eva the rest of his bread, while Helga gobbled up her remaining crust.
Later that night they heard rumors spreading among the prisoners that all of Czechoslovakia was now occupied by Germany. Hitler was on the move, and Eva could feel her life squeezing shut.
Noah, ragged and dirty, stared into the window of a Berlin bakery. It was filled with the most delicious rye breads, rum cherry cakes, marzipan cakes, apple strudel, pretzels, cookies, and pastries.
In the reflection of the window, he saw a policeman approaching behind him. Noah quickly hid in the shadows at the side of the building, as the officer passed by.
A frog sitting in the rocks nearby stared at him, emitting a ribbit every now and then. Noah thought of how he’d loved to catch frogs with his father down at the pond in Edelweiss Park. He shook the memory away. That was a long time ago, last summer, before the “Night of Broken Glass,” when he was just a kid.
Noah emerged from his urban camouflage and was entranced again by the delicious breads and baked goods in his favorite bakery’s display window. He stood and stared at the food. His tongue seemed to swell as he viewed the temptations. It had been three days since he had eaten. There were sores in his mouth, and his saliva had almost dried up. Noah returned to the side of the building, bent down, and scooped up the complaining frog. He slid it in his pocket.
He went back to the front of the bakery, hesitated at the door, and then stepped inside. He reached into his pocket and carefully pulled out the wiggling frog.
He held his hand on the counter and let the frog jump to freedom. The frog croaked, then hopped toward the display of delicious strudel.
A portly lady with a braided bun, and her plump arms filled with baked goods, screamed at the sight of the hopping frog. She tossed her bundles of tasty pastries and breads into the air. The baker cupped his flour-sprinkled hands and awkwardly scooped at the frog, missing him every time.
During the frog chaos, Noah grabbed a loaf of brown rye bread from the counter and ran out of the bakery. The baker, whose protruding stomach proved he enjoyed his own creations, stopped chasing the elusive frog and chased the boy instead, but he was not successful at catching Noah either. He slowed his running when his breathing became labored and his heart pounded. He was not used to any exertion except opening and closing the ovens. With his last breath he called, “Stop him! That dirty Jew boy stole my bread again!”