The Children's Train: Escape on the Kindertransport

by Jana Zinser

  Thousands of people were now crowded into many of the Nazi camps and designated areas of cities, held against their will. They were being forced to work building roads, farming, working in factories, constructing buildings, digging ditches, crushing rock, working in mills, digging coal, and even producing chemicals and armaments. The camps were nothing more than prisons that exploited the inmates’ labor. Children could not work as hard as adults, but that did not stop the Nazis from trying. They did the best they could to work any child to the point of exhaustion. For many children, it proved too much, and they died trying to live in the camps. Noah ended up in a camp, but despite everything they tried, he would not die.

  One day he climbed in the back of a truck supply transport that he had been loading. In this way, Noah crossed the border into Poland. He lived on the streets of Soblin. But shortly after Germany took Poland, Noah was swept up in the removal of the Jewish people and ended up in the Soblin Ghetto, on the outskirts of Poland.

  The Soblin Ghetto soon had an eight-foot electric fence surrounding the incarcerated community of Jewish people, and they were forced to work for the cause of Germany. The crowded confinement brought confusion, disorder, unsanitary conditions, and a frustrated hopelessness that often led to desperate, dangerous actions.

  Noah crossed his arms over his stomach and walked casually past Adler and Dirk, the policemen who guarded the gate. He could hear the hum of the electric fence, with its continuous current, instead of pulsing energy. Police were the guards at most of the camps and ghettos and felt it their duty to inflict the harshest punishments for the smallest crimes of human survival, because their jobs were to keep order at any cost.

  Adler picked up a long bamboo pole used to whack prisoners under the pretense of keeping them in line. Everyone knew he loved to hit people hard with the pole and watch the red welts swell up. The wood was almost unbreakable, light, yet bendable enough to get a stinging hit on the skin. It was an amusement to him to help him pass the hours.

  As Noah walked in front of him, Adler unexpectedly swung the pole and whacked him as hard as he could. A loaf of bread fell from under Noah’s shirt.

  “Well, look at that! Come look at this, Dirk!” he called to the short guard next to him, pointing to the bread on the ground. “This filthy little Jew is stealing food.”

  “They’re all thieves, dirty, rotten, beggar thieves,” Dirk said. His tiny pointed nose turned up in disgust. Although Noah was only ten, he was only a foot shorter than Dirk, a small man with a big Nazi chip on his shoulder.

  Noah stood tall and glared defiantly. “I didn’t steal it. I traded my coat for it,” he said, glancing at the loaf of bread still on the ground. “I’m hungry and cold now, too. And I worked all day in the mill!”

  Adler puckered his jowly face and mimicked Noah in a baby voice. “The Jew thief is hungry.” He clicked his tongue in mock pity. “Such a shame. And now, he is cold, too.”

  “Yes, and I’m sick of this place!” Noah said, his hunger overriding his good judgment.

  Adler and Dirk laughed at his foolish, youthful bravado. Dirk grabbed the bamboo pole from Adler and whacked Noah. “So, you want to get out of here, Jew boy?” Dirk asked mockingly.

  Noah glared at them. The police guards looked at each other. “We’re feeling generous today. Go ahead. Get out of here. We’ll look the other way,” Adler said. They laughed, and Adler’s overhanging belly bounced up and down.

  Noah shook his head. “No, you won’t. You’ll kill me and say I was trying to escape.”

  The policemen looked at each other. “We’ll put our guns down. See, no guns,” Adler said.

  They laid their guns on the ground and held their hands up, palms out. Dirk set the pole down on the ground in a dramatic gesture. “No weapons, not even the bamboo stick. This is your chance to escape.”

  “No, I don’t want to escape,” Noah said, indignantly.

  “You are very stupid,” Dirk said, laughing at Noah’s superiority.

  Noah bent down, pretending to tie his shoe. Then he quickly scooped up two handfuls of loose dirt, threw it in their eyes, grabbed the long bamboo pole from the ground, and took off running.

  The policemen screamed and rubbed their eyes and felt around for their guns. They shot wildly, but their aims were way off, spraying bullets randomly but hitting nothing.

  With the pole held slightly above his shoulder, Noah ran, barely able to carry the long bamboo pole. When he reached the fence, humming with electricity, he stuck the pole into the ground as hard as he could. The pole bent a little as his small body pulled it down. Then, the pole’s response to his speedy momentum flung him up into the air, sending him sailing over the eight-foot fence, one untied shoe barely missing the top wire. He didn’t let go.

  The end of the pole lifted, and the defiant boy became airborne as he gripped the pole. The pole dipped down on the other side, but it tangled in the wire. Noah hung for a moment, suspended in the air.

  Then, in the kind of split-second decision that he had become good at, he dropped to the ground, rolling to a stop. Dazed for only a second, he jumped up, realizing he was on the other side of the fence unharmed. He took off running into the streets of Soblin. He was free, although still breadless.

  In the city, the townspeople quickly identified him, with his ragged clothes and thinness, as one of the people from the ghetto. They were not used to seeing the prisoners walking around town as if on holiday, so they stared as he walked by, stunned by his brazen escape and casual saunter through town.

  A big man suddenly reached out and grabbed Noah’s small shoulder. “What are you doing here? Are you a Jew boy? Did you escape the fences? I’ll turn you in and be a hero, so the Nazis will leave us alone.”

  The man’s fingers dug painfully into his shoulder, and Noah bit them.

  “Ow! You little vicious animal!” the man yelled. He released his grasp, and Noah tore away. The big man thundered after him.

  Noah wove in and out of the crowd, finally losing the bulky man. Free of his pursuer, Noah rounded the corner and ran right into Dirk and Adler, the once-ridiculing and now completely furious policemen.

  “You are stupid,” Adler said, grabbing Noah by the back of the neck. He was escorted roughly back into the ghetto by the two guards, whose uniforms still showed the spray of Noah’s dirt bomb.

  When they passed through the gate, they pushed him to the ground.

  “Try that escape trick again, and you’ll be shot on sight,” Adler said.

  “You’re barely even worth the bullet,” Dirk said.

  Noah knew he would have to find another way out.

  At 16 Poppleton Circle in London, Becca, and Priscilla in her wheelchair, sat at the kitchen table. They rolled old tinfoil into balls, to turn in as scrap metal to support the war effort.

  “You should hear my brother play the violin. It makes you want to dance or cry, depending on what he plays.” Becca laughed. “Peter’s music is going to save the Jews.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. That’s what my papa used to say, and Papa never told a lie.”

  “Maybe his violin shoots out bombs.” Priscilla threw tinfoil balls at
Becca.

  “Maybe the violin bombs make music when they fall,” Becca said. They laughed, hysterically.

  Although Poland was now occupied by Germany, the residents of the Jewish Residential District in Dinsdorf were not sent to Poland immediately. The brick factory had come to rely on their free labor, and the war effort needed bricks to build the new camps all over Poland.

  In the apartment shared by the Vogners and the Levys, Eddie slept on the floor next to Oma Greta’s bed. Although she had been sick for several days, there was no other place to sleep. His mother slept on the floor on the other side of Oma’s bed. Nora and Jacob slept in the small makeshift bedroom.

  As morning dawned, Eddie got up and tapped Greta. “Wake up, Oma! They’re passing out bread and cabbage this morning, and I’m hungry. I want to go early to get some before I have to carry bricks all day.”

  Oma didn’t respond. Eddie nudged his grandmother, whispering, “Wake up, Oma.” He rubbed her cheek. “You’re very cold, like an icicle.”

  Oma didn’t move. Her mouth hung open, and her skin was drained of color and slack, its vitality gone. “Oma, Oma, wake up. It’s morning,” Eddie said in a singsong voice. “Why are you so cold?”

  He stared at Oma. He poked her, and then grabbed his head. “Oh, no! Oh, no! Mutti, Oma is empty!” He screamed, rocking back and forth, holding his head.

  Anna jumped up off the floor and tended to Oma. But it was too late. Oma was dead. She held Eddie and rocked with him. “She’s gone, Eddie. She’s gone.”

  “Where did she go? She was right here last night, in this bed.”

  “She’s dead, Eddie. She went in peace,” Anna said.

  “She didn’t go in peace. The Nazis killed her!” Eddie shook his head rapidly, refusing to accept that his oma would willingly leave him.

  “Eddie, you must not say that!” Anna shook her finger at him. “Don’t let anyone hear you say that.”

  “It’s true,” Eddie said. “She’ll tell you when she comes back.”

  Anna put her arm around Eddie. “She’s not coming back, Eddie.”

  “Like Papa?”

  Anna nodded. “She’s gone for good.”

  “My Oma,” Eddie wailed. “I’m glad she escaped, but maybe she should have taken us with her.”

  Later that day, Victor, a beefy, pompous policeman, and Michael, an ugly big-eared man with close-set eyes, came and wrapped Oma Greta in a blanket, so they wouldn’t have to touch her.

  Jacob, Nora, Anna, and Eddie watched them remove the pale, lifeless body of the woman who had left Poland for what she thought would be a better life, only to be returned by Hitler, and in the end died in poverty and bigotry, imprisoned in a filthy apartment.

  “Typhus?” Victor asked.

  Michael nodded. He shivered and made a wrinkled face of disgust. “Look at the way they live. What do you expect? They’re filthy!” Michael grabbed the edge of the blanket with his dirty fingernails.

  Jacob took a deep breath and drew himself up. “We don’t choose to live this way. I’m a doctor, and it’s almost medically impossible to stay alive in a place this overcrowded and unsanitary. Typhus is impossible to avoid when we’re forced to live like filthy rats in a hole.”

  “You are rats. Foul, scroungy vermin, and if you keep complaining, I’ll make you work double hours digging ditches,” Victor said angrily. He lost his grip and dropped his side of the bundle. Oma Greta’s head hit the floor, making a horrifying thud.

  Anna gasped and bit her lip to stop herself from crying out, but Eddie didn’t have the same restraint. His face contorted in anger. “Don’t drop her! She’s my Oma! She’s a very nice lady.”

  “Shut up, you deformed clown!” Victor yelled. He would have hit Eddie, but his hands were occupied with carrying one more dead Dinsdorf inhabitant.

  Nora hugged Anna. Jacob put his arm around Eddie. Victor and Michael picked Oma up from the ground and carried her out still wrapped in the blanket, but they knocked her against the doorjamb as they left, as if she were an old couch instead of a beloved grandmother.

  Eddie’s arms reached out for his oma, as her small blistered feet, sticking out of the blanket, disappeared from the room.

  “Come back, Oma!” He looked up at his mother. “I wish people would stop dying. There’s not going to be anybody left.”

  Victor and Michael carried Eddie’s grandmother down the steps and outside. They shuffled over to the curb and, on the count of three, flung Oma Greta into the Dinsdorf street like unwanted trash.

  At Bockenburg Camp, Eva waded through the marshes. The mosquitoes swarmed around her. She batted at them, slapping her skin, but nothing could keep them from biting. Soon, the cold weather would kill them, but then, she would have to fight the freezing temperatures. Eva’s life had become an unending battle against man and nature.

  That night, in line for soup, with red welts from the mosquito bites all over her skin, Eva scratched, tormented by the itching.

  Helga pulled her arm away. “Stop it. You’ll tear up your skin.”

  Bert ripped a piece of his shirt off the bottom and dipped it in his cup of water. He placed it gently on Eva’s skin, relieving, for a second, the intensity of the bites.

  Eva smiled at her father. “Thank you, Papa.”

  Later that day after returning from the brick factory, inside the Dinsdorf apartment, Anna divided the last chunk of bread among Eddie, Jacob, and Nora. Anna knew the tradition of sitting shiva to mourn the dead must be done. She covered the mirrors to remind them to look beyond outside appearances and focus on the good inside. There was a lot of good to reflect on in Oma Greta’s life. Although they were prisoners in an overcrowded, disease-infested apartment in a Nazi-controlled neighborhood surrounded by armed guards to keep order, Anna knew the dead must be mourned. The prayers must be said. Respect for the dead must be shown, even in a makeshift prison. Maybe even more so.

  After months at a work camp near Frankfurt, Charlie and his parents had been shipped without explanation to the Soblin Ghetto in Poland. They looked around at the unfamiliar neighborhood. They walked toward corpses lying in the street and stared at the stack of dead bodies awaiting disposal.

  “Why are those people sleeping in the street?” Charlie asked.

  Arnold put his hand on Charlie’s shoulder. “They are dead, my son. They are sleeping with God now.”

  Charlie stopped and stared with the shocked vision of a child faced with mortality of the cruelest form. Arnold divided a small chunk of bread and handed it to Charlie, who had sores on his face and arms.

  Charlie, exhausted and weak, stumbled and fell. He dropped the bread, which landed among the dead. He reached for the bread, but Arnold pulled his hand away. “Don’t eat that, son.”

  “But I’m hungry.”

  “Here.” Arnold handed Charlie his own share of the bread.

  Charlie popped it in his mouth, as he stared at the empty shells of people. “Why do they want us to die? What did we ever do for them to hate us so much?”

  “We exist, Charlie, and that’s enough,” Arnold said.

  “Can
’t God see what they are doing?” the boy asked.

  “Maybe God is waiting to see what we will do,” Arnold said.

  “That’s enough now. Let’s find a place to live,” Evelyn said. She looked at the dead bodies lying in the street. “Looks like maybe an apartment has opened up.”

  “Evelyn, you shouldn’t mock the dead,” Arnold said.

  A train whistle sounded in the distance. “I wonder what Becca and Peter are doing now,” Charlie said.

  CHAPTER 28

  HITLER’S A MADMAN

  (April/May 1940)

  Many months had passed, and the military tension had increased. Adolf Hitler was determined to spread his control toward world domination. For the Kindertransport children, their lives continued to be relatively safe, but they were riddled with worry, loneliness, and uncertainty.

  The April weather turned milder. The wind was not so sharp, the air not so heavy. The night had become restless, as the wind rustled the trees and blew through the fields around Coventry. In the farmhouse, Emil, Maude, and Peter listened to the radio.

  “Reporting tonight’s news on April 9, 1940, German troops invade Denmark and Norway,” the radio announcer said.

  Emil shook his head. “Hitler’s a madman. They shouldn’t prat about. Someone should just kill him.” He turned to stare at Peter. “Why haven’t your people turned against him? Some people don’t have the courage, I guess.”

  Peter clenched his fists, but he held them tightly to his sides, his nails digging into his skin. He glared at Emil and Maude. “It’s not about courage. It’s about power. When someone controls everything you do, it can be a prison even if you aren’t confined.”