The Children's Train: Escape on the Kindertransport

by Jana Zinser

  That winter, Sloan had relented and agreed to let Peter go to Poland. Sloan told Peter he would see things he might not be able to forget, and he’d do things he might not be able to forgive.

  On his first reconnaissance mission, Peter saw the Soblin Ghetto from across a park, and wondered if Sloan was right. Maybe he was too soft and not the commando type, but it was too late to back out. He was committed and in enemy territory, and Hitler was still a monster.

  This would be his first act of sabotage, Operation Rakete, or skyrocket. His job was to get the explosives from a mysterious, but well-connected, man named Abraham, who had been a chemist living comfortably. Then the Nazis had taken his house, shut down his lab, and prohibited him from communicating with his counterparts in the United States, who were trying to help him emigrate to be a part of a secret military project.

  Abraham now lived in a Soblin sewer with his old housekeeper, Martha, who had been displaced along with him. Although she could keep a house clean and cook a hearty stew, she was not very bright and relatively unattractive. Without Abraham, she would have succumbed to the brutality of the Nazis a long time ago.

  Peter made his way to the designated sewer manhole in the middle of a secluded Soblin street. He slid it open enough to climb down, as Sloan had instructed him.

  As he descended the ladder into the sewer, the smell of decay and human waste assaulted his nose. Maybe Sloan was right. Maybe he wasn’t the rebel soldier type. He grabbed his stomach as it contracted, and held his breath, trying hard not to retch. He hesitated, unsure if he could continue.

  But then he thought of Marla, and how she’d forced Sloan and Mica to take him because he’d asked her to. He thought of Eva left behind in the hands of the Nazis, while the Kindertransport took him away to freedom, and what fate had befallen his mother and baby sister. He steeled himself, placed his sleeve over his mouth and nose, and descended into the giant Soblin sewer pipes.

  Peter wandered the dark tunnel until he heard echoing voices in the distance. He turned the corner and saw two ragged, filthy people, huddled together on the side of the curved pipe. They looked like Sloan had described. Martha, a woman with few teeth and patchy hair, smiled, her eyebrows perpetually raised in surprise. Sloan, never one for subtleties, had called her a crooked-nose witch. Abraham was a tall thin man with a large head and a scraggly beard. Sloan had described him as the Ichabod Crane look-alike chemist.

  Abraham motioned to Peter. “Where did you come from?” he asked, pointing a long finger at him. Peter expected Abraham’s big pumpkin head, balanced on such a skinny neck, to fall off at any moment.

  “London,” Peter answered.

  Martha ran her hand nervously through her scraggly patches of frizzy witch hair. “Who leaves London to come here?” she asked.

  “I joined the Resistance,” Peter said. “What are you doing here?”

  “Waiting.”

  “You can’t just sit here waiting.”

  “Why not? That’s what we do. We’re Jews,” Abraham said.

  “If we wait, there won’t be many of us left,” Peter said.

  “He has a point,” Abraham said to Martha.

  “What do you want?” Martha demanded.

  “Ah, Sloan sent me,” Peter said.

  “You? You’re a boy.” She laughed. “And you’re still alive?”

  Abraham raised his eyebrows and looked at Martha. “God has smiled on this one.” He held out a shriveled potato. “Here, you must be hungry.”

  Peter reached out and reluctantly took the disgusting, moldy potato. He held it gingerly between his thumb and finger, examining it. “It’s rotten.”

  “You’re new, right?” Abraham asked, scratching his beard.

  Peter nodded. “They sent me for the explosives for Operation Rakete.”

  “If you don’t want it . . .” Martha snatched the mushy potato from Peter’s hand and stuffed it in her mouth.

  “Come back tomorrow. I’ll have what you need,” Abraham said.

  Peter went back the way he came, balancing on the curved concrete edge with his sleeve over his nose and mouth.

  Martha shook her head as he walked away. “I dislike that boy. He looks suspiciously like one of them.”

  The next day, snow flurries streaked the air. December was cold and punishing. Peter hurried along the downtown streets of Soblin to find the sewer witch, the scientist, and the promised explosives.

  A crowd had gathered around the newsstand. Curious, Peter pushed his way through to the front to see what all the commotion was about. He saw that everyone was buying newspapers with the headline: “DECEMBER 11, 1941: US DECLARES WAR ON GERMANY!”

  Peter slowly backed out of the panicking crowd. His hand quickly covered the smile he could not contain. He knew with the United States on Hitler’s tail, it would change everything. For a moment, a tiny piece of happiness sprang up inside him.

  Then he frowned and shoved the joy back down. In the chaos of the news, he noticed the bread cart next to the newsstand was left unattended. Sloan had taught him that opportunity was everything. Emotions had no place in war.

  Peter looked around. His surge of confidence from the news about the United States made him bold. He reached up, grabbed a loaf of bread, and briskly walked away. When he came to the entrance of the sewer, he glanced around. When the street was empty, he opened the cover and disappeared into the sewer pipes under the city. The smell still repulsed him, but he had become used to no longer having a choice in anything, and acceptance created a tolerance for the intolerable.

  Peter found Abraham and Martha in the same spot on the edge of the curved sewer pipe. “There’s the young rebel who is too good for our potatoes,” Martha said.

  Peter held out the loaf of bread to her. “Thought you might like some bread.”

  Martha eyed it. “What? Did you steal it?”

  Peter glanced down, ashamed. He nodded.

  Martha smiled, showing the few teeth she had left. “Good! You might make it after all.”

  Abraham laughed. “I have your explosives, but tell Sloan to be careful when he hooks up the wires. The connectors are loose, and I don’t have the tools to fix them. It’s sad when science has to be used to destroy things.”

  “Maybe you won’t have to stay down here very much longer. The United States just declared war on Germany!” Peter smiled, happy to be able to give them the news.

  Abraham smiled. “We will dance when Hitler is defeated, but he has taken everything we own, and we have no other place to go.”

  “Me too. I need to go now. We have people to rescue,” Peter said with artificial bravado. He picked up the knapsack with the explosives and marched off, like a child entering a football game, confident he can score.

  “I like that boy,” he heard Martha say to Abraham, as she chewed a big piece of bread. “He’s going to be a good rebel, because he can blend in with them.”

  “I told you God likes that one.”

  “I thought God liked us all,” Martha said.

  Abraham scratched his scraggly beard and shrugged. “Ah, you know, perhaps some more than others.
”

  In the strange echoing sounds the sewer system made, a voice reverberated against the pipes. The sound of Peter’s quiet singing whispered along the foul-smelling underground space.

  We are marching forward,

  With God by our side.

  We will not leave our path,

  For He will be our guide.

  When Peter passed the bread stand, he left his last coin there.

  Noah, the defiant orphan, was now twelve, but still small for his age. He peeked around a building inside the Soblin Ghetto.

  He darted out and rolled under one of two gas vans waiting to be loaded. Noah unhooked the hose that delivered the poisonous exhaust into the back of the van that killed the unwilling passengers before they reached their destination.

  A Nazi soldier opened the back of the van. Noah recognized him as Dirk, one of the soldiers at his escape attempt with the pole. Dirk pushed in old people, women, and children. “It’s not that difficult! Get in the van!” he shouted.

  Noah’s grip slipped, and he dropped the hose. He looked up, and Dirk was bending down, staring at him.

  Dirk grabbed his arm and pulled him out from under the van. “What are you doing, trying to escape?” He shoved Noah into the van so hard that he hit his head on the floor. Beside them, other soldiers loaded the van Noah hadn’t been able to reach.

  The doors shut and the locks pulled across, leaving Noah trapped among the crowd chosen for death. The people in the van clung to their loved ones. Noah sat alone in a corner.

  The engine started. Inside, the van was dark as it rocked back and forth, occasionally hitting a bump. People wept and prayed. An old lady passed out from fear. A little girl with matted hair and rags for clothes cried, as her mother hugged her tightly.

  “Where are we going?” the little girl asked her mother.

  “Wherever God takes us,” her mother said.

  The two gas vans pulled off the road, into a forest near a wide muddy river in the Polish countryside. Dirk opened the back of the van; then, startled, he jumped back. The people in the back of the van stared at him.

  Dirk motioned to Adler, the other driver. “Quick! Come here! They’re still alive!”

  Adler struggled to bend down as he looked under the van. “The hose broke!”

  “It was that kid,” Dirk said, pointing accusingly to Noah. “The bamboo pole kid. I should have known.”

  Adler opened the other van, and dead bodies fell out. The little girl screamed when she saw the cherry red color of their skin from the severe carbon monoxide poisoning. Her mother covered the little girl’s mouth to stop her horrified screams. Noah looked at the bodies tumbling out on top of each other.

  Dirk roughly pulled the people, arrogant enough to still be alive, out of his van. “Everyone out!”

  Noah, dizzy and disoriented from the bump on his head and the rough ride, stumbled out by himself. He was almost the last one off.

  “Move out!” Dirk shouted to them.

  Adler and Dirk herded the people to the deep swift river, driving them to the edge. “Enter the water and don’t stop!” Adler shouted.

  No one moved. Dirk suddenly pulled out his gun and shot the little girl. He shoved her forcefully into the muddy swift river.

  The crowd jolted and moved, walking into the cold river water until it was nearly over their heads. They cried and called for their mothers and fathers, their husbands, and their God. They held each other’s hands, but they continued marching into the water.

  The little girl, bloodied and missing part of her head, floated quietly down the river, carried by its current. The girl’s mother wept great sobs of grief, gulping the air as she walked into the cold water. She did not stop. There were a few bubbles, and then nothing. Without her daughter, death was a welcome comfort.

  Only a few more people remained on the land, waiting their turn to die. Noah slowed at the water’s edge. He was dizzy from his head injury. He looked up at the nearby woods, which spun in his vision, causing more disorientation.

  The mother’s submerged dead body sprung unexpectedly to the surface, floating swiftly as if to catch up to her daughter. Adler and Dirk, startled by the body, turned and shot at it.

  Noah startled as well, and, without thinking, turned and ran.

  The Nazis shot at the escaping boy, but Noah was so little and so dizzy that he couldn’t run straight. Their bullets missed his uncontrollable serpentine zigzag. He ran crookedly into the woods. Dirk ran after him, shooting indiscriminately into the trees. Adler, unused to any exertion, remained by the river.

  Noah’s footsteps were so light that even in the forest, he barely made a sound. He rounded a clump of trees.

  Then someone grabbed him from behind. A hand covered his mouth. He disappeared into the woods, swallowed up by the trees.

  Dirk could no longer see the little boy who’d had the audacity to sabotage his van. He stopped running and twisted each way, looking for Noah. He shot randomly into the woods, and then stood still, listening for the escaping sounds of the little saboteur. But the forest was quiet, giving nothing away of the young fugitive. Dirk lowered his gun and spit on the ground.

  Dirk went back to the gas vans, looking over his shoulder.

  “Did you get him?” Adler asked.

  Dirk nodded. “Just like rabbit hunting,” he lied.

  They laughed and climbed into their empty vans, ready for another load of people to poison.

  Inside the large clump of bushes, a false floor lifted up. Peter, who was carrying the knapsack that Abraham had given him, pulled the boy he’d grabbed down into the underground tunnel.

  “Be quiet and follow me, if you want to live,” Peter said, making his voice deep and trying to sound like a rebel who understands the danger but doesn’t care. He forgot to watch where he was walking and stepped on an icy patch. His foot slipped.

  He fell, and the knapsack with the explosives tumbled with him. He held the knapsack up, and his head took the brunt of the fall, hitting the edge of a tree root.

  The boy watched him bounce. He leaned down. “Are you okay?”

  Peter nodded, embarrassed. “Don’t worry, the connectors are loose. It won’t go off.” He gingerly picked up the bag. He straightened up, rubbed his head, and strode off, a commando in training and lucky to be alive.

  “Have you done this long?” the boy asked.

  “Yes. It can be treacherous. There is danger all around,” Peter said in his deep, fake rebel voice.

  “Oh,” the boy said. He followed Peter as they walked along a dark tunnel.

  They came to a large underground cavern with many people milling around. Carbide lanterns lit the area, casting strange shadows on the walls. Mica and Sloan were almost unrecognizable in dirty camouflage rebel clothes. “Peter, you made it!” Mica said. “How’d you like the sewer?”

  “I didn’t. Here.” He handed Mica the explosives from Abraham. “But I have better news. America’s in the war now!” Peter said with a big smile.

  Mica let out a yell. “Hitler’s got the big guns to deal with now!”

>   “Finally, the Yanks have found their backbone,” Sloan said. “I was wondering if they had one.”

  A woman stepped out from the shadows. She was the rugged rebel they called “Iron Isha,” who would have been pretty if she wasn’t dressed in men’s clothes and covered in dirt. She wore a scarf tied tightly around her head. “Or they didn’t want to be next. Either way, they’re in,” she said, “and that’s good.”

  “If they crack the Nazis’ new Berlin communication code, and now with the Allies on attack, we might really have a chance to win this war,” Sloan said. “Or just bomb them to smithereens. That would work, too.”

  The boy emerged from the dark tunnel and stood up. Sloan pointed at him. “What is that?”

  “Refused to be drowned,” Peter said. “Can’t run straight, but he’s fast. He outsmarted the Nazis.”

  “So, you’ve cheated death, Little Man. Have a seat,” Sloan said. He looked at Mica. “Looks like our rebellion has become a kindergarten.”

  Mica handed both boys a piece of bread. The younger boy tore into it like a ravenous dog. Peter looked at Mica. “The sewer stunk, and their potatoes were rotten.”

  “We have a cream puff on our hands, Sloan,” Mica said, laughing.

  “No cream puffs allowed!” Sloan shouted.

  In the light of the carbide lanterns, Peter stared at the boy. “Do I know you?” Peter asked.

  “No, no one knows me.”

  “Yes, I do.” Peter paused, remembering a face he could never forget. “You’re the stowaway in the luggage on the Kindertransport. I was on that train.”