by Jana Zinser
A man inside the ghetto threw the loop of the rope that Peter had left over the edge of the abandoned guardhouse. He put the other end of the rope through the loop and pulled it through. With a running start, he swung over the fence, as smoke billowed from the explosion, giving him thick cover.
The man ran from the ghetto toward them. He ran out of the smoke. It was Jules.
He climbed into the front seat of the truck next to Sloan and Mica, putting on an old farmer’s shirt. He was free, but it was still a long way to England. Marla, who had become good at negotiating with Sloan, insisted that a condition for a very large sum of money he needed was to get Jules safely to England. The rebel “Iron Isha” had bribed a Nazi officer to discover Jules’s location from his records in the basement of Berlin headquarters, and the rescue was planned. Soon after, both Iron Isha and her Nazi informant had been arrested at the handoff of additional records. That had ended the rebels’ access to Jewish inmate locations and slowed their rescues, but Jules had been saved, and Marla would be happy.
Reluctantly, Peter crawled into the back of the truck and returned the burlap bags to their cover. Inside the truck bed, he smiled at Noah and nodded. “Operation Rakete!” he said excitedly. “Successful!” His smile fell into a sneer. “But they should have let me drive.”
Much later, as the moon climbed high in the sky, the truck reached the border between Poland and Germany. Peter dug a hole through the hay. He and Noah watched as Sloan, Mica, and Jules sat in the cab of the battered truck.
The three rescued boys slept, exhausted from their daring flight from the ghetto. The fake farmers in the cab pulled their hats down low on their heads and buttoned their coats up around their necks.
At the border, the truck was stopped by a guard who stepped out in front of the security gate. “Halt! Where are you headed to in the middle of the night?” he demanded suspiciously.
“Home,” Sloan said.
“Where have you been?” the guard asked.
“Delivering potatoes,” Mica said.
The guard eyed them. “Let me see your papers.”
Sloan, Mica, and Jules handed him their papers. He looked at them and handed them back, his eyes lingering on the truck. “You don’t have any Jews hiding in there, do you?”
“No sir, just some hay and a few potatoes,” Mica said casually.
The guard waved them through, and they drove across the German border.
Then the guard raised his gun and randomly shot into the truckload of hay. “Just making sure the potatoes are dead.”
Once out of sight down the road, Sloan pulled the truck to a stop. Marc and Normie crawled out from under the burlap bags, seed bags, and bales of hay on the truck bed, crying. Unflappable Noah followed them with his eyes open wide, looking stunned.
Peter emerged from the hay, carrying Kramden. The boy was shot dead, the blood barely visible from the perfect hole in the side of his tiny head from the guard’s random bullet.
Sloan walked over to Peter and took the lifeless boy in his arms. “He died free of the Nazis. That is more than he had before you rescued him. Emotions serve no purpose in war. We must move on and protect the other children,” he said harshly, pointing to Marc and Normie, who sobbed uncontrollably as Noah tried to comfort them.
Noah knew how the boys felt. He’d watched his parents beaten to death for trying to protect their home on November 9, 1938. He was little and hadn’t really understood, but he knew the Nazis had no right to destroy their home. His parents had stood up to the Nazis, and the retaliation was swift.
On that long-ago night, when the blood from a blow to his mother’s head had splattered in the Nazi’s face, Noah saw his chance and fled the house his parents had bravely refused to vacate. The Nazis hadn’t even bothered to chase him. A boy his age on the street would be dead by morning, especially on that night when Nazis stalked the streets, hunting Jews. But not Noah. He had an uncanny ability to live.
He’d wandered the streets that night in a trance of shock and horror, an orphan whose last images of his parents were brutal and bloody. He couldn’t even remember how he got to the orphanage, but he could remember the sausages he was fed that night. Although not much had changed with the brutality, somehow, since he’d found Peter, he didn’t feel so alone. A small sliver of hope had returned. Outside the hay truck that night at the border, Noah tried to comfort the other two boys.
Peter nodded to Sloan. He tried desperately to separate himself from the despair and anguish he felt. The random unfairness of life always shocked Peter.
“Peter, we need to finish our business here and move on. We’ve got to get through to Holland, yet. Do you understand?” Sloan asked.
Peter nodded. He watched as Sloan bent down and kissed the assassinated little boy’s forehead, before he gently laid Kramden in the ditch and covered him with weeds. The hardened commando still harbored compassion for those taken by unexplained cruelty, and Peter knew that it was impossible to separate emotion from war.
Several days later, Marla paced around a bench in London’s Hyde Park. Anti-aircraft guns stood behind the locked iron gates. Gunnery sergeants watched the sky through binoculars.
Sloan and Peter stepped out of the shadows with Marc and Normie, who’d escaped the ghetto, but whose price for freedom had been the lives of their mother, father, and little brother. Marla ran and hugged Peter and Sloan.
“Well, if it isn’t my favorite cream puff,” Sloan said, as he hugged her. Behind them was Jules, Marla’s friend and German Jewish organization worker.
“Here he is, Blue Eyes,” Sloan said. “Like I promised.”
She ran and embraced Jules. “Jules! You finally made it! I’m so happy to see you.”
Peter nodded at the kids and stepped forward. Marla saw their sleepy faces. “Oh, my goodness.” She knelt down to them. “Hello, children. Come with me. Everything is going to be better now.” She stood up, and Sloan and Peter were gone.
“Where did they go?” She looked at Jules. “Why are they always doing that?”
“Dramatic effect. There’s one more surprise,” Jules said.
Noah walked out of the shadows. Marla stared at him. Noah stared back, and she broke into a smile. “My little stowaway?”
He nodded.
“Not so little any more,” she said.
“It took me awhile, but I finally made it, thanks to Peter.”
“Peter?” She smiled. “Indeed. So, come, welcome to England, at last.”
Jules gathered the children, picking up Normie, who was so sleepy he could barely walk.
“So, Jules, what do you plan to do in England?” Marla asked her Kindertransport friend.
“Join the British Army and fight Hitler,” Jules said with a smile. “I am a good soldier with a very personal grudge.”
Sloan and Peter strolled around the locked park. Peter looked at Sloan, who was smiling.
“You like her. You don’t like anyone, but you like Marla,” Peter said.
“No, I don’t. She’s demanding and annoying.”
“Yes, you do. You’re in love with Marla.”
�
��There’s no time for love in war, mate,” Sloan said.
Peter smiled. “The war has to end, sometime, mate,” he said, imitating Sloan.
“Let’s see if we can speed that up.” Sloan put his arm around Peter. “Do you think she likes me?” he asked, like a schoolboy.
“Who wouldn’t be overwhelmed by your charms?” Peter teased.
They both laughed, as they melted into the busy pace of downtown London and a chance for a real meal before heading back to Germany.
CHAPTER 34
SPARKS FLEW
(June 1942)
Peter, who at first had resented the Kindertransport, had come to agree that his people should be saved at any cost, including family separation. He had since added sabotage, murder, and the heavy use of explosives to his list of acceptable responses to Hitler. It was war, and Peter was right in the middle of it, a soldier of the underground.
There was too much to do, and he needed recruits. While he was in England, he decided to find Hans and Stephen, the football stars who’d never minded taking a hit. He hoped they would join him.
A farmer drove a donkey cart to the old Pellbrooke Mansion in the English countryside, where many of the Kindertransport children were housed.
Peter jumped out of the back of the cart. He’d been eleven when he’d ridden the Kindertransport; now he was fifteen and as tall as a man. Like his father, he had gotten his height, suddenly.
Peter pointed to the old stone mansion. “Are you sure this is it?” he asked the farmer driving the cart.
“It’s hard to miss them and their football games.”
“That’s them. Well, I thank you then for the ride from the station.” Peter waved to the farmer. He turned and walked up the hill. “Definitely a step up from Dovercourt,” he muttered to himself.
Peter ran into the boys’ room in the mansion. “Any football players from Berlin in here?”
Hans and Stephen stared at him. “Peter?” Hans asked.
“The same,” Peter said.
They hugged each other like lost brothers.
“You’ve grown,” Stephen said, looking him up and down.
“We heard about Coventry. Where have you been?” Hans asked, excited to see his old friend.
“Germany and Poland. I joined the Resistance.”
Eva and her father, still dusty from their day’s labor at the gravel pit, sat on the ground between the barracks in the Bockenburg Camp. The sun set and night settled in. A train whistle blew in the distance.
“I wonder what the boys are doing in England,” Eva thought aloud.
“They’re not breaking rocks, that’s for sure,” Bert said.
“What about William? Do you think he ever thinks of us?”
“I think William mainly thinks about William,” Bert said. He patted Eva’s arm and nodded with his chin toward the shadowy ditch in front of the wall that kept the prisoners in range of the guard towers. A prisoner hunched over, crept along the side, keeping hidden in the shadows.
The prisoner turned as if calculating the distance to the ditch. Eva saw the prisoner’s face. It wasn’t a man. It was a woman, dressed like a man. She wore a piece of cloth tied tightly around her head. She crouched down and, under the cover of darkness, sprinted toward the ditch. When she reached it, she jumped, her long legs stretching to reach the other side. Unbelievably, she made it.
Eva wrapped her arms around her father and whispered, “She’s going to make it. She’s going to escape!”
Like a cat, the woman climbed the wall, somehow finding crevices to cling to. She was almost to the top, and Eva held her breath. A shot ran out from the guard tower, but it missed. The woman threw her leg over the top of the wall, but the shot had notified the other guard towers.
A barrage of bullets rained down on the woman who had the audacity to try to escape. Her body jerked as it was riddled with shots, and she fell off the wall and into the ditch. The guards returned to their posts as if nothing had happened.
Eva, horrified at the woman’s murder, looked sadly at her father. “She didn’t make it.”
That night, as the boys sat on their bed at the Pellbrooke Mansion, Peter leaned close to Hans and Stephen, so the others couldn’t hear. “The Germans are killing all the Jews in gas chambers and then burning them up in ovens,” he said.
“What? That can’t be true,” Hans said, shaking his head.
“Which part, that Germans would kill Jews, or the ovens?” Peter asked.
“The oven part sounds like Hansel and Gretel,” Stephen said, as he shivered, knowing that it was real.
“Only this isn’t a children’s tale. It’s real. I’ve seen the crematoriums at the Reinigen Camp in Lodansk, Poland. The smoke. The piles of dead bodies waiting to be burned,” Peter said. “Killing us the old-fashioned way was taking too long for Hitler.”
“It can’t be,” Hans said, shaking his head.
“It is,” Peter said, nodding.
Hans hung his head, and his shoulders slumped. “Nothing seems real anymore. The Kindertransport seems so long ago.”
Stephen looked at Peter. “Remember when that ugly Nazi made you play your violin?”
Peter nodded and shivered. “My fingers felt like rocks that would break if I moved them.”
“I thought it was over for you,” Stephen said.
They laughed.
“Have you heard anything about your family?” Peter asked.
Hans picked up a letter. “Here’s the last letter I received from my mother. ‘Dear Hans, I am sad to say Oma passed away of typhus. Many people in the Jewish Residential District in Dinsdorf are being deported to another camp in Poland, and I’m sure our turn will be coming soon. This will be my last letter to you. How our beautiful lives came to this point, I don’t understand. Here we are, facing what will surely be the end, apart and frightened. Please know deep down in your heart how much we love you and how happy we are that your life was saved. Make the most of it. With all my love, Your Mother.’”
When Hans looked up, Peter stood next to him, his face solemn and searching. “That’s why I came,” Peter said.
“Why?” Hans said.
“I was angry to leave Germany. Now, I understand why our parents sent us away, to save us. But Hitler will not be stopped unless we do something. We have to stand up to him to save others.”
“So, what do you want us to do?” Hans asked.
“Fight the Nazis,” Peter said.
“You’re kidding, right?” Hans asked, smiling.
“I’ve joined the rebels,” Peter said.
“Jewish rebels?” Hans asked.
Peter nodded.
“Aren’t you scared?” Stephen asked.
“All the time, but I’m more scared of doing nothing.”
“We’re going back to the hostel next week. We miss London, even with the risk of bombs, but that’s about as brave as I get. I’ll never set foot on German soil again,” Hans said.
“I’m sorry, Peter
,” Stephen said. “My parents wouldn’t want me to risk my life again, after all they went through to save me. I may be the only one left from my family.”
“You were always so bold,” Peter said, disappointedly.
“Not like you, Peter,” Stephen said. “You were never afraid to be yourself.”
“When did you become a fearless German hero?” Hans asked with a smile.
“I’m a late bloomer.”
A week later, inside a crop duster plane flying high over the countryside of Poland, Sloan slid the door open as the motor hummed loudly. Mica adjusted the parachute bag attached to Peter’s back. “All right. We are here. Remember to pull the cord. It’s as easy as that,” Mica said to Peter.
Peter peered out the door. The high altitude wind whipped his face. It was a long way down.
“You’ll be fine. It’s actually quite a thrill,” Mica said.
“Are you ready to be a famous rebel?” Sloan asked him.
Peter shook his head.
“Too late,” Sloan said, as he nodded to Mica.
Mica grabbed Peter from behind and pushed him out the airplane door. Peter screamed, as the wind whipped his face. He was falling rapidly to his death, until he remembered what he was supposed to do. He pulled his ripcord, and the parachute deployed.
Mica’s and Sloan’s laughter could not be heard as it was lost in the wind as they fell. They landed safely near Peter, who reached the ground without any broken bones.
Several days later, Peter returned to shine shoes on the sidewalk outside the Soblin Ghetto’s electrified fence, waiting to rendezvous with Sloan and Mica.