by Lila Perl
“What do you mean it’s no matter?” Sibby asks in a peppery tone. “It certainly does matter. Both things matter…a lot. You’ve got to learn that here in the U.S. we fight for our rights. And there’s no Gestapo, no secret police, no marching Storm Troopers to shut us up.”
Helga has withdrawn one of her hands to brush a long lock of hair from her cheek. “I think it is better that we do not speak of these things.”
Sibby instantly frees Helga’s other hand, and we all head toward home in an embarrassed silence. Sibby and I only talk to point out various landmarks so that Helga can find her way without us if she has to. I can’t imagine that they will keep her in seventh grade at Singleton for more than a few weeks. Helga is fourteen and she should be in ninth grade.
At the apartment, my mother is waiting impatiently for Helga so that they can set off for the hospital to visit Mrs. F. who is still pretty weak following her operation, which is said to have lasted six hours.
As soon as they’re gone, I’m down at Sibby’s, where Mrs. Simon has just come off the early shift of her new job at the shipyard. She is wearing overalls, a bandana that covers her hair, and heavy men’s work shoes. Mrs. Simon looks tired and her voice is hoarse from yelling, she says, over the noise from the machinery. But she still sets out milk and gingersnaps for Sibby and me, and sits down at the table with us, her head in her arms.
“So,” I say to Sibby. “do you see what I mean about Helga? She’s very hard to talk to. If you say one wrong thing she shuts up like a clam. And you never know what that’s going to be until you say it. Then it’s too late.”
Sibby sips her milk, crunches on her gingersnaps, and nods. “Something terrible happened to her. You have to find out what it is, Isabel.”
“Me? All I ever do is get into trouble over her. Don’t ask me to interfere.”
Mrs. Simon lifts her head from the table. “All right. Tell me what happened.”
We give her a rundown of the events at school this afternoon and the way Helga reacted when Sibby tried to stand up for her. “She refused to even talk about it,” I add. “Did she want to be put in seventh grade with a lot of twelve-year-olds when she should be in ninth? Was it okay with her that stupid Danny Brill yelled out Sieg Heil at her? It’s almost as though she likes being insulted. That’s crazy.”
“Let me ask you,” says Mrs. Simon, “what do you know about Helga’s family in Germany? Are her parents still there? Does she have sisters and brothers?”
“Two sisters, I think. And I know she has letters, written in German…” I stop myself short. I haven’t told anybody about that morning at Moskin’s when Helga went on a hike and I snooped around among her belongings and found the chocolate box with the picture of the parents and the three little girls, one smaller and the other two older.
“Well,” Sibby’s mother says, “first of all, you should try to get more information about how Helga managed to leave Germany and be sent to England. My guess is that she was put on one of the Children’s Transports. In 1939 the Germans were still letting the Jews leave….if some other country would take them. Now, of course…” Mrs. Simon takes the forefinger of her right hand and draws it across her throat, as though she’s slashing it with a knife.
Even Sibby gasps and I say, “You mean…?”
“What,” says Mrs. Simon, “you never heard the Hitler Youth marching song? It goes all the way back to 1934, the year after Hitler became chancellor of Germany. And when Jewish blood spurts from the knife, then things will again go well. Today, nobody gets out alive. If the rest of her family stayed behind in Germany they could be in prison or in a slave labor camp. Or worse.”
All this information about what’s been going on in Germany is giving me the heebie-jeebies. Why don’t we read more about it in the newspapers? All we keep hearing about are the Japs and the war in the Pacific, and that our government is moving the Japanese people who live on the West Coast into camps fenced with barbed wire because they might be spies.
Could it be that some people suspect that maybe Helga is a spy working for the Germans? Was that why Mr. Lockhart and our homeroom teacher, Mr. Jeffers, didn’t get really angry at Danny Brill’s Sieg Heil? It’s all a mystery to me, wrapped in a tall, silent riddle that goes by the name of Helga Frankfurter.
It’s later that evening and I’m doing my homework at the kitchen table when my mother and Helga return from their hospital visit to Mrs. F. My father is out seeing one of his insurance clients, as often happens on weeknights.
“How is Mrs. F…Frankfurter?” I nearly said Mrs. F. My mother would have killed me.
“Not doing well. Very weak,” my mother replies, as Helga merely nods a polite hello to me and goes to our room. As soon as Helga is out of hearing, my mother adds, “She looks like death warmed over. Now clear your books off the table so I can put some supper together.”
I’m not sure what “death warmed over” means, but I suspect it has something to do with Mrs. F. not having a chance to put on her makeup since the operation.
In the room we now share, Helga is sitting on her bed and reading her program schedule for school tomorrow.
“May I see it?” I ask.
“Ja, perhaps you can explain to me what is P.T., what is Alg., what is Eng. comp?”
It turns out that Helga does have ninth-grade classes in physical training and math, while history is eighth grade and English is seventh grade, so her program is a mish-mosh.
I still don’t see, though, why they put her in a seventh-grade homeroom. She towers among most of the kids except for a few overgrown brutes like Danny Brill. And, even if she does have a German accent, her English is better than people like Billy Crosby who always says “ain’t” and drops all his g’s.
“Listen,” I say, as my mother calls us in to supper (a macaroni and cheese casserole that’s been heating in the oven), “I’m sure things will get straightened out at school and you’ll get to feel comfortable there. And I’m really sorry about your aunt being so sick right now.”
“Ah, about the school it’s no problem,” Helga says lightly over her shoulder, “because soon, anyway, I’ll return to live with Auntie Harriette.”
I purse my lips and don’t say a word. My mother didn’t seem to have such high hopes for a quick recovery for Mrs. F. but Helga has her mind made up. Can I ever get her to tell me anything about her family, as Sibby’s mother suggested? Why does she gloss over everything as if nothing bad ever happened?
I’m chomping away on my gluey cheese-coated macaroni, watching Helga eat hardly anything as usual, when an idea comes to me.
“Helga, maybe you could help me with my homework after dinner. I need some information for my history class tomorrow. It’s an assignment about something that happened in Germany a couple of years ago, you know, when you were still living there.”
Helga is toying with some string beans on her plate. She looks up. “Ah, Isabel, I no longer studied anything at that time because the government had already burned down the school where the Jewish children were sent. So, you see, I have nothing to tell you.”
My mother is gasping with indignation at the Nazis having burned the Jewish children’s school. But after learning about the Jewish blood song from Mrs. Simon, this afternoon, I’m not surprised. “No, no, you wouldn’t have learned about this in school,” I assure Helga. “You would know it just by having lived in Germany at that time. It’s about the Children’s Transports…”
“Die Kindertransporte,” Helga blurts out in German. Her ordinarily pale complexion takes on an ashen hue and her gray-green eyes grow stormy. “Nein, Isabel, it is nothing to talk about.”
“But, Helga,” I implore, “isn’t the…the Kindertransport, the Children’s Transport…the way you got from Germany to England? It…well, it probably saved your life. I know it took you away from your family, but…Oh please, couldn’t you tell me just a little bit about it?”
My mother, who’s been standing over us with two small glass dishes
of chocolate pudding topped with dabs of whipped cream, puts our desserts in front of us and sits down beside Helga. She places her arm around Helga’s shoulders.
“Now, Helga dear, I know it’s hard for you to talk about some things, but couldn’t you maybe help Isabel out with her assignment. She hasn’t been getting the greatest marks at school, except in French. And I think it’s because she doesn’t work hard enough at anything else.”
I give my mother a sour look and stare down at my pudding, the only halfway decent thing that’s been served at this meal.
Then I glance up at Helga. She looks like a trapped animal but, to my surprise, she actually admits that she was one of the many refugee children who were sent to England between December 1938 and September 1939 to escape the Nazis. “Only from babies to under age seventeen were taken. The rest of my family did not go. Papa was already in a labor camp because he was Jewish. My mother and my two sisters were hiding with relatives who were not Jewish.”
“But they must have written to you?” I ask hesitantly. I can never admit that I’ve seen those letters in German that Helga keeps in her chocolate box.
“Ja, Mutti, my mother, wrote for a time after the war broke out, and she and my sisters escaped to Holland. Nothing at all from Papa. And Mutti had nothing to tell about him. In May 1940, the Nazis took over Holland. I remained in England two more years, but no more letters came after that. Never.”
Helga stops and looks away. I’m afraid this is all she’s going to tell me. But then she gulps and says, “Please, Isabel, about the transport, I can only tell you that Mutti went with me to the train station. It was September 1, 1939. There were so many children, boys and girls, from orphanages, from broken families, some older children who took care of the babies. Mutti said, Soon we will all come to England and be together again.
“Then Achtung! The train whistle blew. We were pushed into the railway cars like rabbits. Some of the children did not smell so nice. Some were frightened and they soiled themselves. We rode for a long time all the way to Holland where we were taken to the port and put on a ferry. Then many more Kinder got sick from the movement of the boat in rough waters. At last we arrived in the English port, a place called Harwich.”
I’ve been picturing the awful voyage that Helga made and I’m happy to hear that it finally ended. “What a relief it must have been when you arrived on dry land.”
My mother, too, has been listening with bated breath. “You poor child. Your Aunt Harriette never said anything about how you traveled from Germany to England. I’m sure the English people were very nice to you and made you feel at home. Didn’t that help even a little bit?”
Helga stands up. She hasn’t touched her chocolate pudding. “I will go to my room now, please. Isabel, you can write your paper for the history class. I hope it gives you a good grade.”
Once Helga is gone, my mother brings her hands to her mouth and shakes her head back and forth. “Harriette is afraid that both her parents and even her sisters are all gone by now,” she whispers. “Hearing her story is a good lesson for you, Isabel. It should make you realize how fortunate you are.”
Why does my mother have to turn everything into a criticism of me? I start clearing the dishes off the table. “Excuse me,” I say abruptly. “I need to write down Helga’s description of the Children’s Transport while it’s still fresh in my mind. I wonder how you spell the name of that place in England where the ferry finally landed.”
Ten
A few days later, long-awaited letters arrive at last. There is one from Arnold. My father reads it aloud several times with great pride, as if he alone had engineered Arnold’s decision to go into the Air Force.
All this time, my brother’s been at a Basic Training camp just across the river in New Jersey. In a week or so he’ll be coming home on a furlough for two days. Then he’ll be shipped out to an unknown destination for special aeronautics courses. He’s feeling fine and hopes we are all okay, too.
I remind my mother that I was right when I told her Arnold was probably only going as far as New Jersey. “Isabel,” my mother says, “when will you learn to take this war seriously? You can be pretty sure that not long after his furlough your brother will be flying planes over the steaming jungles of the Pacific.”
“Not until he’s properly trained for it,” my father informs her. “Do you think the Army sends our boys up just like that before they’ve become skilled airmen?”
“Yes, I do,” my mother insists. “They need every pilot they can get. They probably give them a few lessons and off they go to battle it out in the air with the Japanese, who everybody knows are nothing but murderers.”
My father opens his newspaper with a sharp, crackling sound to signal his annoyance, and I leave the room so my parents can continue bickering without interruption.
There’s also been a letter from Sibby’s father, all the way from England. His ship had a rough crossing, pursued by German submarines, so they were forced to alter course and arrived in port way behind schedule. After the return crossing he hopes to have a week or so of home-leave. This is good news for Sibby and her mother.
And I have a letter from Ruthie. It appears to be a belated answer to my postcard of weeks ago. Ruthie, of course, has no idea that Helga is now living at our apartment, and I want to read this in private. It’s Saturday morning and Helga is in our bedroom, so I say I’m going down to Sybil’s and will be right back.
Dear Izzie, Ruthie writes, (I’m reading this in the stairwell between our floor and the one below),
I guess you’re mad at me. But don’t be. School started and I had to help with closing up the hotel. Now we’re all settled in Harper’s Falls for the winter. How is your brother? Did he really go into the Air Force?
Do you ever see or hear from Helga now that she’s living with her Aunt and Uncle in Westchester? I guess maybe not, since you weren’t too crazy about her. But I wanted to tell you something that happened after you left Shady Pines.
Helga seemed so lonely, so one day I asked her if she wanted to walk over to a nearby farm with me. It’s where we buy our chickens and our eggs for the hotel, and my mother wanted me to settle some accounts with them. As soon as Helga saw it was a chicken farm, she got kind of upset and she asked me who ran it. It’s an older couple, who’ve owned it for years. I told her their name but she didn’t seem that interested.
Just then she said she was feeling sick and, even though I wasn’t going to take long, she turned around and walked back by herself. When I got to the hotel, I asked her if she was okay? She said she was fine. The smell of the place, though, had made her feel like throwing up. And then she added that she never wanted to see another chicken farm in her life! Do you think the Nazis made her work on a chicken farm in Germany?
Did Helga tell you we practiced the Lindy? She was pretty good at it. Do you think she ever heard from that sailor Roy? How is school?
Write soon,
Ruthie
Now I really do go down to Sybil’s so I can tell her the “chicken farm” story and see what she makes of it. Mrs. Simon is there, too, because today happens to be her day off. She works at the shipyard six days a week on the “early shift” from six in the morning to three in the afternoon.
Since Mr. Simon will be coming home on leave soon, Mrs. Simon is more like her usual vivacious self. She’s wearing a bright plaid housecoat, she’s manicuring her nails, and her dark eyes glitter. Sibby has just washed her hair and is fluffing out her wet red ringlets.
“Oh, I’m glad you came by, Isabel.” Mrs. Simon says. “Sibby and I were just making plans to visit the U.S.O. club later today. I hear that since they opened they’re getting more and more young fellows in uniform from all over the country. I thought, well, why not volunteer and try to make them feel at home. Want to come along?”
USO! What a terrific idea. I think U.S.O. stands for United Service Organizations. These gathering places for the new recruits are springing up all over the country
…in meeting halls and community centers and public buildings, wherever there’s a big enough space to serve coffee and doughnuts, to sit and talk, and to set up music for dancing. But will my mother really let me go?
“Say something, Izzie,” Sibby urges. “You look…discombobulated.”
I snap to attention. “Of course, I want to go. I’m dying to volunteer. Do you honestly think anybody will dance with us? Oh, and what should we do about Helga?”
“Helga. Of course, Helga,” says Mrs. Simon. “It’ll give me a chance to meet her at last. How is she doing, by the way?”
I whip Ruthie’s letter out of my pocket. “That’s what I really came down here to talk about. Something having to do with a chicken farm. I don’t know if it makes any sense.” And I start reading the part in Ruthie’s letter about how Helga turned sick and left after she and Ruthie got to the farm.
“Do you think the Nazis made her work on a chicken farm?” I ask. “We know about her father being put in a labor camp.”
Mrs. Simon shakes her head. “Feeding chickens and raking up their muck sounds too easy to me. Nazi labor camps are designed to kill, so that more laborers can be brought in and worked until they drop. It’s a slow-murdering process. Did you ever find out, though, what happened to Helga after she landed in England with the Children’s Transport?”
“Uh-uh. She won’t say much about England except what I already heard from her aunt, Mrs. F. I told her I needed more information for my history report. I wanted to know if, after she and the other refugee children arrived at the ferry terminal, did a family choose her and take her to live with them?
“All she would tell me was that, before she came to America, she was living in a youth hostel near a British army base. That was when she was able to contact her uncle, who arranged for her to enter the U.S.”
“Ah,” says Mrs. Simon, her eyes snapping, “What happened between twelve and fourteen? That’s what we’ve got to find out. Something is bugging that girl and I have a hunch that, whatever it is, it isn’t pretty.”