Levi's War

by Julie Thomas

  ‘It was winter when they put me on a train to Marseilles. I had the clothes I stood up in, which were too large for me, and my violin in a case, the one Kurt had given me to play in Dachau. I remember I was terrified of authority figures. When someone in uniform spoke to me I automatically looked at the ground and pulled the non-existent cap from my bald head.

  ‘The boat was crowded, the sea was rough and we were in bunks, kept below deck for days on end. Eventually people began to yell that land was in sight. We would soon be docking in Southampton.’

  He stopped and looked around the room. Every pair of eyes was looking at him, every person was holding their breath.

  ‘There were so many people that at first I couldn’t find him. I was lost in a mass of people hugging and crying and calling out names in so many languages. I thought I was going to be trampled underfoot. Then a lady from the Red Cross took me to a room and there he was, wearing a suit, shiny shoes and a hat. He looked very dapper and I felt so dirty and scruffy. We couldn’t speak. He hugged me so tightly I thought he’d crush the air from my lungs. The first thing he said to me was “It will be all right now” in Hebrew. I just nodded.’

  A tear ran down Cindy’s cheek, and Simon reached out and brushed it away.

  ‘He took me to a hotel and I had a hot shower. He’d bought me a set of clothes, and they were too big, but they fitted better than the ones the camp had given me. Then he took me to a tea house and we had toast and lemon curd and coffee. The weather was cold and the coffee was bitter, but I was too happy to notice.’

  For a moment no one spoke.

  ‘So that was the winter of 1945–46?’ David asked.

  Simon nodded. ‘It was January 1946 when I arrived,’ he said.

  ‘What did he tell you he’d been doing since 1938?’ Major Stratton asked.

  Simon frowned and seemed to be searching his memory. ‘From the very beginning he was reluctant to talk about it. He told me about being stopped at the border and the Gestapo agent and the gun jamming. But then he just said he’d made his way to London. I’m sure he said he’d gone via Switzerland, or maybe I just assumed that. He said he was in an internment camp but not where.’

  Simon scratched his head.

  ‘But nothing about going back to Europe?’ the major prompted.

  ‘No. He said he’d worked on the land, for a farming family in Somerset who had sons in the RAF. He used to say he had a very easy war.’

  ‘That’s probably what he was told to say. The spy forces weren’t keen on people talking about what they’d done.’

  ‘But . . . me. I would’ve thought he would have told me,’ Simon said softly, almost to himself.

  Major Stratton shook his head. ‘I suspect he was told that if he admitted the truth to one, it would become harder to keep it hidden. And he was concerned about how you would react, given what you’d been through.’

  They all sat, assimilating the idea that Feter Levi was able to keep such an enormous truth from them.

  ‘What would it have done to Levi psychologically to be trained like that and then to bury those experiences and go back to normal life? Do you think he suffered from PTSD?’ Kobi asked.

  ‘Possibly, although I think the training that allowed him to become Werner also allowed him to bury those five years, to become disassociated from them,’ Stratton said.

  ‘So eventually it would feel like they’d happened to someone else?’ Cindy asked.

  ‘Precisely. His sole focus was Simon and making up for the fact that Simon had been the one to be interred and survive.’

  Simon sighed. ‘I was very dependent on him for a long time. The world had changed, and I found trusting people almost impossible. I spoke no English at first, and the currency was confusing — first English pounds and then American dollars. Levi was my compass for my every decision until I met Ruth, my wife. Even then I couldn’t contemplate him not living with us. He understood me. He was the one of the few people around us who I could speak German with, and he shared my memories of Mama and Papa, Rachel and David. Life before the war, home, the music. I was afraid I wouldn’t live to be an old man, and I needed to know that Levi would be there for Ruth, and then Ruth and David. I never thought of it as being selfish.’

  ‘What else would he have done?’ David asked.

  No one answered immediately.

  ‘Don’t forget you were a successful banker and that allowed him to be what he wanted to be,’ Cindy said at last. ‘When he left banking and started his own business, your income allowed him to do that.’

  Simon nodded. ‘True. It was like an unspoken reward for how well he’d taken care of me.’

  ‘And in those years it was a difficult time to be gay in conservative America. If he’d pursued an openly gay lifestyle, he’d have been ostracised,’ David added.

  ‘So he chose nothing and I never questioned him,’ Simon said.

  Major Stratton waited for someone else to comment, but no one did. Eventually he rose and walked to the space between the blank screen and the sofa. ‘I think that’s enough for today. Can I ask you to come back tomorrow? We want to talk to you about the recording and whether we can use it.’

  David looked at the other members of his family. They all looked tired and stressed, but they all nodded.

  ‘Of course,’ he said.

  A digestive episode, caused by the strain of the past few days, kept Simon in his hotel room for the next week. David, Cindy and Daniel took the opportunity to do some sightseeing. Kobi spent the days writing his book about Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, the Renaissance artist known as Raphael, and the nights with George Ross.

  When Simon felt up to it, David rang Major Stratton and told him they would be back the next day. The major asked if they could meet him at the front desk of the National Archives at 10 am.

  ‘I wonder why he was so specific,’ Cindy commented as the car drew up outside the building.

  ‘For goodness’ sake, Mom, you’re suspicious of everyone,’ Daniel said with a laugh in his voice. ‘It’s not as if he suggested a graveyard at midnight. I think 10 am at the front desk is a perfectly reasonable request.’

  Cindy frowned at him. ‘There’s a plan, you mark my words — I can sense these things.’

  Daniel shook his head and helped his grandfather out of the car. With his stick in one hand and leaning on Daniel with his other, Simon made his way towards the door. The major was waiting for them by the front desk. He looked ever so slightly as if he was controlling excitement.

  ‘How are you, Mr Horowitz?’ he asked.

  Simon looked up at him and smiled. ‘Better. At my age, better is an achievement.’

  The major had a wheelchair waiting, and Simon sank into it. ‘Thank you, that’s very thoughtful of you,’ he said.

  ‘Now, this way,’ the major led them to the lift, up to a corridor and along to a conference room. There was a large table with several chairs on either side of it.

  ‘Please take a seat, I’ll be with you shortly. There are refreshments over on that table.’ They sat down and Daniel and Cindy served everyone coffee and tea. Ten minutes later the major returned. He held the door open. Outside stood a small, stooped woman, her weight on the cane she held in her hand.

  ‘I have someone here you might want to meet. Horowitz family, this is Mrs Elzbieta Liswski, or Roza.’

  She waited for a moment in the doorway and surveyed them, Wolfie’s family. It was time for them to hear the truth, and her job to relay it. Simon rose, went to her and clasped her hand. ‘Hello, Elzbieta, it is a privilege to meet you again,’ he said.

  She drew herself up and looked at him. ‘Amadeus,’ she said.

  Simon returned to the table, and the major showed Elzbieta to a chair.

  ‘When you call me that it takes me back over seventy years to the music room in our house,’ Simon said, smiling at her.

  She returned the smile. ‘I heard about that room, the wallpaper, the piano, the mural on the ceiling, the vio
lins in glass cases,’ she said.

  ‘Where do you live?’ David asked.

  ‘New York for the last twenty years; before that, Israel.’

  The major coughed. ‘I have shown Elzbieta the parts of Levi’s tape that pertain to her. So she knows what you know. She would like to tell you her side of the story,’ he said.

  ‘We would be very grateful for that,’ David said. ‘Would you like a cup of coffee or tea or a glass of water?’

  She looked over at the side table. ‘I would like an herbal tea, if there is such a thing there.’

  Daniel got up and went to the table. ‘There’s a green tea or a ginger, honey and lemon,’ he said, showing her the boxes.

  ‘Ginger, honey and lemon would be lovely,’ she said.

  When she was settled, with her tea in front of her, she looked at each one of them.

  ‘It fills my heart with joy to know that he had a brother to go home to and an extended family to be proud of. Since I knew about you I have followed your career, Daniel, and I like to imagine how much Wolfie loved to sit and watch you play. He used to tell me about Amadeus playing his violin when they were children. He never played the piano for me, but he talked about music, and it seemed to be the cornerstone that kept him sane.’

  Daniel blushed slightly. His mother looked at him with obvious pride.

  Wolfie’s nephew, David, looked so like him, older than she remembered Wolfie, but with the same coloured hair and eyes and freckles on the bridge of his nose. The same straight back and long fingers. She closed her eyes. Where to start?

  ‘We came from Poland. Warsaw. My papa could see what was happening and that if we stayed there eventually the soldiers would come for us. He tried to persuade more of our family to go, but they were stupid or scared. He cashed in all our savings and so did our Uncle Pawel and Aunt Sofia and my grandparents. We bought train tickets west, for Switzerland, and we packed one suitcase for each family. Mama promised us that when we reached our new home we could buy new possessions.

  ‘Papa gave us all new names, and we thought that they were very strange. My brother and I made up silly songs so we would remember our new names. I can still hear him singing “Roza, Roza . . .”

  ‘We were in Germany when a man came into our carriage. He was very scared. He told us that they were stopping all the trains and searching for Jews fleeing from the East. Some of them had decided to pull an emergency brake and make an escape while the train was stationary. Papa gathered us all together, and when the train suddenly braked he pushed us out onto the grass. Then we started walking. So much walking!

  ‘First, Grandma got sick and we stopped for a couple of days while Aunt Sofia tried to take care of her. But her coughing was terrible and we had no medicine. Then Grandpa got it too. Papa and Pawel looked for a place where we could leave them to rest, but there was nowhere. They died on the same day, and we held a small funeral for them and buried them together.

  ‘We walked over the border into Italy and it was starting to get colder. Pawel and Sofia’s twins, my cousins, were only four years old and they were always very tired. Papa carried one and Pawel carried the other. They cried a lot because we didn’t have much food and we were always hungry.’

  She stopped and looked around the table.

  ‘I felt angry at them. I was hungry too but I wasn’t allowed to cry. Anyway, the twins died just before we found the party of partisans out in the snow. No one else knew I’d been angry, but I remember the guilt as if it happened yesterday. We were all very scared and exhausted, and I think my aunt was so grief-stricken she had decided she couldn’t go on any further. Then all of a sudden there was this huge man in a fur coat standing on the path. He looked so ferocious. Papa told us to follow him, so we did. He turned around and tried to shoo us away, but we just kept following him. I don’t think we would have cared much if he’d shot us all by that point.

  ‘When we got to this campsite, they were yelling at us in a language we didn’t understand but that we knew was Italian. Then this tall, thin man with a gentle smile came up to us and said hello in German. My papa spoke to him and told him who we were, using our battle names. That was Wolfie. He took us into a cave, and we sat beside a fire. He gave us blankets to get warm and some food. All of a sudden we wanted to live.’

  There was silence while she studied her fingers.

  ‘We know you became a very skilled partisan, and we know you became very fond of Wolfie,’ David said.

  She smiled at him. ‘Yes I did. He taught me to shoot and to strip down and clean my rifle. And he and I used to sit by the fire and talk, about our homes and our families. I remember vividly me asking him if he would kiss me because I could die tomorrow and I’d never been properly kissed.’

  ‘Did you know your father had spoken to him about marrying you?’ David asked.

  She shook her head. ‘No. He thought I was avoiding him, but I didn’t know. More than anyone, I knew how close he was to Erik. They shared a special bond, sometimes they didn’t need words, just a look would suffice. I think I knew instinctively that Wolfie didn’t love me the way I loved him.’

  ‘So tell us, what happened to you after he left?’ Simon asked.

  For a moment she said nothing, and then she sighed. ‘As you know, I was raped by the German soldiers when they captured us, and for a few weeks I was afraid I might be pregnant. But thank G-d I wasn’t. Papa wanted me to marry Mikel, because he wanted to know someone would look after me if he was killed, and Mikel was a good man, a kind man. I didn’t love Mikel, but I agreed. Mikel was killed a week before we were due to be married, shot by a German patrol. Uncle Pawel was killed that same night. We buried them beside Erik, and everyone mourned them a great deal.

  ‘In the summer the English broke through and captured all the towns in the north. The Germans had mined the roads and blown up what bridges were left. We eventually surrendered to the British Army, and they put Mama, Papa, my brother, Aunt Sofia and little Mathew and me on a truck north. We were handed over to the Red Cross, and they sent us to a displaced persons camp in Poland. I married Asher, a survivor of Auschwitz who I met in the camp. He was a lovely man, and he understood about loss and suffering. He’d lost his whole family in the Holocaust. We applied to go to Palestine and were accepted.’

  Simon had been looking at the table, and at the mention of Palestine he glanced up at her.

  ‘Levi nearly went there. If he hadn’t heard about me and decided he needed to take me to America, I think he would have. He wanted to fight for freedom in Palestine.’

  She nodded. ‘Asher was a freedom-fighter in those first years. He despised the British. He was in jail when our first son, Micah, was born.’

  ‘How many children do you have?’ David asked.

  ‘Three. Two sons and a daughter. When Asher died in 1996, two of my children were living in New York and they persuaded me to move there.’

  ‘What about your brother and your parents?’ Cindy asked.

  ‘They stayed in Warsaw. My brother married and lived not far from my parents. Mama and Papa lived under Soviet rule the rest of their lives, but after the collapse of communism my brother came to Israel to see us in 1992 and then to New York several times. He died two years ago and left four children and fourteen grandchildren.’

  ‘How did you know Levi had died?’ Simon asked.

  She smiled. ‘I have a friend who lives in Vermont. Sarah Cohen —’

  ‘I know Sarah! She’s a member of our Shul congregation. She lives about a mile from me,’ Simon exclaimed.

  ‘I know that now. Sarah knows I love music and she told me about Daniel and how she goes to the same Shul as his poppa, and his great-uncle had just died. When she said “Horowitz” it rang a little bell. I asked her the name of the poppa and the great-uncle, and she told me. Instantly I was back beside the campsite fire where we whispered our real names to each other. The connection to the music was too much — it had to be my Wolfie. So I came to see you. I know I told y
ou I’d be back, but I lost my courage. I didn’t know what to say. When the major rang and told me about the recording Wolfie had made and that you were all in London, I knew I had to come.’

  ‘And I’m so glad you did,’ Simon said.

  ‘So am I.’

  ‘Just imagine, if you’d gone to Shul with Sarah before Feter Levi died you might have seen him,’ Cindy said.

  Elzbieta shook her head. ‘Asher was a Jew, he wanted a kosher home and a good Jewish wife, and I gave that to him. We raised our three children, we even lived on a kibbutz for a few years. One of my grandsons is a rabbi. But when I moved to New York I had to find my own way in the world, and I realised that I didn’t want to go to Shul anymore.’

  Simon looked away, as if he didn’t know what to say.

  ‘Both Levi and I have had our own battles with our faith over the years. We’ve had to come to terms with the suffering our people went through during the Shoah. I do know many Jews who lost their faith because of their experiences and I don’t condemn anyone,’ he said.

  Kobi shifted in his seat. ‘My biological grandmother was Simon and Levi’s younger sister, Rachel, and I haven’t been a member of this family for very long. I was raised in Australia as a Lutheran. My sister has converted to Judaism, but my elder brother, my mother and I remain Lutheran. No one in this family will judge you for anything.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  London

  September 2017

  ‘When are you going to tell your family about me?’ George asked. He was sitting up in bed, watching Kobi pull on his clothes.

  ‘Every night you creep back to your hotel so you can go down to breakfast as if you’ve slept there all night. It’s deceitful, Kobi — are you ashamed of me?’

  Kobi stopped what he was doing and looked at his lover.

  ‘No! You know I’m not. There are so many people I need to explain —’

  ‘You mean come out to,’ George interrupted.

  Kobi sat down on the bed, his shirt in his hands. ‘I guess so. My mum, my brother and sister. I just feel I ought to tell them before this side of the family find out. I love the Horowitzs dearly but they’ve only been part of my life for three years.’