War Brides

by Helen Bryan

  “It’s midnight and it’s pouring. Who could possibly be watching?”

  “Come on, Elsie,” said Evangeline. She shone her torch down and they saw worn steps carved into one wall and a series of niches occupied by ancient coffins in the other. They averted their eyes and concentrated on the steps.

  “Those look a bit narrow. Men’s feet must have been smaller two hundred years ago,” said Alice, peering over her shoulder.

  “I’ll go first,” said Evangeline.

  Elsie followed her carefully down the first few steps. “It’s freezin’.”

  “It’s too late to go back now,” said Evangeline below her. “Remember, watch out for steep drop-offs, and if you see a puddle or a pool of water, don’t put your foot in it. It might be deep. Just keep close behind me.”

  Alice and Frances watched as the pinprick of light from Evangeline’s torch disappeared into the dark passage. Elsie and she were to go for as long as the first torch lasted then come back using the second torch. If there were forks Evangeline had said they would retrace their steps to the entrance and find a way to mark their route. If they got lost they might never find their way out…

  Evangeline and Elsie went as quickly as they could along the narrow, twisting passage. “’Ow’ d’you suppose they got smugglin’ up them steps?” asked Elsie and shrieked as something flapped over their heads.

  “Only a bat,” said Evangeline, waving her torch about. “They hate the light.”

  “You didn’t say nuffink about bats,” Elsie quavered. She kept looking back over her shoulder, thinking it was horrible having all that black behind them. The walls were closing in, and something brushed her hair as it flitted overhead into the dark. “Ow! This is like ’avin’ a nightmare!”

  “No, it’s not,” said Evangeline. “Come on, you’re not scared of rats—think of all the girls who’d throw up their hands and scream at the thought of one. You’re head rat catcher! Anyway, bats are a good sign. Means there’s a way out so they can fly out at night to find food.”

  “They bite people!”

  “No, they don’t.”

  “’Ow do you know?”

  “Because at home, growing up, I spent time on my grandmother’s plantation. We had everything out there, bats, alligators, cottonmouths. I only had my older brothers to play with, and I wanted the boys to take me with them when they went hunting and fishing. They’d have left me behind if I’d made a fuss about a little thing like a bat.”

  “What’s that big dark thing? There!”

  Evangeline’s beam swept over a black gap in the wall. There was a swoosh as more bats flew out of it and they looked in. “Looks like another cave, with something on the wall.” The torch beam picked up something circular, then glanced off something pale. Both girls screamed.

  Skulls grinned up at them and other bones were scattered about with something that looked like rags. Chains set into the rings in the walls had rusted.

  Evangeline crossed herself automatically. She said shakily, “Alice told me the smugglers kidnapped excise men if they couldn’t be bribed. They must have chained them up down here. No one could hear them above ground and no one knew where they were.” She shuddered.

  “Knowin’ what I know about rats, they must have eaten the…bugger this! Let’s go back, Evangeline! Please!”

  “You can.”

  “Not by meself! Bloody ’ell! Prob’ly them excise men’s ghosts are waitin’ to get even.”

  “The Germans are worse than ghosts, and they’re real. Now hush! Other people got through here, and we’ve promised to help Tanni because no one else will. What if it was your sisters?”

  “I’d like to catch them German pilots when their planes crash an’ all, an’ drag ’em down ’ere, chain ’em up, and leave them to be the rats’ dinner,” Elsie whimpered as they went on step by careful step. “’Ow long we been down ’ere?”

  “About an hour and a half.”

  “Can’t we go back now?”

  “No.”

  “Bugger!”

  The floor was slippery with bat droppings, but the ceiling of the tunnel was higher now, and they could feel air moving.

  Recently Elsie had been going through a moody patch. A few days earlier she had had a frightful row with Bernie, who had slammed the door of the official motorcar and disappeared in a huff. Now, to distract Elsie, Evangeline said, “I saw Bernie was back after your argument. He looked quite the gent—a suit, overcoat round his shoulders. He even tipped his hat when he saw me. Looked like he’d had a haircut. Did the two of you make it up?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “’E wants us to get married.”

  Evangeline halted in her tracks. “Married? Elsie, you’re way too young—and Bernie can’t be much older.”

  “Nineteen, ’e is. He finks ’e’s nineteen anyway. Though it’s possible, ’e says, ’e’s a little older. ’E don’t know for sure. ’E’s got the War Office finkin’ he’s older. ’E says you got to make ’em fink you’re old enough to know what’s what.”

  “But that’s too young to get married.”

  “’Ow old were you when you married Richard?”

  “Well, eighteen, but…”

  “And you said you ’adn’t known ’im long—a few days by the sound of it. I’ve known Bernie three years. Near as dammit.”

  “Are you, um, having a baby?”

  “No.” Elsie giggled. “Bit of luck I’m not, really, but just at the—you know, moment when—anyway, Mum comes into me ’ead, talkin’ about respectable, and I says ‘no.’ Drives Bernie wild it does. Me too. Don’t know ’ow much more of that either of us can stand. No, reason I were cross wiv Bernie is, ’e’s asked me to marry ’im on account of a wife can’t testify in court against her ’usband, which would be a ’andy fing, from ’is point of view. ’Is words exactly.”

  “That’s no reason to get married! Even if they turn a blind eye now, sooner or later all that black market stuff will land him in prison. What will he do when the war is over and they treat him like a common criminal?”

  “Well, that’s exactly what I fought. ‘Wife testifyin,’ I says! ’Ow much, I says, of ’is proposin’ was ’im wantin’ us to get married and ’ow much was it ’im not wanting to go to prison? Bernie looks all confused and starts mumblin’ about will you or won’t you. So I says, ‘Bernard Carpenter,’ I says, ‘even if I says yes, there’s conditions. There’s to be no more of the burglarizin’ an’ scavenging when the jewelers and the toffs are bombed—I don’t care ’ow bad the War Office needs them diamonds. Looting bombsites is disrespectful. No goin’ back after the war to the safe blowin’ an’ muckin’ about with them gangs, especially them Italians in Clerkenwell. Mum always insisted on being respectable. She said then people can’t look down on you, no matter what class you are.’ I says, ‘I owe it to Mum.’ Course Bernie cut up rough at that, said, ‘’Ow’s a leopard to change ’is spots?’ and more to the point, ‘’Ow’s ’e to make a livin’ and take care of a wife and all?’ but I looked ’im in the eye, didn’t I, and told ’im straight, ‘Bernie Carpenter, it’s all or nuffink wiv me. All or nuffink. Either you turn over a new leaf and turn your hand to a respectable line of work or I wouldn’t marry you if you was the last man on earth.’ So ’e went off cross, like. Couldn’t let ’im see I was worried sick ’e wouldn’t come back, could I?”

  “Are you in love with him?” Evangeline had a catch in her voice. “It’s just that sometimes you think you’re so in love you’ll die unless you can be together and then when you are, you find you were wrong. You have to be careful when you’re in love, because you never know where it will take you.”

  “Don’t I know! Mum was in love wiv me dad once. Look where that got her, into a right dickerment, she used to say, so I’m not rushin’ into nuffink.”

  “Good,” said Evangeline, who was in a predicament herself. Once again she counted the weeks since her last period. She had last seen Laurent fiv
e—no, four—weeks before Richard had come home on leave. Laurent had been rushed, even more so than usual, and they had only had a few hours in the afternoon before they had hurried to the Soho pub. Laurent had had a furtive, distant air, which made Evangeline feel she must have done something wrong. He smoked a lot of the sickly sweet cigarettes he said all the musicians used. They gave Evangeline a headache and made her dizzy, but Laurent had been cross when she said so and refused to smoke them.

  At the pub Frenchmen swarmed everywhere, and Laurent was summoned to de Gaulle’s room. The president of the French government in exile, he had just returned from North Africa, and Evangeline had gathered there was an important meeting about German successes there. Before it began, Evangeline had cornered the colonel about bringing Lili and Klara. Laurent had remained closeted with the others, and she had left and taken a late train back to Crowmarsh Priors.

  Then Richard had come back…Please let it not be Laurent’s baby.

  Behind her Elsie was rattling on about Bernie. “An’ another fing. ’E says ’e wants to look after me, but actually, I fink it’s ’im what needs the lookin’ after. So it ’as to be me decides a few fings straight off. If ’e’s going to be my ’usband, a ’usband off down the pub like me dad or wiv them gangs and ’specially a ’usband in prison’s no good to me…”

  There was a faint but definite sound, a low, rhythmic roar.

  “Oh, Elsie, it’s the sea! The cave must be—!” But just then the torch dimmed and flickered.

  “Uh-oh, this one’s going out.” Evangeline sighed. “Time to go back. Mustn’t take any chances. But…” she sniffed… “I can smell fresh air and the sea. Alice said she thought that when the tide comes in,” she pointed the dying beam at the walls, “the water level rises in here. We don’t want to be caught when that happens.”

  “Evangeline!” exclaimed Elsie, forgetting the cold and the bats and her love life. “We done it! We bleedin’ done it!”

  26.

  Auschwitz, Late Spring 1942

  The doctor was furious. Imbeciles! Four months had elapsed since he ordered the Josephs brought to the medical wing, fed and treated for tuberculosis, but in all that time the fools had failed to locate the Joseph twins. Instead they had brought him two forty-year-old women, twins to be sure, Austrian and from the camp at Gurs, but how had such an idiotic mistake occurred? It had been a specific, direct order to find two seven-year-old girls named Lili and Klara Joseph.

  He had been told some nonsense about the records not showing any Joseph twins in the camp. The doctor had raged and pointed out their names—Lili Joseph and Klara Joseph—plainly written on the Kindertransport manifest. And now the Fuhrer was demanding every day to know when the breeding program would begin. If the doctor did not produce a result soon…

  He threatened to have every tenth man in the unit shot unless the Joseph twins were located immediately. Obviously they were somewhere in southwest France. It was clear that Frau Joseph would not live much longer, and he would have to begin searching all over again for parents of twin girls.

  Meanwhile the forty-year-old sisters were sent to a secondary breeding program, an experiment the doctor wrote up with as much obfuscation as possible, buying himself a little more time. Both women had died. He had begun what he called “preliminary work” on the Joseph parents in the meantime.

  27.

  Bethnal Green, East

  London, June 1942

  It was late on Sunday morning but the blackout curtains were still pulled tight across the front windows of the narrow terraced house at the address Tanni had given them. Two young women in siren suits stopped in front and squinted at the number.

  “This is it. Oh, Evangeline, my head hurts like the devil!” moaned Frances. They had spent the previous evening in the Coach and Horses pub, the Free French headquarters in Soho, where Evangeline seemed to know a great many men who all asked after someone called Laurent. She had introduced Frances to a short French colonel with soulful dark eyes and a large black mustache. Evangeline had smartened herself up a bit, and Frances was looking particularly fetching: she had done her nails and hair and worn one of the pretty prewar frocks from Paris that Tanni had shortened to show off her legs. The Frenchman had leaped gallantly to his feet and bowed. He had recognized couture at once and was greatly taken with Frances. He had sat with the two women at a corner table for hours, ordering brandy and more brandy and becoming quite emotional toward the end of the evening when Frances disengaged his hand from her knee where it was trying to creep upward and insisted they had to go.

  “A hangover’s a small price to pay, Frances. Look, you got heaps of information out of him. Plus, if I remember his parting words right, he has never met such a woman, he adores you, his heart is eternally yours, and he’s going to put Paris at your feet when the war’s over. And he’ll be waiting for you this afternoon in the pub…”

  “Oh my head! My poor head! Longest evening of my life! But I’ll have to string him along somehow so he’ll act as a go-between with the Resistance. It’ll be a bit tricky holding him to his promise without actually…if Tanni only knew what we’ve been through! Come on.”

  Evangeline knocked on the door and the curtains parted briefly. Someone had been waiting for them. Then an elderly woman in a kerchief and an apron opened the door a crack. “Quickly, come in.”

  “How do you do? We’re Tanni’s friends. I’m Frances Falconleigh, this is Evangeline Fairfax, and you must be Mrs. Cohen,” said Frances, trying to see in the dark hall after the brightness outdoors.

  “Ach!” groaned the woman, rubbing her forehead. “Come.” She led the way to the kitchen at the back of the house. “Please sit down. Rachel will be here in a minute. It is she who knows everything.” The kitchen faced into a cramped back garden and was a little brighter. Mrs. Cohen bustled, moving a “Make Do and Mend” pamphlet and a pile of jumpers with holes, then busied herself with a kettle, muttering to herself in a language they did not understand. Finally she handed them tea in little glass tumblers. “I am sorry. I am so worried I forget my manners. You are welcome here.”

  Evangeline put down the roll of papers she was carrying under her arm, and Frances stood Tanni’s carpetbag on the floor.

  “A little something to eat?” asked Mrs. Cohen.

  Both girls shook their heads. “No,” they said with feeling. “But thank you.”

  “The rabbi and I heard your husband was badly hurt,” said Mrs. Cohen to Evangeline. “I am so sorry. Will he get any better?”

  Evangeline gazed at her tea. “The doctors aren’t sure yet. I’ll see him later—it’s my day to visit him at the hospital. We all hope he’s improving, but it’s a slow process. I expect Tanni told you that the house Frances lives in has been requisitioned for wounded soldiers. It’s close to the one where I live now with Tanni, her children, and some evacuees. The doctors say Richard can be transferred to the convalescent home as soon as it’s ready and it’ll be better for him than living in our house because it’s being specially fitted out for patients and it’s quiet. He can’t stand noise now—his nerves are still mending.”

  Mrs. Cohen shook her head sympathetically, and then, hearing footsteps outside, she scurried into the hall to open the door. She came back with a younger woman in a head scarf whom she introduced as Rachel.

  “The rabbi is away,” Mrs. Cohen whispered. “I didn’t tell him, Rachel—you told me to say nothing, but it’s so hard keeping a secret from him.”

  “You’re right not to tell him, Berthe. He needs more worries? Let’s get on. I should be at the office and can’t stay long.” Rachel put down her gas mask, yawned, and accepted a glass of tea. “I’m sorry. I’m so tired. Give me a moment to remember what we found out about the Joseph twins…there was something new…I have to remember so much and our records are in a muddle.” She smiled apologetically at Frances and Evangeline.

  “Tanni Zayman’s family?” Frances prompted. “Her parents, Dr. Joseph and his wife? Her husb
and’s mother, Mrs. Zayman? Lili and Klara Joseph who should have arrived in England three years ago but didn’t? If you only knew how desperate Tanni is…”

  “Yes, the Joseph sisters. We believe they have been found. We had made contact with the American Quakers at the Gurs camp before Germany declared war on the US. Technically the Quakers are nonpartisan, but the Germans are suspicious of pacifists and tolerate them only because they can use them for propaganda purposes, to say that the Quakers run relief operations in the camps. It is one of the lies the British government chooses to believe.”

  Mrs. Cohen wound and unwound a spool of thread, muttering prayers under her breath.

  “We told Bruno months ago that either the girls had died on the train or that they never made it to the camp for some other reason. Then we learned that a priest had hidden some children with local families. For a long time we could not find out where, until one of our contacts cycled out to an isolated farm where he had heard an elderly couple had twins. He reported seeing the girls, aged six or seven. The old couple insisted they were their granddaughters. Our friend was worried because the old people would be arrested or shot if they were hiding Jewish children, and the children would be shot too, or deported. We had passed on the information that the girls’ family in England were looking for them, and in any case, our friend knew that if word had reached him of the children’s whereabouts, it wouldn’t be long before the Germans came. He urged them to let him take the girls and hide them elsewhere, but at first the couple refused. It turned out the priest is the old lady’s brother. But finally the couple gave in.”

  Rachel drank some tea.

  “The area is under Vichy control now, but the Germans are expected to extend their demarcation line south at any minute. The Nazis are rounding up all French Jews and are searching for foreign Jews who have taken refuge in France. They are already combing the area around Gurs for children from the Kindertransport manifest who are not in the camp, but we are hearing rumors of something else too. A doctor at Auschwitz may be conducting medical experiments in human reproduction on prisoners. We heard there is a special order to seek out twins and rewards offered for any found. Our friend was right that it is only a matter of time before the Joseph girls are discovered or betrayed.”