My Family for the War

by Anne C. Voorhoeve

  The door that led from the kitchen into the backyard opened and Mrs. Shepard came in. “Ah, Frances!” she said when she saw me, and pulled a pair of rubber boots off her feet. “Are you finished?” she asked, peering into my half-full teacup. She held the door open for me and I followed her into the living room, where I stopped and stood in the middle of the carpet while she went to a secretary and opened one of its drawers. “I’m glad you slept so well,” she said. “We have a lot to do today. We have to register you at your new school, and of course, you’ll want to write to your parents. I’ll give you a card with our address that you can send with your letter.”

  I just stood there and stared at her. Mrs. Shepard had spoken German! At least some kind of German; it was a mixture of Frau Seydensticker’s Yiddish and a word here and there of my native tongue. I had understood almost everything! She turned to face me and seemed to be glad that her surprise had been a success. “In the nursing home where I work, lots of the residents only speak Yiddish,” she explained. “If you want to talk with them, you have to learn it. You don’t talk much, do you?” Mrs. Shepard commented. I lowered my head and shrugged my shoulders.

  When I looked down, my gaze fell upon the grease spot on my blouse, as big as the palm of my hand and growing by the second. It seemed to spread farther up my blouse as I stared at it! Unfortunately, Mrs. Shepard had seen it too. I reached under the waistband of my skirt and, with great shame, retrieved the sticky, crumbling remains of my toast.

  “Some of my old people are also not fans of salted butter.” Mrs. Shepard stretched out her good hand, the one that wasn’t bandaged. I placed what was left of the toast in it and wished I could disappear on the spot.

  “It would probably be best if you go put on a clean blouse,” she suggested, “and then we’ll go to your new school.”

  I hadn’t expected that I would have to go to school on my very first day, and a dark foreboding came over me. My school career had so far consisted mainly of pushing, fighting, and being made fun of, but at least that was all in German, and I felt completely unprepared to encounter English children. Shouldn’t I at least know my way around the neighborhood first, and have some idea where I could run and hide? I guess there was a certain possibility that they would leave me alone in England, but could I really be sure?

  The walk to my future school didn’t exactly do anything to boost my confidence. We passed dozens of little houses, turned left here and right there on different streets, but there weren’t any courtyards behind the buildings or outbuildings, and at most two or three little paths between houses that probably ended at a wall. My feet rooted themselves to the ground. When Mrs. Shepard noticed that I wasn’t coming along, there were already five yards or more between us, and the first words I spoke to her were: “Excuse me, where I hide here?”

  Mrs. Shepard didn’t say anything for a long time, then slowly came back toward me. “People don’t hide here,” she said. “You’re safe now. That’s why you came, after all.”

  “Right,” I mumbled gloomily, and starting walking again. This time it was Mrs. Shepard who stood still for a few seconds longer before she hurried to catch up to me. When she reached me, I got a very strange feeling, as if she was about to take my hand. I quickly made both my hands disappear into the pockets of my coat, and then we reached the school without stopping again.

  Classes had started and I only saw a single young boy, who stood sullenly facing the wall outside the door to a classroom. It smelled like old maps and soup and yes, Mrs. Shepard confirmed, I would get a warm meal at school and could even have a kosher diet if I wanted. I answered that kosher would be fine, though I didn’t know about the diet part.

  We had to wait a while outside the director’s office. Then we were called in, and it turned out that the director was a woman. The first thing Mrs. Collins asked about was Gary. I heard the word war and saw Mrs. Shepard’s smile freeze; puzzled, I thought, Why war? Gary is just at a boarding school.

  Then Mrs. Collins turned to me and I tried very hard to follow her, but unfortunately I hadn’t brought my dictionary and soon had to give up. Mrs. Collins apparently felt the same way, because after less than a minute she told Mrs. Shepard that she would put me in the first grade.

  Mrs. Shepard looked at her in disbelief. “Frances is eleven! You can’t just put her in the same class with the youngest children!”

  But Mrs. Collins would not budge, and so we were back outside rather quickly and walked the same way we had just come, only quite a bit faster, it seemed to me. “Then we’ll just practice at home!” said Mrs. Shepard, after she had let off some steam. “After the summer holiday you’ll join the fifth grade, she can count on that.”

  The first letter from my mother came to my new address, 121 Harrington Grove, Finchley, London, a week later.

  Berlin, 27 February 1939. My dear Ziskele, you can’t imagine the joy that your letter caused in our entire house. Papa, Aunt Ruth, and Uncle Erik all send their love. Papa will write to you himself, but he’s not having a good day today and I’m glad that he is sleeping a little right now.

  Your situation sounds so wonderful! We are hearing stories of children who are placed with families that don’t even have a toilet in the house. Now I really don’t need to worry about you anymore. By now you’ll have your first days at school under your belt. By the time we see each other again, maybe you will have learned English really well, and then you have to help Papa and me!

  Here things have remained calm for the last few weeks, and we are hopeful that the troubles have reached their peak. We expect news about our departure any day now. Have you been able to find out anything yet? No, of course not, you’ve only been there a few days! Sweetie, you have to write us more about the Shepards. That’s really the only ray of hope for us at the moment. You already described Dr. Shepard quite well, and Gary too—do you maybe have a bit of a crush on him? But you left us completely in the dark about Mrs. Shepard, and she’s the one who is mainly looking after you.

  Is it already springtime there? The sun broke through the gray today and reminded us just a little of the good old Berlin that used to be. Do you know who came to visit me yesterday? Your friend Bekka! We went to Cohn’s for an ice cream and she wanted to know all about you. Don’t you write to each other? She is an exceptional girl. I was so happy to have a few hours with her now that you’re not here! When I told her that, she said she would come every day, if I wanted her to.

  So we sit here and wait for better times (ha ha!) and hopefully not too much longer for more news from you.

  Until then, consider yourself desperately hugged by your Mamu.

  “Well, Frances, what news from your mother?” said Mrs. Shepard, looking at me over the rim of her reading glasses.

  I didn’t answer.

  “Is everything okay at home?”

  “Yes!” slipped out a little louder than I intended. I bristled, but she only reached past me, took the book we had been reading together from my hand with friendly insistence, and shut it. “Maybe both of us have something better to do today. It’s still nice outside, why don’t you go for a little walk?”

  She said it, stood up, and left my room. End of the English lesson. I stayed seated at my desk and had the feeling, not for the first time, that there were at least five different Mrs. Shepards running around in this house. I had been here for more than two weeks and still didn’t know who I was dealing with at any given time.

  First there was the gentle, young Mrs. Shepard in the photograph. Once in a while I looked at her, wondering, as I passed her image on the stairs, but I suspected that she was gone, just like the energetic young man in that other photo in Berlin.

  Then there was the Mrs. Shepard who had nearly scared me to death on my first day there. When I helped in the kitchen, she presided over the most rigid rules. Meat had to be soaked, thoroughly salted, and then rinsed three times to remove any traces of blood. Eggs couldn’t contain the tiniest dark speck. More than once, Millie,
who wasn’t Jewish, took home with her in the evening fruit and vegetables that hadn’t met the strict standards. There was also Mrs. Shepard the teacher, looking strict with her little teacher’s glasses perched on her nose, who pinned me down at the desk every afternoon and studied English with me. Another Mrs. Shepard did the most embarrassing things. My first Shabbat began with her pulling me aside, closing the living room door behind us, and saying, “Frances, we’ve been cooking and getting ready together all day long, but we can’t celebrate the Sabbath together while there is something standing between us. The two of us got off to a pretty miserable start. That was my fault, and I want to apologize for it.”

  Adults never apologized to children! I had never heard such a thing and was sure there were no rules about how children should behave if it happened to them. The next day it occurred to me that I should have said “I’m sorry I bit you,” but she wasn’t to going to wait twenty-four hours for my answer. “That’s all,” she said, and let me go, and later when we sat around the beautifully set table I had the feeling that there was much more standing between us than there had been before.

  But it was the fifth Mrs. Shepard who confused me most of all. To watch her as she laid a see-through black cloth on her hair, lit the Shabbat candles, and spoke the blessing over them in Hebrew made a shiver run down my spine. The reflection of the flame on her face, the joy in her voice, her quick, graceful motions—all of these suddenly seemed so unfathomable, so unbearably beautiful, that I wanted nothing more eagerly than to be a part of this mystery.

  Indeed, it was and remained a mystery to me, how these people could celebrate being Jewish. What I had learned to hide, even to hate, was a source of joy in my host family’s house, surrounded by ceremonies and songs at the table and an entire day of quiet on which the Shepards didn’t do any work at all, not even drive a car, and a neighbor who wasn’t Jewish came by late in the evening to turn out the lights.

  I wasn’t really Jewish. But the more I thought about what was appropriate for me in this house, the more confused I became and the less I understood what I actually was, if I wasn’t Jewish. Because something in me was unfolding, quickly and entirely unexpectedly. It didn’t feel foreign to me, but touched me in some inexplicable way: the rituals, candles, and lights, even the Shabbat restrictions, which, if you didn’t constantly think about the things you weren’t allowed to do, brought an incredible peace.

  Part of the Sabbath was Gary too. Throughout the house, the anticipation of his arrival was so tangible you could almost touch it with your hands. The ceremony began with his arrival on Friday evening.

  And yet I only needed to think of my own parents to be reminded that all of this wasn’t intended for me, that I belonged to someone else, whose sign I wore on a chain around my neck. I wouldn’t betray Jesus, Mamu, and Papa for a little candlelight, for all the lovely and wise rituals in this house. And I wouldn’t touch the mezuzah, not even secretly, and even if my fingers tingled with desire!

  Every time I passed a mezuzah in a doorway recently, I felt guilty because I was the only one in this house who didn’t pay my respects to it. Especially now that I knew what was written on the little slip of paper that began: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might.”

  I knew that commandment. Jesus had said it too, but did that make it okay for me to pay tribute to a Jewish tube?

  Mrs. Shepard was right, it was still lovely outside on this late March afternoon. I started walking as soon as I closed the garden gate behind me. Walking usually cleared my head right away, but today, all the disturbing thoughts that had been gathering in my head over the past weeks were just mixed up more thoroughly. The Café Vienna, which I hadn’t yet looked for, the petition on behalf of my parents that I hadn’t yet written, Papa sleeping in the middle of the day, Bekka taking my place, Mamu letting it happen, “now that you’re not here anymore.”

  With three great bounds I crossed the street, and if it had been the English Channel itself I probably wouldn’t have had any trouble walking across the water. What was I doing here? I had to go home! I raced through Holland, a street with low houses built of red brick, ran across the border, a narrow bridge over train tracks, aimed straight for Berlin, and stopped, gasping for breath.

  Train tracks! After two weeks of walking around in the neighborhood, I had assumed there wasn’t a train connection leading out of this section of London, but apparently I had been in the wrong area of Finchley. Just after I crossed over the bridge I saw the sign for the Underground to my right. The subway ran aboveground at this station, and even as I stood on my tiptoes to look at the map of the London transportation system, I saw a train arrive and pull away again. It took a while until I found “my” station way up in the north. Only one line stopped here, and there it was in black and white: If I switched trains just once, I would land directly at Tottenham Court Road!

  There it was on the map, as if it had been waiting for me. I knew what I had to do next as clearly as if it was also printed on the map.

  It seemed to be my fate to be ignored at school. I couldn’t really blame the teacher; he had his hands full exploring the mysteries of the alphabet with thirty first graders and had as little clue as I did why I had been assigned to his class, of all places, and what on earth we should do with each other. But after two days of staring into space, I thought to take books from my shelves at the Shepards’ to school with me. With the assistance of a dictionary—and the silent acquiescence of the teacher—I read all day.

  The little ones soon formed crowds around me during the breaks, fascinated that such a big girl who could hardly speak a word correctly could nonetheless read to them from books. They eagerly gave me tips, outdid each other in sharing vocabulary with me, and hardly left my side until the teacher finally let me walk around during their lessons and help them as they wrote the letters. Receiving such recognition, no, more—elevation to an authority—I noticed after a few days that I actually looked forward to going to school in the mornings!

  Mrs. Shepard took me to a store that carried the uniforms for the London schools, and with trembling hands I dressed myself in the various pieces of the ensemble, stepped out from behind the curtain, and viewed the new me.

  The new me! Surprised and a little scared, I had discovered that I was listed in the teacher’s roll as Frances Shepard. My English wasn’t good enough to convince the teacher that Shepard should be erased, but at least I got him to pencil in my real name behind it. And so instead of Ziska Sara Mangold, it was now Frances Shepard Mangold who faced the world, wearing a blue skirt, a neck scarf, and a straw hat.

  It wasn’t easy to free myself of my crowd of admirers and sneak off to the Underground unnoticed during the break. But when I turned the corner onto the next street I held on to my straw hat and started running, filled with irrepressible anticipation of adventure and destiny.

  With my heart pounding, I asked for a ticket, and rode on a narrow, rumbling subway car into a dark hole. As soon as we reached daylight again, surrounded by honking cars and scurrying pedestrians, I felt entirely at home, as if I were back in Berlin! I quickly found the street sign I was looking for. I hurried along the street, my eyes raised to read the signs on each storefront, and stood as if paralyzed for at least two minutes in the middle of the sidewalk when I actually did see the words I had been longing for. Café Vienna.

  A soft, sweet music began to play in my mind and accompanied me through the door, which opened with the tinkling of a bell and revealed a surprise: The music was real! An actual violinist and a live piano player were playing in the middle of the hustle and bustle, tables crowded close together, men in hats and women in clouds of perfume, plates with huge pieces of Sacher torte and Black Forest cake, cups topped with towering crowns of whipped cream. The scent of chocolate, coffee, cigarettes, and baking overcame me, and if I hadn’t been in a trance of shock and delight already, the smell alone would have instantly robbed me of my sen
ses.

  It wasn’t until an older man pulled out a chair at his table and looked at me with a questioning expression that I noticed that they could see me too, and I wasn’t the only living creature in the midst of a fairy tale. “Na, what may I offer you?” he asked with a wink. “Hot chocolate, perhaps? With lots of cream?”

  That’s when I realized that all these people spoke German! A weak “Ohhh…” was all I could manage, but it was answer enough. Less than a minute later, one of the fragrant cups floated down from the waitress’s tray and was set before me. I dipped my spoon in the whipped cream, licked and sipped and closed my eyes as I savored the last drops.

  “Playing hooky, are you?” The gentleman grinned.

  I leaned back in my chair and ran my tongue along every surface in my mouth, hoping to find a little bit more whipped cream. “Only from school,” I said. “I’ll be back in time and my host family won’t notice.”

  “Your host family?”

  “My parents are still in Berlin. I have to bring them over. That’s why I’m here.” I suddenly had the feeling I was doing something wrong, something illegal. I bent over forward. “Someone told me that people here could help me,” I whispered.

  “Ach,” murmured the older man.

  “I came with one of the kindertransports,” I added, to avoid any silence. “From Berlin. My mother is a cook and a seamstress—now. My father is a lawyer, but he can also work as a butler or gardener.”

  The elderly man leaned back, where several newspapers hung from a coatrack under the coats and hats. He unhooked one, laid it out on the table in front of us, and leafed through it. “Can you read English?” he asked.