My Family for the War

by Anne C. Voorhoeve

  When I came home from school that day, a fat envelope lay next to the telephone, and Mrs. Shepard and Millie shot out of the kitchen as if they had been awaiting my arrival for hours. “Frances! You have mail from the prime minister!”

  They stood so close that I felt like I was completely surrounded. “I know,” I said as indifferently as possible, but secretly I was weighing the letter in my hands and trying to figure out what its heft revealed about its contents.

  The responses I had received from the Refugee Committee and the church had been very friendly.

  Dear Franziska,

  We are so pleased for you that you were given a place on a kindertransport and are allowed to live with a British family. We understand that you miss your parents very much, and you are surely aware that the Refugee Committee/the Protestant Church is already making great efforts to relieve the situation of the Jews still living in Germany. Obtaining visas and permits for individual persons is unfortunately not in our power, but perhaps there are possibilities in your current situation. Have you heard of a domestic permit? That allows women and men to enter into private service agreements that do not burden the British labor market, for example a position as a married couple with cooking and housework for the wife and a role as gardener and butler for the husband…

  And so on. Nothing that I didn’t already know. But the prime minister’s letter was so thick and so heavy that my heart began to pound painfully. The envelope felt just like the one Mamu had used for all our papers for Shanghai. Maybe it had identification cards inside!

  Just holding the envelope in my hand released such a storm of hope that it made me dizzy, like coming into contact with something holy. I ripped open the envelope with a trembling hand.

  But it was only a single, heavy sheet of paper.

  Dear Frances,

  The prime minister was deeply moved to learn of your family’s concerns. He would like you to know that he is so pleased that you were given a place on a kindertransport and are now living with a British family. He understands that you are homesick for your parents, but unfortunately it is not possible for him to arrange visas for individual persons…

  The sheet slipped through my fingers, and Mrs. Shepard caught it before it fell to the floor. She glanced at me questioningly and started to read. When she finally raised her eyes and looked at me with concern, I said, “I knew it wouldn’t work anyway,” took the letter from her hand, and threw it into the wastebasket. Then I went into the kitchen as if nothing special had happened, and as I turned the corner into the kitchen took a quick glance at Millie, who retrieved the letter from the trash and smoothed it out with both hands, almost worshipfully.

  Mrs. Shepard followed me. Go ahead and ask, I thought, and sat down.

  The loudest silence I had ever heard filled the kitchen. Mrs. Shepard went to the counter and mixed matzoh and water, kneaded it into a dough, rolled it out thin, and pricked it with a fork.

  Now that Mrs. Shepard had read much more than I had, I wanted to look at the letter again. Why had the prime minister written that I was homesick, when I hadn’t even used that word? Now Mrs. Shepard must think I was unhappy with them!

  After a few minutes I couldn’t stand it anymore. “Can I help?” I asked in a shaky voice.

  “No, I’m just going to put this in the oven.” Mrs. Shepard reached for her baking sheet.

  But I was faster. Hastily I jumped to the oven, opened the door, lit a match, and turned the gas knob like I had seen her do dozens of times. “Leave that alone, Frances,” were her last words before there was a hiss and a boom. Shocked, I let go of the gas knob, it spit out the flame, and as I fell backward I saw a little fireball shooting toward Mrs. Shepard.

  I swear my heart stood still. She threw the baking sheet aside and turned her head, but it was too late. The flame went right to her hair and instantly she was on fire. What happened next I will never forget as long as I live. Mrs. Shepard reached up to her head, pulled her hair off, threw it to the ground, and trampled on it!

  I started to wail, a high, piercing sound that I never knew I could make. I crawled out of the kitchen on my hands and knees screaming, ran up the stairs, and jumped into the cupboard in my room, all without taking a single breath. I sat there with my teeth chattering as the entire cupboard shook with me.

  Not a minute later there was a hammering on the door of the cupboard. “Frances? Can I come in?”

  The cupboard door opened. I buried my face in both arms. I didn’t dare imagine what she looked like now, burned and disfigured, and it was my fault! I could hear her kneel down in front of the cupboard…

  “Frances, nothing happened!”

  I had so loved to look at her. Her thoughtful smile, the sunshine around her eyes. She could make her eyes laugh without moving her mouth, as if she were lit up inside. She would never look like that again.

  “Frances, dear, open your eyes. Please!”

  Well. The least I could do was look at what I had done! After what seemed like an eternity I opened one eye first, then the second. In front of me on the floor sat an even more beautiful Mrs. Shepard. Her hair was short and dark, her face younger, and her eyes bigger and more glowing than I had ever seen them.

  It’s a dream, flashed through my mind. Mrs. Shepard had emerged from the fire so unbelievably beautiful that there could be only one explanation: The whole thing was my fantasy image of her, which my subconscious made me see to protect me from the reality.

  “Sweetie, I thought you knew that I wear a wig.”

  “A wig?” I mouthed, without making a sound.

  She nodded. “A sheitel, a wig for married Jewish women. You poor thing, this on top of everything else. By now you must think we’re complete aliens.”

  The lump in my throat rode into the open on a wave of tears. I myself fell forward into Mrs. Shepard’s arms—exactly where I had been trying not to fall since I had first seen her kneeling there unscathed. At the last second I tried thinking of the train station in Berlin, but it was useless; it was as if I hadn’t learned anything from that experience. There I was, not three months later, hugging the wrong mother again!

  But the worst thing about it was that it didn’t feel wrong at all. It was just as soft, warm, and comforting as I had feared, and at the same time strangely familiar, like something I had imagined so often that I recognized it.

  Mrs. Shepard, who smelled a bit singed, held me so lightly in her arms that I could have slipped away at any moment: slipped away to race to my desk and write a long letter to Mamu. All the things I had wanted to say to her the whole time but couldn’t put into words came together into clear sentences in those few seconds: I love you, Mamu, you are the one and only, if I had only one wish in the whole world it would be to have you with me… I’m not having fun, Mamu, I have the wrong name and the wrong life, and why does everything take so long?

  But I stayed and allowed what I had feared the most to happen: Someone made their way between me and Mamu, someone who was happier and more generous, whose love would mean joy, rather than pain.

  “There’s been a little accident,” Mrs. Shepard explained when Gary came home. She sat at the vanity table and worked on an old, long-haired wig with a brush and scissors. I was disappointed that she didn’t just leave her much prettier natural hair, but she told me that wouldn’t be appropriate.

  Gary stared at the scraggly old wig with distaste. “I thought I might be able to cut it off,” his mother said halfheartedly.

  Only then did I see how exhausted she was. For her and Millie, the past several days had been filled with cleaning, cooking, and baking. There were potato dumplings, cheese dumplings, marrow dumplings, matzoh dumplings and little liver balls, various soups, chicken, a roast with a delicious filling, a cake made with matzoh flour, and all the ingredients for the Seder supper. The stove and oven had been heated to a very high temperature to make sure that not the slightest bit of food was left, and the Pesach dishes and silverware, which were used only for
this occasion, had been cleaned according to Kosher laws.

  Even the dining room gleamed: the best tablecloth, the best dishes, twenty-five wine glasses, four for each guest and one for the prophet Elijah. Everything was perfect, except for the little incident.

  “I give up,” Mrs. Shepard said, scornfully snatching the wig from its stand and throwing it to me. “I’ll wear a hat. Here, Frances, you can wear this for a costume at Purim.” To my dismay, I saw tears in her eyes. “Come here. I’m afraid you won’t escape either,” she added, and hesitantly reached out her hand toward me.

  She carefully took my little cross pendant and stuck it through the space between the two top buttons of my blouse, so that only the chain was visible. “It would be better to wear that out of sight. Gary’s grandparents are very strict, you know.”

  “I can’t take it off. It’s from my mother,” I murmured, staring at her hand.

  She said, “You don’t need to take it off. But they don’t need to see it right away.”

  “I have that blouse with a high collar,” I suggested. “I’ll wear that, then you won’t see anything, not even the chain.”

  “Good idea,” my foster mother agreed with a forced, narrow-lipped smile that I didn’t quite understand.

  I had already figured out that Gary’s grandparents only came to visit once a year, for Pesach, even though they lived in Sussex, which wasn’t far away. When they visited the Shepards, they didn’t stay at their house, but in a hotel.

  As we waited for them to arrive, there was a strange tension in the air; I looked into the spotless dining room and noticed that I was getting more nervous every minute.

  How could I possibly sing the part Gary had taught me and take on such an important role when I wasn’t even really Jewish? Something would go wrong, something had to go wrong, even if I wore five shirts at once to hide my cross! Suddenly I was hot. I pulled on Gary’s sleeve. “I can’t do it,” I whispered.

  But he didn’t hear me anymore, because right then a car pulled up outside and he called, “They’re here!” At that cue all the Shepards tried out variations of a welcoming smile, giving the impression that the king was paying them a visit, or the prime minister.

  As the guests approached, I recognized with amazement that Dr. Shepard’s parents must be very wealthy. They didn’t just enter a house, they made an entrance, and the kiss Dr. Shepard exchanged with his mother was so respectful that they didn’t even touch each other. Mrs. Shepard senior—Julia—was a birdlike, delicate lady with perfectly styled hair (I couldn’t tell if it was real or not) and, despite her age, almost perfectly smooth skin so thoroughly powdered that we could smell it. Her husband, Marcus Shepard, wore an impressive, full white beard. He growled, “Good evening, son!” and that was the last we heard from him for the next several hours.

  We had all dressed up for the occasion. Gary wore a blue suit and Dr. Shepard a black one, both with a tie and matching kippah; Mrs. Shepard wore a dark red dress and pearl earrings. Her hat looked very elegant, as if she had never intended to wear anything else that evening, and as for me, all I could think about was that one of my knee socks had slipped down. Dr. Shepard took coats and hats from both his parents and Julia Shepard repeated the genteel air kiss with her grandson, who politely said “Grandmother!” as she did.

  I slid a little behind Mrs. Shepard so that I could pull up my sock unnoticed. She stretched a hand out and said, “Good evening, Mother,” and what happened next was so fast that I needed a moment to be sure I had really seen right.

  With a quick, almost dancing motion, Julia Shepard turned to her son and took the heavy coats he had draped over his arm from him; it looked like she might disappear beneath them. In a sweet voice she said, “Amanda,” and with a force that one wouldn’t think possible of such a fragile person, she threw her load over her daughter-in-law’s arm, still outstretched in greeting.

  There was no time to be stunned. In the same movement, Julia Shepard turned to me and I was met with a look so contemptuous and hateful that my arms and legs turned to stone on the spot.

  I remembered that look well. It was the look of my teachers and the other students in Berlin, the look of the men who had broken into our apartment and taken my father away. I had never, ever thought I would be confronted with that look again in England—and on the face of a Jewish woman! A woman who leaned toward me and said in a soft voice, “And this is your little refugee? I am pleased to meet you, my child. What is your name?”

  She gave me a cool, bony hand, and as I watched the friendliness return to her eyes, I realized that the look hadn’t been intended for me, but that I had just been in the line of fire.

  She doesn’t mean me! The relief was so great that I wasn’t able to say my name; I didn’t know it. Ziska? Francesca? But at least my knees knew what to do; they executed a perfect curtsy. “Hello,” I whispered gratefully. The look wasn’t for me. In that moment nothing else mattered.

  Mrs. Shepard silently hung up the two coats and went to the kitchen to get the welcome drink she wanted to offer before we went to the synagogue. And suddenly I caught myself wishing she wouldn’t come back, that for her sake and ours she would just stay there.

  I didn’t want to have anything more to do with that look.

  Two weeks ago, when Gary had given me the Haggadah, it had been clear to me that Pesach would be a more complicated affair than Shabbat. I already knew some things: the kiddush blessing over the wine in a special little silver cup, the hand washing, the prayers over the parts of the meal. But this time there were really strange things. There was an egg as a symbol of life, a lamb bone representing the sacrificed animal, and parsley that was dipped in a bowl of salt water and eaten to remind us of the tears shed by the people of Israel. Three pieces of matzoh, thin flatbread made from unleavened flour, lay under a cloth. Dr. Shepard uncovered them, broke the middle piece in two, and set one half aside. “See, children, this is the bread of affliction that our fathers ate in the land of Egypt…”

  I looked nervously in my Haggadah to see when it would be my turn. Why had I let myself be talked into this? How was I supposed to utter even a single word with the strict older Shepards right in front of me? What if they noticed that something wasn’t right about me too? In the synagogue, I had sat between Mrs. Shepard and her mother-in-law like I was frozen, hardly daring to move.

  Gary sat next to me that evening, his parents at the short ends of the table. But Mrs. Shepard blended into the background and I didn’t dare look over at her.

  “And now, Gary?” Dr. Shepard asked encouragingly.

  But Gary made an amused face. “I’m not the youngest one at the table, Dad, have you forgotten?”

  Then everyone looked at me and it was just as I had feared: The words, which I had been able to recite in my sleep for days, escaped me entirely! It grew quiet and everyone was waiting. I opened my mouth and nothing happened.

  But then a hand rested on mine and Gary started to sing! I joined in, held tight to his hand, and didn’t even notice that he stopped singing after a few words. My voice grew stronger as I sang alone; the song drove the older Shepards from my mind, and I thought about my parents, about Bekka, about Ruben.

  What makes this night different from all the other nights? Why is it that on all other nights we eat leavened bread or matzoh, but on this night we eat only matzoh? Why is it that on all other nights we eat all kinds of herbs, but on this night we eat only bitter herbs? Why…

  When I finished, the room remained so quiet that you could have heard a pin fall. I leaned back, suddenly exhausted.

  “Wow,” Gary said later. “That was eerie. What happened?”

  How could I have explained it to him? I had thought of some of my favorite people and entrusted them to Jesus and his Father.

  Wasn’t this the Passover feast, the meal celebrating the rescue of the people of Israel? Aren’t the people of Israel God’s people? Aren’t they in trouble again?

  And for one inconceivable, u
nforgettable second, I felt that my prayer had been heard.

  Dr. Shepard told the story of the departure of the Israelites from the land of exile, and we sang and ate matzoh, radish, and a sweet mixture of apples and nuts. After all that, the actual meal began. Mrs. Shepard and Gary carried the food in from the kitchen.

  Gary’s grandmother turned to me. “If you’re from Berlin, you must find it exceptionally dull here.”

  And the way she said it! Her look was condescending and conspiratorial at the same time, as if I knew exactly what she meant! I didn’t dare contradict her, but not agreeing with her was something else—I hoped. So I swallowed the “No” and answered, “Actually, I think it’s very nice here.”

  “Nice? Aha…” Her tone became overly sweet and made me think of Kaa, the snake in The Jungle Book. “And what exactly do you find nice, my child?”

  “The family,” I replied awkwardly. “I learn English,” I added more confidently, “and many more things. It is nice to be in an Orthodox family.”

  I added that last bit to make her happy, because Mrs. Shepard and Gary had joined us again and I felt responsible for keeping the grandmother in a good mood.

  But Julia Shepard smiled coolly. “You are not with an Orthodox family,” she said.

  That left me completely speechless. Gary’s grandmother lost all interest in me on the spot, turned away, and critically examined the chicken soup that Dr. Shepard ladled into the bowls. Neither he nor Gary commented on that last remark, and Mrs. Shepard, who was still making herself invisible, certainly didn’t. I must have misunderstood again.

  Hours later, when the older Shepards got into their car, Dr. Shepard took his wife by the hand to take a little walk. Gary and I stayed behind by ourselves. I finally felt like I could take a deep breath.

  “Well?” Gary asked after a brief silence. “What do you think?”

  “Well…” I said. While I was still pondering whether I could honestly tell Gary that I thought his grandmother was the second-most evil woman I had ever met (right after our old neighbor Frau Bergmann), he had already interpreted my “well” correctly and replied, “Once a year it’s tolerable.”