My Family for the War

by Anne C. Voorhoeve

  But Frau Zaandvort, who was forced to do compulsory labor in the same canned food processing plant as Mamu, had given her something else: contact with a group that hid Jewish children under false identities in Belgian convents and homes. In the same night that Mamu and Aunt Ruth went underground with the old women, who wouldn’t have wanted to take in either a man or two children, Uncle Erik set off to bring Evchen and Betti to the Belgian border.

  He found a hideout for himself in the back room of a potato cellar on a Belgian farm. From there, he could just hear the bells at the convent that harbored Evchen and Betti chiming in the distance every morning, noon, and night.

  I tried to imagine how it must have been after the liberation, his anticipation, the unbearable tension as he ran through the forest to the convent—the first time he had seen the sun in twenty months. And then his disbelief and horror as the last two old nuns tearfully told him what had happened that spring.

  Uncle Erik didn’t waste many words on something that couldn’t be expressed. He picked up his story three weeks later, as if everything in between just hadn’t happened. A man arranged passage for my uncle on a boat that would bring him to the coast of England, since he had mentioned that he had a niece living in London.

  Had he considered staying and waiting until Aunt Ruth and Mamu were liberated, I asked gently? Holland was still under German control, but the Allies were inching closer and closer every week and were already approaching Arnhem.

  Uncle Erik looked at me with tortured eyes. “And then what?” he asked. “Should I tell Ruth that I lost the children?”

  That was, in fact, the one question that weighed on him constantly, until after several days he came to the conclusion that he had made an enormous mistake. What was he doing in England? He had to go back as soon as possible and find his wife!

  With difficulty we convinced him not to risk crossing the English Channel, which was scattered with mines, until Holland had been liberated—a matter of a few weeks, we assumed. Weeks passed and turned into months. In spring, when the Germans had been driven from all the countries around Holland, and Aachen was the first German city to fall under American control, and Montgomery advanced on Bremen and Hamburg, the Dutch still awaited their liberation.

  “This has to be the coldest winter I’ve ever lived through!” I said to Walter, shivering, as we set off for the city.

  The ruins at the lower end of Harrington Grove stared at us accusingly, as if it was our fault that they were still waiting to be rebuilt more than four years after the Blitz. During the summer, children had climbed among the half-collapsed stairways and exposed beams, gathering together undamaged furniture and creating hideouts for themselves. The expanse of rubble where I had almost died a year earlier was already fading in the gathering darkness when we passed it. At home, the only room we still heated was the kitchen, and we were discussing whether we should cut down the tree in the front yard for wood. At night we took bricks warmed by the embers in the oven to bed with us, wore wool socks and scarves, and still shivered. And just a few days ago I had gone to the shed and found Victory in the straw, frozen to death.

  “I don’t think we’re allowed to eat a frozen chicken, dear,” Matthew said, watching as Amanda got ready to thaw my pet.

  “I don’t intend to ask the rabbi! She’s clean, she doesn’t smell, she ate nothing but kosher food her whole life. No one’s eaten a purer chicken soup in this country for years.” Before long, a scent began to fill the house that reminded me less and less of Victory and more and more of Millie and better days long past.

  “Victory soup,” Amanda had commented amicably as she filled a bowl for Walter, whose home leave had begun just in time for Shabbat. Unsuspecting, he reached for his spoon, tried the soup, looked thoughtful for a moment, took a second sip, and said, “Delicious! Victory is right around the corner, I can taste it!”

  The others tried hard to suppress their laughter, and I bowed my head deeply over my plate. If I was prepared to eat my own hen just to avoid spoiling Walter’s appetite, I must be worse off than I thought!

  It had been Walter’s idea to run the Elysée on Sunday and give Amanda and Matthew a night off so they could spend an evening together. The thought of being alone with Walter at the theater made my heart beat faster. We hadn’t seen each other in a year and a half, and I liked to think I had noticed a certain admiration in his eyes when he had greeted me. The previous week it had felt strange to turn seventeen, but now, on the third day after Walter’s appreciative look, I felt much better about it!

  Amanda and I shared the bathroom and bedroom mirror to try on our meager wartime wardrobe, drawing fake stocking seams on our legs with eyeliner, and generally having a good time. And I wasn’t even going out, just to work with Walter! But my excitement about it didn’t seem to surprise Amanda in the least. “You look beautiful, dear!” she said when I was finally ready.

  We smiled at each other. “You know, don’t you?” I asked shyly.

  “Don’t worry,” was all she said. “You didn’t give yourself away. If I hadn’t been wishing for it for so long, I certainly wouldn’t have noticed anything.”

  “I love you, Mum.” I put my arms around her neck. When she pressed her forehead to mine, I could tell that we were the same height, just exactly the same.

  “I know you love me,” she said quietly. “I see it every day. It’s one of the nicest things that’s happened in my whole life.”

  The Elysée had managed to defy all the air raids. With time it had gotten a little shabby; the soft red carpet was worn and plaster trickled from the walls in several places from bombs landing nearby. Settling had left several long cracks through the foyer, and the ceiling in the main theater had water damage in a few spots. “When the war’s over, we’ll need to close for a few weeks and renovate,” Walter suggested when he saw the damage.

  We! I thought happily, and once again had another moment I’d be able to twist and turn and ponder the meaning of for hours, even days.

  We fell into the typical routine: I swept the theater and opened the ticket booth while Walter changed a lightbulb in the foyer, stood at the entrance to tear tickets, and finally disappeared into the projection room. After I let in several latecomers, I reached for the stepladder to take it back to the room behind the screen.

  As always, I thought of Gary as soon as I stepped through the door. This was the place where I still cried for him sometimes, where the sadness was immediate and overwhelming like nowhere else. It hung in the curtain, in the grainy recesses of the screen, in every gouge in the floor. I knew how much his parents suffered because he had never been found; there was neither visible proof of his death nor a grave where they could leave small stones. I was the only one in the family who had a place to say good-bye to Gary.

  What would he have said about my feelings for Walter? If I knew Gary, he would have immediately taken things into his own hands. He would have pulled Walter aside and I could almost hear him whispering: “What are you waiting for?”

  I laughed. It would have been too perfect to have a big brother right now! My heart felt unusually light, as if something had already changed, and there was more than just sadness in those memories.

  I noticed the sounds and pictures of the newsreel on my way out. Out of the corner of my eye I recognized the all-too-familiar motifs: the same expanses of gray rubble and ruins that used to be German cities. Seldom did something stand out that still distinguished one from another—the remains of a familiar dome, a bridge, a church tower. Gaunt, haggard people moved along quickly, as if there was still somewhere to go in the midst of all the destruction. It was more likely that they just didn’t want to be filmed in their shame.

  But one grubby little girl, about three years old, spontaneously pulled her hand away from her mother’s when she saw the camera, stood rooted to the spot, and broke out in a beautiful, perfect smile. The mother grabbed her arm firmly and pulled her along, giving the cameraman an odd look, half mischievous
and half accusing, that made it clear how young she was.

  The sister, not the mother. My heart stood still. It wasn’t only that look, it was the position of her shoulders that made me recognize her. Straight. Unbowed. It took a stronger power than the Nazis to destroy Rebekka Liebich. I had always known it.

  “Ziska?” Walter looked at me with surprise as I stumbled up the stairs to the projection room. Outside in the hallway I could have screamed out loud. Now I stood there and couldn’t make a sound. “Ziska,” Walter said again, coming toward me.

  “I saw Bekka,” I cried. “She’s alive!”

  Without a word, he opened his arms wide and I walked into them, without thinking, felt his rough wool sweater and underneath it a heartbeat steadily growing faster, which for a moment I thought was my own. A hand stroked my hair, my neck, then lifted my chin.

  Warmth. Surprise. Recognition. Hazel had confided in me that she practiced kissing her own arm. If I could ever think again, I would tell her that wasn’t even close to the real thing!

  “That’s her. I’m sure of it! Of course it’s hard to tell, it goes so fast.”

  “And if I hold the frame?”

  It was half past ten, and we stood in the window of the projection room staring over empty rows of seats at the screen. Again and again we played those two seconds of the newsreel.

  “What a shame they don’t say which city it is,” Walter said. “It’s somewhere in the Ruhrgebiet, that much is for sure.”

  “The Ruhrgebiet, why not? It was definitely safer than Berlin, where all the neighbors recognized them and knew they were Jewish. Frau Liebich is as old as Mamu, in her early forties, she could definitely have had another baby. And the little girl looks just like Bekka in our pictures from kindergarten!”

  “Is that enough? Are you sure?”

  “Yes, I am. We can go home now.”

  We walked through the sleet to the Underground, the same path we had taken a few hours ago and so many other times before. And yet the street, and all of London, seemed entirely different to me now that my head rested on Walter’s shoulder as we walked and he had his arm around me for the first time. We walked more carefully as a twosome. We had to pay attention to each other, otherwise we’d fall out of step or lose our balance.

  Even so, I couldn’t concentrate entirely on Walter. “Bekka’s coming back,” I repeated, and I vowed it again as we got into the train. “We’re going to see each other again. She’s the only one I was completely sure about the entire time.”

  Chapter 22

  The End of the War

  “There must be ten thousand people!” Hazel yelled directly into my ear. The enormous crowd that filled the entire length of the Mall pushing toward Buckingham Palace was indescribable. People sang and cheered, traffic had come to a complete standstill, and once in a while I was brushed by one of the Union Jacks that were being waved around.

  The Germans had signed the surrender agreement. For people in Europe, the war was over. No more bombs and missiles, no more air raids, no more nights spent in cellars and subway tunnels, no more dread of a telegram boy’s knock on the door. It was spring, there was laughter and music. On that day, the Pacific, where the fighting raged on, couldn’t have been farther away.

  “The king! The king!” The crowd cheered even louder, and indeed, on the palace balcony we could just make out several light and dark spots: the king and queen, the princesses, and the prime minister. “God save the king!” thousands cried. Old men and women placed their right hands on their hearts and wept.

  The old empire had withstood the war. It had staggered, suffered, and bled, but it had persevered. The terror had been overcome, and we were free. Church bells rang all over the city, but there were painful absences of chimes that had been part of the city for hundreds of years: St. Dunstan, St. Clement Danes, St. Alban, St. Augustine, St. Mildred, St. Stephen, St. Swithin.

  I knew that lots of people in the jubilant crowd would start grieving again as soon as the victory celebrations were over, and that the eighth of May would remain a bittersweet day: the end of the war, but not of the hurting. I had hope for Mamu and Aunt Ruth, and even more for Bekka. But Gary and my father weren’t coming back.

  The celebration continued on Harrington Grove. Tables and chairs were carried from all the houses onto the street, lamps and flags were hung; someone had even dragged a piano outside. “Can you stay?” I asked Hazel, but she declined. There would be a party in her own street too.

  We kissed each other on the cheek when we parted. My friend for the war, which was over now! Our old agreement was so long forgotten that it would have been silly to officially correct it. We knew we’d remain friends.

  “Sweet Erik is already upstairs packing.” I heard Amanda’s voice from inside the pantry, where she was rummaging around. “He’ll never get across this week, but he doesn’t want to wait another minute. Ah, here it is!”

  She pulled a brown notebook down from a shelf and blew a thin layer of flour and dust from its cover toward me. “Your garden notebook?” I asked in amazement.

  “Yes! It will be a while before we can get supplies like we used to, but I thought we could make a start.”

  “And where do you think you’ll find flowers?”

  Amanda shook her head, opened one of the little packages, and let me look inside. “You didn’t really think I had just thrown my most precious treasures on the compost heap!” she admonished, and pulled from the assortment of neatly labeled paper packets one that contained tiny brown seeds. “Darn it. If the Germans had surrendered a few weeks earlier, I could have planted petunias.”

  I stared at her. “It’s over. It’s really over!”

  Amanda laughed. “I was afraid you couldn’t really be happy about it,” I said quietly.

  She closed the packet again and turned away. “I’m happy for you, Frances,” she answered. “For you young people. So much has been taken away from you! If you ask me, there can’t be enough celebrating that all of this is finally over.”

  Amanda had decided to celebrate this day as a new beginning, and no matter how bitter and heartbroken she might secretly be, from now on she wouldn’t show it.

  Uncle Erik moved around the room that had first belonged to Gary, then Walter, then him and gathered his belongings. “Why are you taking your winter clothes?” I asked in surprise, holding up the gloves I had knit for him at Hanukkah.

  “Because I lose my residence permit as soon as I leave England,” my uncle replied simply. I couldn’t breathe. “The war is over. The island is happy to be rid of her refugees.”

  “But… you have to…” I was so shocked I could barely speak. “Mamu… how should… I thought…”

  “Let me find them first, Ziska. We can apply for new papers then. Leave it to me to convince your mother that she needs to come here.”

  “Does that mean”—I sat down on the bed—“you think she wouldn’t want to?”

  Uncle Erik smiled. He had grown visibly stronger, but his eyes were only rarely without a sad expression. Ahead of him was the prospect of telling Aunt Ruth about their children’s deaths. “I’ll talk with your mother,” he repeated. “I’ll tell her that you’re the only one of us who still has a home. If we want to start over again together, then it has to be in England.”

  “How do you think she’ll react?” I looked at him anxiously.

  “She’ll need a little time.” He dodged the question. My heart sank. “Ziska, Margot lived to see you again. You’re everything she has left. But I don’t know if she’s prepared for the fact that there are other people in your life besides her.”

  “You’re right. Oh, Uncle Erik!” I hugged him tight. “I’m so sorry about everything that’s happened, and that you had to wait so long to go back… but I’m glad for every day you were here! And I’ve never, ever forgotten that you were there to wave at our train that night. You were the farewell they cheated us out of!”

  “I haven’t forgotten it either.” He patted me
on the back, and after a moment freed himself from my hug. “And now let’s go out and celebrate that the time of good-byes is finally over.”

  We had known for months that this day would come. One German city after another had surrendered—some without a fight, but in many other cases only after Hitler ordered his last reserves of half-grown boys and old men into senseless, unevenly matched slaughters—before the “greatest commander of all time” shot himself in his bunker. In March Walter had been ordered to Lübeck, where they needed German-speaking liaisons between the British commanders and the residents.

  What would happen after that was the subject of continuous speculation—at the Vathareerpurs’!

  Walter had become a British citizen on his twenty-first birthday and carried his new identity with pride. Hazel and her mother expected that he would soon ask me “the question,” as they called it. I, however, was neither as convinced nor as carried away as my friend. I hoped he would take his sweet time with that question. I missed him terribly, and could easily picture us standing under the chuppah and celebrating an exuberant Jewish wedding. But a wedding meant more than a promise and a party. It meant starting our own household, having our own children, and responsibilities I absolutely did not feel ready for. After I’m finished with school! When I’m nineteen! There was no denying there was something there that wanted to be awakened, but for the time being I clung tightly to my last two years of school.

  All the more so when, right after the celebrations, I faced a new and entirely unexpected dilemma. For years we had longed for the end of the war, lived for nothing else; now it had come and gone with breathtaking speed. Londoners went back to their daily lives, everywhere things were cleaned up, built, planned, and the Refugee Committee remembered me again.