‘I don’t know.’ Liesl was puzzled but relaxed when she saw the radiant smiles on Elizabeth’s and Daniel’s faces. It wasn’t going to be a bad surprise.
All four of them walked out of school and up the street, Erich badgering them all the way to tell him what the big surprise was. It must be huge to take them all out of school.
Daniel opened the front door and led them into the sitting room, where Ariella stood.
The children stopped in the doorway, not believing their eyes. Ariella opened her arms wide, her beaming smile and bright eyes lighting up the whole room.
Then Erich yelled, ‘Mutti!’ and threw himself into her arms. She embraced him, bringing Liesl into the hug at the same time. The girl was speechless, silent tears pouring down her face as she clutched her mother. Ariella touched their faces, kissing them and marvelling at how big they’d grown. Daniel put his arm around Elizabeth’s shoulder, and together they stood and watched as their beloved children were reunited with their mother. They left them to the reunion, and Daniel took Elizabeth to the kitchen.
‘It’s going to be all right,’ he whispered. He told her of the exchange and how Ariella had called them ‘our children’. Elizabeth visibly relaxed. Like him, she was both delighted and terrified.
They stood together, unsure for a while, and then decided it would be best to leave them to it. They looked in on the reunion and explained that they were going back up to the school and would see them all later.
Erich jumped up from the sofa where he’d been sitting beside his mother and hugged Daniel and Elizabeth. ‘Can you believe it?’ he asked them, his eyes bright. ‘Even better than a dog!’ He laughed.
‘It is the best news in the whole world.’ Elizabeth chuckled as Ariella took Liesl’s hand. ‘We’re so happy.’
‘And we can all stay here together, can’t we?’ A frown of worry crossed his face.
‘We’ll work out all of that later, but yes, everyone can stay here for as long as they want,’ Elizabeth reassured him, and gently pushed him back to his mother. ‘See you all in a while.’
‘Thank you, Elizabeth. See you later.’ Ariella spoke gently and quietly, and she was different to how Elizabeth had imagined her. She was tiny, like a little bird, and her hair was not red like some Irish people’s – it was more of a burnished copper. She had sea-green eyes and an intense gaze. She was so petite and so ladylike, she reminded Elizabeth of a little porcelain bird her mother had had on the mantelpiece. But she clearly was tougher than she looked.
The rest of the day was a blur, and Elizabeth just kept busy. She tried not to think about Ariella taking the children away, and she hoped Daniel had interpreted the conversation correctly. Did Ariella really see them as Elizabeth’s too? Or was that something she just said in the moment?
It was entirely her prerogative of course, but facing the stark reality of losing the children made Elizabeth feel sick. She knew that despite his assurances to her, Daniel felt the same way. He’d come in a while ago looking for a bandage because he’d sliced his thumb with a screwdriver. It was something he would never normally do, but like her, he was miles away.
They walked home together, neither even able to voice their fears. There were so many things to be ironed out, so many conversations to be had… It was hard to know where to begin.
The children were out when they got home. They were showing Ariella all around the village, so proud of their little place it nearly broke Elizabeth’s heart.
Elizabeth longed to talk to Ariella, to find out her plans, but there would be time enough for that. For now though, mother and children needed just to rediscover each other.
The Morrises had assured her they would handle her class for the rest of the week if she wanted to take some time off. It was kind of them, but she needed to work. She didn’t want Ariella to feel she was looming over her and the children.
She popped out and shopped and bought food with the ration books to make as celebratory a dinner as she could. Daniel brought vegetables, butter and eggs from the farm, and she baked a cake.
Ariella and the children let themselves in through the garden gate, and the children showed Ariella the bench Daniel had made and the tree they planted.
‘Well?’ Daniel asked as he stood behind her while she stirred the soup. Elizabeth knew exactly what he meant.
‘I couldn’t be happier and that’s the truth,’ she said, leaning against him as she felt his arms encircle her. ‘Look at their faces.’ She pointed out into the garden. ‘How could I feel anything but joy at seeing that?’
‘You are a remarkable woman, Elizabeth Lieber, do you know that?’ Daniel murmured into her ear.
‘She’s the remarkable one, not me. To endure all she did, to survive against all the odds.’
‘What now though?’ he asked.
‘Well, we’ll have to see. It’s up to Ariella really, and Liesl and Erich, what they want to do.’
‘Well, there is nothing to go back for, so hopefully she’ll be happy to stay here. Do you think?’ he asked, and she saw the vulnerability there in his eyes. He loved them too much to let them go.
‘Let’s hope so. I’ve made up the spare bedroom for now anyway, so I suppose we just have to take one day at a time. But yes, I really hope she is happy to stay here.’
Elizabeth knocked on the window to beckon them in for dinner.
As the children went to wash their hands before gathering in the dining room, Ariella came into the kitchen to offer to help Elizabeth. It was the first time the two women had been alone since her arrival. Elizabeth found that her mouth was dry. She smiled as she cut the soda bread she’d just taken out of the oven, the aroma filling the large kitchen. Ariella was hard to read, and while Elizabeth longed just to ask her straight out what her plans were, she decided to let Ariella take the lead. There was a serenity to her, a kind of stillness that Elizabeth felt could be restful in other circumstances but for now was disconcerting.
‘Can I help?’ Ariella asked.
‘Thanks.’ Elizabeth smiled. ‘But I’ve got everything under control, I think. Daniel was here, so he did a lot of it.’
Ariella just nodded, then inhaled appreciatively. ‘What an incredible sensation.’ She smiled and her face lit up; there was something otherworldly about her. ‘I can’t remember the last time I smelled home cooking like that. We’ve been eating whatever we could find for so long, but fresh-baked bread, home-made soup, and here, in your house, with my children… I wonder if it’s real. Sometimes I think I’ll wake up in that little attic again and it will be just another day.’
She smiled at Elizabeth’s incomprehension. ‘But I haven’t told you that story yet, have I? It’s a long one, but I’ll get to it.’
‘Take your time. It must be hard to adjust,’ Elizabeth said.
‘It’s not hard, it’s just a bit, I don’t know, surreal, I suppose. I had so many days when I could have given up hope, but knowing they were here with you, happy, safe, loved – it kept me going.’
‘I’m so glad you did. They’ve been so sad.’ Elizabeth was anxious not to say the wrong thing.
‘Elizabeth, I wanted to say something to you. Well, I want to say lots of things, but this is the most important for now. Liesl told me about the letters from Father Dominic and the adoption.’
Elizabeth felt the lump in her throat that had been there since Ariella got off the bus. ‘We would never have done it if we’d known –’ she began.
‘Please,’ Ariella pleaded, her voice gentle. ‘You adopted them to make them feel safe. Poor Father Dominic hadn’t heard from me in so long, he assumed I was dead – not an unreasonable assumption in Berlin these days, I can assure you. He’s dead himself now, poor man. He was so kind. So please, do not apologise for adopting them. I gave them to you in that letter. I will never be able to thank you enough. You loved my precious children when you didn’t even know me or Peter, you took them in, and I can see how much they love you and Daniel. Before coming here, I had n
o plan. I was just going to see how it all went. But now I know for sure I cannot take them from you, from this community. It would be too hard on them and on you. I stayed alive all of this time to be reunited with them, but not to take them away. So I have a proposal.’
‘Go on.’ Elizabeth’s heart thumped loudly in her chest.
‘I was thinking I could stay here in Ballycreggan, if that would be all right, and that we could both be a home for our children. They told me all about the farm and their friends there, and everything is so up in the air in Germany. I used to think we would live there after the war, but now… That is no place for anyone, especially Jews. It would be too hard.’
She sighed, thinking of her beleaguered homeland. ‘Anyway, Peter and I made some investments in America. I don’t have the share certificates, but I met our American broker a few times and he has copies. So if I contact him, he should be able to sell those shares, and I’ll have some money at least to maybe buy a little house or something, and I can get a job… Also there is money in an account in Germany, but I don’t know –’
Elizabeth interrupted her. ‘You’re family now, Ariella, and please don’t worry about things like that. We have this huge house with more bedrooms than we need, so if you are happy to move in here, either temporarily or permanently, then that would be what we would all want, I’m sure.’
‘Thank you, Elizabeth. That would be lovely. But I promise it won’t be forever. I feel like I just want to be near them all the time, but I won’t take them from you and Daniel, so that would work for all of us.’
Elizabeth felt the same way. She would never deny them their mother’s love, but losing them was a heartbreaking option.
‘I can never repay you.’ Ariella’s eyes shone with unshed tears. ‘I honestly don’t know how –’
‘Ariella, you owe me nothing. I lost my first husband in the Great War and miscarried our child shortly after that. I never imagined for one second that I would ever love again, and I shut myself down. But because of Liesl and Erich, I had to open up my cold frozen heart. They needed love and so I loved them, and they loved me in return. I would never have come back here were it not for them, never have met Daniel, never have set up the Jewish school. So my life now, this life I love, is all down to you. If you hadn’t sent them to me, having no idea what kind of person I was, well, I don’t know what would have become of me. So you see, I may have saved them, but in more ways than I can even explain, they saved me too, so there is no debt to be repaid.’
‘So we can share them?’ Ariella asked with a smile.
Elizabeth was blinded by tears. This was the best possible outcome. ‘Yes, let’s share our wonderful children,’ she said as she walked into Ariella’s embrace.
Chapter 32
The following weeks flew by, and gradually Ariella filled the Liebers in on the process of getting to Ireland. She told the children with gentle sensitivity how bad things were in Germany and all of Europe. She told them of displaced person’s camps with hundreds of thousands of people trying to find their way home, and she urged them to tell their friends to not give up hope but also to not be impatient.
Her stories of how Frau Braun hid her in an attic, of Father Dominic, who took such risks to help those who were hunted, and about the people who worked for the White Star organisation soothed their troubled minds. Not everyone was bad; not everyone wanted their families dead.
A Mass was said for Father Dominic, and everyone attended, even the Jews. Father O’Toole gave a very moving sermon based on Ariella’s recollections of the man, and on the goodness of people and how little acts of kindness were like little acorns that grew into mighty oaks. The rabbi asked Daniel to make a plaque in Father Dominic’s memory to be placed in the synagogue, and Ariella was so moved when she saw it. Daniel had carved a beautiful Star of David and underneath inscribed, ‘In memory of Father Dominic Hoffer, who, through his bravery and compassion, saved many Jews during Europe’s darkest days.’
In the evenings, Ariella told them of Roman, of Willi and Frau Braun, of how they got by, and she managed to make it all sound more like a gigantic adventure than the gruelling terror-filled nightmare it was. Even Stella Kübler took on the characteristics of a storybook witch.
After tea one evening, Elizabeth and Ariella were in the kitchen washing up, as Daniel had to go back to the farm – the ancient boiler had breathed its last apparently, and there was no hot water.
‘It would be great to hear that the Brauns were all right. You must worry,’ Elizabeth said.
The two women had slipped into an easy friendship, and while at the beginning it had been a little tricky, the children not sure who the authority figure was, they soon realised they thought the same way about things. A definite no for Erich who wanted to leave school, get an apprenticeship and then join the air force, a no for Liesl who wanted to go to Belfast with a gang of boys and girls from the village to a dance at the big American base, a maybe to them getting a dog and a reluctant yes to Erich joining the big boys in jumping off the big Hangman’s Rock into the sea that summer. It was an unwritten Ballycreggan rule that nobody under fourteen was allowed to cliff dive off the protruding rock that towered over the glittering sea below, and Erich had been plaguing them since the start of summer to allow him.
‘I would dearly love to hear from them. I thought he – they – might have written by now, but…’ Ariella shrugged, but Elizabeth could see the disappointment there.
‘Tell me to mind my own business if you like, but do I get the impression there might be more than friendship between you and Willi?’ Elizabeth asked with a smile.
‘Oh no…’ Ariella coloured. ‘He’s much younger than me, and besides… No, it wasn’t like that. We were just all so hell-bent on getting out alive, we didn’t think…’
‘But in another life, when things were calmer?’ Elizabeth probed gently.
‘Look, it doesn’t matter now anyway. I just hope they’re all right. His leg never fully healed, you know? A botched job in a field hospital, and then back in Berlin there was nothing. He never complained or anything. He took care of us, his mother and me, and he was always joking and laughing through it all.’
‘He sounds like a wonderful man,’ Elizabeth said.
Ariella smiled sadly. ‘He is.’
The long summer stretched on, and soon Ariella became part of the fabric of Ballycreggan. She offered her services to the rabbi as he began the long search for the families of the children at the farm, writing letters, searching reports, making contact with the Red Cross. She didn’t need to be paid, and she was glad to be of some help. The American broker had expressed his deep condolences at the loss of his friend Peter. He sold her shares easily and had deposited the proceeds in her new Irish bank account. There was more than enough to buy a house and to live off for the rest of her life. He also mentioned that the process of recovering her money in a German bank account could be done. It would take some time, but he would vouch for her and use his connections to help her in any way that he could, so she was financially secure.
She’d purchased a lovely house with four bedrooms at the other end of the village, and Liesl and Erich came and went between both houses. It was a period house, built in the 1700s some time by a merchant, and it retained a lot of the old features. Daniel and Erich had done an incredible job in decorating it and furnishing it for her, and she, Liesl and Elizabeth had made curtains and bedcovers. It was now the loveliest and most bright and welcoming home she could imagine. The children often slept over, and she loved that they and their friends felt welcome there. It was a fairly fluid arrangement that suited everyone.
She’d bought an old bicycle that Daniel fixed up for her, and now the sight of Ariella Bannon whizzing by on her bike was an everyday feature of Ballycreggan.
She closed her front door each night and sat in her bedroom, brushing her hair. She missed Peter, and seeing Erich growing so like him was bittersweet. Sometimes she was sure it was her husband when sh
e glanced at her son, just for a split second, but Peter was gone. Like so many others. There was more bad news than good when it came to the families of the children at the farm. She tried to stay busy all day, but at night, his face swam before her eyes. She prayed he was all right.
Willi. His name hurt her heart. She was sure he would have written by now. He knew where she was going – surely he would have got in touch?
But why would he? His plan was to take his mother back to the Black Forest, and then whenever she died, he would go to America. There was no reason for him to contact her, except that she hoped he would.
She’d looked through the Red Cross lists that the rabbi had received, and there was no mention of them. She’d even written to the mayor of Ludwigsstadt. Frau Braun’s father had been the former mayor, so perhaps if the Brauns turned up, he’d know, but she’d heard nothing.
She’d survived, she was reunited with her children – what more could she want?
She got into bed and gazed out at the dusky sky. It amazed her how in summertime in Ireland it never got really dark. It was bright until ten or eleven at night and then became dusk for a few hours before the sun rose again very early. She liked to look at the sky after seeing nothing for so long in the attic; it was something she never took for granted.
Eventually, she dropped off to sleep.
The next morning, the sunlight woke her early. She pulled the pillow over her head and tried to go back to sleep. Two birds outside her window were having an argument, and the exchange was reaching a crescendo. Finally admitting defeat, she pulled her robe on and went downstairs.
The children were up at Elizabeth’s but were coming down in the afternoon to take her to the beach. Today was the day Erich was going to jump off the cliff. She’d confided to Elizabeth that she’d rather not watch her darling son’s body hurtling at speed into the ocean from such a great height, and Elizabeth agreed that she was dreading it too, but Daniel just laughed and told them if they really thought it was the first time he’d done it, they were very naïve indeed. Erich and Simon had been secretly practising for the last two weeks so they wouldn’t look foolish in front of everyone.
The Emerald Horizon (The Star and the Shamrock Book 2) Page 22