I paced the deck examining a newly distinct Antwerp, until an announcement soon after two o’clock called on all remaining passengers to prepare to board the Rhakotis, an ancient freighter that was to transport us to France and England. Conditions on board were primitive with a mere fifty cabins for five hundred people, requiring the majority to sleep on bunks in the hold, women in the prow and men in the stern. The Professor’s last official task was to allocate the cabins. Our family was given two, although the distribution differed from that on the St Louis. My parents, now an established couple, took one, and Aunt Annette and Luise the other, leaving Sophie and me to the bunks. My excitement at the makeshift dormitories, a relic of the school hiking trips from which I had been excluded, swiftly faded in face of the stale air and cramped conditions, and I joined in the general exodus to the deck. The night was so mild that it was no great discomfort and, moreover, it meant that I was on hand when, at twelve, the St Louis weighed anchor and put to sea. I saw that I was not alone in my emotion when, as the ship passed the Rhakotis, a large complement of the crew, the men and women who had witnessed, if not shared, our fate for the previous five weeks, raised their caps with a cry of ‘Good luck to the Jews!’ After waving back, I shifted my glance from the rail to the bridge where a solitary figure stood saluting.
The next morning, instead of heading for Boulogne, we docked at the quay, in the very berth that the St Louis had recently vacated. We were offered no explanation for the move and rumour ran rife, not to be quelled until Herr Troper came aboard to bid us goodbye. At three o’clock the ship set sail, hugging the Belgian coast. I spent the rest of the day on deck until a heavy shower sent me running below, where I passed a sleepless night in the foetid atmosphere, assailed by a cacophony of snores and grunts. To my relief the journey was short and we reached Boulogne before dawn, although we were once again forbidden to land and forced to anchor in the harbour. After breakfast a launch arrived to collect the 220 passengers bound for France, among them the Professor and his wife and Luise’s two friends. Although the memory of my conduct was still raw, the Professor’s wife displayed her magnanimity by clasping me to her bosom and kissing me on both cheeks. My discomfort was nothing to Luise’s when the two little girls were led away. With no other guardian, they were being sent back to join their mother in Germany. Luise kicked and screamed as violently as if she had had a premonition of their fate.
No sooner had the Professor and his wife left the ship than I appropriated their cabin, but even the prospect of privacy failed to allay my desolation. The last few days had passed in a haze of goodbyes and, while my fractured sleep lacked the narrative of a nightmare, it was filled with a sense of dread.
Any doubts we might have entertained about opting for England were dispelled the following afternoon when we sailed into Southampton. Instead of the furtive acceptance of Antwerp and the quarantine of Boulogne, we were greeted with great fanfare. The docks were decked with bunting. Giant portraits of the King and Queen hung across two warehouses. A brass band played triumphal marches on the quay. In the harbour two fire-fighting boats sent jets of water soaring into the air. Reality only set in once we had stepped ashore to discover that the band was not performing but rehearsing; the portraits had not been put there to welcome us on behalf of the King and Queen but to welcome the monarchs themselves who were returning from New York the next day. It was as if fate were preparing us for the irony that was our adopted country’s stock-in-trade.
After the mass of forms we had filled in on the St Louis, the bureaucracy on our arrival was remarkably relaxed. Barely two hours after landing, we were taking the train to London, reaching Waterloo station at five o’clock. A handful of aid workers were waiting on the platform, ready to direct us to temporary accommodation in private homes and boarding houses. It was then that my mother came into her own. Speaking far more fluent English than I had suspected, she announced that we had made alternative arrangements (which I prayed did not involve the sister and brother-in-law whom she had cited to Herr Troper). Then, although to my certain knowledge she didn’t possess a single English coin, she hailed three taxis to take us, together with a mountain of luggage, to the Savoy, a hotel where she had regularly stayed with her father. Her claim that the manager would remember her did little to reassure me and I pictured our being deported for failure to pay the fares or, at the very least, being left to sleep on the streets. My fears, however, turned out to be groundless, the manager’s memory being all the more remarkable given the seven years that had elapsed since her last visit. He immediately saw to all the arrangements: paying the taxis; finding us rooms; assisting my mother to telegraph my grandfather’s bankers in America. Within days the necessary funds had been released and we settled into the hotel for the summer. I spent the time exploring London, in particular the Natural History Museum, while my parents searched the south coast for suitable houses, finally finding one near Bournemouth. It was large and secluded, with a landscaped park, and sufficiently close to Winchester where, in September, I was sent to school.
This is not the place to chart my school career. I prefer to end the story with our arrival in England: a convenient, if arbitrary, conclusion. The outbreak of war brought horror and devastation on a scale far too great for any single narrative to encompass. I simply wish to tie up a few loose ends, telling you what happened to my family and friends, and to Johanna, using information which, in some cases, I didn’t glean until forty years later, and knowing that, in Leila at least, I have a reader who even at the age of five failed to find ‘They lived happily ever after,’ an acceptable answer to ‘What came next?’
With the exception of the narrator, all of the principal characters are dead … although whether or not you consider that to be a happy ending will depend on your view of the afterlife, a subject which you are as loath to discuss with your grandfather as I was to discuss sex with mine.
The Captain was on the St Louis when war was declared. He managed to beat the British blockade of the Atlantic and made for Russia, from where he later sailed the ship back to Germany. He never went to sea again. Years later, when he was under investigation by a de-Nazification tribunal, I was pleased to put my signature to a letter exonerating him from any responsibility for our plight and, indeed, praising him for his efforts to relieve it. Schiendick, both the Captain’s adversary and mine, found a post in the German secret service and was shot when the British captured Hamburg in 1945.
Sophie looked after Luise until her death and then became a language teacher, spending almost forty years at a girls’ boarding school in Dorset. She never married and in later life became an ardent Theosophist. It was as if she found eccentricity the safest face to present to the world. She died two weeks before her ninetieth birthday. Marcus and Leila may remember visiting her although, outside the classroom, she took little interest in children. ‘Bring them to me when they reach the age of reason,’ she declared, in expectation of a lengthy wait.
Aunt Annette enjoyed even greater longevity. To my mother’s and my amazement, she emigrated to Israel in 1952. Three years later, well into her seventies, she married a violinist with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra and became such a rabid Zionist that, out of mutual respect, we agreed never to discuss politics. Until her ninety-first year she returned to England every summer, always bringing your mother and uncle certificates of the trees that had been planted on the Mount of Olives in their names, presents which they considered as inappropriate as you do clothes. Despite her advanced age, she was not destined to die peacefully but in a bomb attack on a bus station in Tel Aviv.
My mother continued to paint, and her growing reputation never ceases to delight me. It was consolidated by the retrospective held in Berlin in 1988 – two years after her death – which prompted my first and, to date, my only return to a city where little but the contradictions remain from my youth. Her legacy was enhanced by the scholarships she endowed to allow young artists from across the world to study and work in England. Yo
u yourselves have met several of the beneficiaries at our summer parties.
My father died in 1950, although in effect he never survived the war. Like many German nationals, he was interned on the Isle of Man at the outbreak of hostilities. The British authorities, who acknowledged no distinctions beyond friend and foe, little realised that, by mixing Nazi sympathisers and Jewish refugees, they were creating a microcosm of the Third Reich. By the time that my father was freed, he was a broken man, whom even I could no longer begrudge the solace of drink. In the event, it was not Johanna and I who confirmed her father’s mistrust of shipboard romances but my parents, who never recovered the intimacy that they had enjoyed on the St Louis, although my mother took care of my father until his death.
Of the final member of the family I shall say little. Luise died of kidney failure in 1944. Her loss, more than any other, still tugs at my heart. I wish that you could have known her and at an age when you were young enough to see her through your own eyes rather than the world’s. Perhaps it was because her body was so impaired that her spirit soared so far beyond it. She had an extraordinary talent for inspiring love and I for one remain forever in her debt.
As for me, I left school in 1942 and joined the Pioneer Corps, transferring to the Intelligence Corps immediately it became possible the following year. You may think it strange, given my detailed dispatches from the bedroom, that I have no wish to dwell on my military career, but I subscribe to the unfashionable view that it is more important for children to learn about love than war. In 1946, I took up my scholarship to Balliol. The incongruities of Oxford – its youthful zest and hidebound traditions, its intellectual freedom and petty feuding – must have struck a chord for I have lived here ever since. Perhaps it was because I travelled so far in my youth that I needed to stay in one place, or perhaps because, after the revelations of Auschwitz, I needed to stay in the one place which, at least in spirit, seemed to be furthest from the camps. Or perhaps it was simply because Oxford, more than anywhere else, enabled me to make a virtue of detachment. Like every survivor since Noah, whose drunkenness, I remember Sendel saying, was no mere indulgence but an attempt to blot out the image of his drowning friends, I have been wracked with guilt. From the first newsreel pictures of skeletal figures squashed into catacomb-like bunks, I have sought to purge myself of emotion. One of your grandmother’s main attractions for me is that she’s so English, as pragmatic as the Prayer Book. She, in turn, knows not to push me too hard. Her one sorrow – at least the only one that she has voiced to me – is that we didn’t have more children. She longed to recreate the benign chaos of her own childhood and presumed that, if nothing else, the genocide would have left me with an atavistic urge to replenish the stock. The only urge I felt, however, was to obey the Torah obligation to have two children. Any more seemed to be tempting fate. Besides, fewer domestic ties allowed her to spend more time in her studio. She balanced her commitments so skilfully that, unlike my own resentment of my mother’s paintings, your mother and uncle both treasured her pots.
I am proud of my wife and children and – although who knows how much more you may have achieved by the time you read this – I am proud of you. Nevertheless, I always carry a shame inside myself. Sometimes that shame has a number – a number of devastating roundness – and sometimes it has a face.
I kept my promise to Johanna, writing care of several Dutch synagogues. I continued until the letters would have put her in danger, although I never received a reply. Three months after the War I took the ferry to Holland. I searched for her in Rotterdam, Amsterdam and the Hague, moving on to smaller towns and villages where disguise would have been harder, but I found nothing. Anyone with any knowledge was anxious to hide it, especially from an Anglicised German Jew. I left my name with various relief agencies; I pored over the ‘P’s on countless casualty lists: all to no avail. Then in 1949, I made a second trip across the Atlantic, this time aboard the Queen Mary. My mother was overjoyed that I was finally taking a holiday, until I explained that I was keeping my ten year-old tryst with Johanna in New York. Realising that she could not dissuade me, she tried to prepare me for disappointment. I was adamant however that, despite all the horrors of the past decade, Johanna would have kept faith and the only reason for her failure to contact me was that she was planning an incomparable romantic reunion (you can imagine my dismay when, sitting in my local Odeon eight years later, I saw it copied by Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr!). I spent an exceptionally windy day on the observation deck of the Empire State Building, to the alarm of the guards who suspected a would-be suicide, and the delight of Melanie, a student from Sarah Lawrence, who was soaking up the atmosphere for a short story. When the building closed, she invited herself back to my hotel and I discovered how easily pleasure could coexist with pain.
I never saw Melanie again. The excitement was too heady to survive at ground level. The week that remained to me in New York – a week that, against all odds, I had planned to fill with treats for Johanna – was filled with despair. However absurd it may sound, I grew convinced that it was my readiness to leap into bed with a total stranger that had kept her away. Oh, I don’t mean that she had seen it all from some hidey-hole behind the postcard stand, but rather that God, Fate, the Universe, call it what you will, had anticipated my weakness and acted accordingly. The guilt that was never far away when I thought of her – the conviction that, had our paths not crossed, she would have accepted her father’s offer, married her plantation owner and now be happily bouncing little Josés and Marías on her knee – multiplied a hundredfold when I pictured how I had repaid her sacrifice with my betrayal.
Writing this account has been an attempt to make amends. When I began, my aim was to give you a clearer idea of where I – and, dare I say it, you – came from. More and more, however, I’ve found that I want to tell you about Johanna. She was no Anne Frank: I may be the last man alive who remembers her. She deserves a more substantial memorial. Let there be no mistake, I love your grandmother very much. She has been my life and I could have asked for no better. But Johanna was my youth. She taught me what love was and what life could be. We shared something on the St Louis – an intensity, a promise – that I have never been able to recapture. Of course there have been compensations (I’m addressing four of them now) but, when Johanna walked down the accommodation ladder, something inside me died. You may recall Aunt Annette declaring that my grandfather’s greatest wish was for me to lead an honourable life. It’s one that I echo in respect of all of you. Even more, however, I wish you love – love in all its tenderness, its danger, its fulfilment; in short, its humanity – and once you’ve found it, may you treasure it for the rest of your days.
There is a postscript to the story. Some three decades after that trip to New York, when The Great Philosophers had brought me a measure of celebrity, among the sack-loads of letters I received was one from Christina, who had watched the series when it aired on Dutch TV. In a few lines she broke the news, much amplified on our subsequent meeting, that she had married a Flemish farmer, both Johanna and her stepfather, the Chemist, having been gassed in Sobibor in 1943. For years I’d been reconciled to the inevitability of Johanna’s death, as well as to its probable manner, but the confirmation peeled open the wound. I knew that Stalin was wrong: no human life was ever a statistic. Meanwhile the sight of Christina, still plumply beautiful in her seventies, the hint of sadness in her gaze offsetting her delicate smile, made the loss of her daughter even more acute. I saw then that in order to stay sane, I had to put the Holocaust behind me and live as determinedly in the present as an advertising executive: a resolve I maintained until I received an invitation to the St Louis survivors’ fiftieth anniversary cruise off the Florida coast. I accepted by return of post. It helped that it coincided with my retirement from my Oxford chair: not as momentous as the rite of passage I had celebrated on the St Louis, but nonetheless worthy of note. I took along your grandmother in the hope of making it as much of a holiday as possible.
In that respect I failed. Most of my friends among the passengers were dead, some even from natural causes, and those who remained were indistinguishable from their grandparents. I found myself tongue-tied, not so much because of what we had lost – I was no stranger to death – as because of what we had shared. I couldn’t bear to confront my fellow witnesses.
I was standing in the cocktail lounge, attempting to rescue your grandmother, whose attention to a spry octogenarian’s fanciful account of my violin recital at the final concert did credit to her training, when I found myself hugged, or rather stifled, by Viktor, now fleshy, bearded and bald, but still my one remaining soul-mate from the ship: a fact that we both acknowledged by bursting into tears. We introduced our wives and swapped details of our families and careers. He was a retired town clerk in Limoges with five daughters (I saw your grandmother’s eyes glisten). Yet for all my delight at finding that he had not only survived the War, hidden in a monastery, but prospered after it, I felt first uncomfortable, then treacherous, and finally desolate at seeing him in the absence of Johanna and Joel.
A Sea Change Page 29