She closed the glass door and dialed the long-distance operator and gave her the number for Žofie at Cambridge—a number Žofie had sent in her last letter. Žofie-Helene studying mathematics at Cambridge. Imagine that. She put in the number of coins the operator specified, and the telephone at the other end rang mercifully quickly.
A British girl answered, and when the operator asked for Žofie-Helene Perger, the girl said she would fetch her. Käthe listened to the clunk of the receiver being set down, and the faint sounds of Žofie’s life in that other world.
Across the Prague station as Käthe waited for Žofie, two Gestapo with dogs on chains strode purposefully toward her.
“Please!” she called into the receiver. “Please! Tell Žofie her sister is coming! Tell Žofie Johanna is on a train from Prague!”
“Mama?” a voice said, Žofie’s voice. It was all Käthe could do not to weep.
“Žofie-Helene,” she said as calmly as she could manage.
“Johanna is coming to England?” Žofie-Helene said.
“Her transport just left,” Käthe said quickly. “She has a sponsor, so she’ll be sent directly on to London Liverpool Street station, where the family will collect her. She should arrive at eleven in the morning on September third. If you can get there, you can see her and meet her family. You can get there, can’t you? Now I have to go, I have to let other parents use the telephone.”
There were no other parents. There were only the Gestapo, one already opening the telephone booth door.
“I love you, Žofie-Helene,” she said. “I will always love you. Remember that. Always remember that.”
“You’re getting a visa too, Mama?” Žofie asked. “And Grandpapa Otto?”
“I love you,” Käthe said again, and she set the receiver back in place as gently as if it were the baby Žofie-Helene had once been, a baby set down in a cradle with a whole lovely life to come.
“Käthe Perger?” she heard, and she turned slowly from the telephone to the Gestapo standing just outside the booth. But her children were safe now. That was all that mattered. Žofie and Johanna were safe.
Newnham College, Cambridge
Žofie-Helene said into the receiver on a hallway telephone, “Yes, at Liverpool Street station the day after tomorrow—the third.” She listened, then replied, “I know. Me too.”
She hung up and returned to the crowded study room, some of the other girls glancing up as she retook her chair, a proof in her handwriting spread out on the table.
“Everything okay, Žofe?” her roommate, in the seat beside her, asked.
“My sister is coming,” Žofie said. “They’ve found a sponsor for her, and Mama just put her on a train from Prague. She’ll arrive in London the day after tomorrow, and I can see her at Liverpool Street station and meet her family before they take her to their home.”
Her roommate threw her arms around her, saying, “That’s wonderful, Žofie!”
“It is,” Žofie said, and yet she didn’t feel wonderful. Mama hadn’t sounded wonderful about it. But of course it must have been hard for Mama to send Jojo off. She wished Mama and Grandpapa Otto were coming too, and Grandmère Betta. She wished her father were coming, but of course that was impossible.
“Would you like company?” her roommate asked. “I can go down on the train with you.”
“I . . . Thank you, but a friend from Vienna who is studying literature at University College is going to meet me there.”
Her friend raised an eyebrow. Žofie only smiled, and returned to her proof.
IT WAS AFTER dinner, and Žofie was back in the study room with just a few of the other girls when the matron entered and turned on a radio.
“Girls, I think you may want to set aside your studies to hear today’s news,” she said.
The voice was the BBC’s Lionel Marson—Lionel, such a funny name, Žofie thought. She tried not to panic, not to imagine all the dreadful things she had been imagining ever since Mama hung up without even waiting for Žofie to say she loved her too.
“. . . Germany has invaded Poland and has bombed many towns,” Lionel Marson was saying. “General mobilization has been ordered in Britain and France. Parliament was summoned for six o’clock this evening. Orders completing the mobilization of the army, navy, and air force were signed by the King at a meeting of the Privy Council . . .”
“Is he saying England and France are at war with Germany?” Žofie asked her roommate.
“Not yet. But he’s saying we’re about to be at war.”
London Liverpool Street Station: September 3, 1939
Žofie emerged from the train carriage amid steam and the sounds of metal on metal. In the chaos of Liverpool Street station, people everywhere, a clock tidily read 10:43. She was scanning the station for Stephan when he wrapped his arms around her from behind.
“Stephan! You’re here!” She turned and threw her arms around his neck, and kissed him—surprising herself.
But he kissed her back, and kissed her again.
He removed her glasses, and he kissed her once again, a long kiss that drew disapproving looks. But Žofie didn’t even notice the looks at first, and even when she did, when the kiss was over, she didn’t mind. Žofie was used to disapproving looks. Even at Cambridge, people eyed her suspiciously whenever she spoke. And if she wasn’t as dainty or well gloved as Dr. Watson’s Mary Morstan, she understood now what had before been only story: how it felt when you could express feelings you’d kept buried inside yourself.
Stephan said, “I think if your train were any later, Žofe, I would have expired from the wait.”
He cleaned her lenses on his shirttail, replaced them on her face, and smiled his crooked smile. “I’ve been watching for Johanna’s train, but they haven’t listed the track yet,” he said. “It should be here any minute.”
She slipped her hand in his as they crossed the platform into the station, his fingers still entwined with hers as they watched an overhead split-flap board roll to indicate an arrival from Harwich, Jojo’s train. They waited at the end of the platform as passengers debarked: women and soldiers, and mothers with their children. Žofie felt happier even than when she’d learned she would be studying at Cambridge.
As the last passengers trickled out, Žofie said, “I must have the wrong train somehow?”
There was no Johanna. There were no unaccompanied children at all.
Stephan said lightly, “We all make mistakes. Even you, Žofie. We’ll just call and get the right one.”
Žofie said, “What if she’s already arrived and left?”
“Then we’ll figure out a way to get to her family’s house.”
He was so reassuring, Stephan.
“Even when you aren’t with me in Cambridge,” she said, “I take out your letters and reread them. It always makes me feel better.”
“You know no one says stuff like that, Žofe,” he said.
“Whyever not?” she asked.
He laughed his lovely, elliptical laugh. “I don’t know,” he said. “Anyway, I reread your letters too.”
STEPHAN HESITATED. HE hated to let go of Žofie-Helene’s infinity necklace, but he took it from his pocket and straightened the chain.
“My necklace!” Žofie exclaimed.
Stephan would have given up anything to see that joy in her face—even this cold little piece of gold he had fingered so many times for comfort since she’d given it to him at the train station in Vienna, since he’d retrieved it from the seam of the train seat at the first “Hurrah!”
“I meant to give it to you earlier,” he said. “I ought to have given it to you already, but I . . . I wanted to keep a little piece of you for myself.”
Žofie-Helene kissed him on the cheek and said, “You know, Stephan, no one says things like that.”
“Whyever not?” he said.
She smiled as she said, “I have no idea.”
Stephan took the necklace and looped it around her neck, and fastened the cla
sp so that it sat where it belonged, on her beautiful skin.
He said, “Most of us say what everyone else says, or we say nothing at all, so we won’t look like fools.”
“But you don’t,” Žofie said.
The Zweig line he’d read the night before came to him: A thousand years will not recover something lost in a single hour. He’d read half the night, unable to sleep for knowing he would see Žofie-Helene. He had tried to sort out what to say to her, how to tell her that he loved her. Then she had just kissed him, before he could say a word.
He hesitated, not wanting to break the spell of her affection, but needing to be truthful, to have her know everything there was to know.
“I do, though,” he said quietly. “I saluted the German troops, Žofe, the day they entered Vienna.”
He waited for her to be shocked, or appalled, or even simply disappointed. How could he have welcomed soldiers who came to murder his father? He hadn’t known that was why they were coming, but he’d known they were not to be saluted, he’d known that no one in all of Austria ought to salute troops who invaded them. But Žofie only took his hand in hers again, and squeezed it.
He touched a finger to the pendant of her necklace, touching her skin with it. “Was he a mathematician, your father?” he asked.
“He was good at mathematics, but he was a writer, like you. He said he would be a better mathematician, but writers were more important now, because of Hitler.”
They walked together to a red telephone booth. As they waited for a man to finish his call, a voice came over the station loudspeaker, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain saying, “This morning, the British ambassador in Berlin handed the German government a final note stating that, unless we heard by eleven o’clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us.”
The entire station fell quiet. The man in the telephone booth emerged and stood with them. Stephan looked to the clock, a thousand stones in his stomach. Eleven o’clock was come and gone.
“I have to tell you now,” Chamberlain continued, “that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.”
Stephan, still holding Žofie’s hand, stepped into the telephone booth and dialed the operator. The telephone rang and rang as Chamberlain said, “. . . Now may God bless you all. May He defend the right. It is the evil things that we shall be fighting against—brute force, bad faith, injustice, oppression and persecution—and against them I am certain that right will prevail.”
In the silence after the prime minister’s words, a low murmur rose throughout the station. Only then did the ringing in the receiver stop and a voice, stifling a sob, say, “Operator. May I help you?”
“The Movement for the Care of Children from Germany, please,” Stephan choked out. “I believe they’re in Bloomsbury.”
He pulled Žofie into the booth with him, closed the door, and put his free arm around her. He tilted the receiver so she too could hear.
“Yes, hello. I’m calling about the train bringing the children from Prague to London,” he said.
Paris: May 10, 1940
Truus sat on the balcony at Mies Boissevain-van Lennep’s Paris flat, a map between them. The sounds of a radio trickled out, but the two didn’t pay it much attention. They were absorbed in a discussion of where Germany’s aggression might lead the world.
“But the Germans, with their wireless communication and their mobility, they can coordinate,” Mies said. “They see a weakness, they can share the information and—”
They stopped talking as they registered what was being said on the radio: “. . . In view of the outrageous German attack on the Netherlands, an attack initiated without warning, it is the judgment of the Dutch government that presently a state of war has come to exist between the Kingdom and Germany.”
Truus set down her cup and stood.
“It won’t be safe to travel back, Truus,” Mies said. “Joop will get out. Joop is probably—”
Truus said, “But, Mies, there are so many children still in the Netherlands.”
Ijmuiden, the Netherlands: May 14, 1940
The bus full of children came to a stop beside the Bodegraven. Truus turned back to see the second bus, Joop’s bus, pulling to a stop behind them at the docks. Already, she was lifting little Elizabeth from the lap of her older sister, saying, “Hurry, children. Quickly.”
The children spilled from the buses, hurried by the volunteers—seventy-four children with no identity cards to get them into Britain, but Truus would let the British worry about that.
“Look, Elizabeth,” she said. “See that boat?”
The little girl said, “It’s awfully dirty.”
Truus removed the girl’s smudged glasses and cleaned them, and replaced them on her adorable face. “Is it still?”
The girl laughed. “Yes! It’s dirty!”
“Well, it is, isn’t it?” Truus said to her, thinking that in this upside-down world, only the children could be trusted to tell the truth. “It tends to carry coal, but it will take you to England, where you can give my regards to their Princess Elizabeth.”
“Like my name?” Elizabeth asked.
“And she has a sister Margaret, like your sister, except hers is younger and yours is older.”
“Will the princesses be there to meet our ship, Tante Truus?” the girl’s sister asked.
Truus gentled her hair. The girl looked up at her, worried eyes behind lenses as smudged as her little sister’s had been, lenses that left Truus thinking of Žofie-Helene Perger. It was binary, the child had understood that. All of life was binary now. Right and wrong. Good and evil. Fight or surrender. War without the choice of neutrality this go-around.
“What if no one will take us?” little Elizabeth asked. “Can we stay with you, Tante Truus?”
“Oh, Elizabeth.” Truus kissed the girl once, and again, and again, remembering Helen Bentwich at Harwich asking if Truus was sure she didn’t want to take the baby back to Amsterdam with her. It hadn’t ever been the baby Truus had wanted to keep.
“Even if the royal princesses aren’t there to greet you,” she told Elizabeth and her sister, “someone will arrange a very nice family to take care of you, a mother to give you love.”
She quickly kissed these last seventy-four children goodbye, addressing each one by name as she sent them off to the ship.
She stood watching the last of them board, weeping now that the children couldn’t see, trying not to worry that what she promised the two little sisters might not be true. The alternative, staying in the Netherlands, was now untenable. At The Hague the government were, even as Truus and Joop saw these last children off, giving the Dutch army the order to surrender to Germany.
Joop put an arm around her waist, and they watched the ship sail, the children waving from the deck rail, calling out, “We love you! We love you, Tante Truus!”
Part IV
And Then . . .
Some ten thousand children, three-quarters of whom were Jewish, found refuge in England thanks to the real-life heroes involved in the Kindertransport effort, including Geertruida Wijsmuller and her husband Joop of the Netherlands, Norman and Helen Bentwich of England, and Desider Friedmann of Austria, who died at Auschwitz in October of 1944. Rescued children grew up to be prominent artists, politicians, scientists, and even, like sixteen-year-old Walter Kohn, who was rescued from Vienna by Tante Truus, Nobel laureates.
The last ferry of seventy-four children left the Netherlands on May 14, 1940, the day the Dutch surrendered to Germany. Beginning that same spring, many of the older boys who had been brought to safety in England were interned by the British, sometimes with Nazi prisoners of war; many later joined the Allied forces.
Efforts to effect similar transports to the United States, through the Wagner-Rogers Bill introduced into Congress in February of 1939, met anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic opposition. A June 2, 1939, memo seekin
g President Roosevelt’s support for the effort is marked in his handwriting “File no action. FDR.”
The writer Stefan Zweig, among the most popular authors in the world in the 1930s and early 1940s, left exile in England for exile in the United States and, ultimately, exile in Petrópolis, in the mountains north of Rio de Janeiro. There, he completed a memoir, The World of Yesterday, and his final story, which he mailed to his publisher on February 22, 1942. The next day, despairing of the war, his exile, and the future of humanity, he and his second wife, holding hands, committed suicide.
Adolf Eichmann’s system of stripping Vienna’s Jews of assets and liberty became the model throughout the Reich. He oversaw large-scale deportations to death camps. After the war, he fled to Argentina, where he was captured in 1960, tried in Israel, and found guilty of war crimes. He was hanged in 1962.
The last Kindertransport from the German Reich—the ninth from Prague—boarded 250 children on September 1, 1939, the day Germany invaded Poland and World War II began. It never arrived in the Netherlands. The fate of those children is unknown.
Most of the children rescued in the Kindertransport effort never saw their parents again.
Geertruida Wijsmuller—Tante Truus—remained in the Netherlands during the whole of the Nazi occupation, smuggling Jewish children to Switzerland, Vichy France, and Spain. Arrested by the Gestapo a second time in 1942, she was, as she had been in Vienna, again released. An obituary described her as “Mother of 1001 children, who made rescuing Jewish children her life’s work.”
Author’s Note
Following Germany’s annexation of the independent country of Austria in March 1938 and the violence of Kristallnacht that November, an extraordinary attempt to bring ten thousand children to safety in Britain began. Although fiction, this novel is based on the real Vienna Kindertransport effort led by Geertruida Wijsmuller-Meijer of Amsterdam, who had begun rescuing smaller groups of children as early as 1933. She was, to the children, Tante Truus.
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