The Gathering Storm

by Bodie Thoene

  We ate by candlelight as the long day drew to a close. Mac played his phonograph records. Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman made the meager meal more enjoyable. I looked up more than once to see Eben’s eyes fastened on my face. After a dessert of wild berries Mac and Eva had picked on Hampstead Heath, I read Jessica’s letter and the news from Wales aloud.

  “A Nazi pilot was shot down and managed to parachute to safety. Madame Rose and her own little Jerome helped capture the fellow. Madame Rose held him facedown on the ground in our field with the farmer’s shotgun until Jerome could run for help and the farmer and constable arrived. They beat the fellow senseless when he attempted to resist. This after Madame Rose had held him captive on her own for nearly an hour. She attributes this to an angel who accompanies her everywhere, and though I cannot claim I see him, I certainly do believe her account.”

  Eben, Mac, and Eva applauded Jerome and Madame Rose. Mac declared that a story must be written about this American shotgun-toting missionary and her flock of orphans now capturing downed Huns in Wales.

  They were the lucky ones, we concluded. How could we equip our people for the fire that would soon fall upon London?

  Eben, who had witnessed the bombing of Madrid in Spain, said, “When they begin to hit London, it will not be hundreds of casualties, but thousands. While they remain here, your women should be trained by the Red Cross. I will speak to the Jewish Agency, and we will make an official request.”

  No sooner had he finished speaking than the air-raid siren sounded. The anti-aircraft gun on the top of Primrose Hill began to bang away as Nazi aircraft droned toward some target in the Midlands. We carefully gathered the remainder of our pudding and tea and made our way to the tin Anderson shelter in the garden.

  It was almost dawn before the all-clear sounded. News came to us in the morning that the Germans had begun firing cannons from France and hitting Britain’s shore from across the Channel.

  Eben said quietly, this was surely a signal that more difficult days were ahead.

  24

  Early on in my service to the Community Undertaking, Placing Children (CUP-C) I learned to hate Sundays at St. Mark’s. The mornings were somewhat uncomfortable, as the regular parishioners arrived to hold their Sunday morning service. The unplaced refugees gathered pitiful bundles of belongings and stood around the walls. Knots of children, each with a chaperone who was in some sense a guard, likewise huddled together.

  Many of the refugees did not understand the words of the preaching. Many of the parishioners were caught between feeling imposed on and feeling guilty about not doing enough.

  Pastor Swanson did his best to alleviate the disquiet. He kept his messages short and encouraged those who were bi-lingual to translate for their countrymen. He also increased the number of hymns that were sung, correctly reasoning that voices lifted in praise to God crossed all national and ethnic boundaries.

  The pastor lavished praise on the efforts of the committee and on the community for its involvement in placing the refugees in homes. As he said, “It is entirely right and proper that our organization is known as CUP, because as our Lord and Master said, ‘Whoever gives a cup of cold water to the needy, it is the same as doing it for Him.’ We may not be able to do much; we may not be able to do all we wish we could, or as quickly as we might wish, but nevertheless, we persist. Each child given shelter, each family given hope, is yet another cup of refreshment. And as the Lord adds, so I also say to you, ‘You shall not lose your reward.’”

  But if Sunday mornings were awkward, the Lord’s Day afternoons were downright agonizing. It was around teatime on Sundays that families arrived en masse to look for children to foster.

  Despite all CUP’s good intentions and Pastor Swanson’s kind words, the process shared many of the qualities of a cattle market. Or, as Eben Golah whispered to me, “A slave auction.”

  All too often the young and cute children were placed in homes right away, leaving their older siblings to languish unwanted against the pillars—the human debris of war. After any blue-eyed, blond-haired urchins had been carted away by families looking for living dolls, next came a cadre of hard-eyed, keen-witted bargainers, who almost had to be prevented from checking teeth and arm strength. These folks were searching for unpaid servants, particularly docile maids, and to some extent, broad-shouldered, young males for service on farms, to replace men absent in the military.

  No matter how alarming the motives, we could not turn down those willing to accept refugee children. If our interviews determined the offered living conditions were acceptable and the family’s ability to provide food and clothing adequate, then we had little choice but to agree.

  When the immediate sorting had been completed and those interviews accomplished, I looked around the room at the ones who had not been selected. Some offered sheepish grins, as if still hoping to find favor. Some glared sullenly, defying anyone to reduce their worth to insignificance because of their hair color or their lack of ability to be beasts of burden.

  And then there were those who turned inward, suffering from God only knew what grief and loss.

  Yosef Helmann was a perfect example of how imperfect was this system. Born into a middle-class Polish-Jewish family in 1925, he grew up in a German village of less than two thousand souls near the Polish border, where his father kept a textile shop. At first everyone got along: Jews and Gentiles, Poles and Germans.

  Then the Nazis came to power.

  In 1934 Yosef saw his father beaten and left for dead by SA thugs. In 1936 Yosef himself was thrown out of a second-story window by exuberant Hitler Youth eager to prove themselves equal to their elders in their capacity for evil and senseless violence.

  Now, at age fourteen, with his scarred face, crooked right arm, and thick glasses, Yosef was alone in an alien land, desired by no one. On his face I read resignation and the desire to end it all. Had I ever been that despairing? After less than a decade and a half of life, was there no hope left for him?

  I called him over and tried to console him. This I knew I could not accomplish by false promises that next Sunday would be better or different, so I recounted my own story about escaping from Brussels to England via Dunkirk. How even then I had not known my father and my husband were both dead.

  Yosef nodded solemnly. “Two years ago next October the Nazis told us we had to leave our home. Poles, but especially Polish-Jews, were not wanted in Germany. We were given one day to gather our belongings and leave for Poland.

  “But do you know what happened then? The Poles didn’t want us either! We were put in a camp between the Polish and German frontiers—a place called Zbaszyn.”

  I acknowledged that I had heard of that horrid place.

  “The lucky ones slept twenty to a small tent. The rest of us shared smelly blankets on wet ground all winter long.” He paused, then shuddered. “I hate cabbage soup. That’s all we ate for six months, I think.”

  “How did you get here?” I encouraged him to continue speaking, trying to establish a connection with him.

  Yosef removed his glasses and wiped them on his sleeve. After he replaced them, he resumed, “Three trainloads of us were packed up and sent to the sea coast. Only children, you see. None of the rest of my family.” His voice trailed away as we both contemplated what that separation had cost him and what it probably meant. He resumed, “We didn’t even know where we were going. Some said Russia; others, Palestine. It wasn’t until we were crammed onto a ship that we learned we were coming to England. They assigned me to the grounds of a summer youth camp. It was better than Zbaszyn,” he said, offering me a sly sideways glance and a wry smile. “Do the British really think the rest of the world eats smoked fish for breakfast and sausages for supper?”

  I smiled in return. “I do not understand kippers either.”

  “Anyway,” Yosef said with a shrug, “when it rained, the camp flooded, so we all had to move again. The next camp over was already full to bursting, so they sent me here instead,
where I’m likely to remain until I’m sixteen and forced out on the street.”

  “That’s not going to happen,” I vowed, somewhat foolishly. Oh, Lord, I prayed. How much is enough? When do You show Yourself to be all-loving and all-merciful?

  “Pardon me, miss,” said a voice at my elbow.

  I looked up to find a tastefully dressed man, of medium height and build, holding a bowler hat as he bowed to me. I almost snickered at the seeming caricature but restrained myself just in time as I recognized what the English call a “gentleman’s gentleman,” or man-servant.

  “May I help you?” I said.

  Yosef started to edge away from me but something prompted me to seize his arm and hold on.

  “That gentleman over there,” the valet said, pointing to Eben Golah, who smiled and waved, “said to speak with you about placing some boys with our establishment.”

  “Your establishment?”

  “I’m sorry if I’m not making myself clear. My name is Flornoy, miss, valet to his Lordship, Baron de Rothschild.”

  “His…lordship?” Realizing I sounded near to babbling, I swallowed carefully and observed, “Of course. How many can you accommodate?”

  “His lordship specified boys,” Flornoy said. “I should think, twenty or twenty-five, if you have that many.”

  Without stopping to take a breath I said in a rush, “This is Yosef. He is my assistant and will be in charge of gathering…twenty-five, you said? It should take…fifteen minutes.”

  A few days went by, and then I received a letter from Yosef Helmann:

  Dear Missus Kepler,

  We are at the Baron’s country home. As the English say: “We have fallen into a tub of butter!” There is a lake here on which we may canoe, and tennis courts! We have a regular school. We sleep only three to a room. And best of all, the village lads came to play football with us and when they left said, “Let’s do this again soon.” Can you imagine? And all of us Jews! Thank you for your prayers, Miss Lora. May the Almighty reward you.

  The flush-faced, broad-hipped young woman who stood before me in St. Mark’s Church spoke English with a thick Irish brogue. “Please, yoor ladyship,” she said. “Meghan O’Toole’s me name. From near Warwick.” She pronounced it “Wahr-wick,” instead of the way the English say “Wor-ick.”

  I liked her immediately.

  “My name is Lora Kepler, Meghan,” I corrected. “And I’m not a ladyship. How can I assist you?”

  “Well, yoor lay—Missus Kepler, that is—it’s like this: I’m maid-of-all-work to the Tunstall family; them as has gone to America. So they left me in charge, don’tcha see? To mind after the big house in their absence. There’s just me and Liam, but we does what’s needed.”

  “Yes, I see,” I encouraged.

  “So, me and Liam,” she continued, “we wuz talkin’. ’Bout bringin’ in a coupla them foreign kids, like. Them as has nowhere’s else to go.”

  “I’m not sure we can do that,” I said with reluctance. It was difficult to pass up any willing volunteers. “Without the consent of the Tunstalls we couldn’t billet children—”

  Meghan’s plump hands flew to her rosy cheeks. “Oh, I wasn’t meanin’ that! Not atall, atall! Never in the big house! I’ve me own cottage, don’tcha see, as does Liam. Well, mine’s good and snug, with a fine thatched roof. And I’ve got room and to spare…now.” She paused, seeming to need a moment to come to grips with some inner turmoil, before continuing.

  “Anyways,” she resumed, “Liam allows as how he could use the help, what with him gettin’ on in years, and there still bein’ the livestock and the gardens to tend and all. So if you’d be havin’ a pair of strapping girls not afraid of a bit o’ work, I promise to see ’em cared for and fed and all.”

  My thoughts instantly leapt to the Cohen sisters. Ages ten and fourteen, they were raven-haired Jewish beauties from Hamburg. With their heavy, dark eyebrows and prominent noses the girls were the total antithesis of Aryan perfection and well off to be out of Germany. They had left father and mother and one older brother behind, not knowing if they would ever see them again.

  Strong and bright, you would think their placement would be simple, but it had not proved so. They spoke Yiddish and German, but their English was limited to a few simple phrases. This had already been cause enough for them to be considered and rejected a few times; that, and the fact they were desperate to not be separated from each other.

  I had tried to reassure them that any parting would be only temporary, but the younger, Leah, clung to her sister, Naomi, and sobbed. I made up my mind to keep them together at all costs.

  “Meghan, I think that’s a wonderful idea. And I think I know just the girls for you.”

  I summoned Leah and Naomi from where the sisters were helping mothers tend their babies. I had them stand beside me and instructed them, in German, to introduce themselves, which they did.

  Meghan’s face broke into a brilliant, gap-toothed smile, but before she could speak, the woman behind her in the queue interrupted: “I can’t imagine what you must be thinking.”

  It took me a moment to realize she was addressing me.

  My chastiser was an angular English woman, thin of face, body, and legs. She was clearly agitated, and her right thumbnail picked incessantly at the other fingers of that hand as she spoke. “These young women are Germans, are they not? They are already suspect as enemy foreigners, wouldn’t you say?”

  Leah did not understand the words, but the hostility came through loud and clear. She buried her face in her sister’s sweater, while Naomi glared at the woman.

  “What are you trying to say?” I demanded.

  “Are you foreign too?” The woman sniffed. “Even so, you can’t be unaware of how things stand in this country. Everyone knows that Ireland is a hotbed of German spies. Why, even now the Irish are in league with Hitler, planning to invade us. Are you trying to plant an entire Fifth Column in the heart of England? Aren’t there camps for such as these?”

  Her expression implied she thought Meghan should likewise be interned.

  Meghan’s head bobbed in a slantwise motion. “I didn’t think. Wasn’t meanin’ to cause no trouble, I’m sure.” With a last sorrowful look, mirrored in Leah’s pleading eyes, Meghan turned to go.

  At that moment something whispered a question in my mind and I called out, “Meghan, wait. What did you mean when you said you had room to spare…now?”

  Wiping her eyes on her sleeve Meghan faced me again. “It’s this way. Me man, Sean…four years wed, we wuz, and him a soldier. I just got word from his mates as come home from Dunkirk. Sean was… killed on the beach, so he won’t be comin’ home, you see.”

  “I lost my husband too,” I said, and before I knew it Meghan and I and the Cohen sisters were tangled in a fierce embrace of shared loss.

  I like to think my formidable stare would have shriveled the English woman like an overdone joint of stringy beef. But when I searched for her again, she was nowhere to be seen.

  There was joy in Inga’s expression as we organized the sleeping quarters for mothers and children refugees who remained at St. Mark’s. We set up bunk beds in schoolrooms in the annex, freeing up the pews in the main auditorium for lectures and music concerts and children’s activities.

  I believe Inga might have regained her desire to live if it had not been for one woman who had been a long-time member of the congregation of the church. The woman’s name was Mrs. Reese. She had been the president of the Women’s Auxiliary at St. Mark’s for many years.

  Hermione warned me, “When Mrs. Reese is in the building, something very dark indeed seems to sit whispering upon her shoulder. She has told the rector that our church has no business taking in enemy aliens who have never been given a classification. She hates Germans. But she hates Jews even more. We may have some trouble from that quarter.”

  Hermione’s prediction was not long in coming true. Mrs. Reese’s resentment of strangers and foreigners invading her territor
y was clear to those of us who worked day to day among the refugees.

  As the temperatures climbed, rationed bathing gave St. Mark’s the permanent and offensive aroma of strong onions. Inga was changing the soiled nappies of a tiny baby when Mrs. Reese stopped to reprimand her. How dare she wash a baby’s behind beneath the stained-glass images of Peter, James, and John? It was, she proclaimed, the desecration of a holy place.

  Inga attempted to explain in broken English that the toilets always had long lines and that the baby needed his nappies now or risk a rash.

  “This is the last straw!” Mrs. Reese roared. “I never thought I would live to see such a thing. Look at you! Jew! You have no respect for our church. None. Desecration! Last straw! We’ll see about this.” Mrs. Reese proclaimed that “her” beloved church had been overrun by filthy, illiterate foreigners and that she intended to put an end to it. As Inga dissolved into tears, the woman stormed from the building.

  That evening Mrs. Reese returned, looking very smug as she led the head of the local branch of the Home Guard to Hermione in the office. Colonel Taylor was an elderly gentleman who had fought in the Great War. His time in the trenches in France had left him with a bitter hatred of all things German. No matter that our residents were German-Jewish women and children who had miraculously escaped from the Nazis. He could not tell the difference between Yiddish and German. To him it all sounded alike. “Besides,” he declared, “there were plenty of German Yids who fought against us in the last war.”

  Mrs. Reese added, “Once a German, always a German. Why are these people not in internment camps like the others?”

  Colonel Taylor waved his swagger stick and with great authority cried, “I demand to see the documents of every enemy alien now housed in St. Mark’s.”

  We had no official documents for these who had most recently crossed the English Channel.

  Hermione squared her shoulders and pointed out that most of the children did not even have shoes to wear. “Nor do the mothers have ration books, let alone the official British immigration documents.”