Munich Signature (15 page)

The image made her anxious. There were no life jackets to toss into the dark seas. Only half a dozen lifeboats. If he was swept away, how would she manage the children?

“Klaus?” she called feebly. He did not hear her. “Klaus?” she called again, wanting to pull him into the security of their little compound beneath the ventilation shaft.

“I’ll get him, Mama.” Trudy raised her head and struggled to sit up.

Trudy was a good girl, a helpful child, even if she did ask too many questions.

Maria put her hand on Trudy’s forehead and pressed her back. “No. No. Let it be. Your father has many things to think about. He needs a little peace.”
He needs to be alone.
She did not say the last words out loud because there certainly was no way for anyone to be alone on this vessel.

Klaus turned again. His deep brown eyes met Maria’s weary gaze. He almost smiled, and she read his thoughts as he shrugged sheepishly.
So, here we are! This is what we spent so many months longing for and praying for! Look, Maria! The sea voyage we always wanted!

Maria raised an eyebrow and answered with a half smile. Klaus looked down at his feet and began his slow, precarious walk back through the prostrate bodies to his family. Maria saw the humor in this as well. Klaus liked her sense of humor. Even in the most dreadful circumstances, Maria had always managed that smile.

“Pardon me.
Bitte. Bitte.
Ah, pardon, Frau . . . ” Klaus stepped over his suitcase into the circle of safety. There was still no place to put his feet without stepping on a sprawled child. In invitation, Maria tugged the limp figure of little Katrina into her arms.

“They seem to have settled a bit.” She patted the empty square of deck and Klaus awkwardly folded his body downward to sit beside her.

“This will pass,” he said with a nod.

“Of course it will,” Maria answered. “Everything in our stomachs has passed already. What is left? Besides, the baby—”

Klaus exhaled with the same sigh that puffed out his cheeks—a nervous habit, one he adopted when he was not quite certain. “This is the worst of it. You’ll see. By tomorrow the children will not even notice the swells.”

“At least no one is thinking of food now, eh, Klaus?”

He patted her cheek. “Or anything else, my beauty.” He winked, then tucked a wisp of Maria’s brown hair back beneath the navy blue shawl she wore. “All appetites have grown pale, I fear.”

She smiled weakly into the gentle face of her husband. Ten years of marriage had produced five bright, happy children. Neighbors commented on the regularity with which Maria Holbein had delivered baby girls. It had become a joke among the other professors at the University of Hamburg, where Klaus had taught chemistry until 1935: “Klaus Holbein and Maria—what chemistry between them,
ja
?”

Somewhere along the line Jewish babies had ceased to be a laughing matter. Jewish chemistry professors had become something to despise. One thing had led to another, and finally to this tiny fragment of iron tossing about on the North Sea. Klaus was thirty-seven, Maria just thirty-five.

“The appetite will return—” Maria touched his cheek—“when we have found a harbor.”

Klaus raised his chin slightly and looked away as if to sniff the air for land. “A port. Yes.” He gazed down at his now sleeping children. “Stuffed into this leaking bottle, we have become God’s message to the conscience of the world, Maria. Floating, bobbing along. And will they stoop to pluck us from the waves, I wonder?” The amusement faded from his eyes and deep sadness settled in.

Maria did not answer him. A little hand reached up and tugged on the sleeve of his tweed overcoat. It was Katrina, looking up from Maria’s lap. Her eyes were clearer now, but still pained with a tummy that would not be still. Klaus leaned down to kiss his daughter on the forehead. “What is it, Katrina?”

“Papa?” the child asked, her brown eyes eager, “will you tell us again about Noah? About Noah and his family in the ark?”

Now other eyes opened and looked toward the lean, gangly man who was father, protector, provider, and storyteller.

“Yes, Papa.”

“Tell us, please, again!”

Maria cleared her throat and raised her eyebrow again. Amused. The gesture that Klaus loved. “Yes, Husband,” Maria added her voice. “Noah and the ark. All the animals at sea. What a mess that must have been! But leave out the same details God has left out of the story, will you? There is much, I now realize, that God did not tell about.”

9

Aboard the Ark

It was hours after nightfall before the ocean swells finally collapsed beneath a curtain of thick fog. Klaus and Maria sat with their backs against the vent shaft as the five children used their parents’ laps and legs for pillows.

The steady drone of the aged engines still pulsed from the foghorn. “Like the mating call of Noah’s elephant,” Klaus whispered with a weary smile.

Earlier Klaus had draped a large blanket over the shaft to make a sort of shelter for them. The cold ocean mist penetrated the makeshift tent easily, causing the family to huddle against one another for warmth.

There seemed to be no hint of sorrow now about leaving Germany. They had lost everything, given up everything for a place beneath the vent shaft. Life had been stripped bare of all illusions of what was important. Divested of all superficial worries, Klaus and Maria had found everything that really mattered—their family. To sit with each other and the five children beneath a vent shaft in the fog was the entire focus of all joy and thankfulness. They were alive. They were together.

Had there ever been a time when they had worried about bills? This moment drove that memory from their minds. Had Klaus ever longed for a radio for their apartment? He could not remember the longing. Was it true that Maria had once sat at the table and wept because all five children needed shoes at the same time? That all seemed so long ago. Another lifetime before this, perhaps.

Now silent tears streamed down Maria’s face and blended with the mist. Here was joy. Five tousled heads. Five sets of little feet. A husband beside her. No one missing. None had been lost. Soon they would join Bubbe in America. Boiled down to raw essentials, Maria and Klaus discovered that the only thing essential now was life itself. Neither of them tried to speculate on where they would spend the rest of their lives after they left the place beneath the vent shaft. Perhaps there would be a warm stove and a kitchen table and steaming cups of tea in their future, but they did not imagine that any place on earth would ever seem as wonderful as this place.

On the ship’s bridge, someone clanged the hour on a little bell. It was eleven o’clock. Nearly the end of The Day they left Nazi Germany. Despite seasickness and overcrowding and uncertainty, it had been a perfect day for them.

Here and there across the crowded deck there was soft weeping and muffled moans of grief from those who had not been so lucky as Klaus and Maria. There were those among the refugees who had first lost everything, and then had lost someone.
To lose someone,
Maria thought as she listened to the sobs of a woman beside the rope coil,
that is to lose everything!

Maria rested her cheek against the arm of Klaus and closed her eyes as shadowed figures moved to comfort the woman whose husband had been arrested by the Gestapo that morning.

“Go to sleep, my Maria,” Klaus whispered. “We are together.” His words were a benediction that ended months of worry about travel papers and Gestapo raids. “All of us. Safe.”

Earlier Klaus had explained to the children that Noah had not known where the ark would finally come to rest. The important thing was to get on the boat, to escape the flood and destruction that would surely come. God would find a harbor for them. Somewhere there was a nation that would hold out the olive branch. Somewhere there was a Mount Ararat where this ark would rest.

***

Maria was not certain how long she had been asleep, or if, even now, she was not still asleep. The constant vibration of the ship had lulled her into dreams that stayed with her even after she opened her eyes. In counterpoint to each dull pulse of the giant pistons, she thought she had heard yet another faint thump and the voice of a man crying weakly for help: “Help me! For the love of God . . .”

Maria sat up beside the slumped form of Klaus. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and leaned close to him to see if perhaps he was crying in his sleep. His lips did not move. His breath was steady and even, matching the cadence of the ship’s internal rhythm.

A dream. You have been dreaming, Maria, unless the ship itself calls out.
The thought made her shudder. She listened hard, scanning the sleeping shapes that littered the deck like discarded sacks. Had someone called? Was someone having the nightmare they had all lived through these last months?

“Help . . .
bitte
. . . help me!”

There it was again. Faint, but clear. Far away, as though it came from the bowels of the ship itself. “
Bitte
. . . help . . .”

Ghost ship. Coffin ship. So they had named the little freighter with its cargo of hated Jews. Did the souls of these now cry out as one to the night?

A cold chill of dread coursed through Maria. All the pleasant thoughts of a few hours ago disappeared. Each thump of the engine was answered by a sharp
Clang, Thump! Clang, Thump!
“Help . . .
thump
. . . me!”

This was no dream. The voice did not come from anyone on deck. Indeed, it echoed hollowly from the broad cone of the ventilation shaft—from inside the freighter!

Maria’s mouth was dry. She tried to swallow and then reached out to nudge Klaus awake. Deep in sleep, he moaned a protest and tried to brush her hand away.

“
Bitte
. . . for God’s sake . . .
hilf mir bitte
!” The words were followed by a groan.

“Klaus!” Maria hissed, pounding on her husband’s arm.

Irritated, Klaus sat up reluctantly, and three children protested the motion of their human pillow. “What is it, Maria?” His voice was sharp. “You want me to run downstairs for a cup of tea?”

“Shhhhh!” she insisted, putting her hand on his shoulder and raising her nose as if to sniff the air.

Thump. Clang. Thump. Clang.

“Just the engine.”

“No!
Listen!
”

Clang. Thump!

“It is the engine. You woke me to listen to—”

“Help, please,” the voice cried out again.

Now the eyes of Klaus widened.

“There, you see?” Maria was exultant. Yes! Klaus had heard the voice.

Klaus leaned forward, repeating the steps she had taken to determine where the plea was coming from.
Not the deck
. The voice called out again and Klaus placed his ear against the metal ventilation shaft. He gasped as the clanging sound rang out again.

“Here!” he cried, jumping to his feet. Children tumbled unhappily onto the planks, and the blanket shelter came loose and fell down over them.

“What’s going on?” shouted an angry voice from a few feet away.

“We are trying to sleep here!” protested a woman, struggling to sit up.

Klaus stood on his toes and peered down the curved horn of the giant shaft. “Is someone in there?” he cried.

Faintly the voice replied, “Please! Help . . . me!”

Maria struggled to her feet and stood at the elbow of Klaus. Others among the passengers stumbled to the shaft.

“There is someone down there!”

“You’re all dreaming!”

“No, I tell you—
there
! Did you hear that? A voice!”

As if strengthened by the presence of humans, the voice cried an urgent explanation. “Please! A rope, or I shall fall! The grid broke beneath my feet . . . ”

Klaus shouted to the woman by the rope coil, “Bring some rope!”

Two frail old men tottered to fetch the end of the thick braid.

“Please!” begged the voice in the shaft. “I cannot—”

“It’s a sixty-foot drop if he falls through the shaft,” someone muttered.

“What is he doing in there, anyway?”

“What are we
all
doing on this ship?”

His five excited children clinging to his legs, Klaus fed the rope down the shaft. “It is coming! Hold on! Tell us when you have it!”

“So dark . . . black down here.” The voice echoed. “Hurry.”

“It is coming!” Klaus reassured the man, trying to imagine how anyone might survive in the shaft that dropped straight down. Was the prisoner bracing himself with hands and feet? If so, how would he grasp the rope? Might it slide right down past him?

“Here! I . . . hold on to your end—”

A dozen passengers and two dozen excited children grasped the rope to brace it against the weight of the voice. Like a giant fish on a line, the voice became the weight of flesh and bone suspended in the middle of the vertical shaft.

“Pull him up!” Klaus grimaced at the weight and leaned against it as the group moved inch by inch across the deck in a tug-of-war. “More men!” Klaus groaned as the weight slipped back several inches.

Fortified by the addition of several scrawny adolescents who answered the call, the rope began to move up more quickly.

“I see light!” the voice called loudly. “Thank God! Thank—” And then the voice emerged from the horn of the shaft. The face was blackened with soot. The face had no beard or hair. Large hands were caked with blood and dirt. The voice belonged to a huge man who had been stripped of every excess pound and who now was simply an enormous blackened skeletal frame. This strange apparition slid from the shaft and then, still clinging to the rope, shot out of the cone and crumpled down onto the place Klaus and Maria had chosen for their quarters.

A spotlight shone down from the bridge, showing that the man was completely naked and blackened not from soot alone but from burns that ran in a curved line from the back of his neck to the sole of his right foot. The festering wounds reeked. Their catch from the ventilation shaft was unconscious. Possibly they had rescued him only so he could die in the open air.