My Canary Yellow Star (11 page)

“This is impossible! Let’s go home!” I shouted in her ear.

We elbowed our way back out of the crowd. Mama’s carefully pinned hair was tumbling down over her shoulders and our clothes were rumpled. Mama was on the verge of tears, and there was a lump in my throat too. I put my arm through Mama’s and we began the long trudge back down the hill. We were on the steps leading down to the river when the sirens began to scream.

“My God! An air raid!” Mama cried.

I cupped my hands over my eyes to look up into the sunny sky. It was clear of airplanes, but the sirens kept on wailing. “We’ve got to find a shelter!” I said.

“Where?”

We both knew that we were only allowed to use the shelters in yellow-star houses. And even in those houses, the safest spots, the ones along the basement walls, were reserved for Christian tenants. We hadn’t passed any yellow-star houses on our way to the Swedish embassy.

Now the street was filling up with people. They were leaving their homes and heading for a tall, official-looking
building at the end of the street. Several people carried suitcases or backpacks. A man had a mattress on his back. A teenage boy was clutching an ugly little white dog in his arms to prevent the yelping puppy from running away. A little girl was dangling a birdcage from her hands. The yellow budgie in it was hiding its head under its wings.

At the entrance of the tall building, an old soldier barred our way. Something seemed oddly familiar about him, then I realized he was dressed in the same uniform from the Great War that Grandpapa Weisz had worn. His photo flashed in front of me – it used to be proudly displayed on top of the piano in my grandmother’s apartment on Rose Hill.

“Get away from here, Jewish filth!” The soldier slammed the door in our faces.

A huge bang. A building exploded in a funnel of fire at the other end of the street. We ran in the opposite direction, taking refuge under a canopied iron gate leading to the garden of a villa. The bombing continued. The smoky stench of the fires made my nose twitch and my eyes burn. A large smoke rectangle appeared high in the sky. As soon as I saw it, I realized that American bombers were hiding high above the clouds and carpet bombing was about to begin. The first missile fell with a loud whooshing noise.

“What are we going to do?” Mama cried. She sounded frantic.

“Let’s go to that apartment house,” I suggested, pointing
to a large building on the other side of the street. “They’ll have a shelter for sure.”

“They won’t let us in!” Mama said, touching the yellow star over her heart.

Before she could stop me, I grabbed the yellow material and tore it off her dress. Then I ripped my own star off my blouse.

“Marta, are you crazy? If they catch us, we’ll be transported!”

“If we can’t get into a shelter, we’ll be killed! Let’s go!” As I grabbed hold of her arm and pushed her toward the building, I noticed that the black stitch marks where the star had been were still visible. We had to make them disappear.

“Dear God, what are we going to do?” Mama wailed.

I ran into the rose garden behind the canopied gate, crouched down, grabbed a handful of dirt, and rubbed it over the front of my shirt. Then I scooped up more dirt and smeared it over the front of Mama’s dress. We were both filthy, but the outlines of the stars were gone.

We ran across the street into the tall building. Arrows painted onto the walls directed us to the entrance of the air-raid shelter. The door of the shelter was locked from the inside. We banged and banged until our knuckles hurt. The din outside was growing louder by the moment. Just then, the door opened slightly and a black eye peered out and looked us over. The owner of the eye opened the door wide.

“Come in! Hurry up! It’s dangerous out there!” he commanded.

We ran down the worn stone steps. The apartment house’s bomb shelter, which was also its basement, was full of people. A bare light bulb in the center of the room lit the tense faces. Every inch of floor space was occupied. People were standing in groups or sitting on the cement floor quietly talking to one another. A woman was crooning to a baby in her arms. Mama and I sat down quietly on the floor near the exit, careful not to call attention to ourselves. We held hands tightly for comfort. Although I was very frightened by the bombing, I was also glad to hear the explosions. Every bomb the Americans dropped meant the war was coming closer to an end and Papa would soon be coming home.

A middle-aged man with a brown beret sidled up to me where I sat on the floor. I slid farther away from him. The man came even closer until his leg was pressed against mine.

“Hey!” he whispered.

I turned my face away and tried to ignore him.

“Hey!” he repeated, pushing something into my lap. I looked down and saw that it was the jacket of his suit. “Put on my jacket to cover that star!” he whispered urgently.

I looked down at my blouse. I saw that the dirt had flaked off my shirt and the outline of the six-pointed star was again visible. Fortunately, Mama’s was still covered by earth. I shrugged on the man’s jacket and buttoned it with
shaking fingers. Just then, there was a tremendous bang outside. The building shook mightily and the lights went out. I hid my face in Mama’s shoulder. A child began to wail, and a woman at the back made a wild keening sound. Finally the all-clear signal sounded and the lights flickered on again. I turned to my neighbor to thank him, but he was gone. I wore the jacket home.

One afternoon a few days later, I had the apartment to myself. Grandmama was resting and the others had gone to look for groceries. I lay on my mattress, eyes closed, luxuriating in the silence. The sound of the doorbell made me jump. When I looked through the peephole, I saw it was Peter. I recognized the red-headed boy standing beside him. He had gone to school with Ervin, but I couldn’t remember his name. I swept the door open.

“Marta, nice to see you,” Peter said. “Do you know Sam Stein?”

“Ervin has talked about you,” I told him. He was not wearing a yellow star and I could see how nervous he was by the way he kept tapping his foot.

He looked around the room. “Is Ervin home?”

“Nobody is here except my grandmother and me. And she’s having a nap. Everybody else is at the grocer’s. They should be home soon, however; the curfew will be starting shortly.”

“I would have preferred to talk to Ervin, but we’ll have to tell Marta instead,” Sam said to Peter. “We can’t stay here until he gets home. They’re waiting for us.”

Peter nodded and turned to me. “I won’t tell you more than I absolutely have to, Marta. It’s safer like that. You know that Sam is working with the Resistance. When Ervin and I told him that you couldn’t get into the Swedish embassy to obtain Schutz-Passes for your family, Sam found out that Mr. Wallenberg moves about to different locations to do his rescue work. We have an address. Come with us.”

“Oh, Sam, how can we ever repay you?” I hugged him so tightly that he grunted in protest.

“You must bring photographs with you,” he said.

I took out the family albums and flipped through the pages of smiling babies, solemn brides, and vacations by the lake, removing faded photographs that could substitute for passport pictures. It took a few minutes, but I finally had pictures of each of us. I wrapped them in a sheet of newspaper and carefully put them in my purse.

“Can Judit come with us?” I asked the boys.

“Not today. They’re expecting only one person,” Peter said.

“We’ll have to ask them to put us up for the night, Marta,” Sam said. “Peter can go home, but we can’t risk it, especially if they give you Schutz-Passes. You don’t want to be caught with six of them in your possession.”

I wrote a quick note telling Mama that I wouldn’t be
home until the next day. I asked her not to worry and promised to explain everything when I returned. I knew she would be furious with me and terrified, but it couldn’t be helped.

After I grabbed my purse, we were on our way. I was careful to close our apartment door gently so I wouldn’t wake Grandmama. In spite of the hot August sun, I covered the yellow star on my blouse with a sweater and prayed that we wouldn’t be stopped by the Arrow Cross, the police, or the Germans.

“We’re going to 2 Percel Street,” Sam announced.

It took us a while to walk the long streets of apartment blocks. We were afraid to take the streetcar. Number 2 was a large and elegant building. We climbed to the third floor and rang the doorbell of a corner apartment. The door was opened a crack by a slight young man with the bluest eyes I had ever seen. He was dressed in a dark suit and had a brown rucksack in his hand. I was surprised by the sturdy hiking shoes on his feet.

“Can I help you?” he asked. He spoke Hungarian with a strong foreign accent.

Sam whispered something in his ear.

“Just a minute,” the man said. He went back into the apartment, closing the door behind him. We waited silently on the doorstep until he reappeared a few minutes later.

“You must speak to Goldberg,” he said. “He will help you.” He noticed that I was staring at his hiking shoes. “A
person never knows when he will have to march long distances,” he said with a wry smile. “Good shoes can mean the difference between life and death.”

He opened the door wider and motioned for us to go in. Then, with a wave of his hand, he headed down the stairs.

We found ourselves in a large apartment. The vast room was full of desks, the same kind that we used to have at school. There were at least a hundred little children sleeping on the desktops. A very fat man was standing in a corner of the spacious room, holding a crying child in his arms. The little boy couldn’t have been more than four years of age. When the man saw us, he murmured to the little boy and gently put him down on an empty desk. The child fell asleep immediately.

“I am Goldberg,” the man said. His Hungarian was very poor. “We speak quiet … little ones sleep.” His smile was kind.

We introduced ourselves. Mr. Goldberg seemed to understand what we were saying to him.

“You meet Wallenberg. He let you in,” he said.

“Wallenberg?” Peter asked. “A man opened the door for us, but he didn’t tell us his name. He told us to speak to you.”

“Man … Wallenberg, ya! He tell me you here. He say I listen. Why you here?”

I unbuttoned my sweater. The six-pointed star was bright against the white material of my blouse. Goldberg’s
face became solemn. I explained to him that we desperately needed Schutz-Passes.

“Please, sir,” I pleaded. “We’re hungry, we’re afraid, but we want to live. We want to buy time until the war ends. The Schutz-Passes will do that for us. Please, sir, help us.”

Goldberg sighed deeply. “You Swedish?” he asked. “Papa Swedish? Mama Swedish, eh?”

“None of us. We’re Hungarians, but we’re Jewish.”

“I understand.”

I repeated what Grandmama had told us. “My grandfather used to import lumber from Sweden.”

“Lumber? Don’t understand,” Goldberg said.

“Trees, wood … Bring from Sweden,” I explained.

“Trees! Trees! Good!” he cried. “When bring trees?”

“I don’t know. Before I was born.”

“Sweden trees, sure?”

I nodded. He looked at me for a long moment, scratching his chin pensively.

“Good, lumber good,” he said. “Come.”

He led us to a black roll-top desk below a tall window. With a key from his pocket he opened it, revealing several stacks of neatly piled documents.

“How many family?” he asked.

“Six of us, sir: my mother, brother, grandmother, aunt, cousin, and me.”

“Have pictures?”

I handed the photos to him.

He deliberately counted out six official-looking documents from one of the stacks of papers in the desk.

“Passport, Schutz-Pass,” he said, pointing to the documents.

He pulled down the roll-top, locked the desk, and the four of us went into the kitchen and settled at an old wooden table. Each of the documents in front of Goldberg had the word “Schutz-Pass” printed at the top. Each bore a replica of the Swedish crown and the signature of Minister Ivan Danielsson. All six protective passports were stamped by an official seal. I wrote out our names for Goldberg. He copied each one into a Schutz-Pass. He also filled in the date and pasted the photographs into the passports. He gave me all six protective passports, and I put them carefully into my purse.

“Thank you, sir! Thank you! You gave us life!” In my joy, I kissed his hand.

“No, no,” he cried. “You thank Wallenberg, not me! I work here. Wallenberg, he bring Schutz-Pass here!”

“God bless you, sir, and God bless Mr. Wallenberg!”

Goldberg patted my hand. He pointed to the star on my blouse. “Take off. Not need … Schutz-Pass.” He walked over to one of the kitchen cabinets and took out a large pair of scissors. “Take off,” he said again.

I carried the scissors into the bathroom, took off my blouse, and unpicked the stitches. Then I cut the canary
yellow material into tiny pieces and flushed them down the toilet. I gazed at myself in the mirror above the sink. The star was gone and the old Marta had reappeared. I felt light, as if I could fly.

Sam explained to Mr. Goldberg that it was dangerous for the two of us to return home that night because of the curfew. We said goodbye to Peter and he left. Goldberg gave us slices of black bread to munch on for supper, then we settled down for the night on the floor under the kitchen table.

Mama was waiting at the window when I returned home the next day. First she hugged me, then she started yelling at me.

“Thank God you’re all right! How could you do this to me, Marta? You must have known I’d be frantic. And you’re not wearing your star!”

“I’m sorry, Mama, but I had no choice.” I stopped her torrent of words by taking her Schutz-Pass out of my purse and giving it to her. I handed around the others as well. Mama and Aunt Miriam wept. Ervin and Gabor whooped for joy.

“So honorable, good men
do
still exist in our world,” Grandmama said.

“How did you get these Schutz-Passes?” Ervin asked. His voice was laced with envy.

I told them all about Sam’s visit, and how we had gone to a safe house and met Goldberg and Wallenberg.