My Family for the War (38 page)

“Is there any other news?” I asked nervously.

“Not that I know of. At home the letters from Walter are piling up. I’ll bring them to you tomorrow. Matthew will be ecstatic when he hears that you’ve woken up! And Hazel asks about you every day.”

“When can I get out of here?”

“Well, you’ll certainly have to stay a few more days. They have all kinds of tests lined up for you—to see if you’re cross-eyed or see double, or whether the little steel plate in the back of your head can receive radio signals.”

“Mum!” I protested indignantly.

“Sorry. I’m just so happy, Frances. So unbelievably happy!” Amanda wiped her eyes. “And as far as your head… no, take your fingers away! Oh, sweetie. That’s no reason for tears. Your hair will grow back. Take it from me, I’ve been there.”

It was mid-April before I was finally allowed to go home, and summer before the hair on the back of my head was long enough to cover the ugly purple scar from the surgery. I didn’t realize what had really gone on while I was unconscious until after I got home from the hospital. There were signs everywhere: the neglected garden, the dozens of books
carelessly stuffed back into bookshelves after Amanda had read them aloud to me, hoping they would wake me up. Two small books about head injuries and traumatic brain injuries lay on the secretary. I didn’t want to think about what I had been spared.

And yet, it soon became clear that I hadn’t come away quite as intact as we had hoped. I got tired very quickly, and suffered from vertigo and headaches if I wasn’t careful. I wouldn’t be the fastest runner anymore, since my head couldn’t take the jolting, and I had to wear a hat anytime I was outside to protect my head from the sun. Being healthy was the only thing I’d been able to take for granted in my life, and it was hard for me to accept that I was supposed to be impaired now.

Of course, I tried to tell myself that all of that wasn’t important when I had almost died. I might not be able to run, but I could walk normally; I might not be a good student right now, but my brain hadn’t been permanently damaged. I could talk, think, feel, I was loved; I had no right to complain! Matthew took me out to the shed several weeks later and showed me something covered with a blanket: a twisted, bent clump of metal and shredded rubber that I only recognized as my bicycle on second glance. “You’re allowed to be sad and disappointed and angry, as much as you want,” he said, “but when you can’t stand it anymore, just come out here and look at this.”

“I know. And I don’t want to be ungrateful, it’s just that…”

“Ungrateful! What do you have to be grateful for? That someone launched a mine at you and happened to miss?”

I looked at him, confused. “I’d be bloody angry!” Matthew
declared, a statement so out of character for him that I almost had to laugh.

I watched as he spread the blanket over what was left of the bike. “There are a few things I’m grateful for,” I said. “That I’m allowed to be with you, for one.”

“You can look at that another way too. If Hitler, cursed be his name, hadn’t become Reichskanzler, you would still have your own parents.”

“True, but then I wouldn’t know that I’m Jewish.”

“That wouldn’t even be a factor. At any rate, it’s not a reason to be grateful.”

“Fine, how about this: I wouldn’t be me!”

Matthew looked at me mischievously. “Now, that is a tough one!” he admitted. “Give me a few days, I’ll think of something!”

“I doubt that,” I countered, and noticed that my dark mood had passed, at least for the day.

Matthew held the door open for me, we stepped out into the sunlight, and I gave him a kiss. Suddenly he wasn’t laughing anymore. “We thought we had lost you.”

“You didn’t, and you won’t either.” I said. “I’ll always love my mother. I’ll never stop hoping and praying until I find her again. But it won’t change anything anymore. My life is here, with you.”

How simple and clear it was. For years I had tortured myself with this question. It had never occurred to me to make a decision before I knew if Mamu would return—or just to make the decision myself! I always thought it was her answer, her decision. I had always feared them both.

It felt rather audacious not to wait for her permission. I
imagined stepping up to her and announcing: “I don’t want my old life back, Mamu. I’d like for you to be part of my new life, and Amanda and Matthew are part of it too.”

But that’s where my fantasy ended. I started to get butterflies in my stomach, and I couldn’t begin to imagine how she’d react. I only knew that this was all I had to offer her.

In May the Germans surrendered Monte Cassino and retreated farther north, followed by the Eighth Army. The Allies invaded Normandy in summer, and within a few weeks, large parts of France and Belgium were controlled by the Americans, the British, and their allies. The Soviets advanced toward Poland. More German cities fell, including Berlin; after months of heavy bombardment it was little more than a ghostly hull of dead walls and half-buried cellars where starving, ravaged people found shelter.

At home we prayed with renewed hope for a quick German surrender. It had to have been clear even to Hitler that he had lost the war. But he chose to let it drag on day after day and be responsible for yet more deaths, not to mention the intrusions into the lives of millions of people. An assassination attempt by his own officers failed, and instead of longed-for peace, there was a new threat for British civilians: remote-controlled rockets that could be launched at us at any time and without any warning, literally out of a clear blue sky. The only defense against them was not to think about it too much.

And yet we began to make plans again, to think of the future. The blackout was lifted—one evening Matthew and I came out of the Elysée and stood in the light, speechless
with joy. Mrs. Collins and the kids returned from Wales. I spent time with my books every day to make up the work I had missed, and two afternoons a week Mrs. Collins helped me. She had been the one to offer, and I happily accepted.

She was also the one who planted an exciting new idea in my head.

“Do you remember the foreign affairs conference last year?” I asked Amanda and Matthew excitedly. “When Molotov spoke, someone stood there and translated directly into English. Mrs. Collins thinks I could do something like that: interpret for German and English, and maybe another language too, that I could learn at college.”

“A lot of young women are going to college nowadays!” I saw Amanda’s face light up as the idea took hold in her mind as quickly as it had in mine. “It’s not as unusual as it was when we were young, Matthew.”

“You don’t have to convince me, dear. Frances as an interpreter would be logical after the last five years, don’t you think?”

They looked at each other almost joyfully, then Amanda said, “We’ve been setting aside money for Gary’s education since he was born, and now it’s lying around in a bank account because we wanted to spend it for something really important. Something that would have meant something to him.”

“That’s out of the question,” I protested immediately. “I won’t take money from you.”

“You’re not taking it from us, it’s from him. You can’t refuse it, love. He was the first one who translated for you, have you forgotten?”

I shook my head silently. “The lovely Mrs. Collins,” Amanda said, and stood up to pour us more tea. “That’s the best idea I’ve heard in a long time. I think I can finally forgive her for putting you in the first grade way back when.”

“I can’t wait to hear what Walter will say about this!” I blurted out.

But before I could share my news with him, something happened that overshadowed all these wonderful plans and made them fade into the distance. On July 23, 1944, the Red Army liberated the Majdanek concentration camp in eastern Poland. What the world had not dared to think was now thrown in our faces—in pictures that intimated far greater horrors than anything we could have imagined until that day.

“It’s the immigration office…”

“For me… ?” Hesitantly I took the receiver from Amanda.
Yes
, I confirmed,
I am Ziska Mangold from Berlin.

Did I know a certain Erik Bechstein?

A sharp pain bore into the back of my head.
Yes, I know Erik Bechstein. He’s my uncle. My uncle Erik.

It was several days before we could pick him up. Illegal immigrants were usually sent back where they came from without further ado, but a Jew who had escaped from the Nazis and managed to make his way to England could certainly hope for generosity in the first months after the concentration camps were brought to light. And where would they have sent Uncle Erik?

“You get the room where almost all of my friends have stayed,” I said as I led him up the stairs.

We hadn’t said much to each other since we had found each other in the hallway at the immigration office. “They’re in a safe place,” were Uncle Erik’s first words. He knew, of course, that there had been only one thought on my mind since I had received that phone call: Where was Mamu?

I had almost expected that we wouldn’t recognize each other after five and a half years, but I was wrong, although Uncle Erik was noticeably shocked when I stood before him—as if he had thought I’d be a ten-year-old Ziska after all this time! He didn’t look much different at all, just a bit slimmer, and very pale, as if he hadn’t seen daylight in a long, long time. As I soon found out, that was true.

It wasn’t until I introduced him that I saw he was a different person; the man who shyly shook hands with Amanda and Matthew bore no resemblance to the cheerful, resilient uncle of my childhood. “. . . pleased to meet you,” he mumbled in heavily accented English. “Forgive me for being here.”

“We are very happy to have you, Herr Bechstein,” replied Matthew emphatically. An hour later Uncle Erik set down his threadbare suitcase next to Gary’s bed. “Nice,” he commented as he looked around.

“This was supposed to be Bekka’s,” I explained. Uncle Erik promptly looked like he wanted to cry again. “Evchen and Betti…” he started.

The horror sliced me like a hot blade. I had never experienced anything like it; a premonition that almost threw me to the floor. “No!” I whispered.

“They were in a convent in Belgium, about two kilometers
away from me. I ran there just as soon as the Americans liberated our town. No one was there, not the children and not the nuns who had hidden them. Someone reported them in the spring and they were taken to Mechelen, the Belgian concentration camp.”

“But the Americans…”

“Too late. Mechelen was evacuated.”

“Evacuated… ?”

“Auschwitz. Gassed right after they arrived, like all the children.”

Uncle Erik set his suitcase on the bed and started to unpack. I stood there without moving, almost without breathing. “And you?” he asked in a monotone. “Lots of destruction, I see.”

“Gary is dead. My… my brother.”

He looked up. I stared back, caught completely off guard and surprised that anything could shock him, after what he had just told me. He gestured toward the door. “Their son?” I nodded.

Agitated, my uncle rubbed his chin and I heard his stubble bristle. “How terrible. Something like that shouldn’t happen to people who help the Jews!”

“They’re Jewish themselves, Uncle Erik.”

“Still. I have to tell them how sorry I am. Such kind faces! You learn to have a good eye for faces when you’re Jewish, Ziska.”

I reached past him and gently shut his suitcase. “Let’s go outside. The sun is shining and Mum must have tea ready by now.”

“That’s what you call her… Mum?”

I blushed. “It doesn’t have anything to do with Mamu,” I started, but Uncle Erik shook his head.

“It’s all right. It’s been more than five years. You had to find some way to survive too, didn’t you?”

I looked at him, stunned. Stunned that he understood.

A safe address: In the summer of 1942, that was the only thing Jews in occupied Holland could still hope for. When my mother found a safe address for herself and her sister in a house owned by two older women, there was no time to lose: Aunt Ruth and my young cousins had already received a deportation notice.

But Frau Zaandvort, who was forced to do compulsory labor in the same canned food processing plant as Mamu, had given her something else: contact with a group that hid Jewish children under false identities in Belgian convents and homes. In the same night that Mamu and Aunt Ruth went underground with the old women, who wouldn’t have wanted to take in either a man or two children, Uncle Erik set off to bring Evchen and Betti to the Belgian border.

He found a hideout for himself in the back room of a potato cellar on a Belgian farm. From there, he could just hear the bells at the convent that harbored Evchen and Betti chiming in the distance every morning, noon, and night.

I tried to imagine how it must have been after the liberation, his anticipation, the unbearable tension as he ran through the forest to the convent—the first time he had seen the sun in twenty months. And then his disbelief and horror as the last two old nuns tearfully told him what had happened that spring.

Uncle Erik didn’t waste many words on something that couldn’t be expressed. He picked up his story three weeks later, as if everything in between just hadn’t happened. A man arranged passage for my uncle on a boat that would bring him to the coast of England, since he had mentioned that he had a niece living in London.

Had he considered staying and waiting until Aunt Ruth and Mamu were liberated, I asked gently? Holland was still under German control, but the Allies were inching closer and closer every week and were already approaching Arnhem.

Uncle Erik looked at me with tortured eyes. “And then what?” he asked. “Should I tell Ruth that I lost the children?”

That was, in fact, the one question that weighed on him constantly, until after several days he came to the conclusion that he had made an enormous mistake. What was he doing in England? He had to go back as soon as possible and find his wife!

With difficulty we convinced him not to risk crossing the English Channel, which was scattered with mines, until Holland had been liberated—a matter of a few weeks, we assumed. Weeks passed and turned into months. In spring, when the Germans had been driven from all the countries around Holland, and Aachen was the first German city to fall under American control, and Montgomery advanced on Bremen and Hamburg, the Dutch still awaited their liberation.