Nightfall Over Shanghai (12 page)

June 9 1944

As Franz held Joey in his arms, he surveyed the people gathered on Ward Road. He couldn't remember the last time he had seen a Jewish crowd looking as jubilant. The news of the Allies' D-Day landings had spread from neighbour to neighbour. It was all anyone in the ghetto seemed to be discussing. People clustered around radios, hanging on every word from the banned Voice of America broadcasts, which described the beachheads the Americans, British and Canadians had secured in Normandy. Franz had never heard of any of these places, but it sounded to him as though every square inch of captured sand had come at a bloody cost. The reports reminded him of the gut-wrenching tales of slaughter that he had heard as a teenager in Vienna from traumatized veterans of the Great War.

The collective sense of optimism was contagious. Franz felt a lightness in his step that he hadn't experienced in ages. It had to do with more than just D-Day. Since returning home, the episodes of dizziness had subsided in frequency to one every few days and had become milder in nature. Moreover, a month had passed without a von Puttkamer sighting, though the young
volunteers—many of whom came from the ranks of the Jewish boxing club—still shadowed him on the streets. Franz had even begun to wonder if Ghoya's threat about being dispatched from Shanghai had been nothing more than another one of his groundless threats. Despite Franz's wariness, hope was germinating.

Sunny pointed at a group of young Jewish women across the street. Their faces were pink and vibrant, and they talked animatedly, giggling among themselves while their children ran up and down the sidewalk chasing a soccer ball made of tightly wadded old newspapers and string. Another cluster of women stood at the far end of the block. Across from them, a group of teenagers from the school formed a small circle. Among them was Hannah, whose back was turned to them.

Sunny rolled her eyes good-naturedly. “The way people are carrying on, you would think that Berlin had already fallen.”

Franz shrugged his shoulders as much as he could with Joey asleep in his arms. “Remember when Paris fell to the Nazis and England was teetering? It all seemed so hopeless then.”

“Has it really changed that much?” Sunny asked. “The Germans still hold Paris and, aside from a few beaches in Normandy, the rest of France.”

“True, but now Hitler's precious
Festung Europa—
Fortress Europe—has been breached. People have reason to celebrate. They deserve that much, Sunny.”

She reached for his elbow and gave it an encouraging squeeze. “As do you.”

“Even if Germany does eventually fall, there is still Japan,” Franz pointed out. “Who knows how long they could hang on for?”

She offered him a small rueful smile. “Whether the Japanese admit it or not, the war is lost for them too. Everyone says so.”

Franz chuckled. “By
everyone
, you mean a bunch of refugee gossips?”

“The radio announcers say so too,” Sunny said. “How can one little island empire—no matter how ferocious or vicious—hold off the rest of the world? It's not possible, Franz.”

“Let's hope not,” he said.

Joey squirmed in Franz's arms and mewled. Franz repositioned the baby across his chest, gently swaying him to and fro. Joey found his fingers and began to suck noisily on them. He stared up contentedly at Franz.

“You see,” Sunny cooed. “He loves you.”

“Just because he stopped crying?”

“No, silly, the way he's looking at you. He knows you're his father.”

The idea felt foreign to Franz, as though he were trying on someone else's clothes. Franz wanted to experience that same overwhelming connection to Joey as he had with Hannah in her first months—that sense that nothing else in the world mattered—but he still had too many doubts. “It's all happened so suddenly, Sunny.”

She laughed. “That tends to happen with babies.”

“You know what I mean, darling. I … we had no warning.”

Her lips tightened. “We've discussed this, Franz.”

“Discussed, yes,” Franz said. “We haven't necessarily agreed.”

Sunny stiffened. The last remnant of her smile vanished and her eyes creased into a squint. “So you're still not willing to accept him into our family?”

“It's not so much the issue … a matter of … accepting.” Franz stumbled over the words.

“Then what is the matter?”

“I am not convinced our home is the best place for him—that we should keep him—under the current circumstances.”

Sunny reached out and grabbed Joey out of Franz's arms, startling the baby and dropping his blanket in the process. Franz bent down to pick it up off the filthy sidewalk. He stood up and offered it to her, but she had already turned her back on him. “How can you talk this way?” she demanded.

“I am only trying to be realistic.” He swirled a hand in the air. “This celebration, it's not real. Nothing has changed. We are still prisoners of war.”

“Not forever, we won't be,” she said as she hugged Joey ferociously.

“Perhaps. Until then, every day it's a struggle to find food. Even rice. And, if you're right about Japan's defeat, it will surely only get worse before the war ends. Perhaps much worse. Especially in the ghetto. They will not leave quietly.”

“So you would have me just give Joey away, would you?” she asked, still facing away from him.

Franz reached for her shoulder but stopped himself, knowing she would only shrug it off. “Not forever. No, darling. I'm only suggesting we find him a safe home until our situation here stabilizes. Perhaps one of your cousins' families—the one who lives in Frenchtown, maybe—could take him in? Then when the Japanese are gone …”

Sunny spun back to face him, her eyes red and burning but her expression steadfast. She snatched the blanket from his hand and swaddled it around Joey. “So you have decided, then?” she asked calmly.

Franz shook his hands in frustration. “When have I ever had any say in the matter?”

“From the very first day.”

He shook his head. “No, Sunny. This is exactly like when you joined the Underground.”

“How can you say that, Franz? How can you compare
that
to adopting a child? Is that really how you see it?”

“Only in the sense that you made both decisions without involving me.” And before he stopped himself, he blurted, “Remember how it turned out with the Underground.”

Sunny's mouth fell open and her eyes clouded with hurt. She stared at him. “Joey is my son,” she finally said. “I will never ever abandon him. If he has to leave our home, then so must I.”

“When did I say you should abandon him? I am merely suggesting—”

Sunny pivoted and walked off without waiting for Franz to finish.

Franz stood helplessly on the street corner, watching his wife go, feeling acutely alone. A noise from behind him drew his attention. He glanced over his shoulder and noticed movement at the far end of the street. The crowd of people began to disperse. A number of them called out to their children, who dutifully abandoned their game to join their parents. Two soldiers made their way through the crowd. Ghoya walked between them.

Franz tasted acid. The blood drained from his cheeks. He wondered if he might swoon again, but his fear kept him upright. He glanced over and noticed that Hannah had broken free of her friends and was moving toward him protectively. He waved her off with a small, frantic hand gesture. She stopped where she was, her face taut with worry.

Ghoya's crazed grin was like a dagger to his chest. “Ah, Dr. Adler, we have been looking for you high and low,” the little man
declared as he and his entourage approached. “Yes, yes. High and low. You were not at the hospital or your home, only the other Jewess and her wild brat.” He looked skyward in mock sympathy for Esther's plight. “I knew you couldn't be far. Not far at all.”

Franz didn't reply, just lowered his chin and dropped his gaze to the pavement.

“The time has come, Dr. Adler,” Ghoya announced.

Franz's limbs felt wooden. He didn't dare glance in his daughter's direction. “May I go home and put a bag together before I leave, sir?”

“I am not a savage. You will have plenty of time to say your goodbyes. You will not be leaving until the morning.”

“Am I going back to the Country Hospital, sir?” Franz asked, daring to hope.

“The Country Hospital?” Ghoya echoed in surprise before turning to his subordinates and making a joke in Japanese that evoked only a cackle of his own. “No, no, no. Not the Country Hospital. I believe I was very clear with you in my office. Was I not? You will not be staying in Shanghai.”

“May I ask where I will be sent?”

“Of course you may, Dr. Adler,” Ghoya said, his tone friendly again. “Ichi-Go.”

The word meant nothing to Franz. He couldn't help but steal a glimpse at Hannah, who stood frozen, appearing more crestfallen than frightened. “Where is Ichi-Go, sir?” he finally asked.

“Ichi-Go is not a place, Dr. Adler. No, no. Not a place at all.”

Bewildered and almost beyond caring, Franz just stared blankly at Ghoya.

“Operation Ichi-Go is the future of the great imperial Empire of Japan. And with it, all of Asia.”

July 15, 1944

Franz swallowed more saliva as the truck lurched again on the twisty dirt road, dipping up and down over another massive pothole. He wondered whether they would be forced to stop to repair a tire, as they had done twice already in the past three or four hours.

His seemingly endless journey from Shanghai had included every conceivable means of transportation. He had been in transit for over a month, without knowing his final destination until only recently. It had begun with such urgency, when the soldiers whisked him from his home to a transport plane at an airstrip on the outskirts of the city. He had flown inside the fuselage of the freight craft, forced to sit on a wooden crate that might have contained anything from food to live ammunition. After the plane had landed hundreds of miles inland on a runway in the middle of nowhere, he had been carried by a rickety old barge along the Yangtze to Wuchang.

Franz had languished for over two weeks in the war-ravaged city, ordered to stay in a tiny, featureless room. Franz's only consistent contact in Wuchang had come in the form of a sullen Japanese private who spoke in broken English and was no more
comprehensible than the pidgin-speaking peddlers in Shanghai. The private brought him meals twice a day, usually rice with some kind of dried fish smothered in a foul-smelling sauce. Franz had little appetite, and the salty taste turned his stomach, but he forced himself to choke down the food just so its smell wouldn't linger in the oppressively stuffy room, where sleep was next to impossible even without the stench.

From Wuchang, Franz had been taken southwest by train in a boxcar crammed with Chinese men, most dressed like the farmers Franz had seen in guidebook photographs of China's countryside. Franz was forced to disembark the train a few miles outside the devastated city of Changsha, which the Japanese had recently captured. He spent another few days hunkered down in a tent pitched among the extensive rubble of flattened houses and buildings. He couldn't help wondering how many civilians had been inside their homes when the bombs had fallen.

While in Changsha, Franz took his orders from a Japanese lieutenant who had been schooled in Cambridge before the war. He spoke highbrow English that made him sound like one of the elite pre-war Shanghailanders. Franz had no interest in talking to the man, but the officer seemed pleased to have someone to impress with his command of the King's English. The lieutenant explained that Operation Ichi-Go meant, in English, Operation Number One. He took great pride in informing Franz that it was the largest operation to date in the Pacific war, and how, with its “inevitable success,” it would not only unite the Japanese empire from Manchuria to Indochina but also rid it of the airbases from which American bombers had been harassing the Japanese homeland.

On Franz's final day in Changsha, the lieutenant announced that he was being dispatched to a field hospital somewhere near
Hengyang. Franz had never heard of the city, but according to the lieutenant, its capture was one of the key objectives in Operation Ichi-Go, somehow related to a vital railway intersection and the “gateway to Southern China.” Franz wasn't interested in the lieutenant's jingoistic chatter, and it only depressed him further to learn that the offensive was gaining ground and the Japanese were apparently on the verge of conquering Eastern China.

The lieutenant drove Franz out of the city to a waiting convoy of trucks and other military vehicles. Without a word of goodbye, Franz climbed into the back of a troop transport. None of the other young infantrymen aboard appeared to understand English, or German. Their response to Franz—a round-eyed stranger in an ill-fitting khaki uniform, devoid of any insignia—was similar to that of the other soldiers he had encountered along the way. At first, they regarded him with curiosity or hostility or a combination of both. Inevitably, they lost interest and treated him as if he didn't exist. Franz noticed that they hardly even spoke among themselves. Eventually, he began to feel pity for some of them. Several looked to still be teenagers and seemed as miserable as he was to be heading to the front lines. He realized that, regardless of the colour of the uniform, these young soldiers were pawns in the war as much as he was, potentially sacrificing everything to try to sate the ambitions and greed of their masters.

They inched along the road for two agonizing days, though Franz considered
road
to be a generous description for the windy, bombed-out route that abruptly alternated from paved to dirt and back. They often had to stop for the soldiers to clear debris or to assemble makeshift wooden plank-bridges to cover the most gaping of the artillery craters. Franz's constant loneliness was punctuated only by the moments of terror when the truck
traversed one of the rickety, mortar-damaged bridges that dotted the road.

Franz had trouble remembering how many days had passed since he had been torn from his family, but his memory of the final minutes with them was as acute as ever and, at times, he wished he could forget. Hannah had not stopped crying. He hadn't seen her as tearful since she had been eight years old, trembling in his arms in the electrified darkness of Kristallnacht. Esther was so upset that Jakob had to throw a tantrum just to get her attention. But Sunny's response had devastated him the most. Tears coursed down her cheeks as she whispered hollow words of encouragement and promises of a speedy reunion. All the while, she cradled Joey almost protectively in her arms. Franz didn't even mention their earlier dispute as he kissed her goodbye, tasting the salt of her tears. What could he have possibly said to make it all right again?

The rumble of an explosion somewhere in the distance jerked Franz out of the memory. Over the growl of the truck's engine, he heard a few more booms echoing. When the truck crunched to a halt, he knew they had reached their destination even before he looked out back and spotted the tents.

Franz followed the soldiers as they climbed out of the truck. The sun was still high in the sky, but the weather lacked the ferocity of a Shanghai summer. He stood in a clearing cut out of the dense bushes and low-lying surrounding trees. Tents were laid out in organized rows that could have covered two or three square city blocks. The soldiers dispersed in various directions, leaving Franz alone on a dirt path. Two men trotted noisily past him carrying a stretcher draped with a sheet bearing a sizable blood stain.

“You were supposed to be here last week,” a familiar voice snapped.

Franz turned to see Captain Suzuki standing across from him in a waist-length lab coat, his arms crossed in annoyance. Franz bowed his head respectfully. “Good day, Captain Suzuki.”

“They promised me you would be here last week,” Suzuki grumbled without returning the bow, “when the wounded were piling up as high as sandbags during a flood.”

Franz motioned to the troop transport behind him. “I only just arrived.”

Suzuki eyed him coldly. “There is no rest here.” He turned and headed down the path. “Ever!”

Franz hurried after him. They passed more orderlies shuttling patients in and out of tents on stretchers. The dirt roads between tents were too narrow for trucks or troop transports to navigate, but the occasional open-air military vehicle—the “Japanese jeeps,” as the boxy cars were known in Shanghai—would rattle past occasionally, forcing them to stand off to the side. Every so often, Franz heard the rumbles of distant explosions coming from somewhere beyond the treeline.

As they walked past
A
-shaped and square tents of various sizes, Suzuki grunted descriptions such as “supplies,” “mess hall,” “convalescence tent” and “barracks.” Then he turned abruptly off the path and strode toward the largest of the square tents. Franz followed him through the flap opening into what appeared to be a mobile operating theatre. White-clad men bustled about, shuttling patients and moving equipment. Three stretchers loaded with wounded men were lined up in front of an area separated by canvas walls, which Franz assumed was the operating room.

Suzuki walked over to a sink in the corner, where a rubber pipe snaked up to a tank mounted high above it. He hung his lab
coat on a nail, donned a surgical mask and cap and then scrubbed at the sink. Before he had even turned around, a male nurse was waiting with a sterile gown and gloves at the ready. The nurse offered Franz a cap and mask and showed him to the sink.

Once gowned, Franz followed Suzuki into the walled-off operating room. The wooden floorboards creaked with each step he took toward the operating table, where a patient was waiting. Franz couldn't help but be impressed by the mobile setup, better equipped as it was than the operating room at the refugee hospital. It was bright with overhead light from two operating lamps positioned above the gurney. A full surgical tray stood by the table. Four other men were present, all of them masked and gowned. Despite the buzz of activity, no one spoke, and the room was as quiet as a monastery.

The scrub nurse faced away from Franz, sorting surgical utensils on the tray. It wasn't until she turned and he saw the red curls poking out from beneath her cap that he recognized her for Helen Thompson. She said nothing, but her eyes softened with a welcoming smile. For a fleeting moment, Franz experienced a sense of relief.

Suzuki snapped a few orders in Japanese to the man at the head of the bed, who held the anesthesia mask and ether. Franz viewed the patient. The young man's expression was taut with pain and fear as the anesthetic mask was lowered over his face. His exposed right arm was swollen, deformed at the forearm and missing its hand altogether, ending instead in a bloody stump of bandages. The only question in Franz's mind was how far above the elbow they would have to amputate. Suzuki solved that mystery by painting the patient's shoulder with iodine. Once it was cleaned and draped, Suzuki brought scalpel to skin and, without
even testing if the patient was still responsive, sliced fluidly through the flesh across the curve of the shoulder.

They worked in silence for several minutes. After the major blood vessels and nerves had been tied off and Suzuki had removed the upper arm from the shoulder socket, he remarked, “Sometimes we see as many injuries from weaponry malfunction as we do from enemy fire.”

“How so, Captain?” Franz asked.

Suzuki nodded to the patient. “I am told a grenade detonated in his hand just as he was throwing it.”

Franz cringed at the thought. “What horrible luck.”

“On the contrary.” Suzuki sliced through the centre of the last tendon that was holding the arm attached. “He is a very fortunate man.”

“This man?” Franz blurted as he pulled the arm free of the man's body.

“He gets to go home,” Suzuki said.

“Without his arm.”

“To parents who will see their son again. Maybe to a wife who has cried herself to sleep most nights since he left.” Suzuki ran a suture through the exposed muscle. “So few of them will,” he said almost under his breath.

Helen eyed Franz quizzically as she handed him a pair of scissors, but neither commented. Suzuki's cheeks flushed slightly, and he cleared his throat. “You will finish this case, Dr. Adler. And the others to follow.”

“Yes, Captain,” Franz said.

“This is not the Country Hospital.” Suzuki dropped the needle driver holding the stitch onto the tray. “Stop the bleeding. Remove as much shrapnel as possible. Amputate when limbs are beyond simple salvage.” He shook his finger at him. “But no heroic
surgeries, Dr. Adler. You will not be doing anyone—least of all yourself—any favours. Am I clear?”

“Yes, Captain.”

Suzuki nodded to Helen. “If you have any doubts, Mrs. Thompson can advise.” With that, he turned and walked out of the operating room.

Franz finished suturing the wound, leaving the shoulder so smoothly contoured that it resembled the armless torso of an ancient Grecian statue. By the time he had scrubbed at the sink again and changed into fresh gloves, the next patient was already on the table and the anesthetist was dripping ether onto the facemask.

Helen acted as Franz's translator. Franz was desperate to ask Helen more about the field hospital and the battles raging around it, but he kept the questions to himself, unsure if any of the other assistants understood English.

The patients kept coming. Franz removed three legs, plucked out pounds of bullets and shrapnel and tied so many stitches that he lost count. He allowed two patients—one of whom was missing a fist-sized section of his skull, and another whose lung had been compressed by a chest full of blood—to die while still under anesthesia. He bleakly wondered how many of the young men who had ridden with him in the troop transport would end up on this table with comparable wounds, if they even made it to the hospital.

All day long, the operating table kept filling with new casualties. Franz was almost surprised when, late in the evening, the orderlies removed a patient from the table without replacing him with another. His neck and shoulders ached. He had fought off three or four bouts of dizziness. But he walked out of the operating room feeling slightly more alive than he had when he had entered.

He stood with Helen outside the tent in the warm evening, her silhouette illuminated only by the glow from the light inside. She extracted a pack of cigarettes from her pocket and, after he waved off her offer, lit one for herself. “I wasn't expecting to see you so soon, Franz,” she said. “Or, to be honest, ever again.”

“Likewise. But, I must say, you are a welcome sight.” He cleared his throat. “How long have you been here?”

“Two weeks.”

“And how are you coping?”

She looked at him and chuckled, answering only with an exhalation of smoke.

A series of booms rang out louder than any previous ones. Startled, Helen tensed for a moment before her shoulders relaxed. Franz glanced in the direction of the sound. The trees glowed and then vanished back into darkness.