Other People’s Houses (6 page)

There was a young woman in
charge inside our carriage. She was slight and soft-spoken. She walked the corridors outside the compartments and put her head in and told us to settle down. We asked her when we were going to leave. She said, “Very soon. Why don’t you all try to go to sleep? It’s past eleven.” Still the train stood in the station. I saw Onkel Karl’s fiancée on the platform, looking in the window. I remember standing
on my head for her. She smiled upside down and mouthed something. I wiggled my toes.

It was after midnight when the train left the station. There was only room enough for four of the eight girls in the compartment to stretch out on the seats. I was the smallest one. I remember that I had the place by the window and I kept trying to bend my neck into the corner and at the same time shield my eyes
with an arm, a hand, or in the crook of an elbow against the electric bulb in the corridor, which burned through my closed lids. The chattering of the children subsided little by little until there was no sound except the noise of the train. I have no notion that I went to sleep, except that I was awakened by a flashlight shining into my face. In its light, behind it and lit like a negative, was
a girl’s face. She said it was time for someone else to lie down in my place. And before I had altogether picked my stiff limbs out of my corner, this other person was creeping into it. The girl who had wakened me was pretty. She said I could sit with her on her suitcase. I liked her awfully. I copied the way she sat with her elbows braced on her knees, her chin cupped in her hands, quite still.
I thought, This is me, awake, watching the children sleeping. I watched the black outside the window turn a queer, beautiful blue that faded into gray and presently lightened to a dead white. The bulbs in the corridor still burned a foolish orange. The sleepers humped shoulders to hide their faces from the light. In the next compartment someone was whispering. Someone let out a laugh and was quickly
shushed. A girl in my compartment sat straight up, stared for a moment, and seemed to go back to sleep, except that her eyes stayed open.

The girl on the suitcase asked me if I wanted to go to the lavatory and wash my face. I wandered down the corridor, peering into every compartment door to see people sleeping. In the lavatory there was a glass sphere over the washbowl. If you turned it upside
down, green liquid soap squirted out. If you stepped on the pedal that flushed the toilet, a hole opened and you could look through it at the ground tearing away underneath. I played until the knocking at the door became so violently impatient I had to let the others in.

By the time I got back to my compartment, everyone was up. Everyone was talking. The children were eating breakfast out of
their paper bags. I didn’t feel like
Knackwurst
for breakfast and it was too much trouble to eat a sandwich, so I had candied pear and three cat’s tongues and a piece of
Sacher Torte
. A big girl said we had left Austria during the night and were actually in Germany. I looked out, wanting to hate, but there was nothing out the window but cows and fields. I said maybe we were still in Austria. It
was important to me, because I was collecting countries. Born in Austria, I had vacationed in Hungary and visited relatives in Czechoslovakia, which was three countries I had been in, and Germany would make four. The big girls said it was so Germany, and it puzzled me.

As the morning advanced, the noise swelled. Everyone seemed to be jumping. In the next compartment, a tall, vivacious girl had
organized a game. I went in and found a place to sit, but I couldn’t understand the rules, so after a bit I organized the small girl sitting beside me into playing ticktacktoe on the outside of her paper food bag. Just as we were getting interested, the morning was over and we had to go to our own compartments to eat lunch. I made her promise faithfully that she would stay right there and play with
me after lunch, but I never went back to find her.

The train had become deadly hot. A trance fell. We ate silently. I had bitten into the sausage and found I couldn’t bear the taste, and I thought I would eat it for supper. The sandwiches had become too dry to eat, so I had some dates and cat’s tongues and a piece of cake and then I sat and sucked some candy. I noticed again the noise of the
train, which had been quite drowned out in the commotion of the morning, and I fell asleep.

I woke in the late afternoon. I blamed myself for having slept all kinds of sights away. Now I would stay awake and watch. I concentrated on the little girl sitting opposite me. She held a suitcase on her lap. Her snub-nosed profile was outlined against the gray of the window. I kept my eyes on her for
such a long time that her face looked as if I had known it forever. She would not talk with me, and I went back to sleep.

I looked for the little girl when I awoke, but I couldn’t tell which one she was. I studied all the children in the compartment. None held a suitcase on her lap. The lights in the compartment had been put on and the window was black again. I went back to sleep.

I started
up as the train rode into a station and stopped. The big girl said this was the border and now the Nazis would decide what to do with us. She told us to sit as quiet as we could. There was much walking about outside. We saw uniforms under the lights on the platform. They entered the train in front. I held myself so still that my head vibrated on my neck and my knees cramped. Half an hour, an hour.
We knew when they were in our carriage, which seemed to settle under their added weight. They were coming toward us down the corridor, stopping at each compartment door. Then one of them stood in our doorway. His uniform had many buttons. We saw the young woman who was in charge of our carriage behind his shoulder. The Nazi signed to one of the children to come with him, and she followed him out.
The young woman turned back to tell us not to worry—they were taking one child from each carriage to check papers and look for contraband.

When the little girl returned, she sat down in her place and we all stared at her. We did not ask her what had happened, and she never told us. The carriage rocked; the Nazis had got off. Doors slammed. The train moved. Someone shouted, “We’re out!” Then everyone
was pressing into the corridor. Everyone was shouting and laughing. I was laughing. The doors between carriages opened and children came spilling in. Where there had been only girls there was suddenly a boy—two—three boys. Dozens of boys. They pulled hats out of the recesses of their clothing, like conjurers, and the hats unfolded and set on their heads were seen to be the hats of forbidden
Scout uniforms. The boys turned back the lapels of their jackets and there were rows of badges—the Zionist blue-and-white, Scout buttons, the
Kruckenkreuz
of Austria—and it was such a gay thing and it was so loud and warm I wished I had a badge or a button to turn out. I wished I knew the songs that they were singing and I sang them anyway. “Wah, wah, la la,” I sang. Someone squeezed my head;
I held someone around the waist and someone held me; we were singing.

The train stopped in a few minutes; we were in Holland. The station was brightly lit and full of people. They handed us paper cups of hot tea through the windows, red polished apples, chocolate bars, and candy—and that was my supper. When the train started up once more, a hundred children from our transport who were staying
in Holland (the advancing German Occupation was to trap them there within two years) stood ranged on the platform—the smallest, who were four years old, in front, the big ones in the back. They were waving. We waved, standing at the open windows, and all along the train we shouted “God bless Queen Wilhelmina” in chorus.

Inside the train the party went on, but I could not stay awake. Someone shook
me. “We’re getting off soon,” they said. I heard them, but I could not wake up. Someone strapped my rucksack onto my back again and put the suitcase in my hand. I was lifted down from the train and stood on my feet in the cold black night, shivering. I remember thinking that now I was in Holland, which made five countries, but it was too dark to see it and I wondered if it would count.

Inside
the ship, I lay between white sheets in a narrow bed, wide awake. I had a neat cabin to myself. I had folded my dress and stockings with fanatical tidiness and brushed my teeth to appease my absent mother. A big Negro steward came in with a steaming cup, which he placed in a metal ring attached to the bedside table. I said, “Is that coffee for me?,” to let him know that I spoke English. He said,
“It’s tea.” I said, “Brown tea?” He said, “English tea has milk in it.” I searched in my mind quickly for something more to say to keep him with me. I asked him if he thought I was going to get seasick. He said no, the thing to do was to lie down and go to sleep at once and wake up on the other side of the Channel in the morning. And then he put the light out and said, “Remember now, you sleep now.”

When I was alone, I sat up and prayed God to keep me from getting seasick and my parents from getting arrested, and I lay down and woke next morning on the English side of the Channel, with the boat in dock. For years I wondered if I could count having been on the ocean, since it had all taken place in my own absence.

We waited all morning to be processed. We waited in the large, overheated crimson
smoking room. It had little tables and chairs so heavy that they wouldn’t budge, however hard we tried to rock them. For breakfast we finished what was in our lunch bags. I had to throw my sandwiches in the wastepaper basket—they were so dry they curled—but when I came to the
Knackwurst
, which was beginning to have a strange smell about it, I remembered my grandmother always said that there was
always time to throw things out. I put the sausage back in the bag.

Newspapermen had come aboard. All morning they walked among us flashing bulbs, taking pictures. I tried to attract their attention. I played with my lunch bag: “Little Refugee Looking for Crumbs.” Not one of them noticed. I tried looking homesick, eyes raised ceilingward as if I were dreaming. They paid no attention. I jumped
happily; I tried looking asleep with my head on the table. I forgot about them. I was bored. We fidgeted and waited.

My number was called late in the morning. I was taken to a room with a long table. Half a dozen English ladies sat around it, with stacks of paper before them. One of the papers had my name on it. It even had my photograph pinned to it. I was pleased. I enjoyed being handed from
one lady to the next. They asked me questions. They smiled tenderly at me and said I was finished and could go.

I stood in the corridor and wondered where. The boat seemed almost deserted. I walked up some stairs and through a door and finally came out into the open air onto a damp deck. There was a huge sky so low it reached down to the ground in a drizzle as fine as mist. A wide wooden plank
stretched between the boat and the wharf. There was no one around to tell me what to do, so I walked up the plank.

I stood on land that I presumed was England; the ground felt ordinary under my feet, and wet. A workman was piling logs. I stood and watched him. I don’t know if it was a man or woman who came and took my hand and led me into a shed so huge and vaulted it dwarfed the three or four
children who were at the other end and swallowed the sound of their walking. I was told to find my luggage. I walked among the rows of baggage; the floor was covered with it from end to end. It seemed utterly improbable that I should come across my own things. After a while, I sat down on the nearest suitcase and cried.

Some grownup came and took my hand, and led me to my belongings (following
the numbers until we came to 152), and showed me the way to the waiting room. It was full of children and very warm. The photographers were there taking pictures. I pulled my suitcase a little away from the wall and sat on it, looking dreamy. I think I fell asleep.

It seems to me that then and for weeks to come I was in a state of excitement and at the same time constantly sleepy. Scenery and
faces shift; we were always waiting. At the wharf we waited for hours. There was another railway carriage, a new station, other platforms where we stood in columns four deep, photographers taking pictures. At the end of the day, we arrived at Dovercourt. There was a fleet of double-decker buses waiting to take us from the station to a workers’ summer camp where we would stay while the Committee looked
for foster homes. I began to take notice again. I had never seen double-decker buses before. This at last must be something English. I remember asking if I might ride on top. I sat on top and in front, and was the first to see, through the dull gray winter dusk, the camp, like a neat miniature town on the edge of the ocean. I remember wishing, as we drove in, for some glow of sunset, some drama
to mark our arrival.

The buses drew up in front of a huge structure of glass and iron, and we all got out. Inside, it was big and hollow, like a railway terminal. We sat with our baggage at long trestle tables, while a small man with an enormous bald brow stood on a wooden stage, out in front, and talked through a megaphone. He explained that he was the camp leader. He called us by number, divided
us into groups of four—three small children, and one older one to be our counselor—and told us to go and leave our things in the cottage assigned to us and come right back to have our supper.

The camp consisted of a couple of hundred identical one-room wooden cottages built along straight intersecting paths. To the right, at the bottom of every path, we could see the flat black ocean stretching
toward the horizon over which we had come. Back of us was England.

Our little cottage had little curtained windows that gave onto a miniature veranda. We thought it was sweet. We squealed, choosing our beds. The counselor, a thin girl of fourteen or fifteen, held her nose and asked what the horrid smell in here was. “Whew!” said all the little girls. “What a horrible smell! What can it be?”

I knew it was my sausage, and was badly frightened. Like a pickpocket whose escape has been cut off, I mingled with the crowd. I held my nose, looked ostentatiously in corners, and helped curse the dirty, idiotic, disgusting person who was responsible for stinking up the place. It felt so good to be mad at someone I almost forgot it was me we were yelling at.