The Children of Willesden Lane: Beyond The Kindertransport: A Memoir of Music, Love, and Survival (14 page)

Aaron walked angrily down the hall. “Why would he care, anyway? He’s not Jewish!”

Lisa looked in Aaron’s eyes and saw how frightened he was. “Let’s go for a walk in the park,” she offered, trying to comfort him. She had always assumed that nothing bothered him; now she wasn’t so sure.

They walked back to the crowded sidewalks of Tottenham Court Road. Aaron pulled a coin from his pocket and led the way to a fish and chips stall, where they were handed steaming hunks of cod in wartime wrapping—recycled newspapers. When they pulled the paper off the fish, the black ink of the headline stained the flesh. Aaron read (backward): “Miracle at Dunkirk.”

“Some miracle all right,” he mocked. “I don’t see why the English are so happy about the miraculous evacuation of hundreds of thousands of soldiers from the beaches of France. It looks like a massive retreat to me.”

“Aaron, it is a miracle,” Gunter protested. “The Nazis had us surrounded; without the boatlift, they would have captured half the British army!”

Lisa agreed, and so did most of England; Britain was overtaken by a wave of superpatriotism, Union Jacks flew from every door. It made her proud; she only wished she could share the sight with her family to give them hope.

Eager to change the mood of the group, Lisa insisted on going to Hyde Park to see the swans. The ponds were flanked by antiaircraft guns pointed expectantly at the sky.

Gina looked terrible, and her stride had slowed to a morose shuffle. She sat on the park bench and put her head in her hands.

“I know this sounds really selfish, but I can’t imagine my mother in a camp. How can she go to a camp? What do they mean, is it like Dovercourt? With tents? She’s never even cooked for herself! She doesn’t know how to do anything! Maybe they won’t take rich people like her. . . . maybe they’ll let her bring the maid.”

As soon as she said the silly words, she cried again, this time about how stupid she sounded. “I know it sounds stupid, I can’t help it,” she said.

“No, it doesn’t,” Gunter said, taking her hand. “Come, let’s go feed the swans; it’s better not to think about it.”

Paul, Lisa, and Aaron wandered around the park. “Will we always be at war?” Lisa wondered aloud. “Guess it depends on whether the Yanks get into it, doesn’t it?” answered Paul.

“They won’t,” Aaron said.

“What do you boys want to be when it’s over?”

Aaron looked at Lisa strangely. “Who cares? There’s a war going on.”

“I’m going to join the air force,” Paul said, proud to have a better answer than Aaron’s.

“No, I mean, what do you want to be after the war . . . what do you want to do with your life?” Lisa insisted.

“I don’t know. My father was a shoe salesman,” Paul said, somewhat lost.

“Why does it matter now?” Aaron asked. Yet one look at Lisa let him know that wasn’t the answer she was looking for.

When Lisa and Gina went to work the next day, the tabloid headlines confirmed the worst:
PARIS FALLS TO THE NAZIS
—
DE GAULLE FLEES TO ENGLAND
. Lisa took Gina’s hand and began to walk faster, almost in a march, until the two girls’ strides were identical.

“We can make it, we can make it,” they chanted, pushing the fear away.

At Platz & Sons, Lisa took her place at the machine, fastened her hairnet securely, and began another tiring day. She noticed that Mrs. McRae in front of her was wearing a black armband. At lunch her worst suspicions were confirmed.

“Did you hear?”

“Mr. McRae. Killed in Belgium he was, never made it to the beach for the boatlift.”

“Just found out yesterday, she did. Can you believe she’s come to work today?”

“That’s what I’d do, if it were me.”

The workers ate quickly, their lunch break had been cut to fifteen minutes. Lisa went back to work filled with awe for the British people, who didn’t seem to cry, who sacrificed everything. She watched Mrs. McRae’s hands tremble as the bowed figure in front of her sewed uniform after uniform.

“I’m very sorry to hear what has happened,” Lisa said softly, leaning forward. Mrs. McRae took her hand and pressed it warmly, saying nothing, then lifted another pant leg onto her machine.

A button pinned to Mrs. McRae’s lapel read “Support our men in arms.”

The Fall of France left Britain alone to face Hitler, and the British steeled themselves for an expected invasion.

There was a growing sense of paranoia about enemy aliens in their midst. Women who were too blond were suddenly “suspect.” A poster showing a sleek, sophisticated blond socialite surrounded by doting soldiers admonished: “Keep mum, she’s not so dumb.”

People were looking everywhere for spies. Workers of German and Austrian ancestry were laid off, and fifty thousand aliens were rounded up and put behind barbed wire in racetracks, at factories, and on distant islands like the Isle of Man.

It was long after lights out in the hostel when the whistle of the Grieg Piano Concerto in A Minor sounded insistently from the hallway outside Lisa’s bedroom. She opened her eyes, leapt out of bed, and shook Gina. They dressed and rushed downstairs to the dining room, where Aaron and Paul stood in their pajamas, holding a candle.

“Gunter isn’t back,” Aaron said, worried.

It was only midnight; some of the other teenagers had been known to sneak in that late, but Gunter? He was never late; he was 100 percent dependable.

“What should we do?” asked Paul.

There was a noise down the hall and Hans appeared, tapping his hand on the wall for guidance. He slept in a cot off the kitchen, since it was decided that the third-floor dormitories would pose a hazard in a sudden evacuation.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

“Gunter’s missing. I think you should wake your mother.”

“Me? Why me? I’m already blind, I don’t want to lose my ears, too.” They had all come to accept Hans’s sarcastic brand of humor.

The group looked at Lisa, the meaning clear: She was the favorite, so it would fall to her to wake the matron.

She knocked gently on the door, but there was no response, so she had to rap as loudly as she could.

“What is it!” came the angry response.

“Gunter hasn’t come home.”

“Who?”

“Gunter’s missing!” Lisa yelled through the door.

Mrs. Cohen appeared a minute later in the hallway, her long gray brown hair loose on her shoulders, not in its normal place on top of her head. She grabbed the telephone in the alcove and ran her finger down a list of telephone numbers on the wall.

“Is this the police station? This is Mrs. Cohen from the refugee hostel on Willesden Lane. I’m missing one of my charges.”

Lisa watched as Mrs. Cohen’s face darkened.

“Enemy alien! Is this a joke? He’s a young boy,” she shouted into the phone.

“I know he’s sixteen, I know he’s German . . . What do you mean he’ll be interned! He’s Jewish!”

Mrs. Cohen slammed down the phone and opened a thick handwritten book listing the names and addresses of each resident’s employer. Finding the number of Mr. Steinberg, the man Gunter worked for, she dialed and explained the situation, then nodded in gratitude. “Thank you so much.”

“Mr. Steinberg is English,” she explained to the concerned teenagers. “He’ll go right away to the police station and try to vouch for Gunter’s loyalty. Now go to bed,” Mrs. Cohen said.

They didn’t. They lit more candles and sat around the dining room table and waited.

“Sixteen? Did Gunter have a birthday?” asked Paul. “Last week. He didn’t tell anybody but me,” Gina said. Aaron wandered into the dark living room and came back with the chess board. He set up the pieces and he and Hans played several games. The blind boy beat him almost every time.

“Let’s make some tea,” Lisa said.

“There is no tea,” Gina reminded her.

“Let’s get some mint leaves and boil some water,” Lisa suggested, and the two girls took off toward the kitchen. There was an eerie light shining from the back of the house. They followed the flicker and were surprised to come across Johnny sitting on a milk crate, writing in his notebook by candlelight.

“Johnny! What are you doing?” Lisa asked.

“When I can’t sleep, I write,” he said nervously.

“May I see?” Lisa asked, leaning over to see, but Johnny put his huge hands over the page to cover it.

“Oh, no, no. It’s not any good,” he insisted.

“Would you like a mint tisane?” interrupted Gina.

“A what?” he asked.

“Tea, silly.”

“No, thanks.”

“Maybe you’ll show me some other time,” Lisa said, smiling, and headed out into the backyard.

“He’s probably writing a love poem about you,” Gina teased.

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“I see the way he looks at you; it’s the same way Aaron does.”

“He does not!” Lisa said, brushing aside the comment, but in her heart she wondered if it was true.

At two in the morning, Hans and Aaron were still playing an endless endgame, chasing each other’s king back and forth across the board. Lisa was bored silly.

“Hans,” she said, “do you mind if I ask you something personal?” She tried to sugarcoat the question she had been wondering about for so long. “Have you always been blind?”

He made a chess move after feeling where Aaron had left his pawn, then let out a sigh, trying as hard as he could to sound flip. “No, God gave me this as his special present last year.”

“Last year?”

“A mob at school beat me up the day after Kristallnacht. The actual diagnosis was that a chair leg hit my optic nerve. But not to worry, the Rabbi said it was a gift.” His voice was dripping with sarcasm.

Lisa was stunned. “Why did he say that?”

“He said it was a gift because otherwise my mother would never have taken me out of Berlin. We’d still be there. She would never have left; she never thought it would happen to her.” He paused for a breath, then went on. “You want to know a secret? She’s never been to a synagogue.”

The room was silent for a moment. Then Hans put his hands on the chess board again and made his move.

“Checkmate.”

At three
A.M
. the committee adjourned and went to bed.

When Gunter finally came in late the following evening, he was surrounded by his friends. “Tell us what happened!” they said in unison.

Gunter had been on the double-decker bus coming back from Steinberg & Sons in the East End and looking out the window at the antiaircraft guns. His seatmate looked over, saw Gunter writing a letter in German, and called the police to arrest him as a spy. Gunter explained that he was writing a birthday card to the daughter of his employer and that he was Jewish; why would he be a spy? But he had a German accent and an alien registration card and was taken to the station.

Jewish or not, aliens over sixteen were being interned. Luckily, Mr. Steinberg showed up in time and signed an affidavit stating that Gunter’s work at his factory was “critical to the war effort, and without him, the assembly line would shut down.”

Lisa turned to Paul and Aaron with a worried look. “How old are you?’

“Fifteen,” they replied in unison.

“But still, you better be careful.”

When Lisa and Gina were getting up from the table, Johnny came and slipped Lisa a piece of paper, then left silently.

“See?” Gina said.

Lisa opened the envelope and read: “Please do not show this to anyone else.” She turned away from Gina and unfolded a poem.

Always I see the faces

The faces at the station

The faces at the station

Are dimming before my eyes . . .

Always I hear the voices

The voices that are calling

That are calling out to me

But yet I cannot answer.

My mother, my father,

My sister, my brother

They are here now

Always

My heart is with them.

She looked up and saw Johnny staring at her from across the room. She was very moved by the simple words. Somehow his poem struck a chord in her heart in a way that was usually reserved for music alone. She winked at him and he smiled back, raising his pen as a salute.

She folded the paper neatly and put it in her pocket, safe from prying eyes.

14

I
N THE SUMMER
of 1940 the war came to the skies over Great Britain. Newspapers were awash in headlines of dog-fights between the Luftwaffe and the Royal Air Force; newspaper boys updated their chalkboards with daily tallies of how many Spitfires, Hurricanes, and Messerschmitts had been knocked out of the sky over the English Channel. The coastline of southern England was first to be hit, as the Germans went after airfields and radar installations. Women of all ages fell in love with the image of the handsome RAF pilot with his handlebar mustache, who flew scores of sorties on any given day, blasting the Jerrys out of the skies.

Lisa continued the difficult routine of factory work, pushing piece after piece of material through the sewing machine until her arms ached. Her mood picked up in the afternoon, as she counted the minutes left on the clock until her shift was over and she could get back to Willesden Lane and her piano.

One afternoon, after a methodical search through the Cohens’ sheet music, she chose Beethoven’s beautiful
Pathétique
Sonata as her next goal. Professor Isseles had mentioned once that it was a “must-learn.” She opened it and frowned in dismay.

“There’s more black than white!” Aaron exclaimed, coming over to sit with her. “Looks like Beethoven spilled his inkpot all over the page,” he said, looking at the thousands of black notes dotted close together on the page.

“No matter. I’ll just start with the first one. Now move over!” She gave Aaron a flirtatious bump and he fell off the piano bench with a theatrical groan.

“Don’t worry, Lisa, you can do it,” came the reassuring voice of Hans from the nearby couch.

September 7 brought Lisa’s disciplined routine to a halt. Saturday afternoon, as she was playing warm-up exercises, there came the piercing blast of the air raid siren. There had been many false alarms, so she kept playing. Why run to the shelter, as she had so often, and wait in boredom for nothing to happen? But then she heard the low rumble of approaching aircraft, and suddenly everyone came running down the stairs. Gunter grabbed Lisa by the arm and they raced onto the front lawn, training their eyes on the skies for a quick look, as the rest of the hostel ran by them into the convent, screaming.