The Incidental Spy (2 page)

B
y fall Josef’s letters were less frequent. He was fine, he said in the one letter she received. His mother was sick. When she coughed, her handkerchief was tinged with blood, and they feared it was tuberculosis. But he was working with a carpenter in Budapest and learning a trade. “Think how useful that will be when we build our house.”

She wanted to share his optimism, but she hadn’t heard from her parents in months, and Josef said he hadn’t seen them in Budapest. The émigré German Jewish community there was small; everyone knew each other. She had heard the rumors about the SS rounding up Jews and sending them to forced labor camps. She prayed that wasn’t the case and that she would soon receive a joyful letter from Paris or London or Amsterdam.

She was in the filing room one afternoon, in reality just a cramped closet, when a male voice called out from the front.

“Halloo. Is anyone there?” It was a tentative voice, speaking heavily accented English that sounded like a German national. Bavarian, actually. Lena had learned how to figure out what part of Germany someone was from by the way they spoke English.

She hurried out. A young man with dark curly hair and glasses that magnified his brown eyes leaned against a wall. He was about six feet—she was using feet and inches in her calculations now—and solidly built.

“How can I help you?” She said, knowing her own accent marked her as a foreigner.

His face lit. “You are German!” Something about his expression, so innocent and yet full of delight, instantly put her at ease.

She nodded. “And you are from Bavaria.”

He switched to German “How did you know?”

She tapped her lips. “I hear it.”

He smiled back. “You have a good ear.” He raised his palm. “Munich.”

“Berlin.” She did the same.

“Do you work here?”

“I am the department secretary. Since last May.” She tilted her head. “Are you new?”

He laughed. “No. But I have been away.”

“Oh. You are Karl.”

He brightened even more. “Yes.”

“You have been at Columbia in New York.”

He nodded. “And you?”

She held up her hand. “As I said, I am not a student.”

“Your name.” There was a softness in his voice as he said it.

She felt a flush creep across her face. “Of course. Lena Bentheim.”

He offered his hand. “Karl Stern.”

She took it. Stern could be a Jewish name. They stood with their hands clasped a beat too long. Neither appeared to mind.

* * *

Karl came to the Physics office with a different reason every day. He needed a book from the library—she often checked them out for the students. He needed to find a paper someone else had written. He lost his schedule of classes for the fall. Lena never said anything, but she looked forward to his visits.

Two weeks later he mustered up the courage to ask her to tea.

“Tea? How – lovely.” She giggled. “But we are not in London.”

“Yes, of course.” He flushed from the neck up. “Coffee, then.”

She cocked her head. “Not in Vienna either, although it is true that Americans are in love with their coffee.”

Karl’s face turned crimson. He stammered. “Well—well then, I apologize for—for… “ His voice faded and he seemed to shrink into himself.

“But beer,” Lena smiled. “Now that’s another matter. Do you think we might find a nearby tavern?”

Karl’s face glowed.

“Come back at five, yah?” She said.

He nodded enthusiastically.

Lena took him to a restaurant just off campus. The menu boasted the Budweiser logo, and the words “Makes Good Food Taste Better” at the top. The tavern offered thick soups, meat loaf, and even hamburgers at prices students could afford. All washed down with beer. The pleasant smell of grease drifted through the air; Lena’s mouth watered. They both ordered the meat loaf.

They talked about everything, but focused on what was happening in Germany. The Berlin Olympic Games had just ended, and Hitler had taken a keen interest, hoping his Aryan athletes would dominate the competitions. It was the irony of ironies that Jessie Owens, a Negro from America, won practically all his events. Because of the games, moreover the German government had temporarily refrained from actions against Jews.

“But more restrictions are on the way,” Karl said.

Lena sat back. “Are you Jewish?”

“Of course. I thought you knew.”

She leaned against the back of her chair. A deep wave of relief passed through her. Karl understood. The other German graduate students were sympathetic, but they weren’t Jewish. It wasn’t the same. For the first time since she’d come to America she realized how guarded she’d been.

“Where are your parents?” she asked. “And the rest of your family?”

“In Austria. I am trying to get them here. I think it will happen, but I don’t know when. The U.S. has become quite restrictive about who can get in.” He paused. “What about yours?”

She hesitated, then shook her head. “I don’t know.”

He reached across the table and squeezed her hand.

B
y the end of the year Lena and Karl were a couple. She spent more time at his apartment, a shabby room in the southern part of Hyde Park, than Ursula’s, but Ursula didn’t seem to mind. It was as if her aunt knew what was happening and tacitly approved. Karl was invited to
Shabbos
dinner every Friday; it became the only big meal they ate, except when they went out.

The night she and Karl made love for the first time, she had the feeling she was his first. Afterwards she knew she had to write Josef. At first she had been wracked with guilt, and tried to keep Karl at a distance. But he was so unassuming, gentle, and smart she soon developed feelings for him. There had been no letter from Josef in months, anyway. Memories of him were fading like dried flowers inside a book, a book that had been written centuries earlier.

Meanwhile the Physics Department was suffused with an enthusiasm that hadn’t been present before. Compton, the head of the department, was known for and studying cosmic rays, but the experiments that intrigued the students were those Enrico Fermi started in 1934 in Europe.

One night, after they made love, Karl tried to explain Fermi’s work in a way Lena could understand. “It has to do with bombarding elements with neutrons instead of protons. One of the elements Fermi uses is uranium, which is one of the heaviest of the known elements.”
“Why is that important?” Lena asked.

“Because the result turned out to be lighter than the elements he’d started with.”

She frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Fermi himself didn’t really understand why, but others were quick to link it to Einstein’s theory of E=mc2.”

“Why?”

Karl grinned. “Because a great deal of energy was released during the bombardment.” He paused. “When we figure out exactly how it happened and what exactly was released, a new world of possibilities will emerge.”

Lena loved to listen to Karl. She barely understood what he was talking about, but his eagerness and love of learning kindled a desire in her to go back to school. To finish what they called, in the States, high school. Maybe, afterwards, she would even enroll at the university.

T
he day Lena and Karl married was a warm, breezy day in June, 1937. The tiny wedding at KAM Isaiah Israel synagogue in Hyde Park included less than a dozen guests: Ursula and Reinhard, the graduate students in the Physics Department, a secretary, Bonnie, from the Math Department with whom Lena was friends, and Professor Compton and his wife. Lena had bought a white dress on sale at Marshall Field’s, and Bonnie had helped her make a veil. But what she loved most were her white sandals with rhinestone bows, which sparkled in the light, making her feel as though she was floating above the ground.

After the ceremony, Ursula and Reinhard invited everyone to their house for wedding cake and champagne. Ursula surprised Lena with a marzipan cake from Lutz’s, the German bakery; her aunt had gone all the way to the North side to pick it up. Later that evening, Karl’s friends took them to a special performance of the Benny Goodman Trio at the Congress Hotel, and they kicked up their heels until the wee hours. Lena couldn’t have asked for a more perfect day. If only her parents had been there to see it.

* * *

A few months later, as they walked to the quad from their apartment near 57th and Dorchester, Lena—now Mrs. Stern—held up her hand, watching her wedding ring flash this way and that in the morning sun. She did that a lot now. To most people, it was just a modest gold band, but to her it was as valuable as the whole of the recently built Fort Knox.

She turned to her husband. “Thank you, Karl.”

“For what?”

“For everything. You made me whole again. I finally belong.”

He smiled and reached for her hand. They walked a few steps in silence. Then, “I have a confession to make,” she said.

“What, my darling?”

“I wish…” she hesitated. “Sometimes I just want to forget what’s going on in Europe. I just want to think about our life here. Does that make me a terrible person?”

He squeezed her hand. “I do not think so. I do it as well sometimes.”

“Doesn’t it make you feel guilty?”

“I don’t let it. And, I take heart that I am working in a field that could end the suffering there.”

“But that’s so far in the future… and so unsure, given how powerful the Nazis have become.”

He took her arm. “Perhaps. Perhaps not. And, don’t forget, Lena my darling, you are helping, too.”

“I’m not doing anything except typing and filing and writing letters.”

He touched her lips with his index finger. “Don’t say that. Your work allows us to concentrate on our research. And that research might well give America a valuable tool one day.” He leaned over and kissed her. Lena wanted to collect moments like this, if only to store them in life’s album of happy times.

So Lena tried to ignore the steady drip of bad news from Europe. It worked for a while, but like a leaky faucet, the bad news was unrelenting. Hungary was pressured to join the Axis; reportedly, Jews outside Budapest were being rounded up. Lena prayed that Josef stayed safe. She wouldn’t let herself think about her parents, trying to persuade herself that whether they were at a labor camp, or had been sent to what were now called concentration camps, she was in America, and America was interested in America, not Europe.

America was focused on rebuilding its economy and staying out of the war. Of course, people like Henry Ford disparaged Jews, as did Father Coughlin, a Catholic priest whose weekly radio program drew millions of listeners. She would turn off the radio when his show began.

* * *

In March 1938, the Nazis overran Austria and annexed it to Germany. By October they had invaded the Sudetenland, and November brought
Krystallnacht
. It was no longer possible to ignore what was happening. Europe was an ugly carcass filled with violence and death.

But the physics community of which she was now a part celebrated good news. Enrico Fermi was awarded the 1938 Nobel Prize for his work in neutron bombardment, and that made everyone optimistic about the future of nuclear research.

By December Lena had missed a period, and her breasts had grown tender. She knew from repeated discussions with Bonnie that she was pregnant. She wasn’t sure how Karl would take it—he had been working such long hours—so she surprised him one evening and took him to the restaurant with the Budweiser menu. It had become their “spot.”

“I have news,” she said after they’d ordered beers.

Karl cocked his head. “About your parents?”

She shook her head. “No. Nothing like that.”

His brow furrowed. “Then what?”

She reached for his hand. “We’re going to have a baby.”

Karl blinked as if he hadn’t understood.

“You. And me. We’re going to have a child.”

A glorious smile unfolded across his face.

* * *

Just before Christmas, two scientists announced they had replicated Fermi’s experiments. They had bombarded uranium atoms that threw off neutrons and energy. Under the right circumstances, they claimed, these “boiled off” neutrons might collide with other atoms in a chain reaction and release even more neutrons and energy. They called it “fission.”

The scientists were from Berlin.

I
n March of 1939 Hitler seized Czechoslovakia. Neville Chamberlain spoke of appeasement, and so many people wanted to believe him that the voices begging the world to stop Hitler went unheard.

A month later Karl came home, a wide grin on his face. Lena was simmering bean soup. Thick, the way he liked it.

“You look like that cat in Alice in Wonderland.”

“You’ll never believe it!” he said.

“What? What is it?”

“I’ve just had a letter from my parents.”

Her eyes widened. Letters from loved ones in Nazi-occupied countries were rare. “And?”

“Next month they will board a ship in Hamburg and sail to Cuba!”

Her mouth fell open. “Really?”

He nodded eagerly. “The ship will carry almost one thousand Jewish refugees. They will stay in Havana for a while, and after that—“

She cut him off. “We can bring them here!” She waved the wooden spoon she’d been using to stir the soup. “How wonderful!”

“They say to expect a telegram from Havana toward the end of May.”

“Karl. We must celebrate.”

“Yes.” His soft brown eyes were shining. “I think rum. Do we have any?”

She giggled. “No, but I will go out and get some. This is wonderful news.”

“They will love you.”

She gave him a shy smile. He hugged her, then patted her stomach which, at six months, was nicely rounded. “And when the baby comes—”

Lena cut in again. “What’s the name of this magic ship?”

“The St. Louis.”

* * *

The ship sailed from Hamburg on May thirteenth. Lena and Karl made preparations. They decided his parents would take their bedroom until they found their own place. Karl and Lena would sleep in the living room. They bought a used couch, which opened into a bed. Lena planned menus for two weeks and brought home grocery bags stuffed with food.

The ship was due to land in Havana on May 27th. But the day passed with no telegram from Karl’s parents. When there was still no word by evening the next day, they began to worry.

The story didn’t take long to emerge. Once the ship entered Cuban waters, Cuba’s pro-Fascist president, Federico Laredo Bru, decided to ignore the refugees’ documents. Only twenty-two of one thousand Jews were allowed to enter Cuba. The rest were forced to stay on the ship. The refugees appealed to America to let them in, and a chorus of voices on both sides of the issue joined in. There were marches, hundreds of letters written to FDR, poignant stories about the refugees on the ship.

There were also those who demanded the ship and its cargo be turned away. Negotiations between Cuba, the US, and even the Dominican Republic seesawed with good news one day, bad news the next. It seemed as if the entire world was holding its breath.

Ultimately, the nay-sayers prevailed. On June seventh, negotiations failed, and the St. Louis was forced to return to Europe. Lena and Karl were devastated. Karl sank into such a severe depression Lena worried he might do something crazy. She hid the kitchen knives in the back of the cabinet.

Several European countries eventually took in some the refugees, but those who went to Belgium, France, or the Netherlands were trapped when Hitler invaded those countries a year later. A few months after the ship returned to Europe, Karl got a letter from his parents. They had settled in France. That was the last time he heard from them.

* * *

At the beginning of August, Albert Einstein wrote a letter to FDR. In it, he summarized the latest scientific thinking on chain reactions, uranium, and fission. Then he wrote:

On September first, Hitler invaded Poland. Two days later England and France declared war against Germany.