A Master Plan for Rescue (18 page)

We squeezed our way through the cheering crowds on the wide avenue. On the ground, Rebecca found one of the red and black flags, and put it in my hand so I wouldn’t seem conspicuous. She kept her camera in front of her own face. All around us, happy Germans threw flowers and waved flags, and shouted, “
Heil Hitler,”
too preoccupied with the miles of rolling tanks and soldiers on horseback to notice the Jews in their midst—the pale woman in the sweater taking photographs, and the man who could no longer ignore what the Führer had in mind for his birthday celebration next year.

•   •   •

The next day
when I returned from the shop, the flat felt as if a hole had opened up in it and I knew Rebecca had left me.

She had taken everything that had belonged to her. The wool felt beret I had never told her was too big for her head and all of her photographs. All except one print of the old woman with the shriveled leg. That she had left on the kitchen table next to my passport.

“So this is how you will do it. You will leave me first.” I sent the words echoing into the hole that had opened up in the flat.

Rebecca had left me one other thing, although she had probably forgotten about it. A photograph of herself.

I had taken it the summer I began collecting favors from Nazis. It was a warm day, and Rebecca and I were picnicking on one of the yellow benches in the Tiergarten, sharing a quarter-kilo of French pâté—courtesy of a motorcycle with a temperamental engine that belonged to a high-ranking SA officer. I am certain it was a trick of the sunlight, but for once, Rebecca looked flushed, as if there was blood running beneath the flesh of her cheeks, and I wanted a photograph of it, proof maybe that she would be with me longer.

I had had to make her swear to develop it, and even then, she would print me only one copy.

“Hide it somewhere, or I will throw it out.”

I had hidden the photograph between the pages of
Das Kapital
, because Rebecca would never search for it there. She thought Karl Marx was tedious.

I could have looked for Rebecca, but I did not think I would find her. I could have turned one of my favors into having the Gestapo search for her, but even if they found her, I knew she would leave me again. Instead, I sent a message to Herr Gloeckner letting him know that a Peugeot engine of his automobile’s exact make and model had recently turned up in my shop—actually, I had had it for months—and that while it was in poor repair, I was confident I could get it into even better condition than the one presently inside his vehicle. I then mentioned that the SS
St. Louis
would be departing Hamburg for Havana in three weeks’ time, and that it would be carrying approximately nine hundred Jews lucky enough to be in possession of one-way tickets and Cuban visas.

Herr Gloeckner sent a message back that he would like to test this new engine before going to the inconvenience of troubling the Cuban embassy. I replied that as I did not wish to overestimate my abilities, I would wire him the location of the new engine once I was safely in Hamburg with my ticket and Cuban visa, reminding him that if I failed to deliver on my promise, it would be no inconvenience for someone of his standing in the party to have me arrested there.

Fortunately, Herr Gloeckner’s fondness for his French automobile exceeded his dislike of Jews. A first-class ticket for the SS
St. Louis
and a Cuban visa arrived within a week of my message.

I took the last possible train to Hamburg before the
St. Louis
was set to sail, thinking maybe Rebecca would change her mind, even when I knew she wouldn’t. Still, at the railroad station, I stood on the platform until the conductor stopped to ask me if I was getting on or not, and if I was, then I had better hurry up and do it.

•   •   •

In Hamburg,
we were made to wait in a big wooden building known as Shed 76 that sat at the end of the docks. It was a building of no windows, and it was damp. And the way it was bleak, and how the Gestapo officers looked at our Jewish passports made me think that when we were finally let through the door, we would not be walking up the gangplank of a pleasure boat bound for Havana, but into a boxcar headed toward one of the concentration camps we had only then begun hearing about. Concentration camps with the names Dachau and Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald.

The
St. Louis
is a lie
, were the words going through my mind, while a square-headed Gestapo officer examined my documents.
It is only another way to make the Jews pay for their own extermination
. For why would the Nazis send nine hundred Jews on a one-way pleasure cruise to the Caribbean?

“This is a first-class ticket.” The square-headed Gestapo officer took in my frayed woolen trousers and no-longer-white shirt. It had seemed a waste to turn a favor into new clothes.

“It was arranged by a ranking officer of the Nazi Party.”

“First class?”

I stood myself straighter. “Are you questioning Herr Gloeckner’s judgment?”

The square-headed officer made me open my suitcase and rifled through my belongings—shirts, trousers, socks, underwear. He found Rebecca’s photograph of the woman with the shriveled leg and held it close to his small eyes.

“I know this place.”

“It is the plaza outside the Dietrich-Eckart-Bühne amphitheater.”

“This is government property.”

I let him have it. Let him, because I still had the photograph I’d taken of Rebecca that warm day in the Tiergarten. It was folded in half and tucked into my sock because I had noticed how Nazis were reluctant to make Jews take off their socks, as if they believed the rumor that we possessed hooves like the devil.

When he gave me back my suitcase, I went to sit on the wooden benches beside the other Jews who were hoping that the
St. Louis
was not a lie. It was not much after that the shouting started.

The person shouting was a dark-haired man of close to fifty who appeared to be wearing a larger man’s suit, or maybe he had only been shrunken and put back into his own. He was standing before the desk of the square-headed Gestapo officer who had taken Rebecca’s photograph of the woman with the shriveled leg, and spit was flying from his mouth as he ranted. “I am telling you this was no accident! No random mishandling of luggage. This was the deliberate work of the Gestapo!”

What I heard in the shrunken man’s voice was something I had never heard in a human voice before—the sound a mechanical thing makes when it is near to breaking. When all the other parts of the machine are compensating, so it is functioning in a fashion, but you can tell it will not be for long. I am thinking that the man’s wife heard it as well, for she had her hand on the man’s knobby shoulder and was whispering into his ear, like that might be a kind of fixing.

“Herr Loesser,” the square-headed officer was saying, his tone full of condescension. “The Gestapo takes no interest in your family’s luggage.”

“Yes, yes, yes, yes.” The shrunken man moved his head up and down as if a spring in his neck had come loose. “That is what you always say. The Gestapo has no interest in you, Herr Loesser, but we will put you on our watch list. The Gestapo has no interest in you, Herr Loesser, but we will put you on our arrest list. The Gestapo has no interest in you, Herr Loesser, but we will put you on our death list.”

Herr Loesser’s wife turned pale and gripped the sleeves of his too-large suit, bunching them like curtains. Beside her stood a thin-shouldered boy of twelve or so. But it was the girl at his side—Herr Loesser’s daughter, I supposed—who caught my attention. She was a dark-haired girl of sixteen or seventeen, and there was something about the clear-eyed way she was watching the interaction between her father and the square-headed officer that made me think of Rebecca.
This
, I thought,
is what she was like when she still believed in the dream of Paris, in the time when she knew nothing about her heart
.

“Why do you bring up arrest lists, Herr Loesser?” the square-headed officer asked. “No one has said anything about arrest lists. I have only informed you that one of your family’s trunks has been mistakenly sent to Shanghai.”

“My husband has been unwell,” Frau Loesser murmured to the officer.

The square-headed officer gathered all of the Loesser family’s documents in one large hand and rose. “We will look into this mention of arrest lists.”

Herr Loesser’s daughter stepped close to the square-headed officer and gazed up at him with dark eyes. “My father was a lawyer before the Reich Act.” Her voice was low. “I fear he sometimes forgets himself.”

The officer looked down at the young Jewish girl. She held his eyes, then only slightly lifted the corners of her mouth—not enough to be called a smile.

The square-headed officer set down the Loessers’ documents.

Later, when I saw the family sitting on the wooden benches, I noticed Herr Loesser’s daughter wiping her hands on her skirt, as if she had touched something unclean.

The Germans made us wait inside the dim dampness of Shed 76 long enough for us to stop believing in the
St. Louis
, to grow certain we had done them the favor of traveling to Hamburg to prepare for our own deaths. Only then did the doors at the front of that bleak building slide open to reveal—like a floating city—the beautiful ship. Its hundreds of windows sparkling in the sunlight, its flags—covered in swastikas—snapping in the wind off the ocean.

A man in the spotless white uniform of the ship appeared in the open doorway.

“Might I have your attention, ladies and gentlemen?”

We sat stunned, for it had been so long since anyone had called us anything but
Jew.

“You may now board the SS
St. Louis
.”

Then, as if to stun us further, the man in white gave a small bow.

Music began to drift through the open doors—“Vienna, City of My Dreams”—and as we stepped through the open door into the light, we saw that it was coming from an orchestra playing on the ship’s deck.

First up the gangplank was a tall woman whose traveling clothes consisted of a fur wrap and beneath it, an evening gown. It was the kind of gown a Hollywood actress would wear, made of shimmering fabric that caught the light as she stepped through the doors, reflecting it back into Shed 76, into the eyes of the Gestapo officers examining the documents of the latecomers, letting them know that Jews could dress like Hollywood actresses. But this woman—Babette Spiegel, the wife of a doctor—was more interesting than any Hollywood actress, for above the shimmering gown and the fur wrap, she wore a perfectly round monocle tucked into the crease of her left eye.

Babette Spiegel began to walk up the gangplank as slowly and grandly as any Hollywood actress. She did not turn her head to see if her husband, handsome in a white dinner jacket, or her young daughters, dressed identically in dresses I recognized from the shops on the Kurfürstendamm—where Jews had not been allowed to shop for some years—were following her.

A photographer stood beside the gangplank, and spotting him, Babette Spiegel stopped walking and rested one long-fingered hand on the metal railing, and put the other on her shimmering hip. She lifted her chin, as if she knew how the sunlight would catch the golden edge of her monocle.

But the photographer moved the camera away from his face.

“Is the light not quite right?” Babette Spiegel asked him.

The photographer did not answer her, and before she could ask him anything else, a small and disheveled man pushed his way through the crowd and came running up the gangplank behind Babette Spiegel.

I had smelled him before I saw him, and he smelled like a hundred dead animals, like rot and decay and death. His face looked bruised and the back of his hair was matted with blood. His clothes were shabby and it appeared that he had slept in them, but worse, they seemed to be stained with entrails, as if he had come to the dock straight from butchering animals.

Later, once we were at sea and away from Germany, he would tell me that his name was Aaron Rosner, and that for the nine days before boarding the
St. Louis
, he had hidden himself from the Gestapo among the animal hides outside a tannery yard near Hamburg. When I knew him better, he would tell me that he had been arrested a block from his house during Kristallnacht and sent to Dachau.

“Every morning after roll call, they hung somebody and made us watch,” he would tell me. “And every night after evening count, they drowned somebody in a vat of water and made us watch that, too.”

After six months, with no explanation of why he had been arrested or why he was being let go, the Nazis released him and told him he had fourteen days to leave Germany. His wife and family sold everything they had to buy him a tourist-class ticket on the
St. Louis
. They could not raise enough money to buy tickets for her or his two children.

“I try not to think about them anymore,” he told me.

But on this day, Aaron Rosner—smelling horrible and with blood in his hair and the guts of animals on his coat—was so eager to leave Germany, he was rushing the gangway, pushing ahead of Doktor Spiegel and his daughters, stepping on the train of Babette Spiegel’s shimmering gown.

The photographer put the camera back to his face and waved at Babette Spiegel to move out of the way. But the sight of the long lens of the camera being aimed at him halted Aaron Rosner, made him hunch his neck into his shoulders and shift from one side of the gangway to the other.

“Keep still!” the photographer snapped.

“What are you doing to this poor man?” demanded Doktor Spiegel.

“I am from the Ministry of Propaganda,” the photographer said without removing the camera from his face.

These words stopped us all as surely as if that camera had been turned into a rifle. Babette Spiegel was so still, her dress had ceased to shimmer. Her husband and daughters appeared as if frozen on the gangplank. I stood behind the Loesser family, not daring to take a breath. Only poor Aaron Rosner, who had shut his eyes and clenched his fists, could not stop himself from shaking.