A Master Plan for Rescue (19 page)

The photographer shot several pictures of Aaron Rosner, the clicking of the shutter sounding in the crisp air like gunfire. Then he waved his hand and released us.

Herr Loesser began the climb up the gangplank.

In the bright of day, I saw how unwell the man looked, how deep-set and haunted his eyes. The photographer could not have missed it either. He stopped Herr Loesser with a raised hand and put his camera close to the man’s face, shot two or three pictures. As the camera’s bulbs flashed—bulbs which seemed unnecessary, as the day was so bright—Herr Loesser flinched as if he had been struck across the mouth.

Herr Loesser’s dark-haired daughter—that girl so much like the Rebecca I had never known—had gone ahead, but seeing what was happening, she turned and came down the gangplank, put her hands on her father’s shoulders and spoke softly into his ear.

“Ruth,” Herr Loesser said, in that voice of something near breaking.

“Another,” the photographer demanded. Again he brought the camera close to Herr Loesser’s face. Again the bulbs flashed.

Herr Loesser, like a cornered animal, began to back into me.

“Be still!” the photographer said.

But Herr Loesser would not be still. The back of his too-large suit was pressed against my chest, and I knew if those bulbs went off again, he would run, or worse.

Herr Loesser was shaking his head, saying,
“Nein, nein, nein, nein, nein,”
although everybody knew you did not say
nein
to the Ministry of Propaganda. Not if you wanted your family to keep walking up that gangplank, not if you didn’t want to end up in one of those camps we had only recently learned the names of—Dachau, Sachsenhausen, and Buchenwald.

“One more for the Ministry.” The photographer brought the lens of the camera within inches of Herr Loesser’s face.

The gangplank beneath my feet began to vibrate with footfalls. A man in a white uniform had come out of the ship and was walking toward us with deliberate steps. He pushed himself between Herr Loesser and the photographer’s camera, as if stepping between a firing squad and its victim.

“Get away from my ship,” he demanded.

The photographer did not move from his spot at the side of the gangplank. “These photographs are to be rushed to Berlin at the request of Minister Goebbels.”

“I do not care if Adolf Hitler wishes to view them. I will not have my passengers harassed.”

The photographer smirked at the man in the white uniform. “I do not believe the captain of a pleasure vessel has the authority to override an order from Minister Goebbels.”

The photographer again pointed his camera at Herr Loesser.

With one quick motion of his arm, the captain knocked the camera out of the photographer’s hands, clattering it to the dock.

“If you do not immediately remove yourself,” he said, “I will kick you and your camera into the sea. And I believe we have just emptied the bilge.”

The photographer looked from his empty hands to the foamy water at the base of the ship.

The captain turned toward Herr Loesser and made a small bow. “I am Captain Schroeder, and on behalf of Hapag Cruise Lines, I apologize.”

Herr Loesser, the Loesser family, and I stood on the gangway without moving.

Captain Schroeder put his arm out. “Madam,” he said to Frau Loesser.

Herr Loesser’s wife placed the very tips of her fingers on Captain Schroeder’s white sleeve and allowed him to lead her onto the ship. Ruth Loesser took hold of her father’s arm in such a way to make it look like he was leading her. I gave Herr Loesser’s back a nudge. “Maybe we should follow,” I said to him quietly. “Before anybody has his mind changed.”

•   •   •

The St. Louis
sailed from Hamburg harbor on May 13, 1939. Germany was not yet at war with any country, and even we Jews did not know for certain what was happening in the camps. Not unless we had been in them ourselves, and very few of the people who went into the camps came back out to tell their stories.

In 1939, most of the world did not know about the camps, or very much about what was happening to us in Germany. But the photographer who stood beside the gangway and insisted on photographing Aaron Rosner with entrails on his clothes and Herr Loesser hunted and shrunken in his suit—choosing them to represent us rather than Babette Spiegel in her shimmering dress—made me understand why the Nazis would allow nine hundred Jews to board a pleasure boat bound for Havana.

Joseph Goebbels wished to turn us into the real-life representations of the Eternal Jew—the exhibit Rebecca had read to me about on that unusually clear autumn day. We were to be the exhibit’s hook noses and thick lips made into flesh and blood. The personifications of the Jew who had mocked Jesus and was condemned to wander the earth until Judgment Day. The Jew who would have considered it a favor to be put out of his misery.

Goebbels would show the world the photographs of Aaron Rosner and Herr Loesser—and a hundred other miserable Jews boarding the
St. Louis
—the Jews the Nazis in their compassion were permitting to sail away from Germany in the luxury cabins of a pleasure boat. And once he had shown us to the world, who in it would criticize Germany for not wishing to keep us? Who in it would criticize them for anything they decided to do with us?

I understood all this before I had reached the top of the gangplank, had absorbed this truth before I watched the Loesser family—with that daughter so like Rebecca—disappear down the ship’s corridor. Yet once I was shown to my first-class stateroom, I forgot everything that had happened on the gangplank and fell into a kind of dream world, a spell cast by the sparkling ship itself.

I did not think Herr Gloeckner had bought me a first-class ticket because he valued my services so highly. I believe he bought it because it did not occur to him to buy any other kind. I had never seen luxury of this sort before. Everything in my stateroom gleamed and shone with a brilliance that spoke of money. The bed linen was an unnatural white and had been pressed to the smoothness of marble. Even the air inside the cabin seemed softer, as if the staff of the ship had whisked it, so it would be easier to breathe. I could not think of hanging my rumpled trousers and frayed shirts on the shining wooden hangers, certain the closet would spit them out the second I turned my back.

This dream world persisted when I left my stateroom, for I walked on polished mahogany decks and thick carpets, ate at tables draped with starched cloths. And even if this luxury had vanished, if my stateroom were magically turned into my flat in the Kruezberg, I—and every passenger on the
St. Louis
—would still have imagined we had entered a place of fantasy. For as long as the white-uniformed staff—the
German
white-uniformed staff—continued to call us
sir
or
madam
, continued to bring us cold drinks and warm tea and fresh linens for our rooms, for as long as they did not suddenly stop and put a gun to our heads and call us
Jew
, and demand we begin waiting on them, we would remain in this dream state.

Thus for the first days of our two-week journey, I—and the other nine hundred Jews—floated about the
St. Louis
like people under a spell. Mornings, we played shuffleboard under an open sky on A deck. Late afternoons, we waltzed across the checkerboard floor of the
tanzplatz
on B deck. Evenings, we toasted each other with champagne in the Schanke Bar on C deck. We traded our real money—what little we had of it—for shipboard money, buying postcards with photographs of the glittering ship. I do not know what the other nine hundred Jews wrote on theirs, or to whom they addressed them. I wrote,
I am well, but somehow I think that you know that. Come and find me
. Then I tossed it into the sea.

Under the spell of the
St. Louis
—and maybe also the presence of Herr Loesser’s daughter, whose existence alone seemed to promise a second chance for Rebecca—I invented a future I knew better than to believe in, but believed in anyway. On the afternoon Doktor Spiegel said over a game of cards that he had heard the Nazis intended to move Jews into ghettos for the purpose of making it easier to round them up—Doktor Spiegel always knew a lot about what the Nazis were planning, I do not know how—I dreamed up a story in which Rebecca did not fall into their hands. If I had not done this, it would have been the same as if the Nazis had sent me to one of their camps and were exterminating me piece by piece.

I leaned against the bright brass railings of the
St. Louis
and saw Rebecca’s story inside my head as if it was an elaborate machine I intended to fix. She would use her French to fool the Nazis and stay out of their ghetto, meet instead some French journalists traveling in Berlin, drawing them to her with her Leica. Journalists who would help her get to France, take her all the way to Paris. Because this was a dream, and where else could I send her?

Beneath the spell of the
St. Louis
, this story seemed plausible. More than plausible, it seemed true. Something that had already happened. And I passed days wandering the sparkling ship, my head filled with pictures of Rebecca in Paris, doing all the things she had told she would do those many evenings in our flat in the Kruezberg.

•   •   •

There was only one of us
nine hundred Jews who was not seduced by the dream world of the
St. Louis
. And I did not think of him until one evening, when his voice—sounding like the thing inside him had moved closer to breaking down—startled me from behind a low wall near the ship’s swimming pool.

“They are here, but they will not find me. They are here, but they will not find me.”

Herr Loesser was repeating this phrase in the cadence of davening, as if the narrow space behind the wall where he had hidden himself was a synagogue, and he was there to petition God for protection.

One of the white-uniformed crewmen was at the far end of the deck, coming toward us with his arms full of towels, and I feared that if the crewman came upon Herr Loesser crouched behind this wall, davening like a madman, he might change his mind about all of us, maybe change the minds of the rest of the crewmen, and they would stop treating us like passengers and begin treating us like the refugees we were.

“Herr Loesser,” I whispered, leaning over the wall.

Herr Loesser grabbed onto the front of my shirt, pulling me close. His breath was vile, a decay nearly as bad as that of Aaron Rosner when he’d first entered Shed 76. But also worse, in its way, for the decay inside Herr Loesser was still working on him.

“You cannot tell them about this hiding place. You cannot let them know anything about it.”

“Of course. Of course.” I attempted to remove Herr Loesser’s hands from my shirt. “Why not come and walk with me? The sunset is lovely.”

“Cannot you see?” Herr Loesser breathed his evil breath into my face. “That is how they trick us, with sunsets and swimming pools. Then it is off to the death camps.”

The man’s eyes were burning and at first I thought it was the reflection of the low-lying sun. Then I understood the sun was on the other side of the ship, and it was his madness I was seeing.

I glanced up. The crewman with the towels was closer now.

“Herr Loesser, the Nazis and the death camps are days behind us.”

Herr Loesser started laughing—a maniacal laugh that nudged the thing inside him closer to collapse.

“What if I take you to Frau Loesser?” I said. “To your family. They must be alone.”

This mention of his family diluted some of the burning in his eyes.

“Come.”

Herr Loesser’s hands still had hold of my shirtfront. I took him by the elbows and helped him to his feet.

“All is well here, gentlemen?” asked the crewman with the towels.

I nodded, placing my hands over those of Herr Loesser.

When we reached the Loessers’ stateroom, Herr Loesser stumbled through the door, past his wife, and threw himself onto the bed. Frau Loesser stood in the doorway a moment looking me over, then she told me to wait. After a minute or two, her daughter, Ruth, returned with one of her father’s suits.

“You do not think your father will need this himself?” I asked, remembering the trunk that had been sent to Shanghai.

“Maybe one less suit will force my father to spend more of his time in our stateroom,” Ruth Loesser said with a half-smile.

“Thank you,” I told her, and began to go.

“So that you know,” she said. “The Gestapo have been trying to arrest my father for the past month. I do not know how he managed to get us onto this boat.”

•   •   •

After I had been
on the
St. Louis
for one week, the dream I had drifted into began to be interrupted by a twitching in my hands. I would be sitting in one of the wood chaises on A deck, practicing the phrases from my German/Spanish dictionary, and I would glance up and see my hands in the air above my lap, my wrists turning one way and then the other, as if I was tightening the bolts on an invisible engine. Later, I would be in my stateroom, looking at the photograph of Rebecca—which the spell of the ship had lulled me into taking out of my sock and tucking into the corner of my gleaming mirror—and I would catch the reflected motion of my fingers plucking at something in the air, like I was pulling at the wires of a radio’s speakers.

I had never gone so long without having anything to fix, and I wandered the ship, searching for something—anything—that was broken. But long before we had come aboard, the Nazis had taken everything we owned that might need fixing—even our watches—for the small amount of gold they contained, and except for a suitcase with a sticky latch that belonged to a Herr Bergmann, there was nothing.

As the days went by, the jumpiness in my hands grew worse. I could not shave myself without my fingers jerking so violently, my face began to look as bad as Aaron Rosner’s had the day he arrived in Shed 76. One afternoon at lunch, I caught Babette Spiegel squinting at me through her monocle and realized that my hands were twirling in the air above my schnitzel. That evening, Doktor Spiegel knocked at my door with a bottle of sedative in the pocket of his dinner jacket.