A Master Plan for Rescue (22 page)

Steward Schiendick and his friends went into the stateroom of Morris Weitz’s widow, whom we had not seen for days. When she appeared later on the scorching deck, looking pale and disheveled, we believed we were seeing a ghost.

“They blew out Morris’s candles,” she said in a shaking voice. “Called them a fire hazard.” Tears were running down her wrinkled cheeks. “How could they be a fire hazard when I never left the stateroom? When I always watched them and never slept?”

While the searching continued, I sat in the Loessers’ stateroom with Max—I had sent his family, including Ruth, to the deck, so they would not have to watch him cowering. We sat on the bed and waited for Steward Schiendick and the other men to burst through the door, but they never came. Maybe they understood that the anticipation of their coming would be harder on Max.

When I returned to my own stateroom, my suitcase had been unpacked and my clothes tossed about the room. I suspected that Steward Schiendick had understood, too, that draping my worn trousers and frayed shirts on these gleaming surfaces would shame me more than any beatings would. As I put my clothes back into the suitcase that smelled of the flat in the Kruezberg, I was grateful that since the night I’d come upon the men singing the
“Horst Wessel,”
I’d returned Rebecca’s photograph to my sock.

At sunset, several Cuban police boats sailed out to us and spent the night circling the
St. Louis
, shining their searchlights into our portholes while we tried to sleep, finally banishing any illusion that we were passengers on a pleasure ship.

Tuesday came and brought no change, except that it was hotter. By midday, it was nearly impossible to stand in the sun at the railings on the upper deck. My shirt was stuck to my skin as if with glue, and my tongue was dry and thick in my mouth. Still I forced myself to remain.
If I stand at this railing until two o’clock
, I told myself,
we will get off this ship tomorrow. If I do not wipe this drop of sweat from my eye, the thing inside Max Loesser will not break down before he sets foot in Cuba. If I do not drink water, Rebecca is safe in Paris.

I had decided the Germans had brought us to Hell. That all the fine linen and the glasses of champagne and the calling us
sir
and
madam
had only been to trick us, to keep us from suspecting. Because if we had suspected, we would have escaped the way Morris Weitz had escaped, the way Leonid Berg had escaped. Because that was the only way you could escape this particular Hell.

It was just after three o’clock and the domed buildings of Havana were shimmering in the heat, or maybe I was only dizzy, when a door slammed hard at the end of the deck. I turned. Coming toward me in the blinding sunlight was Max Loesser. He was running, and his arms were covered in bloody sleeves.

“They cannot get me now!” Max shouted.

As he ran, the sleeves turned to liquid, as if melting in the heat, leaving a trail on the hot deck behind him. But as quickly as they sloughed off, new sleeves appeared, thick and red and running to his elbows.

I shook my head, trying to clear it of this delusion caused by heat and despair. But as I did, Max Loesser rushed past me, moving the air in a way a delusion never could, spattering blood across the bottom of my trousers.

“Murderers!” he shouted. “Try to get me now!”

Max threw himself onto the railings, staining them red. He paused there a moment, waving his red-coated arms as if he was signaling to someone, then in one motion he tumbled into the sea.

The water foamed where he landed. And then the blood came up—thick and red—floating on the surface of the water. Max’s head floated up next, a dull black island in the center of all that blood.

My ears filled with the wailing of the ship’s siren, or maybe it was me making the sound. Because as I looked down on Max Loesser’s black head bobbing in an ocean of his own blood, I knew that despite all I had tried to fix him, the thing inside Max Loesser was well and truly broken. I had failed him in the same way I had failed Rebecca. And while the sun beat down on my head, I built a new—and more terrible—story of her future, one filled with pictures of Rebecca drowning in a vat of water before breakfast, hung from a rope before a line of horrified Jews before the evening count.

It was not that I had not known Rebecca would die before her time. I had learned to live with that knowledge. What I could not live with was the idea that it would be the Nazis who would kill her.

I wrapped my hands around the burning railings, set a foot onto their top.

Herr Bergmann—who had come from where to stand beside me?—grabbed me by my shoulders. “It is a dangerous distance. And crewman Meier has already gone.”

I looked down into the sea. Crewman Meier surfaced through the bloody water, his head and shoulders stained red.

Herr Bergmann pulled me back from the railings.

Max Loesser thrashed about in the bloody water, fighting crewman Meier’s efforts to save him. One of the circling police boats had to come and help, the Cuban policeman pulling Max into the boat, working with crewman Meier to tie tourniquets above his wrists. But the moment he was let go, Max Loesser clawed at his wrists to open the wounds, bit at the tourniquets with his teeth. It required two policemen to hold Max inside as the boat sputtered toward Havana Harbor, the rest of us watching from the sunstruck deck, wondering if we, too, should slit our wrists and throw ourselves into the sea.

Some hours later, Captain Schroeder informed us that Max Loesser was in a Cuban hospital and was expected to live. He had radioed for permission for Herr Loesser’s family, or at least for Frau Loesser, to be allowed ashore to visit. No such permission had been granted. When I later saw Ruth Loesser standing at the railing before sunset, she did not offer me even a half-smile.

•   •   •

On Wednesday,
Josef Joseph—a lawyer from Berlin I had hardly spoken with the entire voyage—asked me to be on the Suicide Patrol. The Suicide Patrol was the idea of Captain Schroeder, the consequence of Max Loesser’s bloody leap into the sea, and the fact that the ship’s doctor had run out of sedatives. That night, as I took my two-hour shift, walking the upper deck in the roving light of the police boat search beams, I wondered what I would do if I encountered one of my fellow passengers teetering on the railings. Push him, most probably, then follow him into the black water.

•   •   •

On Thursday,
the reporters and news photographers came, ferried out in fishing boats. We had been anchored outside Havana Harbor for nearly a week, and news of the nine hundred Jews nobody wanted had begun to spread. A few of these boats held sightseers who wanted to see for themselves what we eternal wandering Jews looked like up close.

On Thursday, too, we saw the notice, placed on all the boards where before had been placed notices about concerts and fancy-dress costume balls.

The Cuban government has ordered us to leave the harbor.
We shall depart at 10 am Friday morning.

Captain Schroeder ordered the full Suicide Patrol on watch for the entire night.

•   •   •

By the time Friday,
June 2, dawned, bright and hot, the whole world knew our story. Knew how Captain Schroeder sailed the
St. Louis
three miles out from Havana Harbor, and then for two days sailed us in circles while a Jewish humanitarian organization in New York negotiated with the Cuban government—a government that was now demanding a sum of five hundred dollars for each of us.

Once it became clear that raising such a sum for Jews nobody wanted was not possible, the negotiators turned their hopes toward America.

Captain Schroeder turned the
St. Louis
toward America as well, sailing us on Sunday near enough to the Florida coastline, we could see the hotels lining the beaches of Miami. American fishing boats carrying news photographers skidded across the waves to shoot pictures of us. I stood at the railings, trying not to look like a miserable, wandering Jew as the photographers shouted at me in a language I didn’t understand. Their clicking cameras were Speed Graphics, which reminded me of Pietr, and made me wonder what kind of truth I represented.

But Jews, it turned out, were not very much more popular in America than they were in Nazi Germany, and Franklin Roosevelt did not wish to have nine hundred of them spilling onto the beach in Florida.

On Monday, we got word that Governor Brú had again changed his mind. He would grant us permission to land in Cuba if we remained on the Isle of Pines. Captain Schroeder turned the
St. Louis
back toward Havana.

But on Tuesday, after reading the morning newspapers, which revealed Cuban sentiment to be against this plan, Governor Brú had yet another change of heart. Captain Schroeder informed the Hapag Cruise Lines of Governor Brú’s decision. The cruise line sent the captain a three-word message.

Return Hamburg immediately.

At eleven-forty on Tuesday, June 6, we turned from Cuba and set a course for Germany. Max Loesser was still in the hospital in Havana. His family remained aboard the
St. Louis
.

What the whole world does not know is how different the journey back to Europe was from the one we had made leaving it. “For the safety of the crew,” Steward Schiendick ordered a ban on all social intercourse between the crewmen and the passengers. A ban which did not prevent the crewmen from buying up the bits and pieces of jewelry we had hidden from the Nazis—things we sold for money to send cables begging President Roosevelt to reconsider taking us in.

None of us played shuffleboard on A deck. None of us drank champagne in the Schanke Bar. The ship’s orchestra, when it played, played to an empty room, for none of us wished to waltz across the checkerboard floor of the
tanzplatz
. Once, one of the crewmen left a shortwave radio tuned to a German station and a few of us heard the voice of Joseph Goebbels telling the rest of the country, “Since no one will accept the shabby Jews on the
St. Louis
, we will have to take them back and support them.”

But none of us believed the Germans meant to support us for very long. Indeed, one afternoon as he passed me, Officer Closterman mumbled something that sounded very much like, “These are your last free days.”

On Saturday, after we had been heading back for four days, helmsman Heinz Kritsch was found hanging from a beam in the locker room, another suicide. Some of us found comfort in the fact that the ship had started killing Germans. Others imagined Kritsch had had some hidden Jewish blood. For a brief instant, I wished that I had had the courage, but by then, I had repaired the mechanism of the story of Rebecca saved in Paris. Maybe it was that it had been too long since I had fixed anything. Maybe it was that I could not bear to look at Ruth Loesser, sitting on a deck chair that never faced in the direction from which we had come, as if that tropical place no longer existed. Maybe it was only that I was a doomed Jew on a boat full of doomed Jews, and I had already lost too much.

•   •   •

But Joseph Goebbels
would have to wait a little longer to take back the shabby Jews nobody else wanted. Due to the efforts of the Jewish humanitarian organization, on Wednesday, June 14, the
St. Louis
was allowed to dock at Antwerp. I was put on the freighter
Rhakotis
along with more than five hundred other passengers of the
St. Louis
. The
Rhakotis
possessed cabins for only fifty-two passengers and I spent the night on a wooden chaise on the upper deck. Even after it began to rain, I stayed on the upper deck. It did not matter how soaked I got. I was off the
St. Louis
.

The
Rhakotis
arrived in Boulogne at dawn. I stood at its rusted railings and gazed at the French coastline, telling myself I was looking at the country where Rebecca lived.

Two hundred and twenty-four of us were to be chosen for France. I pleaded with the official issuing visas, did my begging in French, imagining that would sway him, telling him I had a connection in Paris, a fiancée.

“Do you have some proof of this person?” he asked me.

I dropped to the floor in front of his desk and removed my shoe, peeled off my wet sock.

The official did not touch the photograph in my hand.

“Do you have evidence that this person is in Paris?”

In the end, I went with the group that was sent to England.

Kitchener Refugee Camp was situated in the green Kent countryside. It held close to five thousand Jewish men, all of us hoping to emigrate to Palestine or South America or the United States. We slept in crowded barracks and worked in the piggery or on the land, and if we were lucky, we were taken on supervised outings to Ramsgate and Margate and Sandwich.

But we were not free, and as I had no money and no relations in any of the places the British government could send us, I knew I would stay in Kitchener until England went to war with Germany, and I was declared an enemy alien and imprisoned in a more obvious way.

But high-ranking officials everywhere have a fondness for temperamental vehicles. I repaired the misfiring engine of an MG Magnette Coupe that belonged to a mid-level official in the London Home Office, who occasionally visited Kitchener. Mr. Simeon was much like Herr Gloeckner, except that he hid his dislike of Jews behind better manners.

At first, I considered asking Mr. Simeon to help me cross into France. But after I had been off the
St. Louis
for some weeks, I began to think more clearly and remembered my promise to Rebecca to leave Europe. In the end, I asked for an American visa.

“The Americans have had their fill of Jews,” Mr. Simeon said. “Best I can do is Canada, and that will be temporary. When it runs out, make yourself invisible.”

I went to Quebec, but could not blend in with my German-accented French. When the time came to make myself invisible, I slipped into the United States at a spot in the woods where nobody knows or cares where the border is. I went to the Lower East Side because I speak Yiddish, and because everybody there is from someplace else.