Against the Wind (16 page)

This very credible background was almost my undoing. A Nazi officer accosted me and asked if it was true I was Czech. I explained my German heritage, which he believed, whereupon he asked me for help.

It seems an elderly Czech man, who spoke no German, could not make himself understood to the increasingly impatient guards. I was asked to translate.

It was a frightening moment. I knew a native Czech speaker would see through my imposture. I could only pray he would be as sensitive to my plight as I was to his.

Thanks be to God, he was!

But even when that interview came to a successful conclusion, my dilemma was only beginning.

The German officer asked if I were alone in Munich. If this was some elaborate trap, I didn’t want to implicate anyone else, so I said yes.

He asked to take me out to dinner! How could I refuse a member of the Gestapo?

My mouth was able to speak more heroically than my heart felt. “Oh, yes,” I said. “I’d love to see the beer hall where the Hitler revolution began.”

The
Oberleutnant
, who insisted I call him Alfred, took me into a world of thumping steins and pounding polka music, papered thickly with Nazi banners. The agent offered to teach me the Nazi drinking songs. As he said, “Soon you’ll be singing them in Prague, yes? One People! One Nation! One
Führer
, eh?”

All the time I was keeping the forced smile plastered on my face I kept wondering if this was one of the men who had interrogated my father. Was his preferred method of persuasion the rubber hose, the bare fist, or electric shocks?

And still I could not escape.

Instead of driving me to my hotel when we left the beer hall, he piloted the staff car into the countryside. I was more afraid than ever.

Then he parked on a hillside overlooking a brightly lit compound surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers.

It was Dachau.

My companion was proud of his work. “They die quite easily here,” he said, his words slurred with too much drink. “The Greater Reich will be cleansed of all the
Untermenschen
.”

I heard the savage barking of guard dogs and the rip of machine-gun fire. The Gestapo officer snickered. “Sometimes they kill themselves by crossing into the dead zone on purpose.”

Papa
, I thought.
Oh, Papa!

My night of horrors ended at last because my companion had to catch an early train to Berlin. I let him think I had been inspired by the Nazi vision of the future by asking him to return me to the beer hall.

From there I could get a taxi to a hotel without revealing my destination to the Gestapo.

“Perhaps I’ll see you in Prague,” he suggested.

“Thank you for showing me what to expect,” I said.

He kissed me. I kept the violin case between us as a shield. He saluted and drove away.

I became violently ill moments later.

The next morning I went to Munich’s Marienplatz. With hundreds of other visitors I watched the famous animated figures on the clock tower perform their mechanical dance steps.

When I left the square I had three things I did not possess when I entered it: two small children in a covered pram…and the memory of a father’s anguished face watching his children leave him, perhaps forever.

The children slept on the train ride from Munich to Prague. Dosed with cough medicine, they slumbered deeply. There was no danger at the border crossing.

It was a good thing. My heart sick for my father and my country, I have no heroism or cleverness left.

¹⁰
“Oh, Ain’t We Crazy!” attributed to Harry McClintock, aka “Haywire Mac”

¹¹
“I Yi, Yi, Yi, Yi” (I like you very much) lyrics by Mack Gordon, music by Harry Warren

13

DEAD IN THE WATER
NORTH ATLANTIC
AUTUMN 1940

M
y eyes adjusted to the darkness. I discovered to my relief the orange flickers were not from a fire but from dimly glowing emergency lamps. In the days spent aboard the
Newcastle
I had never noticed them before this moment. Grateful for the faint illumination they provided, I knew how terrifying and bewildering those corridors would have seemed in the utter darkness of a cloudy North Atlantic night.

Newcastle
’s deck had an almost imperceptible downhill slope and a slight lean to the right as I staggered forward.

The ship still surged serenely onward. Our speed though the water did not slacken. I felt reassured. Was my first panicked reaction overblown? I took a deep breath and forced myself to calm down. My thoughts raced.
Maybe
Newcastle
isn’t sinking, not at all! The water around my ankles must be from a broken pipe. Of course the children are frightened. Oh, Jesus! I’m frightened! Who wouldn’t be?

I prayed in that moment that my job was reassurance, not rescue.

Ahead the hallway curved outward before straightening again. I remembered my cabin was just beyond that bend. A few more paces and I would have my life vest securely belted on and could round up my young charges.
Like a drill,
I would tell them.
Part of the adventure.

After six more steps my progress came to an abrupt halt. The passageway was blocked. The outer wall bowed inward; the floor buckled upwards. What remained of the corridor was jammed with fallen ceiling and splintered wood paneling.

My lips tightened with anger and determination to reach my cabin. Irrationally, I thought of the pendant watch Murphy had given me for my last birthday. His picture was inside the cover, as was the baby’s. The watch lay on the night table in my cabin, and I meant to get it.

Seizing a chunk of paneling, I wrenched it free and tossed it behind me. A bit of ceiling tile followed, and some mahogany molding. A length of pipe frustrated me for a moment, but I managed to bend it out of the way.

I grasped a piece of jagged metal. The serrated edge sliced my palm when I tried to yank it free. Winding a pocket handkerchief around the wound, I concentrated on removing the trash blocking the inboard side of the hall. Though only half the height of the passage was clear, I managed to open a space wide enough for me to advance.

I don’t know what made me poke my head into the opening. It would have been sensible and much easier to extend my foot through first.

What greeted my gaze beyond the wreckage was a void—a featureless emptiness that fell away into a pool of water and was open to the sea beyond. Waves lapped at the edges of the hole. White foam outlined the ragged remains of what had moments before been
Newcastle
’s smooth steel skin.

Where the corridor had been, where my cabin had been, and the one beyond that, and the rooms of the decks below mine, was now a gaping hole. If I had stepped unknowingly through that crevice, I would certainly have crossed the threshold between this world and the next. I struggled to reconcile the conflicting images. Behind me was the carpeted hallway of a comfortable passenger liner. Ahead was a crater resembling the wound left when a Nazi bomb shattered a block of London flats.

I trembled from the chill wind funneling up from the sea…and from the realization of what one more step would have meant. The crevasse was a canyon, stretching at least three decks high and two cabins wide…and included the space where my room had been.

Where I might have been.

The back wall and one side wall of my living quarters were all that remained intact. No floor…no ceiling…no bed or nightstand or cupboard. No pendant watch.

If I had not stopped to visit with Mariah, if I had not paused to tell Connor good night, if Miss Pike had not detained me, I would have been directly above the strike of the torpedo, right in the path of the explosion.

Stark reality brought me, shivering, back to my duty. Seawater filled the space beneath where my cabin had been, and the level was rising. This was no minor alarm.

Newcastle
was, indeed, mortally wounded, and our time was short.

Through a haze of acrid smoke I saw the door where my five girls were quartered. A mere twenty feet from where I stood, they were on the far side of a chasm filling with the seawater and rimmed by fire from the burning ship. I prayed they had not been blown away by the blast that demolished my cabin. Above the roar of gushing waves I heard faint cries for help. “Betsy! Lindy! Alice! Margaret! Nan!” I called their names, “Oh, Jesus! Help me!”

They began pounding frantically. Had they heard me?

I remembered the passage from Isaiah Mama taught me when I was a little girl terrified of thunder:

When you pass through the waters,

I will be with you;

and through the rivers,

they shall not overwhelm you.

When you walk through fire,

you shall not be burned,

and the flame shall not consume you.
¹²

Was there ever a moment when the threats named in that verse were so real? Could God’s ancient promise to His people be living and true for us on this terrible night? I knew somehow I must save my girls!

Muffled pleas reached me. “Help! Somebody please! Help us!”

It was not possible to go farther forward by the path I had intended to follow. There was no way to cross the yawning gulf. At first glance it seemed the only way to get to them was by retreating.

I stared into the void. Circling the inner edge of the abyss, like a ledge above a canyon, was a thin ribbon of deck. Six inches wide at most, the shelf tapered in places to the thickness of a slice of bread.

Could I do this?

“I’m coming! Hold on!”

“Elisa? What?”

I turned. Miss Pike and her sniffling girls shuffled toward me. Like a bossy mother hen, she kept them close. Each was dressed in a warm coat with her life vest securely buckled over the top.

“Elisa?” she questioned again.

“Your lifeboat station is Number 6?”

“Yes. Why?” she demanded.

Her commanding manner had returned. It and the bloodsoaked scarf knotted around her head gave her a distinctly nautical air, like a pirate queen.

The most direct route to Station 6 was forward. “The hall is…is blocked,” I said. “The blast. The floor is gone.”

Miss Pike caught the significant tremor in my voice.

“Your girls?”

“On the other side.”

“Ah.” She stooped and peered through the debris to examine the damage beyond. She gasped as her eyes swept across the devastation. “Oh, Lord! Lord have mercy!”

“My cabin. Gone.”

Her face registered horror at how close I had come to losing my life. The frantic pounding from the children’s cabin sounded again.

“How many lost in the blast?” she asked.

It was a question I could not answer. “My girls…I must join them. You can see I must. Miss Pike, go back the way you came.”

“Yes, back. The stairs were open, and then up before we go forward to our station? But you?”

“You go,” I said. “I…I’m going to them…the fastest way.”

“Elisa, how?”

“A bit of a ledge remains. Like walking a fence when I was a girl. I can do it.”

“My dear,” she cried. “My dear girl!”

“I must try, Miss Pike. But please, send someone down. A ship’s officer. Someone to help them…in case…” I swallowed hard. “Send someone to help me.”

Miss Pike read the determination in my expression. Her eyes brimmed, and she muttered, “God keep you, Elisa.” Then squaring her shoulders she instructed: “Come, girls. No dawdling. Follow me.”

I was alone again with my fears, juggling the terrifying prospect of creeping along the tiny ledge against their urgent need. Taking a deep breath, I stretched my foot through the hole and planted it on the narrow rim. The metal shelf was solid under me, and my confidence grew.

Grasping the wreckage with my bandaged hand, I ducked my head, stepped into the opening, and made the mistake of looking down. Below me the sea surged and crashed. When
Newcastle
wallowed in a swell the steel canyon filled with streaks of foam and watery fingers stretched up as if to seize me. A puddle of burning oil gestured with tendrils of smoke. When the wave crest passed, the pulsing black mass receded, like a hideous monster preparing to spring. The air was filled with chilly, salt-and-oil-laden vapor.