The Children of Willesden Lane: Beyond The Kindertransport: A Memoir of Music, Love, and Survival (13 page)

Aaron paused, as if he wondered whether to continue. “And?” asked Paul.

“She didn’t want me to move the cot inside though, she wanted me to sleep in her bed.”

The words fell heavily on Lisa; she didn’t know why but she didn’t want to hear what came next. Aaron sensed the mood of the group and went silent.

“Did you sleep with her?” Paul insisted.

Aaron didn’t answer for a long time, as if he wished he could take it all back. “What do you think?” he tried to say ambiguously, but the friends looked at this handsome, arrogant boy and knew the answer.

Lisa didn’t know whether she liked this Aaron anymore. Why had he shared this? It made her uneasy.

Gunter had been listening quietly; there were tears in his eyes.

“Gunter! What’s the matter?” Gina asked gently.

“I was thinking about the birds and bees—when my father tried to tell me about the facts of life,” he answered, his voice trailing off.

“And?” Gina asked.

Gunter was silent.

“Oh, please tell us,” she coaxed.

“It was the day I was to leave Cologne. The transport left at midnight, so there was a lot of time after dinner, and my mother asked him, just like that. She said, “Take your son and tell him what fathers tell sons.’ So we left the house and started walking around the block. My father hadn’t spoken much since we’d decided about the Kinder-transport . . . he had been awarded the Iron Cross in the Great War, fighting for Germany, and now they’d smashed his shop and were sending me away.”

Gunter started to cry.

“What did he say?” Gina asked.

“He never said anything because he couldn’t stop crying.”

Gina took his hand and squeezed it tight.

As weeks passed and there was no sign of Germans, the chill of winter made the rooftop adventure less attractive, so the Willesden boys gave the binoculars back to the warden. Months went by without the sighting of a single German bomber, and many Britons became convinced it had all been a false alarm. Half of the 800,000 parents with young children who had left for the countryside returned home and England played a waiting game. Even the 150,000 soldiers of the British Expeditionary Force, who had been sent across the Channel, were waiting, hunkered down in muddy barns in Belgium and France.

One day, Mrs. Cohen asked the
Kinder
to move their bedding back to the hostel from the convent bomb shelter, and the normal life of the hostel resumed—if anyone dared call it that.

Lisa’s waiting also continued. When Hanukkah came, a promised visit from Sonia was postponed. In spite of the lull, people said London was still too dangerous.

12

R
ATIONING WAS
announced New Year’s Day. It was 1940. Mrs. Cohen sorted through the coupons on the kitchen counter and muttered to Mrs. Glazer, “Four ounces of meat per week per person? Good grief, these are growing boys and girls.”

She took the coupons to the shops on Walm Lane twice a week to pick up the meager supplies. Luckily, the kosher butcher kept a jar on the counter with a hand-lettered sign—“For Our Needy Refugees”—and used the coins to help the hostel buy additional provisions; occasionally, the greengrocer slipped in something extra. All in all, they got by.

The bulk of the items were parsnips, potatoes, and flour. The children were assigned turns lugging the heavy bags back home, moaning about the disappearance of candy and chocolate from their lives. The rations were mere subsistence; Lisa often felt hunger gnawing at her stomach.

One Saturday, when it was Lisa’s and Gina’s turn, a freak snowstorm transformed the neighborhood from its customary gray to a brilliant white. After synagogue, the two girls broke off from the rest of the group and went to collect the groceries, fastening the bags onto rickety-wheeled trolleys. The sun was shining for a change, and Lisa saw things in the neighborhood she had never noticed before.

There were colorful, reflective strips in the shape of wrenches and hammers pasted on the blackout curtains of the hardware store, and the bric-a-brac shop had a hand-painted mural of a room of antiques. The light stanchions had newly painted zebra stripes to ward off the rash of car accidents that had begun the night the streetlights were turned off. It all put her into a merry mood, and the two girls skidded home on the icy sidewalks, laughing their way down Willesden Lane into the gigantic crossfire of a serious snowball fight.

The hostel had divided up into teams by rooms, and the boys and girls were pelting each other mercilessly. Lisa and Gina became instant fodder for the cannonballs of snow, so they were forced to fight back with everything they had—turnips and potatoes (the vegetables flew better and took less time to produce than snowballs)—and soon several of the little boys were sobbing from direct hits.

“I’m sorry, Leo! I didn’t mean it,” Lisa said with contrition, but ten-year-old Leo responded by stuffing a huge wad of snow down her back.

“Truce!” someone yelled, and Johnny came forward and comforted the crying children by rolling an enormous snowball and beginning a snowman. Everyone pitched in and the snowball became life-size. Gina hit upon the idea of decorating the face with a green turnip top. She stuck it on to make a mustache, and everybody gasped.

“
Der Führer
has arrived,” she said in an eerie voice. “Let’s kill him!” someone shouted.

The younger boys leapt on the snowman, and in seconds the effigy was pummeled into slush.

The front door opened and Mrs. Cohen came out on the porch and surveyed the soggy groceries with displeasure. Turnips and potatoes littered the front yard, and her expression alone was enough to send everyone scurrying to pick them up.

“Aaron, Paul? Please come here for a moment.”

Mrs. Cohen was carrying a bucket of black tar and handed it to them. “Mrs. Knight at 156 would like our help, her roof is leaking. I want you two boys to find a brush and help her.”

Paul took the pail from her, but Aaron hung back, saying to no one in particular, “Isn’t it convenient to have all these refugees to work all the time.”

Mrs. Cohen overheard and turned to him. “Aaron, I’m tired of your thinking that you are somehow above these things. And I’m also tired of your thinking you don’t have to obey the same rules as everyone else. If you are late for a meal one more time without a good excuse, we will not serve you, understood?”

Aaron pretended he wasn’t affected by her words and turned and left with Paul. Lisa watched him and worried. What worried her most was that she liked him too much. He was trouble; and she knew she should stay away.

Lisa and Gina hurried to finish kitchen duty, carrying the soggy bags of produce to Mrs. Glazer in the kitchen.

“Downstairs, please, but leave some potatoes here,” the cook said to Gina, directing her to the tiny cellar below. “Here, Lisa,” she said, handing her a large knife. “Peel me fifteen potatoes, would you, please?”

Lisa was beginning her task as Mrs. Cohen came into the kitchen. She stared at Lisa’s snow-reddened hands holding the poised knife.

“She is not to use knives, Mrs. Glazer,” the matron said matter-of-factly, handing the sharp utensil back to the cook. “Please come here, Lisa, I want to introduce you to someone.”

Mrs. Cohen escorted Lisa to the living room, past several girls who were vacuuming and dusting, over to a boy in his early teens who sat calmly on the couch. He had neatly combed hair and was wearing dark glasses.

“This is my son, Hans. He was hoping you could play something for him.”

“Hello,” Lisa said shyly.

“He will be staying at the hostel with us,” Mrs. Cohen added with her usual formality, then turned and left them alone.

“Thank you for the use of your music; I hope you didn’t mind,” Lisa said.

“Not a problem. I won’t be needing it,” he said with an odd sarcasm. “Would you play something by Debussy?”

“ ‘Clair de Lune’?” she offered.

“How about ‘The Girl with the Flaxen Hair’?” he replied.

“I don’t know it.”

“There is a copy of the music there.”

“I’m terrible at sight-reading.”

“Please?” he asked.

Trapped, Lisa leafed through the stack of music and found the piece. She hated to sight-read because she was so bad at it, but fortunately the piece was simple, and she muddled through the first page. When she saw the complicated second page she stopped, too much of a perfectionist to allow herself any more mistakes. “I’ll play you the ‘Clair de Lune.’ ” Without waiting for a response, she launched into her favorite piece.

“Mother was right, you play beautifully—it almost makes me feel there might be something nice left in the world,” Hans said when it was over. He had a sad, resigned air about him.

“Won’t you play me something now?” she asked. There was a long silence before he spoke. “Yes, I will, if you’ll help me to the piano.”

It was only then that she realized Hans was blind. She got up, took him by the arm, and led him to the piano.

“Please show me middle C.”

She put his thumb on the proper key, then hesitantly, he began “The Girl with the Flaxen Hair,” playing with warmth and determination. “I’m sorry, but it’s the only piece I remember by heart.”

Listening to him play, a profound feeling overtook her. How lucky I am, she thought. She had spent so much time thinking about how terrible things were and how worried she felt about her parents and Rosie that she hadn’t had time to be grateful—grateful for Sonia’s escape, grateful for her own freedom. She knew God had given her a gift, and she vowed to use this gift to its fullest. She would practice and practice; she would fulfill the promise she had made to her mother.

13

H
ANS SPENT
his days in the living room, reading books in braille and listening to the wireless, memorizing the voices of every reporter and politician on the BBC. His only respite was Lisa’s practice session. Each evening when she returned from work, he happily joined her at the piano bench, tapping his cane to the rhythm of her Czerny exercises and offering praise and suggestions with each new piece she’d tackle.

After each session he returned again to the radio. The recent news had been grim. The arrival of spring had brought an end to the waiting—in quick succession the Nazis had landed in Norway, invaded the Netherlands, and entered Belgium, Luxembourg, and the north of France. The new vocabulary word was
Sichelschnitt,
the cut of the sickle; Hitler’s panzer divisions were slicing through Europe.

The third Sunday in May, Hans spread the word that there would be an important broadcast that evening, the first speech by the new prime minister. Almost all of the thirty residents crowded into the living room, spilling over the sofas and onto the floor, as Hans turned up the volume.

Winston Churchill’s voice was powerful and magnetic, and they leaned forward to hear every word. “I speak to you for the first time as Prime Minister in a solemn hour for the life of our country. . . . A tremendous battle is raging in France and Flanders. The Germans, by a remarkable combination of air bombing and heavily armored tanks, have broken though the French defenses north of the Maginot Line, and strong columns of their armored vehicles are ravaging the open country. . . . They have penetrated deeply and spread alarm and confusion in their tracks. . . . It would be foolish to disguise the gravity of the hour. It would be still more foolish to lose heart and courage . . . for myself I have invincible confidence in the French army and its leaders. . . .”

When Lisa went to bed that night she was trembling with fear. She pulled out the pictures of her mother and her father and held them close to her as she fell asleep.

Two weeks later Lisa received two letters. One was from Sonia in Norwich and included a small black-and-white photo of her young sister in a flared wool coat, standing in a garden with her new family and the family dog. “I have enough to eat and am learning to speak English, but I miss you very much and . . .”

The second letter was very disturbing. It was her own letter to her parents in Vienna, addressed to 13 Franzenbrükestrasse, which had been sent back stamped “Undeliverable.” Lisa called a “committee” meeting, in despair. Gunter, Gina, Paul, Aaron, and Lisa gathered around the dining table and shared their worries—none of them had received any recent news of their parents. They agreed to meet at the Bloomsbury House the next day after work.

Gina and Lisa met the boys outside the Tottenham Court tube station, and together they walked east to Bloomsbury Street. The beleaguered old building was familiar by now. The Jewish Refugee Agency offices inside were still overcrowded, no longer with lost children, but with desperate relatives searching for news.

The five teenagers convinced the volunteer secretary that they had to see Mr. Hardesty himself, but when they were ushered into his office, they were somewhat tongue-tied.

“And how is Willesden Lane?’ he asked, recognizing them.

“Mr. Hardesty, we do not have one word from our parents,” Lisa said, speaking for the group. “No one is giving us any information.”

“The government must know what is happening,” said Aaron. “Someone must know.”

Mr. Hardesty looked at the visibly shaken teenagers, running his fingers through his thinning white hair. “I don’t know what to tell you. Believe me, we know very little. The Red Cross is trying to find out all they can.”

Lisa handed Mr. Hardesty a handwritten list of the names of all their parents. “Please, can you find out where they are?”

He took the list of names and read it, then leaned back in his chair and shut his eyes, searching for the right words. “All we know is that many Jews are being sent to relocation camps, and that is why you are not receiving letters.”

“Camps?” Gina asked forlornly.

“Relocation camps, we know very little about them. The Red Cross will try to help, but personally I know nothing . . . I’m sorry. Now if there are questions about England I can answer, I’d be—”

Aaron stood up rudely and headed for the door. The rest followed, but Lisa stayed for a second. “Thank you, Mr. Hardesty,” she said.