Let Me Whisper You My Story (10 page)

T
HE STREETS WERE
filled with people searching and calling out to each other. I watched all this, in my silent world, trying to understand what was happening.

‘There is someone alive here. Quickly, help me,’ an old man yelled from a crumbled building.

Freddy and I ran to him and tore at the rubble with our hands, though Gertrude tried to pull me back. I cried silently with happiness when a man was pulled out from a pile of broken bricks and grey dust. His mouth was caked with blood, but he was alive. I saw his dusty Nazi uniform, and, bewildered, stood back. Freddy took my hand and we walked away.

I found myself staring at children who were about my age with their shaggy hair, torn clothing and dirty faces. Some were with adults. Others quite alone. Were we still children? I didn’t feel like a child anymore. Since Heinrich’s death I felt childhood was far behind me.

People were on the move, in carts with horses if they had them, but mainly just walking out of streets that didn’t look like streets anymore. Some held placards with
photos of missing family. ‘Have you seen this boy? His name is Fritz Müller. He’s nine years old with fair hair and blue eyes. Was last seen in…’

I looked around for a face I knew. Would Miri suddenly pop out of a crowd and claim me? Was that Papa over there, that stocky man with a beard? No, that wasn’t Papa. That man’s eyebrows did not reach out to shake hands with one another.

Would they recognise me? I was twelve years old. No longer a nine-year-old with bows in her hair. My hair was matted with dust and my face was dirty. The blue dress I wore was bleached dull grey by mortar dust and smoke.

In the building where we sheltered no-one asked or cared whether I was Jewish. I was just another child of the war. Nobody cared about the dirt on their clothing or having a bath. Many cared about seeing a doctor, for there were so many injured, and everyone cared a great deal about food and water.

Food parcels were brought in by the soldiers and the Red Cross, but the heavy trucks could never bring enough food. Those people strong enough queued at food stations twice and got twice as much. The weak depended on the strong, who didn’t always care about hungry people.

A baby boy was born in the building where we sheltered. I went to see him, all red and screaming and so tiny, nestled in his mother’s arms. Later, someone told Freddy and me that the baby did not live.

For the first time in so long, I began to cry. Tears streamed down my dusty cheeks. Gertrude tried to
comfort me. ‘It’s the hunger, Rachel. Mothers are not healthy enough to have healthy babies.’

Freddy blinked away tears. ‘I wonder about my father,’ he said to me. ‘Is he still alive or has he too been swallowed by the war?’

Occasionally, soldiers threw chocolate and biscuits to us from their trucks. One soldier smiled at me, but I was scared and quickly looked away.

‘We have to be careful. Don’t take the chocolate, Rachel,’ Freddy said, holding me back. ‘I heard a man at our building say that it’s poisoned. They’re trying to kill us.’

Gertrude heard him. ‘Freddy, only the Nazis do that.’ She caught a bar of chocolate in mid-air. ‘Here, have some.’

She opened the bar and gave us each four squares of chocolate. The taste was heavenly. I let a square settle in my mouth and sucked it slowly.

Freddy reddened. ‘I have learned a lot,’ he told me as he ate. ‘A lot about the damage lies can do. A lot about Jews. But how can I trust anyone now? If the Führer told lies, how can one trust these new soldiers with their flashing smiles and chocolate?’

‘Ah, Freddy,’ said Gertrude, ‘we’ve been living with lies for so long. It will take a while to trust again.’

As we sucked the chocolate, Freddy asked me, ‘Why is it that Leipzig is occupied by men who came to stop the war but can only do it by firstly bombing buildings and killing? These new soldiers bombed a building that killed my grandfather. Hitler has killed millions. That’s what I’ve heard. Do we have to fight war with war?’

I shrugged. There was no answer to his questions. I didn’t understand either.

His lips smudged with chocolate, he looked at me seriously. ‘I have decided, Rachel, that it’s time for me to hate war. All war. It doesn’t matter who starts it. War only brings death and suffering.’

I nodded. I took his hand and squeezed it.
I feel the same way.

Much later, Freddy told Gertrude and me that people were saying that Hitler had killed himself, his wife too, in his Berlin bunker, when the Russian army arrived in May 1945.

‘Everyone was talking about it. Hitler used poison, then he shot his wife and himself. Just to be sure there was no trace, the Nazi guards burnt the bodies, Rachel. How foolish. Everyone knows that Hitler left plenty of traces.’

T
HE DAY THAT
Gertrude handed me over to the Red Cross started as a day like every other. Streets were being cleared, trucks were taking away the bodies found in the bombed-out buildings and Germans were queuing for food at stations set up by the Red Cross.

Gertrude spoke to a Red Cross nurse for quite a time. The nurse wrote notes in a book then Gertrude turned to me. ‘My darling, the time has come for you to reclaim your life. Somewhere out there your family will be looking for you. The Red Cross will look after you. They will find your family, those who are left. You are old enough now to search for them.’

I clung to Gertrude.
Don’t you want me anymore?
But she was right. I was old enough to understand. Somewhere out there was my family. I hoped so much for that to be true. The Red Cross would find them. Gertrude had said so. It was time for me to leave her and Freddy.

Freddy held me too. He hugged me and kissed me on both cheeks. He had never been so affectionate before, and I felt my cheeks redden.

‘Silent one, I will miss you. When we meet again you must call me Freddy.’

‘Your life is in front of you, Rachel,’ said Gertrude, wiping her tears away. ‘It will be a good life. A better life. Don’t forget us, though. We will write to you through the Red Cross. And one day, when you are safe and sound, I will send you your mama’s frying pan.’

I looked down at the frying pan oddly clutched in Gertrude’s hand. Both Mama’s hand and Gertrude’s had used this old copper pan. I also reached out and touched the pan before I was pulled away, and in that last moment I felt Gertrude’s hand upon the pan and my mama’s too, and the hands of generations of my family, including my great-grandmother’s whose painting had hung in our old home.

Then I was taken, gently but firmly, and put on a bus with other children, and several nurses. Although my stomach was knotted with fear and grief at leaving Gertrude and Freddy, I thought that maybe this was the way the war ended. Families, torn apart for years, found each other again.

The more I clutched the world’s longest scarf and felt the small weight of Miri’s journal, the more I began to
feel that somewhere, my family was alive. The Red Cross would surely find them.

On the bus, young children wailed and were comforted by the nurses. I, on the other hand, felt the tight muscles at the side of my mouth relax, and for the first time in ages, I smiled.

I would find my family. It would happen. It must happen.

T
HE BUS RATTLED
along. With my nose pressed against the window I looked out at ruined towns, where the broken buildings were being knocked down before they collapsed. Women with scarves wrapped around their faces to protect them from the dust were shovelling rubble into carts. There were men there too but mainly women. Where were the men? Killed in the war? Heavy machinery moved twisted metal. Soldiers were everywhere.

The faces of the people were heavy. They knew that the war was over. Ordinary Germans were the unhappy survivors. No homes, their families lost. I wanted to feel some pity for them but I couldn’t. I remembered the walks along the street with my parents, the sneers and the little girl who’d spat on me. I wondered if I’d forgive them one day.

Eventually the bus arrived at a village. Most of the buildings had been flattened, but at the end of a lane I saw a winding driveway that led to a large two-storey brick home with a slate roof. It had been turned into a
hospital. How strange, I thought, that some buildings remained whole while others had been flattened. ‘How did the bombs miss it? A miracle,’ a Red Cross nurse said.

‘Rubbish. There are no miracles, just good luck,’ said another nurse.

I overheard them talking as we left the bus. ‘This place belonged to a Nazi general. It was his country home. He was killed. What would he say if he knew his precious home was being used to care for war orphans, many of them Jewish?’

The first thing I noticed in the house was the separation of the well children from the sick. Part of the mansion had been turned into a long dormitory for healthy children who did not have family to care for them. Another section with numerous bedrooms was being used as a hospital. Most of the children were survivors from the concentration camps. Many of them had awful illnesses and were suffering from starvation. They had been put in camps towards the end of the war and had just enough energy to see the war out before the camps were liberated. Red Cross vans had brought as many sick children to the home as they could carry. There were also children who had been hurt in the bombings.

We healthy children ate in a big dining room and the sick children were fed in the hospital. The nurses were very careful not to feed them too much as their stomachs couldn’t take it. They fed them tiny amounts of watered milk and sugar and small amounts of food every few hours, and slowly increased their food until they could digest proper meals. I found this out by listening to the
talk of the nurses and Red Cross staff who helped care for us.

I heard one nurse tell another that one and a half million Jewish children had been murdered, most of them under the age of six. It was such a big number. The nurses looked shocked. Someone else said six million Jews died. Nobody seemed to know the exact figure. The number seemed impossible. No-one could imagine such a number. Then I listened as they talked about all the deaths from the war—some said twenty million, others said thirty million. I tried to string together faces in my mind—children from the street I lived in, my own sister, my cousins. I ran to the corridor and vomited into a basin there.

Normally, when the nurses spoke of these things they made sure no children could hear them, but as I was mute, they often didn’t notice I was there. I moved so quietly I seemed to dissolve into the walls. Being mute made me an excellent listener, and I replayed their information in my mind, trying somewhere in their stories to find news of the Jews of Leipzig and what had become of them.

I was curious about the other children and wished I could speak with them, as they talked nonstop to one another. One child called Ursula told me how she’d been hidden in the woods by a farmer. She’d slept in a barn and he came in each day with a bucket of water for her to wash with and another bucket for her to use as a toilet. Inside his coat he carried food. She’d been alone for seven months with no-one to speak to. She had no idea what had become of her family.

I learned through the nurses that, when the death camps were liberated by the Americans, the British or the Russians, some of the survivors wanted to beat up the Nazis who had been their guards. The survivors didn’t care if they used their last ounce of energy. At once concentration camp they were stopped by a rabbi. ‘Don’t become like them. Stay human.’ So there are survivors from the camps, I thought. My family must be among them.

At the home, I slept in the long dormitory with other children who were healthy. At night a tiny girl called Sarah crept into bed with me. I didn’t mind at all. This little girl was a comfort. She reminded me of how I’d cuddled up to Annie.

One night I woke up as I heard a whistling noise. Was it bombs falling? Together, Sarah and I crept under the bed and curled up together. We took our pillows with us and I covered her with the world’s longest scarf. We weren’t the only ones. While the whistle broke the silence of the night, children silently crawled into bed with one another.

The next day I saw a boy, younger than me, blowing a toy whistle. I pulled it away from him. ‘It’s all I have,’ he said to me, his face scrunched with fear. Maybe the whistle had been under his pillow and somehow he’d leaned on it causing it to screech in the middle of the night. Either way he’d scared us. I couldn’t throw it away, though I wanted to. One of the girls told him how whistles, sirens, loud noises and even the barking of dogs terrified us. The boy, who’d been hidden on a remote farm and not had our experiences, nodded and kept his whistle in his pocket from that time onward.

Outside the building there was a patch of green grass and even some swings. Those of us who were strong enough used the swings.

Once when I was on the swings I noticed a child in the hospital part of the home watching me through a window on the ground floor. I stopped the swing and curiously walked over to her.

I had never ever seen anyone so skinny. Her face was not like that of a child; it was so gaunt and bony that only her huge eyes showed expression. Her brown hair was short and thin with bald patches between fine tufts of hair. It looked like it had fallen out and started growing again. For a long time we just stared at each other through the window. Then she coughed and a nurse came and took her away. That was when I realised how lucky I’d been that Gertrude and Heinrich had found me and taken the risk of hiding me.

I could not imagine what this child had been through. With all my heart, I wished her better, and that soon she would be outside in the garden sitting on a swing and skipping on the grass.

O
NE DAY SOMEONE
came to get me from the garden. I was taken to an office. A woman sat opposite me, her black hair carefully folded in waves, her hands clasped together. She smiled at me. She had powder on her face and ruby lips and looked like a movie star.

‘Ah, Rachel, the child who does not speak. Do you know any English?’

I shook my head.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said in heavily accented German. ‘You’ll learn. We are sending you to England in an aeroplane, Rachel, to a wonderful place there. It’s an orphanage for Jewish refugees. England has agreed to take a thousand Jewish refugees and about twenty-seven large homes are being used to house child refugees, before they are either adopted or placed with surviving relatives. If you have any family left, the Red Cross keeps good records and they will be found. Maybe you have aunts or uncles somewhere?’

I wished I could tell her about the long table for the Sabbath, the bread throwing, my cousins and aunt and uncle, Miri, Mama and Papa.

I would be leaving Germany, I thought. Would the Red Cross still look for my family if I left?

As if reading my thoughts the lady said, ‘Don’t worry. If you have family left then leave it to us. It will take time, but we will find them.’

I began to wonder. Perhaps this was the place I had to go to before my parents could pick me up. Hope began to swell in me. Yes, I’d go to this other place, England. The lady told me the plane would look like a whale with wings. I would sit inside with lots of other children.

If I keep travelling far enough I’ll find them all, I thought, and one glorious day, I will have a party and invite Gertrude and Freddy, so my parents can properly thank them. I missed Gertrude and Freddy more than I thought possible, and gruff old Heinrich, now buried somewhere in the rubble of Leipzig.