Lilli's Quest (4 page)

Four

True to his promise, on September 1, 1939, Adolf Hitler sends Nazi Germany's fiercest fighting divisions into neighboring Poland. True to
their
promise, the governments of Great Britain and France declare war on Germany two days later. World War II has begun.

The morning of September 1 finds Lilli and Mutti on the busy street with the trolley line, on the very block where Lilli tackled Helga to the ground just a few days before. Mutti, always much more stylishly dressed than the average German
Frau
, wears a flowered-chiffon summer dress and a brimmed straw hat, tilted at a charming angle.

Lilli, already tall for her age, walks beside her mother. She is dressed in her usual khaki clothing, high socks, and sturdy shoes. She carries both a small suitcase and a backpack. Her heart is racing. She could never have imagined this scene until the day of Helga's accident . . . Helga, who now rests with her broken arm and dislocated shoulder in a cast, attended in the attic room by Gerda and a hired nurse.

After Helga's fall, people began to gather, seemingly from nowhere, muttering and making suggestions for lifting her from the ground. Several older men and women scolded Lilli for having knocked her sister down. The police were sure to be arriving at any minute to investigate the hubbub.

It was Gerda who saved the day, huffing and puffing as she caught up with the runaway and her pursuer. With great strength and care, she lifted Helga to her feet, carefully embraced her wounded arm and shoulder, and walked her back to the house, with Lilli trailing shame-facedly behind.

“Just a bit of roughhousing,” Gerda soothed the slowly-dispersing crowd. “They are sisters and members of the Hitler Youth.”

The harried days that followed were taken up with Mutti's daring plan to have Lilli substitute for Helga on the Kindertransport.

“How can this happen?” Lilli asked her mother. “I am a year older and Helga and I don't look alike. They will not honor the passport. And what will happen to Helga, and to the rest who remain behind?” Lilli insisted that she was cheating Helga of a chance for freedom that was rightfully hers.

Mutti was gentle but persuasive. “You wanted to go from the very start, Lilli. How foolish to waste this chance for freedom. Once you are in England, you may be able
to save us all.” With that, Mutti pressed into Lilli's hand the name and address of Papa's brother, Herman, who lived in America. Lilli remembered hearing her parents speak of the American relatives, with whom Papa had corresponded for years prior to his arrest. Herrman knew of their plight, but had been unable to help the family because of his country's strict immigration laws. So, for Lilli, the Kindertransport would be more than just an escape from Nazi Germany—it would also be a mission to find a way to contact her uncle.

Before her departure, Lilli tried to make peace with her sister. “What are you so worried about, Lilli?” Helga remarked cynically. “You know I didn't want to be sent away like a scared bunny. I'll stay here and fight for my rights.”

“What rights?” Lilli exclaimed. “You haven't any here in Germany. Where were you even running that day? Into the arms of the street police, or those brutes, the Brown Shirts, or straight to the Gestapo itself?”

Helga turned away, gingerly lifting her right arm and shoulder in their hard cast.

“We won't talk about it anymore,” she pronounced.

The trolley is crowded and noisy, and there is an air of excitement everywhere. All along the route, groups of Hitler Youth are marching through the streets, cheering and carrying flags and large banners bearing swastikas.
The news of the
Fuhrer's
invasion of Poland has traveled fast, and the German people appear to be supporting him in his reckless grab for conquest and power.

Mutti and Lilli sit rigidly side by side and do not speak until Mutti announces, “We will get off at the next stop.”

Lilli peers out the window. They are still a few blocks away from the bustling railroad station. Mutti explains that it will be better to say goodbye at some distance from the train platform, as the Nazi authorities frown on too much public display.

Mother and daughter descend from the trolley and make their way through the congested streets. Lilli has already said goodbye to her Bayer grandparents and little Elspeth, as well as to Helga, the two sisters crying and hugging each other. Soon it will be time to say goodbye to Mutti, who remains a mystery to Lilli. Noting the presence of so many Hitler police and high-level Nazi officers surrounding the railroad station, Lilli thinks about the tall shadowy figure of Captain Koeppler. What is his true relationship to Mutti? Was Papa betrayed by Mutti's “old school friend” or has he been helped? If Papa is alive, why can't the Captain get word to them from him?

“I will write to you, Lilli my child,” Mutti says as they drawer closer to the station. “And you will write to me. We must never lose touch . . .”

“And you will let me know the first thing if you hear
from Papa,” Lilli interrupts. “And tell me about Helga and Elspeth . . .”

Their words are drowned out by the noise of blaring announcements, harsh commands, and the shrillness of the train whistle. A moment later, mother and daughter are being wedged apart by the steely shoulders of the uniformed police. They manage one last embrace before Lilli is swept away in the direction of the nearest railroad car.

The Nazi guards shove the children onto the train like so many cattle. Toddlers are carried aboard by older children, and there are even some infants in the arms of brother and sisters, themselves no more than teenagers. No parents or guardians are allowed to go along. The only adults on the train will be the German officers.

Lilli reaches a seat beside a window in the dreary car, which quickly fills up and overflows into the next car and the next. There are perhaps two hundred children about to travel on what will likely be the last Kindertransport ever to leave Germany.

Lilli peers out the window, trying to get one more view of Mutti. She manages to catch a glimpse of her mother's tall, lovely figure in the crush on the station platform.

But with so many little faces pressed against the grimy windows, Mutti doesn't see Lilli, who is waving furiously amid the clutter and tears of her fellow children. Soon only a tiny space remains in the window,
through which Lilli catches a final view of Mutti, dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief. Beside her, stands the tall, grim figure of Captain Gerhardt Koeppler.

It's almost a relief for Lilli to look away from the window into the stern face of one of the German soldiers, who are checking for name tags and luggage identification. The tags mean that the children have valid travel visas, or passports. Any child without a tag will be removed from the train.

Lilli gropes nervously for her visa. It is there, pinned to her coat. Then she is asked to point out her luggage. The officer lifts up her backpack and suitcase, and seems to be weighing them. He hefts the backpack questioningly. “What have you got in there?” he asks with a grin, “the family silver?”

Alarmed, Lilli gulps. “Books. Some English books to read.”

The soldier's grin widens into a toothy smile as he presses the pack to feel its contents and then sets it down beside Lilli. “Ha. Well, good luck to you then, Helga Frankfurter.” And he is gone.

Helga!
She is now Helga. Lilli must never forget this. She will be Helga forever. And who will Helga be? What will become of her?

Lilli is still pondering this awful question when she feels a jolt and realizes that the train is leaving the station. Soon they will be clattering through the
countryside on their way to the border with Holland, where they will at last be beyond the clutches of German authority.

The seats in the train are arranged to face each other, so that some of the children are riding forward, and some backward. From her cramped position beside the window, Lilli looks directly across into the eyes of a bespectacled boy who, unlike many of the others, is well-dressed for the journey. He is so proper and neat that she can't help smiling at him and, to her surprise, he smiles back and thrusts out his hand.

“Stefan Korzak,” he announces with formal courtesy. Lilli imagines that if he was on his feet he would click his heels.

“Li . . . Helga Frankfurter,” she replies, stumbling a bit. “Where are you from?”

Lilli learns that Stefan is from a Jewish family in Austria. The country has been under Nazi rule since March 1938, so his parents have arranged for him to live with the family of his uncle, a businessman in England.

“What about you?” he asks Lilli.

Lilli hunches her shoulders. “I don't know where I will live. But I do have an uncle in America. Perhaps I can go to live with him some day.”

Stefan leans forward, his eyeglasses glinting in the staggered light of the rumbling train. “Don't plan on it. They don't let Jews in that easily.”

Lilli feels for Herman Frankfurter's address, which
is sewn into the pocket of her blouse, and shudders. She doesn't want to talk to Stefan Korzak anymore. He is surely one of the very lucky members of the Kindertransport, clean, and well-dressed.

Babies, in the arms of children Lilli's age, cry incessantly. Every now and then the smell of vomit wafts through the car. Some of the young travelers have motion sickness; others are frightened. Gerda has packed a lunch for Lilli of bread and cheese and fruit. But her stomach is turning and she wants nothing to eat. She leans back against the hard wooden seat and shuts her eyes. But images leap before her . . . her goodbyes to Helga and Elspeth, the barking orders and rough handling of the Nazi guards at the railroad station, her last glimpse of Mutti with the menacing Captain Koeppler at her side . . .

Lilli is awakened by the sharp, jerky movements of the slowing train, and by the sound of cheering coming from within the railroad car. Stefan Korzak is leaning toward her with a gleaming smile. “We have come to the Dutch border,” he announces. “We are free, Helga Frankfurter. Free!”

Lilli rubs her eyes. She is being crushed by her seatmates, who have swarmed to the windows, seeking their first view of Holland, a free country (even though the
Fuhrer
has already made plans to swallow it up, along with Belgium and even France).

Stefan, who has a better view of the Dutch railroad station from his window, informs Lilli that “the Nazi guards are leaving the train. And the Dutch train conductors are coming aboard. Goodbye to Hitler!”

There is more cheering, not only for the unarmed, blue-garbed trainmen entering the cars, but also for the many Dutch women and children who have come to see the Kindertransport pass through on its way to the seaport. Train windows have been opened and the kindly visitors are passing sandwiches and chocolate bars, even cups of hot cocoa, to the clamoring hands within. Lilli finds herself gulping back tears of surprise as a chocolate bar wrapped in gold paper is thrust into her hands

Too quickly, however, the train sounds its whistle, warning of its imminent departure for the ferry slips on the North Sea. “Goodbye!” the visitors cry out as they slowly disperse. “Good luck to you for a safe landing in England.”

It's late in the day when the weary and sea-sickened Kindertransport travelers arrive in the English port of Harwich. They are taken to the assignment center, where they will meet their hosts. The children, so happy and refreshed during their brief stop in Holland, are now limp, and many of the little ones have fallen fast asleep. Even Stefan Korzak looks a bit roughed up despite his fine clothing. He suffered a sick stomach several times
during the crossing, and Lilli couldn't help feeling sorry for him. But when his uncle and other family members come to claim him—and he and “Helga” exchange formal farewells—Lilli becomes envious again.

She has been sitting on a bench in the assignment center for what feels like a very long time. Little by little her younger companions have been offered homes, their luggage collected as they have gone off to live with their new families. But Lilli, who appears older than her twelve years, is repeatedly passed over.
What if nobody wants me?
she worries.
I've come so far. Mutti said I would be safe here, but where will I live?

Her thoughts are interrupted by one of the refugee officers overseeing the welfare of the diminishing number of Kindertransport arrrivals. “Not to worry, dear,” says the pleasant-voiced woman. “I promise you'll have a bed tonight and a warm meal.”

“But where?” Lilli asks anxiously. An Army transport has arrived to take several of the oldest refugee boys and girls to an orphanage. Lilli is not sure what a British orphanage is like, but it does not sound like the “good home in England” that Grossmutter Bayer had described. “I want to live some place where I can go to school and . . . and skate and do sports, and go to the cinema . . .”

“Of course, of course, all in good time,” the officer
assures her in a friendly manner. “But meanwhile, dear, we must assure that your basic needs are taken care of. Please collect your things and come with me.”

With a sinking heart, Lilli slings her backpack over her shoulders, picks up her suitcase, and haltingly approaches the waiting transport.

Five

The daylight hours of an English summer seem to go on and on. It is still bright out as Lilli bounces along on a country road in a battered farm truck, seated between her new family, a Mr. and Mrs. Rathbone, instead of in the Army transport that was to have taken her to the orphanage.

She was about to climb into the transport with the other older children who had not been claimed when she felt a tap on her shoulder. “There are some people here asking about you,” said the refugee officer. “Come and speak to them.”

Mrs. Rathbone, whose first name is Agnes, is tall and thin-lipped, with black hair that is scraped back from her face and gathered into a tight knot. She did most of the talking, while her stout, gray-bearded husband, Wilfred, stared silently at Lilli through small, watery eyes.

“You're a tall one. Have you already finished school?”

“
Nein
,” Lilli hastened to reply, adding in English that she wanted to go to school to learn to read and write the language.

“Ah, but you already understand it,” answered the canny Mrs. Rathbone. “There's a school for the young ones in the village, if they'll take you. As for your new home, we've a poultry farm in the countryside with lots to keep you busy. Life there is a bit old-fashioned but it's a healthy place and you'll be safe from the bombs Hitler is sure to drop on our towns and cities.”

When the refugee officer asked if she accepted the offer to go and live with the Rathbones, Lilli readily answered, “Yes,” in English. Her belongings were removed from the Army truck and tossed into the open back of the Rathbones' farm vehicle, which was filled with straw, chicken feathers, and numerous egg crates.

Twilight is beginning to descend when Mr. Rathbone drives off the unpaved road, lined with hedgerows, into an even narrower one. Soon the farmhouse and its surroundings come into view. At first, the snuggling house, built of rough stone and topped by a roof of thatch, reminds Lilli of pictures in the German storybooks she read when she was small. For Lilli, who has lived in a city all her life, the image of a country cottage has always been a romantic one. So she is startled when she steps from the truck into a slab of thick mud, toward which chickens come running from all directions, accompanied by the barking of two large dogs. For a moment, Lilli wonders if, like
Alice
in the book she has been reading, she has fallen into a rabbit hole.

“That'll teach you, my lady,” says the burly Mr. Rathbone with a basso laugh. “Have you never been on a farm before?” Mrs. Rathbone doesn't wait for an answer, hurrying Lilli—who struggles to retrieve her suitcase and backpack from the truck—along impatiently. “It's already late for tea, and we'll have an early night for certain,” Mrs. Rathbone mutters seemingly to herself.

Lilli follows her hostess out of the filthy yard and up a pathway of half-sunken paving stones to the farmhouse entrance. Framed in the doorway stands a small, roly-poly boy, with the broad Mongolian features of a child born with a defect. He appears to have been crying, his knotted fists still rubbing at his eyes. But he lights up at the sight of Mrs. Rathbone, reaching to grasp her about the hips.

“Have you been a good little son while we were away?” asks Mrs. Rathbone, already rushing past him to get the “tea” ready. “Look, Tim,” she points to Lilli, “we've brought you a sister.”

Lilli learns that the Rathbones' farmhouse, with its stone floors and tiny windows, has no electricity or running water. It is also revealed to her—thankfully—that “tea” in working-class England can also mean supper. She has been terribly hungry for a long time now.

Sitting at the rough wooden table in the kitchen that is also part sitting room, Lilli partakes with Tim and the
Rathbones of bread, cheese, pickles, and scalding cups of strong dark tea. She is offered sugar lumps but warned that, with the war on, she must restrict herself to no more than two.

Tim sits across from Lilli on the wooden bench, his huge, nearly black eyes boring into her.

“Now, mind your manners,” Mrs. Rathbone cautions, as bits of moist chewed bread dribble from Tim's mouth. Lilli can see that he has trouble controlling his slobbering. He is also extraordinarily excited by the presence of this tall, graceful young girl, with gray-green eyes and tawny hair. When Lilli smiles at him, he giggles back and wriggles with happiness.

“Tim's a good boy, he is,” Mrs. Rathbone assures her. “He's ten years old and a bit mischievous, but he means no harm.”

Lilli asks if Tim goes to school.

“Learning's not for the likes of him,” Mr. Rathbone growls. Lilli is struck by the harsh tone and the note of dismissal in Tim's father's voice.

When they are finished eating, Lilli climbs up the ladder to her room, which is in the loft under the eaves. Suddenly, the sadness she's been trying to repress overwhelms her. The moment she gets into bed, the sounds of small skittering creatures all around her in the dark, she begins to weep uncontrollably. She is crying for
Helga, for Elspeth, for Papa, for Mutti. She knows that, although she is out of the grasp of the mad
Fuhrer
, her loved ones are not. She would give anything to leave this strange place and take her chances hiding with the others in the coal bin of the Bayer house in Germany.

Lilli's life with the Rathbones quickly falls into a pattern. In the mornings, she wakes up early to feed the chickens before walking three miles to the local primary school. The students there are from the surrounding countryside, and Lilli is placed in a grade where no one is older than nine. Lilli, at age twelve, feels idiotic sitting at the back of the room, trying to learn as much English as she can while the class drones on doing multiplication tables and memorizing the names and dates of the monarchs of Great Britain.

When she inquires about attending a higher-level school, Mrs. Rathbone tells her that most advanced schools in England require fees. “Surely you can't expect us to manage that, Helga my dear,” she says. “The funds we receive from the refugee committee barely cover your keep as it is.”

Lilli frequently dwells on this as she does her daily after-school chores, sweeping and scrubbing the stone floor, gathering eggs, cleaning out the chicken coops, as well as looking after Tim. The last thing is something she cannot avoid, as he often comes into her room without
invitation, wrapping his short, thick body around her with rough affection. He even walks to school with her and waits outside, peering in through the windows to the amusement of her schoolmates, until the teacher drives him away.

A few weeks after her arrival, Lilli writes her first letter to Mutti—in German, of course—trying to explain her new life.

“I find it very strange,” she writes, “that people in the English countryside are so poor. They do not own their farms; they rent them from some great landowner who lives in a castle and rules over the entire domain. They must pay him from their earnings or they will be driven off the land.”

“What odd foods we eat, especially for ‘tea,' which is supper. Mainly, there is dried salty fish and boiled eggs, because we have plenty of those. There is no running water or indoor toilet, as we had on Heinrichstrasse and with the Bayers. The outhouse is full of spiders. And now that the weather has begun to turn cold at night, the chamber pots in the cottage have begun to freeze, for there is only the fireplace for heat. When I climb up to my bed in the loft, I take a heated brick or a large stone, wrapped in layers of flannel.”

Lilli also tells Mutti about her grimly silent hosts, and about Tim. “I don't think they are mean people, but they are very sad and disappointed by their sick little boy.
I disagree with Tim's father. Tim should go to school and he should have friends. Sometimes I give him a few lessons. He is not stupid.”

Lilli tries to keep her letter as factual as possible. She does not tell Mutti how heavy her heart is, with an ache that never goes away. She ends the letter hoping the family is still safe at the Bayers, and imploring Mutti to write back soon. But who knows what is happening now in wartime Germany?

It is now January 1940, and the English winter, with its bleak skies and chilling rains, has set in. Nonetheless, Lilli and Tim are venturing forth on a walk to the village, which Tim dearly loves to do. Lilli is focused on the small country post office, where she has been hoping for months to receive an answer to her letter to Mutti.

Tim is pointing as they tread along to the distant “castle” where the rich landowners of the estate live. It is the largest house Lilli has ever seen, four stories high and topped with numerous turrets and spires that appear to challenge the sky.

“Have you ever been inside the manor house?” Lilli asks Tim.

He shakes his head violently. “No. Mustn't never go there.”

Lilli tries to imagine what it must be like inside: high ceilings, fireplaces and heating stoves in every room,
elegant furnishings and draperies, and servants to look to one's every need. Could anything be more different than the chill and spare life at the Rathbones?

The soggy unpaved road on which Lilli and Tim have been navigating the puddles gives way to a hard surface as they approach the village, with its parish church, its pub, its inviting shops, and, of course, its post office.

As they are about to enter the main street, they come face to face with two little girls, who are, strangely, dressed in what Lilli would call “city clothes.” They are bundled up against the cold in woolen coats and matching bonnets. Yet their knees are bare, and their shoes seem hardly suitable for country roads. Lilli, who is happy to see new faces, greets them with a smile. “You look like sisters,” she can't refrain from remarking.

“Yes, we are. I'm Clarissa and this is Mabel,” says the older of the two, who looks about ten. “We're from London. Where are you from? And what's the matter with him?” Tim clutches Lilli's hand more tightly.

So many nosy questions, Lilli thinks indignantly. “Nothing at all is the matter with him,” she replies, and she promptly asks a nosy question of her own. “If you live in London, what are you doing here in the countryside?”

“Oh, we're Pied Piper children,” Clarissa declares. “We've come to stay at the manor house until the Jerries stop blitzing London. There are four of us here now and more coming soon.” Since the war began, there had been
talk of a Blitz, an all-out bombing of British cities and towns by the terrifying
Luftwaffe
, the German air force. So the government organized the Pied Piper Operation, where British children are evacuated by bus or train to the countryside, where they will be out of harm's way.

Lilli can't help feeling jealous at the luck of the two sisters. Imagine if something so fortunate had happened to her and Helga. “What's it like there?” she inquires almost timidly.

“Ooh,” Mabel speaks up for the first time. Lilli guesses she's around seven. “It's lovely. We've nothing so posh at home, our own rooms and a cook and a server for meals. We're even allowed to ride the horses. Today, we've come into the village in the van. My lady is going to outfit us with proper country clothing and allow us to buy sweeties.”

Clarissa gives her little sister a sharp look. Perhaps Mabel is talking too much.

She narrows her eyes and says to Lilli. “You have an odd way of speaking. You're not English, are you?”

Lilli shakes her head. “I'm a refugee from Germany. I'm living now with a farm family in the nearby countryside. Tim here is their son.”

Clarissa nods, but still seems a bit confused. She looks down at Lilli's boots, the same ones Grossmutter bought her at the
Kaufhaus
last spring. They are encrusted with farm filth, and the seams have begun to split. “You
should get a new pair of those while you're in town,” she says.

Angry tears spring to Lilli's eyes. She tugs hard at Tim's hand, and whirls him around in the direction of the village post office, walled with gray stone.
Why have I come here?
Lilli agonizes.
These people are strangers.
Everywhere there are strangers!