Safe Haven (2 page)

“When did you become my father?”

“When I stopped being your editor,” he snapped. “Now, listen up, kiddo. I may have found a way for you to redeem yourself.”

“Why do you care?” It was a sincere query. After all, the paper’s reputation had taken a blow because of her.

“I’ve asked myself that very question. The answer is that you have a gift, Suzanne, and when you use it properly, you have the potential to be one of the best reporters I have ever worked with.”

She felt her throat close around a lump of emotion that could only be broken up by tears.

“Are you still there?” Edwin asked.

Suzanne made a guttural sound to let him know she was and reached for one of three handkerchiefs wadded into balls on the floor next to the sofa.

“This involves traveling, Suzie. I suspect you should plan on being on assignment for several weeks at a minimum so figure out how to sublet your apartment and how to pack for an extended stay.”

She blotted the tears and cleared her throat. “If it involves my going to Siberia, count me out.”

“Close. Ever hear of Oswego in upstate New York?”

“No.”

“It’s a small town north of Syracuse on Lake Ontario. There’s this fort there cleverly named Fort Ontario—dates back to the French and Indian War.”

Suzanne did not like the sound of this. Ever since the Allies had landed on the shores of Normandy, the tide of war had turned, and the really big stories were in Europe—not some old fort in upstate New York. But Edwin had a thing for history, so she was beginning to understand where this might be going.

“Look, Edwin, I appreciate this, but—”

“Hear me out. You know that announcement that the president made last month about bringing some refugees to America as his guests? The one that mostly got buried in the depths of the papers because of the whole Normandy landing?”

“I was a little busy that month,” she reminded him.

“Stop wallowing and try reading the news instead of making it up.”

“Okay, that was below the belt.”

“Sorry. I’m trying to help you. Do you want my help or not?”

Once again Suzanne felt tears threatening to overwhelm her. “I do,” she whispered then sniffed loudly. “Refugees coming to America … to Oswego?”

“To Fort Ontario in Oswego.”

“When?”

“They are on a ship crossing the Atlantic—scheduled to arrive by the end of the week.”

“How many?”

“There were supposed to be a thousand, but officially only 982 made it.”

“From?” She felt the stirring of her journalist juices. She was sitting up now, gathering facts.

“The ship sailed from Italy, but my understanding is the group represents at least fifteen or twenty different countries.”

Suzanne stood up, picking up the phone and stretching the cord as far as possible as she reached for pen and paper. “Men? Women?”

“And children—whole families in some cases.”

“Jewish?” Everyone had finally accepted that the Nazis were specifically targeting the Jews. Some stories Suzanne found impossible to believe, yet apparently those stories weren’t the worst of it.

“Mostly Jews but also Catholics, Protestants—I think some Greek Orthodox.”

She scribbled as fast as she could. “So they come here and then what?”

“Well now, see that’s the story. Then what?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Roosevelt has labeled them ‘guests,’ which means they have no legal status here. The State Department is adamant that once the war is over they are to go back to wherever they came from, and FDR has agreed to those terms.”

“But that’s barbaric. I mean what if their homes and countries have been bombed to smithereens? What if their homes have been taken over by someone else? What if—”

Edwin chuckled. “Now that’s much better, Suzie. You’re sounding like a real reporter.”

“I am a real reporter,” she huffed.

“Prove it.”

In those two words stood the challenge she didn’t realize she’d been waiting to hear—the chance she had been sure had been lost to her forever.

“I will.”

“I can’t pay you—at least not officially.”

“I don’t need your money,” she shot back, although she was practically broke. Her mind raced even as she struggled to capture all the information that Edwin continued to rattle off at lightning speed.

Refugees traveling on a troopship with wounded soldiers
.

As Edwin suggested, I could maybe sublet my apartment and save some money that way
.

Crossing the Atlantic in a convoy accompanied by two other ships carrying German prisoners of war
.

I have a little savings, and my mom …

Scheduled to stay until war ended, so at least several months
.

Months? Where would I live in the meantime? Maybe there is a boardinghouse in Oswego
.

“Look, I’m sending you a train ticket and some primary documents by courier.”

“I thought you weren’t paying me.”

“It’s a loan. You need to get up there and get settled.”

“When are the ‘guests’ scheduled to arrive in Oswego?”

“Saturday if all goes according to plan.”

“Okay, I’ll be there. And Edwin? Thanks.”

“Don’t make me regret this, Suzie. It’s an assignment that a lot of reporters could parlay into a Pulitzer.”

In his tone she heard a hint of having second thoughts.

“I’ve learned my lesson,” she assured him. “I won’t let you down.”

This had to be the hottest summer that Theo Bridgewater could remember—at least for Wisconsin. He was harvesting feed corn with his father when he saw his mother come running across the field. She was waving a piece of paper and shouting to be heard above the racket of the harvester. He touched his dad’s shoulder and motioned toward his mother.

“Ellie?” Theo’s father called out as he shut down the engine and the machine wheezed to a stop in the middle of a row of corn shocks. He jumped to the ground and removed his baseball cap to wipe sweat from his face with a faded bandanna. “What’s happened?” Both men started across the already harvested rows to meet her.

“Oh, Paul, they’re alive,” she shouted, stumbling over the flattened stalks. “They’re alive, and they’re coming to America. My brother, Franz, and Ilse and little Liesl—they are all alive.” She burst into tears as she hugged them both.

Theo met his father’s disbelieving eyes. It had been two years since they’d had word of Ellie’s brother and his family. The last letter they had received told them that Franz, Ilse, and their eight-year-old daughter, Liesl, were joining Ilse’s sister Marta and her family for a skiing holiday in Switzerland. That letter had raised alarms on several fronts, for Theo’s parents immediately understood that
skiing holiday
was code for escape. With the war raging, few people could manage a holiday. But of far greater concern had been the absence of any mention of Theo’s sister, Beth, traveling with them.

Beth had gone to Munich in the late 1930s to act as a nanny and companion for Liesl. Theo remembered their aunt Ilse as a mousy, nervous woman given to attacks of depression and anxiety. Liesl had been born late in life for Franz and Ilse, and according to Beth she was a lively child who could easily exasperate her mother. But his uncle’s last letter had made no mention of Beth, who Theo and his parents had been trying to persuade to come home to America from the day the Nazis first occupied Poland.

Following the news of Franz, Ilse, and Liesl’s supposed escape there had been no word for months until they received another letter—this one from Beth. She told them that she was now living on a small island off the coast of Denmark with her new husband—a German doctor named Josef—and their good friend Anja and her family. Her next letter had come to them from Belgium and reported that she and Josef were running a café and expecting their first child. Both letters were carefully worded to avoid providing too much information for the censors, and neither mentioned Franz, Ilse, or Liesl. Also neither letter had included a return address. The letters that Theo’s mother sent to the apartment in Munich, hoping they would be forwarded, went unanswered.

Finally, just this past April they had received a long, uncensored letter from Beth reporting that she and Josef were in England with their newborn daughter, Gabrielle. Beth also added that she had had no news from her aunt and uncle. She wrote that she and Josef were doing everything they could to locate the rest of the family but so far had been unsuccessful.

Since then, Beth’s letters had come regularly, but there had been no further news of Franz, Ilse, and Liesl, and at every meeting for worship the family attended as members of the Religious Society of Friends, they stood and asked their fellow Quakers to please continue to hold their daughter, her husband and child, and Ellie’s brother, his wife, and their child in the Light and pray for their safety.

Now standing together under a broiling sun and cloudless azure sky, Theo watched as his mother released his dad and unfolded the letter with shaking hands. “It’s only a couple of sentences,” she said, squinting at the thin paper. “But there is no doubt that this is my brother’s hand. Paul, see how he has written it?”

“Franz always did have a fine handwriting,” Theo’s dad replied as he took the paper and shaded the words with one of his large, dirt-encrusted hands so he could scan the contents.

“When do they get here?” Theo asked, and Dad handed him the letter:

The letter’s contents raised so many questions—when was “tomorrow”? Who were “the others”? Why were they going to this Fort Ontario, and where was Oswego?

But when Theo voiced the questions, his mother cupped his cheek. “Answers will come,” she said. “The important thing is that they are alive, they are safe, and they are here.” She took the letter from him and carefully folded it to fit back in the envelope. “I should call Matthew,” she said, no doubt already making a mental list of what would need to be done.

“He had that big delivery of lumber this morning,” Paul reminded her. “Call Jenny.” Theo’s brother owned the local hardware store. Their sons’ careers had been predetermined. Matthew would take over the family’s hardware business after his dad’s brother—a lifelong bachelor—retired, and eventually Theo would take over the farm. Matthew had taken to his assignment like a duck to water. Theo was a born farmer, but he was also restless and wanted to find some way that he might make a real difference in the world. In the thirty years that he had been alive, there had been not one but two world conflicts. To Theo’s way of thinking, that trend needed to change, and he was pretty sure that what he really wanted was to be a part of that change. He just had to figure out how.

“I’ll call Jenny, then,” his mother continued. “She’ll be home. I want them to come for supper so we can decide what to do next.”

It had always been their way to gather together whenever a member of the family faced a new and potentially complicated decision. Theo recalled when they had decided that Beth should go to Germany. Shortly after Liesl’s birth, his aunt and uncle had visited them on the farm in Wisconsin and were preparing to return home where Franz was a professor at the University of Munich.

Ellie had worried about Ilse’s inability to bond with her new child and had suggested that Beth—freshly graduated from high school—could return to Germany with them to help out.
“It will be an adventure
,” Theo remembered his mother telling Beth. In those early days of Hitler’s rise to power, no one could have imagined how terrible things would become. And lately as his sister’s letters spoke more freely of the journey she had taken since leaving the farm, they were beginning to understand what an adventure it had been—Beth had met this German doctor, married him in the middle of his trial for crimes against the Nazi government, been sentenced with him to a prison camp in eastern Poland, escaped with him and their friend to Denmark, and from there moved to Belgium to await the birth of their daughter while they ran a café. Now they lived in England.

The truth was that Theo was more than a little envious of all that Beth had seen and done. Although he fully appreciated that a great deal of it had been horrible and terrifying, he admired his sister more than he could say for the courage she had shown in the face of such challenges.

Here at home he’d faced his own challenges. In school—even in the years he’d spent studying political science at the University of Wisconsin in Madison—he had had to deal with those who shunned him because of his German heritage and ridiculed him because his Quaker faith did not permit him to enlist. The truth was that he did not believe war was the answer to anything. And if he could, he would dedicate his life to finding ways to show that peace—not war—was the only way to go.

Theo wanted so much more than taking over the family farm.