Safe Haven (5 page)

The train slowed, waking Ilse with the break in its seemingly endless rhythm. Sunlight streamed through the open windows, and in spite of the early hour, it was obvious that this would be another hot, humid day. She sat up and leaned closer to Franz as they stared out the window, eager for their first glimpse of the place they would stay. A murmur rolled back toward them from the front of the car.

“What are they saying?” Ilse asked her husband, whose command of languages far exceeded her own ability to speak only German and basic English.

“There’s a fence,” he replied. “With the barbed wire on top. Like the camps,” he added. His voice became a whisper as he stared out the window at the fence, the low white wooden buildings that stood in rows like soldiers near a small cemetery. The men—some in uniform—hurried around inside the fence. And she knew that Franz was back in the prison camp where he had been taken for questioning and then held for months. The place where he had been beaten and starved. The place where he had suffered much more that he would not tell her. He had escaped from that camp and found her and Liesl in a nearby village, and together they had made their way over the Alps and into Italy just as the Allies were liberating that country.

“It is not the same, Franz,” she whispered as she wrapped her arms around his thin shoulders. “This is America. They might have the fence for all sorts of reasons. It is not the same.”

But she was less certain as they climbed down from the train and were ushered inside the fence.

As they waited in line to be registered, she fingered the tag they were all wearing—the one with a number and the words
U.S. Army Casual Baggage
imprinted on it as if they were no different from the cardboard suitcases and paper bags that held their belongings. Of course, some travelers clutched fine leather suitcases and satchels as well. The finer luggage pieces bore travel labels from exotic places like Paris and Rome and Monte Carlo. But those were the exception, and she knew that those refugees also wore the casual baggage tags.
When one is an outcast
, she thought,
one has no other identity
.

Ilse looked around. Townspeople lined the outside of the fence, pointing and whispering and watching them as if they were animals in a zoo. Some men held large cameras. News photographers, she guessed. Children, women, and a few men—most of them older—made up the rest of the crowd. Well, why shouldn’t they stare? She and the others must seem so very foreign and exotic to these Americans dressed in clean and well-fitting clothes and wearing proper shoes and socks. Some of the women wore straw hats that blocked the sun and shaded their features. Ilse touched her hair and knew that it hung in limp waves. She tugged at her dress, trying without success to lengthen the skirt. They had wanted to look their best for their arrival, but the disinfection process had squelched those hopes, and after riding all night on the train, the clothes they wore were wrinkled and stained with sweat. They must look like exactly what they were—people without a country or home to call their own.

“Mama?” Liesl clung to her arm. “Why are those people staring at us, and why are they behind that fence? Have they been naughty?”

Ilse realized that her daughter’s perception of things was that they were free and the townspeople were the ones being held behind the wire fence. The idea made her smile. “They are curious,” Ilse replied as they inched closer to the table where men were seated, checking the numbers on their tags against names on lists. She was reminded of all the times that she and Franz had had to show their identity papers while living in Munich. Just going to the market, a person could be stopped and harassed and questioned. Ahead of them, a Jewish family stepped up to the table, and she wondered if they would again be required to wear the ugly yellow felt stars that had labeled them in Europe.

“Welcome to Fort Ontario,” the smiling man at the table greeted them when it was their turn. Another man standing next to him translated the words into German and handed Ilse a paper bag stuffed with towels and a bar of soap. He was also smiling. Ilse had noticed that about the Americans. They always appeared so open to new people. Their niece Beth had been like that.

After their names had been checked off, they followed others up a hill to another line and more tables labeled C
USTOMS
where they were separated from their few belongings. They had all heard the stories—and some of these people had actually had the experience—of such procedures in the concentration camps. People had been told that the baggage they had checked as they boarded a train would be delivered to them later, but instead, they had been led off to their deaths. For this reason, most of their fellow travelers on this journey had kept what hand luggage they could with them, and they refused the help of boys from town who met their train and offered to carry their baggage for them. The boys reminded her of the youth corps in Germany—the “brown shirts”—but someone explained that they belonged to a group called Boy Scouts that had nothing to do with war or politics.

“I will tag your belongings,” the young man explained and went on to assure them that their things would be delivered to their quarters as soon as possible—probably while they were at breakfast. Did they really have a choice?

Franz set down their two suitcases, bound by twine because the edges were coming apart, and stood watching while a man tagged them and then handed him half th≠≠e tag as a receipt. “This way,” their guide and interpreter said as he led them and others toward one of the barracks. Inside Ilse expected to see a barren dormitory packed with rows of bunks perhaps stacked three high like the barracks Franz had described to her after his escape from the prison camp. Instead a hallway led past doors, each with a name on it. She began to recognize some of the names as families they had met on the ship coming across the Atlantic. Franz stopped before the last door. He ran his finger over the small placard that read F
RANZ
, I
LSE, AND
L
IESL
S
CHNEIDER
.

Their guide—yet another smiling young man wearing pressed trousers and a crisp white shirt—handed Franz a key.

“Wilkommen,”
he said as he continued the tour in German. “Bathrooms are shared—men’s on the second floor and ladies’ on this level.” He opened the door with their name on it and stood back to give them a chance to enter the small apartment.

Ilse could not believe her eyes—two rooms just for them. “Kitchen?” she asked.

The smiling young man explained that all meals would for now be served in the mess hall.

“Mess hall?” Liesl repeated and giggled. “We will eat in a messy hall?” During the years that Beth had lived with them, Liesl had learned basic English, but—like Franz, whose English was fluent—sometimes certain phrases made no sense.

“Dining hall,” the man explained. “We’ll go there next.”

The apartment was furnished with a wooden table and four chairs, a wall shelf that held a few cups and glasses, and a single cot in the room where they stood. Beyond that Ilse could see another room with two more cots and a footlocker at the end of each cot for their clothes. With her imagination, she began decorating the place. She had seen wildflowers on the hillside near the lake as the train pulled in. Perhaps later she and Liesl could go pick some for the table. There were no curtains on the window in the bedroom.
We will have to do something to cover that
, she thought.

“Ilse?” Franz put his arm around her shoulder and turned her back toward the hallway. “He says it is time to eat.”

“In the
mess
hall,” Liesl announced in English, and once again she giggled. It occurred to Ilse that their daughter had immediately responded to the kindness of the American. She was sure that this was Beth’s influence.

The scent of cooking food would have guided them to the dining hall even if their interpreter had not been with them. When they entered the long brick building, they were taken aback first by the noise—people talking in several languages, people laughing and exclaiming over the bounty before them. And indeed it was a feast—even more impressive than the meals they had been served on the voyage from Italy. The long wooden tables were filled with large glass bottles of milk, bowls the size of Ilse’s mixing bowls at home filled with hard-boiled eggs, plates stacked high with sliced bread, dishes of jam and marmalade, and trays that held small boxes labeled C
ORN
F
LAKES
. Ilse watched in fascination as one of the Americans demonstrated how to open the box and then add milk so that the box became the bowl.

She and Franz glanced at each other and burst out laughing. It felt so wonderful to share a moment like that. For months they had had to settle for scraps or wait in long lines while someone dished up half a cup of watery soup. The bread here was white and soft. While Ilse was not sure she liked it as well as she had the heavier rye bread they had enjoyed from the bakery that occupied the ground floor of their apartment building back in Munich, it was ever so much better than the gooey gray concoction that passed for bread in Europe these days.

Their interpreter explained butter was still rationed. Franz pumped the hand of their guide, thanking him in German and English. Then he led the way to a crowded bench at one of the tables. The people already there squeezed closer together to make room for them. Smiling, they shoved the food into their mouths as if they might never again see such a meal. Ilse saw some people hiding slices of bread and hard-boiled eggs in their pockets as they had at meals on the ship—just in case.

“America,” one man kept murmuring to himself as he ate. “America.”

Ilse understood his disbelief. But as she looked out the window behind where Franz was filling Liesl’s glass with milk for a second time, she could see a large American flag snapping in the breeze off the lake. The only barrier between them and that flag was the fence, its thorny wire making Ilse all too aware that they might be on American soil but they were not yet free.

  CHAPTER 2  

T
heo had risen early and skipped Mrs. Velo’s breakfast to get to the fort. He had hardly slept. Aside from the heat that seemed to rise up from the lower floors and stagnate in the attic rafters, the excitement that he was going to find his aunt and uncle—his mother’s only brother—and bring them home with him to the farm had kept him up most of the night.

As he stood outside the fence, waiting for the train to arrive, he supposed a stay at the fort was a necessary step on the road to true freedom for his aunt and uncle. But he shuddered to think what their first impressions might be as the train rolled onto the siding and they got their first look at the place that would be home for at least the next several months.

It was nearly 7:00 a.m., and the train was scheduled to arrive before eight. In spite of the early hour, locals had begun to gather on street corners and rooftops to get their first look at the refugees. Inside the wire fence men—some in uniform, others in coveralls—were setting up tables and shouting instructions to one another about the best way to process the new arrivals. Theo heard hammering and saw men carrying paint buckets as they exited the barracks. A man in uniform called out instructions to the painters in German, and Theo was at first puzzled but then realized the men in coveralls were German prisoners of war. How would the refugees react to their presence? Could some of the POWs have been guards in the prison camps the refugees had escaped from?

The soldiers and Americans in civilian dress seemed anxious to get the work done and move these prisoners out before the train arrived. Every once in a while, someone would look in the direction the train would come from and then shout at the POWs to go back to work.

On the bus trip from Wisconsin to Oswego, Theo had stared out at the passing countryside and thought about what the refugees would think of this new land once they boarded the train that would bring them to the shelter. Oswego, like Milwaukee, was on one of the Great Lakes, and he knew from having gone to Milwaukee on vacation with his parents that the expanse of water was so huge that even if the day was perfectly clear it was impossible to see the other shore.