Isabel’s War (15 page)

My mother looks at Helga, who is pale and quiet. “Well, I hoped you two weren't fighting. Did the blackout upset you, Helga?”

Helga shakes her head.
“Ach, nein.”

I can't wait for my mother to leave so I can hear the rest. Finally she does.

“What happened to Tim?” I gasp in a loud whisper.

“I got him back to the farm. His head wound healed, but he became more sick in many other ways. His parents blamed me for what happened to him and I took care of him from then on all of the time, working also on the farm. I never went back to the school. About a year later, Tim died. After that, I went to live in the hostel near the Army camp. I told you before that it was right that I should be punished when I arrived to England. And that is what happened.”

“But why, Helga? What did you do that was so
horrible? Why should you have been punished?”

“No more questions, Isabel. You promised.”

“Creamed onions and cauliflower
au gratin
,” Sibby informs me. “My mom says to tell your mother that's what we're bringing. And thanks a lot for inviting us to dinner.”

The month of November has slipped by and everybody is getting ready for the first wartime Thanksgiving. The whole country is in a tizzy about the holiday this year. Because of rationing, it's hard to get butter for mashed potatoes or sugar for pies and desserts. Even turkeys and chickens are a little on the scarce side.

And, on top of that, President Roosevelt recently announced that coffee is going to be rationed. Starting on November 29, three days after Thanksgiving, Americans will be limited to one cup of coffee per day. It isn't because of a coffee shortage. There's plenty of coffee in Brazil. And also there's plenty of sugar in Cuba. It's because of the scarcity of ships—which are needed to carry soldiers and weapons abroad—that are available to bring these luxuries to American tables.

Sibby and I don't drink coffee, so we couldn't care less. I do think, though, that my mother isn't going to be too thrilled with Leona Simon's contribution of creamed onions and cauliflower
au gratin
. We usually have candied sweet potatoes and buttered green peas for vegetables on Thanksgiving.

“What, by the way, is cauliflower
au gratin
?” I ask Sybil.

“You don't know?” she clucks. “It's French. Guess you'll have to ask your boyfriend, Billy.”

I hate it when Sibby teases me about Billy Crosby, whom I sincerely detest. “Never mind. I'll look it up.”

“Oh, don't bother. It's just breadcrumbs and cheese sprinkled on top of the cauliflower. You know Leona. She's always trying to make vegetables taste better. She says we all have to plant Victory Gardens next spring because meat rationing is going to get even stricter.” Sibby sniffs. “Can't you just see us trying to grow dinner in a window box here in the Bronx?”

I really must dash off a letter to Ruthie before the holiday weekend. I know that Helga doesn't want me to tell anybody about her hardworking life on the chicken farm, about the weirdly silent Rathbones who wouldn't let her go to school, and about poor slobbering but loving Tim who died when he was only eleven. But I owe it to Ruthie to answer her questions, especially the ones about Helga.

Dear Ruthie,

How are you? No, of course, I'm not mad at you. Are you at me? I have so much to tell you. But I waited to be able to give you the whole story about Helga and the chicken farm, which I found out happened in
England, not in Germany.

I'm going to write Helga's story in the form of a composition—or I guess you could call it a biography—on a separate piece of paper attached to this letter. It starts with when she left her family in Germany and went to England with a bunch of other Jewish refugee children on something called a Kindertransport. You'll understand everything when you read it.

Now for a surprise. “Do I ever see or hear from Helga?” She's been living with us here in the apartment since school began! She also goes to my junior high, where she has mostly ninth-grade classes but not all. Her Aunt Harriette, Mrs. Frankfurter (I call her Mrs. F.) took sick after they got back from Shady Pines and had a serious operation.

We're better friends now than we were up at the hotel, but Helga is still hard to know really well. She says mysterious things about telling lies and having to be punished for them. I don't understand.

Arnold joined the Air Force and he came home on furlough for two days when he was transferred from New Jersey to Massachusetts. He looks so handsome in his uniform. Helga had a letter from Roy telling her he was on a ship in the Pacific. That's all I know on the romance side.

This will be Helga's first Thanksgiving. We're having company—my friend Sybil and her mother from the
building and Helga's aunt and uncle now that she's feeling better. Have a Happy Thanksgiving.

Love, Izzie

P.S. A boy in my French class likes me. He stares at my chest all the time and asked me to go to the movies with him. It's a war movie, of course...
The Commandos Strike at Dawn
. I actually hate him. What do you think I should do?

Fifteen

“To our absent loved ones,” my father declares, raising his wineglass in a toast as we all sit down to Thanksgiving dinner in the crowded dining space in our apartment. Everybody joins in, including Sibby and me who, instead of wine, are drinking ginger ale with maraschino cherries, otherwise known as Shirley Temples.

Each of us, of course, has special absent loved ones in mind. My parents and I are thinking of Arnold, who now writes that he might soon be shipped overseas. This makes no sense to us because he hasn't had his Air Force training yet and what if they send him to North Africa before he even learns to fly a plane?

Sybil and Leona are surely thinking of Mr. Simon somewhere in the submarine-infested waters of the stormy North Atlantic, trying to steer a ship loaded with war supplies to a safe harbor in England.

And Helga, what is she thinking about? There's Roy, of course, somewhere in the Pacific, where the war against the Japanese still isn't going well. But she has more absent loved ones than any of us...her father,
last known to have been in the German prison camp of Buchenwald, and her mother and two sisters hiding out in fearfully dangerous German-occupied Holland.

I would have thought that Helga's non-Jewish
Mutti
would have been able to save herself and her daughters. “But marriage to a Jew, or having one Jewish parent,” Helga has told me, “is a black mark. In the case of a child, of course, Jewish blood runs in the veins.” And I'm reminded again, at our festive and abundant Thanksgiving table, of the Hitler Youth song,
And when Jewish blood spurts from the knife...

But in spite of everything, I try to think of today as a cheery occasion. For one thing, it's the start of a four-day school holiday. Already, Mrs. F. has invited Helga and me to visit her in Westchester this weekend. “And Sybil must come, too,” she adds. “You girls can have a lovely time. There's skating, horseback riding, hiking in the woods.”

Mr. F. places his hand on Mrs. F.'s ring-studded fingers in a cautioning gesture.

“Oh,” she laughs, “Herman thinks I'm not well enough yet. Of course, I wouldn't be able to do any outdoor sports with you girls. But we'd still have fun. And the housekeeper is there to take care of meals and laundry.” Her black-rimmed eyes look around the room anxiously.

As soon as Mrs. F. came in the door, I couldn't help
noticing how much thinner she looked than before her operation. It had been hard to tell how much weight she'd lost when I saw her in the hospital, wrapped in her bedazzling dressing gowns and cuddly blankets.

Today, though, her normally full cheeks look sunken and her chin seems to have become rather pointed beneath her—as usual—expertly applied makeup. She is beautifully dressed, however, in a honey-toned mink coat and matching hat, worn over a dressy suit of amber-colored velvet studded with a gleaming gold brooch.

“You never told me how glamorous she was,” Sibby whispered after she'd been introduced. “She could be a movie star, one of the older really dramatic ones who scratch out the eyes of the men who've wronged them.”

Now, as my father carves the turkey and my mother passes the laden plates around the table, Mr. F. and Leona Simon find themselves talking about the special Day of Mourning and Prayer that is to take place in New York City just about a week from now. Its purpose is to call attention to the Jews who are trapped in Nazi-dominated Europe and have no hope of being able to escape to any other country. Synagogues, radio stations, and stores and factories will have special services.

Mr. F. thinks this is a good way to awaken Americans to the fact that Jews all over Europe are being rounded up and thrown into labor camps. But Leona thinks it's too late to do much good. “If you read the teeny, tiny
little reports that are tucked away in the corners of the newspapers,” she tells Mr. F., “you'll learn that the Germans have built at least half a dozen new camps this year in Poland alone.”

Leona pauses and glances around the table, noticing that Helga and Mrs. F. are busily involved in some sort of private conversation. “And,” she adds confidentially to her listeners, who now include my parents as well as Sibby and me, “they don't call them labor camps anymore. Or prison camps. They call them concentration camps.”

“What,” I pipe up, “are they concentrating on?”

“Oh, sweetie,” Leona replies, in a completely different tone of voice. “Here come our plates of delicious food. Do you and Sybil need refills of your Shirley Temples?”

Without waiting for an answer, she snatches our glasses off the table and disappears into the kitchen.

Why didn't Leona answer my question? I jump up and follow her. I have a hunch she was about to say something important and dreadful that would be very upsetting, and that she didn't want certain people at the table to hear...especially Helga.

Leona is busily pouring ginger ale and adding bright red cherry juice and extra cherries to our glasses.

“You didn't answer me in there, about the...the concentration camps.”

“Isabel, you shouldn't be in here. This isn't a good time to talk. The concentration camps are connected
with something the Nazis are doing now to the Jews in Germany. It's called the ‘Final Solution'.”

“The Final...Solution?” I'm getting the idea that this has nothing to do with the algebra problems that have been giving me big headaches in Mrs. Deutsch's math class.

Leona gives me a shove and I return to my seat at the table. My mother raises her eyebrows questioningly, but happily she doesn't comment on my brief absence. I'm not known for rushing into the kitchen to try to be helpful during meals.

I dig into my plate of turkey, stuffing, sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, and Leona Simon's creamed onions and cauliflower
au gratin.
Something seems to have taken the edge off my appetite. I poke away even at the good stuff. The creamed onions, of course, are terrible, the cauliflower not quite so bad, probably because of the French
au gratin
touch.

Sibby takes a look at my face. Then she pokes my arm. “Hide the onions under a turkey slice,” she advises. “You're not going to throw up, are you, Izzie?”

“Shut up,” I whisper. “I'm not. And don't try to give me ideas.”

Everybody else at the table seems to be having a wonderful time, talking and eating and drinking. My father and Mr. F. are having a lively discussion about the American and British landings in German-controlled
North Africa earlier this month, and they are predicting an invasion of Italy sometime next year. Mrs. F. is getting a little bit tipsy during a gossipy exchange with my mother. Leona is talking to me, Sibby, and Helga about Frank Sinatra maybe doing a holiday show at the Paramount. Even Helga looks happy.

The meal ends with Mr. F. popping the cork on a bottle of champagne that he and Mrs. F. have brought to the party, along with a lavish assortment of holiday pies and desserts. “I think all the girls should have a sip as well,” Mrs. F. announces. “One day this terrible war will end in victory and our darlings will all grow up and have ‘champagne' lives!”

Champagne—the very name of this pale bubbly wine sounds so exciting. Skillfully, Mr. F. fills eight thin-stemmed crystal glasses and places one before each of us. Since we've already toasted our absent loved ones, my parents suggest we drink to Harriette Frankfurter's continuing recovery and wish her a return to perfect health.

Mrs. F. objects and begins to dab at her eyes with a lacy handkerchief. “Oh, no, not me,” she protests. “I'm well already. To all those everywhere who are suffering so much as a result of this war.”

But we've already raised our glasses and are toasting the health of Mrs. F., whose eyeliner has begun to run in rivulets down her cheeks. I put my glass to my lips. The
rim of it is so thin that it feels like, if I squeezed it too hard, it would shatter into a thousand tiny crystal shards. So this is champagne.

I take a swallow, exploding bubbles go shooting up my nose, and my mouth is instantly filled with the stinging, acid flavor that comes from biting (once on a dare) into a dead June bug.