The Children of Willesden Lane: Beyond The Kindertransport: A Memoir of Music, Love, and Survival (26 page)

Lisa remained speechless.

“That is, if you would like a debut,” Mrs. Floyd said, teasing.

Lisa leapt from her seat, crying, “Of course I would!” and wrapped her arms around her instructor in an exuberant, spontaneous hug. “I don’t know how to thank you,” Lisa said, genuinely honored.

“Oh, and one more thing. For the location of your debut . . . we are thinking of Wigmore Hall.”

Wigmore Hall! It was incredible. The moment she had dreamed about all her life was finally within her grasp.

24

T
HE JUNE
recital had gone off without a hitch and Lisa settled into a summer and fall of choosing and preparing new repertoire for her debut. The Howard Hotel remained a popular night spot and now Gunter took to joining Gina for a weekly Friday-night visit.

As winter came, the battles in Europe raged even more intensely and it was decided to wait a season to rent Wig-more Hall for the debut. Rationing was severe and people’s minds were on war, not music. January saw the Allies battling through a frozen Europe, taking back city after city from the Third Reich. Russia marched through Poland— first Warsaw, then Lodz—and the United States and Great Britain obliterated Dresden in a firestorm.

When she heard there was a battle raging for Vienna, Lisa went to the synagogue and said a special prayer. Would it be a firestorm too? Would her city disappear as Dresden had?

Through the avalanche of news, the children of Willesden Lane waited. Waited for letters, waited for word. Straining for news from the deportation camps, where they knew their parents were waiting—to be liberated.

Lisa tried mightily to center herself in the music and her practice, and Mrs. Floyd helped her perfect the repertoire for her debut. Her favorite new piece was the Polonaise in A-flat Major of Chopin—the
Heroic
—whose triumphal notes seemed a fitting tribute to what surely would be a great Allied victory. Even Lisa, who was always afraid to get her hopes up, allowed herself to believe the day was near.

“That’s right, Lisa, keep it building, just like that. . . .” said Mrs. Floyd.

Lisa played the melody and accompanied it with the images in her mind. She vividly imagined the impending day of the reunion with her family. She played the chords with a boundless joy that summed up all her prayers and visions of that day. She saw her mother’s smiling face and outstretched arms, her father’s embrace, their weary faces smiling, their troubles lifted. She pounded the piano in joy, imagining Rosie’s and Sonia’s shouts of delight the day the three sisters would be united.

In the middle of a thunderous passage, the door to the studio flew open and two excited girls poked in their heads.

“Hurry up! Haven’t you heard?”

Lisa lifted her hands from the keys, and when the ringing of the polonaise died away, they could hear the faraway bells—the pealing of the clock tower, of Big Ben! Then the sounds gathered momentum—and were joined by the bells of the churches all throughout London.

Lisa ran to the window; traffic had slowed to a crawl and people were running and shouting and jumping in the air. Union Jacks sprouted from every window, and horns were honking wildly.

Lisa had never seen Mrs. Floyd move so fast, but there she was, leading a group of excited students lickety-split down the spiral staircase and into the streets, where they joined the growing crowd. They boarded a packed trolley for Buckingham Palace, which wove through a sea of revelers wearing paper hats and waving noisemakers. When the trolley could no longer move, they got out and were pushed the remaining blocks to the Mall, where Churchill himself was addressing the throng.

Lisa was awestruck. She had heard his broadcasts, seen him on the newsreels and in the newspapers—but here he was in person, the man whose words had given strength to everyone during the dark years. Here was the obstinate, beloved prime minister, waving to the assembled masses, homburg in hand.

“God bless you all. This is your victory!” he roared into the microphone.

The crowd roared back. “No! It is yours!”

“There we stood alone, did anyone want to give in?” the prime minister thundered, his words echoing across the vast expanse.

“No!” The crowd shouted again.

“Were we downhearted?”

“No!”

“In all our long history we have never seen a greater day than this,” he said, waving his famous hat.

Then when it seemed the crowd could not get any more excited, the king and queen and the princesses appeared on the balcony, waving and saluting as the crowds cheered, and the bells redoubled their ringing.

Lisa looked at the upturned faces surrounding her and was overtaken by a profound feeling of gratitude for Britain and its people. They had endured so much and with such good spirit. She was proud to be one of them. She, too, had endured.

When the speeches were over, people began to sing and dance as bands were hastily assembled on street corners and bonfires lit. Total strangers embraced one another as they jammed overflowing pubs. For the first time since the blackout had begun five years before, the streetlights flickered to life and giant searchlights crisscrossed the sky.

The war in Europe was over! Hitler was dead! The Allies had taken Berlin! The horror was over—at least for the millions and millions of British who had fought so proudly and suffered so much.

Staring at the unmitigated joy on people’s faces, Lisa was suddenly overcome with a shiver of isolation and sadness. When would the war be over for her? Or for her friends at the hostel?

From the swirl of the crowd, Mrs. Floyd and the other students reappeared and invited Lisa to join them for a victory dinner.

“Oh, thank you so much,” Lisa answered. “But I think maybe I should celebrate with the others at home,” she said, suddenly not feeling at all in a celebratory mood.

“Are you sure?” her teacher yelled above the noisy crowd.

Lisa nodded her head and waved good-bye as two of the students grabbed Mrs. Floyd by the hand, pushing the elegant English lady into a conga line that danced away from her. Lisa headed away from the raucous festivities.

The buses had stopped running, since the drivers had given up trying to navigate the crowded streets, so Lisa decided to walk home. She waded against a tide of well-wishers who flashed the V-for-Victory salute as they walked by. Gradually the crowd thinned, and with it, the sense of exhilaration and camaraderie. She walked faster and faster past rows of boarded-up buildings and shops— trudging forlornly over the bomb-scarred streets and past the destruction. When she came to her beloved Hyde Park she was buoyed temporarily to see that the swans had survived. She stood by the pond for a long moment, watching them swimming in gentle gliding motions over an eerily still pond. Beautiful things could survive, she told herself; she tried to have hope.

In the cold, dark stillness of the waters she superimposed an image of what she imagined would exist across the English Channel—a dark and silent Europe, battered and ruined, so far from her now. Her mind conjured up the streets of Vienna she’d left behind so long ago—and she saw for a moment the smiling faces of the beloved ones left behind. She thought she could hear their laughter the day of the ill-fated picnic on the balcony. Where were they now? Where were her mother and father and sister Rosie?

Chilled and lonely, she left the park and headed up the large avenue toward Edgware Road. More revelers ran by her, anxious to celebrate—their nightmare of waiting was over. But for Lisa and her fellow
Kinder
on Willesden Lane, the nightmare of waiting had just begun.

At first, there were just rumors. Unsubstantiated rumors, impossible rumors, which spread like wildfire through the already broken hearts of the Jewish community. Place names like Treblinka, Bergen-Belsen, Nordhausen, Auschwitz, and Theresienstadt were whispered from ear to ear.

Talk of mass graves, piles of bodies, piles of unspeakable obscenities. Photos leaked out of hollow-eyed inmates staring from behind barbed-wire fences, their fleshless, bony bodies hardly able to stand.

Lisa couldn’t read most of the articles about it in the newspaper. She couldn’t bear to hear it when she was told. She had known the terror of the Nazis, seen Kristallnacht, but never could she have imagined what had transpired, unreported, behind Nazi lines.

She couldn’t practice, either, although sometimes she would play exercises and scales, comforted by the mindless repetition. It was difficult to go to her job at the Howard Hotel and watch the smiling people as they talked of their hopeful futures, but she needed the money and was grateful for the distraction.

Finally the Red Cross, the United Nations, and the U.S. Army began to post lists of concentration camp survivors as they were liberated, moved, and organized in camps for displaced persons.

Lisa flocked with the other desperate refugees to the agencies posting the lists. The pages were chaotic and disorganized, taped to walls in crowded hallways, often not dated, not alphabetized, put up as soon as beleaguered workers could type them, to help the frantic search of the heartbroken relatives.

She went every day to see if new lists had been compiled, going over and over the old ones with care. Seeing that there were no Juras on the list, Lisa looked for Leo’s name. There were dozens of Schwartzes, but no Leos and no Rosies.

Rumor guided the search for lists. Gina would hear that new lists were at the United Nations Relief Agency, then someone else would hear that names were posted at the U.S. Army Office, which oversaw the displaced persons camps, or at the World Jewish Congress offices, or in hastily printed Jewish newspapers.

Mr. Hardesty wandered through the halls and saw faces he recognized from the Kindertransport so many years earlier. He saw Lisa and greeted her with tender care. He looked at the crowded hallways, filled with some of the ten thousand
Kinder
who had been saved by their hurriedly organized train rescue. Ten thousand now seemed so few.

One day Gunter found his mother’s name on the list from a displaced persons camp near Theresienstadt. Shaking with emotion, he spent the day writing hurried telegrams to make contact. When he returned to the hostel, he was so sensitive to the others’ pain that he told only Gina about his news, feeling it was selfish to talk openly of his good fortune. But Mrs. Cohen heard and spread the word, feeling it important that what little joy there was should be shared.

During those first months of searching, Lisa would often lie on her bed and stare at her parents’ pictures, placed reverently on her nightstand, and try hard to remember their faces. Their real features had long ago been replaced by the features she had memorized from the photographs. Sometimes, but only in a dream, she thought she could catch a glimpse of her mother’s expression the night she had wiped the blood from her father’s face on Kristallnacht. She had tried over and over to recapture it. And she could sometimes see the smile her mother gave her when they would play together at the piano after her lesson with Professor Isseles. Sometimes she was sure she caught a glimpse of it, though other times it seemed unbearably dim.

Yis’ga’dal v’yis’kadash
—May the great Name of God be exalted. Nightly, the prayers at the synagogues chanted the names of the departed.

One weekend afternoon, a familiar figure walked through the front door of the hostel. It was Aaron Lewin, carrying his air force satchel and wearing the insignia of lieutenant.

Mrs. Cohen was the first to recognize him. “Aaron! How wonderful to see you. Come in, come in!” There was no hint of her former animosity. War had put such petty matters behind them.

“Is Lisa here?” he asked, direct as always.

“Yes, she’s upstairs, please go on up.”

“Aaron!” Lisa yelled, leaping off the bed. “It’s so good to see you!” And it was good to see him again; he looked so mature, so sophisticated. She gave him a brief hug but the atmosphere between them was distant—she had gotten no letters from him for many months.

“I was worried about you! Are you all right?”

“Never better,” he answered but his expression said the opposite. “This place looks like it needs some attention,” he continued, glancing at the cracked glass of the window. “Maybe I should grab the toolbox.”

Lisa smiled and led him to the kitchen to find the matron. She knew intuitively that Aaron needed time to get his bearings.

They spent the day together. Lisa watched as Aaron tackled the mechanical things that badly needed fixing. He worked in silence.

After lunch, Lisa felt it was time to broach the difficult question she had been waiting all morning to ask. “Have you heard anything about your family, about your mother?”

“My mother is dead. So are my brothers,” he answered, not adding any details.

“How?”

“I don’t know. How would we ever know?”

“Then how are you sure they’re dead?”

“We have to just assume it, don’t we?” he said flatly, trying to shield himself from the pain of his words.

“How can you just ‘assume’ it?” she said, starting to get upset.

“Lisa, you must be realistic. I think it’s time you faced it. What are the chances any of them survived?”

“Am I supposed to give up hope? Is that what you’re saying?” Lisa asked trying to sound defiant. But her words came out halfhearted. It was her turn to be silent. She looked out the kitchen window at the gray sky and felt a leaden, numbing sadness. Could it be possible that she would never see her parents or Rosie again?

As the long summer afternoon was ending, Aaron asked Lisa to come with him into the back garden. They walked over the lush grass to the hedge that separated the hostel from the convent next door. Lisa’s heart was still heavy from the terrible realizations that were beginning to wash over her.

Aaron had his back to her as he said, “I’ll be leaving for New York. I’ve managed a visa for America.”

“Oh,” she said, with an involuntary gasp at the unexpected news.

Still facing away from her, he continued: “Will you come with me?”

Lisa was silent. Her world was fragmenting around her; she was facing the loss of everyone she held dear. Could she bear to lose Aaron even if she knew her feelings had changed? She didn’t know if she had the strength to say no.