The Girl With No Name (3 page)

Papa had thought they were safe. He was a well-known doctor in the town, his practice flourishing. The fact that his mother happened to be Jewish had never concerned him. They were fully assimilated and he considered himself, first and foremost, a German. He had been an army doctor in the Great War and had received a medal for his service. But now that counted for nothing. His mother was a Jew, so he was a Jew. He was no longer allowed to treat anyone but Jews; his former colleagues treated him as if he had the plague and when he had gone to the aid of one of his pregnant patients who was in early labour, he had been arrested by the Gestapo and had disappeared. On the now notorious ‘Kristallnacht’ they had been turned out of their home, left to find shelter wherever they could while another, Aryan, doctor who’d already taken over the surgery, now took the apartment above it. They had taken temporary refuge with Mutti’s sister Trudi and her family, but their apartment was small and crowded and it was almost impossible to house so many, particularly a blind child, so they’d had to move on. Marta had found two rooms in an old tenement building on the edge of the town and there they had managed to stay. Martin, Lisa’s blind older brother, had gradually learned to find his way about and for a short while some sort of normality had returned. Except there was no Papa. He hadn’t been released, he had simply disappeared and so Marta had decided that she must try and get her children to safety. Lisa’s name had been added to the list of Jewish children waiting for places on one of the Kindertransport trains to take them to safety, out of the country.

‘I don’t want to go,’ Lisa had pleaded, but her mother was insistent.

‘If a place comes up, darling, you’re going. I need to know you’re safe.’

‘But what about Martin?’

‘They won’t take Martin,’ her mother said bitterly. ‘They won’t even put his name on the list; blind children are too much trouble.’

The days and weeks had passed. There had been no news of Papa, despite every effort her mother made to find out what had happened to him, where he had been taken. Lisa got her passport, but she had not been given a place on the train. She was relieved. She didn’t want to go and she hoped against hope that she wouldn’t be chosen. Then suddenly, one afternoon, a man came to the apartment and said there was a place on the train leaving Frankfurt the next day. Someone was not going after all. There was room for Lisa if she had her passport and wanted to go. She didn’t want to go, but her mother was determined that she should and began to pack. The next day Lisa had bid a tearful farewell to Martin and then gone to the station with her mother.

‘The war is coming,’ Mutti had said. ‘I can’t leave Germany without your father and Martin can’t leave without me. As soon as you get to London, you must send me your address and we can write to each other, but if the war comes and you can’t write directly, you can try to get letters to us through your father’s cousin Nikolaus, in Switzerland.’ She pressed a folded sheet of paper into Lisa’s hand. ‘Here’s his address in Zurich, and we’ll write to you the same way. If we can, we’ll go to him. It may be possible, because Switzerland will surely stay neutral.’

Lisa looked at the paper now, Nikolaus Becker’s name and address. Would Papa ever come home, she wondered. And if he did, would the three of them be allowed to leave Germany, to go to Zurich?

She looked round the bleak little room that was now hers. She was here, she must make the best of it, but it wasn’t going to be easy. She got to her feet and went into the little bathroom that jutted out, a precarious afterthought, on the back of the house. She splashed cold water on her face and then determined to pull herself together, she went downstairs.

‘She’ll be fine,’ Dan had said. It was an optimistic remark, but neither he nor Naomi knew just how optimistic. It was far more difficult being a foster parent than Naomi had expected; being responsible for a child who wasn’t yours, needing to keep her safe so that, one day perhaps, she could be reunited with her parents. When she and Daniel had offered themselves she hadn’t realised how heavy the responsibility would feel.

The early weeks had not been easy on either side. Lisa was desperately homesick and unable to explain her fears and her emotions to her new parents. She spoke only a few words of English and the Federmans spoke absolutely no German. Everything was strange to Lisa, and with no children of their own, Naomi and Dan were at a loss as to how they might deal with a thirteen-year-old girl, who looked at the world through wide, frightened eyes and often cried herself to sleep.

‘I’m beginning to wonder what we’ve taken on,’ Naomi sighed to Dan one evening when Lisa had been with them for a week. ‘The poor kid is so homesick and I can’t communicate with her except by signs and the odd word or two. I tried to give her a hug today when she was looking very down, but she pulled away and ran out of the room. I don’t know what to do, I feel so helpless.’

Dan pulled her into his arms and held her close. ‘You’re doing the best you can, love. You can’t do more. We just have to take each day as it comes and when her English improves we’ll be able to talk to her properly. Till then, well, we have to be patient and try and understand how she must be feeling, dumped on us, complete strangers, and away from everyone and everything she knows and loves.’

Naomi returned his hug. ‘You’re a wise man, Daniel Federman,’ she murmured. ‘I don’t deserve you, but I’m glad you’re mine.’

It did indeed take patience and goodwill on both sides, but with a great deal of sign language they managed to communicate enough to get by.

Soon after Lisa had arrived, Mary James, Naomi’s oldest friend, looked in for a cup of tea one afternoon. She and her husband Tom kept the Duke of Wellington pub on the corner. It was Dan’s local and the four of them had been friends since their school days, growing up in the area, building their lives in the familiarity of their London streets. When Naomi and Dan had decided to offer themselves as foster parents to a refugee child, Mary had, Naomi knew, suggested to Tom that they should do the same, but Tom had refused. He’d been in the last war, he said, and he’d seen enough bloody Germans to last him a lifetime and he wasn’t bloody going to have one in his house.

Mary had said no more about it, but when Lisa arrived in Kemble Street, she had taken pains to get to know her. On her first visit, she’d brought an English–German dictionary with her. ‘Found this on a stall down the market,’ she told Naomi. ‘Thought it might be useful!’

Naomi gave her a hug. ‘You’re a saviour! Look, Lisa!’ She held out the dictionary. When Lisa saw what it was she gave Mary a huge beam and said carefully, ‘Thank you, madam.’

Mary smiled back at her and said, ‘I hope it helps you.’

It certainly did. The dictionary was well-used. Left on the mantelshelf in the kitchen, it was there to hand when anyone was at a loss for a word in either language.

After that, Aunt Mary, as Lisa was instructed to call her, often dropped in to see how the girl was getting on and Lisa found herself looking forward to her visits. Mary seemed to understand how lost and lonely she must feel, a child in a foreign country, living with strangers and with war fever building around her.

It was indeed a time of national tension. War was coming, everyone knew that now, it was only a matter of when. The country had been preparing for months and Lisa was soon involved in some of the preparations. Naomi took her to the local distribution centre to have a gas mask fitted. People were queuing up to get their masks which were laid out on tables ready for trial. Harassed-looking volunteers dealt with each person in turn, finding the right mask and explaining how it should be put on. Lisa watched, wide-eyed, as Naomi was fitted with hers, not at all liking what she saw. Then it was her turn. The woman picked up a mask and, pressing it firmly against Lisa’s face, told her to push her chin forward into it and then adjusted the straps, so that it fitted snugly round her head. Lisa hated it. She hated the smell of the rubber, the touch of it on her skin, but more she hated having her face enclosed, feeling that she couldn’t breathe.

‘Just breathe normally,’ the woman said. But Lisa couldn’t, she fought for breath as a bubble of panic rose in her chest, threatening to suffocate her, and she ripped the mask from her face, gasping for air.

Naomi tried to encourage her to put it back on again, but she refused. She couldn’t explain her panic, all she could say was, ‘No! No! No!’

‘She’s a refugee,’ Naomi explained. ‘She doesn’t speak English.’

‘Well,’ snapped the weary volunteer, ‘that won’t stop her getting gassed, now will it? Never mind,’ she glanced back at the queue of people waiting, ‘it was a good enough fit. Just take it home with you and get her to practise wearing it, so she gets used to it. Instructions are in the lid.’ She handed them the two gas masks in their cardboard cases and turned to the next in the queue.

Another day they went to the street market and Naomi managed to buy the end of a roll of black material so they could make blackout curtains. Together they sat in the front room and covered the wooden frames Uncle Dan had made to fit each window.

‘Good thing our windows ain’t big,’ Naomi remarked as they stretched the scant fabric across the frames and stitched it into place. ‘We was lucky to get this much.’ Black material was in great demand and she knew she had been extremely lucky to find any at all. Lisa liked to sew and helping Naomi with the blackout brought her a little closer to her foster mother. Naomi could see that Lisa had been well taught. Her stitches were neat and even and she worked quickly.

‘Good, Lisa,’ she said. ‘That’s very good. You sew beautifully.’ She was rewarded with a shy smile and Lisa’s first unprompted words. ‘My mother do me this.’

Building on this effort, Naomi said, ‘Your mother taught you. That’s good, Lisa, very good!’ They exchanged smiles and another link was forged between them. The next evening, when Naomi was listening to the wireless and darning one of Dan’s socks, Lisa leaned across and took another from the mending basket, neatly darning the hole which had appeared in the heel.

Number sixty-five Kemble Street had no garden, nowhere to put one of the Anderson shelters that the government were providing, and though there was a public air raid shelter at the far end of Hope Street, the thought of running there through a raid in the dark of night and being crushed in among so many was frightening, so Dan decided to fix up the old vegetable cellar as a shelter.

‘Is it deep enough?’ Naomi asked anxiously.

‘Should be,’ Dan reassured her, ‘unless we get a direct hit.’

‘So, shouldn’t we go to the Hope Street shelter?’ persisted Naomi.

‘That wouldn’t survive a direct hit either,’ he told her. ‘We’re just as well here.’ He brought down a couple of sagging armchairs and an old mattress with blankets and pillows, so they could sleep if the raid was a long one, keeping them there all night. There was a rickety table and on a shelf along one wall were some candles, stuck into the tops of beer bottles, matches, some bottles of water and biscuits in a tin.

When Lisa saw the cellar shelter she was terrified. She hated small spaces and being shut in. She had never liked closed doors, always leaving her bedroom door open, and the idea of being underground, actually under the house, filled her with horror. The cellar was a dark, cramped space, with no window and no electric light. The low ceiling and the grey stone walls pressed in on her, the dank musty air smothering her so that she could hardly breathe. She froze at the top of the steps and only allowed herself to be taken down, holding firmly to Dan’s hand. He had lighted some of the candles and the light flickered in the draught from the door.

‘Not shut door,’ she had begged. ‘Not shut door.’

‘No.’ He spoke reassuringly, knowing that she understood few of his words and hoping his tone would calm her. ‘Not today anyway. Only if there’s a raid.’ He recognised her panic and said soothingly, ‘We won’t be down here much, me duck, only if there’s an air raid,’ and with that he led her back upstairs to the kitchen.

‘She’s claustrophobic,’ he told Naomi later. ‘We’re going to have trouble getting her down into that cellar when the siren goes.’

Always pragmatic, Naomi said, ‘We’ll face that when the time comes. We ain’t at war yet, thank God.’

War fever was in the air though and it was only three weeks later that, listening to the wireless, they heard the grim news that Hitler had invaded Poland. Naomi and Lisa had come home from the market weighed down with groceries: tins of meat and vegetables, soup and sardines, iron rations to be squirrelled away for future use. Everyone was stocking up against the expected scarcities. Londoners knew they would be Hitler’s prime target and they were preparing themselves.

‘I saw some kiddies being taken to the railway station today,’ Naomi told Dan. ‘Dreadful it was. They was all lined up with labels on their coats, being taken away from home to goodness knows where.’ She looked across at him and added softly, ‘Just like poor Lisa.’

‘Better than staying here in London and being bombed to death,’ Dan said.

‘S’pose so,’ Naomi reluctantly agreed, ‘but heart-breaking for their mums.’ Secretly, she’d often wondered how Lisa’s mother could bear to send her daughter so far away, all alone; it wasn’t natural, she’d thought. But now, she realised, London mothers were doing exactly the same thing. Sending their children off into the unknown, with no idea of where they’d gone or who would be looking after them. It took brave women with deep love for their children to do that. And for the first time she was glad that she had no children to send. Then she thought of Lisa.

‘D’you think we ought to be sending Lisa away to the country, too?’ she asked Dan.

He shook his head. ‘Don’t know. Be a bit much for her, wouldn’t it? She’s only just got here, poor kid.’

‘Perhaps I ought to go and ask that Mrs Carter, at Bloomsbury House. What d’you think?’

‘You could, I suppose. See what she thinks is best.’

Naomi nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I think I will. Don’t want Lisa to escape from the Nazis only to be bombed by them here.’