The Story of Henri Tod (7 page)

They were never apart. The schoolhouse had only the one room for the forty-odd students. When they returned from classes they worked, side by side, helping Uncle Hans with the cows or with the hay; or Aunt Steffi, in the kitchen. She quickly noticed that they liked to be together, and for that reason did not separate the chores by assigning kitchen work to Clementa and outdoor work to Henri. They were put to work together, indoors and out. When it got dark they went into Henri's bedroom, which doubled as a study, and did their homework, Henri helping Clementa with her work, she, occasionally, with his. Supper was increasingly unimaginative fare, as shortages multiplied, but they were never hungry. After supper they would resume their homework and then, for one half hour, they were permitted to play games, and there was a checkers set, and some playing cards. After a year or so they were permitted to listen to the radio, which broadcast news of one Nazi victory after another, although they did finally conclude, after a few weeks of trying to sort it all out, that the Nazi army had
not
undertaken an amphibious operation against England; and descriptions of enemy bombers shot down suggested that there were considerable Allied air raids going on. In Tolk, so near the Danish border, it wasn't often that they saw enemy aircraft overhead, although blackout precautions were rigorously observed.

One day, two months before Henri's sixteenth birthday, just before noon, the children heard the sound of a motorcycle, the roar diminishing to the whine, then the little stutter, as the engine was turned off. Directly outside the schoolhouse. There was no knock on the door. It opened, and an elderly man—someone had once pointed him out to Henri as the mayor of Tolk, also its postmaster and undertaker—escorted in a hulky young man dressed in a Nazi uniform.

The mayor approached Mrs. Taussig at her desk in front of the blackboard and whispered to her. The Nazi officer was meanwhile scrutinizing the children and taking notes. He said nothing. Mrs. Taussig addressed the class. “Children, the gentleman from the army here has been sent to check on draft registration.” She was interrupted by the officer, who spoke to her in a quiet voice that could not be heard. Mrs. Taussig then transcribed the order: “The captain wishes all the girls to leave the room.”

They did so, rather in a hurry. Clementa managed to grip Henri's hand on the way out.

Now the captain took over. He was very young, perhaps twenty-five. His brown hair was clipped short, his frame husky, his voice metallic. “How many of you are sixteen years old or over sixteen, raise your hands.”

Two of them did so. “Move to that side of the room.” The captain reordered the seating.

“How many of you are fifteen years old?” Henri and one other boy raised their hands. “All right, the rest of you are dismissed. Wait a minute”—he pointed to a boy leaving, who looked older than the others—“you. What is your name?”

“Paul, sir.”

“Paul what?”

“Paul Steiner.”

“Steiner? Stay here.”

The captain was interested in four things. He wanted to know by documentary evidence whether either of the two boys who had given their age as fifteen might actually already be sixteen. And he wanted to know whether Steiner was Jewish. Concerning the first point, the captain wanted supplementary proof other than that which school enrollment records provided, so Henri and Siegfried were sent home to consult their parents. Steiner, with the name suspiciously Jewish, was asked where he had been baptized. He replied that he didn't know. Mrs. Taussig intervened and said that the boy's parents were Lutherans, to her certain knowledge, as she regularly saw them in church on Sundays. The captain was finally satisfied, and now needed from Steiner only proof that he was not yet sixteen.

Uncle Hans had two years earlier foreseen the need for papers. Having through sources established that St. Bonaventure's Church in Hamburg had been bombed and all its records destroyed, he procured on St. Bonaventure's stationery a baptismal certificate, dated December 7, 1928, which listed Henri's birthdate as one year earlier. In longhand he wrote that his nephew had been born in Denmark, at his mother's home, and that when Henri's mother and father were killed in the auto accident, they had merely been visiting in Germany, so that no papers concerning their son and daughter were in hand, and that he had never known where his dead brother had kept such papers. “Give this to the captain, and if he wishes to see me, tell him I am here, at work, and would be glad to see him.”

It worked. But the captain had made careful notes, and told Henri, Siegfried, and Kurt that they would receive notices within thirty days of their sixteenth birthday telling them where they were to report for induction into the army. The senior boys would be receiving their notices right away. He put away his writing materials, bowed perfunctorily to Mrs. Taussig, and left the schoolhouse.

After dinner Uncle Hans informed Henri that he needed to talk with him. The spring evening was warm, and Uncle Hans said they might take a little walk. It was then that he told Henri that he must go abroad, that contingency plans had been made to take him to England. The following day, right after dinner, a resistance member would pick him up and take him to Tönning, on the North Sea. He would be delivered there into friendly hands, and by the end of the week he would be in England. Once there, a Mr. Wallenberg would look after him. When the war was over—as, Uncle Hans said, surely it would be over, within a year or so—he would be reunited with Clementa.

Henri, up until now compliant in attitude, stopped dead in his tracks. What? Leave without Clementa? He came close to hysteria. He would do no such thing, ever ever ever ever. Uncle Hans replied calmly that he had no choice in the matter, that resistance leaders made such decisions, that they had evidently reasoned that Clementa, as a girl, was in no danger, unlike Henri, who stood to be drafted in a matter of weeks. Henri replied that he would rather be drafted than leave Clementa. Hans Wurmbrand replied that to be drafted would hardly put him any closer to his sister. Henri threw himself into a mound of hay at the side of the pathway, and half swore, half cried that he could not leave Clementa. Hans Wurmbrand reasoned correctly that he should let the matter drop for the moment and confer with Clementa.

And of course he did; and of course Clementa went to Henri and told him that if he truly loved her he would leave, and be safe, until the war was over. He had cried, inconsolable at the thought of their separation; but agreeing, finally, to go. They stayed up until early in the morning, talking, exchanging endearments. At school that final day he could not bear to look in her direction, or she in his, and halfway through dinner, after removing the soup plates, Clementa crept upstairs and shut her door. Aunt Steffi handed Henri a note. He opened it. Clementa had written, “You must not say goodbye to me. I will see you very very soon. I know I will. Besides, that is the royal command of Queen Clementa, who loves her King Heinrich so very much.” Henri lunged out of the door, and wept uncontrollably until the car came, and after hugging his adopted parents he went off with the stranger and two weeks later was enrolled in St. Paul's School in London as a boarding student.

Mr. Wallenberg told Henri that he had been a friend of Henri's father, that he would look after Henri until the war was over, that Henri was to be extremely careful not to divulge to anyone the circumstances of his departure from Germany or give any clue concerning the practices of the apparatus that had brought him to safety, and above all he was not to breathe a word of the existence of his sister, or of the Wurmbrands. Special arrangements would be made to instruct him in the Jewish religion, but this was to be done during the vacation period because his Jewish background, combined with the obvious fact that he was German, might arouse curiosity in someone capable of making mischief.

To all of this Henri of course assented, but he was astonished on being told that there was no way in which he might communicate with Clementa, that the resistance was simply not willing to run risks in order to deliver correspondence. The day he heard that—the day before entering the school—he resolved that he would write her a letter every single night and, after the war, he would give her the whole collection to show her that he had not let a day go by without thinking of her.

St. Paul's School could not remember when last it had received a student of such energy and talent. Although the curriculum was very different from what he had got used to at Tolk, it was only a matter of weeks before the necessary adjustments were made. Before the semester was over, Henri was receiving all A's—in Latin, Maths, English, Geography, Greek, and History. He was permitted to stay at the school during the summer vacation, during which he studied and did chores twenty hours every week. By the beginning of the Michaelmas term he was jumped in grade to the fifth form. Several months later, soon after his seventeenth birthday, he was elected school captain, his office to begin in the Lent term, after the holidays of December 1944.

That was the night. It was traditional that the captain-elect and his prefects should be taken by their predecessors to the Aldwyn Chop House, next door to the school, a favorite and handy restaurant for visiting parents. It was the unspoken tradition of the school that on that night the captain and outgoing prefects would entertain their successors and dip deep into the Aldwyn's inexhaustible supply of ale. The headmaster of St. Paul's had himself staggered out of Aldwyn's sometime after midnight thirty years ago, and so—on that one night—the school's stern rules were, very simply, overlooked.

Henri had not tasted beer before, but of course as captain-elect he was the special object of the revelers. The incumbent captain rose with toast after toast to Henri Tod, the German boy who in a little over a year had had such a meteoric career at the same school as the great General Montgomery—Montgomery, who would be the first to reach Berlin (cheers!), by God, and show those Krauts (nothing personal, Tod) who was who, and maybe General Montgomery would bring back Hitler's mustache to frame in the school's museum (cheers!). Are you willing to drink to that, Tod?

Henri lifted his glass solemnly to the defeat of Hitler. To the defeat of Hitler
and
the Germans, corrected Espy Major.

Wait a minute, wait a minute, Henri smiled, jug in hand, there
are
some good Germans, you know, please don't think that they are all like Adolf Hitler.

Well, said Espy, there are certainly a lot of Germans who are taking orders from Adolf Hitler and a lot of Germans who have been cheering Adolf Hitler all these years. Perhaps, he said, Tod was so engaged in his studies while in Germany that he didn't have a chance to find out what was happening to other people?

Henri at this point could not quite focus, either on his companions or on the question. But he felt a compulsive need to straighten Espy out, and so, as the boys began filing out to cross the street to the campus and to their dormitories, Henri approached Espy and asked him to come with him for a minute to the corner of the room, as there was something he wished him to know. Espy good-naturedly did so. “But first,” Henri said solemnly, trying to remind himself how one was supposed to look when one looked solemn, “first, you must promise me that you will never tell anyone what I am about to tell you.” Espy promised, solemnly, that as long as he lived, Tod's secret would be safe. Well, said Henri, he
had
suffered. He was a Jew. His parents had been taken away and killed in a concentration camp. He had a sister, her name was Clementa. She hid out in a town called Tolk, with a family called Wurmbrand. They pretended that Clementa and Henri were their niece and nephew. They had looked after them since he was thirteen, and they were in touch with the Resistance. And the Resistance had brought him safely to England. Was this not evidence that there were indeed good Germans?

Espy Major whistled, and whispered that he'd had no idea that Tod had gone through so much, and that he wished immediately to modify any suggestion that Tod had not known danger. Whereupon they shook hands, rose, and Henri was very sick. Espy led him to his bed.

Three weeks later, Henri was surprised to be called out of his Greek class. Mr. Wallenberg had secured permission of the headmaster to interrupt him, and was waiting for him in the reception room.

He was pale, and told Henri that he needed to talk with him privately. And so they drove to The Boltons, at Number 7 of which Wallenberg lived. Inside, he told Henri to sit down.

“Have you spoken to anyone about the Wurmbrands and your sister?”

Henri's lips quivered, and for a moment he did not reply.

Wallenberg repeated the question.

“I told one boy.”

“When?”

“The night I was made captain. Three weeks ago.”

Wallenberg turned his face to one side. “The day before yesterday, the Gestapo went to the farmhouse. They took the Wurmbrands out and shot them. They took your sister away in their car. She was driven to Hamburg and put on a train with all Jewish people rounded up in a general sweep. The train left Hamburg, and headed toward Poland.”

Henri Tod left St. Paul's the next day and took a job in Leeds as a coal miner. His curiosity about Espy was limited, because he knew that Espy himself would not wish harm to come to Henri's sister. He did inquire about the profession of Espy's father, who was a journalist, wholly engaged in covering the war. It crossed his mind only fleetingly to ask Espy Major whether he had told his father (or anyone else) the story of the new school captain's secret family in Tolk, but decided against doing so. Of what use that line of questioning? On whom could the blame be put, other than himself? And so all he did was to collect, wordlessly, his personal materials, and leave a note in the headmaster's office. He did not leave a forwarding address with Mr. Wallenberg, whom he never saw again.

In the spring of 1950, he knocked on the door of the dean of admissions at Trinity College in Cambridge and said he would like to enroll to do advanced studies in philosophy. The dean looked at the young man, deferential but proud, mature beyond what the dean had experienced in young men of twenty-three or four. He was clean-shaven, strong, even-featured, brown-eyed, with perfectly shaped white teeth, slender nose and lips. The dean told him, somewhat more courteously than he'd have addressed a young man less striking in appearance and behavior, that there were conventional ways of applying for admission to graduate schools—where had he attended college?