Read The Other Half of Life Online
Authors: Kim Ablon Whitney
The Other Half of Life (23 page)
Thomas patted Marianne on the back. “Your father will be looking for you two. You need to have dinner. You can't travel on an empty stomach.”
“I'm not hungry,” Marianne said.
He forced a smile. “You? Not hungry? That will be the day!”
On the way to the dining hall, Priska walked close to Thomas. He smiled at her. He was holding it together for her and for Marianne too.
“There you are,” Professor Affeldt said, walking to ward them. He looked from Priska to Thomas. “I'm sorry. I tried.”
“I understand,” Thomas said.
“Did you try everything, Vati?” Priska asked. “You said he was our cousin?”
“Yes, of course, but, darling, you don't know how lucky we are that these countries have agreed to take us in the first place.” He reached out to her but she turned away from him. Professor Affeldt continued, “No one is going back to Germany. They've assured us of that.” He sighed and then said, “We should go eat.”
Priska looked at Thomas. “I want to spend this last hour with you.”
“Of course he'll join us,” Professor Affeldt said.
“No,” she said, still facing Thomas. “I want to be on deck with you. I want to be alone with you.” Thomas
couldn't help but notice how Priska's alliances seemed to have shifted.
“All right,” Professor Affeldt said. “I'll see if I can take something to bring with us in case you get hungry later.”
Priska took Thomas's hand and they walked to the railing overlooking the quayside. Below, deck boys carried luggage down the gangway.
“I can't believe I'm getting off,” Priska said. “It felt as if we'd be on this ship forever, and now in a matter of hours it's all over. I know I should be happy, but where will you be sent? How will I know? How will we find each other again?”
Thomas heard a strange calmness in his own voice as he answered, “We'll write to each other once we're settled.”
Priska's voice was near panic. “But how will I know where you are? And who knows where we're going exactly?”
“We just have to trust that somehow we'll find each other again.” Thomas raised his eyebrows and smiled. “We have to have faith.”
“Don't make fun of me,” she said.
“I'm not making fun of you. Not really.”
Priska looked at the dock. “I know, let's make a pact—”
Thomas furrowed his brow.
“If for some reason we don't find each other, in five years' time we'll meet. On this very day in five years. June 17, 1944. This craziness will surely be long over by then. I'll be nineteen and you'll be twenty.”
Thomas tried to imagine himself at twenty but couldn't. He couldn't even imagine what he'd be like an hour after Priska had left the ship.
“We'll meet in Miami,” Priska continued. “We'll both be in America by then. We'll meet by the harbor where the ships come in. Where we would have docked.”
Thomas stared at her, trying to carve her features into his mind.
“All right?” She extended her hand to shake on it. Her eyes were wide open and he knew he would surprise her, but he wasn't passing up his last chance. Thomas leaned in and touched his lips to hers. They stood together, lips pressed against lips, joining themselves, until Paul and Claudia walked by.
“Young love,” Claudia said to Paul.
Priska pulled away and giggled.
“Five years from this very day,” Thomas repeated. “If we don't find each other before then.”
Franz, Claudia, and Paul were among the passengers disembarking in Antwerp. Franz shook Thomas's hand.
“If you ever get to America, make sure you see Lasker play.”
“I will,” Thomas said. “Good luck.”
Next, Thomas shook hands with Professor Affeldt, hugged Marianne, and held Priska against him. Almost everyone assigned to Antwerp had filed off.
“Priska, we need to go,” Professor Affeldt called. “Thomas, take care.”
Priska moved away but held on to Thomas's hand. She let her hand slip from his until they were just touching finger tips. Then they were no longer touching at all.
Thomas watched Priska walk down the gangway, feeling as if the air around him were disappearing with her. His throat, still sore, was closing up. Just before the end of the gangway, she turned and waved. She was smiling her wide smile, and all of a sudden he could breathe again.
Five years. Miami. If not before.
T
homas stood on the pier in Miami, looking out over the water. It was blazing hot out and he wiped away a trickle of sweat from his forehead. They should have picked a time of day. Not just a day, but a time of day. But they had been so young, and with all that had been going on around them, he could understand why they hadn't been more specific. And anyway, they had planned to meet five years after, and now it was ten. He hadn't been able to come five years after, or the next year either. They had been so naive to think everything would be back to normal by 1944. In '44 the war was still going, and nothing would ever be back to normal again for those who lived through it.
He had come every year since '46, but she had never shown up, and he had told himself that this was the last time he would come. If she didn't come today, well, then he would know what had happened to her.
He rubbed the toe of his shoe against the grain of the wood of the pier. He looked out at the ships dotting the
harbor. No liners today. In '47 he'd been at this very spot when the liners were boarding. How strange it had been to see the people getting on. Even now it was still hard to reconcile being on this side instead of out there, floating.
The day grew hotter as the sun bore down on him, but he would wait all day if he had to. He wouldn't leave. Not until the sun had set, officially ending the day and his last remaining hopes.
He hadn't worn a watch, but from the sun's position in the sky he guessed it was near three o'clock when he noticed a woman coming down the pier. As she came closer, he saw she had curly hair that bounced against her shoulders. Seeing him, she broke into a jog and then pulled up fifteen feet away from him. He wondered if he looked that different. He carried himself differently, he knew that much. He felt more confident in his own body, but one shoulder sloped downward in a strange way, on account of a gunshot wound. It was fully functional, just looked a little odd.
“Thomas?”
His heart felt as if it would soar right out of his chest. She was here. They had found each other. She was alive. He stepped toward her, squinting. He had thought about this moment time and time again, only now something wasn't right. Well, of course, the war had changed her. It had changed them all. Who knew what she had lived through?
She must have seen his confusion because she took a sharp inward breath and said, “No. No, it's Marianne. I'm
sorry.” She had started crying. Tears pouring down her face. He knew those tears. They were the same ones he had inside him. They stayed buried until they surged forth uncontrollably. “Priska told me she had promised to meet you.”
Thomas looked away. “She didn't make it.”
“She died in Auschwitz.” Marianne paused, as if she was still trying to get used to saying those words. She continued, “I didn't know if you had survived. I hoped so much you had. I wanted you to know. I tried to find you, but I couldn't find record of any Thomas Werkmann from Berlin. I needed to find you and tell you, and now I have.” She smiled, tears still wet on her face. “You're alive.”
“Yes,” he said, and he felt it painfully—his being alive, and Priska not.
Marianne brushed away her tears. After a while Thomas broke the silence. “Do you know what happened to some of the others? Günther, Ingrid, Jakob …”
“I don't know. I ran into Paul at the camp for displaced persons that I was sent to after the war. He said Claudia was killed.”
Thomas closed his eyes briefly. “We thought we were saved ….”
“Yes, we all did. How were we to know that the war would soon start and the Nazis would be invading France and Holland?”
Thomas sighed. “What happened to your family after you left the ship?”
“We first went into a quarantine camp, and then we were transferred to the Lloyd Hotel in Amsterdam, where we shared an apartment with another family. We actually went to school—a Jewish school in Amsterdam. Life was all right in a way. Then the occupation came.” Marianne glanced away from Thomas. “Mutti wanted us to go into hiding, but that meant we'd likely have to split up and Vati didn't want to do that. Before we could decide, we were taken to the Westerbork internment camp on the German border. Again, at the beginning it wasn't so bad. But by 1942, the Germans took over the camp and everything changed. We had to work in the fields all day, and more people were crammed into our small room. Then they started taking people away on the transports. Every Tuesday a train would leave. My father was the first to go. About four months later my mother, Priska, and I were sent to Auschwitz. When we got off the train, they made two lines. My mother went to the left and we went to the right. We never saw her or my father again. Priska died of typhoid a few weeks before the camp was liberated.”
Marianne breathed deeply. Thomas watched her chest rise and fall. She was skinny and he remembered her voracious appetite.
She asked, “Where were you sent? We never knew.”
“I was lucky,” he said. “I was sent to England. In En gland we were classified as enemy aliens because we were German.” Thomas shook his head at the irony of it all—that
he, a Jew, could somehow be an enemy of the forces opposed to Hitler.
“I went on to volunteer for the Alien Companies of the Pioneer Corps. I fought against the Nazis in France in 1940. Later I was transferred to an elite commando division. We parachuted behind enemy lines to do reconnaissance in advance of British units. That's when my name changed from Werkmann to Workman. That's probably why you couldn't find me. They wanted us to be British, not German, and that was fine with me. All my time fighting for the Allied forces, I was relatively happy. All I ever wanted was to fight the Nazis, in whichever way I could.”
Marianne nodded. “Yes, you always were so courageous.”
“Really?” It was odd to think that was how she had thought of him. He remembered then that she'd fancied him. He flushed a bit to think of it, even now. He continued, “After the war I came here. My brother was already here by then. My mother came too. My father died in Dachau.”
Thomas saw what looked like a ghost of the moon high in the sky. It never made sense to him why sometimes you could see the moon in the plain light of day.
“Do you still have your good appetite?”
She chuckled. “Yes.”
“Will you have dinner with me?”
“That would be nice.”
S
tanding outside the museum, Thomas had a change of heart. He wanted to turn around and forget the whole thing. But next to him was Marianne, and next to her were their son and daughter, Seth and Faith. And they had all made the trip to D.C. from New York. Certainly all three might have understood if he said he couldn't go through with it—Marianne, in particular. But he had never agreed to do something and then not done it, and now was no time to start.
The museum was quieter than any other he'd ever been in. It was as if it had been built on the foundation of those eleven million lost souls. Once he set foot in the Hall of Witness, he had to stop and remind his old lungs to breathe. The brick walls felt as if they were closing in on him. He looked up at the giant skylight and felt dizzy. Again, he thought of turning back, of scrapping the whole visit, but
he took a deep breath and headed toward the wide staircase that led to the exhibits. There was so much to see at the museum, but at his age he had to conserve energy. They would go first to the exhibit on the
St. Francis
. If there was time and strength left, they could explore more afterward.
At the sign that pointed the way to the exhibit, Marianne took his hand, squeezed it, and then released it as if she was telling him she was there if he needed her.
“Ready?”
He nodded, his throat already thick with memories.
He moved from one oversized photograph to the next. Seth's and Faith's eyes were wide. They knew little of the story beyond that he and Marianne had been on the ship the whole world had turned its back on. For so many years he had wanted nothing to do with any of those memories.
The past should stay in the past
, he had always said as an excuse not to tell them much about his own childhood in Berlin or his life during the war. Perhaps Marianne had told them more—he wasn't sure.
There was text alongside the images but he didn't need the narrative—this story was his. Names and faces of passengers that he hadn't thought of in years flooded back to him: Frau Rosen, Herr Kleist, Franz, Wilhelm. He recognized some of those very people in the photographs.
Thomas paused at a picture of the captain. Thomas had kept up with what had happened to him more than he had with anyone else on board. The trip to Cuba hadn't been his
last voyage after all. Later that year he had helmed the
St. Francis
on its usual summer-holiday voyages from Germany to the Caribbean. When war had broken out that September, the ship had been on its way to Bermuda and he had managed to bring it safely back to Hamburg. It was his final voyage; the captain never returned to sea. He took a desk job during the war, and afterward he was put on trial for collaborating with the Nazis. Thomas and other surviving passengers of the
St. Francis
had written a letter testifying on his behalf. Thomas had found out that the captain had indeed been the main reason they were treated so well on board and served the best meals. The shipping line had wanted to cut costs by lowering the standards, but he had insisted on nothing less than the best. The captain was acquitted and later recognized for his efforts to help the passengers of the
St. Francis
to safety.
As for Manfred, Thomas often thought about him and wondered what had happened to him. He would likely never know.
Thomas moved to the next photograph and his breath caught in his throat. When Marianne had told him she was planning to donate their photographs to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, he had agreed it was a good idea. He had looked at them quickly before she sent them off, but now here they were, blown up to almost life-size. He and Günther halfway up the mast. Priska, Ingrid, and Marianne in a lifeboat. He stopped short before the next photograph.
There she was: front and center. Her curly hair, her wide eyes, her mischievous smile. All of them were grouped around the life ring with the words ST. FRANCIS emblazoned on it, but he saw only her. While he had forgotten many of those other people who had been on board the
St. Francis
, not a day had passed that he hadn't thought of her. On his wedding day, on the days when his children and grandchildren had been born—he thought of her then too.
“Doesn't she look beautiful,” Marianne said.
“That's your sister?” Seth asked.
Marianne nodded.
“That's who my Priska is named after,” Faith said of her own young daughter, who had stayed at home in New York with Faith's husband.
Thomas wondered if Seth or Faith could tell from the photograph how he had loved Priska. He was standing close to her, and the lens had caught him looking at her, not at the camera. It was certainly no secret to Marianne that he had loved her and always would. They had discussed as much before he asked her to marry him. In fact, he shared with Marianne that love for Priska. It was one of the many things that bound them together.
“It says here the United States decided not to let you in,” Faith said.
“They should have,” Marianne replied. “If anything, they could have taken us temporarily.”
Faith pointed to a reproduction of a page from the
New York Times
. “You were front-page news.”
“We didn't know that back then, of course,” Thomas said. “We were in our own little bubble on the ship, and what news reached us couldn't always be trusted either.”
“Why didn't the United States let you in?” Seth said.
Thomas clucked. “They had quota numbers and procedures to follow. We appealed to Roosevelt. Priska even wrote a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt—we never got a response from her, but later I did hear she had tried to help us.”
Faith shook her head. She had what Thomas liked to think of as the Affeldt family curls. “They should have made an exception. It's like how the United States could have bombed the rail lines to Auschwitz once they knew what was happening there, but they didn't.”
“It would have saved a lot of lives,” Marianne agreed. “Over seven hundred of us had quota numbers for the U.S. already—it just would have meant taking us a little early.”
“You didn't hold a grudge?” Seth asked.
Thomas shrugged. “Things got too complicated for grudges. Your uncle Walter was here … so much had happened.”
Thomas read a few lines of the text underneath a photo graph of the
St. Francis
docking in Antwerp. The passengers looked tired but happy. Thomas remembered how they had all thought they were saved. “Two hundred fifty-four of us on the ship ended up dying in the Holocaust?” he read
out loud. “Did you know it was that many, Marianne?” He sorted through the names he remembered: Günther, Ingrid, Hannelore, Franz, Wilhelm, Jürgen, Frau Rosen. Many of them had certainly been killed.
Marianne shook her head. “We were the lucky ones.”
Before they left the exhibit, Thomas went back to the photograph of them all huddled around the life ring. He reached out and touched her face with his fingers, hoping to feel something besides the glass that encased the photograph. But all he was left with was an impression of cold.
He wouldn't remember seeing other parts of the museum. He walked numbly through the corridors, not even feeling the age of his body. He didn't realize Marianne was holding his hand until they exited the museum. The sun was bright and he went to shield his eyes, only to find his hand attached to hers.
“Are you okay?”
“Mmm,” he replied. He staggered a bit as he walked, off-kilter from the sun's glare and from the memories, which reverberated over seventy years. Being unsteady on his feet reminded him of the day rough seas had hit the ship and so many had been seasick. The memories would stay with him. They were what he had left of her.