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10
Gisela
MAY 1940
The May morning was still dark when I awoke to an explosion that rattled the windows and shook the room. It was followed by another and another. In between the blasts, I heard a roaring, growling sound that I couldn’t quite place at first. It grew louder, closer. When I realized what it was, my heart seemed to stop beating—the drone of airplanes. Hundreds of them.
Belgium was under attack.
“Oh, God, please... no,” I whispered.
Months had passed after France and Britain declared war on Germany last September, and not much had changed for our Jewish community in Belgium, aside from a growing uneasiness about the world situation. We observed Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and then Sukkot. My family had celebrated my seventeenth birthday in November, but we didn’t speak of the horror of Kristallnacht just one year earlier. In December, every Jewish home lit candles for Hanukkah, brightening the cold, winter nights for eight days.
Then in early April, a month ago, the Nazis surprised the world by invading and occupying Norway and Denmark with the same lightning warfare they’d used when invading Poland. Their tanks and planes had been unstoppable. The Nazis seemed determined to swallow up all of Europe. Even so, Passover brought us the reminder of God’s deliverance from slavery.
We understood firsthand what freedom meant after escaping from Nazi rule, although we would all breathe easier once we were allowed to immigrate to the United States. We were still waiting. In the meantime, I was looking forward to starting nursing school. Sam hadn’t been able to enroll in the university, but he was deep into his Torah and Gemara studies at the synagogue and worked part-time.
Our adopted nation of Belgium had declared neutrality and had posted troops to protect our borders, but neutrality hadn’t prevented Belgium from being invaded during the last war. With Germany to the east and France to the west, Belgium had become a blood-soaked battlefield back then. I had wanted to ignore all these things and continue to believe that Sam and I were safe, that our families were safe, that the Nazis couldn’t touch us here. But the unmistakable sounds of distant warfare no longer allowed me to do it.
The noise had awakened Ruthie, too, and she sat up beside me in the bed we shared, her eyes wide with fear. We gripped hands as flashes like lightning shone from behind the window shades in bright bursts, followed by more rumbling booms. “That’s not thunder, is it, Gisela?” she said. I shook my head and pulled her into my arms.
“Is it the Nazis?” Ruthie asked. “Are they coming here, too? Are they going to find us again?”
I saw no point in lying to her. “It does sound like we’re being attacked. Let’s see if Vati and Mutti are awake.”
Vati was sitting in the dark at the kitchen table, still in his pajamas. Mutti was making coffee, and when she turned to us, I saw that she had been crying. “Come here, dear one,” Vati said, pulling Ruthie onto his lap.
“Is there going to be a war here, too?” she asked.
“Well, I’m afraid it looks that way.”
She buried her head against his shoulder and sobbed. “I don’t want them to come here, Vati! I don’t want them to find us again!”
“Shh... shh...,” he soothed. “Belgium sided with the Allies in the last war, and they defeated the enemy in the end. The Americans joined the fight, and they changed the course of the war. It will be the same this time—you’ll see. The Americans will come to our defense.”
I wanted to believe my father, but bitter disappointment made me reluctant to trust the Americans to rescue us. We huddled in our kitchen, feeling the apartment building shudder and listening to the sound of our lives changing once again. If we were all about to die, I wanted to be with Sam at the end. “May I invite Sam and his family to come over?” I asked. “Please? They shouldn’t be all alone.”
“Yes, of course,” Vati replied. “Let’s all get dressed and I’ll go see if they want to join us.”
They did, and our two families sat in our living room, trying to find a news report on the radio as the distant explosions continued and sirens wailed. “Does this building have a basement?” Sam asked. “Maybe we should move down there if the air raid gets worse.”
“The Nazis will probably attack the Belgian military installations and airfields first,” Vati replied. “But it wouldn’t hurt to gather some blankets and food and flashlights and take them down there, just in case.”
“What if they win, Vati?” Ruthie asked. “What if the Nazis win and they take over Belgium, and they come after us again?”
“We’ll figure out a way to escape from them. We escaped once before.”
But had we? I was beginning to understand why Max Loewe had jumped overboard in Havana Harbor. He had exhausted all hope of ever finding refuge and safety.
More than a week passed as the war raged throughout Belgium. We spent each night with our neighbors in the building’s dark, damp basement, watching the cobwebs sway on the rafters above our heads as bombs shook the foundations. The British and French offered the Belgian military no help. We learned on the radio that the Nazis had invaded the neighboring Netherlands on the same day they’d invaded us and forced its government to surrender. There seemed to be little hope for us. The stress took a huge toll on Vati. He had never fully recovered his health after being imprisoned, and his nagging cough left him too weak to eat most days. He remained much too thin. Sam seemed overwhelmed as well, with his mother and brothers depending on him. There were no letters from his father advising him what to do. We all felt so helpless.
“I don’t have anyone I can confide in but you, Gisela,” Sam told me in one of our few moments alone. There had been a lull in the fighting, so we sat on the front steps of our apartment building as we had so often before the invasion. But children no longer played in the street, and a haze of smoke dimmed the spring sunlight. The air smelled of burnt metal. Our Jewish community was a ghost town. Everyone huddled inside around their radios, desperate for good news. “I have to remain strong for my mother and brothers,” Sam said. “I keep assuring them that everything will be all right, but I don’t think it will be. The Nazis are going to win. And then what?”
“Vati says the men at the synagogue are discussing what to do. You aren’t alone. They’ll figure something out.”
“The Nazis hate us. If they win, they’ll persecute us here the same way they did back home in Germany.”
“Then we’ll have to pray that they don’t win. The British and French will fight them off. And Vati says the Americans will help us again.”
