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“But will help come in time? The Nazis bombed Rotterdam in order to force the Netherlands to surrender, killing hundreds of innocent civilians. They’ll do the same thing here. If they bomb Antwerp... We’re so close to the train station that we’re certain to be a target.” His words sent a shiver of fear through me. I wanted to lift his spirits but didn’t know how. Instead, I spoke words that I didn’t really believe.
“We’ll figure out a way to escape from Belgium. There must be some place we can—”
“There’s no place to go, Gisela. My father and I worked so hard for so long to get US visas and landing permits for Cuba. That was my only goal for months, and when I finally was able to get my family on board that ship, it seemed like an answer to prayer. And now here we are again. The Nazis surround us on all sides. They patrol the seas with their U-boats. We’re trapped. We didn’t even have one year of freedom together!” His voice broke and he took a moment to recover. “Just when we’ve adjusted to a new life, all of the rules are going to change again when the Nazis occupy our city. I don’t have the energy to start all over again.”
“I know, I know,” I murmured. “But in spite of all that we’ve been through, we met each other and fell in love.” I rested my head on Sam’s shoulder as I tightened my hold on him. A smoke-scented breeze blew loose debris down the street, remnants of someone’s home or business that had been blasted to pieces. My instinct was to gather everything up and return it to the owners, as if that would somehow make a difference. I struggled for something to say that would give both of us hope. “It’s natural to want to see what’s coming around the corner and make plans for the future, especially with your mother and brothers to take care of. Having a plan seems like the only way to keep hope alive. But none of us can see the future any longer. We’ll make ourselves crazy if we keep imagining the worst and trying to prepare for it.” I lifted my head from his shoulder and kissed Sam’s whiskered cheek before resting it on his shoulder again.
“All we have is today, Sam. That’s true whether there’s a war or not. We have our families and each other and we’re together. We have enough food to eat and a roof over our heads, and that’s all that we need for now. It isn’t up to you or Vati or anyone else to figure out a way to save us. God was the One who parted the Red Sea, not Moses and not us.”
“I just wish He would do it soon.”
“Me, too.”
While we waited, Sam and Vati continued to pray at the synagogue down the street with the other men. Our mothers scurried out to shop whenever they could, buying whatever they could find on the increasingly empty store shelves. Other than that, we remained in our apartment, listening to the sounds of war and the depressing news broadcasts.
Near the end of May, we heard devastating news from London. “That can’t be right!” I said with tears streaming down my cheeks. “Have I misunderstood?” I gripped Sam’s sleeve, hoping I had translated incorrectly. He held up his hand for silence as he continued to listen, then slumped forward with his head lowered.
“What is it, son?” Vati asked.
It was a moment before Sam lifted his head and cleared his throat. “The Nazis have surrounded the British and French armies. The Allies are trapped on the French coast with their backs to the English Channel. It looks like both armies will be forced to surrender.”
“Surrender? Then all is lost? Europe is defeated?” None of us wanted to believe it.
Then the news we’d all dreaded and feared was announced. The Belgian military forces, which had held out against the far-superior Nazi forces for eighteen long days, had been forced to surrender. Since Antwerp was an important shipping port, the Wehrmacht quickly occupied our city. The newspaper and radio broadcasts fell under Nazi control, but we were able to get occasional news broadcasts from England, which Sam and I translated for everyone.
Sam and I barely slept for the next few days, waiting beside the radio for the latest news bulletins and speeches from Britain’s prime minister. Between the two of us with our limited English skills, we learned that Britain had called for every available fishing boat and civilian craft to help the Royal Navy rescue their Expeditionary Force and evacuate them to Great Britain. Some of France’s soldiers were evacuated with them, but thousands more French troops had been forced to surrender.
We were listening to a German radio station a week and a half later when we learned that Hitler and his victorious troops had arrived in Paris. Mutti burst into tears, knowing that her brother and mother lived there. France signed an armistice on June22. In a mere forty-three days, nearly all of Europe had become captives of the Nazis or their allies.
Vati switched off the radio after hearing the news and said what we had all been thinking. “It’s over. It seems the Americans have refused to become involved in Europe’s war. There’s no longer any hope of a rescue.”
Neither Sam’s family nor mine moved from where we sat. Our eyes were dry. We had long since run out of tears. Now that my father had turned off the staticky radio, we could hear the floors creaking in the old building as our neighbors moved around upstairs. Vati seemed to be gathering his thoughts as if he had something more to say. We all waited. “I’ll tell you what we are going to do,” he said. “We’re going to return to our jobs and our schools and live our lives as best we can for as long as we can. And may God help us all.”
July and August were hot, airless months. We remained inside our apartments except to dash to the store or the synagogue, fearful of the Nazi soldiers that had taken up residence in Antwerp. Seeing swastikas and hearing my native language spoken in the streets of our adopted home filled me with fear. The Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, which had been supporting us and the other refugees from the St.Louis, left Belgium when the Nazis arrived. Sam worried about how we would survive. “The Belgian government is going to take over our support,” Vati told us after coming home from the synagogue one evening. “They’ve promised not to betray us to the new authorities.”
I started nursing school in September as planned, riding the streetcar to my classes near the hospital. The school was run by Catholic nuns, and two girls from my synagogue named Esther and Rachel also studied there. We rode together to school and back every day. I loved nursing school from the very first day and found my studies exciting and challenging, a welcome diversion from our impossible situation. Sometimes, when I shared what I’d learned with Sam at the end of the day, we could almost forget that we were hated Jews with no place to call home.
Then, just as everyone feared, the dreaded Nazi persecution began all over again. In October, the Nazi-run newspapers announced the first of their anti-Jewish laws, declaring us “undesirable” and restricting our freedom. We knew our lives would get increasingly worse. I turned eighteen in November, and although two years had passed since Kristallnacht, the only thing that had changed for my family and me was that we were living in Antwerp instead of Berlin.
By December, it was too cold for Sam and me to sit outside on the front steps, so he asked me to sit with him on the drafty second-floor landing instead, saying he had news. Cooking odors wafted from behind apartment doors, along with the occasional sounds of pots rattling and babies crying. We had to move aside from time to time as our neighbors came and went. My school was on a break because the Christians were celebrating Christmas, and tonight was the first night of Hanukkah. We should have been lighting candles, but even if we could have afforded them, no one wanted to advertise the fact that we were Jewish.
“I got a letter from my father today,” Sam told me as we nestled against each other on the hard wooden steps. His honey-brown hair was tousled from being outside in the wind, and I reached up to smooth it into place. Sam had grown a beard since we’d arrived in Antwerp a year and a half ago, and it was darker than his hair, the same dark color that his eyebrows were. I loved the soft feel of his beard against my cheek. “My father has been to every foreign consulate in Havana, begging the officials from every country in South America to take us. But the doors keep slamming shut.”
“Doesn’t the world know what’s happening to us?”
“If they did, wouldn’t they be trying harder to help us?”
“I would hope so.” I wanted to believe that the nations’ silence and seeming lack of concern for us was from ignorance, not indifference. But hadn’t the world known of our plight aboard the St.Louis and refused to help? “So we really are trapped now,” I murmured as the truth sank in. “We can’t escape from the Nazis.”
“Well, there are still some underground organizations that will help Jews escape to Switzerland, or even Spain, for a hefty fee. And Aaron Goldberg and I are still meeting with a Zionist organization that is trying to help us. The British closed Palestine to immigration, but I looked into getting my brothers there on student visas. In the end, my mother thought Palestine was too dangerous—as if it’s any safer here in Belgium with the Nazis!” He gave a bitter laugh.
“Would you have gone to Palestine with them? Your brothers are only—how old now? Twelve and fourteen? I can see why she might be hesitant.”
“She didn’t want our family to be separated any more than we already are. She wouldn’t have been allowed to go with them, and she would be left here all alone if I went with them.” The creases in Sam’s forehead told me how frustrated and worried he was. He spent much of his time while I was in school trying to take care of his family and looking for a way to help us all escape from Belgium. As grim as his father’s news from Cuba was, I suspected there was something more that he was hesitant to tell me.
“What else is going on, Sam? What aren’t you telling me?”
He gave a crooked smile that didn’t reach his gray-green eyes. “You know me too well,” he said. “We just learned the Nazis rounded up a group of Jews here in Antwerp and shipped them out by train to forced-labor camps.”
