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“Nowhere. I was a patient in the American hospital in Buchenwald at first; then they let me work there until I was strong enough to come and search for you. If you come back with me, we’ll probably need to live in a displaced persons camp until I hear from Sam or Uncle Aaron. It won’t be much of a life, and we’ll be starting all over again, but at least we’ll be together.”
Ruthie hesitated as if she was trying to imagine herself there. “Would it be all right—I mean, may I stay here until you find Sam?” she asked. “I know Mrs. Peeters will let me stay and work for her.” It had been five years since I’d left home to board at the nursing school, five years since Ruthie and I had lived together as sisters. We were almost strangers after so much time and separation. She had a home here and a life of her own. I had nothing.
“Yes, of course you may stay. I’m glad you’re safe and that you’re happy here.”
“And if you decide to go to Cuba? Would I have to go, too?”
My heart squeezed. “No,” I replied. “You’re my sister and I love you, but you’re old enough to make your own decisions. You’re a young woman now, Ruthie. And you’re so pretty. I was your age when I met Sam, remember? I’ll bet the young men are already flocking around you, am I right?”
She looked down at her hands and blushed a little. “There is someone I like at church. He isn’t my boyfriend or anything, but we talk sometimes.”
Her words struck me hard. She was talking about a Christian boy at a church, not a Jewish boy from the synagogue. “Are you still going to church and pretending to be Catholic?”
Ruthie shrugged. “I don’t have to now that the war is over. But I still go with the family.”
I told myself it didn’t matter. Aside from my silent prayer in Sister Mary Margaret’s office earlier today, I hadn’t called on the God of my childhood in a very long time. I wasn’t even sure I still believed in Him. “I think you should stay here until I find Sam; then we can all figure out what to do next.”
We finished our tea and said goodbye. It was what I’d been doing for as long as I could remember—saying goodbye.
Jim was waiting for me outside. I saw him studying me as if to see if I was all right, so I managed a quick smile. “Ruthie is fine. She’s happy here. We decided that she should stay here until... well, until we have someplace to go.”
“Give it more time, Gisela. Everything is still in chaos after the war. The way forward will be clearer once things settle down.”
“Yes, and once I find Sam.”
“Shall we go back to Antwerp?” Jim asked. “I can see you’re getting tired.”
“Not yet. I would like to go to the rooming house where I lived before I was arrested. I didn’t have very many belongings, but maybe some of them are still there.”
The rooming house also seemed unchanged, and for a horrible moment, I relived the panic I’d felt on the morning that I’d seen two SS officers waiting out front for me. But the owner remembered me and was very kind. “One of the other nurses saw you being taken away and... well, when you didn’t come back, we guessed what might have happened. I packed up all of your belongings, hoping you would return for them. They’re up in the attic.”
Jim climbed the ladder to the attic and retrieved the box, then sat beside me in the lounge while I sifted through it. My clothes were too large for me, but they might fit once I gained back the weight I’d lost. I would no longer need the prayer book and rosary beads Sister Mary Margaret had given me. Jim spotted the photograph my roommate’s father had taken of me on graduation day and pulled it from the box. I was glad he could see that I hadn’t always looked this way.
“I was going to give that picture to Sam but I never got a chance—” Suddenly the grief that had been slowly filling my heart all day caught up with me. Grief for Sister Veronica. For Sam. For the village of Mortsel. For my sister, Ruthie. And for all of my lost years. I covered my face with my hands and wept. Jim wrapped his arms around me and let me cry.
“Sam would have come looking for me if he could,” I sobbed. “We promised each other!”
“We won’t give up until we find him.”
“And Ruthie... she’s all the family I have left, but I feel like she was lost to me a long time ago. Nothing will ever be the same as it was before Kristallnacht... before Hitler and the Nazis... when we lived in Berlin with our aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents...”
“You’re right, Gisela,” Jim murmured after a moment. “I’m afraid it can never be the same. But I’ll help you any way I can.”
Jim made me eat something before we took the train back to the hostel in Antwerp. “We’ve done enough for today,” he said. “Try to get some rest.”
I did manage to sleep, but I awoke before dawn, thinking about Sam. I remembered what he’d told me about his plans to hide his mother and brothers. “We have to go to the Hotel Centraal,” I told Jim when he came for me after breakfast. “The owner was in the Resistance. He helped Sam find hiding places for his mother and brothers.”
We found the modest hotel easily enough, but it seemed to take forever for my request to speak with the owner to make its way from the front desk to his office. When it finally did, Lukas Wouters welcomed Jim and me warmly. He was a tall, stately gentleman in his seventies with white hair and old-fashioned side-whiskers—not at all how I had pictured a Resistance fighter. The fact that someone his age would risk his life and his livelihood to fight the Nazis gave me a deep respect for him. But I was desperate to find Sam, so I blurted out my question before we’d barely been seated. “I’m looking for Sam Shapiro, my fiancé. Do you know what happened to him or his family?”
He nodded, but it seemed ominous that his smile had vanished. “Sam’s mother, Mrs. Shapiro, hid in my family’s home under a false name, posing as our maid. She remained safe with us for the duration of the war. We found hiding places for her two sons on two different farms in the countryside. Their fair coloring helped keep them safe, and the three of them were reunited after Belgium was liberated.”
“What about her oldest son, Sam?”
“Yes, Sam.”
My heart pounded wildly as Mr. Wouters paused.
“Sam was very active with the underground, which is how we met. He arranged for his family and for countless other Jews to go into hiding, providing false IDs and so forth. He and the others also rescued downed Allied airmen and helped them escape back to England, mostly through Spain. In the winter of 1943, Sam came to me and said that he’d decided to go to England with one of the rescued RAF crews and join the British Army. I thought it was much too dangerous. I told him the Resistance needed him here, but he was determined to fight.”
