Long Way Home(19)

We remained in the shadows, holding each other closely and kissing until the distant commotion we heard on a deck below ours grew quiet. We heard three short blasts of the ship’s horn and felt the ship begin to move forward once again. We learned the following morning that a despondent crew member had jumped overboard to commit suicide after Professor Weiler’s funeral. The St. Louis had halted and a rescue boat had been launched, but the search for the missing crewman had ended unsuccessfully. I recalled the conversation I’d overheard before the ship set sail—how departing on the Sabbath and on the thirteenth day were bad omens—and I shivered to shake away the thought.

On Wednesday, the Jewish Feast of Shavuot began. The crew transformed the social hall for the celebration, with flowers and bowls of fruit and two palm trees that were borrowed from the dance hall. The traditional shipboard party to celebrate the end of the voyage would fall on the second day of Shavuot, Thursday evening. It was to be a fancy costume ball. Some passengers wore elegant evening attire. Others fashioned costumes from bedsheets and miscellaneous articles of clothing. Sam and I didn’t dress up, but after the elegant meal ended and the tables were pushed aside to create a dance floor, we danced until our feet ached—and then we danced some more. I would never grow tired of being held in Sam’s arms and resting my cheek against his chest to hear his heartbeat. We stayed up until the last song ended at 3 a.m. Then one of the stewards announced that the beam from the Bahamas’ lighthouse was visible in the distance. Before saying good night, we went out on the deck to see it.

“That’s a symbol of our future together, Gisela. It’s shining off in the distance for now, but it will grow brighter and brighter in the days to come. We will get there one day. We’ll be together forever, I promise you.”

“I love you, Sam.”

“And I love you. We’ll be together no matter what. We’re part of each other’s lives, now and forever.”

“Some people might try to tell us this is just a shipboard romance.”

“No, this is real, Gisela. Can’t you feel it?”

“I can.”

Sam had brought his family’s prayer book with him, and we placed our joined hands on top of it as we pledged our love to each other, sealing it with a kiss.

We were thousands of miles from the Nazis’ reign of terror. We were free. And Samuel Shapiro and I were helplessly in love.





5


Peggy





JUNE 1946

The next two weeks dragged by as we waited for Jimmy’s insulin treatments to end so we could visit him again. Every morning, Mrs. Barnett and I prayed that the treatments would help him. Work in the veterinary clinic slowed, with TB testing all finished and another spring birthing season over. June hadn’t ended yet, but summery weather arrived early, bringing long, sweltering days. I sat in Jimmy’s hot upstairs bedroom for a few minutes every afternoon, looking around at the mementos of his boyhood and slowly rereading all of his letters. When I compared his early letters, written when he was still in basic training, to the letters he wrote from the battlefield in Europe, I thought I detected a change. In the beginning, he talked about the friends he’d made and how the Army was forging them into a team. By the time their training ended, Jimmy and his fellow recruits had formed a brotherhood, able to work together for the common goal of defeating the enemy.

I fanned myself with my notebook in the stifling bedroom as Jimmy came alive again through the words of his letters. I felt like I was with him as he described life aboard a troop ship on the way to Great Britain. It was overcrowded, and they’d slept in bunks a foot apart from each other, wondering how many Nazi U-boats were shadowing them. He frequently mentioned two friends in particular, Mitch O’Hara and Frank Cishek. Mitch had been Jimmy’s college roommate, and Frank Cishek was also a medic.

His letters grew shorter and more somber as time went on and his company became engaged in the thick of battle. I had learned more about the D-Day invasion from reading the newspapers than from Jimmy’s letters. It was only when reinforcements relieved him and his men for a short R and R that he’d had time to write. Just to let you know I’m okay . . . Sorry I’ve been too busy to write . . . Thanks for your letters. Please keep them coming . . . I thought I’d found the letter he’d written after Joe Fiore and dozens of others from their company had been wounded in battle. Jimmy had stayed behind at the field hospital where the soldiers from his company had been taken, making sure their conditions had stabilized and arrangements had been made to ship them to a military hospital in England. But the war wasn’t over for him yet. I checked the date of his letter and knew that nearly a year of hard fighting remained before victory in Europe was declared.

That sense of belonging and camaraderie that Jimmy described was something I had never really experienced for myself until I’d worked in the IBM plant during the war. The factory job offered me a brand-new beginning in life. Nobody knew my past or that I was the “dog girl” with “cooties” who lived above her father’s garage. I had graduated from high school near the top of my class, and my school counselor had encouraged me to apply for a nursing scholarship. The demand for nurses was great during the war and he thought I would easily qualify. Mr. Barnett offered to write a letter of recommendation for me, but Pop was firmly against the idea because it would mean leaving home and living in the nurses’ dormitory in New York City during my training.