Long Way Home(28)

Someone in the hall began to chant, “We must not sail. We must not die,” and hundreds of us quickly joined him. “We must not sail. We must not die.” The chant was still ringing out as Mr. Goldsmith left. The Cuban policemen who’d been stationed on board all left, as well. The rumble of the engines increased as the ship finally began to steam toward the open sea. Passengers lined the rails, some weeping, some standing in stunned silence as Havana’s skyline faded in the distance.

“We have no place to go,” I said to Sam. It was a devastatingly hopeless feeling.

We sailed all night and all day Saturday, heading slowly north toward Miami. Sam and I could only steal short snatches of time together, as his mother and both of my parents grew increasingly depressed. “My mother keeps asking, ‘What are we going to do? Where are we going to go?’” Sam told me. “I don’t know what to tell her. It’s up to me to take care of everyone, and . . . and I don’t know what to do.” Holding each other for a few minutes each day gave both of us comfort.

When we awoke on Sunday morning, I looked out the porthole and was relieved to see that we were still off the coast of Florida. We were so near and yet so far. Not long after breakfast, a US Coast Guard cutter approached. “Maybe this is good news,” Sam said as we watched the cutter circle our ship. Everyone waved to the Americans, and for a few minutes, I dared to hope for a rescue. But then the Coast Guard captain called out to us through a loudspeaker, and I understood enough English to know that the Americans weren’t going to come to our rescue or offer us refuge.

“Do not approach any closer. You will not be allowed to land,” the loudspeaker blared. The cutter was circling us to prevent people from jumping overboard and trying to swim to shore.

“I don’t understand why the Americans won’t help us,” Sam said. “Isn’t it called the land of freedom?” None of us understood it.

That evening, the St. Louis turned south again, back toward Cuba. The passenger committee announced that we would be allowed to disembark on the Isle of Pines, off the Cuban coast. The news was met with applause and relief. Once again, we brought our suitcases up on deck in anticipation. Late that night, we were told to go to bed. We wouldn’t arrive until tomorrow morning.

Morning came and went. We spent all day Tuesday in limbo as negotiations to land on the Isle of Pines or possibly the Dominican Republic continued. In the end, all of those negotiations fell through. On Tuesday night, we sensed the ship changing course, heading north once again. Vati was convinced that the Nazis were deliberately playing with our emotions, offering hope, then snatching it away, simply to torture us. If that was their plan, it was succeeding. We were Jews. We were hated and rejected by the entire world. Nobody wanted us. Our only certain welcome was in a Nazi concentration camp.

We sailed all day Wednesday with no idea where we were headed. On Thursday, the loudspeakers summoned everyone to the social hall. Herr Joseph from the passenger committee made the announcement we’d all been dreading to hear: “The captain has been ordered to return the ship to Europe.” A gasp swept the room. Vati looked as though he might faint. I began to shiver from head to toe, remembering the beatings and killings in the streets, the fires, the relentless fear that awaited us.

“Are we going back to Germany?” someone called out.

“Not necessarily. Please, remain calm. We have a long voyage ahead of us, recrossing the Atlantic. In the meantime, the Joint Committee and many other friends are working on our behalf to find sanctuary. The world is watching.”

“Does the world know that the Gestapo is waiting to arrest us? Do they know about the camps?” someone shouted. There was no reply.

Once again, everyone began to chant: “We will not return. We must not die. We will not return. We must not die.” I couldn’t draw a breath deep enough to join in. We were sailing back to Europe.





7


Peggy





JUNE 1946

“Hey, what are we going to do about Jim?” Joe Fiore asked me. “We gotta spring him out of that place.”

“I know. If it was up to me, I would, believe me.” I didn’t want to return to Pop’s apartment after visiting the VA hospital with Joe and Buster, so I drove up the hairpin turn to the lookout point and got out of the car. Whenever I was upset, it always helped me regain my perspective to gaze down at the broad valley and see villages and green fields below and rows of purple hills in the distance. It was a God’s-eye view of this beautiful valley that was my home. Too late, I remembered that it might not be my home much longer, and a dark emptiness filled me.

Joe barely looked at the view. He was agitated, pacing back and forth in the parking lot, running his hand through his curly black hair, kicking gravel against the guardrail. “Jim hardly looked like himself, you know?”

“I do. Listen, I didn’t have a chance to tell you before, but the doctors plan to try electrical shocks next.”

“Don’t let them do it! The guys I knew who went through those shock treatments barely knew who they were afterwards! There was this one guy—he and I had been playing gin rummy all week. He’d been beating the pants off me. After they shocked him, I sat down with him at our usual table and started shuffling the cards. He said, ‘I don’t know how to play that game.’ Can you believe it? I had to teach him how to play all over again. Another guy broke down in tears because he couldn’t remember if he was married or not, and he was afraid he wouldn’t recognize his wife when she visited. Now, you tell me what good something like that does?”