Long Way Home(58)
And soon we were home. It was wonderful to see my family again, but the changes that had occurred since I’d seen them six months ago shocked me. Everyone was noticeably thinner, their clothes hanging on them like they belonged to someone else. Vati was as pale as death and coughing more than ever. Mutti and Ruthie resembled frail, worried sparrows who startled at every sound in the streets outside as if expecting another pogrom. But the biggest change was that Sam’s family had given up their apartment and moved in with my family to save money on expenses. Mrs. Shapiro now shared the bedroom with Ruthie, and Sam slept on a mattress in the living room with his brothers when he was home. Both of our families had been comfortably well-to-do back home in Germany, and to see them reduced to near squalor enraged me. I longed for God’s vengeance on the Nazis for what they had done to us. But I swallowed my outrage and sat down with these loved ones to celebrate Shabbat and my return home.
“We’re so proud of you, Gisela,” Vati said when I told him about graduating at the top of my class. Then I told them about Sister Veronica’s offer to study for an advanced degree, and his happiness seemed to overflow. “I would dance for joy at this news if I was strong enough,” he said. “You have to accept her offer, Gisela.”
“But it’s going to mean living away from everyone for even longer, and I’m so lonely there. I miss all of you.”
“And we miss you, darling girl,” Vati said. “But it gives me great pleasure to hear of your success in spite of Herr Hitler’s efforts to degrade and diminish us. You would be doing this for all of us.”
After dinner, Sam and I offered to clear the table and wash the dishes, giving us a chance to talk alone in the kitchen. “I’ll be starting work in the hospital when I return,” I told him, “and earning a small salary, minus what I owe for my room and board. I want to send you as much as I can to help pay for food and expenses. But how should I send it? By mail?”
“No, don’t trust the mail. Let me give it some thought.”
“I feel like a traitor, living in relative ease with food and freedom while everyone is crammed into one tiny apartment.”
“Gisela, I know you remember the story of Queen Esther. There’s a reason why God has placed you where you are.” I hoped he was right.
I stayed home and nursed Vati for a week and tried to cheer Mutti and Ruthie and give them hope. When my week was over, Sam took me back on his bicycle. We stood in the alley by the rear door of the nurses’ residence to say goodbye. I would remove my sweater with the telltale yellow star before going inside.
“Now that I’ll be living in the nurses’ residence, you can visit with me in the lobby anytime you want,” I told Sam. “Maybe I can even go home with you now and then. And I can give you all the money I’ve saved up.”
He looked into my eyes and traced his fingers down my jaw. “I love you, Gisela.” He sighed and held me close, and I sensed he was about to say things I didn’t want to hear. Now would be the time for him to say, “We’re another day closer . . .” but he didn’t. “Tomorrow comes with no guarantees,” he said instead. “For now, we need to hold any plans we make very lightly.”
“But we’ll see each other again, won’t we?”
He kissed me and said, “God willing.”
I spent the rest of June and July working in the hospital, doing what I had trained for two years to do, while waiting for my advanced nursing classes to begin in the fall. I loved my job, even the dull, messy parts of it, because it kept my mind occupied from thoughts of Sam and home. He showed up on his bicycle on a broiling day in late July to take me home for a brief visit, and I could tell that something had upset him. “We’ll talk about it when we’re all together,” he said as we sped through the streets. Every store we passed had long lines of people waiting out front. I noticed that Sam took a winding route home to avoid the area around the train station.
Sam hadn’t told my family I was coming and they were surprised and overjoyed to see me. “I would have cooked something special for you, if I had known,” Mutti fretted, but I assured her that I wasn’t hungry. Vati was sitting at a table in the living room when I arrived, teaching a mathematics lesson to Ruthie and Sam’s brothers. It was summer, and it seemed absurd for them to be doing schoolwork when we faced such an uncertain future. But what else could they do to provide a distraction?
After all of our greetings, Sam quickly grew serious. “We’ve all heard about the arrests and deportations of Jews in other Nazi-occupied countries, but now they’re starting to do the same thing here in Antwerp. The security police arrested a few hundred Jews at the Central Station as they arrived from Brussels. There was no reason and no recourse. There were more sudden arrests on nearby Pelikaanstraat.”
“Where are they taking all these people?” Vati asked.
“To a temporary transit camp, for now, in a former Army barracks in the town of Mechelin. The camp is near a rail hub, and according to my sources, the plan is to deport every Jew in Belgium to camps in Germany and the east, maybe as far as Poland.”
I saw my father shudder. “What should we do?” he asked.
“Everyone needs to go into hiding. We can’t wait for them to come for us. The people I know in the Resistance are going to help. They can supply fake ID cards that aren’t stamped ‘Jew.’ Gisela, I brought you home so we could all say our goodbyes—”