“Oh! It is . . . wonderful!” She inhaled its fragrance. It seemed so long since she had smelled anything so wonderful. “I will take it with me and . . . find a bathtub!”
Jacob cleared his throat again. “Well I . . . that is . . . we thought maybe since it is our last night . . . maybe you might want a real bath now.”
She laughed. A bath! After six weeks? Could there be a better gift? “But where?”
“We filled the baptistery for you,” Mark said enthusiastically.
“It has been heating all day long,” Jacob added in a matter-of-fact tone. “We will stand guard out here. The curtain is closed, so . . . ”
The baptistery. It almost seemed a sacrilege. Lori hesitated as she wondered what Papa would say.
“But in church—”
“We got the idea from Grandfather Kalner,” Mark explained helpfully. “In a Jewish church, you see, that is where everyone used to take a bath. I can’t remember the name, but Grandfather swore it was true.”
“Well then—” Holding the sweet-smelling bar up to her nose, Lori hurried past the altar and through the door that led to the baptistery. She climbed the steps, not minding the profoundness of the dark.
The air was warm and steamy from the water the boys had prepared. This tank was something Papa had made as a special project for the church. Heated water. It was a wonder and a marvel—and a necessity, since old Herr Gruber had gotten baptized one Sunday and died of pneumonia the next from the shock of the cold water. Papa had not wanted to send his flock to heaven quite as soon as that.
Lori laid her clothes aside and brushed her toe across the warm, soft liquid. She heard herself sigh with pleasure as she stepped down into the tank and let six weeks of bone-cold discomfort melt away. Beyond the curtain where the boys waited for her, she heard them laugh with delight at her pleasure.
She untied her thick braid and let her hair float on the water. Clutching the soap like a treasure, she lathered herself from head to foot. She held her breath and slipped her head under the water, surfacing only when her lungs began to sting.
“Why didn’t we think of this sooner?” she called.
Did they hear her? It did not matter. This was nearly heaven, one memory she would have with her from New Church every time she took a hot bath!
And then, through the curtain, she heard them singing. They were caroling softly to her, apologizing in their own shy way for six weeks of harassment.
It was hard to remain unforgiving while floating in the scented luxury of a warm, soapy baptistery.
“Thank you,” Lori muttered into the water. “I love you all.”
32
Flight
The drive north through Palestine toward Hanita was long and dangerous. Sandwiched between armored transports, Captain Samuel Orde was grateful for the protection of the convoy. His vehicle was not government issue; Orde’s enemies within the politics of the British military had seen to that. He was using transportation provided by the scrounging efforts of Larry Havas and maintained in what was wryly referred to as “operational order” by Zach Zabinski.
The car, of uncertain parentage, may not have had one original part left on it, but as Zabinski said, “It runs more than it doesn’t.” Orde was returning from an unsuccessful attempt to get his Special Night Squad supplied with more modern weapons, including explosives.
“Can’t be done,” he was told. “Out of the question.” The belligerent Jews must not be given the means to take action against the Arabs except in strictest self-defense.
It did not matter that the Jihad Moquades, the Holy Strugglers, were provided with German-made weapons, or that they recruited mercenaries from nearly every Islamic nation in the Middle East. It did not matter that they were promised ten pounds a month if they lived, and instant admittance to Paradise if they died battling the hated Jews and the infidel Christian Britishers. What mattered was that British policy required nothing to be done to antagonize the Arabs any further. Offensive weapons for Jews? Unthinkable!
Orde was disappointed, but not surprised. His continued appeals for more equipment and official British sanction for his squads was partly a ploy. Orde reasoned that if he stopped asking, the political wizards would begin to question why. He did not want them to examine the stores of captured weapons with which the Jewish troops trained and fought. The convoy sped up slightly, taking advantage of a slight downgrade.
Captain Orde tried at all times to understand the minds of his Arab terrorist opponents. True, they fired their weapons wildly at times, expending more cartridges in an aimless show of emotion than Orde’s troops would go through in a month of training and combat combined. But the sermons of their leaders acted upon them like a drug, driving out fear of death and making them a formidable foe.
Driving northward, Orde’s little car eventually parted company with the convoy as he turned off toward Hanita. He mulled over the other reason for this trip, hoping that it might prove more successful than the appeal for arms.
In a recent action against Arab infiltrators, one Holy Struggler, an Iraqi, had been wounded and left behind. Through gritted teeth he explained to an interrogator that he hated all the British and all the Jews. He was angry that he had only been wounded, because he had lost both his ten pounds a month and his place beside the prophet Mohammed.
The Iraqi prisoner had warned darkly that the battle was only beginning. New men were coming from the north, he promised, more every day. Soon the stinking British would all be rotting in hell beside the cursed Jews. Haj Amin Husseini and the great German leader Hitler had both promised that it would be so!
Orde had transported the talkative captive to the British Mandate’s government offices in Jerusalem. Hopefully, he reasoned, somebody in charge would figure out that there was more than just Arab unrest at stake here, that the only possibility of retaining a democratic toehold in the Middle East was the establishment of a Jewish homeland.
Orde downshifted as he rounded a corner and rolled into an Arab village that sprawled across the abruptly narrowed road. Maybe, just maybe, after the information was reviewed, the British government would realize that it was already at war with Germany. Just as in Spain, Nazi Germany was flexing its muscles, challenging a ruling government while pulling the strings of manipulation from just barely behind the scenes.
Captain Orde downshifted again, then braked as an Arab boy leading a donkey loaded with a bundle of sticks walked directly into his path. Orde instinctively thumped the steering wheel as if to honk the car’s horn, but the horn was one piece of equipment that had never worked.
Having made his sudden entrance onto the road, the donkey apparently decided that it did not wish to make as quick an exit. It stood with its ears laid back in an elaborate show of sulky displeasure. The Arab boy first tried to pull the donkey into motion; when this failed, he went behind the animal and gave it a shove. It merely shifted its weight from one to the other, but continued standing in the middle of the narrow lane.
Orde scanned the road to see if it was possible to go around the balky creature, but one side was bordered with a low stone wall and the other blocked by a roadside produce stand. Orde hoped that the proprietor of the stand would assist the boy in moving the donkey, but the owner was nowhere in sight. No one else seemed to be around, either.
Orde did not want to get out alone in the middle of an Arab village, but he had nearly decided that he was going to have to help when the beast at last moved. The boy took a stick from the bundle on the donkey’s back and tapped it lightly on a hind leg. Both boy and pack animal moved rapidly out of the street. As he slowly accelerated, Orde watched the pair disappear from sight; from behind the houses, the boy stared back at him. He had not given Orde a single glance during the struggle in the road.
Why is he watching me? Orde wondered. And why did the boy suddenly remember the secret to making this particular donkey move after several minutes of struggle? It is almost as if he received a signal that it was time to mo
ve on.
A tiny pebble of suspicion dropped into the pool of Orde’s mind, and its ripples spread out through his every fiber. Orde’s nerves and the hair on the back of his neck stood on end—a thin wisp of white smoke was coming from the back of his car!
At that moment Orde ceased to think, and his reflexes took over. He braked the little car hard and turned its wheels into the low stone wall for good measure. The immediate stop almost threw Orde into the windshield, but he turned the motion to the side and lunged out the car door. He rolled over the stone wall, smashing his shoulder heavily as he fell.
The bomb planted in the rear of the car went off with a deafening roar. A great ball of flame rolled up as the gas tank exploded. His head covered by his hands and his face pressed into the dirt of Palestine, Samuel Orde could feel the concussion of the blast and the intense heat that burned his hands and the back of his neck.
Pieces of the auto began to rain down like shrapnel, but Orde was already up and moving. He ran in a low crouch along the stone wall, and, miraculously, none of the spinning pieces of jagged metal touched him. He ran desperately, expecting any minute to be pursued.
By the time the frightened villagers came out to view the smoking remains of the assassination attempt, Orde was already more than a mile away, heading for Hanita. As he covered the ground in a rapid hike, he alternated between thanking God for sparing his life and apologizing for having been so stupid that he needed divine intervention.
Orde would never have forgiven such inattention on the part of one of his troopers, and he resolved to never again be guilty of it himself. Especially not now, he thought. There are miles and many Arabs between here and Hanita.
***
Not even a strong cup of coffee could remove the chill from Karin Wallich.
Peter stood by helplessly as his mother trembled uncontrollably beneath Frau Singer’s thick Eider quilts. Every moment of fear she had felt over the last weeks suddenly broke loose. She did not cry. Peter would have liked it better if there had been tears in Karin’s eyes, but there were none. She simply lay there, staring at the ceiling and shivering as though she lay in a pool of icy water.
“There now, Karin my dear. My dear . . . ” Frau Singer stroked Karin’s forehead. “You are safe now. No harm will come to you here.”
Peter knew that Frau Singer’s words of reassurance were only a whisper of hope. Harm could, indeed, come to them here. Nowhere in Vienna was any Jew safe.
Marlene huddled in the corner of the bedroom beside a large dark chest of drawers, her brown eyes wide with fright. Finally she realized the seriousness of the situation.
At last, Peter thought as he stalked past her, Marlene figured it out!
Mercifully, Baby Willie had fallen asleep in a bed made up in the bottom drawer of the chest. Peter stooped over his baby brother and found some comfort in the fact that he could sleep so peacefully. He wanted to reach out and brush back the curl on his smooth forehead, but instead he contented himself with simply gazing at the child. Peter did not look at Marlene. He knew that if he looked at her, all comfort would vanish. He blamed her somehow for what had happened. He could not explain his anger, not even to himself, but he knew for certain that Marlene’s actions had led to their discovery and the note and this.
He looked at his mother again. He wished she would cry. “We are finally at Frau Singer’s after all, Mama,” he whispered, hoping to remind her that they had wanted to be here all along. She did not acknowledge his words or even look at him.
Once more Peter gazed mournfully at her, then walked heavily out of the room. He picked his way around the bolts of material that littered Frau Singer’s once-spotless front room. The light was out. A soft glow emanated from the gas heater. Peter went to the window and leaned against the frame. He pulled back the shade a fraction until he could see the street and the entrance to Otto’s apartment building. Soon they would come. They would come in search for a mother and three children.
He did not have long to wait until the first act of the drama took place. They came on foot, the tall SS Major Wolfgang von Fritschauer and three other men. The couple who had come to bring their champagne and Christmas greetings!
The sight of the major made Peter want to shout at Marlene to come and see what she had done! He wanted to shove her fat, simpering face through the glass of the window and scream at her. But he simply watched in silence. Was there any hope of warning Otto what he was coming home to?
At the thought, Peter’s heart beat faster. Perhaps he could run down the stairs and wait across the street to call a warning when Otto came home.
The instant the thought came to him, he spotted two more men in the shadows flanking the doorway. No doubt others would be at the back door and still more watching from either end of the street. The awareness of how near they had come to their own arrest made Peter sweat as a wave of fear and nausea washed over him. The trap had been set only minutes after they had found safety. Now Otto Wattenbarger would pay the penalty for all of them.
Peter waited, hearing the kind murmuring of Frau Singer in the bedroom. He could not understand what she said. His attention fixed on the solitary figure of Otto Wattenbarger as he rounded the far corner. He passed beneath the ring of a streetlamp, his step cheerful, unsuspecting. He carried a shopping bag in one hand and a very small Christmas tree in the other.
So he decided we must have a tree after all .. . . .
“Turn around,” Peter whispered, desperately willing Otto to hear the danger. “Go back. They will not know it is you if you go back now.”
The words made a round circle of steam against the windowpane. “Go back . . . .”
Otto walked on, unheeding the warning of Peter’s heart. And then, for just a second, he paused and glanced up at the window of his flat. It was dark behind the shade. Mozart the cat sat like a black shadow on the sill. “Yes, it is dark!” Peter urged. “We are not there! Something has happened! Go back! Do not go home, Herr Otto!”
Another few seconds passed; then Otto started forward again. The spring returned to his step. Whatever whisper of dread he had heard was gone now. He did not notice the men in the shadow. He did not see the man walking half a block behind him. Propping the little Christmas tree against the door of the building, he shifted his shopping bag and stepped into the trap.
Peter groaned audibly and hung his head as the glass door swung back, reflecting the men who waited in the street. A minute passed until the light behind the shade came on. Mozart jumped from his perch, and Peter knew that it was finished.
He shook his head slowly as he imagined the startled look on Otto’s face; the accusation; the denial; the arrest.
Peter slammed his fist against the wall and leaned his head against the window frame.
A moment later he heard a sniffle. Marlene! She stood at his elbow, staring at his face when he turned to scowl down at her.
“It’s all my fault,” she said. “It’s my fault, isn’t it, Peter?”
For an instant he was filled with such hatred for her that he wanted to answer her with a smack across the mouth. He thought better of it. No need for that. He simply answered honestly. “Yes. Yes, Marlene, it is all your fault. Except for you we would have been on our way across the border tomorrow. Now we are trapped here.” His rage almost choked him. “And now, because of you, they have arrested Herr Otto. Because of you, they will throw him into prison and torture him!”
Marlene gave a strangled sob and covered her face with her hands. She did not argue. She did not beat her fists against Peter in resentment. It was true. All her fault. Marlene sank to the floor with a groan and sat there very quietly in her pretty Christmas dress while Peter stepped over her.
***
Standing in the long queue of last-minute shoppers waiting for the streetcar transfer, Lucy at last considered the implications of her impulsiveness. The thought of warning anyone to run from Wolf filled her with a mix of giddy excitement and fear. She also felt strangely pleased
at what she had done; it seemed like a Christmas present to the Jewish family. She hoped beyond reason that young Peter and his family had escaped and that the traitorous Otto, who had helped them, was also on his way to safety somewhere.
Perhaps curiosity made her board the streetcar back to Frau Singer’s, or perhaps the warmth she felt when she considered her good deed. She did not consider the possibility that a raging fire of danger behind that good deed threatened her as well.
Lucy smiled as she stepped off the car in front of the boarded-up shop. She had already thought of a good excuse for her return: she would simply claim to have dropped her lipstick and then come back to look for it. Maybe she could look out the window of the old woman’s apartment and watch Wolf enter in search of people who were long gone.
She did not need the basket maker to show her the way this time. Lights blazed pleasantly from the old woman’s upstairs window. Most likely she was already working on Lucy’s corset.
Glancing back toward the street, Lucy pulled the braided bell cord and waited. The old woman did not call down to her. Lucy rang again, a little longer this time.
***
At the first ring of the doorbell, a chill coursed through Peter’s body. Cold perspiration beaded from every pore. It made no sense that such a simple sound in this safe place would blast away his composure like a cold wind. He had remained calm through everything until now. He told himself that they were safe and that he was glad to be away from the tyranny of Otto’s lessons and warnings. He had said it did not matter that Otto was arrested as long as the rest were safe. These were, at best, fragile self-delusions that enabled him to accept what had happened. But the second ring of the doorbell shattered his hopes and plunged him into an abyss of fear for the first time in weeks. The sound of the ringing, urgent, insistent, demanded that the door be opened.
“It’s the Gestapo,” Peter said to Frau Singer as she rushed past him to peek out the window.