“But they did, somehow, right?” I said. “Because therewassome sort of American Kindertransport?”
“Right. Individuals pooled their resources. The German Jewish Children’s Aid association brought over two hundred and fifty young German Jews in 1934. Then they brought over children fleeing the Blitz, a wave of kids from Central Europe helped by the FrenchOeuvre de Secours aux Enfants, and kids from Spain and Portugal.”
“And they were all placed with families?”Like O’ma.
“Pretty much. Though American law, unlike European, stated foster kids had to be placed with families of their own religion. At first, there weren’t really enough Jewish families to go around, and people were nervous to advertise publicly because of anti-Semitism. Orthodox families did try to volunteer, but the Children’s Bureau often wouldn’t qualify them because their homes were too crowded.”
“I’d think it would be better to live in a crowded house than no house,” I said.
“Bureaucracy is filled with red tape. Luckily, families heard about the program through word of mouth and opened up their homes.” She nodded at Noah. “And look at what a difference what a single person, what a single family can make. His grandfather’s family took in your grandmother, right? And here you are.”
Here I was.
Harvard’s Widener Library presided over part of Harvard Yard. Dozens of steps led up to the Corinthian columns fronting the red brick structure. Dr. Weisz walked us inside. “There’s over three and a half million books here,” she said. “And five miles of aisles.”
Clearly I wasn’t the only one with a library/book obsession.
She got us set up at the listening stations, and helped us find the two recordings by the people who’d been on the same ship as my grandmother. “Let me know if you find anything out,” she said. “I hope you do.”
After she left, Noah and I plugged in our headphones and looked at each other. Noah nodded. “Let’s do this.”
We pressed play.
At some point during the recordings, Noah took my hand. Iglanced at him, and found him staring at the ceiling, while he idly ran his thumb across my palm.
I supposed that was the thing about Noah. I didn’t have to explain anything to him. I didn’t have to tell him I would like a hand to hold right now. I didn’t have to explain how I was feeling, because he had the same emotions tied up inside of him, too.
Two hours into Michael Saltzman’s recitation of his life, he described the ship from Paris to New York. I perked up, but the description was over in a moment, and he didn’t mention anything about my grandmother. Instead, I listened to him talk about being separated from his older brother and sent off to distant relatives in California, none of whom spoke German, while he didn’t speak English. He liked the palm trees, though.
Twenty minutes later, Noah’s head jerked up. “I think I have something.”
“Really?” I paused Michael’s recording. “What?”
“Here.” He set the recording back a minute and we both put an earbud in. “Ready?”
I nodded, and a warm, scratchy voice filled my ear, coated in a thick German accent.“—a girl named Ruth attached to me early on at the église in Paris. She was four years old and from a town close to mine. She was a quiet thing, and used to watch me closely. I think she missed her parents very much, and half expected everyone else to leave her, too. That was the first time I realized I had to be strong for other people. I had to take care of this little girl because no one else would, and I was older than her and a stand in for an adult. We were together on theSS Babette, which took us from Paris to New York in one week. Some of the actual adults were terribly seasick, but we never were. It was wonderful. I’d never been on a boat before. It felt like a vacation.
“The German Jewish Children’s Aid society placedRuth and me anda few of the other kids in the Holtzman House in New York until families could be found to take us. We were there together for a few weeks, but I don’t remember what happened to her. I suppose a family took her in, but I just remember her following me around, ghostlike, and then her being gone. I remember thinking—you don’t learn how much you’ll miss people until it’s too late.
“Anyway, the Holtzman House wasn’t a bad place to be, even if it was packed. I was fifteen, not so appealing to families, and I wanted to get a job and live my own life...”
We listened for a few more minutes, but she didn’t mention O’ma again. I paused the recording and looked at Noah. I could feel how wide my eyes were, feel the adrenaline coursing through my body. “I didn’t really think we’d find anything.”
“But it’s her. It has to be, right?”
“It has to be. Ruth. TheSS Babette. Four years old.” I shook my head. “I can’t imagine having to take care ofmyself, not to mention a little kid. And thinking it was like a vacation.”
“Kids are resilient. And it probably was, compared to what they’d been through already.”
“True.” I blew out a breath. “Okay. So. What do we think ‘a town close to mine’ means?”
“She said where she was from in the beginning—let’s find it.”
The woman, Else Friedhoff, came from Hamburg. We looked it up and studied the map on my phone. Hamburg lay northwest of Berlin, not far from Denmark, a port city on the confluence of three rivers. Dozens of names of smaller towns doted the map around it, many of them coastal: Bremen, Lüneburg, Schwerin, Lübeck, Cuxhaven. “So she’s from northern Germany.”
“It’s a start.”
“Definitely a start.”
