Hannah
Hannah peered through the tiny window of her second-class cabin, the lights along the shoreline twinkling in the distance like a mirage.
It had been more than two days since the MS Brittany had pulled into Havana Harbor. When the ship had first docked, the passengers had gathered too eagerly at the gangplank. But as the hours passed in the Cuban air, muggy even in February, and they were not let off, their bodies grew sweaty under many layers of clothing and the stench that had been with them all along became insufferable. People dropped their heavy suitcases and sat on them. Confusion bubbled around Hannah in multiple languages, replaced eventually by quieting fatigue. “Paperwork delay,” the steward claimed, though she suspected it was a lie. They were urged back to their rooms with promises of a nice meal. No one wanted to eat; they all just wanted to leave.
Hannah had spoken little to the other passengers during the long journey. But after they were not permitted to disembark, she found herself moving closer to groups of people, trying to overhear snippets of conversation that might have some bit of information. They were not to be let off in Cuba, she gleaned with alarm from the rumors. The landing documents they had purchased were, in fact, fraudulent. There was talk that they might disembark in Miami instead. “The United States will take us,” an Austrian woman with several small children had proclaimed confidently. Hearing this, Hannah had been less than certain. Freedom and equality, she knew from experience, were a promise made only to some.
Hannah lay on her narrow berth now. Her memories reeled back, as they always did in the darkness, to that final night months earlier in Berlin as she lay on the cold floor of Isaac’s long-shuttered kosher butcher shop, certain each breath would be her last. She could still feel the sharp pain of broken glass shards as they pressed against her belly. There had been Nazis, violent S.S., rampaging in the streets of Scheunenviertel, the city’s ravaged Jewish quarter, with knives, terrorizing any remaining Jews they caught. What would stop them from doing the same to her and the child she carried? She had dived behind the meat counter in a panic.
As she hid in the darkness, Hannah’s heart pounded. The truth was she and Isaac were not just any Jews. They were part of the resistance, Hannah drawing anti-Fascist political cartoons under a pseudonym and Isaac printing them in the underground newspaper he distributed across the city and beyond. If the Germans found the printing press hidden in the back of the butcher shop, it would mean death not just for her and Isaac but everyone who worked with them.
The men drew closer to the door of the shop, undeniably marked as Jewish with a swath of yellow paint. Their shadows loomed large and menacing across the floor. She slid awkwardly behind the counter, hindered by her rounded stomach. She held her breath, trying not to move. “Stop!” she heard Isaac’s voice commanding, with only a trace of a waver in it. He sounded so firm that for a minute she thought they actually might listen. He had stepped out from hiding in the cutting room purposefully in order to direct them toward the opposite end of the shop, away from her and the materials hidden in the back room.
Of course, the men did not stop. They crashed through the door and knocked him to the ground. Isaac let out a wail as he fell to the floor. The men beat and kicked him with dull, sickening thuds. For a moment, her eyes locked with his beneath the counter. She wanted desperately to leap out to his defense the way he had to hers. He averted his gaze, willing her not to move, to stay hidden and save their child and herself. But his cries were unbearable. Blood flowed from his head, mixing with stains left by slaughtered animals on the floor.
Soon Isaac grew silent. The men stormed through the store, running past her without seeing. She covered her head with her hands and burrowed deeper beneath the counter, praying. She heard tables and shelves crash to the ground and a shout of glee as they discovered the printing press. Her papers were there, and now they would know that Maxim, the pseudonym she used for her comics, had originated here. As they smashed the press to bits, she held her breath, waiting for the men to discover her and kill her as well.
But the men left the shop, satisfied that they had finished the job. As they ran back onto the street in search of new prey, Hannah started crawling toward Isaac, then froze. A lone Nazi brute, who she had not noticed remained in the store, was looking through the counter for bits of meat. As she crouched lower, a floorboard creaked. The Nazi’s head swung in her direction and she waited, holding her breath for certain detection. But he turned back to his attempted looting. The store had been closed for many months, though, and so he found nothing.
When at last the would-be thief had gone, Hannah scurried to Isaac, praying he might be alive. She knew he could not survive the beating, but she wished he might linger for a few minutes so that she could touch his face and whisper words of comfort. She leaned her head close as he whispered his very last instructions, the one thing he needed her to do. “Go. The newspaper is finished, and it isn’t safe for you to remain here anymore. Save yourself and our child.” He could not protect her any longer.
“I will. I swear it.” She hoped desperately for a bit more time. But his eyes were already open to the sky. She kissed him again. “You saved us. We are saved.” He needed to know that his sacrifice had meant something. Her words hung in the air above them, unanswered.
She looked around the shop, wondering what to do next. Something burned in her stomach. For a second, she thought it was a labor cramp. But it was too early: the baby could never survive. Though she had felt fluttering kicks, she was only five months along and nowhere near a life that could sustain itself separate from her. Then she felt something warm between her legs. She sat motionless, willing it to stop, but the ache became a burning pain and the trickle of blood a river. She was losing the baby, and there was nothing she could do to stop it. Her promise to Isaac, which she had made just moments earlier, to protect their child, was already broken. It seemed then that Isaac’s death had been in vain because the baby was gone, and without the child or Isaac himself, her own life was worth nothing.
Hannah had left Berlin the next day, setting out covertly for Hamburg hidden in the back of a car, transport arranged by one of her few remaining resistance contacts who had not been arrested. She needed to leave Germany, but it had at first proven impossible, and she had hidden in the port city for several months, certain she would be discovered and arrested. For weeks after losing the baby, she had fever and chills that made her worry about infection. Her body ached, as did her heart. She could not outrun the memory of the man she had loved. Even more painful was the loss of their child, crushing her in a way she could not have imagined. Once she had eschewed things such as marriage and children. But with Isaac it had almost seemed possible. Now with the dream shattered, she saw the promise as a kind of hubris: What had made her think that she deserved the same happiness as everyone else? By nature, she was solitary, and that was how she would now remain forever.
Finally, she had been able to use her reputation as an artist and a favor from an old friend to arrange scarce, precious papers and secure a place on the Brittany, a ship headed for Cuba, and one of the last to carry Jews, since Hitler had issued a prohibition against their emigration. She would arrange passage from there to America. But the trauma still loomed large.
A shuffling noise from across the room stirred her from her thoughts. Hannah had wanted a first-class cabin to herself and could afford to pay for it. But there was simply no such thing on the dilapidated ship, and so she had had to settle on the next best thing, a tiny stateroom shared with two spinster sisters from Sopot who were trying to get to their cousin in the Dominican Republic.
Hannah had bigger problems than her cabinmates, though. Official word had come that no one would disembark from the Brittany in Havana. The ship would depart for Europe in the morning. The passengers had reacted with disbelief, followed by anger. Their papers were entirely in order. Many had spent their life savings on the visas that promised to get them in. But it had all been a scam. There was simply no place for the ship full of refugees to land.
“Where are we to go?” an elderly man had demanded. They were Jews, hunted by the Reich. They could not possibly return to the countries from which they had fled, steps ahead of arrest or worse. Surely there would be even more horrible reprisals for them now because they had tried to escape.
Unable to sleep, Hannah walked up onto the deck. They had been at sea for so long that she scarcely smelled the salty air anymore. But its brackishness filled her lungs now, thick and stifling. She pressed herself close to the rail, as if leaning closer to shore might actually bring her there. Like Moses, she could see the Promised Land but was unable to enter it.
“Careful,” a voice behind her warned. Hannah turned to find one of the ship’s security officers, making rounds of the deck. The light of his cigarette glowed in the darkness. She expected him to scold her for being out and usher her back to her cabin. Instead, he simply held out a pack of cigarettes, offering her one. She waved it away. “Hell of a thing,” he said. Hannah knew enough English to understand his words, and that he was talking about the passengers’ situation.
“What do you think will happen next?” she ventured. He shrugged. “Will we go to America?”
He shook his head. “Nah. Roosevelt is too much of a politician.” The price of saving a ship full of Jews was too much for even the president of the United States to bear. “Other countries will let some people in, though.” She tilted her head. “Belgium and Holland have agreed to take a number of folks.” Hannah’s heart sank. They would be going back to occupied Europe after all. “Priority will be given to those with a relative to vouch for them.” So their salvation would not come through some sort of collective rescue. It would be every person for themselves, using whatever connections and resources they had. “We set sail for Antwerp in the morning.”
Lily, she thought suddenly, remembering her doe-eyed cousin, the closeness of their youth. Just months apart in age, they had been almost like sisters, reunited each summer at their family cottage by the Baltic Sea until Lily’s family had moved to Belgium when she was ten. They had kept in touch more regularly by letter when they were younger but had not spoken often in recent years. Hannah somehow knew, though, that Lily would help. Belgium, occupied by the Nazis, was hardly safer than Germany was. Still, it was her only chance.
“I don’t suppose I could send a telegram,” she said to the steward.
He looked at her dubiously. “The wire is only for official crew business, ma’am.”
“Then, perhaps you could send it.” Hannah tried to think of a way to persuade him. Another woman might try to flirt, but it was an art that had always been lost on her. She reached into her pocket, feeling for the remaining cash she had with her. She had been hoarding it, and more than ever she hated to part with it now, not knowing if she might need it wherever she finally landed. But she had no choice.
The guard palmed the money and shoved it in his pocket, then produced a small notebook and stub of a pencil. “Write down what you want to say and the address, and I will make sure it is sent. Keep it short.”
Hannah hesitated. She wanted to see the message sent personally to make sure he followed through. She was hardly in a position to negotiate, though. She took the notebook, the pencil hovering in her hand above it as she tried to figure out what to say to the cousin she had not seen in more than two decades, who was now her best and only hope.
Arriving in Belgium on the MS Brittany. Please come for me. Your cousin, Hannah Martel.
She included her surname, as though Lily might have forgotten over the years who Hannah was. She felt as though she should write something more, perhaps tell her cousin when and in which port she would arrive. But there was so much she did not know—including Lily’s address, which she’d left buried in her things back in Berlin. Hannah recalled, though, that Lily’s husband, Nik, was a professor at the Universitair Ziekenhuis in Brussels (or at least he had been before the war), so she wrote down the address in care of him at the hospital there and hoped that would be enough.
She handed the paper to the officer. “Please send it as soon as you can.” He turned and walked away without agreeing to her request.
Hannah slumped against the rail of the ship, shaken by the turn of events. The last thing she wanted was to return to Europe. But right now she just needed somewhere safe to land so she could start over and try again.
The next morning, the ship pulled from the harbor before dawn, like a lover leaving without saying goodbye. Hannah remained in bed, skipping breakfast. She could not bear to look at the shoreline as it receded in the distance. She wondered if Lily had received her message, tried to imagine her reaction. Even if the telegraph had gotten through, she was unlikely to receive a response onboard.
As the ship churned out through rougher waters, Hannah’s insides quaked. It was not merely seasickness. What if she arrived in Belgium and there was simply no one there to meet her? She would die before she would go back to Nazi Germany. She vowed to throw herself clear overboard into the Atlantic before letting that happen. Return was simply not an option.
But even in her despair, she felt a flicker of hope. She still saw Lily as a girl with her long black braids, elegant and refined in a way that Hannah had never managed. Hannah’s childhood had not been an easy one: her father drank himself to death when she was sixteen. Her mother, who had never been able to protect Hannah from her father’s drunken wrath, died a few months later. Lily and their summer visits had been a light in that dark world. Lily had been, quite literally, a lifeline, the only friend she had. At their last tearful farewell when Lily’s family left for Belgium, they had sworn to always remain close and be there for one another. The first part of that pledge had failed; they had grown distant and all but lost touch. But the second part remained a prophecy unfulfilled, and she hoped that Lily remembered.
Now as the she lay bobbing with the ship, she squeezed her eyes shut. If she were a religious woman she might have prayed, but instead she just desperately hoped and wished their promise would be true so she could reach Belgium safely and begin to look for another way out.
Her very life depended upon it.