Chapter 9

ST. PAUL’S, 1936–1937

The channel crossing from Vlissingen, Holland, was not a smooth one. Passengers were standing on the upper deck when suddenly large swells and wind rocked the boat. Everyone was caught off guard and tightly grabbed the rails; one after another, they vomited over the side. It was a chain reaction. Eva wrote in her diary with dark humor, “The passengers started to feed the fish.”⁴⁰ The rough seas, however, did not affect Eva and Heine. With fascination, she counted the number of waves that preceded the larger one that crashed against the hull. Rather than chaos, she recognized a rhythm to the storm.

After an exhausting travel day, Eva returned to Bute House and collapsed immediately on her bed. The mattress jackknifed in the middle; that jarred her and reminded her that she was far from home. Before she could fall asleep, she thought about the last few days. There was tension at home. Eva wrote, “Mutti [Mommy] evidently told Ruth [Eva’s older sister] to do something. I don’t know what the connection was, but all of a sudden Papa said, ‘Eva can do something now too. In fact, lately she hasn’t done very much.’”⁴¹ She felt blindsided. She wondered why her father was so sarcastic. Her father, usually soft-spoken, was tense and harsh. She did not understand that his lashing out was misplaced. To add to her discomfort, her last Friday night Shabbat meal at home was disappointing. She recalled, “The talk was only about how bad everything was politically. Why does that have to be? Friday night really should be the one night of the week where the whole family comes together to talk about pleasant things. But not to talk about politics and actually about things that nobody really knows anything about.”⁴² She wondered what her own words meant, “nobody really knows,” but she did not take her own question far enough. She did not ask: Knows what? What will happen to the Jews? To Germany? To her family? To herself ?

The memory of the last few days at home was vivid. She saw herself walking through the Tiergarten to the zoological garden. It was getting dark, and the “lovebirds” huddled on the park benches. She remembered the young conductor on the bus. How very attractive he was. He had caught her eye, and she was a bit taken aback. She wondered if she was attracted to young men more than before. All she could do was shake her head in puzzlement, but with a telling smile. She proudly fondled her new, eight-bladed jackknife with all its gadgets. Such a perfect going-away present from her friends. They knew her very well, for Eva loved knives and camping equipment. The tense last few days at home had been rescued by Anni. She was sure that it would really be good for Eva to go to Gross Breesen and that, sooner or later, she would get there. In the moments before Eva fell asleep, she thought to herself, “I think I will have a big fight at home, but I’m not going to be easily stopped.”⁴³

Eva’s reentry to St. Paul’s for the fall term was not a happy reunion. As before, there was a stark difference between the school day of classes at St. Paul’s and the time spent at Bute. At least at school, there was the beautiful, quiet library. She wished she could stay there all day, every day, just reading and listening to the silence. It was as if the quiet walled out the intruders of her new reality. She was enthusiastic about the sports program, and some of her classes were challenging in a way that spurred her curiosity. Eva thought that most of the teachers were friendly, perhaps too much so. She questioned if “a strict teacher is really best for most of these girls. She creates order.”⁴⁴ Eva’s German schooling was the opposite of the free-flowing style of St. Paul’s. Even though the teachers were approachable, Eva found that most of the girls were not engaging. When she asked them a question, nobody seemed to give her an answer. She felt invisible. She was so terribly lonely. Her questions haunted her: “Why am I so different from the other English girls?”⁴⁵ Why couldn’t she make close friends like she had in Germany? The only saving grace was that the Jewish holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur were approaching, and that meant that she would leave school to stay with Frau Sachs, a family friend who owned a boardinghouse. It wasn’t that she so looked forward to the synagogue services but that she could escape school. “It will be nice to get out of the daily monotony here. Also, you hear about other things as well. I will fast too. Otherwise, I would become a completely simple-minded imbecile.”⁴⁶

The Matric exam loomed above her head like the glisteningly sharp blade of a guillotine. In Germany, the same series of university qualifying exams was called the Arbiter. To Eva, the passing of the Matric exam seemed to be irrelevant, reserved for some other lifetime, in some other world. Didn’t her parents realize this? Every time she became depressed, however, the words of one of her Bund friends buoyed her up: “Always keep your head up high, even this year will have an end.”⁴⁷ This became Eva’s mantra, and thoughts about Gross Breesen constantly popped up out of nowhere.

As if dislocation was not bad enough, Eva’s self-image began to plummet: “Today, after tea, I ran around the huge lawn area with two other girls. I have to lose some weight. Things can’t go on this way. I’m swelling up like a clump of yeast dough. And here it really shows up a lot more because most of the English girls are quite thin.”⁴⁸ Everything was beginning to pile up. Eva was so uncomfortable. She didn’t like her school, her situation, her appearance, herself. She read and reread a poem that seemed to speak to her, tried to rescue her:

It’s dawn

And the fog is lifting.

The whole world is lying in sunshine,

So it will be for you no matter how big the troubles are.

In life there is dawn.

Trust in God, and have courage yourself

And after all things will get well.

Don’t drown in your own troubles, many others must survive

In worse difficulties.⁴⁹

“Don’t drown in your own troubles.” How easy that sounded, but it was so hard to do alone. Trying to give herself a pep talk, she copied a quotation in one of her school notebooks: “Nothing is so insignificant, so small that it doesn’t have value. Nothing is so large a burden, that it cannot be carried.” But did Eva really believe that?

The fall term settled into a rhythm of aching monotony. To an outsider looking in, Eva’s life would not appear so bad. There were times when she was accepted and appreciated by the other girls. For instance, her piano playing always drew a circle of admirers, especially when she played Mozart and Beethoven, but what really impressed everyone was that she could play from memory and seamlessly switch from classical to popular tunes. Once, without notice, she was asked to accompany a visiting professional singer. She sight-read the music perfectly, and the soloist remarked, “You really played beautifully, how musical you are.” After the concert, she received congratulatory slaps on the back with “jolly good; you are really brilliant.”⁵⁰ More often, small groups of girls circled her as she led singing on her guitar. In one session, she sang “Little Hans,” and when she sang in a very sad way, the girls started to sob. In the end, they thanked her over and over, and one girl broke into cheers. Eva was a little embarrassed because she loved doing this and because it put her in a better mood since most of the songs were in German. For a little while, her singing transported her home, again happy and unburdened. These moments, however, never lasted. On the athletic field, Eva was praised by the players and coaches. She was a strong athlete who played with exceptional physical skill, but again, she could not sustain the positive feelings of accomplishment and acceptance.

LONDON

London offered new experiences. The Royal Opera House in Covent Garden became her favorite music hall. Even the Scottish bagpipes had a new charm. At first, Eva thought that they “sounded very monotone,” but she gradually appreciated their “more soulful meaning.”⁵¹ But no matter how things seemed to improve, Eva remained terribly unhappy. “When I study, I am distracted, and the loneliness doesn’t feel so much. It is so empty inside of me. I am missing a good friend. From the people in Germany, I hear at best once a week. Ah! It is so sad the way people are being torn apart… it is hopeless. I am in a terrible spirit. I could start crying most anytime.”⁵² Eva was stuck in a downward spiral of dark emotions: “I can sit for a long time and stare at one point and think about nothing. I always try to do something about it, but it doesn’t work. If only I had a person here that I could talk to about all the things that bother me. I’m so terribly lonely, and longing even though I’m only fifteen years old to be in Germany and home. Even though they don’t like us Jews in Germany, I love the country and the people.”⁵³

Eva was emotionally paralyzed. She could not adjust and go forward, and she could not go backward. The frequent fog of London clouded her vision of the future, and the wet mist coated her with an indistinct fear. She wished she could have taken to heart Anni’s repeated urging: “Have courage, have hope.”