Forgotten Songs...Inclusive

"We have made it, my love," he said to her reassuringly, gently, and he felt her relax as easy-loose sensations arced through her arm into his soul.

"You have decided on Quebec, I take it?"

"As a first stop, yes. The Americans have closed down immigration from Europe now, especially for Jews..."

"But why...?"

"It is the same story, my love. The same as it has always been, the same as it will always be."

"So tell me again, please -- why are we running?"

"To stay one step ahead of the Hatre. To survive, to live and to love life while we are alive."

"So? Quebec? And then what?"

"Do you remember Stefan Petersen, from my days as a resident?"

"Stefan? Of course?"

"He is teaching now at the medical college in San Francisco, and yet I have been in contact with him since he left Denmark. He has been trying to convince me to come join the faculty there, so I think this will work out -- but even so we may need to be patient. Some doors will not be so easily opened now, not with all these new restrictions, but we will be safe in Canada for the time being."

Tilda looked across the sea to the faint shimmering coastline across the strait and sighed. "That is home, is it not?" she said, pointing across the water to Denmark in the distance.

"Yes, that -- was -- home."

"Do you think we will ever come back?"

Anders shrugged. "Before this madness began I had thought about San Francisco as a home for us. About America. I was beginning to feel so hemmed in at the University, like my future there was predefined and limited. It seems odd now, preordained in a way, but when I thought about San Francisco I felt a kind of hope, even a year ago, and for some reason now I feel that our future is there, and that for us it will be correct future."

"I have always trusted you, my husband. Where you go I will follow."

"And wherever we end up, I will love you with all my heart."

She smiled and the sun peeked out from behind a scudding layer of fast moving clouds. "Do you think that, perhaps, they have food on this boat?"

"I have heard a rumor that this may be so. Are you finally hungry?"

"I am," Tilda Sorensen said, her red hair streaming on those sun-kissed autumn breezes, her green eyes alight with something akin to hope, perhaps even happiness. "For the first time in days, I think."

"Then let us find something! I am so happy you finally feel well enough to have an appetite."

Still looking out over the horizon, Tilda pointed to something low in the sea, and her brow furrowed with sudden anxiety. "What is that?" she said, and as Anders followed her eyes he squinted and shielded his eyes with his left hand.

"That," he sighed, "is a periscope."

And as if on cue, a German U-boat surfaced a few hundred meters off the Kungsholm's port beam, and she steamed alongside with her Nazi ensign streaming in the wind from her conning tower. Anders and Tilda and several hundred fleeing Jews stood at the port rail, all of them gathering in sudden fear, all staring at the submarine as if they were staring into the eyes of death itself, and soon enough all Tilda Sorensens's happy appetites had slipped away on dark, unseen currents. The ship's captain came on over the ship's PA just then and announced that because of anticipated submarine activity the Kungsholm would omit her customary stop in Southhampton, England, and that they would be steaming directly to New York. He assured the passengers and crew that as a vessel flagged in Sweden that the vessel -- and all her occupants -- had been assured safe passage by the German Foreign Ministry.

Anders Sorensen looked at the glistening black submarine steaming alongside their pristine white and gold liner, the submarine's captain having decided to come closer still -- thinking that perhaps his proximity alone would be enough to menace those squalid Jews standing at the rail one more time -- and Sorensen could feel the man's loathing from where he stood. Sorensen did not, he realized at last, understand his fellow man. Hadn't all the Hate cultivated by the Church and Hanseatic merchants finally dissipated once and for all? Why had their virulence resurfaced once again, and why now, and with such malevolent intent? 'What have we done to deserve this?' he wondered -- just as Jews all around Europe have for a thousand years.

Or, he wondered, did this hatred spring from another place, from a darkness within all men's souls that he had not yet encountered?

He looked down now, almost straight down at the officers and enlisted men standing on the submarine's conning tower. Men in black leather jackets were staring up at the Jews clustered along the Kungsholm's rail, and he wondered what was on their minds, and in their hearts, as they looked up him, and at all these fleeing Jews. Predator and prey -- or was it simply a mindless pursuit? Or, again, was there some darker force at work? And in the face of so much hate, would this submarine captain recognize something so inconsequential as Swedish neutrality?

The encounter lasted perhaps a half hour, but by the time the submariner turned and departed towards Helgoland he had made his point...

...because every time Anders went out to take a walk around the promenade he stopped at the after-most stern rail and looked into the Kungsholm's wake, for the periscope waiting out there, closing-in to end his life. Yet the submarine captain's emotional victory was complete, if only because for the rest of his life, Anders continued to run from images of that submarine and her torpedoes coming for him in the night, and in his nightmares he died a thousand times, and always in searing agony as the Kungsholm slipped beneath oily waves on her way to eternal darkness.

Chapter Two

San Francisco, California December 1945

Anders and Tilda Sorensen stood beside the railway platform at Oakland's 16th Street Station, waiting for the arrival of the Southern Pacific's Number 12, the Cascade, inbound from Seattle and now due to arrive in ten minutes -- and only a half hour late! It was chilly out that Saturday morning because an unusual cold front from the northwest had pushed through during the night, dumping rain on the city and leaving a crisp, cloudless sky over the bay after it passed. Anders felt Tilda tremble as a gust whipped along the platform so he put an arm around her shoulder and held her close. She leaned into him and sighed, content as current conditions allowed.

"I remember making this journey," she said. "It was so long, and so very uncomfortable."

"It was not so long ago, you know? And you were uncomfortable?"

"Oh, no, I didn't mean to say that. The journey from home in general, I meant. And that first winter in Quebec...I hope I am never again as cold as we were that winter."

Anders laughed at the memory, but then again it hadn't seemed all that funny at the time. "I remember the hideous coal burning stove most of all. It put out enough heat to warm perhaps one room, and wasn't that an awful apartment."

"We were lucky not to die of pneumonia," Tilda sighed. "I will remember nothing but the cold."

"Well, life is much better here, don't you think?"

"I have never been happier, my love."

"I know. I feel the same way, and every day I thank God we made it here. This was the correct choice for us."

"I hope I was able to set up the new apartment well enough. I don't know what to expect now."

"It is just temporary, Tilly. As soon as her husband is finished with that school we will help them find a house; until then they must remain close to us. We will both need to look after Imogen, I'm afraid. Rosenthal's telegram was bleak, but at least she survived the madness."

"Is he coming?"

"Rosenthal? Yes, soon. Perhaps by spring, but I understand he is working to get as many Jews into Palestine as he can, despite the rancid objections of the British."

"I have a bad feeling about all that, Anders."

"Many do. Relocating so many people will not be achieved without cost."

"They should all come here," Tilda said, and perhaps she spoke only half-jokingly.

"But California will never be the Promised Land," he sighed.

"Only because the desert fathers had never been here. One week in San Francisco and Israel would have been built here, or perhaps in Monterrey."

Anders chuckled. "You might have a point," then he cocked his face into the wind and listened. "Do you hear that?"

"Hear what?"

"The train. Can you hear the whistle?"

"Ah, yes, I can...just."

"I wonder what it is about that sound that is always so exciting?"

"Taking a trip, I think, is like getting away from all of our day to day cares, all our frustrations and worries...so maybe it is the hopeful sound of release?"

"You are so wise, Tilly. Yes, look right there!" he cried, pointing to the north. "See the steam, there, just above the trees and those warehouses?"

And yes, there above warehouses and neighborhood streets lined with bungalows pulsed vast geysers of steam -- gray and black at times, then purest white...a procession of cloud-like billows rising into the blue sky -- until the locomotive's monstrously bright headlamp appeared as the train rounded a curve, then soon enough and car by car the entire train came into view. Anders and Tilda stepped back from the edge of the platform as the locomotive huffed and chuffed into the station, and then Anders looked for the Pullman sleeper that had come from Seattle.

"What a beautiful train!" he cried. The cars were the deep red and orange of a western sunset, trimmed in silver and with a black roof, and even the huge steam locomotive wore the same colors.

"Which carriage is she in?" Tilly cried, trying to be heard over the cacophonous noises of the arriving monster.

Anders looked at his notes again, double checking his memory. "9034, a sleeping car. Ah, there it is!" he said, taking Tilly by the hand and stepping towards the car as a porter opened the door and set out his yellow step on the platform. People began filing out two by two, but they saw no Imogen Schwarzwald, and no husband with her.

Then at last a tall, almost gaunt man stepped down to the platform, then he turned and raised his hand to help a withered old scarecrow-lady down the steps...and just then Anders recognized Imogen and his first impulse was to turn and run from the horror of her decline.

"My God," Tilda whispered. "Could that be our Imogen? She must weigh fifty pounds, if that!"

Anders held his tongue but in that moment all the alleged horrors of Hitler's Final Solution crystallized in his mind and once again his blind hatred of all things German came up in a raging tide of acrid bile. His best friend, Imogen's father, dead. Killed. Shot in the back of the head for providing medical care to resistance fighters, a colonel in the Gestapo waiting in the wings to take possession of the professor's house, and then the colonel's turning up face down in a canal with a knife shoved into the back of his skull.

An eye for an eye, right?

That's how the game has to be played, right?

You don't meet the enemy head on, on his terms. You slip around behind him, preferably under cover of night, then you slit his throat in his bed. You send a message with your audacity: no one is safe. You cannot hide from us. That was the lesson Europe's Jews had learned from this latest reign of terror, paid for with their dearest blood. That was the truth Europe's Jews would carry with them as they returned home, to Palestine. And now all the horror that Anders Sorensen had hoped to push aside here in California came crashing home again. He wanted nothing to do with the old world, because he saw in California what every new arrival in California had always sought: he wanted to rejuvenate his very soul, to reinvent his life while he recovered the best facets of his other self, the life he had been forced to abandon in Copenhagen. Since the gold rush, California had become the land where people went to make their fortune, and then to enjoy the fruits of their prosperity -- in a land that truly was made of milk and honey.

But now Imogen Schwarzwald stood before him and everything he had run from came home in one thunderous crash, and in that sundered moment he felt all his hopes and dreams wither and die on a parched vine. Then he ran to her and when she recognized him she opened her arms and fell into his embrace.

"Oh my God, my sweet love. What has happened? What did they do to you?" he whispered into her ear.

"You do not need to know such things, Uncle," came her whispered reply.

"Oh my dear, I am sorry but I must tell you that you are wrong about this. I must learn what you learned of the people who did this to you, to see and feel what you experienced at their hands. I must know, you see? I must know so that it can never happen again..." He felt her grow hard and stiff so he pulled her closer still. "But not today. Today is for happiness, for you have made it to our home -- to your new home -- and you are safe now. I will let nothing bad happen to you ever again."

He pulled away and saw her tears, but that was before he looked beyond the tears.

And what he saw there left him reeling with uncertainty, for surely she was the most fragile human being he had ever seen, cast adrift on demon-haunted seas with no hope of finding a safe shore. No hope, true enough, but a searching uncertainty too, like somehow she carried the burden of guilt for what had happened.

He pulled her close again, only this time he lifted her in his arms and carried her off the railway platform and through the station, then all the way out to his car, a black and gray Buick Roadmaster convertible parked on the street with the top down. Imogen's husband dashed ahead and opened the car door, then he helped Anders get Imogen seated.

Anders, seriously winded now, went to the back of his car and leaned against the rear fender, taking his time to catch his breath -- and he used a handkerchief to mop his brow while he introduced himself to Imogen's husband, Lloyd Callahan.

"You really did not need to do that, Doctor," Callahan said in his usual Scottish seaman's brogue. "Imogen needs to walk, to regain her strength..."

"No, Lloyd, this was something I had to do." Anders stood tall and looked at Imogen. "I should have never allowed her father to talk us into letting them remain in Copenhagen. I should have insisted they join us, all of them."

"It is hard to imagine what she's been through," Tilda said, "but I couldn't have imagined in my worst nightmares that a human being could look so frail..."

"Oh, really?" Lloyd said, startled by this stranger's unwarranted tactlessness. "Well, you did not see her on the docks in Copenhagen, not as I did. Clothes like rags, her skin yellow and caked with mud. She was on death's door then and so ill she could hardly eat."

"And yet," Anders sighed, "here she is with you? Her mysterious savior?"

"Aye," Callahan barked. "Many things brought us together, Doctor. Forces, you might say, beyond all our control."

"Yes," Anders replied, "fate is a strange thing. So many unexpected intrusions." Unexpected, he wanted to say, like the unforced exclusions from those who had truly loved Imogen. Like the man who by sheer force of will had protected her during her long confinement. The man who through sheer force of will carried her from the Bohemian mountains surrounding Theresienstadt back to the Danish coast, back to her home. But no, he would not speak of those things today, and perhaps he never would. This brutish sailor had no interest in such truths, and he doubted such a man ever could. This boorish Callahan was, after all, a useful enough idiot, but he would, in the end, never do as a husband -- or as a father.

No, he would not do at all.

+++++

Within a year of his arrival in California, Anders had earned enough to purchase a nice little house on 6th Avenue between Hugo and Irving, and as the house was located very close to the hospital his old routines blossomed. Anders had always loved his morning walk to the clinic in Copenhagen and here, nestled up against the Sutro Hills, he once again felt comfortable enough with the neighborhood to resume that tradition. And besides all that glorious proximity, he simply loved his new home, a narrow three story affair that, that for all intents and purposes, looked more like a Dutch home lifted from a canal in central Amsterdam than the usual American bungalow that lined almost every other street here in the city.

But the real delight was to be found outside, off the rear of the house, for the area behind all the houses in the block had been given over to a huge common garden absolutely teeming with birds and enchanted little nooks to sit and wile away a sunny morning. He loved the little gardens that popped up back there and soon began planting flowers and putting up bird houses.

As live-in maids were the exception now in America, the practice being frowned upon even among the well-to-do, they no longer employed a live in housekeeper. Still, he had found a partial workaround that had, so far at least, worked out splendidly. He had turned parts of the top floor of the house into a small apartment, and they let out the room to needy medical students, a move with less than charitable intent because in lieu of rent the tenant would help Tilly out with chores around the house, including cooking evening meals in their spacious new kitchen. Naturally enough, all the tenants to date had been female, because it wouldn't do to have a young man wandering around the house with his wife so close, and all had been Jewish to help keep a kosher house.

He had, to date, found California exceptionally tolerant in this regard, and because of events during the war Anders found himself drawn to his faith in ways he never had in Denmark. He'd first found a Reformed synagogue near his house and began attending, not telling Tilda and never wearing a kippah anywhere but inside the temple. In this way, he observed the Judaic sabbath as best he could -- given his obligations at the hospital -- and it was months before he even broached the subject with Tilly. Yet she was immediately interested in attending services, claiming that since leaving home she had felt something missing from her life. Perhaps reconnecting with their religious roots was that something?

And yet when they first went to the temple together he caught himself looking over his shoulder more than once, as if he might find a leather jacketed submariner lurking in the shadows, or worse still, agents of the Schutzstaffel waiting just ahead, watching and recording their every move. Even Tilda admitted to feeling as much...and that a kind of uneasiness permeated their every move when they went to observe their faith because, she had to admit, as a Jew she would forever be a stranger in a strange land. They talked to their rabbi about their feelings, and all the elder could do was commiserate and tell them that they were not alone in their fear. The only real answer, the rabbi told them, resided in Palestine.

Yet by the time the war came to an end they had both grown comfortable in their new skin. They felt like Americans. They contributed to the war effort freely and gladly; Anders bought war bonds and Tilly volunteered at the hospital, helping out as best she could by rolling bandages and doing other menial chores. Yet she soon began to regret her lack of higher education, and this led to feeling inadequate.

But then both Anders and their rabbi encouraged her to pursue her interests, to attend college and see where this new road might take her.

And this, she finally realized, was the real beauty of America.

She was no longer bound by stifling traditions, no longer limited to a role in society imposed on her by her elders. Because in the beginning she had simply watched the procession of young women boarders pass through their little apartment with little more than idle curiosity, but soon enough she talked to them about their own hopes and dreams as women in a male dominated hierarchy, and soon enough she realized that all hierarchies are meant to be challenged, but that in America such challenges were not necessarily doomed to fail.