Chapter 12 Children Hear You
In his infant years, whenever James Winslow couldn’t sleep—or something scary had woken him up—his mom would soothe him with a song.
It wasn’t really a song, but Honor sang it like a song.
“No war, no war, no war,” she whispered in her little boy’s ear like a lullaby, but it was a bewitching incantation.
“How long will it be before Jimmy starts to remember what he’s heard or seen?” Honor asked her sisters.
“Before Jimmy’s three, he’ll be repeating words he’s heard,” Faith said first, but she didn’t sound sure.
Hope had only one child; she sounded more uncertain than Faith. “Around four or five, Jimmy will develop something like a linear memory—he’ll see the storyline, he’ll start putting things together,” Hope had said.
Prudence had no children, but she was a doctor; she spoke an incomprehensible kind of language. “Verbal and visual recognition are different cognitive processes,” Prudence started to say, but she just stopped—she knew when no one in her family was listening.
Thomas Winslow was beside himself with anguish over such a woeful lack of specificity. As an English teacher and a reader of those plotted novels of the nineteenth century, Thomas was all about being specific.
In September 1947, Jimmy Winslow would be six and a half—to Constance Winslow’s thinking, this was a year older than he needed to be to go to kindergarten.
As a librarian, Constance was no less enamored of specificity than her husband.
Jimmy would be an old kindergartner, in his grandmother’s opinion, but his enrollment was put off until Arnaud Beaudette, Jimmy’s frequent playmate, was due to start school.
In a well-meaning way, the Winslows were specific regarding when Jimmy should hear the story of his birth mother—undoubtedly before kindergarten, where another child could speak to him, or he might overhear kids talking.
“Saying ‘the orphan’s kid,’ or worse,” Faith suggested.
“Maybe ‘the Jewish orphan’s kid’ is worse,” Hope had said.
“Just ‘the Jew’ would be bad enough for Jimmy to hear some kid say, because you know it would be said in a hateful way,” Prudence piped up.
“Right you are, Prudence—we tell James who he is before our dear boy hears something hateful,” Thomas said.
“Or the first time our dear boy hears anything—we tell him then!” Constance cried.
But the drawn-out way the war was ending would test the Winslows’ best intentions.
The townspeople of Pennacook had never seen so much news about what was happening (or had happened) to the Jews.
Before the end of World War II, Allied forces were uncovering the magnitude of the Holocaust. The Allied advance into Germany shed more light on Nazi forced-labor facilities and concentration camps.
There were sixty thousand prisoners at Bergen-Belsen when it was liberated in April 1945.
American troops found Dachau, where they made the remaining SS guards gather up the bodies and put the corpses in mass graves.
That same spring of 1945, the Dachau death train was discovered—a train of forty or fifty freight cars, transporting four thousand prisoners from Buchenwald to Dachau.
More than half the inmates starved to death en route; the train was traveling for three weeks.
That same April, the Americans liberated Ohrdruf, a subcamp of Buchenwald, as well as Dora-Mittelbau and the Flossenbürg concentration camp.
Not even the townspeople of Pennacook could avoid seeing the newsreels and the photographs in the Western media, though what they saw wouldn’t deter a few townsfolk from denying the Holocaust happened.
The publicizing of the atrocities in the Nazi death camps made almost everyone aware of the systematic extermination of the Jews.
For a small New Hampshire town, there was a lot of talking about Jews.
In the fall of 1945, one of the ladies of the town spoke to Constance, who heretofore would have pegged this woman as one of Pennacook’s silent anti-Semites.
Yet the woman sounded sincere when she inquired of Constance, in a tremulous voice, if Esther was “all right.” Obviously, because the Jews were in the news, there was more talk about Jews.
This made Constance worry more about what Jimmy might hear.
“Children hear what adults talk about to other adults, Tommy—children might not listen to you when you tell them what to do, but children hear you,” Constance told him.
“Right you are, Connie, and children repeat what they’ve heard. Nowadays, what another child could say to our dear James might not be hateful—it could be innocent or sympathetic,” Thomas said.
The Winslows foresaw how the horrors of the Holocaust might make some of the townsfolk feel sympathy for the Jews—not to mention the news of the Nazi and fascist war criminals who were already fleeing Europe. Not even the townspeople of Pennacook wanted the war criminals to get away.
“Rattenlinien,” old Isaac Drucker would say in German, in reference to the ratlines, the escape routes for Nazis and other fascists seeking safe havens in Latin America.
There were two main ratlines. One went from Germany to Spain, then to Argentina; the other went to Rome and Genoa, then to various countries in South America.
There were Vatican ratlines, supported by some Catholic clergy.
Isaac and Bluma Drucker hated Bishop Alois Hudal, an Austrian Catholic and Nazi sympathizer who was rector of a Roman seminary for Austrian and German priests.
Bishop Hudal helped wanted Nazi war criminals escape, including Franz Stangl, the commanding officer in Treblinka, and Adolf Eichmann, who fled to Argentina.
(Joseph Mengele fled to Argentina, too—then to other countries, dying in Brazil.)
In March 1946, a Haganah team of Palmach fighters assassinated Gotthilf Wagner, the leader of the German Templer colonies in Palestine. In her letter, Esther was a little vague, calling Wagner “a former (maybe active) member of the Nazi party.”
“Perhaps the parentheses are deliberately contradictory, Connie—or some vagueness remains in our Esther,” Thomas said.
“Esther’s Jewish business is her business—not ours, Tommy,” Constance reminded him.
In 1948, there were more assassinations intended to drive the Germans out of Palestine.
Long before then, the British authorities had called the Templers “enemy nationals”—arresting and deporting many of them to Australia.
There’d been Templer colonies in Haifa, Jaffa, Jerusalem, and Sarona—now a neighborhood of Tel Aviv.
The Templer colonies would be resettled by Jews.
With Israeli independence in 1948, the State of Israel was most specific about the Templers.
There’d been pro-Nazi sympathizers in the Templer colonies.
Israel wouldn’t permit ethnic Germans who’d been sympathetic to the Nazis to return to Israel or stay there.
The Templers who’d been deported weren’t allowed to come back; the ones who’d remained in Israel had to go.
In 1946, Esther’s letter didn’t have much to say about the German Templers.
Without comment, Esther had enclosed an old photo of the Haifa wrestling club with the wrestlers from the British military’s Eighth Army.
Honor was repulsed by the muscular men in their absurd singlets—she seemed reluctant to pick out Moses Little Mountain among the wrestlers.
The other Winslows were more interested in the photo.
Some of the wrestlers were tattooed, including Moshe Kleinberg.
“Do wrestlers like tattoos?” Thomas asked Honor.
“I don’t know, Daddy—Esther didn’t tell me,” Honor told her father.
“Haifa is a seaport—I suppose you can get tattooed in a seaport,” Thomas ventured to say.
“I don’t know, Daddy,” Honor repeated.
When Esther was showing everyone her baby bump, the senior Winslows had noticed she’d still not been tattooed. They’d wondered if Esther had changed her mind about the Jane Eyre quotation.
“Is Esther ever going to get her Jane Eyre tattoo?” Constance asked Honor.
“Esther said she’ll get that tattoo after her stretch marks have faded,” Honor told her mother.
With the outbreak of World War II, the Templer colony in Sarona became a detention camp.
After the war, the fortified camp became a military base for the British.
One day, after the British Mandate had ended, the old Templer houses and the army barracks would become Israeli government offices—including offices for the IDF and the intelligence services.
But this was where the Winslows would get lost—even Honor, who was in the closest contact with Esther.
Did Esther really write that Ben-Gurion changed the name of Sarona to Kirya? Honor thought so, but she couldn’t find the letter where Esther wrote this.
And what about the Israeli intelligence services?
As Israel’s first prime minister, Ben-Gurion set up the Mossad. Yet nowhere in Esther’s letters to Honor—not once, not ever—did Esther mention the Mossad. Not that the Winslows knew or would remember, but Ben-Gurion put a former foreign ministry adviser, Reuven Shiloah, in charge of the Mossad.
On March 2, 1951, Ben-Gurion ordered Shiloah to take over all overseas operations. Not that the Winslows knew or would remember—after all, it was Jimmy’s tenth birthday.
Over the years, in regard to what the Mossad’s operations would be—beyond Israel’s borders—these would certainly include covert intelligence-gathering and pursuing Nazi war criminals.
Not that the Winslows would know—nor would Esther write about it to Honor.
In Hebrew, Mossad meant nothing more than “institute.”