A Swedish ocean liner, the MS Gripsholm, was waiting for us at the harbor in New Jersey. It had been used in previous months for this purpose. Ours was to be the sixth and last of the internee exchanges for prisoners of this war. By now, more than two thousand Americans who had been trapped behind enemy lines in Germany and Italy had been exchanged for four thousand German nationals and their children, as well as a few Italians. Every exchanged German internee had been carefully analyzed by the German government prior to being accepted for repatriation.
Swedish authorities took over for the FBI agents and border-control officers who had escorted us to the gangplank. The only boat I had ever been on was a friend’s father’s fishing boat. I was wide-eyed as we stepped aboard. The ship, gleaming and adorned with bright lights, was strung with red-and-white Swedish flags. One thousand of us boarded, more than half from camps in Texas, but there were repatriates from camps in North Dakota and New Mexico, as well as nearly two hundred German prisoners of war. We waited in long lines to be processed onto the ship’s manifest and assigned to cabins, bundled against a biting wind and the threat of sleet.
The departing whistle finally blew at sundown, and the great ship, thirty times as big as my friend’s fishing boat, eased out of the pier. It was cold on the upper decks, but Max and I wanted to watch as the American coastline fell away. Papa stood with us, talking with other internees from other camps, learning what they knew about how the war was progressing and sharing what he knew. Mommi stayed in our stateroom, three decks below, to unpack our suitcases.
I remembered when Papa had been away at his father’s funeral, he had traveled by ship, and so I knew the journey would be a long one; we’d be nearly two weeks at sea. We had to travel as far as the port city of Marseille, France, which Papa had been told was now back in Allied hands, and complete our journey by train into Germany.
But Papa hadn’t told us how rough the Atlantic can be. The first day on open water, when I could see nothing but gray sky and gray ocean, the sea decided to toy with us in such a way that I, like most everyone else on board, could concentrate on nothing except the nausea. In my misery, I forgot my fear of where we were going and my anger at having to leave America.
In time, though, the ocean grew calm, and Max and I would spend the day exploring the ship’s vastness. Some days I would pal around with Nell and Nathalie and a few of their friends. They were all bilingual and I was jealous of their ease with the German language. One girl, a year younger than me, named Willi, took an interest in me and helped me with my language skills. I saw Gunther only from a distance, and it was hard for me to remember that I had once been infatuated with him.
The Gripsholm was an ocean liner and not a troop ship, so there was a swimming pool and a cinema and a dining room full of food whenever we went inside to eat a meal. The farther south we sailed, the warmer the air became, and the calmer the sea. One afternoon, a school of dolphins began to dart and dive in our wake. It was a magical moment, seeing those animals play like that.
I wrote to Mariko that night, telling her about the dolphins, and kept the letter in my suitcase to send to her as soon as I could. I wrote her again when we crossed the Strait of Gibraltar, with Spain on one side of us and North Africa on the other. The Rock of Gibraltar looked like the head of a sledgehammer.
Finally, on the twenty-first of January, we sailed into Marseille. I had expected a lovely French coastal town, warm and welcoming. I hadn’t known that the Nazi armies, before being routed by the invading Allied troops, destroyed as many houses and buildings as they could.
I watched with eagerness until we drew near the piers. What I saw on shore made me shudder. The city was a heap of ruin.
As we glided into the harbor, the ship hit an abandoned German mine. Papa, Mommi, Max, and I were standing together at the railing, and we all collided into one another as an explosion in the dark water beneath us rocked the deck.
Max looked up at Papa. Fear was in his eyes as I’m sure it was in mine. “Are we being torpedoed?” Max said.
“No, no,” Papa answered him with quick but measured assurance. He was afraid, too.
The German military had been routed out of France, hadn’t they?
Another explosion underneath sent the bow swaying.
A crew member nearby yelled something, perhaps in German; I wasn’t sure.
“He said we’re taking on water!” Mommi said to Papa with wide eyes.
Other repatriates around us began to panic. Another crew member thrust life jackets into our arms.
“We’re sinking!” yelled a woman with a toddler in her arms.
“No, we’re not!” said a man with a thick German accent.
I stood frozen in place as passengers and crew members scurried about. The ship listed slightly, and its whistle sounded, calling us to prepare to get into the lifeboats.
“What are we supposed to do?” Mommi said, drawing Max and me close to her.
“They will tell us,” Papa said soothingly as he put his arm around her. But he looked as though he might have to spring into action and decide for himself how to protect us.
The ship stopped its slow forward motion and we hit no more mines, and for many long minutes nothing else happened. Everyone stood still and waited. Some prayed. Some put their hands on the railing and looked out into the water as if to summon any remaining mines to the surface. Then divers jumped into the water and we heard a crew member telling a passenger near us that the divers would clear the mines. All of us waited as the divers did their work. I wondered if it was dangerous, what they had to do. What if one of the mines went off as a diver was moving it?
But in time, the whistle blew the all-clear sign and the boat began to move forward again; the divers had apparently been able to clear a path. As we eased our way to the docks of the broken city, I realized I’d had no idea what war was really like. I thought I had known, living as a detainee in a wartime internment camp all this time. But the mines in the water and the destroyed city before me were showing me that I had understood nothing.
We disembarked from the ship and were bused to the train station, where we were told to buy food if we wanted to eat anything. The French had no intention of providing meals for us on the train. They watched us with accusing glares as American military police escorted us onto train cars that would take us through the liberated French countryside into Switzerland. The Swiss crew members had been neither cold nor warm toward us, but the quiet hostility from the French officials at the docks and at the train station was unmistakable. We were German. They were French. Their country had been occupied, ravaged, and demolished by German troops.
We were the enemy.
PART THREE
17
San Francisco, 2010
Rina leaves me in the care of the hotel concierge to return to her office and clear her schedule so that she can take me to see Mariko. She would not hear of my regrets for having completely disordered her day. If anything, Mariko’s daughter is grateful, rather than put out, that I’d just shown up in the hotel lobby like I had, with not so much as a phone call in advance.
“I think maybe you were meant to find her now,” Rina had said when she dismissed the second of my offered apologies. “My mother has been sad lately. The medication she’s on keeps her pain at a manageable level, at least for now, and she told me months ago when she first got her diagnosis that she felt like she’d lived a full life and was grateful for every moment of it. But I haven’t sensed the same peace from her the last five or six weeks. I can tell something is bothering her, but when I ask she tells me it is nothing. And not to worry. But I do worry. I really am so very glad you are here, that your health has allowed you to travel. Very glad.”
When I had told Rina many minutes earlier that I, too, was dying, her eyes had filled with concern. I had told her that I had a slowly advancing condition from which I would not recover but that I was not in any real pain. Her concern for me abated a bit, but I could tell she was wondering what that condition was. Cancer, like her mother’s, perhaps? I didn’t elaborate, and she did not press. As Rina leaves me to get her vehicle out of the hotel’s garage, I sense Agnes swirling about, suddenly mesmerized by the opulence of the hotel and the unfamiliarity of it.
“It’s not like you haven’t been here before,” I mumble to her.
I look into my purse to prove I have a reason for being here and I pull out my key card. Room 703 is written clearly on the envelope that holds it.
I stand to look about the expansive room for an elevator. For heaven’s sake. A hotel this size should have several. And you shouldn’t have to wonder where they are. They should be clearly marked. A bellhop who has been standing near me asks me if I need something from my room.
“What was that?”
“I said, did you need something from your room? Shall I tell Mrs. Hammond you’ll be right out?”
This young man is making no sense at all.