“Stop! No! Not allowed!” the soldier said in bad Arabic. She struggled to find the right words and said something in Hungarian that Mahmoud didn’t understand. She started to raise her gun at him, and then she glanced up and saw the frowns on the faces of the UN observers.
Mahmoud stepped outside. The woman looked around at the other guards and called out to them, as if asking what to do. Mahmoud took another step, and another, and soon he was away from the building, walking toward the road.
Waleed ran through the door after him, followed by the rest of the children. The Hungarian guards yelled after them, but they didn’t do anything to stop them.
“Mahmoud!” Waleed said, panting as he ran up alongside his brother. His eyes were bright and alive for the first time Mahmoud could remember. “Mahmoud! What are you doing?”
“I’m not staying in that place and waiting for them to send me back to Serbia. Come on,” Mahmoud said. “We’re walking to Austria.”
Gunfire crackled. An artillery shell whistled overhead and hit with a shuddering thoom somewhere nearby. Ruthie cried, and Josef’s mother hugged her close.
Josef peeked out the window. They were hiding in a tiny schoolhouse in a village called Vornay, somewhere south of Bourges, in France. The desks were all in perfect rows, and a long-forgotten assignment was still written on the chalkboard. It was dark outside, and the trees surrounding the schoolhouse made it even darker. That was good—it helped them hide. But it also made spotting German storm troopers harder.
Josef ducked back down inside, and his eyes fell on a map of Europe on the wall, the various countries shaded different colors. How wrong that map was now, just a year after he and his family had come to France as refugees. Germany had absorbed Austria, and conquered Poland and Czechoslovakia soon after. Holland and Belgium and Denmark had fallen to Hitler, and the Nazis occupied the northern half of France, including Paris. All of France had surrendered, but there were still pockets of Free France Forces resisting the Nazis throughout the countryside. The countryside where Josef and his family were now.
The only refugees from the St. Louis who were still safe, Josef realized, were the ones who had made it to Great Britain—though word was that Hitler was going to try to cross the English Channel any day now.
Josef and his mother and sister were trying to get to Switzerland in the hope that the Swiss would give them refuge. They’d made it this far traveling by night, sleeping in hay barns and out in fields under the stars, but the Nazis had finally caught up to them.
A light played across the window above him, and Josef chanced a look out again. Storm troopers! Headed toward the school!
“They’re coming!” Josef told his mother. “We have to go!”
His mother picked up Ruthie and headed for the door, but Josef stopped her. There was only one door to the schoolhouse, and the Nazis would be using it. “No—this way!” he said.
Josef kept low as he scurried to the back wall of the classroom. There was a window there. They could climb out and run for the woods.
He tried the handle. It was stuck! Josef looked over his shoulder. He could see the beam of a flashlight in the hall outside, could hear the familiar German language of his homeland. They had to get out of there!
Josef threw his elbow against the glass, and it shattered. That brought a cry from the hallway. Josef knocked the rest of the glass out of the window in a panic. He felt his coat sleeve rip, felt something cold and sharp against his skin, but he didn’t have time to think about that. He helped his mother out first, then handed Ruthie out to her through the window.
“Go, go!” Josef said before he was even all the way out the window, and his mother picked up Ruthie and ran for the darkness of the woods. None of them carried suitcases anymore—those had been left behind long ago—but they all still wore their coats, even though it was the height of summer. His mother had insisted.
The only thing any of them still carried was Bitsy, the little stuffed bunny Ruthie had never parted with. It was tucked tightly under Ruthie’s arm.
Josef leaped down from the window, stumbled, got back up, and ran.
“There! There!” The beam of the flashlight found him. A pistol cracked, and a bullet blew the bark off a tree less than a meter away from him. Josef stumbled again in panic, righted himself, and kept running. Behind him, the storm troopers were yelling to each other, barking like dogs after a fox.
They were on the scent now, and wouldn’t let up. Not until Josef and his family had been caught.
“There’s a house up ahead!” his mother yelled over her shoulder. She swerved onto a small dirt lane, and Josef overtook her, beating her to the door. It was a little French country house, with two windows on either side of a double door in the middle and a chimney on one side.
Josef caught a faint whiff of smoke from the kitchen fire, and a curtain fluttered in the window.
Someone was inside!
Josef pounded on the door. He glanced over his shoulder. Three flashlight beams were bouncing up the lane toward them.
“Help. Please, help us,” Josef whispered frantically, still pounding.
No one answered, and no lights came on inside.
“Halt!” came a young man’s voice.
Josef spun around. There were four German soldiers behind them. Three of them pointed flashlights at them, making Josef squint. He could still see well enough to know that two of them had rifles pointed at them. A third carried a pistol.
“Hands up. Put the child down,” the storm trooper told Josef’s mother. Ruthie tried to cling to her, but Mama did as she was told.
Dully, Josef realized that he’d lost some of the feeling in his right arm, and that his sleeve was coated in blood. He’d cut himself on the window glass. Badly. He squeezed the place where his arm had grazed the glass, and the pain was so blinding it almost made him pass out.
Ruthie had her head down, crying, but she raised her little bunny’s right arm and said, “Heil Hitler!”
One of the soldiers laughed, and as he blinked the pain of his arm away, Josef thought maybe the soldiers would let them go. But one of them said, “Papers.”
They were in trouble now for sure. Their papers had big letter Js stamped all over them. J for Jew.
“We—we don’t have papers,” Mama said.
One of the soldiers gestured at her, and a storm trooper with a rifle marched up to them and checked her coat pockets. He quickly found the papers she carried for her and Ruthie, and just as easily found Josef’s papers on him.
The soldier brought them back to a man with a flashlight, and he unfolded them.
“Jews,” the man said. “From Berlin! You’ve run a long way from home.”
You have no idea, thought Josef.
“We’re going to Switzerland,” Ruthie said.
“Hush, Ruthie!” Josef hissed.
“Switzerland? Is that so? Well, I’m afraid we cannot allow that,” the soldier said. “You will be taken to a concentration camp, like the rest of the Jews.”
Why? thought Josef. Why bother hunting us down and taking us back to prison? If the Nazis want us Jews gone so badly, why don’t they just let us keep going?