The Children's War Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Praise

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  ALSO BY MONIQUE CHARLESWORTH

  Copyright Page

  For Alex, Sophie and Jonathan

  Acclaim for Monique Charlesworth’s

  The Children’s War

  “Gutsy. . . . Charlesworth’s novel holds its own in [a] distinguished crowd [of literature on World War II], in part because the characters are drawn with such precision. . . . Without describing a single battle, it captures the essence of the war and the wrecked lives of so many who survived it. . . . Beautiful and heartbreaking.” —Fort Worth Star-Telegram

  “A five-star read from start to finish, Charlesworth’s book ranks with the best of illustrious historical writers.” —Edge (Boston)

  “Charlesworth explores the lives of ordinary people and young children caught in a war they may or may not have believed in—a war from which they were powerless to escape for it followed and found them no matter where they tried to hide.” —Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

  “The Children’s War is that rare fiction that has the feel of actual life. Once I became engaged by the child Ilse’s perilous journey through the Nazi occupation, I was compelled to escort her to safety. This is a beautifully composed book of past terror that calls to us during our present international peril.” —Laura Shaine Cunningham, author of Sleeping Arrangements and Dreams of Rescue

  “[An] impeccably researched novel. . . . Charlesworth describes [the war] with singular power and imaginative reach. . . . This suspenseful and beautifully written work about the Second World War will inevitably give rise to reflections not only about the story it ostensibly recounts, but also about today’s children of war.” —The Globe and Mail (Toronto)

  “In this absorbing story of children who have to grow up too fast and parents who are less than perfect, Monique Charlesworth explores, with sensitivity and insight, the poignant drama of youth in a time of war.” —Eva Hoffman, author of Lost in Translation

  “[An] intensely moving story of . . . emotional awakening.” —The Daily Telegraph (London)

  “[Charlesworth] has a keen eye for detail and wide sympathies. She tells it as it really was. . . . Sometimes you get the feeling that a certain novel is one that its author has been preparing for years to write. This is such a one, and it is really very good indeed.” —The Scotsman

  “Stunning . . . tender, shocking and beautifully written, The Children’s War marks Monique Charlesworth as a major talent.” —Image (Dublin)

  “Charlesworth interweaves the two contrasting tales with a deft and eloquent pen. . . . She creates such a sense of intimacy with Ilse and Nicolai that by the last page we seem to have tasted something of the grief, chaos, terror, beauty and delight they experience themselves.” —The Tablet (London)

  “Children never write the histories of war, and yet it is their lives—so malleable, so vulnerable—that are often most changed by it. By shifting her gaze to a child’s-eye view, Monique Charlesworth has given us a completely original retelling of some of the familiar stories of World War II.” —Geraldine Brooks, author of Year of Wonders

  “A beautifully detailed story of World War II through the eyes of two teenagers growing up in the war years.” —The Daily Telegraph (Sydney)

  “A compelling, sometimes harrowing, and moving novel that deserves a wide readership.” —The Sydney Morning Herald

  “A haunting and lyrical novel of childhood stripped bare in the face of barbarous circumstance.” —The Age (Melbourne)

  ONE

  Marseilles, March 1939

  Ilse held her suitcase safe between her knees. There was a continuous loud crackle of announcements, which she could not understand. After an hour she moved to the corner seat beside the frosted glass window, for this gave an angled view of the Gare St. Charles. There she watched the constant flickering of single and multiple blurs against the yellow advertisement for Amer Picon. Any one of those blurs might open the door from the huge vault of the station and solidify into the person collecting her. This was distracting. Each time the door opened and it was not for her, she could not settle. In the guidebook, the tour of Marseilles occupied twelve pages, whereas Paris took up thirty-three. Marseilles was a mighty port, the oldest of the cities of France. Ilse shut her eyes and conjured up the map of the harbour which, facing west, was defended by its two great forts, Saint-Jean, to the north, and Saint-Nicolas, to the south. How happy her mother had been to find a guidebook in French in the tiny foreign-language section of the Wuppertal public library.

  Greeks from Asia Minor had landed here twenty-six centuries ago, dark men in galleys with long oars. Centuries passed. Another hour went by. The city of enthusiasms welcomed the revolution, sent five hundred volunteers to Paris. The soldiers from Marseilles electrified the crowd with their rendition of a new marching song. It became the hymn of the revolution and was renamed in their honour. The guidebook had printed all the verses. She sang them in her head: the day of glory has arrived. People came and were collected and were replaced. Yawning, she feared to sleep. Marseilles, she recited to herself, is the great western emporium for trade with the Levant, importer of grains, sugar, peanuts, copra and Indian corn. How hungry she was. The big boy with the scuffed shoes unwrapped and ate his picnic, shovelling bread into his mouth. The woman with two small children went away to the café and then returned with chocolate bars. But Ilse did not move. What if the Red Cross woman came and did not find her there? Her legs felt funny, tingling with pins and needles but also very soft. Anxiety blurred the din, sharpened the ceaseless turning and returning of the same thoughts. Her head jerked up as once more the door opened abruptly, letting in a swell of noise.

  It was a short woman with dark hair dyed blond. “Du bist Ilse,”1 she said. She was not German. Ilse stood, a little wobbly. Certainty, which should have brought relief, was worrying. How had she recognised her? The Red Cross woman beckoned to Ilse to come nearer. She smelt of sweat, her pink face thickly powdered. With a pencil, she trailed down her typed list and crossed off Ilse’s name, scoring it deeply. “Come! Hurry you along!” she said in an odd mixture of German and French.

  They hurried through to daylight and dust and wind. A huge flight of steps led past massive statues down to a boulevard. There was a hotel opposite and the sprawling city below, a patch of green to one side. Ilse noticed some young children playing and paused just for an instant but the woman (red woman, cross woman) hurried her on. They were to take a taxi. As she opened the door, the woman told the driver to go straight to the ship’s offices and to take the most direct way. She was disinclined to talk, which seemed to Ilse a great pity and an opportunity missed. Wriggling forward in the seat, the woman took off her jacket and eased her feet out of her shoes, as though she was on her own. How busy she must be, to need this moment so badly. Her feet were swollen with angry-looking bunions, the blouse ringed with sweat stains under the arms. She studied the list, which was typed on both sides of the piece of paper, as she bit at ragged cuticles. Her hands looked raw and used. Perhaps she went back and forth all day, shuttling unknown children on and off boats, to and from stations. Ilse hoped so. She badly wanted a companion.

  Jolted against the acrid odour of sweat and perfume on the turns, Ilse looked in vain
for traces of the great trading city. There was no sight of the world-famous Canebière (“broad boulevard at the heart of Marseilles where those touring Provence must choose to stay; site, in more turbulent times, of a permanent guillotine”). She saw unremarkable streets full of people and trolley cars and trees whipped by the wind. She tried to see the street names, for the French loved liberty, equality and fraternity. Every town in France boasted a street named after deputy Mirabeau, a Jean Jaurès or a Garibaldi. Her mother had explained that France honoured great men who fought for freedom, even the foreign ones. There could never be a Hitlerplatz here. This was why everyone loved France. Hard as she tried, squinting against the light, the streets reeled by much too fast for her to read the names. But for the dirt and the names of the shops, it might have been Düsseldorf. They turned into smaller and darker streets. There was still no sign of the sea but she had smelt it in the sharpness of the wind; she felt its nearness in the way the streets all hurried down towards the water.

  She cleared her throat and spoke in her careful French. “Can we go to Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde? From the peak, one can admire the view of the town and the Mediterranean.”

  “What?”

  “A church. It is called Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde.”

  “You want a church?” said the woman, giving her a curious, sidelong look.

  “There is a lovely panorama over the sea,” persisted Ilse. The steeple, with its gilded ten-metre-high Virgin, rose fifty metres above the hill. The guidebook said that it was the Virgin who kept the city safe.

  “Ah no, there is no time. It’s the opposite way,” she said.

  Ilse had the timetable of her long journey firmly fixed in her head. She knew that she had hours to spare. She looked at the woman and the way her fingers ripped at each other, and her turned-away face.

  They turned into a square and then the taxi drew up at a big cream building. The woman told the driver to wait. A queue spilled onto the street. The woman forced her way inside in the face of protests, tugging Ilse behind her. She cast one look at the room, which was packed with people, and pushed Ilse on, one hand in the small of her back, not unkindly but firmly.

  “These people are waiting for the boat to Oran. You’ll go from La Joliette. That’s the new port. You can walk to the dock from here. Go with the others. You understand?”

  Ilse nodded.

  She watched the short figure stumping out to disappear into the haze, the last link in the human chain that had moved her to this place. She knew that the woman was supposed to see her onto the boat. Sitting on the suitcase, Ilse was level with the legs shuffling towards the ticket office. She had been wrong to mind the smell of sweat. The Red Cross woman was the sort of person whose kindness was all used up in her work, leaving nothing over for conversation, no space into which other people might intrude. She would probably never talk to the children she took from place to place. Ilse thought with regret that she had had her opportunity to see Marseilles and she had sat in the station and not taken it. From Strasbourg to here, she had crossed the whole of France without even drinking a cup of the prized French coffee: for this she had nobody but her stupid self to blame. It was nearly three o’clock. French people took two or three hours for lunch. The tables at the charming seafront restaurants would still be full. Her mother had told her how to order food in a proper restaurant and had recommended the bouillabaisse. She would have undertaken any of the excursions her mother and she had planned, had they been offered. But Ilse was incapable of leaving this room, where she had been told to remain, to go to an unknown café, however near.

  Weeks ago, her mother had bought a berth in a four-person cabin in a cruiser, a white ship which would set sail from the harbour built by the Romans as the sun set. Big though the ship would be, it hardly seemed possible that all these people could get cabins. They looked hard-pressed and too poor for a luxury cruise. The woman at the guichet was bad-tempered and snapped at anyone who showed the slightest impatience with her. Every berth was taken. There was space on deck. She shrugged her shoulders. If they didn’t want this boat, then they could take the next. For you to choose, she said. But it would be just as crowded if not more so. One or two went away. Most just bought tickets.

  Her stomach rumbled. There would be dinner on the boat, perhaps at the captain’s table. Because it was such an expensive journey all the meals were included. Conversation would be animated and pleasant, and the captain would salute his guests in champagne, making toasts to every one of them. “A votre santé, Monsieur le Capitaine.” “Et à la vôtre!”

  The people waiting did not look as if they were the kind who dressed for dinner and she felt embarrassed in advance for them, for the awkwardness when they found out. Her good dress was at the top of the case, and she hoped it was not too crushed.

  At six o’clock a man in a blue official-looking jacket opened the double doors at the back of the room. The crowd pushed forward. A short walk from the back of the building lay the sea, which was not blue at all but nearly black. The wind blew hard and she held her coat together to keep warm. From the quay she saw that despite the pretty name, the Belle de France was not a cruise ship but a ferryboat. Streaks of rust lay down the funnels. There could be no sun loungers on this deck, no pursers in white uniforms. There was no first class. She had been told to find a steward who would have a passenger list and tell her where to go, but no such person seemed to exist.

  The decks were already full of people who had no berths, who lay or squatted on the floor and should have been unhappy, but had a kind of ease. Men in long gowns with dark faces and sandals were smoking strong-smelling cigarettes. These were probably Berbers, natives of Morocco. One man gave her a welcoming smile. Coffee-coloured, he was beautiful with eyes of a miraculous, deep blue. She was not to smile back. Her mother had been very clear about whom to talk to (almost nobody) and when (only when essential).

  It was stuffy down below, where a long snail of passengers trailed down corridors all carrying luggage and looking for their cabins. Ilse held her suitcase in her arms as a buffer before her and followed the others. People argued. Nobody knew where to go. The names of the passengers were handwritten on slips of paper pasted outside the cabin doors, so each door created another obstacle in this already crowded place. Ilse reminded herself that those like her, shuffling from corridor to corridor, sidestepping and stumbling with their luggage and fighting to see the scraps of paper, were the lucky ones. They would have a bed to sleep on. Mademoiselle Blumenthal’s berth was at the very end of the corridor a further floor down; there seemed no way that fresh air could penetrate these depths. She read a French name and two more German-sounding ones, a Madame Ginsberg and a Mademoiselle Tischler. The door was open: a nun sat on a bunk reading. A fat middle-aged lady wearing a lace blouse sat on the other side with suitcases piled beside her, with eyes closed. When Ilse knocked, she gave a start.

  “Bonjour, Mesdames,” she said quietly. A lucky chance had allocated her the top bunk. She lifted up her suitcase and heaved it up, then scrambled up after it. She had not had a space of her own for days. There was a little net on the side, which would be a good place to put her book, her own light switch and a hook for her coat. The blanket was folded in a neat way and perhaps the sheet was clean. She hung up her coat and lay down, and through her trembling legs and the heaviness of her head, which was now aching quite hard, she felt deep relief at being in the precise place which her mother had selected for her. With her eyes closed, she could almost see her mother’s face.

  “Are you Mademoiselle Blumenthal?” The fat German lady stood in the middle of the cabin, beaming and looking at her.

  Ilse said that she was.

  “Miriam Ginsberg, very pleased to meet you.”

  She stared too hard. Ilse wondered if she had a smut on her nose. She rubbed it, unobtrusively, checked that her hands were clean.

  “My dear. You won’t fall down, will you?”

  Ilse said that she was fine. She opened the case
, took out Winnetou and hid behind it.

  “What are you reading?”

  She held up the book politely.

  “Isn’t that a book for boys?”

  She shook her head, concentrated and read on. A tall, thin woman came in and the fat lady whispered something and then introduced her as her sister, Fräulein Tischler. The sister, who had a sweet smile, held out her hand. Ilse climbed down, did her curtsy, offered her hand and climbed back up again. The thin one whispered through one cupped hand to the fat one, something that Ilse had been taught was extremely rude and quite unnecessary when a person was not even looking in their direction. She turned on one side and read on, facing the wall. If she remained that way round and kept her head down, she could avoid seeing them.

  Old Shatterhand, feigning timidity, said he could not swim and asked how deep the water was. The Indians despised this. When kicked into it by Intshu-tshuna, he threw up his hands and dropped into the water with a show of terror. Once in the element he knew so well, everything changed. Like an otter he swam under the cold water, holding his breath, surfacing at the overhang on the opposite bank where there was just room for a man to lift up his face and breathe, and the chance that he would not be seen. It was a daring and a courageous plan.

  “Would you like to come and sit with us? It’s much more comfortable down here.”

  “No, thank you.”

  The Indians had believed his show of fear, despising him, and now they stood, amazed, scanning the waters and wondering where he had gone. With lungs full, Old Shatterhand slid down into the water again and swam with powerful strokes on to the distant bank. The water eddied and flowed, and the Indians stared. By now, surely, he was dead.

  “Are you hungry?”

  Ilse turned round. Miriam Ginsberg’s eyes were big and brown, her hair done in plaits coiled about her head, lipstick disappearing into the furrows round her mouth.

  “I’m going to eat in the restaurant later, Frau Ginsberg,” she said.