Page 10 of The Girl with a Secret
“Don’t mollycoddle me, Rosa, I’m not your child,” she snapped. “You might feel guilty for the way you’ve treated me over the years, but you can’t make up for that now.”
Rosa had to bite her tongue.The way she’d treated her? She could have bandied that accusation right back at her! The only thing Rosa had ever done to her mother was hide a horrible truth from her, for herownsake. It was something she’d discovered her mother would never forgive.
“Leave me,” her mother commanded, rolling over on her bed so her back was to her daughter. “I don’t want your company anymore.”
You never did, Rosa thought with a mixture of sorrow and anger, but she didn’t say the accusatory words. Instead, she slipped out of the cabin, taking a deep breath to steady herself. It annoyed her that her mother’s barbed comments could still hurt her so deeply. After years of them, she surely should be immune, but, to her shame, she wasn’t. Her only defense was to act as if she didn’t care, but right now she couldn’t summon the strength.
She started toward the social hall, thinking she’d find her friends, only to realize she felt too dispirited to jolly them along as she’d so often tried to do, promising they’d be toasting each other with cocktails at the Inglaterra Hotel in Havana in just a few days’ time. Well, they wouldn’t, she didn’t believe it for a minute, and she couldn’t pretend any longer. She didn’t even want to.
They weren’tevergoing to get off this ship, Rosa thought despondently as she slipped out onto A deck and gazed out at the placid harbor, fishing boats bobbing alongside several cruise liners—three ships had come and gone since theSt Louis’arrival, their passengers disembarking without any trouble. How could anyone believe that it was all going to turn out all right for them?
Just then, the ship’s horn gave a single, long blast—the traditional signal for “man overboard.” Rosa’s heart lurched.What had happened now? Had someone else fallen—or jumped? She shuddered to think.
She saw a commotion happening much farther down the ship’s deck; people were shouting and gesticulating, and a police launch was cutting through the water far below, churning up white-flecked foam on either side of the little boat. Rosa started hurrying down the deck, only to nearly smack into Hannah halfway along. She stumbled backward, one hand pressed to her chest.
“Rosa, there you are!” Hannah’s blond hair, usually pulled back into a neat bun, was half-falling down about her face, which was flushed from exertion, her voice breathless as she pulled Lotte behind her, the young girl pale-faced and wide-eyed. “The most dreadful thing has happened,” she exclaimed, drawing Lotte closer to her side, her arm around the girl’s thin shoulders. “Too terrible for words!”
“Did someone fall overboard?” Rosa’s stomach dropped at the thought. There had already been a death and a suicide on board. Another casualty would surely plunge everyone into even deeper despair.
“It’s Sophie’s father!” Hannah told her, her voice dropping to a hushed whisper. “He’s gone and thrown himself off the ship. Cut his wrists first as well, the poor man. He was absolutely distraught. I saw it all happen myself—they’re just fishing him out of the water now.”
“What…” The word escaped Rosa in a breath. She’d known Sophie’s father was emotionally fragile, but she hadn’t realized just how on the brink he must have been, to do something so drastic, especially with his own children on board. “Is he… is he…?” She couldn’t make herself say it.
“He’s alive,” Hannah replied, “and a member of the crew said they’re going to take him to hospital in Havana.” Her face creased with worry as she hugged Lotte to her. “Poor Sophieis beside herself. And little Heinrich! How has it come to this, that a man thinks he’s better off dead than on this wretched ship?” Hannah clutched Lotte more tightly, and Rosa saw the anguished question in her friend’s eyes that she didn’t want to voice aloud.
What if theywerebetter off dead than on the doomedSt Louis?
CHAPTER 6
FRIDAY, JUNE 2, 1939
Rosa had thought that the bleak mood on the ship couldn’t get any worse, but after Sophie’s father’s attempted suicide, it darkened even more dramatically, as the fleeting holiday mood vanished, replaced by thinly concealed terror. Members of the crew were put on suicide watch, patrolling the corridors each night to make sure no one else flung themselves off the ship. Police launches cruised through the water, surrounding the ship, and leaving the passengers feeling all the more as if they were in a floating prison, with no escape—and no news. Sophie’s father, at least, was in stable condition in a hospital in Havana, and would be returned to the ship as soon as possible.
“Although what for, I don’t know,” Sophie remarked bleakly to Rosa, when she’d told her the news. “If we aren’t allowed in Cuba, where will we go?”
On Friday morning, news came at last, and it was even more unwelcome. The Cuban President, Federico Brú, had ordered theSt Louisto depart from Cuban waters. They might not know where they were going, Rosa thought, but it seemed they still had to leave.
When she asked her father about it while they had coffee in the social hall, he was both encouraging and dismissive.“Captain Schroeder says he cannot possibly heave anchor until tomorrow night. We still have some time before Brú’s command must come to pass.”
“Time?” Rosa eyed her father uneasily. His normally immaculately brillantined hair was disheveled, a stray lock flopping greasily onto his forehead. His shirt was wrinkled, and there was a stain on the cuff of his smoking jacket. For a man who prided himself on his appearance, he looked unsettlingly unkempt. He reached for the coffee pot and sloshed some into his cup, not meeting her gaze. “Time for what, Father?” she pressed. He didn’t reply, and she stated flatly, “You haven’t been able to reach anyone of note, have you?”
“It is not for lack of trying,” her father replied with an edge. “The passenger committee has cabled many dignitaries and politicians in the United States, as well as various American and European newspapers, to get the media’s attention, but they don’t seem very interested in a thousand homeless Jews, as it turns out. The Joint Distribution Committee has become involved, as well—they’ve been attempting to broker a deal with the Dominican Republic, but they want half a million dollars just to take us!” His voice quivered in indignation. “It’s an outrage! As if we are beggars, caps in hand, when every person on this ship has paid for passage as well as a visa…” He trailed off, for he’d already told Rosa himself that the visas were worthless, handed out by a Cuban government worker on the take, with no real authority. “There has been talk of the ship going to Miami or Washington, but…” He let out an aggrieved sigh. “Considering how much money the Dominican Republic wants, I’m afraid it seems like so much wishful thinking at the moment.”
Rosa knew the Joint Distribution Committee was a Jewish charity in the States that had been trying, quite successfully, to get refugees out of Europe. But if even they couldn’t manage to save theSt Louis, then who could?
And what would happen if no one did? They couldn’t cruise the Caribbean seas forever, with no port in view. They would run out of food and fresh water, as well as fuel. Logically, the ship had to go somewhere, butwhere?
Rosa knew the answer before she’d even made herself ask the question. The place—theonlyplace—they could go to was Germany. Sent back to the country where they’d been reviled and excluded and even worse… the thought was utterly horrifying. Just imagining it made her stomach hollow out and her heart start to race. Their house by the Wannsee had already been taken from them, given to an SS officer her father had once treated, a turn of events which had precipitated his decision to emigrate. They’d sold all their possessions—the antiques and the Art Deco furniture and art the Reich found degenerate—and her father had moved as much of his money as he could out of the country, which in the end had not been nearly enough. But they had nothing back in Germany.Nothing.
And that was assuming they wouldn’t first be arrested, or worse…
“Your little friend’s mother has been sending her fair share of cables,” her father remarked acidly as he took a sip of coffee. “She’s in the telegram office every day, sending something or other to someone important, or so it seems.”
“Sophie’s father has some connections in the States,” Rosa replied, keeping her tone deliberately mild. “Through the legal profession. I’m sure they want to make good use of them.”
“I suppose so,” her father replied with an ill-disguised harrumph, his handsome face screwed up in a momentary scowl. He obviously didn’t like the idea that someone might be better connected than he was, and yet that was, Rosa knew, the unfortunate truth of the matter.
“It’s too bad all your connections are back in Germany,” she couldn’t keep from saying, her voice possessing its own touch of acid. “Not very useful now, are they?”
