Page 46 of The Girl with a Secret
She’d had no idea just how far away the Isle of Man was until they’d taken a train up to Liverpool, first through flat green fields and then through gray-looking cities, the sky filled with smog; all the rail signs had been removed or covered up, so Rosa had never been able to tell where exactly they were. Outside some town or other, she’d found a newspaper discarded on a carriage seat, and she’d sank down in a daze as she’d read the headline.
We Will Never Surrender.
It was a summary of Churchill’s speech, after three hundred thousand British soldiers had been evacuated from Dunkirk, just the other day. Germany had invaded France three weeks earlier, as well as the Low Countries; Belgium and the Netherlands had already surrendered, and France was about to. Rosa had had no idea about any of it until that moment. She’d feared, as everyone had, but she hadn’t known. Now the knowledge weighed heavily inside her, lining her stomach with lead.
Hannah… Rachel… and Sophie’s family, little Heinrich.
They were all already or about to be under Hitler’s rule once again, suffering the same restrictions and persecutions as back in Germany… or maybe an even worse fate. Who could know what would happen, now that Hitler had expanded his evil empire? Rosa had thrust the paper away from her, her stomach churning, unable to bear reading any more of it. Her friends, she’d realized, were in a prison as surely as she was.
They’d taken another train from Liverpool to the city’s port, where they’d been jeered by locals as they were herded along the dock to the waiting ferry that would take them to the Isle of Man.
“Nazi lovers! Go home to your Führer, why don’t you, if you like him so much?” someone had shouted.
“You’re not wanted here!” a red-faced housewife had spat. “You never were! Not youoryour brats!”
A heavily pregnant internee, a toddler clasped in her arms, had angled her face away from the hateful woman, while Rosa had struggled to hold her own head high. She’d felt a maelstrom of emotions whirling within her: indignation, that she was being lumped together with genuine Nazis, and guilt, that maybe she belonged in that wretched category, after all. All of it, along with the awful taunts and shouts that dogged them all the way to the ferry, felt like too much to bear. She had held onto her mother’s arm, who walked with her head down, her shoulders slumped, like an old woman. She did not look a single person in the eye.
And now, after an interminable, three-hour ferry journey, this little outpost of humanity bobbed before them in the Irish Sea, its green hills sweeping down to the seafront. Home—but for how long?
“It’s not so bad, is it?” her mother murmured as they surveyed the promenade running along the beach of what they’d been told was the island’s main town, Douglas.
It was a lovely, sunny day, the air surprisingly balmy; in any other instance, Rosa might have enjoyed being out on the water that sparkled so brightly underneath a benevolent summer sun. Ahead of them, the gracious Victorian buildings that lined the town’s seafront were half-hidden behind hastily erected fences of barbed wire. The fences were everywhere she looked—along the seafront, up on the barren hilltops, even in the sea itself, foaming waves crashing over their bottom. Jagged and ferocious looking, they enclosed everything—and everyone—in. Rosa imagined that the island’s non-German residents were not appreciative of their home being turned into what amounted to an enormous prison.
Rosa did not have much time to think about it, however, as she, along with all the other women, was ushered off the ferry and herded toward a train that would take them to Port Erin, on the other side of the island, where the women would be interned. Rosa had learned during their journey that the men would be housed here in Douglas, and she hoped to find her father at some point, although considering there would be several thousand men on the island, she did not know when that would be, or if she would even be allowed to.
When they arrived in Port Erin, everything was in disarray, the sky starting to darken over the sea, with shreds of clouds smudged with violet as the sun sank toward the water. Rosa glimpsed several impressive Victorian hotels perched high above the seafront; they had yet to be encased by barbed wire, but perhaps it was only a matter of time.
As the women were shepherded toward a church hall near the station, it was soon abundantly clear that they had been brought here without adequate staff or provision. The women walked uncertainly, milling about as twilight fell; Rosa could see no one in charge and she couldn’t help but think that there was nothing to keep her from slipping away into the darkness, save that she had no idea where to go, and she was on a fairly small island. Where would she go?
She glanced around the crowded hall as women shifted and slumped where they stood, exhausted from their journey. Rosa and her mother had kept themselves mostly apart in the month they’d been in Holloway Prison, but now, as they waited, Rosa found herself sharing both bracing and commiserating smiles with some of the women she recognized. They were a motley bunch—some well-heeled, with hats and stoles and expensive-looking handbags, others still in the maid’s uniforms they must have first been arrested in. Some women were fearfully young, little more than teenagers, or pregnant, or holding babies intheir arms. Others were elderly and looked exhausted, sagging where they stood.
Rosa had discovered, in the last month, that very few of the women to be incarcerated actually were the Nazi supporters the British government feared. Many were Jews, and those who weren’t, were hostile or at worst indifferent to Hitler and his regime. The few genuine Nazis, however, were vocal enough to make everyone notice them—and shudder, even as they did their best to ignore the mere handful of Hitlerites.
Still, Rosa felt a surprising and needed sense of solidarity with them all as they stood in the hall, waiting to be told what would happen to them. Right now, they were all just hungry, tired, frightened, and longing for home.
An impressive-looking woman in her sixties, dressed entirely in tweed, bustled to the front of the hall. She was clearly in charge, and looked it, seemingly unfazed by the dozens of women crammed inside, and more milling around outside.
“Ladies!” she boomed, her voice carrying easily across the hall. “Welcome to the Isle of Man. I am Dame Joanna Cruickshank, and I am in charge of the Rushen Camp for Women Internees. You are very welcome here.”
Rosa had to swallow something close to a laugh at that.Were they?
“You will be given directions to your billet now,” Joanna Cruickshank continued. “And we will continue to work to maintain a semblance of order as we get this camp up and running to everyone’s satisfaction. You can all help with that! We want you to be as comfortable as possible during your stay.” The smile she beamed at them seemed genuine, and for the first time Rosa felt a flicker of—no, not hope, not as much as that, but something that lifted her spirits just a little from the weary funk they’d been in for nearly a month.
Joanna Cruickshank did not look at the women in front of her as if they were prisoners as well as potential traitors. She smiled at them as if they were human beings, as if theymattered. It was enough to make tears sting Rosa’s eyes.
A few minutes later, she and her mother were handed a slip of paper with an address and were told to make their way to a boarding house down the street facing the seafront, separate from the grand hotels on the cliffside. Women were walking in every direction, trying to find their billets, with no one to accompany or guard them. As Rosa walked down the street with her mother, she felt an exhilarating sense of freedom, even more than when she’d first arrived in London and had first felt the fear that had dogged her back in Germany and on theSt Louisslip away. Perhaps their internment wouldn’t be as awful as she’d feared.
The boarding house, when they finally found it, was small and homely, a terraced house facing the seafront, a “No Vacancy” sign in the window. They were welcomed in by the landlady, Mrs. Kneale, with what seemed like genuine warmth; she paid no mind to their German accents and remarked approvingly on Rosa’s nearly fluent English. She helped them with their few bags—her mother had, at least, been able to bring more clothes to Holloway—and then made them toast and tea in the kitchen while they sat at a scrubbed oak table, wilting with exhaustion.
“You must have had a terrible journey,” she clucked as she plied them with currant-studded buns. “Such a long way, and so much upheaval! I don’t mind saying as plain as day that I don’t agree with what they’re doing. You can’t put that many people behind bars, just on thechance, I say. And I expect you came to this country to get away from Hitler in the first place!” She puffed up, reminding Rosa of a hen ruffling its feathers, and making her smile a little.
“Yes, we did,” she confirmed quietly, putting an arm around her mother, who looked as if she might fall asleep right there at the table. “We’re Jewish, you see.”
Mrs. Kneale shook her head, her lips pursed. “Jewish, and imprisoned like you’re Hitler himself! It’s a crime, that is,” she stated staunchly. “There’s no other way of putting it. A crime.” And she poured them more tea.
Her kindness, after such an unsettling month of fear and uncertainty, was almost Rosa’s undoing. The tears that had stung her eyes during Dame Joanna’s welcome threatened to roll right down her cheeks. She managed to blink them back as she smiled at her new landlady.
“Perhaps we won’t be here too long,” Rosa said. “It can’t be that pleasant for you or your fellow residents, to have so many people thrust upon you.”
