1945, Holland, Belgium, France, and Switzerland

By Leo Cappèl

The older people just stood there, trying hard to smile.

“Write to us,” Dad said from behind the rope barrier.

“Of course I will.”

“And don’t forget to thank the people who are going to look after you,” added Mum.

“I won’t.”

I got a window seat. A window seat, but the platform is at the other side of the train, hidden beyond a corridor full of people. I had so much wanted to wave good-bye to Mum and Dad. See them just one more time.

Ten kids in each compartment. Skinny, war-worn kids with big name tags and little suitcases: 500 of us from Amsterdam, and on the way our train will pick up another 500 from Rotterdam. All selected by the Red Cross, all on our way to Switzerland.

The boy facing me adjusts his name tag. “Hendrik de Waal,” it says. “How old are you?” he asks.

“I’m 12. And you?”

“I’m 13. I’ll be 14 next month.”

He looks away again. One of the smaller kids, a girl, takes a book out of her suitcase. A book with large letters and pictures. She doesn’t turn the pages for a long time.

I notice a bronze plaque above the window: NO SMOKING.

NO SMOKING - GNIKOMS ON NO SMOKING - GNIKOMS ON

A woman with a blue armband pushes a trolley along the corridor. She opens our door. “Breakfast. A bread roll and a cup of milk.” Afterwards, Hendrik crumples up his paper cup and squeezes it into the ashtray under the narrow window. One of the girls throws her cup into the luggage net above her head and the last milk drips out into her hair. Nobody laughs.

Mum and Dad must be home again by now. Mum will be getting my young sister out off bed and my little brother. She’ll tell them to put the towels back on the rail and to brush their teeth. And Dad will be putting the plates on the table for breakfast. The plate with geese for my sister and the one with rabbits for my little brother. No plate for me.

NO SMOKING - GNIKOMS ON NO SMOKING - GNIKOMS ON

We don’t stop all that long in Rotterdam. Five hundred more kids. Now there are exactly 1,000 of us. It doesn’t feel real. Only our little compartment is real.

A woman with a Red Cross armband looks in. “You kids all right?”

I begin to think of them as armbands. Not people.

An orange armband pulls open the door: “Toilets at both ends of the carriage, but no running in the corridor.”

The train is moving very slowly. Because of land mines, Hendrik says. Later on there’ll be hills, real hills. I don’t think my sister would like that; she likes open country, where you can see the horizon. My sister never liked Amsterdam. Mum didn’t, either.

NO SMOKING - GNIKOMS ON NO SMOKING - GNIKOMS ON

An orange armband opens our door: “We’ll be at the Belgian border shortly. If you want to go to the toilet, you’d better go now. Once the customs officers are on the train you’re not allowed out off the compartment.” Nobody moves.

The train stops. A lot of men in uniforms, black, green and blue, move up and down the corridor. One comes in, a big bundle of papers in his hands. He counts us, writes something down, leaves again, slamming the door behind him.

Nothing happens.

One of the kids says: “I need to go to the toilet.”

Another says: “You can’t. We’re not allowed.”

“I know.” She sits there, knees tight together.

Again one of the men in uniform comes in to count us. Still 10 of us, what does he think?

Now I’m in a strange land. Shortly I’ll see those hills Dad talked about. Mum and Dad went to Belgium once, before the war. Dad….

NO SMOKING - GNIKOMS ON NO SMOKING - GNIKOMS ON

No smoking, it says. I smell the smoke from the engine, smoke and steam.

A blue armband comes in, brings our lunch. Sandwiches and a paper cup of soup. “You’re in Belgium now,” she says. “With a bit of luck we’ll get to France tonight.”

With a bit of luck? I doze off, glad of my window seat. The train jolts to a stop, starts again, waking me up. Outside are the hills. Big. Much bigger than I expected. Trees are growing all over them and enormous rocks are sticking up through the grass. Rocks as big as a house, bigger even.

Dad had told me real mountains are easily ten times as big as the hills in Belgium. Ten times? How could they stay up? And Dad had said that there is no flat country at all in Switzerland, only mountains. Mountains everywhere. Scary.

Nobody talks. Sometimes an armband walks through the corridor, but doesn’t look into our little compartment.

Dinner is a mash of potatoes and beans. On paper plates and with a kind of flat wooden spoon. Like an ice cream spoon, but three times as big. Is that how people in Belgium eat?

It begins to get dark outside. The train slowly zigzags between the hills. If I keep my head very close to the window I can see the two locomotives whenever the track curves to the right. Sometimes there is a bright red glow from the locomotives against the clouds of grey smoke.

The hills look black now. Are they bigger than before? The sound of the wheels changes. We’re going over a bridge. Big, big rocks down there. And deeper yet? What is there? Nothing, just empty darkness.

Sometime during the night I awake. The train has stopped, and customs officers are walking up and down the corridor. One opens our door, says something I can’t understand. French? Are we in France now? I fall asleep again.

The French hills are different, bigger, no more large rocks sticking up out of the ground. Breakfast is different, too. Tastes all right, though.

All the kids want to go to the toilet at the same time, so an orange armband tells us to go back to our own compartment and wait. “One compartment at a time,” he says. Ours has the seventh turn.

I fall asleep again, wake up for lunch. Nobody says anything. The only sound that never stops is the slow rhythmical thrumming of the wheels.

France is boring. The hills look like enormous dunes. The train is going very slowly again. More land mines? Sometimes we come past burned out houses, but mostly it just looks like ordinary farmland. What would Mum and Dad….

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Again it gets dark. Again I fall asleep, the kid beside me sagging against my shoulder.

Another border, customs officers, another large railway station. Basel. This must be Switzerland!

They take us to a large hall with a concrete floor and showers along one wall. More showers than I’ve ever seen before. An endless line of them, all close together. No partitions, just showers. We are told to undress. Boys, girls, everyone. We undress completely and wash ourselves in those showers. Nurses and men in white coats inspect every one of us. Most of us are allowed to get dressed again, some have their hair cut off first. For all to see. All their hair. Everywhere.

“Now line up under those large letters. Children whose surnames start with A under the sign A and so on. Hurry up, please.”

A lady with slightly grey hair looks at my name tag. She nods, points at herself, and says, “Frau Willy-Kern.” The Red Cross armband next to her nods, too. “Frau Willy-Kern will be your foster mother for as long as you live here in Switzerland. You go with her now. All the best.”

“Thank you,” I whisper.

Frau Willy-Kern takes my suitcase, gestures to follow her. We go back to the railway station. She has brought little bread rolls with ham and a lot of cheese. And she gives me real chocolate with nuts. I can’t understand a word of what she is saying, but somehow that doesn’t matter.

Her house is really large, white, with dark brown woodwork all over.

Frau Willy-Kern shows me a booklet like a small dictionary in three columns. Her own language: Dutch and how to pronounce the Dutch words.

“Are you hungry?” she tries to say.

“No, you don’t pronounce it like that.”

She clearly does not understand me.

“Do you have to go to the bathroom?” she reads off, again in Dutch.

“Yes, that’s how you say it,” I tell her. “We’ll be able to talk together yet.”

She shows me where the bathroom is. And my bedroom.

The house is a little way up a slope next to the village. And beyond the village stands a mountain. A beautiful mountain, glowing red in the light of the setting sun. So beautiful. I don’t know how far away the mountain is, but it feels like I can almost touch it.

Frau Willy-Kern says that mountain is called Säntis.

Säntis.

From my bed I can see the mountain. Guarding me.

Säntis, standing there like a sentinel.

Dutch-born Leo Cappèl is a sculptor, author, musician, and instrument fanatic. For 16 years he and his wife Karen lived aboard their 54-foot home-built ketch, making early musical instruments and playing music, but they have since moved “ashore” to a tiny island off the New Zealand coast.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Monday, April 16th, 2007 | Email This Post

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