Kindertransport by Olga Levy Drucker

Author:Olga Levy Drucker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co. (BYR)
Published: 2011-03-24T04:00:00+00:00

10

I ALWAYS KNEW I WAS JEWISH

The mood at boarding school was gloomy after our return. For one thing, a lot of the girls hadn’t come back. Some of the teachers stayed away, too. Even June was not there anymore.

“It’s because of the war,” we were told. “Now that our men are off to fight, women are needed on the home front. And anyway, maybe they can’t afford boarding school anymore right now.”

Everywhere there were patriotic posters along street walls and on public buildings. “Keep the Home Fires Burning” read one. Another showed women, looking after their households and families. But many of them were now needed in the factories to replace the men who were fighting in the war. I assumed that that, too, was meant by “home fires.”

At one of our daily prayer meetings, Miss Carter told us proudly that June had joined the ATS, or Auxiliary Territorial Service. I imagined her in her smart uniform, with her little hat set rakishly to one side of her head and her thick curly hair piled up under it. Besides the young men, there were a lot of army, navy, and air force women around now, too. I wished I was old enough to be one of them.

Even though there were only a few of us left now, our lessons went on as before. Miss Carter filled in for missing teachers. In a way it was better for us, because we got a lot more attention.

Our prayer meetings were kept going, too. We sang hymns for “those in peril on the seas” and prayed to Jesus for all the brave “boys” who were fighting the evil dictator. They were not all on the seas. Planes began to fly overhead in squadrons of three or more. They flew in formation, much like the flocks of geese I had seen going south for winter. We soon learned to recognize the heavy bombers or the little one-engined fighter planes called Spitfires. Of course, jet planes were unknown at that time.

One of the less pleasant consequences of war was the way our dinner plates looked. There was much less meat on them these days, more potatoes and vegetables. We all gave up sugar in our tea, “for the war effort.”

One day an air-raid warden handed each of us a funny-looking shoulder bag. They contained gas masks.

“Open up your bag and take out the mask,” he said. A strange contraption that looked like a black pig’s snout with an oblong window for eyes stared up at me. The black snout had little air holes in it. I was torn between a giggle and the willies. I pulled the object out of its bag and held my breath.

“Put it over your face, like this. The strap goes round the back of your head. Don’t worry, just go on breathing,” said our instructor.

That’s easy for you to say, I thought. The smell of rubber made me gag. But after a few more practices we all got the hang of it.

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