Someone Waiting for You is the second of two novels comprising Jerome Ostrov’s World War II saga, When Country Calls. The story begins in August 1936 as Jonathan Sternbloom and his best friend Charlie Brody, both recent graduates of London’s prestigious St Paul’s School, prepare to disembark from the RMS Queen Mary. They are headed for Cornell University where they have received scholarships to play soccer. Originally from Hamburg Germany, Jonathan has already experienced many of life’s highs and lows, especially the brutal death of his mother at the hands of Nazi Brownshirt thugs. As Europe trembles in the face of an increasingly bellicose Hitler, Jonathan and Charlie find opportunity in an America which, despite its ongoing struggle with anti-Semitism, is still a marvel of acceptance.
When war breaks out, Jonathan, now a medical student, enlists. From that point, the story follows Jonathan’s medical unit through the great theaters of the war in Europe. As the war grinds on and the world begins to learn of Hitler’s unimaginable atrocities, the reader is reintroduced to Jonathan’s extended family in war ravaged Poland and to Charlie’s relatives in occupied Denmark. Through tragic loss and uncommon determination, the family stories begin to converge until they reach their unexpected conclusion in yet another country of opportunity, Israel.
Prologue
Aboard the RMS Queen Mary
August 1936
The two new arrivals from England leaned over the railing of the RMS Queen Mary as it began its gradual approach into Upper New York Bay and the nearby Cunard Piers. As the great ship glided past Bedloe’s Island, the eyes of the two locked on to the Statue of Liberty. They followed her right arm, raised 42 feet in the air.
There, held by her great hand, was the torch of liberty with its message of welcome and assurance. The two young passengers had brought with them the immortal words from Emma Lazarus’ ode to the statue, The Great Colossus. They had promised their parents they would recite Lazarus’ timeless composition as they sailed by the great lady, but they had no idea how deeply it would affect them. Under the bright azure sky, they began devoutly, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.” As they reached the final words of the poem, the stanza that for half a century had given expression to all that the statue represented, their youthful voices cracked. With a teary-eyed effort, they strained to complete the remaining stanza of their short recitation: “Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
The moment lingered, but soon they recovered their composure. They again felt the elation that comes with being 17 and at the cusp of a great adventure. But they were also feeling homesick for the parents they had left behind in England.
It was August 1936. In Nazi Germany, dark clouds hovered alarmingly over the country’s 500,000 powerless Jews as the Reichstag proclaimed one law after another aimed at devastating the country’s Semitic population. Most telling were the two laws passed the previous September at the Nazi Party’s annual rally. The first of these so-called Nuremburg Laws, the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, declared that Jews and Germans could no longer marry. The second, the Reich Citizenship Law, pronounced with even greater ominousness that only persons of German or related blood were eligible to be citizens. Those who failed to qualify—the Jews and later the Romani—were considered wards of the state, lacking all rights and helplessly vulnerable to an increasingly deranged Adolph Hitler and his spineless toadies.
For most English 17-year-olds, the events taking place in Germany might only have been of passing interest. But, each boy’s family had a strong connection to Germany and its threatened Jewish community. Despite their elation over what lay ahead, this connection also occupied their thoughts and weighed on them.
For the winsome Jonathan Sternbloom, the memory of that April day in 1933 remained in his consciousness. His father, Anton, and he were at the Hamburg train station saying goodbye to his mother, Hannah, as she boarded the train headed for Poland. It was a journey that would take her through a virulently anti-Semitic Germany and a Poland deeply rooted in intolerance toward its Jews. The parting had been tearful, and both father and son had been filled with foreboding as they waved goodbye.
Anton had been an esteemed professor of anthropology at the University of Hamburg. He had held on to his position as long as he could, but the writing was on the wall. In one of the earliest Nazi proclamations, Hitler had served notice that Jews would no longer be welcome to occupy academic positions. After much deliberation, Anton had chosen to leave his position and accept another post offered by a colleague at University College London. The decision to leave for England had been wrenching for Anton, made even more so when Hannah had insisted on taking the train across the Polish border to Danzig before continuing to England. In Danzig, Hannah hoped to see her family, especially her brother, Abraham Herskovitz, and her ailing mother, Sofia. But Hannah’s journey had gone disastrously awry.
How far Jonathan had come since that bleak April day. After his father and he left Hannah, they boarded the Hamburg Sea Queen, a steamer bound for London. Jonathan had been consumed with anxiety, having left school midterm and having set sail to England without his mother. With a display of resilience well beyond his years, he had barely complained. Indeed, he had used his time on board ship to make friends with the red-headed Charlie Brody, who now stood beside him on the upper deck of the Queen Mary.
Prior to that earlier voyage, Charlie and his mother, Saundra, had been visiting Saundra’s sister, Agatha Kreisler, in the little town of Geesthacht, about 35 kilometers from Hamburg. Their visit had coincided with Passover. Together, the two sisters had reprised some of their favorite childhood Passover dishes and had even put on a respectable seder for Agatha’s appreciative German husband, Lorenz, and their two assimilated children, Sarah and Werner.
While in Geesthacht, Saundra had become aware of the anti-Jewish sentiment that was coursing through Germany and increasing by the day. Even so, she had been shocked when, one day, she and Charlie witnessed a parade of the Sturmabteilung, Hitler’s brown-shirted paramilitary, and listened to the anti-Semitic slogans hurled by the parade’s giddy onlookers. When it came time for Charlie and her to return to England, Saundra had been filled with concern for her sister.
She had tried to persuade Agatha to return to England along with her family. Her entreaties had borne little fruit, especially after Agatha broached the matter with her husband. Lorenz was a proud German and a war hero. He could not imagine his family, Jewish or otherwise, being swallowed by the anti-Semitic hysteria that was overtaking Germany. He, of course, had been wrong. Fortunately, luck had been on his side and he had found a job in Denmark. Shortly afterward, he had arranged for Agatha and their two children to join him in Copenhagen.
A few days after Saundra’s talk with her sister, Charlie and she had boarded the Hamburg Sea Queen for the trip back to London. There, Charlie met Jonathan. Charlie had suggested that Jonathan and he explore the ship, an invitation welcomed by the preternaturally curious Jonathan. But more importantly, the prospect of exploration had given Jonathan a chance to escape from his thoughts. He missed his mother and knew they should have heard from her. His uncommon intellect usually enabled him to reason things out, but he could not understand what was happening. Why hadn’t they heard from Uncle Abraham and Aunt Mittel? Weren’t they supposed to meet his mother in Danzig and take her to see Grandma Sofia? If something was wrong, were his Herskovitz cousins, Janós and Irena, safe? The questions kept pressing in on him, and the chance to explore was a great relief.The boys had enjoyed one another so much that Charlie insisted Anton meet Saundra. When they did, Charlie went one step further and suggested that Anton and Jonathan move to their neighborhood in the Golders Green section of London. Anton had tried to avoid conversation. He had not heard from Hannah.
Distraught over the lack of contact, the last thing he had wanted was to become involved with strangers. But Saundra had taken up the chant, noting that her sister-in-law Vanessa, who lived nearby, rented out rooms and currently was without tenants. Saundra had wired her husband, Giles, who, with their other son, Randy, had remained home in Golders Green. Giles was deputy curator of the London Museum, an unusual position for a Jew, even one as accomplished as Giles. Both Giles and Vanessa had been at the wharf to greet Anton and Jonathan when the steamer arrived in London.
Even as Jonathan marveled at the fast approaching New York skyline and breathed in the smells of the city, his thoughts shifted from Hannah to Vanessa, whom he had also come to think of as a mother. Widowed since her husband fell in battle during one of the early episodes of the Great War, Vanessa’s life had taken on a colorless routine as she stood on the wharf awaiting the passengers from Germany. In addition to renting out rooms, she worked in a small dress shop and designed women’s wear. Her free time was divided between doting on her brother’s children and doing volunteer work for the Jewish war veterans.
Vanessa had been eager to meet Anton and Jonathan. Renting out two rooms would help greatly with her expenses. But as she was introduced to father and son, she began to reconsider. She felt daunted at the prospect of taking in two boarders who were in great emotional distress over Hannah’s unexplained absence. Saundra had reassured her sister-in-law that the entire family would help, so Vanessa had taken in the two new refugees from Germany. She could never have imagined what lay ahead. The days spent without hearing from Hannah had turned into weeks and then months. During this time, Vanessa had ungrudgingly looked after her two boarders. With a newly-discovered maternal instinct, she had tended to Jonathan as he faced the trials of being Jewish in a new country and in a new school. Without artifice, she had also worked earnestly to make life as easy for Anton as his long hours at the university and his tormented thoughts would permit. Every night she set a place for her downcast boarder, often accompanied by his favorite whiskey, no matter the hour of his arrival.
When a prank gone awry had brought Charlie and Jonathan before the local magistrate, Vanessa had stepped in to help. The magistrate had been lenient, requiring only that the boys perform community service in the form of aiding elderly war widow Hilde Zorrofsky, the victim of their prank, with the maintenance of her house. Vanessa had pitched in with many of the more difficult household and cleaning chores.
In a strange twist, the boys had become close to Mrs. Zorrofsky. They were captivated by her stories of the Polish shtetl where she had lived as a girl and they were attracted to her Jewish past. Soon they insisted on attending Shabbos dinner at Mrs. Zorrofsky’s house, with their parents and Vanessa in tow. Over time, the dinners kindled a spark of Jewish awareness in Anton and he, too, began to fall under Mrs. Zorrofsky’s spell. With each passing Sabbath, Anton also began to take notice of Vanessa and appreciate all she had done during his loneliness. His appreciation had turned to affection and she had reciprocated. After receiving official confirmation that Hannah had been the victim of a demented lieutenant in the Sturmabteilung, Anton had felt great sadness but also the relief that comes with closure. Soon after, Vanessa and he were married.
Mrs. Zorrofsky had died, leaving her estate in trust for Jonathan and Charlie. Indirectly, she had also bestowed on Jonathan another legacy. Her recollections of Jewish life in the shtetl had stimulated Jonathan’s imagination and had triggered many questions about Judaism that Anton, though moved, had not been able to answer.
After consulting his new friend, Rabbi Professor Stanley Marcus, Anton had provided Jonathan with a gift his son would long treasure. Drawing on Marcus’ contacts, Anton had arranged for Jonathan to spend time working on a kibbutz in Palestine the following summer. It was there that Jonathan had acquired his deep love for the land. It was also there that he had met and become hopelessly infatuated with fellow summer kibbutz worker Kayla Lewis of Cape Town, South Africa. They had separated after the summer and since then had been relegated to nurturing their aching love by mail.
As fate would have it, it was Kayla who had brought the two travelers to this far-away destination with its many uncertainties. Jonathan and Charlie had remained tethered, a relationship that had played out at the esteemed St Paul’s school in London. There, they had excelled in the classroom and on the football field. Jonathan had been the star, with Charlie close behind. Both had been bound for Oxford. But the previous summer, Heath Winston, master of sport at St Paul’s, had introduced Jonathan to Todd Wentworth, a former classmate of Winston’s and now a classics instructor and assistant soccer coach at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Wentworth was spending time with his family and also recruiting for the university’s soccer team. He had observed Jonathan play football and, taken by his talented play, had offered him a scholarship to compete at Cornell. Wentworth had made the same offer to Charlie, if only to ensure Jonathan’s acceptance.
Even with Cornell paying for tuition and board and Mrs. Zorrofsky’s bequest underwriting the rest, Jonathan had hesitated. He knew that one does not readily throw away the chance of becoming an Oxonian, an Oxford Man. However, Jonathan had suddenly changed his mind. Kayla had recently informed him that she would be going to school at McGill University in Montreal, where one of her brothers was then a student. Jonathan had asked Wentworth how far Cornell was from McGill. When Wentworth responded that Montreal was a mere five-hour train ride from Ithaca, the deal was closed. Ultimately, both Charlie and he agreed to journey across the Atlantic to the distant upstate New York town of Ithaca. With the ship’s loudspeaker blaring the announcement to disembark, their adventure would soon begin.
Order
