The Night Crossing by Karen Ackerman Read Free Book Online

1
    O ne night, just after Clara and her older sister, Marta, were put to bed, Clara overheard her parents talking in the sitting room.
    “We must leave Austria now, before it is too late,” her father murmured.
    Softly her mother replied, “But Innsbruck is our home, Albert.”
    It was 1938, and not too manymonths earlier, there had been laughter, conversation, joking, and singing in their home. But the family piano had been sold to buy firewood, and now the only sounds Clara heard at night were the whispers of fearful voices.
    “I won’t let us be rounded up and sent to some prison that the Nazis call a camp,” her father continued. “Jews get branded like animals, the rumors say. I will not allow it to happen!”
    “But what will we do?”
    “I’ll make arrangements tomorrow,” Clara’s father said. “Austrian money can still buy a way for us to escape Hitler and his Nazis.”
    Though Clara didn’t know quite what her father meant, she knew that since Adolf Hitler and the Nazis hadinvaded Austria from Germany, terrible things had been happening to the Austrian people, especially Jewish Austrians.
    As she lay in bed, Clara held Gittel and Lotte, her two favorite dolls, tightly. At last she fell asleep.
       “J UDEN! J UDEN !” a young voice screamed, joined by another voice, and then another, until the voices all came together in one thunderous roar behind them. Marta held Clara’s hand so tightly that Clara nearly cried as the two sisters ran across the rough cobblestones of the street that led to their home.
    They flew past the Duessel bakery, boarded up and painted with Nazi swastikas, and they jumped over the trash that lay on the sidewalks of what had once been an orderly street of houses. Now the homes all had broken windows and looked empty even if they weren’t. The Jewish families inside often lived in back rooms and basements, hoping to make a quick escape if the Nazi police appeared at their front doors.

    Clara didn’t have to turn around and look to know that among the group that was chasing them was her best friend, Hilde.
    Marta pulled Clara up the front steps into the doorway of the building where they lived, and the other children scattered. The girls were safely inside, at least until school the next day.

    C LARA WOKE SUDDENLY to Marta’s grumbling.
    “You kicked me again,” Marta complained, turning on her side to go back to sleep. “You were dreaming.”
    The real chase had happened more than a week earlier, but Clara still dreamed of it. She got up from the bed with her two dolls in her arms.
    “Mama?” Clara whispered as she entered the shadows of the sitting-room doorway.
    Her mother looked up, startled, from where she sat in the candlelight because there was no money to pay for electricity. Lately, any little noise in the house alarmed Mama.
    “Another nightmare?” she asked softly. Clara nodded. “Come,
maydel,”
she said, and opened her arms to her younger daughter. Clara climbed onto her lap, and Mama pulled the edges of her shawl around them both.
    “Will they take us away?” Clara asked.
    Mama held her tightly. “I won’t let anyone take you away—ever—so you mustn’t worry.”
    “But they chased us, and the Nazis took Mr. Duessel. I saw them, Mama. They broke the windows of the bakery and went in and dragged him out to the street,” Clara whispered. “They laughed when Mrs. Duessel begged them not to take him away, and one of them spit on her as they drove off.”
    Her mother did not answer. There was nothing to say, because it was all true. The Duessel kosher bakery had been raided, and Mr. Duessel arrested for continuing to bake and sell kosher goods to Jews. The bakery had been boarded up, and Mrs. Duessel had gone to live with her daughter and son-in-law. No one knew where Mr. Duessel was now.

    “If we’re very careful, we’ll all be fine,” Mama finally replied. “Now go back to bed, Clara.”
    But as she slipped from her mother’s lap and