Sussex, 1943

By Andrea Johnson

I heard my mother cry for the first time on a bright, crisp autumn day in the middle of the second world war. Until that day I had hardly believed such a thing possible.

My mother, Mary Russell - she added my father's surname to her own only due to the occasional whim, or when required by officialdom to surrender principle for the sake of practicality and sign herself "Mrs. Holmes" on some legal document or other - was formidable in her reserve.

I must hasten to add that she was always quick with a smile or a word of praise for a task well done. Love there was in abundance in our household, but expressions of affection were low-key more often than not and usually of a verbal rather than physical nature. She and my father frowned on more overt displays of emotion, and my brother and I, by preference of our inborn temperaments and our own upbringings, grew to emulate them.

On the day in question, I had been in my father's laboratory, conducting a chemistry experiment, when I remembered a book that might prove useful in my endeavors. I was on my way to fetch it when I passed my parents' bedroom and, by accident, overheard my mother's outpouring of grief and rage and helplessness.

"Damn it, Holmes! Is there nothing we can do to stop it? There must be millions of them, of us, of my people, discarded like... like... so much garbage. My cousin Edith Klein said she saw the bodies stacked like kindling in the concentration camp, before she somehow escaped. She said they gas them, and they burn their bodies, and the smoke from the crematoriums fill the skies... she said the smell of their putrified flesh fills her nostrils even now, months after she has made her way to England..."

I stiffened with horror and instinctively pressed my back against the wall, jamming my fist into my mouth to hold back my own involuntary cry of shock and disbelief. I did not understand what she was speaking of, not entirely, but I knew enough of the whispered stories coming out of Germany to understand that this meant Apocalypse, my mother's and my brother's and mine, and that of Jews of a dozen nations who were bound to us by ties of religion and culture and blood. Such would be our fate if the Third Reich won the war. Never before had I felt so acutely that I was a Jew and thus a target of irrational hatred.

I had met and spoken with some of the Jewish children who had been brought to safety in England before the war. My mother and I packed care packages of old clothing and toys and necessary toiletry items for some of the Jewish children who were housed at an old boarding school in a nearby town. I befriended one of the students, a German science prodigy named Leni, and the two of us wrote letters and met at the movie theater in town when one of us had a free day.

We wrote not of the war, but of the things of youth - each word we inscribed on the thin paper a promise that one day our daily lives would be filled not with rations and midnight visits to air raid shelters and separation from friends and loved ones, but with the dances and parties and dates with handsome young boys that we, like other girls our age, longed to enjoy.

Leni was beautiful - a lively, brown-eyed brunette with the lush figure in vogue in 1943. By contrast, I was shy and earnest, far too tall, too thin, and too awkward to be fashionable. Somehow I always seemed to be tripping over my feet or pushing my glasses up my nose just as a handsome young soldier walked across my path. I hated the way the thick, Coke bottle lenses magnified the strange, light gray eyes I had inherited from my father. But Leni was kind enough not to make note of my awkwardness and instead said she wished she were a blonde like me. We had become close friends in the year we had known one another.

Leni did not know what had happened to her own parents and brother, and so she envied me my family. When I complained that my little brother John Jacob - who was known to his friends, enemies and acquaintances as Jack - had been particularly beastly one day, she reproved me. When she wished her brother Carl were still there to tease her, I was chastened and knew that I truly did not want to contemplate life without my brother. Leni's parents had put her on a train at the Swiss border and promised to join her in a few months. She waited and waited for letters from them that never came. Had my pal Leni's family been gased, and burnt to ash?

I bit down fiercely on my tongue to keep silent.

"Russ, Russ..." I heard my father say gently.

"Dear God in Heaven," my mother said hoarsely. "Master of the Universe. I have studied His ways all the days of my life. And yet where is He now, Holmes?"

"I do not know," my father said gently. "But I am here."

For how long? I thought, and then instinctively shied away from the insidious thought of my father's inevitable decline and death. I did not want to think of it, but I had always known that I might lose my father long before I was ready to do so.. He was hale and hearty and had a suppleness of mind and body that belied his age but he was 82. What would become of us if we lost him?

"What use am I?" my mother cried aloud. "What have my studies contributed to this world, to the end of this war, when my people are dying? If it weren't for the children, I could do something. I could go to Germany, perhaps infiltrate the S.S., gain intelligence that would help aid the resistance there..."

I, too, wished I could do something, anything, that would stop the horror I knew would haunt my dreams that night. I found anger a more comfortable companion than the helplessness and horror that had first stricken me when I heard my mother's words and her sobs.

I admit that I was also hurt and more than a little angry that they didn't think me old enough to help them in their war efforts. I was sixteen, after all - a year older than my mother had been when my father had taken her on as his apprentice. Why else had they spent years training me in their methods, teaching me to decipher accents and deduce a man's occupation from the muscle development in his back and arms, to distinguish between the peaty soil found outside our snug stone cottage and that enriched by the bull in old Mr. Warner's pasture?

I was their student in chemistry and theology and detection from the time I could lisp a request for another chapter of my Uncle John's "Hound of the Baskervilles." My mother had smiled indulgently and read the famous story of my father's investigation on the Moors to me on the sly. My father did not approve of her corrupting me with Uncle's flights of fancy.

Though he closely resembled photographs of my father as a boy of 12 - tall, with sharp, angular features, dark hair and gray eyes - my brother Jack resembled my father more due to a certain annoying sardonicism and a talent approaching genius on the violin than he did in other ways. Detection and theology held little interest for him.

Physically, I suppose, I most resembled my mother except for the color of my eyes. One night, when I was about nine, I fell asleep in the basket chair before the fire. I felt my father's penetrating gaze upon me and heard him drawl, "Good God, Russell, look at her. She'll have half the stalwart sons of England at her feet. Lucky for her she took after you, eh?" My mother had snorted at this snortworthy statement.

'Me? Beautiful? Not bloody likely!' I thought, certain I had a face only a doting father could love, yet pleased that at least one man in the world had thought so. I pretended to remain asleep as my mother lifted me from the chair and prepared to carry me to bed.

She assured my father that it mattered not whom I resembled: brains and spirit were far more important than looks for a woman of the twentieth century, and those qualities I had in abundance from both of them.

I hid my smile in my mother's shoulder. They loved me, and respected my abilities. That was what mattered the most. They had always said both my brother and I were the longest and most successful case they had undertaken during their long and fruitful partnership.

Surely I, their firstborn, their intellectual heir, their daughter, their apprentice, was worthy of consideration if there was spying to be done now, when our family life and the security of our homeland were threatened?

"My dear, sweet wife," I heard my father say now with such tenderness that it embarrassed me. His low tone suggested intimacies I would rather not associate with my progenitors. "It may seem so now, I admit, but our efforts have not been for naught. Two Jews at least live now and will enrich the world because of you, and they will do so long after we are gone."

There was silence now, except for my mother's deep sigh.

"And because of you," my mother said at last. "Judith and Jack are here because of us both. Never think that I regret anything about our life together. It's just that I wish I could do more. I feel so damned helpless!"

It was years before I learned just how much my mother and father had done for the war effort. They taught spies about to enter the Third Reich the art of disguise and how to use their eyes, ears, and brains in new ways. Their students, in fact, gathered intelligence that helped turn the tide of the war.

My parents' money helped support dozens of Jewish refugee families who had escaped from the Third Reich. Some settled in England, like my friend Leni. Others sailed to a new life in America. Generations were born because of them. And yet, because they had given two hostages to fortune - my brother and I - they dared not enter into the fray directly.

Embarrassed by their nearly palpable emotional intimacy, I inched away from the wall then, thinking to creep away unnoticed. But I should have known my father's hearing too keen to allow for that.

"Judith?" he called out.

"What?" my mother said. "Bloody hell! I didn't want the children to know. Judith, come in here."

I winced as I obeyed her command, uncertain what kind of reception I would receive. My parents were not necessarily averse to my eavesdropping as long as it was not upon their conversations. I had intruded upon a very private moment.

"Mother, Father, I'm sorry," I stammered. "There was a book I wanted and I didn't realize you were here."

My mother's eyes were swollen with tears and strands of her reddish blonde hair had escaped her old-fashioned chignon and were sticking to her wet face. I was not used to seeing my normally formidable, unflappable mother in such a vulnerable state.

"How much did you hear?" my mother demanded. I prepared to dissemble, and then gave up in the face of her unrelenting gaze.

"Do they really... burn... them?" I whispered.

I intended to sound very brave, as I thought they would want me to, but my voice quavered. I was mortified when I had to bite my lower lip to keep it from trembling. My father's hooded gaze took in everything. I could never hope to hide anything my unruly emotions, most especially my crush on Hector, the postman's son who gave me my first kiss the month before he enlisted; the white lie I told about going to the library when I really intended to meet Hector in town to say goodbye; the birthday present for my father I had secreted under the false bottom in my trunk from those all-seeing gray eyes. It was most annoying.

But then my father shocked me by wordlessly holding out his arms to me. I thought about being brave and worldly and grown-up for a moment. Then I decided that I would really rather be eight years old again, to go back to a time when he could make everything all right even though I knew that comfort to be nothing but an illusion. I walked into the shelter of his embrace and let him stroke my hair.

"If I could remake the world for you, my darling girl, I would," my father murmured into my ear.

I wallowed in him for a moment, and then stepped back.

"You taught me to see the world as it is," I told him, my voice steadier now. "And to fight evil wherever it is found. There is still more good than evil. There has to be."

My father kissed me on the cheek.

"When I look at you, and your brother, and your mother," he said. "I know that to be true. It will be all right, child."

"I want to help you to make it right," I told him, straightening my shoulders as I faced my parents. "I'm not a child. I want to do something, not just wait here to be slaughtered."

My father smiled at my mother.

"Maybe we can find a little something for you to do," he said enigmatically.

"Holmes, no," my mother said. "Don't encourage her."

I glared at her. I couldn't help it. I didn't want to be helpless any more than she did.

"What were you doing when you were just a few years older than me?" I demanded, with all the arrogance of an obnoxious adolescent.

My mother's eyes flashed at my affrontery. My father laughed.

"There you are, Russ. Here stands our life's work. A true daughter of Yisroel. But I promise you whatever I find for her will not be dangerous. No, daughter of my age, protestations are useless. You must have a few more years before we permit you to risk your skin. But there's no reason you can't put your intellect to work for King and country. I had a notion to formulate a new code that might be of use to our fine men in uniform. Shall you join me, Judith?"

"Can we start now, Father?" I asked eagerly.

My father laughed. The two of us were secreted in his laboratory, bent over a Sanskrit dictionary, until the wee hours of the morning.

But that night I had the Dream for the first time.

I imagined myself standing in a line of young women wearing a yellow Star of David sewn onto a shabby coat, standing outside a large warehouse like building. Inside, I knew, though I could say nothing to those who waited with me, was a gas chamber. What must they tell those women to get them to walk inside without starting a mass panic?

I thought this clinically, even in the midst of the dream.

What could one sixteen-year-old Jewish English girl, even a girl who was the daughter of Sherlock Holmes and Mary Russell, do against an entire country capable of industrializing murder?

I woke up screaming and this time in my mother's arms.

"Mother, the Dream, the Dream," I stammered.

"I know, Judith," she whispered as she rocked me back and forth. "I do know better than you think I do."