Free After the Train by Gloria Whelan Page A

heartbreaking, Peter. The trains and the wounded never stopped coming, the soldiers getting younger and the number of wounded increasing. Some of the returning soldiers told us stories of German losses that were never reported in the German papers.”
    I see Mother clench her hands. I feel terrible for her, but I must know. “Other trains came through the station while we were tending the soldiers. Those trains were boarded shut. They were like the trains that ship animals to a slaughterhouse. Sometimes we could hear pounding on the doors or the voices of people inside shouting. There were many guards with dogs around those trains, and at first we thought the cars were transporting Allied soldiers to prisoner-of-war camps. The German Red Cross distributed food packages sent from overseas to such soldiers, so I knew of those prisons.
    “Rumors began to circulate about the sealed trains. The official story was that there were young men on the trains who were on their way to a work camp, but it was whispered that the trains held Jews forced to go to a concentration camp at Dachau. At first I refused to believe such stories; still, the pleadings and the screams from the trains haunted my dreams.
    “There was no knowing when the trains with wounded soldiers would arrive in the station. The Allies had bombed the tracks all over Germany, and trains were often delayed, sometimes getting in late at night, so our Red Cross teams had to work around the clock. One night several trucks arrived at the station, pulling up just a few feet from me. Immediately soldiers with their guard dogs surrounded the trucks. When the doors were opened, hundreds of elderly people and women with little children spilled out and were herded by the soldiers toward a train that stood nearby. I saw at once the yellow stars sewn on the prisoners’ clothes and knew they were Jews. We had heard rumors, but we didn’t want to believe. Now the proof was right in front of me. There was a lot of confusion. The children were crying and some of them tried to run away. Peter, I wept. What had my country come to?”
    As Mother talks, I think of Herr Schafer’s parents. They would have been sent to their deaths on such trucks.
    Mother sees the look on my face. “I am almost finished now, Peter. At that moment the attention of the soldiers was diverted to a truck where men were making an attempt to break loose. Some of the soldiers headed in that direction, leaving fewer to guard the truck near me. The prisoners passed by me in the dark, so close Icould have reached out to touch them. When a woman holding a toddler in her arms bumped into me, I felt the warmth of the child against my chest and instinctively reached out my arms. ‘Take him,’ the woman begged. ‘For the love of God, save him.’” Mother takes my hands in hers and holds them tightly. “Peter, how could I not do as she asked?
    “There was only a second before the rest of the soldiers would return with their dogs and their guns. I was alone. The other Red Cross women were busy elsewhere. The remaining soldiers were occupied herding the people onto the train. No one was watching us. I tell you, Peter, to this day I don’t know why I took you. Had I been caught, it would have meant prison or worse. I don’t know whether it was my pity for your mother or my own wish to hold a child in my arms, or both. God will have to judge me, but I saved your life and that is what your mother wanted. You must never forget her sacrifice. To give you up must have been worse than death for her.
    “I had a basket of sheets and bandages to use with the wounded soldiers. That is where I hid you, just as his mother hid baby Moses in a basket in the bulrushes.”
    I know the story from Sunday school. The pharaoh of Egypt ordered all the sons of the Jews killed. When a son was born to one Jewish woman, she took him andhid him by a river. The baby was found by the pharaoh’s daughter, who saved the baby. The baby became