The Last Flight of Poxl West by Daniel Torday

written the national bank in Prague and I have heard nothing back but we can no longer maintain our funds and we can no longer make purchases and we can no longer liquidate our assets.
    I have not heard from Johann Schmidt and I learned only the other day he has left for New York and could not have provided you with leather work so you cannot have work from him. What are you doing to keep aloft, my son? Please write to tell us. It pains me that we did not say good-bye to each other before your departure, but your mother explained you’d had a fight over money and so you left. I’m sorry that I was not there to see you off and know that I worry about you. Please understand I will do for you what I can from afar. And that I already have. Poxl you should go to the Leathersellers College in London. It will be possible for you to obtain a student visa to attend the school there. Johana and Niny can provide you a place to live and an introduction to the city. I have made arrangements with an associate in the consulate for you to have an exit visa from the Netherlands and a visa into England. You should leave immediately.
    You ask after our lives here—the Bauers’ sugar factory outside of Prague has been taken. I have gone to the Central Jewish Office and registered. I have papers and no one else has the expertise to run Brüder Weisberg. At the office in Prague they say they will send up a Devisenschutz Sönderkommando to look over our records. A troop of German soldiers has come through our neighborhoods in Leitmeritz, asking, and we are sure to see them again. One came up the Muehlengasse a few weeks ago and asked after our business and I asked was he the Devisenschutz Sönderkommando and he asked after my papers, but I told him I didn’t have them and he said he would be back. He was the man who came through to find out. I would see others soon enough, he said.
    Here there was a break in my father’s letter. After the caesura my father had written the new date, September 22, in a hand substantially less neat than the one that proceeded it.
    I write again without amendment or revision. The Devisenschutz Sönderkommando has come to the house. We will not control Brüder Weisberg and I would not tell you Leo that I put up a fight. But what could I do? There was nothing to do. What will become of it anyway? No one could tell you, least of all me.
    Leo I am looking to London, from where we might be able to reach Palestine now and you must do the same and come from Holland this minute if you have not already. You must go to the British consulate in Rotterdam where I have arranged for a visa in London.
    Your father
    I did not note at the time the absence of any mention of my mother at all in the second part of my father’s letter: the cease of majesty dies not alone, but like a gulf doth draw what’s near to it. Wise as my father’s advice might have sounded, and wise as it clearly was in retrospect, leaving Rotterdam meant leaving Françoise.
    I reread the letter.
    I thought of Heidi, and it made me think of Françoise with the Brauns, but that was not enough to rend me from her. I sat down at my desk and wrote a long reply. I told my father I wished him and my mother well in their travels to London and hoped they would arrive safely. He should write me at the address I gave to tell me he’d arrived. I’d met a woman now, and while I didn’t tell him it was love that was keeping me—who can say in the moment what makes him do anything?—I told them that I was happy to be there with her. My home now was in Holland, with Françoise.
    8.
    War broke out across Europe. My father did not write again. The Tennessee Sisters played their gigs at the Café le Monde. Greta lent a high close harmony a third above Françoise’s leads as they sang “What Would You Give in Exchange for Your Soul?” Their English was still a little rough, a little full of umlauts