The Story of Henri Tod by William F. Buckley Page B

crying!”
    â€œShh,” Henri said, removing himself to the corner of the seat. By the time they reached Tolk, a two-hour drive, it was dawn. Clementa began to cry, and so the spell was broken as they drove, finally, into the little farm where they were met by the Wurmbrands.
    Mrs. Wurmbrand told them that they would be staying here at the farm for a while, that such were the instructions of their parents, who would be absent for a spell, but soon they too would come. Meanwhile, Mrs. Wurmbrand had said, they must refer to their hosts as Aunt Steffi and Uncle Hans. Now they must go to bed, and she would talk to them more later in the morning.
    If asked when did he and Clementa realize that they would not again be seeing their mother or father—or Hilda—Henri could not answer. For the first few months, Aunt Steffi simply kept postponing the day on which they could expect to see their parents. When, after the first fortnight, Clementa had asked why her parents had not written a letter, Aunt Steffi said curtly that where her mother was, there was no post office. At the time, Henri had not known how to interpret this retort. Aunt Steffi was kind, but not demonstrative—but this time she had put down the telephone in the kitchen during dinner, after an exchange of only a couple of minutes, during which she had contributed practically nothing except to say, “Yes … Yes … I understand … Yes.” She had then, inexplicably, leaned down and embraced first Clementa, then Henri, and had left the kitchen so quickly that, though Henri could not absolutely swear on it when he and Clementa discussed the episode, he thought she was in tears; certainly there had been a noticeable heaving of her bosom. By the time Henri had reached age fourteen, he had guessed that that was the conversation at which Aunt Steffi had got news of his parents’ annihilation. When he was fifteen he would find out: at Belsen.
    In those early days, Uncle Hans told them that the war had brought on a number of difficulties and hardships, and that it was important to take certain precautions. For instance, under no circumstances must they discuss politics, not with anyone. This instruction Henri found extremely easy, because he didn’t know anything about politics, except that there was a war going on, and Hitler was the head of the country, and Henri was quite certain his father didn’t like Hitler. A few weeks later, Uncle Hans told them he was going to enroll them in the little school at Tolk. He told them that—“now listen to me very carefully”—they were to pass as orphans, the children of a Danish mother and Uncle Hans’s brother. Their parents had died in a car crash when they were very young children, they had been brought up by a cousin near Hamburg, and when that cousin died they had been brought to Tolk. Their surname was Tod.
    This deception they managed without difficulty, and without difficulty they mingled with the children, most of them, like Uncle Hans, sons and daughters of farmers. The schoolmaster, after two months, was called away to serve in the army, and passed along the teaching job to a widowed sister, who was a proficient disciplinarian. Her attention gravitated toward students in whom she detected curiosity, and before long Henri was reading special books assigned by her, and handling English with considerable fluency, as was Clementa.
    And so it was that, gradually, the profile of Nazi Germany transpired in his mind, and Henri gradually came to know what it was all about. He and Clementa were Jewish; they were being protected, for some reason he did not know, by “Aunt” Steffi and by “Uncle” Hans, and if it were known that they were in fact Jewish, they would be taken away, perhaps to wherever it was that their mother and father had been taken. All this he passed on to his sister, but only after he had thoroughly digested the data and it had become