Danielle Byers

“I can’t remember a specific time when the comments and the name-calling started, but one evening in November it all got much worse,’ she said. ‘My brother Tobias and me were doing our homework at the dining room table like we always did.’
‘You’ve got a brother?’
She hesitated before nodding. ‘Papa was working late at the clinic in a friend’s back room – it was against the law for Jews to work as doctors. Mama was making supper in the kitchen, and I remember her cursing because she’d just burned her hand on the griddle. Tobias and me couldn’t stop laughing because Mama never swore.’ The memory of it made her mouth twitch in an almost-smile.
Then someone banged on our front door. It was late – too late for social calling. Mama told us not to answer it. Everyone knew someone who’d had a knock on the door like that.’
‘Who was it?’
‘The police, usually. Sometimes Hitler’s soldiers. It was never for a good reason, and it never ended happily. We all dreaded it happening to us. So, Mama turned the lights out and put her hand over the dog’s nose.’ Esther, glancing sideways at me, explained: ‘We had a sausage dog called Gerta who barked at everything.
‘The knocking went on and they started shouting through the letter box, saying they’d burn the house down if we didn’t answer the door. Mama told us to hide under the table and went to speak to them. They wanted Papa. They said he’d been treating non-Jewish patients at the clinic and it had to stop. Mama told them he wasn’t here but they didn’t believe her and came in anyway. There were four of them in Nazi uniform, stomping through our house in their filthy great boots. Finding us hiding under the table, they decided to take Tobias as a substitute for Papa. ‘When your husband hands himself in, we’ll release the boy,’ was what they said.
‘It was cold outside – a freezing Austrian winter’s night – but they wouldn’t let Tobias fetch his coat. As soon as they laid hands on him, Mama started screaming. She let go of Gerta and grabbed Tobias – we both did – pulling on his arms, yelling that they couldn’t take him, that he’d done nothing wrong. Gerta was barking. I saw one of the men swing his boot at ther. She went flying across the room, hitting the mantelpiece. It was awful. She didn’t bark after that.’
It took a moment for the horror of what she was saying to sink in.
‘Don’t tell me any more if you don’t want to,’ I said gently.
She stared straight ahead like she hadn’t heard me. ‘They took my brother anyway. He was ten years old.
‘We ran into the street after them, and it was chaos – like the end of the world or something. The whole town was fully of Nazi uniforms. There were broken windows, burning houses, people sobbing in the gutter. The synagogue at the end of our street was on fire. I was terrified. So terrified I couldn’t move. But Mum kept running. Shouting and yelling and running after my brother. I didn’t see what happened but I heard the gunshot.’
She stopped. Rubbed her face in her hands. ‘Afterwards they gave it a very pretty name: Kristallnacht – meaning “the night of broken glass”. But it was the night I lost my mother and my brother. I was sent away soon after as part of the Kindertransport, though Papa never got used to losing us all at once. Nor did I. That’s why he came to find me. He always promised he’d try.’
Anything I might’ve said stayed stuck in my throat. There weren’t words for it, not really. So I put my arm through Esther’s and we sat, gazing out to sea, two old enemies who were, at last, friends. She was right – it was her story to tell. And I could think of plenty who might benefit from hearing it.”
― Emma Carroll, Letters from the Lighthouse

“I still didn’t understand everything. People, it seemed to me, were much harder to crack than codes. Yet it didn’t matter where we came from, our language, our nationality, or our religion. As long as we all looked to the light.”
― Emma Carroll, Letters from the Lighthouse

“Bit by bit, the noise died away. The pupils began to look quite intrigued. Some sat forward, chins in hands. You could see the mockery still lingering in their faces like they were waiting for something to make fun of. But as Esther explained the yellow stars and what they meant, their expressions changed.
It was like watching newspaper catch light when you made a fire. Once it took hold, the flames began to spread and glow. At last, the class were starting to understand. This was someone their age, who they sort of knew, explaining what prejudice felt like from the other side. That horrible sense that if people were your enemy it meant they didn’t feel, didn’t breath, didn’t think like you did. Really, they were hardly proper people at all. So it was all right to drop bombs and destroy people’s lives, or treat them no better than animals.
Except it wasn’t.
The mood grew ever more sombre. By the time Esther finished talking, a few pupils were wiping their eyes. The rest of the class looked stunned.
‘Thank you for listening,’ Esther said, her chin held high. I was close enough to see the tiniest tremble in her bottom lip. And it made me think her even more magnificent.”
― Emma Carroll, Letters from the Lighthouse

“Every Monday and Friday night, leaving us with awful suppers to reheat, our mum didn’t work late shifts at the printworks. She went to an office in Shoreditch. And from there, by radio, by note, by telephone and letters, she exchanged messages with Miss Carter and Mrs. Henderson and Queenie and others like them on what she called ‘humanitarian war work’. She’d never met any of them in person.
‘I can’t tell you any more details. It’s secret work. How you know even this much is really quite beyond me,’ she admitted.
‘I worked most of it out myself,’ I told her. She might’ve hidden it from me all this time, but I wasn’t stupid. ‘Sounds like Sukie did too.’
‘Your sister spied on me,’ Mum replied bitterly. ‘She stole paperwork, listened in to private conversations. She was very foolish to get caught up in something she knew nothing about.’
‘She did know about it, though. What Hitler’s doing really got to her. She was desperate to do something about it. All that post from Devon? It wasn’t from Queenie. Those were letters from the lighthouse, written by Ephraim, who feels the same about the Jewish people as Sukie does.’
‘It was stupid, impulsive behaviour,’ Mum argued, ‘of the sort your sister’s very good at.’
Yet to me she had missed a vital point.
‘You know Sukie wanted to help you, don’t you? She saw how ill you’d got over Dad. By standing in for you on this job, she was making sure you’d get some rest, like the doctor said you should.’
‘I might’ve known you’d stick up for your sister,’ Mum remarked. ‘But it didn’t help me – it worried me sick!’
‘It did help thirty-two refugees, though,’ I reminded her.
‘She was lucky she didn’t get arrested straight away.’ Mum went on as if she hadn’t heard me. ‘When I found out that night what she’d done, I was all for going after her, hauling her back and locking her in her bedroom, till this frightful war was over if I had to. But it was too late by then. She was already halfway to France.’
‘You knew the night she disappeared?’ I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘And admit that I do undercover work and Sukie was doing it too?’ Mum cried. ‘Good grief, Olive, it’s secret business. It was too dangerous to tell you. There’s a war on, remember!’
‘People always use that excuse,’ I muttered.
It stunned me that Mum had known all this time. But then, hadn’t there been signs? The looks in our kitchen between her and Gloria, the refusal to talk about Sukie, the bundling us off out of the way – to here, the very place Sukie might, with any luck, show up. It was a clever way of making sure we knew the moment she set foot on British soil again.”
― Emma Carroll, Letters from the Lighthouse