As they neared the frontier Russell kept a lookout for Hirth’s son, but saw no sign of the boy. The descending path from the guardhouse had indeed been easy to follow, and he hoped that hunger would eventually drive the boy down.
There were no problems at the border — Albert’s papers were exquisite forgeries — and none at the subsequent checkpoints. They stopped for lunch at the Villach transit house, which had just received another shipment of orphans. They would be going south in the next few days, Lidovsky told Russell. And no, he added without being asked, there had been no sightings of the Hauptsturmfuhrer’s son. He felt it too, Russell thought. They had let themselves down.
Soon after one o’clock they set off again. Albert was eager for news of his mother and sisters. ‘I can’t believe I haven’t seen them for so many years,’ he said. Did Russell think they would eventually come to Palestine? ‘I live on a kibbutz, but I can find them a flat in Tel Aviv.’
Russell told the truth as far as he knew it, that his mother was torn, that the girls were happy in England, at least for the moment. ‘Of course, if you do get your state…’
‘We will.’
‘You’re that certain?’
‘Yes.’
‘I have a journalist friend who agrees with you. He says the Zionists have the two things that matter — sympathy and money.’
Albert smiled at that. ‘He’s right.’
‘The Arabs won’t give up their home without a fight.’
‘No, I’m sure they won’t. But they will lose.’
‘There are more of them.’
‘That won’t matter. Our men have learned a lot, first in our Palmach militia, then in the British Jewish Brigade — and we’re better fighters than they are. And our morale will be better. We Jews are all in it together, but the Arabs with money treat the others like shit.’
Russell grunted his concurrence.
‘And there’s another thing. The Arabs in Palestine have other countries they can move to — Transjordan, Syria, Egypt, the Lebanon. We have nowhere else. We have to win. The British will try and stop us, but their hearts aren’t in it, and in any case their day is over. The Americans are the ones that matter, and they support us.’
‘Anti-Semitism is hardly unknown in the States,’ Russell said mildly.
‘No, but a third of our people now live there. That’s a lot of money, a lot of sympathy. And a lot of voters that the politicians won’t be able to ignore. Americans love an underdog.’
‘That’s the British. Americans love a winner.’
‘Even better. We will win, believe me.’
‘Oh, I do,’ Russell said. And he did. In fact, only the British Government seemed otherwise inclined.
They drove up the Drau valley to Spittal, then turned onto the mountain road to Radstadt. There was snow on the slopes but rain in the air, and no fear of the road being blocked. It was around two hundred kilometres from Villach to Salzburg, and by late afternoon they had reached the first of the three Jewish DP camps that Albert needed to visit. The first, a permanent affair, bore the unofficial name of New Palestine; the others were purely for transients, and had less to offer in terms of food and accommodation. The Haganah had an arrangement with the American authorities not to increase the number of residents in their Austrian zone, Albert told Russell, so they needed to keep people moving, shifting groups on across the Italian or German borders to make room for new arrivals.
Having dropped off the car soon after dawn, they hitched a ride on a lorry heading east to pick up another group of Jews travelling west. Cold rain fell in sheets for most of the three-hour journey, and the River Enns, when they reached it, looked almost too choppy to cross. But a small boat heaved its way to their landing stage an hour or so later with thirty Jews on board, and Russell watched several look round in wonderment before climbing aboard the lorry. They had reached the relative safety of the American zone.
Russell and Albert clambered aboard the boat, and watched with admiration as the captain worked his way up and across to the eastern shore. It was a half hour walk from there to St Valentin, but they saw no sign of Russian occupation forces until they reached the station, where a few Red Army men were drinking tea in the platform cafeteria. They seemed unusually subdued, Russell thought. Probably hung over.
Their train to Vienna only stopped once, and it was still early afternoon when they arrived at the Westbahnhof. Russell had expected an overnight stop, but Albert was anxious to reach Bratislava that day. A cab carried them across the city and over the Danube to the station in Floridsdorf, where a local train was waiting, seemingly just for them. The whistle blew the moment they were safely on board, and an hour or so later they alighted at a desolate country halt. A ten-minute walk brought them to the Austrian end of a long wooden footbridge, which extended out across a wide expanse of marsh and river. The frontier was in there somewhere, and two Red Army soldiers were guarding the Austrian end, albeit with no great diligence. They waved the two men through without even checking their papers.
‘How about coming the other way?’ Russell asked once they were on the bridge. ‘Do they just let your people through?’
‘A small bribe is usually enough,’ Albert replied. ‘The only people they stop are their own.’
There were no guards on the Czech side, but a longer walk to transport. After twenty minutes or so they met a party of Jews heading in the opposite direction, around thirty in total, with the usual male majority. The luggage on display was remarkable, with everything from battered old suitcases to paper bags pushed into service. Spare pairs of shoes were laced together and hung around necks, and several umbrellas were vainly raised to ward off the mist. Many were carrying fresh loaves of bread, parting gifts from the refugee centre in Bratislava.
The two of them reached the city as darkness was falling, and walked down through rapidly emptying streets to a square at the heart of the old quarter. A domed Byzantine church loomed over one side; the other was dominated by the stone-built Hotel Jelen, where UNRRA and the Haganah shared quarters and responsibility for the Jewish emigrants. A small door cut in a larger gate led into a woebegone courtyard, overlooked by scum-covered windows and rusted iron balconies. They climbed the stone staircase to the first-floor reception, whose walls were plastered in writing. As Albert talked to the man at the desk, Russell skimmed through the messages in search of an Otto or Miriam. He found no trace of either, but the walls themselves seemed worthy of preservation. The wrong religion perhaps, but they brought back memories of reading Pilgrim’s Progress at school; there was something both chaotic and intensely focussed about this migration, and a sense that nothing could deflect it.
The Jews he met that evening did nothing to shift this impression — even those intent on reaching America seemed committed to the Zionist idea. Albert gave a brief talk on current conditions in Palestine, and Russell sat at the back of the rearranged dining room, watching the eager faces of those all around him. He was impressed by Albert, who managed to enthuse and reassure his audience without minimising the obvious difficulties. When one man asked what their chances of reaching Palestine were, he said ‘one hundred per cent’ — some might have to accept British hospitality for a while, but everyone would get there eventually. When another man asked if their women would be safe, he didn’t just say yes, he turned the question round. ‘Where,’ he asked his audience, ‘could a Jew find greater safety than in a Jewish state?’
Afterwards, when Russell congratulated him, Albert thought he might have ‘laid it on a little thick. But we need them,’ he insisted. ‘We need every Jew we can get.’