“Another branch of our service might want to talk to you about her some day.”
After Spencer left, Bill Macneil reread his father’s letter, then opened the one from Helma Graf—after some thoughtful hesitation.
It was the first time he had heard directly from Helma since waving goodbye in Yokohama. Her silence had been a relief, in a way, because he feared that complications would arise from what he had regarded as a passing affair. But then, by the end of 1941, he began to feel some concern for her. Gradually, his thoughts about Helma became more positive. He recalled her persistent pursuit of the man—himself—she professed to love to the point of distraction: What had been a bother was taking on a certain charm. He found himself admiring her retention of chastity until she felt obligated to sacrifice it in a last-gasp effort to tighten her hold on the target of her devotion.
Even her annoying use of the juvenile expression ‘jeepers’ seemed cuter than it did obnoxious. He remembered more fondly what he could only describe as her looks of desperate innocence.
On those nights he slept alone, his last waking thoughts were more often of Helma than the Chinese waitress on Grant Street or that sophisticated, high-toned, eager young lady from Nob Hill. The memory of Helma’s naked body in his cabin on the City of Glasgow shone through the mists of encroaching slumber with remarkable clarity. Her lewd lipstick decorations on her intimate parts repelled him less and fascinated him more. What had been a confused, hurried, and startingly abrupt coupling took on—seven months later—the more engaging aspect of a rhapsodic adventure in sweet lust.
He found himself longing for an opportunity to repeat the experience.
Even so, his changing perception of Helma did not extend to marrying this strange, determined female who steadfastly refused to see evil in the hearts of men who actually had not a scintilla of good anywhere within them.
Helma’s letter was disappointingly brief. Even though she addressed him as “My dearest Bill” and employed “thee” and “thou” liberally, her letter made him wonder if someone was reading it over her shoulder—or if she thought someone would later invade the privacy of her mail.
She was sorry, she wrote, that she had been so remiss in her correspondence. One reason was that most Westerners still in Japan were sending their foreign mail out through the International Red Cross, but many voiced suspicions that Japan’s secret police—both the Tokko Keisatsu (Special Political Police) and the Kempeitai—were censoring letters.
Helma had waited until she could make an arrangement with a family friend in the Swiss Embassy to send out her messages in the diplomatic pouch for delivery to Pepin and Lurlei Schwerz in Zug, Switzerland. Pepin was her father’s first cousin. She had written instructing him how to handle her communications. Even getting nonofficial letters from Switzerland to the United States in wartime was time-consuming—but not impossible.
He could, she wrote, send letters to her—if he had not forgotten her—by the same route in reverse, and she included Pepin and Lurlei’s mailing address in Zug.
Helma’s letter was written in January, before the Swedish repatriation vessel Gripsholm sailed the following month, but Helma believed her parents would be aboard. She was thinking about moving into Bill’s Tokyo home to be of whatever assistance she could to his family. Also, it would benefit her in that she would no longer have to travel back and forth between Tokyo and her parents’ home in far-off Shizuoka Prefecture.
Before Bill could wonder why she would not stay in Shizuoka—a better place than Tokyo to take shelter from the uncertain dangers of war—Helma sprang her surprise. “I am thinking about taking a job. Missionary work seems out of the question. Although I am a Swiss neutral and legally free to move about Japan even as the Japanese can move about my country, it doesn’t work that way in actuality. Too many people assume I am American or English and therefore cause problems. This inconveniences the Germans, too, even though they are allies of the Japanese. Anyway, what work would I do? I am not sure. I might obtain a clerical position at the Swiss Embassy. I have also heard Radio Tokyo may be hiring persons fluent in English. Anyway, I must have money for living expenses, so we will see. I love thee. Helma.”
Chapter 8
Shanghai, China
October 1942
Sarah “Chankoro” Macneil was living in a comfortable but small apartment in the International Settlement of Shanghai.
She lived alone, although Colonel Kazuo Ishihara was a frequent visitor, occasionally staying all night.
Her Chinese amah-san, Mrs. Chang, had basement quarters and came every day. Sarah’s job was special assistant to Ishihara, who had been transferred to staff duty under Major General Kenji Doihara, commander-in-chief of the Imperial Japanese Army for the Shanghai area. Besides his other duties, Ishihara was in charge of the 16,000 Jewish refugees in Shanghai.
The largest assembly area for the Jews was Pootung Civil Assembly Center. The Pootung Jews were stateless refugees or were carrying passports of enemy nations: America, Great Britain, and others. Jews with Russian or Iraqi passports, for example, were still free to move about Shanghai. All the Manchurian Jews had been brought to Pootung.
About 3,000 of the Jews had been German, but many of these had left their homeland without proper documents and the rest did not want to identify themselves as German, fearing what might be done to them by an ally of the Nazis. They sought safety in statelessness.
Germany’s “final solution” to the Jewish question had begun in January 1942. Japan was well aware how “final” the German “solution” was. For all their resentment of the West, the Japanese were not prepared to go as far as the Germans.
The Blums’ Far East Zion plan came apart late the previous year, right after Pearl Harbor. War obviated any hope that American Jews, under the guidance of Rabbi Stephen Wise—who soon condemned any Jew who supported Japan’s aims—would invest in an industrial base in Manchuria to nurture Wise’s coreligionists. Nor would the Japanese, with all-out war confronting them in the Pacific, consider the expending of their own resources to establish a prosperous and stable alien population there.
Japanese who had favored the Blums’ FEZ concept—including Colonel Ishihara and, to a lesser extent, General Doihara—were ordered to halt all such grandiose machinations as FEZ and to assemble forthwith the refugee Jews then in Manchuria and move them to a central camp in occupied China where they could be watched. Refurbishing the Pootung barracks and the mass movement had taken seven months.
Sarah was pleased the Pootung buildings had roofs, the water supply was adequate, and garbage was collected. Sewage facilities, however, were primitive, medicines were in short supply, and the inhabitants would soon, she thought, begin to show signs of malnutrition as the supplies of food they had brought with them began to run out. There were already a few cases of beriberi, malaria, dysentery, and some heart infections.
Sarah’s problem was how to do as much as she could for the Jews in obedience to her vow to the dying Nathan Blum, without arousing the suspicions of Colonel Ishihara.
Kazuo Ishihara was actually a decent man, although Sarah’s true feelings toward him were not anything at all like those she pretended. He had a wife and family at home in Fukuoka, Japan, and was twenty-one years older than she. Fanatically clean, he wore glasses and a trim moustache and was an inch shorter than Sarah, who was herself quite short. How he performed as a lover, Sarah was not qualified to judge since she had little basis for comparison. To be sure, Ishihara was hardly the equal of Nathan Blum,
