Louise's War Read Free Page B

for help in locating her, and I pestered the New York office of her father’s bank. I wrote dozens of letters and got not one in reply. After Pearl Harbor I stopped trying to find her, but I wondered every day whether she was homeless and hungry, or even alive. I didn’t think I’d know what had happened to her until the war was over, if then.
    But now I knew that Rachel, Gerald and little Claude were still in Marseille and desperate to get out of Europe. I felt just as desperate. And powerless. What could I possibly do to help them? I’d learned from reading the newspaper what financial resources were required to sponsor a Jewish European refugee for an American visa, and I didn’t have them.
    I felt thankful that I was alone in the office. I couldn’t have hidden my emotions from anyone. I felt alternately feverish, freezing cold and shaky, as my body responded to my anguish. For a few minutes I thought I might need to rush back to the bathroom to faint again, or maybe spew. But I commanded myself to calm down. Giving in to panic would be useless.
    What could I do to help Rachel? Could I even admit to anyone at OSS that I knew her? Would that influence the decision to respond to Gerald’s overture, or not? I’d never felt so helpless in my life.
    I could think of only one option.
    With Bloch’s file tucked under one arm, I knocked on Bob Holman’s office door and waited for him to call out for me to enter. Holman, the head of the Europe/Africa desk, was a very fat man. In this stifling heat he often stripped to his underwear to work, and he wasn’t the only man in Washington who did so. After a bit of shuffling around he called out to me, and I went into his office. Holman, his round face red, forehead streaming perspiration, sat at his desk knotting his tie. A cot with a rumpled pillow stood in a corner. The files on his desk, weighted down with whatever he could find to keep them from being scattered about by the breeze from his Philco floor fan, lay stacked in piles all around him.
    Holman would decide whether or not to forward Bloch’s file to the OSS Projects Committee, which had the authority to direct Special Operations, the glamor boys and girls of OSS, to smuggle the Bloch family out of Marseille. Over the last six months I’d earned Holman’s respect by recommending specific dossiers to him, and he’d asked me to flag material I thought could be important. He got the credit for whatever I suggested, which I resented, of course, but that’s just the way it was.
    Truth was, I knew as much about Holman’s work, and what went on in OSS, as he did. The difference between us was, Holman got briefed officially along with the other men in our branch while I picked up what I knew from the papers I filed, gossip in the girls’ restroom and coffee-break conversations.
    ‘I’ve got a good prospect for you, Mr Holman,’ I said, handing him the Bloch file instead of tossing it in his pending basket.
    ‘Let’s see it,’ Holman said, taking the file from me after resting his thick Havana cigar on the rim of an overflowing ashtray. ‘Wait a few minutes, Louise, I’ve brought fresh lemonade from home,’ he said, as I turned to leave. He read through the contents of the file.
    ‘A hydrographer familiar with the North African coast,’ he said. ‘Interesting. Might be very useful to us.’
    Holman laid the file aside. He hadn’t tossed it into his ‘to be filed’ box yet, which was good, but then again he hadn’t stacked it in the Projects Committee box either.
    ‘Take a seat,’ he said. ‘Have some lemonade.’
    ‘Thanks,’ I said.
    Holman pulled a Thermos bottle from a desk drawer. He sat it smack down on the Bloch file, leaving a wet circle on its Manila jacket.
    He poured me a glass of lemonade, which I drank appreciatively. It was still cool.
    ‘Where did you get the sugar?’ I asked.
    Holman chuckled. ‘I have my ways,’ he said. ‘Or rather I should say, my wife has her ways. She’s a