We went over the Stefanie Bridge on foot. I walked between my parents. Each held a hand. My father talked to my mother about going to the Chinese Consulate in the morning.

“Daddy,” I said. “Daddy, look!”

My mother was saying to my father, “Grete mentioned something about getting into Holland.”

           I tugged at my mother’s hand. “Look at the moon,” I insisted. There was a white moon shivering in the black water of the Danube underneath us, along with a thousand pretty lights from the bridge.

           My father said, “Holland is too close, “but I’ll go and see, if there is time. I’ll do the Chinese Consulate first thing.”

           They kept talking to each other over my head. I was hurt. They were making plans for a tomorrow in which I would have no part. Already they seemed to be getting on very well without me and I was angry. I withdrew my hand and walked by myself.

           We got into a tram. Across the aisle there was another little Jewish girl with a rucksack and a suitcase, sitting between her parents. I tried to catch her eye in order to flirt up a new friend for myself, but she took no notice of me. She was crying. I said to my mother, “I’m not crying like that little girl.”

           My mother said, “No, you are being very good, very brave. I’m proud of how good you are being.”

           But I had misgivings; I rather thought I ought to be crying, too.

           The assembly point was a huge empty lot behind the railway station in the outskirts of Vienna. I looked among the hundreds of children milling in the darkness for the girl who had cried on the tram, but I never saw her again, or perhaps didn’t recognize her. Along the wire fence, members of the Committee stood holding long poles bearing placards; flashlights lit the numbers painted on them. Someone came over to me and checked my papers and made me stand with the group of children collecting around the placard that read “150-199.” He hung a cardboard label with the number 152 strung on a shoelace around my neck, and tied corresponding numbers to my suitcase and rucksack.

          I remember that I clowned and talked a good deal. I remember feeling, This is me going to England. My parents stood with the other parents, on the right, at the edge of darkness. I have no clear recollection of my father’s being there — perhaps his head was too high and out of the circle of lights. I remember his greatcoat standing next to my mother’s black pony fur, but every time I looked toward them it was my mother’s tiny face, crumpled and feverish inside the fox collar, that I saw smiling steadily towards me.