World War II Remembered

“Loose Lips”

283 “Loose Lips” • Marcia Auerbach Khatri In the spring of 1944, when I was 15 years old and living on a farm in Vermont with my parents and sister, my father, George Auerbach, left the farm to travel by train to Los Angeles. Although he had thought that he and my mother would be able to manage a farm and leave behind the work they had been doing in the movie industry—my father wrote screen plays, my mother was an actress—it hadn’t been easy. So he was on his way back to Los Angeles with a new screen play that he had recently completed. Not long after he left, I came home from school one day and found my mother in a state of agitation. Two black limousines, bearing Washington , D.C., license plates, had driven up to the farm, and several men had poured out of the cars and proceeded to search the house and barn. My mother was even more disturbed because the neighbors had been driving slowly by our farm all day, craning their necks to see what was going on. There had been much gossip at our expense ever since we moved to the farm. They called us “city folk” and looked at us with a great deal 284 World War II Remembered of suspicion. We were different. It didn’t help that my mother wore blue jeans and high heels to the grocery store—which caused considerable interest, as well as many tsk’s and shaking heads. We had a huge antenna in our back yard that my father installed because our radio reception was extremely poor. Neophytes at farming , we also caused smiles as our neighbors watched us. One disaster almost became local lore. My mother’s first purchase, on our arrival in Vermont, was a washing machine. With horror she discovered that we had no electricity. The washer was returned and the money spent to buy a horse that, quite logically, was named Bendix. My father thought the bigger the better—so Bendix was huge. The first morning after his arrival I woke to noise, confusion, and lots of people milling around the stable. Bendix had fallen through the stable floor! The poor horse was suspended on the floor, his legs dangling below him in the stable’s dark, low cellar. How to get him out? Eventually the stable roof had to be removed, and Bendix—unhurt, but clearly unhappy —was hauled up and out with a huge derrick. As the War intensified, the town’s suspicions, fed by our strangeness , my father’s British accent, his German name, our California life style, the antenna, and our ineptness as farmers, developed into a belief that my father was a German spy. Aware of their suspicions, he had given a speech in the Town Hall calling the charges absurd and adding that his wife’s ancestors had fought in the American Revolution . It didn’t matter what my father said; the men in the black limousines confirmed the suspicions . The townspeople believed the visit meant that military authorities had come to investigate. My life really changed after the limo visit. I had been elected president of my class, but after the limos no one would attend class meetings; a teacher told me, “Marcia, no one will come any George Auerbach “Loose Lips”: Marcia Auerbach Khatri 285 more.” I had been an airplane spotter—a position I was very proud of—and they told me I could no longer do that. Worst of all, my friends no longer called to invite me to various events. It was not until we moved back to Los Angeles, late that same summer , that my father told us the following story that explained why we were visited by black limousines containing agents from military intelligence . On arrival in New York City, in early May, with several hours to kill before his train departed for Los Angeles, my father went to the Harvard Club. At the bar he began a conversation with a high-ranking officer in uniform who, he realized, had already had many drinks. The general told my father that he had just returned from England and, in a slurred, half-drunken voice, began to talk about the preparation of troops for the coming invasion. As he reeled off many details, my father became anxious about the information the officer was revealing. He...