The Last Year of the War, page 22
The uncles seemed neither in favor of nor opposed to the Third Reich, but I could see they loved Germany. They loved their home and the craft the Sontag family had perfected over the last century. But they, too, seemed reticent to talk about what the Nazi Party had done to the country. If you were a devotee of Hitler and his idea of a perfect world, you said what you wanted. If you weren’t, you said nothing.
Because I was not in school, I was only around people my parents’ and grandmother’s ages. I met one girl, though, fifteen like me, at the end of our second week. Her name was Brigitte, and she was the oldest daughter of a friend of Oma’s who owned a linens store that was located a few blocks from Werner and Klaus’s watch shop. Brigitte seemed happy to meet me when Oma introduced us, even though she spoke no English. She showed me her bedroom in the flat above the linens shop and her doll collection and the needlepoint tablecloth she was working on. She asked me questions about living in America; at least that’s what I thought she was asking. But I couldn’t tell her what America was like; I didn’t have enough German words for that. And she seemed so interested; that was the worst part about it. She wasn’t looking at me as if I were a monster.
On the walk home that evening, Papa told me to give it time. It wouldn’t always be this way with Brigitte, the one and only friend I had made. Every day I was learning more of the language, he said. Soon I would be able to understand everything Brigitte asked, and I would be able to answer her.
The next three weeks dragged on. We ate skimpy meals cobbled together from what Mommi could buy at the market and what Oma had stored in her cellar. I learned to eat rabbit and drink ersatz coffee and not gag. Four times we were sent to the cellar for air-raid threats. Four times we emerged after the all clear. I made fuses. I listened to Max tell us about his classes and his Hitler Youth after-school gatherings, which all boys his age were required to attend. If I had been in school, I would have been doing something similar.
We prayed for the war to end, for the rabbits to produce, for the air raids to cease, for the kerosene to hold out. For spring to come early.
Every day seemed the same until Papa was called in to see the officer who had finalized his return to Pforzheim. He had a message for my father.
Papa was wanted in Berlin in one week to work on a special project.
He would be there for an indeterminate amount of time.
His family was not to come with him.
20
In the months and years that followed the air raid on Pforzheim on the twenty-third of February—the same day Papa received those orders to Berlin—I would learn of the full scope of the attack. I would have a chance to read all the details that military correspondents and war department assessors and meticulous historians would pen about that night. It is one thing to read the account of an event, however. It is quite another to experience it.
Newsreels would announce to Allied civilian viewers, after the fact, that Pforzheim had been destroyed, as though it was a dangerous beast that had been successfully dealt with rather than a city of mostly ordinary people. More than eighty percent of its structures were destroyed or damaged in that one night of bombing. Ninety percent of the city center was reduced to ashes, including the Sontag watch shop. Some historians would say the destruction in Pforzheim was the greatest proportion of damage in one raid during the entire war.
Nearly eighteen thousand men, women, and children perished, dozens of them dear friends of Papa’s extended family. Some died immediately from the impact of one of the five hundred exploding incendiary devices that fell. Others died in infernos the bombs created and from which they could not escape. Some suffocated where they crouched because the bombs sucked all the oxygen out of the air. Some were buried in their cellars or couldn’t run fast enough out of their collapsing houses. Some burned and drowned in the two rivers that ran through the city, which in happier years had given Pforzheim a lovely pastoral beauty but during the bombing curdled aflame in a phosphorous stew.
We were lucky compared to the thousands upon thousands who were killed or injured. We’d run down to Oma’s root cellar when the siren sounded a few minutes before eight and huddled together as the earth around the foundation of the house began to shake when countless bombs met their targets all around us.
This raid was nothing like I could ever have imagined. It was relentless and malevolent, though it lasted less than half an hour. We could hear the whistling and the booming and screaming. Dust and dirt and bits of plaster rained down on us. The house above moaned in near anguish, as if in warning that it wouldn’t be able to protect us, that it might, in fact, collapse and kill us. I didn’t want to die beneath Oma’s house. I didn’t want to be crushed under its terrible weight. I hadn’t realized I was screaming until I darted to the narrow cellar staircase to flee the howling house. Papa’s strong arms were suddenly around my middle, pulling me back. I worked my way free of his grasp and lunged again for the stairs, falling onto them and cutting my lip. But I scrambled up and had nearly made it to the door when, again, I was pulled back, hitting my elbow on a joist and hearing it crack against it. Mommi was weeping and reaching for me; Oma was rocking back and forth, whispering prayers for deliverance as she held Max against her chest in a bear-like embrace.
“You can’t go out there!” Papa was shouting in English. “You can’t go out there!”
“I don’t want to die!” I screamed, and I tasted salt and blood in my mouth.
“If you go out there, you will! We have to stay here.”
Mommi had her arms around me then, as well as Papa, and they held me in a cocoon of their arms as the house continued to wail and the world outside continued to sound as if it were ending.
After the attack came the silence. My grandmother continued to pray, even after the bombing stopped and the house ceased its awful groaning. We waited a long stretch of minutes listening for the all clear from the civil defense siren, but it never rang out.
Papa told us we had to stay in the cellar until it sounded. We fell asleep against each other waiting for it.
Sometime later, I awoke. Mommi and Papa were also awake. My father was on the stairs, nearly to the door. He looked back at me.
“Stay here with your mother until I know it’s safe.”
Mommi put her arm around me and pulled me gently to her lest I try to follow Papa anyway. I would remember this one-armed embrace for years to come. It was the last time my mother touched me like that, a mother protecting her child. She would hug me, of course, in the subsequent years, but I never again felt her strong arm of protection over me like that. The embraces that would follow would always feel more like hesitant apologies, because her fragile soul had led us here. My mother had sent us, as the lady on the train had said, straight to hell. Mommi never said this to me in so many words, and I know it wasn’t true, but in the days and years that followed, I knew these were the feelings in her heart.
She and I watched Papa ascend the cellar stairs and open the door carefully, one inch at a time. Rays of muted sunshine struck him, and we knew then that whatever he was seeing was bad because the root cellar was under the house. How could the sun reach him? I smelled smoke.
“Oh God,” he whispered. Maybe to the Almighty. Maybe to Mommi and me. Maybe just to himself.
“What?” Mommi said in German. “What is it?”
Papa said nothing; he just took the last stair and stepped into the light and disappeared from our view.
Mommi rose, keeping her hand on me, so she could peer into the opening. Sunlight made her squint. The odor of ash and chemicals grew stronger.
She looked down to Oma and Max, who were still sleeping, then reached down to take my hand. “Stay right behind me,” she said in English.
We took the stairs slowly, she leading the way and I close behind. The old wooden steps creaked under our weight. As we got closer to the cellar door and the kitchen beyond, I could see Mommi’s golden brown hair was flecked all over with plaster dust from our night in the cellar. From the back she looked like an old woman. I probably looked the same.
Mommi emerged first from the cellar, and I felt her flinch, as her hand still held mine. Then we were both over the threshold and looking at blue sky where the kitchen ceiling should have been.
There aren’t adequate words to describe what it was like to see Oma’s house laid open like it had been torn apart by a savage animal. A few blackened walls still stood, and the staircase resolutely pushed its way to a second story that wasn’t there. But the rest of the lovely old house was a stark mix of char and rubble. Papa would tell me later that the house, being on the outskirts of the city, hadn’t suffered a direct hit. If it had, we would have likely perished in the cellar. But it had been caught in the impact of all the other nearby explosions and then the firestorm that engulfed the city, and that was enough to nearly destroy it.
Papa had clambered over the ruins of the big oak table and was kneeling on its splintered remains, his hands lying helpless in his lap. Mommi went to him, dropping my hand so that she could put her arms around him. I followed and climbed up next to him. Papa, who never cried, turned to me with tears streaming down his face.
“You never got to see it in the springtime,” he whispered.
I leaned into him and the tears began to fall from my own eyes.
Minutes later, Oma and Max also came up the stairs, and my grandmother sank to her knees in the ruin of her kitchen and began to weep.
Papa went to her. We all did. We crouched in the wreck of her kitchen and cried together.
When I was ten, a family in Davenport who lived relatively near us lost their home to a chimney fire. They got out with their lives and their beagle, but they lost all their possessions in that blaze. I remember how sad we all were, and how the neighborhood all pitched in to give them clothes and shoes and used furniture and extra dishes for the rental house they had to move into. Even toys and bicycles for their three children. They had lost everything, and all the neighbors had wanted to help shoulder the weight of that loss.
If Oma had lost her house to a chimney fire, I could easily imagine her Pforzheim neighbors doing the same thing for her, stepping in to help not just with donations but with the comfort of sympathy that reminds you when you are grieving that you are not alone.
We didn’t yet know that nearly all of Pforzheim’s homes had been lost in that raid. Thousands were dead; thousands more were injured. No one would come to shower my grandmother with care and compassion and casseroles.
“Mein Gott,” Oma said as the smoky fog cleared a bit and we could see down the little hill into the city.
It was unrecognizable. Parts of the city center were still aflame, and smoke rose everywhere. The incendiaries had created a firestorm that had swept through the city. Buildings that hadn’t been crushed by the sheer weight and power of the bombs had been food for the fiercest of fires.
Oma’s closest neighbor, Herr Hornung, called out to us from what had been the house’s front steps. He asked if we were all right.
Papa stood and helped Oma to her feet. “Ja, ja,” he said. “Und du und deine Frau?”
I couldn’t understand what Herr Hornung said in reply about him and his wife. I think he said they were all right, but I looked across the snow-covered vegetable garden to where the Hornung house should have been. It was gone. Herr Hornung and his wife surely had not been at home last night. The bomb that hit their home had taken out half of Oma’s house and just as much of the house on their other side, but it had completely obliterated the Hornung house.
Then Herr Hornung said something else and Papa looked from us back to Oma’s neighbor. “Wir alle?” Papa asked. All of us?
The man said, “Ja,” and then he said, I think, that anyone who could help was needed.
Papa said we’d be right along, and Herr Hornung hurried away.
Papa turned to us. “There are people trapped inside their houses and cellars and many wounded. Anyone who can help is being asked to come. Anyone.” He looked to Max and me.
“They are just children,” Oma said.
“No, we’re not, Oma. Elise and I can help,” Max said before I could figure out the right words.
“We can’t stay here anyway, Mutti,” Papa said. “It’s not safe. And we can help. Look. None of us are hurt.”
“But Werner and Klaus and their families!” Oma said, and a string of other words I didn’t understand.
Papa said we would do both. We would make sure the uncles and their families were all right, but we would also help with the rescue efforts.
My father scrounged in Oma’s half-standing garden shed for shovels, work gloves, and buckets. Oma was able to find us tea towels in the ruin of her kitchen so that we could make masks. I noticed that the barn was a flattened heap, the rabbits inside it surely all dead. We began to walk toward the smoking city, picking our way at times. As we got closer to the worst of the destruction, the extent of it became clearer. Oma faltered for a moment, unable to look at the city she’d lived in all her life in such a state. A noxious odor hung in the air.
“Come, Mutti,” Papa said, pulling her gently along. “We must do what we can to help. We can’t think about anything else right now.”
A table had been set up at the entrance to the oldest part of the city, and people whose own sheds and garages had been leveled were being handed shovels and spades, gloves and masks. The International Red Cross had arrived at dawn to set up a field mess hall for rescue workers. Someone else was giving directions to people to go to the rubble piles where cries for help had been heard.
Papa asked the man giving instructions about the street where the uncles’ shop was located and was told everything on that street was still burning. No one was going into that part of the city center yet. We could only hope that, like us, the uncles and their families had fled to a safe place.
Mommi and Oma were asked to help tend the wounded in a makeshift tent hospital a block away. Papa, Max, and I were put into a rescue group and handed gloves.
I couldn’t understand all the instructions we were being given. I just did whatever Max and Papa did. We were sent to a building that might have been three stories at one time. I did not recognize the street—there was no street, really—even though I felt familiar with this part of the city. We had walked through it every day for three weeks on our way to the watch shop. We stretched out our number so that we could become human chains to clear away debris and reach people who were trapped inside. Max and I and several other teens and adolescents were put into a chain for the smaller pieces of rubble.
For the next half hour we moved splintered wood, chunks of concrete, and bits of this and that as we made a path to get to the people faintly calling out from beneath the wreckage. Then from the front of the line I heard someone say they had found someone. I saw two men pulling a girl or young woman from an opening they had created in the ruin of the building. She was covered in dust and looked like a ghost. She wasn’t moving, and her head lolled at an odd angle. Even I could tell this young woman was dead. She had not been one of those calling out.
Two men bearing a stretcher took the body, laying it gently on the stretched canvas. They hoisted her up and began to pick their way past us and I saw the young woman’s face. My breath stilled. It was Brigitte. Max and I had been standing in front of the linens store and I didn’t even know it.
Brigitte! My one friend here.
I suddenly wondered if the bearers knew who she was. What if everyone who knew her was dead? What if there was no one left who knew her name? A sense of urgency overcame me. The bearers had to know that they were carrying the only girl my age who had been kind to me in Pforzheim, or at least who had had the opportunity to be kind to me. I took off after the stretcher, caught up with it, and touched the arm of one of the carriers.
“I know who she is,” I said to him in German. “Her name is Brigitte Scheffler.” There was so much more I wanted to say but I didn’t know the words and the stretcher-bearers didn’t have the time.
“Brigitte Scheffler?” the carrier said, making sure he’d heard me correctly. I had an accent; I knew the citizens of Pforzheim could tell German wasn’t my first language, but Papa had assured me they couldn’t always tell that meant I was American. The stretcher-bearer was an older man, perhaps older than Papa. He had a kind face, but he looked tired and the day was still young.
“Ja,” I replied, and I told him she’d been fifteen. Something in my voice must have given me away—not that I was English-speaking, but that this dead girl had been my friend.
“Es tut mir leid, Fräulein,” he said tenderly. Hearing him kindly say he was sorry almost made me weep.
I asked him to be careful with her. I couldn’t think of the word for gentle. He nodded and they took off.
The next few hours were a blur of dust and charred wood and rubble. A man and a little boy were found alive with minor injuries, but Brigitte’s mother and grandmother and two little sisters were brought up from the debris lifeless.
At noon we were served a quick meal of bologna and cheese sandwiches in the tent the Red Cross had set up. We had not eaten since supper the night before. I ate what was set before me even though the food tasted like ashes and dirt. Papa left us with Herr Hornung and went to see if there was news of Werner and Klaus. He came back an hour later and told us the street where the watch shop had been had literally been flattened. All that was left of that part of the city was smoke and ash and embers. He didn’t see how his uncles and their wives and Hilde could have survived if they’d still been in the building.
