THIRTY
Hiram and Erich, Dresden, 1945
Hiram got to his aircraft about twilight, climbed into the heavy Lancaster bomber and started the massive engines to warm them up for the distant bombing run that lay ahead. Though the skies were clear, the darkening winter night would bring with it a bone-chilling arctic wind that was pushing its way south across England and northern Europe. It was the eve before Ash Wednesday, and would long be remembered for its connection to that holy day.
When the engines finally warmed, Hiram shut them down and waited in the silence of the cockpit with his copilot for the green Verey light to flash from the control tower, signaling him to move into a line with the other planes preparing to take off. After the morning briefing, he had tried to rest, even sleep for a few hours, to be at his best for the many hours of flying ahead. But the excitement of his first command of the plane overwhelmed his mind and nerves, causing his adrenal glands to pump overtime. He had flown eleven missions as copilot, and had been given the full command only hours earlier when the captain reported in ill. Hiram knew he was ready though. Months back, when a heavy burst of flak tore through the cockpit, wounding and disabling the captain during a mission over Berlin, he took command and brought the heavily damaged aircraft safely home after completing its bombing run. A small matter, he would say to those who praised him.
Lying in bed waiting for the evening mission to come, he thought of all the bright, good days yet to be lived when the war was over. He would then go home to Prague, taking little Anna with him should Julia not see the end. It was good he had promised to do so to Julia the night she first returned from entrusting Anna to Angie McFarland’s loving care in Scotland. All Julia would ever say about Angie was that God must always hold in his hands a few special people for times such as these, and she had to be one of them.
Anna was five now, and he had helped celebrate her birthday with Angie, as he had each year after Julia left. Taking what presents he could find in the stores, he rode the bus to the small village below Angie’s high hill where she waited for him with Anna by her side.
“Uncle Hiram,” she cried, running to him when he stepped from the bus.
“Do I know you?” he said, teasing Anna.
Then, sweeping her up in his arms, Hiram held Anna high above his head as he always would do, holding her there for a moment listening to her squeals of joy. Later, the squeals would turn to wonder as Anna opened Hiram’s presents, carefully saving the wrapping paper from each one like a good Scot would do, whether in war time or not. A small wooden horse he had discovered in a wayside craft shop outside of London immediately became her favorite and didn’t leave her hand the rest of the evening. Even when she recited passages from the Torah, as a surprise gift to Hiram, Anna clutched the toy horse tightly for fear that it might try to run away, as she often believed her mother had done. No letters had come to her from Julia in nearly three years and she was now only a faceless shadow to her.
Anna’s final performance of the evening brought tears to Hiram’s eyes, as she told the story of Hanukkah and the festival of lights, which she would soon celebrate with Angie. It wouldn’t be exactly right, but Angie had done her best to make it so, and to teach her, using what she’d been able to gather from the books she had read. She had bought an old metal lamp, and, with Anna eagerly helping her, decorated it with a host of paper symbols of lions and eagles, and then fashioned eight branches for candles. Together, she and Anna would light the Hanukkah lamp with its eight small candles on Christmas Eve and offer special prayers of thanksgiving to God. With no Christmas tree to be found on the barren hills around the house, Angie bundled and tied together an armful of straw gathered from the barn, which Anna quickly decorated with paper chains she had cut. Colored in bright orange and red and green, they became their joyous lights on the straw Christmas tree. “After all,” Angie told Anna, “my Jesus came into this world with straw beneath his feet.”
Later, when Anna climbed into her bed for the cold night, Hiram sang songs to her, ones that he and Julia had learned as children, and told her stories she had never heard about her mother. Some were true and some weren’t, but all were told to make Julia more real to her than some distant face that dimmed with each passing year. No stories were told, though, about her father, and later Hiram thought it strange that Anna asked no questions as to where he was or even who he might be. All Angie would say, when Anna did ask, was that her father was off fighting in the terrible war like her mother somewhere far away, and that seemed to satisfy her. In time, the question was no longer asked of her, and he was forgotten.
When the time came for Hiram to return to the air base, he held Anna close for what seemed an eternity, not wanting to let her go. His last embrace was for Angie, whom he had grown to love as Julia had. The day he first met her, Angie was everything that Julia said she would be, as God-like as one could become while walking this earth. From the very beginning, he felt, had she been younger in years, or himself older, he would have loved her in a far different way than the gentle love he felt for her now. She was a fine, full-bodied and handsome woman, not attractive in a pretty way, but in a magnificent way that always held her grace before your eyes. It covered her like the skin she was born with from head to toe. And when he told her that God must have showered her with such grace, she turned beet red for several minutes before finding the words to answer him. “The grace of God doesn’t rest easy on a person you know. The most we can hope for is to breathe it in from time to time, because we can’t hang on to it.”
When they parted, no one said goodbye.
“It was too harsh a word to use,” Angie said.
Hiram knew she was right. The fields of our memory are unbounded, and we can never forget those we have loved and who have loved us in our lives. For him, what he would remember most was that Angie’s soul sang like a bird at dawn.
The green light having flashed to go, Hiram started the engines a second time and began to taxi in between other planes moving in a row down the long runway towards the take-off point. When he reached it, Hiram turned the nose of the plane into the wind, opened the throttles full with the brake on until it seemed like the fuselage would shake apart, then suddenly released them, propelling the big aircraft down the runway like a sling shot would a rock. In seconds, he could feel the aircraft lift from Mother Earth and begin to groan as it rose higher into the night skies with its heavy load of explosives. Rising every few seconds like flights of frightened blackbirds taking wing, hundreds of bombers soon filled the sky, circling the town of Reading thousands of feet below. As the war’s end seemed imminent, Hiram still could only hope this would be his and the crew’s last mission. Each day when the news came, it seemed there would be no more targets left in Germany to bomb; but what was to follow no poet’s words could ever describe had there been a thousand lines written.
Hours later, Hiram took the plane down to two thousand feet to start the massive bombing run with the other planes on Dresden. Looking down, he could see clearly the icy country roads and darkened woods and fields surrounding the beautiful city, appearing to the eye as if they had been painted there a thousand times or more by God himself. Ahead of him, de Havilland pathfinders had swooped in low over the city marking targets with bright flares. To Hiram, the city seemed unprotected. There was no antiaircraft fire, no dreaded searchlights that always froze a plane momentarily in the skies for enemy eyes to see and fire on. When no enemy night fighters rose to meet them, Hiram knew the city was undefended and doomed, with mercy its only escape. Ordering the bomb doors open, he watched as the thousands of incendiaries dropped by the planes ahead slowly began to build their own little pockets of hell across the city. It was as if he were watching something out of a beautiful but frightening fairy tale, as tiny dots of light would twinkle on, then suddenly burst into flames. Dresden was beginning to burn like ancient Rome did, only more horribly, and in a way that only an angry God would allow. When the second wave of bombers followed two hours lat
er, acting like a huge vacuum pump, their fresh hail of incendiary bombs pulled the spreading fires into one gigantic firestorm.
Below, people scurried back and forth in every direction with no discernable pattern of direction, much like a disturbed nest of aimless ants running helter-skelter, seeking a hiding place that was nowhere to be found. Many reached the cellars of their homes, only to die there from asphyxiation, as the building firestorm drained the oxygen from the air to feed its hungry stomach. Like a raging tornado, the howling firestorm grasped and tugged at everything, seemingly pulling the entire city into its fiery mouth to devour. Buildings along the streets, shattered first by the bombs, collapsed in the swirling wind. Many people that could find no shelter died where they were, or were dragged bodily by the growing vacuum into the fire along with chunks of wood and metal and blazing tree limbs.
His bombing mission complete, Hiram banked the plane to climb into formation for the long journey back home. He could feel the searing heat from the lapping tongue of the raging firestorm far beneath him, which was turning all the clouds and smoke around him into a fiery red. Looking below one more time at the hell they had brought to Dresden, Hiram hoped, as he always did, the little children would be spared the horror. War is not for children, he had argued one night in a pub, it is only for adults who play games with it. Yet, had he known of the horrors in Auschwitz and the other camps across Germany and Poland, he might have thought differently. There were rumors of such truth, but everyone knew the Germans loved children, so they could only be false.
Moving into the thickening clouds closing in on the plane, a fast-moving shadow seen only for a second by Hiram smashed into the midsection of his aircraft, slicing it in half before both aircraft burst into a ball of fire. To those who could see it, the flaming death of the two planes and their crews seemed like an old exploding star in its death throes, finally surrendering its long-held place in the universe. What it had been, its shining existence, was no more. So it was with Hiram’s life, now nothing more than a thousand pieces of burning ashes floating on the firestorm’s wind to no particular place. Only Julia and her cousin Abram would remain to tell those who would listen about their proud family and its long existence in Prague.
Standing in the broad meadows by the Elbe River less than two miles away from the burning city, Erich saw the huge fireball from the colliding planes briefly light up the night sky before plunging silently to the earth. He had arrived only moments before, exhausted and cold and hungry from his own distant journey from Auschwitz. When he drew near to Dresden, walking with a scattering of refugees he had joined a hundred miles back, the winter darkness before him began to redden as the sea of flames raced unchecked through the old city, engulfing everything in sight. Soon an unchecked blast of warm air spread out across the ancient river, lifting the siege of winter momentarily. The blackness that had been the night around him now glowed in such an eerie color that no artist could have captured it had he dared to try.
A deafening noise made of wailing screams and yelling came towards him from across the river. For a second Erich could see nothing. Then hundreds of human figures emerged from the shadows racing to the Elbe. Some sat down at the edge of the river, desperately inhaling between loud sobs the drafts of fresh air coming from across the river, where Erich stood watching them. Others who could scarcely see, their eyes swollen and blackened with soot, walked into the river a little ways and began dousing their face and body with the icy waters, as if they would be born again.
Erich made his way to a large rock a few feet away from the river’s edge and sat down to watch the apocalyptic scene unfolding before him. With the burning city as a backdrop, only whispering shadows of the actors could now be seen. In time, calmness descended and some began walking back and forth, searching for their families. Many still stood alone, crying softly until someone came and led them away. They knew what was still happening there, of the burning bodies and the cries of the dying and the stench of the dead. Few would sleep that night, or even dare to try. The ending of the nightmare was still too distant to see.
When the first light of morning came, Erich roused himself from a grassy bed he had fashioned back in the meadows to try to capture some sleep, though all he found himself doing was shivering uncontrollably through the remaining night hours from the bitter cold, wondering what was left of the city he loved. His father was safe in Berlin, he was sure. But his mother would have suffered through the bombing alone in the cellar of her home. And it was her life he cared about.
Looking to Dresden, the thick smoke of the diminishing fires still spiraled upward, masking much of the sunlight, making the morning seem like the twilight of evening. Several German police could be seen moving among the stirring crowd, cautioning everyone to stay the day by the river until the major fires were extinguished. When they saw Erich and the doctor’s insignia on his uniform, they beckoned him to come with them back to Dresden. Few doctors were alive, they told him, to treat those that might live. But strangely to Erich, they seemed in no hurry to leave, and waited until shortly before noon to do so.
As Erich and two of the police began to make their way along a back road to the city, they asked nothing of him. He was among the refugees fleeing from the advancing Russians, they supposed, and asked no questions. That he was a doctor was all that mattered at the moment. They had traveled only a short distance towards Dresden when the deafening roar of approaching bombers shook the countryside around them. It was the Americans’ turn to squeeze from the dying city its last breath. Bombing in the daylight provided newer targets that had somehow escaped the fury of the two British raids, bringing death to thousands more who had emerged from their shelters into a new day, thinking all was safe again. Buildings that had survived the night and firestorm now crumbled, trapping and killing hundreds more in their wake.
Without any kind of shelter near him, Erich quickly lay flat on the ground, as everyone else was doing, hoping an errant bomb would not find its way to them. When the bombing finally stopped, one lonely plane taking photographs of the carnage appeared, circling over the city like a giant condor, its great wings casting eerie moving shadows on the dead below. As people got to their knees to stand, some whispered that Armageddon had come and they had not been chosen, and they wondered why God had passed them by. But most said nothing, drummed into a deafening silence because they knew that only desolation and death lay ahead of them in the city.
Erich’s route to his home took him into the old city square past a massive water reservoir that dominated the square. Rescue crews were working feverishly ahead of him when he arrived, tossing bodies like bales of hay to the street’s sides so large bulldozers could begin the greater task of clearing away debris and rubble from the crumbling building. Looking at the reservoir, Erich knew the story of Dresden’s fiery death was there before his eyes. A macabre ring of charred corpses, young and old, circled its walls. Many lay across the reservoir’s walls, with their arms outstretched in one last attempt to fling themselves into its cool waters. They would have died there, though, in a worse death perhaps. Hundreds had plunged into the reservoir as their last hope to survive, but soon found themselves unable to breathe in the relentless heat sweeping over the reservoir from the raging firestorm. Many, unable to swim, drowned in the ten-foot waters, dragging others down with them. During the long night, most of the water evaporated from the reservoir, causing the dead to collapse one by one into an unimaginable pile of quickly rotting flesh.
Erich turned away and would look no more. The scene was too close to that of the deep ditches filled with burning Jews and gypsies at Auschwitz. These were Germans, and that did seem different to him. No one looked at him, or cared who he might be, as he proceeded on through the smoldering devastation to his home. Along the way, bodies were being carried from almost every damaged building to add to the growing dead littering the streets. Many intersections were already filled with large stacks of the dead, some reaching ten feet high, waiting t
o be carted to the ancient city square by horse-drawn carts where they would be doused with gasoline and burned. Later, because there were so many bodies, flamethrowers would be used to burn them, painting a surrealistic scene that would last a lifetime for the people watching. Only those being carried from the cellars of the homes and buildings could be identified, if there was someone left to do so.
After twenty minutes making his way across town, Erich stood looking at what once had been one of the finer homes in Dresden. From the days of his great-grandfather, the Schmidts had lived in this beautiful home, envied by all those around. There was little left of it now to see. The roof and top floor had imploded from the bombing, collapsing onto the first floor before bursting into flames. It was the cellar Erich sought, though, where his mother might be and other neighbors who might have sought safety with her.
Erich walked around the side of the house to where the steps were leading to the cellar door. He stopped for a moment by a walnut tree, gnarled by time and the elements and now blackened by the fire. Memories of his childhood adventures climbing among its branches and limbs were no longer there to be seen. What he saw, though, no child could ever have imagined. Pieces of burnt flesh, in all sizes, hung from the limbs like thin strips of charred tinsel, as if someone had methodically tried to decorate the tree. A mother and child had sought shelter there beneath his childhood tree, when a bomb exploded in the street close by, leaving what was left of their bodies hanging from the tree. In Erich’s mind, the gruesome scene, perhaps, could be his mother.
Erich found the thick steel cellar door badly charred and twisted but still intact. Pushing it open, a rush of intense heat captured in the cellar swept across his face. No one, he knew, could live long through such heat.
There was no light except through the open cellar door and a small hole in the floor above, letting rays of the sunshine down like a small spotlight into the cellar. Moving slowly towards the back of the cellar, the soles of his boots became warm from the heat the concrete floor still held, adding an eerie feeling to his presence there. They were lying huddled together when he saw them, his mother and father, a mixture of ashes and bones with bits of charred flesh still attached. Nothing was there to tell him who they were except a large brass belt buckle that he had given his father many Christmases ago and his mother’s wedding ring. His father loved the power the buckle expressed, not that it had been a child’s gift to him. Erich picked up the buckle and ring from their ashes and left the cellar quickly to inhale fresh air again. Standing in the street, he looked one last time at the ruins before him. Strangely, he felt little loss over finding his parents dead, but it was wrong, he believed, the way his mother had died. Unlike his father, she was a God-fearing woman who would harm no soul. With the Russians only a few miles away, Dresden’s war was over. So why would the enemy seek to erase it from God’s eyes when they could have enjoyed its wonderful beauty as he had? Erich mused. They seemed no less the beast than Germany was.
Erich walked away then, without looking back, leaving his mother and father’s ashes to become a part of the rubble when it was cleared away by the bulldozers. For his part, no one knew where he was now, having been swept along with the mass of refugees filling the roads from the advancing Russians. Though the official news from the Western Front was heavily censored, rumors weren’t; and more often than not they carried enough snippets of truth that one could weave a dismal picture of what was unfolding there and on the Eastern Front. With the American army ready to cross the Rhine, hiding out in Mainz under Maria’s roof would be impossible, Erich knew. So he would turn south to Triberg and his beloved Black Forest. The small village held nothing the Americans would want, except maybe to lounge unhurriedly in the warm springs. The Germans would come, though, after there was no more fighting, coming just as they did when the Great War ended, bringing their shrapnel-laced bodies and half-bodies to soak in nature’s healing grace bubbling in the ancient springs around the city. They would sit where the waters flowing across their broken bodies were those that had healed the German warriors of old. Only their bodies would be healed, not their minds, and perhaps, Erich believed, he could search for his own sanity among them by tending to their mental needs.
Yet even then he might have to hide for years, because he knew the British and the Americans would want to imprison or hang many of the medical personnel who had been at Auschwitz. It bothered him some that this might happen, because he had done nothing terrible like the doctors Mengele or Wirth, who should be put to death. He had been nothing more than a camp doctor examining prisoners, doing what doctors do, and had killed no one there with his own hands. He had sentenced no one to death by his selections on the ramp. The fact that some did die was by Dr. Wirth’s orders, not his. What they probably would do, Erich thought, would be to come after him for what he had done earlier to the crippled children at Görden, killing them like he did. But even there he was still being a doctor, acting from compassion, which all good doctors should do. The great virtue is in their oath, and surely they would accept that fact.
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A Perfect Madness Page 30