by Ursula Hegi
Sometimes when she emerged from the cellar, Ingrid would be confronted by new horrors: mutilated people transported in hand carts to the hospital; dead goats or cats in the middle of the street; people buried beneath the ruins of their houses while others tried to dig them out. Some would be found alive, most dead. One of her students, eight-year-old Hermann Blaser, was missing after a bombing and not found until hours later, his body burned. On her way from the school to the streetcar, Ingrid encountered his mother who, demented with grief, carried a cardboard box that used to contain soap and in which she’d collected Hermann’s bone remains.
The earth of the cemeteries was never at rest. It became confusing to Ingrid to figure out where the front was. Didn’t the civilians suffer as badly as the soldiers? What kind of world was it where you could emerge from a cellar after a bombing, emerge into air that was opaque and dense, and feel relieved that you’d been spared?
In her neighborhood, Ingrid saw people become more sober about the government as they suffered destruction and witnessed each other’s powerlessness and anguish. She’d never seen the people of Burgdorf this poor, this hungry, this afraid, and she envied Trudi’s father, who was content even with Steckrübensuppe—turnip soup—and who had the gift to see the good in everyone, even in her who was always so hungry that she even craved the smell of boiling potatoes and sour milk. On the outside she knew she didn’t show her greed and discontent, but within she railed against her hunger.
Many in town longed for the days of the unknown benefactor, when their distress would have summoned a gift from him. As winter began, the cold intensified the hunger. Refugees from Schlesien and other parts of the country settled in Burgdorf. Several old people and two infants froze to death in their houses.
Cellars were colder than any other place, and even prayers did little to alleviate the physical pain that came with extreme cold. In her parents’ cellar it occurred to Ingrid that her concept of hell had to be all wrong because, surely, hell must be the coldest place you could imagine. During air raids, she’d try to keep her daughter warm by wrapping her in extra layers of her own clothes, which she kept in her broken suitcase by the stairs. The floor, where she and her parents spent many nights, was hard despite the blankets that her father spread out. Those blankets were the only comfort she would accept from him; whenever he’d offer her one of his jackets she’d decline, unable to tolerate anything he’d worn so close to his skin. Yet, even with several blankets and two coats, she’d feel cold. And something would always stick out—her legs, her arms, or her cold, cold neck. Though she never mentioned the cold, she felt selfish for noticing it, for crying inside about the misery it caused her.
Throughout that winter, Max talked more and more about finding Ruth Abramowitz and introducing Trudi to his aunt. By then, Leo’s car had been seized for the war effort, and when Trudi asked Max how he planned to get to Dresden, he said they could go on the train. To get money for the tickets, he sold three of his paintings to a wealthy woman whose daughter he used to tutor. He pretended to be ill at the ammunition factory, collapsing several times at his desk, until he was told to stay home for a week. The second Sunday of February 1945, a day before his thirty-eighth birthday, he and Trudi were prepared to set out for Dresden and Leipzig on the train, when her father developed a sudden high fever and cough.
“Just go,” Leo told Trudi. “I’ll be all right without you.”
But she seized the chance of staying with him. She had been nervous about meeting Max’s aunt. How would she react if she saw her nephew walk up to the front door with a Zwerg woman?
“We could make the trip later,” Max suggested.
“Why don’t you go without me?”
“Because we’ve wanted to do this together.”
“We’ll make another trip. In the summer. Maybe you can … you know, get your aunt sort of ready for me? Besides, it would be good if Ruth knew about her parents.”
“But I don’t want to take the jewelry and things if I go by myself.”
“Why not? I trust you. And she may need them.”
When Max left, he told her, “I still wish you’d come, or that we’d go later, together.”
Afterwards, she would go over these two options in her mind, again and again—picturing herself in Dresden with Max as the firebombs annihilated the city, then picturing herself postponing the trip. If only they had waited as he had suggested. Then they’d both still be alive. And they would have celebrated Max’s birthday on its proper day. She should have known better than to let him talk her into wishing him happy birthday one day early, considering the misfortunes those early celebrations had brought upon her father’s side of the family. But the morning of his departure Max had brought a cake made out of turnips to the pay-library and had teased her into letting him have his gifts, two shirts and a vest she’d sewn for him. Her misgivings had felt silly—after all, nothing terrible had happened in her lifetime—but then again, maybe that was only because she had honored the superstition she’d grown up with and had not celebrated anything before its time. When Max vanished in Dresden two days after his departure from Burgdorf—or perhaps on the way to Leipzig, Trudi would tell herself, hoping that he’d first visited his aunt or that even, against all reason, he’d absconded with the Abramowitzs’ treasures though she knew he’d never steal from anyone—it was as though his disappearance proved the superstition.
• • •
She felt stunned by the magnitude of the destruction. Thousands and thousands of people had perished in Dresden that February Tuesday, many of them refugees who couldn’t be accounted for. Canisters of phosphorus had been dropped on the city, turning people into live torches, driving hordes of burning, shrieking bodies toward the ponds that had been established for extinguishing fires and now became graves as many drowned, trampled or crowded by others into deeper water. And then the bombs began to rain on the city. For forty minutes. Everywhere. Without selection. On churches and hospitals and prisons and schools. Killing, maiming. A carpet of bombs.
With each horrible detail she’d find out, Trudi would despair more; and yet she’d try to picture Max alive—wounded and unable to let her know what had happened to him—but alive. She’d be patient. She’d wait. For as long as it would take. Nights, her fears presented her with every possible disaster that could have happened to him, and the worst was that he’d become one of the burned bodies buried in the mass graves that had been dug in an immense ditch around the center of Dresden.
Wavering between fear for his life and feeling rejected—maybe he’d wanted to get away from her; maybe he’d returned to his wife—she wandered through Burgdorf, searching for him though she was sure she wouldn’t find him. She tried to imagine him close by, tried to evoke him by willing him to return to her.
Several times she took the streetcar to Kaiserswerth and talked to the watchmaker, who hadn’t seen Max since he’d left for Dresden. “He said he’d be back in a week,” he’d tell her and let her borrow the key to Max’s room above the shop, where she’d sit for hours.
If an airplane passed low above his roof, she wouldn’t even bother to look from the window. She remembered how impatient she’d become with Alexander for praying his house would be hit by bombs. I didn’t understand then, she thought and sent him a silent apology.
Most of the time she’d be staring at the paintings, and she’d see herself in his arms, asking him, “What did you see this time?” And Max would tell her, first with words, then with colors. In his arms, she had tried to see what he saw—exotic buildings, entire cities—and once she’d managed to glimpse a yellow flower at the moment, the brink, a flower the warm shade of yellow-orange that blossomed behind her eyelids, blotting out everything else until all of her was yellow-orange warm.
She walked. She slept. Without regard for time. In the middle of the night she might find herself by the river or on the fairgrounds without recalling getting there. On her face, she’d feel the old tears and snot, and she�
�d move her arms to shake off invisible assailants. She stopped caring for her clothes, her hair. Since the town had not known about her love for Max, people did not come forward to comfort her, to share her grief, or tell her that she was not the only one who’d lost someone, that all of them had friends and family who’d vanished—dead perhaps, or living in foreign countries. The only one who understood was her father, who’d close the pay-library to look for her as he once had for her mother, who knew how to find her and bring her home, who’d sit her down and feed her something warm and soothing, who’d pull his comb from his shirt pocket and untangle her hair.
She kept returning to Kaiserswerth, and when the watchmaker told her, “I’ll have to rent the room—that is, if your friend doesn’t come back soon,” she left her shoes with the high, high heels inside Max’s wardrobe, but she took his paintings from the walls and carried them home, where she wrapped them and stored them in back of her closet.
A month after the firebombing of Dresden, the saddest of all trains passed through Burgdorf, a long train filled with people from a KZ, gray faces and striped suits behind the windows. Thin, hungry, and ill, they were transported to another camp because the Americans were getting close. When the train stopped at the Burgdorf platform for more than half an hour, none of the prisoners got off. Armed SS men stood along the platform, separating the train from the line of townspeople, who stood watching at a distance.
The air was damp and cool and still as if it were solid, poured around the three groups like those half globes of glass that fit into your hand and contain an entire town and which—unless picked up and shaken to distribute a shower of snowflakes—will remain immobile. Yet, all at once, something moved, a woman’s shape in a beige raincoat, loosening itself from the line of watchers, setting in motion a sequence of other motions. It was the third-youngest Buttgereit daughter, Bettina, flying from the restraining hands of her sisters toward the train, thrusting the half loaf of bread that she’d just traded from Frau Bilder for an embroidered purse, toward one of the half-open windows of the train. Several gaunt hands tried to clutch the bread, but before any could seize it, four SS men closed around Bettina Buttgereit, their black uniforms one impenetrable knot that absorbed her pale coat and rendered her invisible until they disentangled. Gripping Bettina between them, they thrust her toward the train. Into the train.
Silently, the line of townspeople retreated, shrank. Just as the train pulled out of the station, the people noticed the face of an old man who looked strangely familiar, though no one could say who he was. Behind the passing window, he wrenched up his bony chin, pressed his fleshless lips together, and focused his sunken eyes on something above the people’s heads.
After that train, it felt as though the Americans might arrive any day. It was the end of March when they approached Burgdorf, and what announced them from a distance was the rumbling of their tanks. When Trudi rose from her bed and looked from the upstairs hall window, people in the street were running for shelter as though they’d heard the air-raid sirens. As she grabbed a white sheet and hung it from the window, the front door flew open.
It was Frau Weiler, carrying a basin of holy water. “Quick now, Leo, Trudi—” she yelled. “To the church. We have to hide.” She stared at Trudi as she came down the stairs, still in her nightgown, her hair disheveled. “At least put a coat on.”
Not too long ago, Trudi would have welcomed the Americans as rescuers, but since the firebombing of Dresden that had changed. Besides, her aunt had warned her in a letter that a lot of Americans thought all Germans were Nazis. Trudi already knew what it was like to be considered an enemy within your own country because you were against the Nazis, and now she felt even more isolated because she might well be regarded an enemy by both sides.
Her father’s hand on her elbow, she found herself in the street with him and Frau Weiler, whose scarf was slipping from her gray hair as she flung drops of holy water around them. They hurried across the church square and ducked into the cellar of St. Martin’s Church, where the priest was trying to calm nearly two dozen people, most of them more terrified than during the air raids which—compared to this—had come to feel familiar.
Leo and Trudi sat next to Ingrid, who was there with her baby and parents.
“Nothing will happen to us.” Frau Weiler was splashing her holy water on everyone.
The priest waved her away.
“Nothing will happen to us.…”
“Don’t be so sure,” the taxidermist said. “Those Americans have killed plenty of us with their bombs.”
Fräulein Teschner clutched a long white cloth that she’d snatched right from the altar during a quick detour on her flight from the rectory.
“They come with bayonets,” the taxidermist whispered. “And they stab anyone who resists them.”
“Someone has to be our messenger,” his wife decided.
“Someone who knows English,” the priest said.
“My daughter has studied English,” Herr Baum announced, and everyone looked at Ingrid, who sat there with Rita, rocking her stiffly.
Without speaking, she laid her daughter in Trudi’s arms though her mother reached for her. Trudi blinked. The child was peering into her face with Ingrid’s eyes. Curving her arms, she brought Rita closer. Max. If only you’d waited. Seven weeks. That’s all it’s been since you left. Seven weeks.
“To signal peace.” Fräulein Teschner thrust the white cloth at Ingrid.
“You don’t have to do this,” Leo Montag told Ingrid as she stepped next to the door.
The taxidermist was saying, “They push their bayonets into straw and mattresses to see if anyone is hiding.”
His wife nodded. Her hand trembled as she applied fresh lipstick.
But Ingrid was wearing the expression of a martyr who has finally found the tormentor who’ll grant her eternal salvation.
“Remember now,” the priest said, “you need to talk English with them when they come.… Tell them—tell them that we surrender. That we have suffered, too.”
“That we are glad they’re here,” Ingrid’s father said.
Leo Montag spoke up. “First tell them there are no soldiers here.” His eyes skimmed across everyone in the cellar and returned to Herr Heidenreich. “That pin—” He motioned his chin toward the Hakenkreuz on Herr Heidenreich’s lapel. “—today it could cost you your life.”
The taxidermist, who’d once prided himself on having shaken the Führer’s hand, fumbled with the clasp. “Mein Gott, I can’t get it off. I—”
The pastor’s housekeeper darted across the cellar, shoved his fingers aside, and yanked at the pin so hard that a piece of fabric came off with it. Her eyes wild, she scanned the cellar and ran to the corner where the life-size nativity set was stored. Without hesitating, she shoved the pin beneath Maria’s long plaster skirt.
They all stared at the statue.
“Don’t look at it,” she hissed.
Ingrid began to flap her white cloth.
Her mother was reciting the Lord’s Prayer: “Water unser, der Du bist im Himmel…”
“They’re here!”
Herr Baum whimpered.
…geheiligt werde Dein Name…”
“I don’t hear any—”
“Sshh—”
… zu uns komme Dein Reich…”
The priest’s chins trembled.
… Dein Wille geschehe…”
The altar cloth billowed in Ingrid’s hands as four American soldiers charged in. “No German soldiers here,” Ingrid cried. “No German soldiers …”
“No—German—soldiers,” the priest echoed the foreign words.
The taxidermist joined in. “No—German—soldiers. No—”
… wie im Himmel so auf Erden …”
“We surrender,” Ingrid cried, forgetting any aspirations of martyrdom.
“Surrender … surrender …” other voices echoed.
The people of Burgdorf told each other they were glad the America
ns—Amis, they called them—were the ones who occupied their region, not the Russians. Although several civilians had been killed while resisting their occupiers, all that was in the past now, and the Americans were organizing Schulspeisung—meals in school. Children who arrived for class, some barefoot, all hungry, were each given a tin container and a spoon to keep. Between ten and eleven on school mornings, they’d line up and proceed toward the smell of the hot soup that simmered in tall kettles. The recipe changed frequently: pea soup, mixed vegetable soup, beef broth with rice, cream soup, lentil soup.
The children’s favorite was Kakaosuppe—cocoa soup: sweet and brown, it filled more than their bellies, saturating them with memories of chocolate they’d tasted long ago. Some days, if they could no longer tolerate their hunger and soup time seemed too far away, the children would bang their spoons against their tin containers. One of them would start, a hesitant clang that immediately drew a chorus, steady and mounting until the voices of the teachers were drowned. Some teachers would take their soup portion home with them to share with their families, grateful for what the Amis were doing.
American soldiers were stationed in houses throughout Burgdorf. Despite warnings not to trust any German, some of them became friendly with the townspeople and showed them photos of their wives and children. The Rathaus and the former Hitler-Jugend quarters became offices for the American military, and the pianist’s mansion—where Fräulein Birnsteig had committed suicide in January after learning that her adopted son had died in a KZ—was turned into an officers’ club. Hakenkreuz flags and SS emblems disappeared from the graceful rooms, and on Saturday nights a dance band played American music.
Although the townspeople approved when some of the more industrious boys ran errands for the soldiers or shined their shoes, bringing home packs of chewing gum and narrow bars of American chocolate, they scorned the young girls who dared to go dancing with the soldiers or were seen taking drives with them.