by Lee Strauss
They should be here. This was their safe place.
But it wasn’t safe enough. The cellar was empty.
Back on the street Emil looked for someone, anyone he recognized.
Then he spotted Frau Fellner, the old lady from across the street. In the maelstrom of war and bomb destruction, her side of the street had mysteriously been left intact. Her house still stood.
“Frau Fellner!”
“Emil?” Frau Fellner’s eyebrows pushed together. “Emil Radle?”
“Yes, it’s me.” Emil thought she didn’t know him because he had grown, but then he realized it was because he was blackened with soot and ash. He wiped his face and brushed off his clothes.
“Please,” he held her arm. “Have you seen my mother and brother?”
She shook her head, no. “I’m sorry, Emil. I haven’t seen them for a long time.”
“Do you know if they are alive?”
Again she shook her head. “I don’t know. Some people have gone north to look for food. Maybe they went, too.” She shrugged her shoulders, and frowned. There was nothing else she could tell him.
Emil looked north, and his hopes withered away. He had come this far, so many weeks of walking, of dreaming. He was meant to find them today, but they were gone. And he didn’t know where they were, or if they were alive.
It was a sunny day. It would’ve been beautiful in normal circumstances, Emil thought. He stood in the middle of the street in Passau, in front of his burnt out home, sun beating down on his head and he didn’t know what to do. The Nazis no longer controlled him, and the Americans couldn't seem to be bothered. He wanted someone to tell him what to do.
Suddenly his knees gave out. He didn’t know if he wasn’t paying attention to his bad leg, or if it was just a combination of physical and emotional fatigue. He was on his knees, in the same manner as his mother when she prayed.
Emil heard a choking, gurgling sound and found that he was weeping. He wept for Germany. He wept for Katharina. He wept for himself because he was alone and hungry and didn’t know what to do.
Since he was down anyway, it occurred to him that maybe he should try it. Try praying like Mother. So he did.
When he managed to get up, he took one step north and then stopped. For some reason he felt the need to turn around and go the other way.
After a short while Emil saw a cattle path that cut across a field. It didn’t make sense to go off the main road, and yet he felt compelled.
He limped through the bushes, careful not to catch his foot on twigs or rocks jutting out until he heard the babbling of a stream. Then he saw someone fishing.
The thought of fish made his stomach growl, and he wondered if there was any generosity left in Passau. Perhaps that boy would share his lunch.
“Hallo!” Emil called out. He was a ways away, and the sound of the stream must have drowned out his voice. He continued to call out until he was only a few meters from the boy and when he turned around, Emil’s heart leaped. His face broke into a massive grin.
“Helmut!”
“Emil?” Helmut dropped his pail, and ran to his brother, pulling him into an enormous bear hug. “Emil! You’re alive!”
“And you’re alive!” It was strange for Emil to hear laughter coming from his mouth. “Mother?” He had new hope, “Father?”
“Yes! They’re both here!”
Helmut grabbed his bucket of fish and led Emil through the trees to an old hunter’s shack.
“I found this shack while searching for food,” Helmut told Emil. “Father came home a few days before the bombs, and we hid here. It's a good thing we didn't hide in the cellar...”
“I know,” Emil said. “I was there.”
They walked through dense bush into an opening where a cabin stood. A thin figure was tending a small garden. She turned to them and her expression went from shock to joy. “Peter!” she shouted, “Peter, it’s Emil!” Mother ran to Emil and covered his filthy face with kisses.
Father appeared at the front door. His left arm was missing, but he walked to his son and held out his right hand. Emil limped to his father and grasped it.
“Young man,” he said looking straight into Emil’s eyes.
They were two soldiers. They both knew. They understood.
“It’s so good to see you, Father.”
His father pulled him into a tight, one-armed embrace. “It is so good to see you, son.”
EPILOGUE
THOSE IN BAVARIA CONSIDERED themselves very lucky to have been occupied by the Americans rather than the Soviets. They’d heard things, word got out, and it wasn’t going well for their friends and family in the northeastern areas occupied by the Communists. It was an irony, really. Hitler had been so passionate about eliminating the communists, and now they ruled the former capital of Germany, his beloved Berlin.
Well, at least half of it, Emil thought. The Allies decided to split the city up. He didn’t know how that was going to work, but again, he was just glad he was in Bavaria and not Berlin.
The Americans treated them rather well, considering they were POWs of sorts. They organized new governments and rebuilding initiatives, but they weren’t soft by any means. They aggressively rounded up all war criminals, the most famous of which went to trial in Nuremberg. They arrested Tante Gerta.
Emil always knew there was something not quite right with her. The prison for women where she worked was actually a Nazi Concentration Camp. She’d administered the extermination of Jewish women, and women who posed some kind of “threat” against the state. She was sentenced to death for war crimes.
Everyone on their street worked together to rebuild the neighborhood. Even though Father only had one arm, he worked as hard as the rest. The first night they sat together around the table in their rebuilt home, Mother cried. She gave thanks for the meal, for the four of them being together again, and then they all said a resounding heart-felt Amen.
They missed having the Schwarzes next door. Frau Schwarz had been overcome with grief when Karl was killed. A short while later she’d taken her own life. The whole Schwarz family was lost because of the war.
Emil visited Johann regularly. Usually he was laying in bed, with the lights dimmed, his violin left neglected in the corner. Johann’s mother was always happy to see Emil, and hoped that his visits would help draw Johann out of his melancholy. He took Katharina’s death hard, as Emil knew he would. He told Johann over and over that Katharina would want them to keep living, and not to take the fact that they were still alive for granted. Emil said it to cheer Johann up, and eventually Emil started to believe it, too.
The Allies instigated a denazification plan. Anything that promoted Nazism was destroyed. Government policies were rewritten as was school curriculum.
None of the old teachers from Emil’s school remained and they had no word of what happened to Herr Bauer or Herr Giesler.
The school building had been destroyed so now they met at the old Hitler Youth district office, in the same room where their unit used to meet. The room was much the same as before, except that the Luftwaffe model no longer hung from the ceiling.
It was a smaller space than they had at their old school, but they didn’t really need a big one. Most of the kids were gone now, dead. Gone were Friedrich, Wolfgang, Rolf and, of course, Moritz. Anne was gone as were all the Jewish kids. Many others were gone too, like Katharina. Irmgard was busy raising a baby on her own.
In some ways it was like starting from scratch, Emil thought, like they were infants who knew nothing. As it was, Emil was too old to remain in school for long.
The adults in his neighborhood were called to an assembly to watch movies of the concentration camps and Emil attended with his parents. The Americans said they wanted to deprogram them. Most watched the films with disbelief, horrified. Some refused to believe it, all lies, they said. Still others burst into tears. Emil believed it all.
Eventually life became somewhat normal. The areas of Passau that
were destroyed were rebuilt. The adults went to work; the kids went to school. They would never forget the war. The world wouldn’t let them, and neither would history.
One afternoon Emil went to see Johann. As he walked up the road he heard the sweet music of Johann’s violin. Johann was getting better it seemed. Emil listened closely recognizing the tune. It was a one he hadn’t heard in a very long time, since before the war.
Emil smiled. It was one of Johann’s favorite songs, The Loreley, composed by Heinrich Heine, a Jew.
THE END
I hope you enjoyed Playing with Matches. Please consider leaving a review. They are so helpful to Indie Authors like me and help other readers find the books they love.
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About the Author
Lee Strauss is the author of The Perception Series (young adult dystopian), The Minstrel Series (contemporary romance), and young adult historical fiction (and is currently working on a new Romantic Suspense series). She is the married mother of four grown children, three boys and a girl, and divides her time between British Columbia, Canada and Dresden, Germany. When she's not writing or reading she likes to cycle, hike and do yoga. She enjoys traveling (but not jet lag :0), soy lattes, red wine and dark chocolate.
Lee also writes younger YA fantasy as Elle Strauss.
For more info on books by Lee Strauss and her social media links visit leestraussbooks.com. To make sure you don’t miss the next new release, be sure to sign up for her newsletter!
AUTHOR’S NOTE
It’s never easy to write a war story. With World War Two being the most famous of wars, it’s quite possible that I got some detail wrong, and a more studied reader will catch the error. That said, I spent countless hours researching and did my best to represent war time life as authentically as I could. If anything, reality was far worse than what was captured in these pages.
Though Playing with Matches is a work of fiction, I had the privilege of knowing a few people who were children during the war, and who shared their stories. I borrowed from some of their own true experiences to weave together some of Emil’s fictional ones. Because of this, I consider this work a collaborative effort.
Books by Lee Strauss
See all books by Lee Strauss/Elle Strauss at Lee’s Author page.
Young Adult
The Perception Series (dystopian/sci-fi/romance)
Ambition (short story prequel)
Perception (book 1)
Volition (book 2)
Contrition (book 3)
Playing with Matches (WW2 history/romance)
Playing with Matches
A Piece of Blue String (companion short story)
Jars of Clay (ancient Rome history/romance)
Jars of Clay
Broken Vessels (Jars of Clay Volume Two)
Contemporary Romance
The Minstrel Series
Sun & Moon
Flesh & Bone
Heart & Soul
Peace & Goodwill (a Christmas Novella)
Romantic Suspense (mystery/sci-fi)
The Nursery Rhyme Series
Run Run Run (Gingerbread Man Part 1 - coming soon!)
See all books by Lee Strauss/Elle Strauss at Lee’s Author page.
ACKNOWLEGEMENTS
I owe a huge amount of gratitude to Emil Biech who shared his story of how he walked from Nuremberg to Passau as a teen at the end of the war. This became the seed that turned into Playing with Matches, and Emil Radle is named after him. The twisted bike story is his, as is the emotional impromptu prayer in the street that led him to the cattle path where he found his brother fishing in a creek. Emil Biech passed away on January 30, 2015 but a piece of his life will live on in these pages.
I also must thank my dear parents-in-law for telling their stories. The strafe incident belongs to Herbert Strauss and the potato bin that never emptied belongs to Martha Strauss. I also got the idea for Tante Gerta from a story about one of her grandmothers.
Inspiration and details for the train ride to the eastern front and some of the fighting sequences come from W. John Koch, whom I’ve never had the honor of meeting, but I’m very grateful that he wrote a book about his story. My gratitude also extends to Guy Sajer for writing The Forgotten Soldier. His account about his time fighting on the eastern front was invaluable.
A special thanks to Angelika Offenwanger for guiding me on German Culture, my Wattpad fan, Restintheshade, for army authenticity notes, and to Claudia Dahinden for her hard work and insights on the German language translation.
And to all those people who dare to resist evil in any age–thank you.
Recommended Reading
No Escape: My Young Years Under Hitler’s Shadow - by W. John Koch
Hitler Youth: Growing Up in Hitler’s Shadow - by Susan Campbell Bartoletti
The White Rose: Munich, 1942-1943 by Inge Scholl, Arthur R. Schultz and Dorothee Soelle
When Truth Was Treason: German Youth against Hitler: The Story of the Helmuth Huebener Group, Based on the Narrative of Karl Heinz Schnibbe by Blair R Holmes, Alan Keele and Karl Heinz Schnibbe;
The Forgotten Soldier by Guy Sajer