The American Fiancee

by Eric Dupont

  “Promise me you won’t tell Wolfgang I was pregnant. If he knows I lost the baby, he’ll say I did it on purpose.”

  “I promise, Tante Clara.”

  I kept my promise, Kapriel. And Clara kept her composure. We took the children and a few suitcases to the railway station, with Herr Neumann leading the horse. We’d run out of gas a long time ago. Butter, too. We didn’t have much of anything left, to be honest. The station was in complete and utter chaos. The tracks were being cleared of debris, but no one was allowed to travel. To victory our trains will roll on. No traveling until the war is done. That was one of the signs at the station. The Nazis were rather fond of inane rhymes. If it rhymes, then it must be true!

  So there was to be no taking the train unless authorized by God knows who. Erich Koch? Clara was only just holding it together. She called the railway staff every name under the sun: “I’m a personal friend of Magda Goebbels! You haven’t heard the last of this!” We couldn’t calm her down. I tried to look on the bright side: Hans and Hannelore had stopped crying. They’d become numb to trauma, a defense mechanism that would soon serve them well.

  We had to stay home. Dreadful news reached us that October. The Russians had broken through the frontline, coming into East Prussia through the village of Nemmersdorf, where the Wehrmacht managed to beat them back a few days later. Villagers were found massacred, their bodies mutilated. All the women had been raped, some finished off with bayonets. People were nervous, but nobody dared leave.

  The Neumanns didn’t hold out much longer. One night in November, they left without saying a word to anyone. Only to come back again three hours later. They had come across three hanged men after a bridge. One had a sign around his neck: “I tried to flee.”

  Wolfgang didn’t come home until Christmas. He assured us that the Wehrmacht was preparing—in the event of an emergency, we shouldn’t talk about it—a mass evacuation by way of the Baltic Sea. That if the Russians came, if we heard artillery fire, we should leave for Gotenhafen. The order to evacuate would come eventually. He seemed very calm. All of East Prussia was absurdly calm in December 1944. He even decorated a Christmas tree for the children. He looked relieved. Neumann explained to me later that Wolfgang must have understood that the war was almost at an end, that he would be able to go back to his normal life again, in his own home. Little Heinrich was already talking. Hans was eight years old. The two eldest were able to sleep, but the youngest would often have nightmares. They would dream of the zebra galloping as the bombs rained down, you see.

  Wolfgang left again for Gotenhafen on January 6, the feast of the Three Kings. Before he left, there was of course a scene or two with Clara. I could hear them through the wall shouting at each other. “When it’s all over, I’ll have you locked up! You’ll go back to the institution, you crazy bitch!” And he left, at last. Anja pointed out to me that there were no SS families left in Königsberg. Unlike most, they had been given permission to travel. All people wanted was to find refuge in the Reich, in Berlin or Dresden, not to stay there, waiting to be torn to shreds by the Bolsheviks. Anja found it strange, and I did too, that Wolfgang hadn’t wrangled permission for us to travel. Before he left, he said to me again: “When the Russians come, leave with the Neumanns. Come meet me in Gotenhafen and we’ll all leave by sea.”

  Heavy snow began to fall, Kapriel. A real winter like none East Prussia had seen for a very long time. A Soviet winter. Fifteen, eighteen degrees below zero. What? You’re not impressed? On January 12, 1945, the Russians marched across the German border and news spread like wildfire across the city. This time, people openly ignored the travel ban, hitched up their oxen, their horses, put together makeshift carts. An entire people took to the roads.

  The Neumanns had prepared a cart. It even had a roof. Frau Neumann was in a particular rush to leave: she had three girls, all younger than I was, who had been sharing the same room, our old living room, with their parents since August. In the meantime, we had had to put other people up, so many homes had been bombarded.

  We left on January 22. I led the procession. Two carts and four horses for four families. Just the one man, Herr Neumann, who had never led anything in his life. All these people had become my whole world. My mission was to bring them to Gotenhafen, or further west, ideally as far as Berlin.

  “We’re not waiting any longer. We’ll have to walk to Elbing. There will surely be a train after that.”

  Clara refused to leave. She clung to her piano, wouldn’t hear of leaving the music room. It was too cold, she cried. Herr Neumann had a wooden leg, that’s why he was still in Königsberg and not with the Wehrmacht. We had buried the china and silverware in the garden again, not too far from where the Neumanns had buried the zebra, by an apple tree. Because we were sure we would be coming back. It would only be for a while. I put the children in the cart with a suitcase, then went back into the house to tear Clara away from her piano.

  “We have to leave right now.”

  “I’m not going anywhere without my piano.”

  Then she wanted to bring all her scores. I let her bring just the one book. You know what she wanted to keep? The Magic Flute.

  “To sing with the children along the way,” she said.

  We walked alongside the cart toward Elbing. How far? At least one hundred kilometers. The temperature had fallen again to around minus twenty-five. We walked in silence. A long, unending line of people. Only the old, the children, and the sick sat in the carts; the others walked. Shortly after Königsberg, shouts and cries from behind us. “Out of the way!” It was the Wehrmacht, our own army, traveling by truck, fleeing the same danger we were, only they had gas! And they were knocking down the carts, knocking down people to save their own skin. How many kilometers did we walk the first day? Twenty? No. Fewer. We had to find somewhere to sleep. In the homes abandoned by people who must have been further ahead, we even found a few potatoes. The second night, we slept in the home of a countess. I don’t remember which one, but she let us sleep in her heated anteroom. Otherwise everyone would have died of cold. She said, I remember:

  “We have to get past Elbing as quickly as we can. We need to hurry before they surround us.”

  That very night, the countess left with her people, in the shadows. We needed to sleep. But the rest proved fatal. There must have been twenty-odd families from Mozartstraße. Some had stayed behind, like Anja, who didn’t want to come with us. It’s funny, it wasn’t until a few days after we left that I started to wonder what had happened to her. What would become of her? What would the Russians do to her? She hadn’t wanted to come to Germany. She preferred to try her luck with the Russians. Go figure . . . To do that, Kapriel, to do that, she really must have thought the Germans were . . . Anyway . . . A little more white wine? Where’s the corkscrew? How old would Anja be today?

  (With that, Michel, she got up again, pretending she couldn’t find the corkscrew she had left on the little table beside her. She disappeared into the kitchen. I heard her blow her nose again, once or twice. Then she came back in with another corkscrew.)

  This will do the job! Look, Konsum’s finest! Made in the GDR! Ha! Ha! Now where was I? Oh, yes. It’s so easy to lose all notion of time, you know. I know we left Königsberg on the twenty-second, I remember that the countess was the second night and that Clara wanted to play her piano. There must have been a hundred of us watching her play the overture of The Magic Flute in the music room of that grand old home.

  It would be the last time she would ever play the piano. Then she wanted me to sing Ach, ich fühl’s. I got through half of it. How they applauded! I had never been applauded like that. Just to please them, I finished the song. The next day, the shit began because, until that point, the heavens had been with us. First, old Meisel, the cook I had been holding by the arm as we walked beside the cart, sat down on the side of the road. She never got back up. She died right there and then, Kapriel. It was cold enough to kill you standing there with your boots on, you can t
ell them that back in Canada. And that’s what happened to her, along with thousands of others who never picked themselves back up again from the side of the road as they tried to flee. Then, just before Elbing—it must have been a little after Heiligenbeil—a Wehrmacht convoy appeared right in front of us.

  “Turn back,” they shouted. “They’re at Elbing!”

  “Who is?”

  “Ivan!”

  There were a million and a half of them, Russians hell-bent on revenge, pouring into Germany. They had taken Elbing, which meant that East Prussia had been surrounded. All the carts pulled off to the side and the Wehrmacht trucks raced past. Some were only half full. They didn’t think to stop to pick up the sick or the children. We needed to turn around, but to go where? The sea was our only means of escaping Ivan, to the north, beyond the Vistula Lagoon. We had to reach the small strip of land, the Vistula Isthmus, that links Gdansk to East Prussia. Ivan hadn’t gotten that far yet. The cold that had taken so many children and old people now gave us the ice that would save us from the Russians. Thousands of families waited, not daring to venture out onto the ice. Far off in the distance, we could hear the artillery. I had to take Clara by the arm; she was liable to collapse at any minute. She climbed onto the cart with the children, then Herr Neumann made the decision.

  “We need to cross. Otherwise Ivan will take us here on the shoreline.” And like a colony of ants making its way across the white tiles on a bathroom floor, we advanced. In silence so we could hear the sound the ice made when it cracked. The clanking of the harnesses, the children sobbing in the carts, the wailing of the old folk. Then a cry rang out:

  “Planes!”

  It was already too late to take cover on the shore. Three times they swooped down at us. Whole families were swallowed up with each explosion. There was nothing we could do for them. We just made our way around the holes and kept on walking and walking. Picture the scene. We were walking across the frozen Vistula Lagoon to reach Gdansk when the planes arrived. We could hear them long before we saw them, the sinister din announcing our imminent death. The whistling sound draws nearer, won’t take no for an answer, grabs your attention and won’t let go.

  But you run, there’s no time. The harnesses clank even harder, the horses whinny in fright. Then the planes dive down. You pray to the heavens. Not me! Have pity, not me! I’m a good girl! I went to Sophie-Charlotte-Schule! I learned French! I don’t deserve these bombs! And twenty meters ahead of us, the ice opens wide, swallows two carts. An old woman stands at the edge, peering into the icy hole her family has just fallen into. Keep going. Walk on. And the music of Mozart going around and around in your head, because after three nights without sleep, you’re starting to go mad. You can hear voices. And the overture to The Magic Flute is banging away at your eardrums. Ach! When it wasn’t the Russian bombs—dropped on civilians, Kapriel!—it was the sometimes too-thin ice that gave way beneath the weight of the carts. Shouts. The sound of the water, lapping. Then nothing. Go on. Walk around the hole. In silence. I remember, on the other side of the lagoon we walked a few kilometers across the ice that covered the land. There was a woman tugging on the arm of an old lady, her mother. People were just dropping dead at the side of the road. No time to bury them, no time to say good-bye. Anyone who sat down stayed down. Frozen in two minutes flat. It wasn’t until we got to the other side that we realized: Helga. You know, children don’t stand up as well to the cold. We had to leave her by the side of the road, too. Without a word.

  Two nights in a stable. Then the road, the long, snow-covered road, the planes screaming down at us, dropping bombs on us. A woman holding an ax, tears in her eyes, cutting off her son’s frozen toes while he screams blue murder. Blood on the snow. I still see it. After how many days? Eating snow so as not to die of thirst. The animals dying of exhaustion. The length of the snow-covered trail, the skeletons of horses we slaughtered and ate while the flesh still quivered. Each pushing forward his last possessions on earth. I saw her, Kapriel, and on nights when I don’t drink enough I can still see her: that woman dragging a blanket with a gramophone on it, its long copper corolla advancing like a cursed mechanical flower in winter. I remember because two days later I stumbled over her body, lying dead beside her gramophone, and I cursed her in the darkness. And the overture of The Magic Flute swirling through the frigid winter air. Then the city, at last. The people hanging by their necks as we approached Gdansk. A city jam-packed with refugees with nothing to offer those of us who wanted for everything.

  All of East Prussia converged on Gdansk. Cinemas and schools had been closed; every building was being used to house the waves of refugees.

  Some had come from Allenstein, others from Cranz, from Memel. All were fleeing Ivan. The stories circulating about the men—and especially the women—who stayed behind were enough to make your blood run cold. I thought of Anja, and of our neighbors who had preferred to stay. You know, Kapriel, of the three hundred thousand Germans who, for all sorts of reasons, didn’t manage to flee East Prussia, the vast majority of them died: from the cold, from hunger, from illness; raped, or shot. The luckier ones got three weeks on a train to Siberia, where they were imprisoned in labor camps.

  And so there we were in Gdansk, after five days of walking through the most unbearable cold. We’d lost Helga. And Clara was showing signs of a new round of fever. We were in a classroom. Hannelore was ill too. People tried to sleep, piled in on top of each other. We’d been given tea and blankets by the auxiliaries or some other women in uniform. Clara kept saying: “Our Führer will send us a ship!” or “After the final victory, we’ll throw a huge party!” And that was while she was lucid! Clara got increasingly delirious. What else did she used to say? Oh yes, I remember: “Do popes have mustaches, Sister? No! A pope has never had a mustache!” I think when we were on the road, Tante Clara completely lost her mind.

  In the morning, people from the Wehrmacht told us that ships were taking aboard refugees in Gotenhafen. That we’d have to walk thirty kilometers and, after that, there would be boats for Denmark and for Kiel or Hamburg, I can’t remember which. Clara came around to her senses at the sound of the name “Gotenhafen.”

  “That’s where Wolfgang’s waiting for us. We must push on, Magda.”

  To Gotenhafen, thirty kilometers, still with the Neumanns. Some of the Wehrmacht, moved by the sight of the children, let us climb aboard their truck. The Neumanns’ horses had dropped dead from exhaustion just before we got to Gdansk. So we ate them. Gotenhafen was a small port town on the Baltic Sea. In late January 1945, there were 120,000 refugees trying to sail back to the Reich. I welled up when I arrived at the port. Do you remember the Wilhelm Gustloff, the boat my parents took in August 1939? Well, it was right there! In Gotenhafen! It had been turned into a floating hospital as part of the war effort. Word had it the Gustloff was about to cast off and that she was taking refugees. Thousands were already on board, apparently. People had built makeshift shelters in the streets; they were burning wood they’d ripped from the roofs to keep warm. Scuffles kept breaking out between the homeowners and the refugees. Real battles. The port itself was in total chaos. Everyone wanted to get on the Gustloff. Anyone with a ticket was saved. Refugees trying to clamber up onto the gangways were pushed back by the Wehrmacht. I managed to make it that far.

  “We’re looking for Obersturmführer Hinz.”

  Nobody seemed to know who I was talking about, but one man agreed to have a look onboard. A half hour later, the soldier came back to tell me he hadn’t found Wolfi on the Gustloff. That it would be best to ask the port authorities. I asked him if the children and Clara could board once the boat was ready to leave.

  “They need tickets. Ask at the office. No one knows when the boat is leaving. It’s already quite full. I don’t think there are any tickets left.”

  We had to be quick. There were so many people crammed into the port that just trying to move turned into hand-to-hand combat. I swear I stumbled over a dead grandmother. She
didn’t seem to belong to anyone; she’d just been left there. Two hundred meters in front of us, homes and offices were about to be pounded by the Russians. We needed tickets—now. I left Clara and the children by the gangway and threw myself into the mass of bodies. People were jostling and shouting outside the ticket office:

  “I’ve been a party member since 1934! I have six children! I need to get on the Gustloff!”

  Others produced bundles of cash. Blows were exchanged. Everyone wanted to get on that boat, no matter what. Rumor had it the Russians were no more than twenty kilometers away.

  “They’re strangling children and raping women!”

  That was the type of thing I was hearing from people driven insane with fear. There was a row of ugly concrete buildings beside the ticket office. People from the Wehrmacht were going in and out and I thought to myself that they might know where Wolfi was. I knocked on the first door and a young soldier opened. I explained the situation.

  “SS? They’re all over there. Not here.”

  He pointed to the last building. I was just about to knock on the door when Wolfgang himself opened. You should have seen his face. It was like he’d seen a ghost.