Breadcrumbs and Bombs

by Susan Finlay

  That night, she tossed and turned in bed. She conceded she didn’t really want her brothers and sisters dead. But what if Gott had been listening to her thoughts and took them from her? She cried and prayed. Please don’t take them. I didn’t mean it. I love my family. If you have to take someone, take me.

  In the morning, she put away the laundry and then trudged through chilly streets to the church to speak with the priest and give her confession. Hardly anyone was outside, but whether it was because of the cold air or because of the soldiers stationed here, she didn’t know. She kept her head bent down most of the time to avoid eye contact with the soldiers. No one wanted to be noticed by them or to be questioned. Once inside, she immediately headed for the confessional.

  “Will Gott take my brothers and sisters?” she asked the priest sitting behind a grating. He couldn’t really see her, but she knew he would recognize her voice from school. “I didn’t really mean it.”

  “It was a moment of weakness, my child. Gott understands.”

  Hanna Nagel, Dec. 24, 1944-Feb. 1945, Altstadt, Sudetenland—

  HANNA NAGEL RUMMAGED through the root cellar, looking for something she could prepare for dinner for the children. They were all getting too thin; any thinner and they would be just pale skin stretched across protruding bone. How was she supposed to eat enough for herself and a growing baby inside her? This was very bad. Pregnancy was a time when a woman needed to eat extra food, and nutritious food at that, not watery soup and a few meager scraps of potato. And she worried so often about Christa. At eleven years old she looked more boy shaped than girl shaped. How would she grow up and attract a husband if she didn’t get enough food to enable her body to develop into a woman’s body? Ernst was a worry, too. He kept growing taller, like a beansprout, for the life of her she couldn’t see how, but his weight lagged so far behind. At ten years old he was tall. Not as tall as a man, but tall for his age. Hanna would never have thought anything of his height, except that her neighbor’s boy, only a few months older than Ernst and the same height, had been grabbed and conscripted into the army. The frantic mother had produced papers showing he wasn’t old enough. It mattered not. They did whatever they wanted and made their own rules. Since that day, a month ago now, Hanna kept Ernst hidden from the officials so the same wouldn’t happen to him.

  The baby inside her suddenly kicked hard. Hanna put her hand protectively over her belly. She should not bring another baby into this world. Not at this horrific time. But Gott had given her this precious life and she would protect the baby, no matter how difficult the circumstance. That’s what mothers did. If her baby had already been born, she would give up her portion of dinner to feed her baby or any of the other kids. But she couldn’t do that while the baby was still inside her. He or she needed the nourishment only she could provide.

  She sighed and headed back up the stairs to the stube, then ambled down the hall and out the side door of the farmhouse. She didn’t want to kill another of their chickens, but what else could she do?

  Christa looked up when Hanna entered the chicken pen. It was clear from the look in the girl’s eyes that she suspected something. Hanna rarely entered the chicken pen. Only Christa and Ernst, and occasionally Fritz, did.

  “Christa, I need you to get a big bucket of water from the well.”

  “You are going to cook one of my chickens, are you not?” she accused.

  There it was, out in the open. Hanna had hoped to take the chicken without Christa seeing, but it was too late. Christa was too clever for her own good.

  “Sorry, Christa, but you know we have to eat. Today is Christmas Eve and we need our Christmas dinner. These chickens will all be eaten by the Nazis sooner or later, if we do not eat them first. It is only a matter of time before they come back for the rest of our animals.”

  “Please do not cook it. Please, Mutti.”

  “There is no other option. How many do we have left?”

  “Six.” Christa rushed over to the chickens and stood in front of them, as if forming a shield. “They give us eggs. If we eat the chickens, we will not have eggs to eat or to trade.”

  “No one is trading for them, anymore. They do not have anything to trade. Nothing we can eat.”

  “But we can eat the eggs.”

  “We are only going to kill one chicken right now. That will give us time to look for other options.” Christa frowned. “I will let you pick the chicken, if that helps.”

  “It does not help!” she screamed. “Could you pick which one of your children to kill?” With that she ran crying out of the pen and into the house, slamming the door behind her.

  Oh mein Gott. Hanna inched toward the chickens and studied them. In her mind she began seeing them as her kids. The roundish little one—that was baby Andreas, almost two years old. The light colored one that always followed the mother hen until it had died—that one was Giselle; the tall one—oh, that was Ernst, no question. By the time she’d studied all six, she knew she couldn’t do it, either.

  Resigned, she picked up all the eggs she could find and placed them in the basket they kept near the coop. With that done, she turned and strode out of the pen, through the front gate, and down the street. Time to pay a visit to the wealthy Czechs on the hillside. Maybe they would have food to trade for her eggs.

  Half an hour later she returned with a basket of sausages. Those would make a fine Christmas dinner. When she entered the house, the kids were sitting in the living room, their faces tear-streaked.

  “We do not want to eat one of our chickens,” Giselle said. “We will not do it.” She stood up and crossed her arms.

  “Well, then, it is a good thing I got some sausages from one of the locals,” Hanna said.

  The kids jumped ups and shouted with glee.

  Ja, it was the right thing to do, Hanna thought. Chickens will come another day, but Christmas is not the right time for it.

  THE NEXT TWO months went by slowly. In January, Hanna encountered a large group of ragged-looking ethnic Germans on foot on her way back from town with the family’s rations. The Germans stopped her and begged for food—anything for their starving children. She talked to the mother and found out they’d been living in a small town, similar to Altstadt, but in Poland. They were running away because the Red Army had taken over their town, raping women and even young girls, including one of the woman’s daughters.

  Hanna surveyed the children. The oldest, apparently the girl who’d been raped, couldn’t have been more a year or two older than Christa. Hanna shivered.

  Studying the tormented faces, and seeing her own children in them, she reached into her bag and pulled out a loaf of bread, broke it in half, and handed it to the mother. The mother hugged her and then broke the bread into small portions and handed them to her starving family. Hanna cried the rest of the way home.

  Another time, when she picked up their rations, a clerk handed her a leaflet about the slaughter of Sudeten Germans in Poland. That poor family had been only one of many.

  In spite of near starvation, Hanna’s belly was growing. Her strength, however, was dwindling, but she was still alive and still protecting her children. They mostly had to huddle together at night to keep warm. At night Hanna shared her bed with three kids, and the other three kids huddled together in another bed. There wasn’t fuel anymore for heat. Not in their house and not anywhere in Altstadt. Everyone was past complaining, near freezing.

  The baby wasn’t kicking as much now as it had two months ago. That worried her, but she couldn’t see a doctor about it. The doctor had been taken away. He was desperately needed elsewhere, the Nazis had said. The doctor’s wife confided in Hanna and others that she was certain he’d been taken to one of the concentration camps to treat prisoners who worked outside the camp in factories on day trips. Said the Nazi’s couldn’t let those needed prisoners die.

  As for everyone else—the regular citizens—they could die for all the Nazis cared.

  But Hanna’s immediate probl
em was the baby in her belly. What would happen when the baby came? She would have to somehow find a midwife and figure out how to pay her. Hanna had pushed out six babies, but none by herself. She couldn’t afford to pay a midwife, but she couldn’t afford to attempt it herself and die in the process. What would her kids do without a mother or a father around to protect them?

  This morning, she had stayed in bed as long as possible, for the warmth provided by the kids and the blankets. None of them needed to get up early, as it was snowy and cold outside and they wouldn’t be doing outside chores. The kids sleeping in the next room appeared to be sleeping in as well. They were too quiet for it to be otherwise.

  A series of loud booms in the distance brought her out of her thoughts. She carefully got out of bed and padded over to her bedroom window, lifting the corner of the blackout curtain to peek outside. Smoky black-gray winter clouds, swirling, thick, monstrous-looking, threatened to dump more moisture onto the already thick layer of snow. Her eyes moved to an eastern section of foothills hugging the mountains surrounding the town. Her heart sank. Dark specks in the white snow blanketing one of the hills resolved into ant-sized soldiers—fighting near a bare ridge. German soldiers trying to hold back the Red Army. It had to be. She knew it was the Red Army because she’d been hearing news reports for days on the radio. They’d been in Poland for some time and were reported to be nearing the Sudetenland border. They’d obviously reached it. A feeling of foreboding crept through her body, and she gripped the edge of the window frame to keep from collapsing under her heavy pregnancy weight.

  Mein Gott! If the Russians win, they could be here in town within days. Weeks at most. And then they would be doomed.

  Ilse Seidel, September-October 1944, Memmingen, Germany—

  ILSE SEIDEL THANKFULLY found berries near the dilapidated house where Ron was hiding. Each day she picked a basket full and took part of them to Ron and the rest of them home to her family. She was able to sneak bread out of the house every couple of days and occasionally a potato or carrot. She feared it wouldn’t be enough to keep the American nourished. The only saving grace was that he was laid-up and not burning many calories.

  Ilse was worried. Ron’s cold or flu should have cleared up by now, but if anything it seemed worse. Months earlier, a neighbor had died from untreated pneumonia. Ron exhibited the same symptoms. Ilse knew Ron probably needed medicine or he would end up like that neighbor.

  Ilse found a doctor in town and went to beg for medicine. “It is for my brother,” she lied. “Our mother sent me.”

  The elderly doctor gave her a questioning look, but said nothing. Ilse was relieved he didn’t ask her to bring her brother in for examination. The doctor was giving medicines to the poor and needy, working out of a derelict building.

  “Better to use up the medicine I have here, before the military confiscates it,” he said, smiling and winking as he handed her a bottle of pills. She said she couldn’t pay him, but he only shrugged and replied, “I am Jewish—one of the few Jews who was not captured.”

  Why he entrusted her with his secret she couldn’t say. Perhaps because he suspected she had her own secret to keep. It had taken her some work to find out about the doctor in hiding, because it was difficult to penetrate the underground in Memmingen.

  A week and a half after Ron finished his course of antibiotics, he was sitting up and smiling when Ilse entered the shack.

  “You look like a new person,” Ilse said. “The medicine seems to have worked miracles on you.”

  “Sure did.” He was interrupted by a coughing fit, but his chest was no longer rattling with the cough, and the fit was much briefer than before. “Guess I’m not quite ready to run a marathon just yet.” He looked pensive for a moment, then said, “I hope you won’t stop coming to see me because I’m well now.”

  “Definitely not. I do worry, though, that you are in danger. I have seen fewer soldiers in town. But they could just be in the area patrolling the countryside now. Nowhere is safe.”

  “I know. I will need to leave very soon. I need to find a way to contact my unit or at least the U.S. military. If I’m lucky, they can steer me to a place where they can pick me up.”

  She nodded, not wanting to encourage him to leave. He must, of course, leave. She just wasn’t ready for it. After almost three months of caring for her wounded and sick airman, what would she do once he was gone? She’d enjoyed their long talks. Even when he was sick, he would talk, or preferably listen to her talk, according to him.

  Her American soldier was in danger here, but he’d be in worse danger if he was on the move in this hostile territory, without anyone guiding him. He had not one but two targets on his head. He was in a soldier in the U.S. military. He was also a Jew.

  It had taken him a month or more to admit to her his faith. She could understand his wariness. When she hadn’t pulled away, instead asked him questions about religion in general, it had led to a discussion about the Nazis and the disappearance of the Jews from the German towns. He’d told her what he knew.

  He told her the Germans, her own people, had begun rounding up the Jews, but not to move them to their own communities as the Nazis told everyone. They’d been taken to concentration camps, or ‘death camps’ as some referred to them. When she asked what that meant, he hesitated, his color fading. Eventually, he shared with her the open pits he’d seen, filled with the remains of Jews of all ages, including mothers, children, and even babies dumped there to rot.

  She’d heard rumors in town, whispers in the dark air raid bunkers, and of course she’d heard something about that on the BBC radio. Hearing it firsthand from someone who’d actually seen the pits filled her with anger and hatred for the Nazis.

  She stood and caught a glimpse of white flakes through the window and walked over to get a closer look.

  “What’s going on?” Ron asked, fear in his eyes.

  “Snowflakes. The first I have actually seen falling this season. I know there are several inches of snow on the ground,” she quickly added, “but that fell overnight, while everyone was sleeping.”

  He stood up then, wobbly from not walking much in the past few months. She rushed over, put her around him, and helped him over to the window.

  The door suddenly clattered open and a rush of frigid air entered. But the chill Ilse felt rising up her spine wasn’t from the chilly air, but fear from her brother standing in the doorway, his rifle aimed at them. She gasped, feeling a bit faint. No one said a word for several seconds. Desperately thinking what to say, she opened her mouth, faltered, then blurted out, “I . . . how did you find me?” Then it hit her. He must have spotted her and followed. Her footsteps in the snow would have made it easy. “I thought you were deployed to Poland. Your last letter said you were in Poland.”

  “I wrote that letter months ago,” Johann said. “I was sent here to Memmingen to help patrol.”

  “How long have you been here? Why did you not come to the house and tell us?”

  “I should be asking the questions,” he said. “Who is this man and why are you helping him?”

  She took a deep breath and let it out. “Will you please put your weapon away, brother?” She hoped Ron would pick up on the word brother and realize who Johann was. Ron understood German.

  Johann lowered his rifle and stood with his legs apart, totally blocking the escape route. “Tell me who he is.”

  Before Ilse could reply, Ron said, “I’m a wounded airman. I was in a four-engine bomber plane with a crew of ten that got shot down. I was one of only two who were able to jump out with a parachute. I got injured coming down in a thick copse of trees, but not badly. The other guy got hit with a piece of debris from the airplane on his way down. He didn’t survive. When I was able, I searched for him and buried his remains.”

  Ilse had heard about what happened, of course. She tensed, waiting for her brother’s reaction.

  “That was months ago,” Johann said. Turning his head to Ilse, he accused, “You hav
e been helping him all this time?”

  Ilse nodded, biting her lip, expecting Johann to point his rifle again.

  “I should turn you both in,” he said. “You know that. They will kill you. No questions asked.”

  “Please do not. Johann, if you care anything about me, you will forget what you have seen and heard here.”

  He didn’t answer.

  Was he thinking about letting them go? Was he going to turn them in? Would he shoot and kill Ron? Ilse had never been particularly religious, but she began to say a silent prayer.

  “I cannot turn my own sister in to my commanding officers. I could not live with myself.” He turned his attention to Ron, who had backed away and leaned against one wall of the shack, near the window, giving Johann a perfect target. “You will leave here by the end of the week. My unit will be searching this area next week. If they find you, they will shoot you.”

  “That is three days from now,” Ilse said. She turned to Ron. “Will you be able to walk out of here by then?”

  “Yes. Before your brother arrived, I already knew it was time to leave here. I’ve been readying myself.”

  “Good,” Johann said. “Ilse, you must never tell anyone about the airman. Do you understand? I cannot protect you if you are caught helping or even suspected of helping the enemy.”

  “I understand. Thank you, Johann.”

  He turned on his heels and left them alone.

  Ilse rushed over to Ron and squeezed him. “I am sorry. I tried to be careful and make sure no one was following me. I did not know my brother was in Memmingen.”

  “It’s all right. I—we—knew I had to leave. This just confirms it. It’s just lucky it was your brother that found us. I’ll leave in the morning, before dawn.”