The Hands of War

by Marione Ingram

  When it was time again for her to report to the Gestapo, Mother talked about not going since it was possible the police thought we had been killed during this incident. But she went anyway because she knew the authorities were meticulous about accounting for everything and everyone, including corpses. Besides, unless we had a foolproof place to hide, citizens, like the two women who had recently denounced a Jewish woman living in the Winterhude district, would most likely report us. The denounced woman was married to a non-Jew. She had offended her neighbors by slipping some food to a hungry Russian prisoner of war who was engaged in forced labor on her street. Mother didn’t tell me what transpired on her succeeding visits to the Gestapo, but I became increasingly apprehensive about her safety whenever we were separated. This fear surfaced while I was taking Rena to Cousin Inge’s apartment, impelling me to disobey Mother’s instructions and return home.

  * * *

  If Mother didn’t wake by morning I resolved to take Rena to Cousin Inge’s apartment without further delay. Mother was still warm, even moist to the touch, and I felt increasingly optimistic that she would awaken at some point. But I knew that I needed help. I couldn’t telephone—our line had been disconnected by the authorities much earlier. I felt certain, however, that Inge would be able to contact my father. Tall, attractive and resourceful, she was the daughter of his half-brother and had been our communications link in the past. She also had looked after Rena on occasion and had been the one to take Helga to live with an Aryan family. Her parents had a grocery store beneath their apartment, and though there were small swastika flags in the store window, they also had a Jewish woman living in their apartment.

  Chapter 4

  Awakening

  I was awakened in the morning by the sound of moaning and looked over to see Mother pulling at the neckline of her dress. Her eyes were still closed but Rena’s were open and she was quietly talking to a rag doll I had placed near her. I lifted her gently with the doll and placed her on Mother’s chest. Moments later Mother opened her eyes and tried to remove my startled sister before realizing what she had in her hands. When she became fully conscious, she kissed and hugged Rena and held her against her breast.

  Mother didn’t explain why she had tried to take her life, and I didn’t ask while she was still weak, on the verge of tears and having difficulty standing or moving about. But I am sure I would have asked if an unexpected visitor hadn’t arrived within an hour of her awakening. Since no one had called on us in weeks, the sudden knocking startled and frightened us, until we heard my cousin Inge’s voice on the other side of the door.

  “I was so worried about you,” Inge said, still breathing hard after climbing up the stairs. She explained that the Jewish woman living in her apartment had received a deportation order yesterday and had taken her own life. Inge said she feared that we had received such an order and would have come sooner but couldn’t get away.

  I looked at Mother and I understood in that instant, even before she explained, that we also had received a deportation order. In a few days we were supposed to report to Moorweide Park, the place from which our Jewish relatives had been taken along with almost all the other Jews in Hamburg. Mother told Inge that, in a desperate bid to save her children, she had asked me to take Rena to Inge’s home and then had tried to take her own life, hoping the authorities would not go further after finding her dead. Inge didn’t say anything but simply leaned forward and took Mother’s hand. The two women sat down and searched each other’s eyes and then began to talk while I made tea from the packet of food Inge had brought. They continued to talk even after the air-raid alarms started blaring shortly after our grandfather clock, which had been made by my great grandfather, struck noon. Unlike us, Cousin Inge could have gone to a shelter because she was a Gentile. But she didn’t move, even when the second, more compelling series of alarms warned that Allied bombers were expected to arrive within fifteen minutes.

  “It must be the Americans,” Inge observed, quietly underscoring the fact that the American bombers usually came during the day and the British by night.

  I kept expecting her to go to a shelter. There was a massive concrete bunker several stories high within easy walking distance and a smaller brick shelter even closer. She could also have been admitted to the shelter in the basement of our building. Neither Mother nor I would have thought less of her for doing what we could not. But Inge continued to sit with us as the minutes ticked away. I served the tea but couldn’t help remarking that it was ten minutes since the second alarm had sounded. Cousin Inge thanked me for the tea, which she stirred pensively and began to sip as if it were too precious to be put aside for an air raid. When the all-clear sounded a few minutes later, however, Cousin Inge drained her cup in one swallow and stood up.

  “Thank heaven that’s over,” she said. “It’s time I got back home.” She smiled and so did we. Her eyes were a glistening turquoise as she told us goodbye, promising that she would let Father know about the deportation order as soon as possible. When she left, Inge took Rena with her, along with a bag filled with Rena’s clothes and dolls.

  * * *

  That night it was unnaturally hot even for the last week of July, and breathlessly still despite the distant flashing of dry lightning. Mother and I went to bed soon after sunset. Although I was tired and glad to be in the same bed with her, I couldn’t sleep because of the heat and because Mother soon began writhing and gasping and occasionally crying out in her sleep. I didn’t know whether this was because of all the gas she had inhaled or because she was so upset by our deportation order. Both thoughts distressed me and I was still wide awake less than an hour later when the air-raid sirens began to wail again. This time I counted while the sirens sang out three alarms of fifteen seconds each, with five-second intervals in between. This signaled that Allied bombers were expected within half an hour.

  Although we couldn’t use the shelters, I knew that Hamburgers were proud of the elaborate air defenses that had seen them through more than a hundred and thirty air raids. As engineers, machinists, shipyard, factory, and foundry workers they made a lot of the defensive hardware, including the radar devices that tracked enemy bombers practically from the time they left the coast of England. And they were almost as admiring of the interceptor aircraft as they were of the men who flew them. Photos of fighter pilots, the new Teutonic knights, were in every newspaper and magazine, and it was a point of civic pride that Germany’s most coveted reward for extraordinary heroism was a few nights in Hamburg’s renowned red light district.

  Mother’s energetic response to the air-raid sirens indicated that, despite the deportation order, she had fully recovered her will to live. She leapt out of bed after the first wail, turned on our radio and began to run water in the tub so that we would have a supply in case it was shut off after the bombs started falling. She also checked the hallway to make sure a bucket of sand and a fire extinguisher were available and then began to boil two of the three eggs Inge had brought. But we were both relieved when the all-clear sounded minutes later. Much as we wanted the Allies to defeat Germany, we were terrified when bombs fell in our neighborhood and horrified when a nearby children’s hospital was hit. At such times I was in a state of emotional turmoil, simultaneously hating both the bombing of residential neighborhoods and the murderous conduct of the Nazi regime that was being attacked. Thankful that there had been little or no damage this night, I gave my licorice mask of Winston Churchill a long lick and we went back to bed. The night was so quiet I could hear a family returning from our air-raid shelter, rolling their children and supplies in a small wagon with iron wheels.

  A few hours later we were awakened by another series of alarms. Barely five minutes later there was a second warning—a short blast of the sirens repeated fifteen times a minute—followed by a radio announcement for Hamburgers to go immediately to their shelters. The announcer was known fondly as Uncle Valerian because of his soothing tones and confident manner. But there was alarm
ing urgency in his voice as he warned that a large fleet of Allied bombers was arriving within a few minutes. Each time he repeated the order he was more emphatic. I glanced at Mother, who was staring at Rena’s empty bed. I tried to reassure her by pointing out that Cousin Inge would surely take Rena to an air-raid shelter.

  Mother unpacked two woolen blankets from a trunk at the foot of the bed and took them into the bathroom to soak in the tub in case we needed to protect ourselves from fire. I put on a smocked dress, heavier and more protective than the one I had taken off earlier. There was no Mogen David on it, but I knew from past experience that this wouldn’t stop some people from identifying us as Jews, apparently because both Mother and I had very dark hair and eyes.

  Looking out a window toward the Eilbeck canal the first thing I noticed was that the sky was almost clear except for a few high clouds and a large moon which I couldn’t see but which I assumed was full because the clock on a distant steeple was clearly visible. As soon as the frantic alarms went quiet, the ack-ack battery on the Alster cracked out two quick test rounds to let everybody know they were at their battle station. Echoing barks from other batteries indicated they too were ready for combat. Beams of light probed the lowest clouds, searching for the Mosquito bombers buzzing overhead. Then, suddenly, the crews began to shift and jerk the beams about as if they were out of control. Simultaneously the ackack batteries launched an ear-shattering barrage that didn’t last very long but filled the sky with tiny puffs of smoke. The moon seemed to have fallen to earth, bathing everything in light so intense that I could read the time on a steeple clock. It was just past twelve thirty. I ran to a window that faced in the direction of the Alster, since the dazzling light seemed to be coming from that direction, and saw that it wasn’t the moon but hundreds of flares in Christmas-tree clusters, smoking a bit as they slowly descended.

  Overhead the first wave of British heavy bombers droned like a chorus of celestial pipe organs. This dirge was soon interrupted by a series of explosions, apparently in the St. Pauli district, where revelries famously continued during air raids despite Uncle Valerian’s stern counseling. All too soon bombs began to fall near enough that I could also hear their high-pitched whistles. Not content with the unnerving whine bombs normally made as they fell, the British had added a device which produced a blood-curdling sound that built in intensity as the bomb descended. Although I hadn’t heard her call out, I knew Mother didn’t want me to stand in the window during the raid. But it was difficult to take my eyes from the sight of the universe exploding. Returning to bed I held on to Mother as the bombing continued for more than two hours. Finally the all-clear sirens began to wail and the thunder of explosions was succeeded by the anguished braying of fire engines, ambulances and other emergency vehicles.

  An Allied bomber in an exploding sky over Hamburg. (Source: Imperial War Museum)

  Remembering a thud directly above our heads during the raid, Mother and I went up a short flight of stairs to the attic, a storage space for tenants, now empty as a fire precaution. Mother carried a flashlight and a hand-pump fire extinguisher. As soon as we entered we saw a jagged hole in the roof and something that looked like a piece of bent pipe among wood splinters and shards of tile on the floor. There were no flames or smoke but Mother doused the pipe and surrounding area with the liquid in the extinguisher. Then we got a bucket of sand and covered the pipe as best we could. Because the roof was sloped Mother was able to put her head through the hole to look around for signs of fire on the roof.

  “Oh, my God!” she exclaimed. After a minute or so she lifted me up so I could see. Across the city thousands of fires were burning, most of them a considerable distance from us, but some only a few blocks away. Although it was not yet dawn, coils of smoke were clearly visible and not just the smell, but even the taste of soot entered our open mouths. We went back to our apartment but there was no possibility of sleeping with the turmoil outside and within. I could see that Mother was worrying about Rena, since there had seemed to be a lot of fire in the direction of Inge’s home. She lived near the part of Alster Lake that had been covered with netting to mislead the bombers into dropping their bombs in the water. Her street was named Brandsende, because many years earlier a terrible fire in the heart of the city had halted there. Although I reminded Mother that the street was lucky, we went out to see for ourselves.

  Walking toward the Alster and Brandsende, we passed hundreds of people in the streets talking about the raid and inspecting their neighborhood for damage. Everybody was shouting because of the noise and the excitement over the magnitude of the raid and the destruction. We heard that Hamburg’s air defenses, including the Luftwaffe, had been totally ineffective because the British had dropped metal foil that had somehow jammed all the radar. This seemed exceedingly farfetched. But several blocks later, l spotted a large strip of foil draped like Christmas tinsel over an evergreen branch. I picked it up and took it with me. On a block that had been hit by a high-explosive bomb, prisoners in striped clothing were helping to look for bodies under the smoldering rubble.

  When we reached the Alster we could see huge fires raging on the far side. We also discovered that incendiary bombs had in fact set fire to the camouflage netting that had covered part of the lake. An elderly fire warden wearing an old-fashioned spiked helmet told us that the anti-aircraft battery on a barge in the lake had suffered a direct hit. The entire crew had been killed. He confirmed the rumor that the city’s air defenses had been knocked out by some new radar-jamming device. When I showed him my piece of tin foil, he examined it carefully and refused to give it back. Probably recognizing us as Jews, he pointed to an area across the lake devoid of flames.

  “You can see that the English spared the Jewish district,” he said, fuming.

  “But there are only Nazis living there now,” Mother reminded him.

  We continued walking to Brandsende and saw that it had once again been spared. We didn’t try to make contact with Inge then because Mother was satisfied that Rena was better off with her and we didn’t want nosy neighbors to realize that Rena belonged with us.

  On the way home we passed hundreds of people sitting or lying on the ground outside St. George Hospital. Most were children with their mothers. Many were coughing and a few were bloodied. It reminded me that a hospital for children in a nearby district had been destroyed in a raid two years earlier. I had been in that hospital sick with pneumonia before it was bombed. A family friend, a woman whose father was a high city official, had arranged to have me admitted as her niece. For the three nights I was there Mother had dreamed that I was behind a brick wall in an area engulfed with flames and that she could hear me calling but couldn’t get over the wall. So, even though I was still having difficulty breathing, she had slipped into that hospital wearing a shawl over her Star of David and had taken me home. A night or so later, incendiary bombs had set fire to the hospital and many of the children had been killed. Now looking at the children on the grass beside St. George I felt sorry for the injured and hoped they wouldn’t have to be taken to a hospital far from home. At the same time I envied them for being able to get drinking water from an emergency supply being dispensed there. Mother and I didn’t dare ask for some.

  As we left the area we heard an ambulance driver tell a nurse that there were more than a thousand dead on the other side of the lake and that many more people were trapped and might not be saved because the water pressure was too low to put out the fires in the area. Returning to our apartment in the largely unscathed Eilbeck District, Mother told a woman in the courtyard of our building about the hole in the roof and the metal object on the attic floor. She asked the woman to inform a warden but the woman didn’t respond, perhaps because we were the only ones still living on the top floor or perhaps because it was Sunday morning and she was on her way to church.

  We hadn’t been back in our apartment more than an hour or so when air-raid sirens suddenly began warning that more bombers were on the way. Like everyo
ne else I hoped that it was a false alarm and wondered how the firefighters and rescue workers who were battling hundreds of fires would react. Mother and I watched from a window as the first waves of American Flying Fortresses passed overhead after dropping thousands of tons of bombs on harbor areas.

  Mother said that the Americans were after the U-boats, trying to persuade me that we weren’t targets even though we could see bombers almost directly above us.

  Hamburg’s history as a seaport circulated in the bloodstream of all its citizens. Storied pirates were our true patron saints. Here the world’s largest and fastest passenger liners and battleships had been built, and from here many of the liners had sailed as part of the fleet of the world’s largest shipping line. As in the city’s cultural achievements, Jews figured prominently in the naval legend. A brilliant Jew named Ballin had steered the local shipping line into preeminence as the world’s largest. My love of the harbor and the sea had little to do with Ballin, however, but was passed to me from my father, who had made the sea his university. I wanted to do the same when I grew up. Despite wartime secrecy, like everybody else I was aware that since the scuttling of the battleship Bismarck in Montevideo Bay, Hamburg’s shipworkers had been building mainly submarines. Unlike others, I wasn’t proud that Winston Churchill had said these U-boats, which hunted in packs like wolves, were a greater danger than the Blitz. But I dearly hoped the American bombers had been listening to him and were dropping all their bombs on the submarine pens. I said as much to my licorice mask but didn’t think it could hear me over the thundering explosions that were moving steadily nearer like a natural storm.