“If it is not too much trouble,” Hannah said. Her stomach growled at her subtlety.
“No trouble. I was just going to finish this one up and close up shop,” Petyr said.
“Please. Finish.”
Her stomach now threatened to cannibalize itself for the treachery.
Petyr was a man of details and a perfectionist. Apart from walking, Petyr did not rush a single thing. Wilhelm had told her as much, and from the times she had been with him, it had been that way—not necessarily a bad quality, yet annoying when having to wait on that person. But Petyr was doing Hannah a favor and taking the risk, and because of that, she waited patiently. Even in her hunger and slight annoyance, she appreciated the amount of time, thought, and care that went into everything Petyr did. Wilhelm had taken that quality, and it extended far beyond bouquets and wreaths.
The supper Petyr prepared told Hannah he had gotten used to eating alone. There were no casseroles or meat pies. Each meal consisted of a piece of meat, potato, and a vegetable. It was the sort of monotony most would have hated, but Petyr found reliably comforting.
“Sorry,” Petyr said, shrugging at how unappetizing the dinner looked. Petyr had a cupboard full of spices his late wife had used but had no idea how to use them. The spices and herbs he used were strictly limited to salt and pepper.
“You are a better cook than Wilhelm,” Hannah said, smiling, even if it was untrue.
“Nearly burnt the house down the first time he cooked,” Petyr said.
Hannah felt guilty at how naturally their conversations continued, knowing Wilhelm had never been able to hold such conversations with his father. Yet, she also knew it was hard to not argue with someone who was so similar. It was hard to tell what type of man Petyr would have been had the war not happened and had his wife still been alive. But Hannah recognized the kindness in his eyes, visible through the obvious pain.
Hannah stayed with Petyr for three weeks, helping out at the shop and spicing up dinners, both figuratively and literally, and on 1 November, she told him she was going to return to Berlin to join her parents. Petyr had tried to dissuade her from it but knew her intentions were pure even if dangerous and, honestly, Petyr wouldn’t have thought much of Hannah if she had not wanted to.
“I’ll come back,” Hannah promised.
Petyr hugged her and watched her board the bus. The grey bus jerked forward with a discharge of black smoke. It was only as the bus sputtered out of the city did Hannah realize she had forgotten the manila folder and the photographs and blue rose inside. She had decorated Wilhelm’s old room with the pictures. They were her most prized possessions, and she had purposefully put them all in the folder so she would not forget them. The dried blue rose was kept on the nightstand next to the bed. She had held it in her hands every night. It had served as something of a dreamcatcher, and without it, she was vulnerable.
Hannah had deliberately taken the last bus, the 10:30, so she would arrive in Berlin well after midnight while most were asleep in their beds. Only three other people were on the bus, and when each stepped off and branched off into different directions, Hannah exited.
The city she loved had turned on her. The street lights were no longer casting security in illuminating her surroundings. Instead, they were like giant searchlights that betrayed her location. She hurried across the streets to her family’s home. She removed her key, but to her dismay, the door was unlocked. It was never unlocked. Her father had always locked it, and after Kristallnacht, he had become doubly paranoid and triple checked if it was locked. The shop was dark, and the mannequins made her jump more than once. In the darkness, the suits they wore looked like the black leather of the SS.
She crept silently through the black dividing curtain and up the steps. As soon as the black curtain parted open, the lights upstairs cast a glow on the base of the steps. It was certainly well past her parents’ bedtime, but either her mother or father must have gone to the kitchen for a glass of water. Hannah smiled. She had been sick with worry the entire three weeks in Schönfeld. But neither her mother nor father was at the kitchen sink. The bathroom door was open and the light, off. Hannah’s first thought was someone had left the kitchen light on but, like with the lock, her father could not clear his mind enough to sleep unless he had personally verified every light was off, candle was blown out, and window, shut.
“Hello?” she called out.
The walls of the living room had been stripped bare of the art, paintings, and photos that had hung. The dishes, silverware, and fine china were stacked on the kitchen table. Four figures, cloaked in black and wearing black field caps with the Totenkopf (skull and crossbones) stepped out of her parents’ bedroom. They were SS, but to many, they were the Grim Reaper.
“What a late hour to be calling,” the highest-ranking officer said.
The man had more medals and insignia patches than Rottenführer Weaver and Untersturmführer Hauser and was much older than both, appearing to be in his late fifties with bits of gray hair on the sides of his head, unconcealed by his field cap.
“I would greet you with a good evening, but we are well past evening and even night. Good morning, Miss, I am Obersturmführer Weitel. May I see your passport please?” he asked, removing the black leather glove from his right hand and extending it.
The other three stalked behind her. Hannah removed her own mitten and reached into her pocket. One of the three took two steps forward and watched her hand closely, no doubt to see if she was reaching for a weapon. Hannah pulled her passport from her coat and handed it to Obersturmführer Weitel. He nodded appreciatively. Weitel looked over the passport and, much to Hannah’s shock, he handed it back over.
“Thank you, Mrs. Schreiber. Now, can I ask what you are doing here?” Weitel asked.
A lie needed to come to Hannah and fast.
“I came to check on the building. Will it be made available for Germans?” Hannah asked.
“It will,” Weitel said.
“And the previous owners? They are Jewish, I was told,” Hannah asked.
“They were,” Weitel answered again.
Were—past tense. Even if Weitel could feel Hannah’s beating heart, her shaking hands or see the cold sweat covering her body and forehead, he showed no signs of it. But like so many of the SS, it was not the kill that gave the greatest thrill but the hunt, and some loved to prolong it. But Hannah needed to know where her parents had been taken.
“Where are they now?” Hannah asked.
“No longer here,” Weitel said.
Hannah was asking too many questions, and she knew it. She had to make herself seem more interested in the building than the previous occupants—a task easier said than done. She walked through the living room—her legs were gelatin, the bones in them, gone and glanced into the open rooms. Many of the possessions were gone or piled up to be removed from the home. Hannah’s childhood home was being disemboweled. She had a memory in every square inch. She paused by her parents’ bedroom. Her father’s “junk” drawer had been pulled from the dresser, and the pictures, letters, tickets, and trinkets were scattered about on the wooden floor.
“Leave your contact information with Oberschütze Reinhart, and you will be contacted when the building is ready to have a tenant,” Weitel said.
Hannah was no longer welcomed, and to stay any longer would be unwise. Yet, she would not leave until she received information about her parents’ whereabouts.
“The previous owner made tuxes. I saw them downstairs. They appear to be well made. I wish to have their contact information so they can make dresses and suits for me and my friends,” Hannah said.
“I do not have it. Now, if you would, Mrs. Schreiber, it is time for you to leave,” Weitel insisted.
The man who Hannah presumed to be Reinhart went into her parents’ bedroom, but the other two still remained standing in front of the stairwell. Reinhart sorted through the mess on the bedroom floor and discarded the pile with utter disregard for how valuab
le they may have been to the owner. He paused and lifted a photo from the heap. He marched to Weitel and gave him the picture. In the flash of a moment, the photograph went from Weitel’s hand to his face, and not only did her parents’ faces smile from the photograph but Hannah’s too.
Hannah’s survival instinct jerked her body into action. She turned and her legs, which had barely supported her weight when the SS stepped out of her parents’ bedroom, now were steel beams, and she went from the living room to the top of the stairs in four strides.
“Stop her!” Weitel commanded. The two men at the top of the stairs grabbed her by the shoulders. “Bring her here,” Weitel said. Hannah’s feet dragged as the two men carried her to Weitel. “Your passport,” Weitel demanded.
“I have shown you my passport,” Hannah said.
“Now!” Weitel yelled. His voice had not struck Hannah as menacing before, but the way he had spoken caused Hannah’s eyes to open wide and her breath to shorten. The men held her firmly from the back. Hannah removed her passport and gave it to him. Weitel drew a knife, black handled with the silver Nazi eagle on it, and pointed the blade at Hannah. He brought it to the passport and used the blade point to poke at the corners. A small curl betrayed the hidden layer. He ripped it off and revealed the true passport—“Sara Hannah Goldschmidt” with the giant red J stamped on it. “You are stupid,” Weitel said, holding up the photograph, one of the hundreds Hannah had taken of the three of them.
“Where are my parents?” Hannah asked.
“They have been relocated east—to a Jewish community,” Weitel said.
He removed a folded piece of paper from the inside pocket of his leather coat and carefully unfolded it. A picture of a home with a large spacious green lawn and a Jewish family smiling stretched the cover of it. Hannah, however, would not believe her parents would willingly leave without telling her. But if they had been told Hannah had already gone, maybe they would have.
“Where?” Hannah asked.
“Time to board a train.”
Fall of France
Wilhelm hoped he and Heinrich would be stationed together but, shortly after their month-long boot camp was over, Heinrich was sent to another unit to invade Denmark. Wilhelm hated boot camp, but it was made bearable entirely because of Heinrich. He could be counted on to listen to and crack a well-needed joke. While most men simply gave handshakes to those who were reassigned, Wilhelm and Heinrich’s relationship ran much deeper. Neither was too proud to hug the other on their last day together.
“If you see Erich before I do, give him a good backhand to the nuts,” Heinrich joked.
“I’ll be hung for treason. He’s an officer,” Wilhelm replied.
“God help Germany,” Heinrich said.
They fell silent, both too terrified to acknowledge out loud they may never see each other again.
“Take care of yourself. We will have some stories to tell when we get back,” Heinrich said.
“You too,” Wilhelm said.
The early spring months of 1940 brought Wilhelm nothing but inactivity. But Wilhelm hardly complained for, in war, inactivity was heaven. May came and added to the months since he had last seen Hannah, and even boot camp with Heinrich was now months removed. But it was a comfort to know Hannah had her parents and Lena to keep her company.
With each new day, Wilhelm and the German army moved west. Hitler would make his biggest statement of the war thus far. The German Wehrmacht, the people’s army, which was much different than the SS, pushed into France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. Wilhelm was behind the 7th Panzer division as it bypassed the famed Maginot Line, a line of concrete fortifications, obstacles, and weapon instillations built by the French a decade earlier to stop an invasion by Germany. Instead, they blitzed through the Ardennes Forest led by one of Germany’s greatest generals—Erwin Rommel.
While the tanks and forces went around the Maginot Line, the Luftwaffe (air force) simply flew over it. The artillery fire blasts exploding on the ground and the whizzing airplanes overhead put Wilhelm in a temporary state of paralysis. Bits of grass and dirt blasted into the air from shell explosions. The German army followed their tanks and kept cover behind them, but the seemingly unending heavy machine gun firing from the French struck many down. It was hard to believe a man who had been alive less than a second ago no longer was—dead from a random errant bullet. Some missed so narrowly that men paused to check themselves only to be hit by a different bullet.
When the Luftwaffe planes powered forward with a loud buzz like a swarm of angry hornets, Wilhelm and the German infantrymen cheered, and the cheering did not stop when the bombs were dropped. It was odd to cheer for death. Each and every German knew what the silence and break in shooting meant—the men on the other side were dead. To the outsider, it was barbaric. The cheering rose to higher volumes in response to the silence, but the uninitiated to war had never been shot at.
There had been the same response to “what is the weather supposed to be like?” The answer was always, “cloudy with a high chance of metal rain.” Wilhelm needed to march on a battlefield once to accept it as an incontrovertible absolute truth. The weather in France in May 1940 was pleasant, warm, and basked in sunlight. But the battlefields were always covered in smoky clouds from artillery fire, and the skies drenched the fields in metal rain in the form of bullets. The forecast never changed.
There were more close calls than Wilhelm could count. It all fell on a pause, a duck, a crouch, a charge, and a dive. Some called it God’s protection, others, sheer dumb luck, and others, fate. But one thing was for certain—each man gained an appreciation for life. The nights brought euphoria to the survivors as well as great pride. They had pushed further into France in five days than what had been accomplished over a year during the Great War.
But each mile they advanced, the faces of the dead stared up from the cratered, blood-soaked, grassy fields with open, unseeing eyes—French soldiers with names, families, and lives Wilhelm would never know. The fallen were scavenged for food, water, and supplies. Their possessions were taken—a right granted long ago as the spoils of war. The tanks bulldozed through, the debris on the ground floated momentarily, photographs stripped from the pockets of the dead slowly twirled in the wind, held up by ghost-like hands of the fallen.
Lost & Found
Hannah’s feet dragged along the ground, skipping when the front of her shoes dipped too far forward. Two hands held her from under her shoulders. Even with her jacket, their grip pinched her skin. She tried to squirm free, but the two men dragging her were strong as oxen. She was powerless to resist and saved her strength as the men hauled her to the train.
The train, with its long line of cattle cars, seemed to stretch for a mile. The cars were made of wood and coated with a red paint that had severely faded from years under a strong sun. Hannah’s first thought was Noah and his ark—only it wasn’t animals shepherded onto a ship, it was people, and the ark was a train, though the wood looked no different. And the most glaring difference was that it was not salvation the train brought, but damnation. The two men gave Hannah a hard-enough push for her to fall to the ground. She covered her face to lessen the impact. Her book bag was thrown at her. She picked up the bag and hurried to her feet. The crowd behind her swarmed, and she barely made it onto the train before she was trampled.
The inside of the cars had nothing but open space, space enough for fifty to stand, but space slowly disappeared as more and more piled in. Soon, the space was gone.
“There isn’t enough room,” Hannah yelled.
She was forced further and deeper into the corner. The car was stifling. It baked like an oven under the sunlight, and as more people piled on, it became a furnace. The light from the open door did not reach Hannah nor did the fresh air. Her breathing escalated. She tried peering around those stacked in front of her, but the man in front of her was a skyscraper. She had to use her elbows to keep him from continuing to back into her.
; “Where are we going?” Hannah asked.
She got a response in five different languages—two she recognized and three she did not.
The train shrieked and jerked forward, causing people to bump into those in front of them, as the train powered ahead with a menacing thud. The man in front of Hannah inadvertently pinned her against the back corner. His coat covered her mouth and nose, pressing against them. No air filled her lungs. Her hands were pinned helplessly to her sides. She was suffocating, and there was nothing she could do. Her eyes bulged open so grotesquely that the elderly woman beside her noticed. She hit the man’s arm and yelled at him in Polish. He turned to look at Hannah and then pushed the man ahead of him for more room. Hannah thanked her, panting as she gulped in the stagnant air. The older woman only smiled at her, no doubt, not understanding Hannah’s German.
The train car had only one barred window that provided ventilation, but none of it made it to Hannah. The train continued to power forward as the sun fell. They traveled hours packed elbow-to-elbow. Hannah kept her eyes closed, taking calming breaths and trying to force herself to someplace else.
Strong stale urine wafted through the dead dormant air. A wooden bucket was passed around. The elderly woman beside Hannah took it and lifted her maroon, dirt-covered dress and placed the bucket underneath. Urine hit the pail. After she finished, she offered the pail to Hannah. She gagged as she took it. Feces floated inside and urine dripped off the sides. It was nearly full, and one bump would spill the contents all over her. But Hannah hadn’t gone to the bathroom since leaving Petyr’s—a time that felt like not hours ago, but days. Her thoughts gravitated to her father and mother like the pull of a giant magnet. She had called out their first and last names early on, but there was no reply. A part of Hannah hoped they were on the train and in a different car, and another part of her pleaded with God they were not. Urinating into a pail in front of what appeared to be over a hundred people was embarrassing and degrading, and it caused the tears in her eyes to thicken. She passed the bucket up, and the person beside the barred window had the unfortunate duty of pouring it out.
Forever Fleeting Page 17