My parents had signed an oath that they would not disclose the terms of their return to Germany, including any details regarding prisoner exchanges. Papa didn’t want to saddle Max and me with having to keep such secrets, so my brother and I didn’t know our days in Switzerland were so that the transfers would take place in an orderly fashion between American and German forces, with the Swiss as intermediaries. Max and I were unaware that as we sat on the tracks on the Swiss side of the Rhine River that American prisoners of war, many of whom were seriously wounded and who had been waiting for us on the German side, were escorted to our train car as we were led out of it. It would be a couple of years before my father told me this had happened.
The next train we boarded was bound for Stuttgart, Germany, and we showed our papers and passports for the last time. Papa had wanted very much to telephone Oma from Switzerland to tell her we were coming, but he was given no opportunity. He would’ve written to his mother that we were on our way, but he wasn’t allowed to tell her we were being repatriated while we were still in America.
The day was only half-spent, and I was cold and tired and hungry. These three sensations together had a numbing effect on me. Mariko felt far away from me as I settled onto the train that would take us to Stuttgart. I fingered the bracelet that was just like hers, closed my eyes, and wished I was back in Crystal City and that she and I were sitting on my front step—or hers—and I was telling her I had the strangest dream last night. I dreamed I was on a train traveling from Switzerland to Germany.
And then the train began to chuff and chug and I opened my eyes. We were pulling away from the station. It was all real. Not a dream.
At the first stop on the German side, half an hour later, our last contingent of armed guards got off. We were at last free. Papa yanked off his identification tag, and the rest of us followed suit.
I turned my head to look out the window as the train pulled away from the platform. The sky was colorless; the ground—where it wasn’t covered in snow—was black and shades of brown. The trees were skeletons. In the distance on low hills, I saw pines, and they were evergreen as always, but their limbs were laden with snow and ice and what seemed to me a sense of despair.
Papa must have noticed my disappointment at the view outside the window. “It’s much prettier in the spring, Elise,” he said. “As pretty as a postcard. You’ll see.”
I wanted to imagine it. But I couldn’t.
At our next stop, the train sat for a long time at the station, longer than it should have. Papa talked to Mommi in low tones, again in German, and I couldn’t make out all the words. Then German soldiers got onto our train and I thought to myself, Here we go again. They would want to see our repatriation tags and we’d already taken them off. I’d crumpled mine and shoved it into my coat pocket; I was probably going to get a scolding because of it.
But the soldiers walked right on past us like we were invisible. They weren’t there for us. They were just riding the train. One of them had a newspaper under his arm and Papa looked longingly at it as they strode past us.
The same thing happened at the next stop. The train sat for a long time. Then it finally started up again. We had no idea what had caused the delay. A woman got on, though, and she took a seat across from us. She looked worn and tired, like she’d been traveling for nearly a month, same as us.
Papa bid her good day. She just nodded to him. She looked at Max and me and offered us a weak smile.
“Bitte,” Papa said to her. “Meine Familie und ich waren schon lange Weg. Kannst du mir irgendwelche Neuigkeiten von Pforzheim erz?hlen?”
I only understood some of the words. He spoke them so fast, they all ran together like one long ribbon. Max told me later that Papa had said we’d been away for a long while and did she have news of Pforzheim. The woman stared at Papa as though she hadn’t heard him.
Later that evening Max told me this was how the conversation went:
“You’ve been gone? Where? Where have you been?” the woman said.
Papa had lied and told her we’d been in Switzerland.
The woman again just stared at him. Then she said, “Why on earth did you come back?” and she’d looked at Papa as though he were mad to leave the safety of Switzerland to bring his wife and children back to Germany.
It had been Papa’s turn to stare at her for a moment. He’d finally answered that he was coming back to take care of his mother.
“You’ve no one else already here who could do that?” the woman said.
“Nein,” Papa answered.
She shook her head as though Papa was the unluckiest son ever to have no one to care for his mother at a time like this. She said she didn’t know in what shape Pforzheim was. They weren’t getting news like they used to, and she didn’t have any friends or family in Pforzheim. She was from Stuttgart and headed back there. Her daughter had just had a new baby and she’d been visiting her.
Papa told the woman we were headed for Stuttgart that afternoon, too. He asked her how things were in Stuttgart. He had some friends there from his days at the Technische Hochschule, and he hadn’t heard from them since before the war.
The woman, clearly astonished, asked him if he’d been hiding underground the last couple years.
Papa said nothing.
“You want to know how things are in Stuttgart, do you? They’re the same as they are everywhere. I’ve run to my shelter more times than I can count!” the woman said, angry now. She surely wasn’t angry at Papa. Just angry. “We’ve been bombed a dozen times or more this last year alone. My parents’ and my sister’s houses were burned to the ground and they barely got out with their lives. My mother-in-law perished in September along with nine hundred others. Downtown Stuttgart, including your school, is a ruin. How can you not know this?”
“We . . . we weren’t getting news,” Papa said, looking as worried as I’d yet seen him.
The woman leaned over in her seat to speak to Papa in a quiet voice. But Max heard her.
“I hate to tell you this, but you’ve made a terrible mistake. You’ve brought your wife and children straight into hell,” she said. And then she sat back on her seat and drew some knitting out of her handbag. She was done talking to us.
I was the only one of the four of us who didn’t understand what she’d said. Mommi’s eyes had filled with tears and I’d looked over at Max sitting next to me on the aisle side. He glanced at me, eyes wide.
“What?” I mouthed to him. “What did she say?”
My brother just shook his head and I knew I would have to wait until we were alone to find out what the woman had said. But I was able to piece together my own version of what she’d been talking about by just looking out the window the closer we got to Stuttgart. With every mile that took us deeper into Germany, the view on the other side of the glass looked more and more like what we had seen in Marseille: bombed-out buildings, charred remains of houses, rubble.
The way Papa had described Stuttgart in times past, I had pictured a big, beautiful place full of life and purpose, but that is not what we saw as the train slowed for its approach into the main station. On either side of the tracks, in between standing buildings here and there, were the burned remnants of the city. It was as if we’d entered a world made of ash and dust and debris. The four of us were without words; we just sat and stared at scene after scene of the destruction. The woman who had spoken to us earlier could see we hadn’t been prepared for this. Not this. She shook her head in what was either pity or empathy. Maybe a blend of both.
“Why didn’t they tell us it was this bad?” Mommi whispered to Papa in English.
“Did you ask?” I said. “Did you ask them if it was like this?”
Papa turned to me and hissed at me in German to be quiet.
The woman had heard me, though. She was looking at me with wide, knowing eyes. Then she turned to Papa and asked him something. I believe it was “How long have you been away from Germany?”
Papa swallowed. “Many years,” he said softly. Viele Jahre.
The woman looked from my parents to Max and me, and then back to Mommi and Papa. What she said next Max had to translate for me later.
“This is not the place you left,” she said carefully and quietly. “Be very careful what you say, and what you do. Do you understand?”
She glanced at me and then back to Papa.
“Ja,” Papa said.
The train came to a stop at what appeared to be the only functional platform at the Hauptbahnhof. The woman rose and grabbed her knitting and bag, as though she didn’t want to be seen as having traveled on the train with us. She was at the door as soon as it opened and was gone before we’d reached for our carry-on bags from the rack above our heads.
Papa turned to me as he pulled down my bag and handed it to me. “Don’t speak again unless we are alone, or unless you can say what you need to in German,” he whispered. “All right? Just until I can get us safely to Oma’s.”
It scared me that Papa felt he had to tell me to be quiet; it felt like he was asking me to be invisible—his English-speaking American daughter.
I nodded and looked away so that he couldn’t see me flicking away tears that stung my eyes.