We stepped out onto the platform into a light snowfall. The other passengers from our train were getting their bags or shuffling away, heedless of the strange cityscape beyond the tracks. Perhaps they had gotten used to looking at a city that was half fine and half rubble.
No one said anything to us. After having been so highly visible that we’d had to be counted every morning and every dusk, and then having been led here and there for nearly a month by armed guards, we stood with our suitcases, completely ignored by everyone around us.
Papa seemed to need a moment to decide what he would say. When he did, he said it in German. I believe it was “All right. Follow me. I want to telephone Oma first.”
He herded us into the station, where there were more soldiers than civilians. Papa told us to wait on a bench while he went to use the public telephone. He came back within minutes. The telephone wasn’t working.
Papa said something else and left us again. I bent toward Max and he whispered in my ear, “He’s going to see when the next train is to Pforzheim.”
Papa was at the ticket window a long time and came back without any tickets. He looked very worried. He explained why but I only heard the words for yesterday and tomorrow.
“Come,” he said. And then he added a string of words I didn’t know and just one that I did. Taxi.
We headed out the main entrance to where Papa expected to see a rank of waiting taxis. There was only one, and someone else was getting into it.
Only three more taxis came over the next hour and three more people quicker than we were got to them. It was now getting dark. We hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast and the snow was falling harder. I felt bad for Papa, who was clearly at a loss for what to do. Nothing on this day was happening like it was supposed to. And he still looked so very worried. So did my mother. She kept looking to Papa for what to do next, even if it was just the wisdom of taking another step forward.
He led us back inside the train station. It was quieter now. Apparently there were no more trains running that day. He told us to wait and he went back to the ticket counter. He spoke to the man behind the glass for several minutes.
While they were in conversation, I turned to Max. “What happened? Why is Papa so upset?”
“Pforzheim was bombed yesterday. The ticket man doesn’t know how badly,” Max whispered back, and Mommi glared at us and put a finger to her lips.
Finally, Papa came back with a piece of paper in his hand. The ticket man had written down the names of a few hotels nearby that he believed were still open and able to receive guests.
We lifted our bags and went back out into the snowy sunset with our tired bodies and hungry bellies.
“Diesen Weg,” Papa said. This way.
We followed him past a row of buildings that were all in one piece, but then the next city block was nothing but a pile of concrete chunks, protruding metal, and blackened timbers where structures used to be. I hadn’t been so close to the effects of war before. I reached down to touch the remains of a front door, slung over marble steps leading nowhere and lying just inches from my feet. Someone had lived here, had used this door when arriving home or going to work or welcoming friends to dinner. Snow and the indigo twilight were making the rubble look almost pretty.
“Kommen Sie,” Papa said, looking back at me.
I rose to continue following.
The first hotel on the list from the ticket man was shuttered, dark, and closed. The second one, another ten minutes’ walk, was still open for business, but the proprietor had available only one attic room—which slept only one—and the kitchen was already closed for the night. Papa told her that was fine. We didn’t care. We just needed a place to stay the night and if she had a little milk and some bread for the children, bitte?
She took Papa’s money—he had exchanged American dollars for Reichsmarks in Geneva—and we trudged up the stairs. The room was barely big enough for one person, let alone four. There was just the bed, a table, a lamp, a braided rug on the floor, and a thick blackout curtain nailed over a small window.
“You and Mommi take the bed,” Papa whispered to me in English, lest the walls were thin.
“No,” Mommi said. “Max and Elise can have the bed.”
Papa started to protest, but Mommi was firm. She would not have one of her children sleeping on the cold floor while she slept under the covers on a mattress.
The innkeeper brought us half a bottle of milk and a round loaf of black bread that was hard and tasteless, but Max and I ate it like it was the finest chocolate. Then we each used the tiny toilet on the floor below us and climbed back up the steep stairs to the attic.
My parents laid out their clothes from their suitcases to make a bed on the braided rug and covered themselves with their coats. Max and I got under the covers and curled up against each other to drive out the chill. When Papa turned out the light, the room was plunged into darkness, thick and cold.
“Papa, is Oma all right?” I whispered.
“I am believing she is, Elise,” he whispered back. “Tomorrow will be better. We’ll see her tomorrow. I’m sure of it. Let’s all try to get some sleep now, hmm?”
I think he just wanted me to stop talking in case anyone else in the hotel could hear us speaking English.
We were all quiet for a little while. Soon I heard the slow and even breathing of my parents.
I asked Max if he was still awake. He was. I asked him to tell me everything that had been said that day. Everything the woman on the train said, the things Papa said. And he did.
“Is it bad that you only really speak English, Elise?” Max asked.
“Maybe,” I said. “I don’t think it’s good.”
“You could pretend you don’t have a voice.”
“I could.”
“I will tell you everything that people say,” he said. “So you won’t miss out.”
“Only at night when we’re sure we’re alone. I don’t want people hearing you speaking English, either.”
“I can teach you more German. Just like Hans taught me.”
“Sure. That would be nice.”
There was silence between us for a few minutes.
“I don’t think there are any cowboys here,” he said.
“No,” I replied. And it seemed a sad thought. Max was not quite eleven. I was thinking then that if my parents didn’t return to the United States when this terrible war was over, Max would have to live here for seven years before his eighteenth birthday. That seemed a sad thought, too, compared to my paltry twenty-seven months. But it wasn’t an impossible scenario. He spoke the language here. He made friends quickly. He would be okay. And then he could join me back in America, where we both belonged.
“But we don’t have to stay here forever, you know,” I finally replied. “You can still be a cowboy someday, Max. You know that, don’t you?”
I waited for his response. But my brother didn’t answer. He’d fallen asleep.
It seemed a very long time before I fell asleep, too.
And then I was jolted awake by a loud and strange keening sound—an alarm of some kind—and the shouts of my parents. Mommi and Papa were yelling, “Aufstehen! Aufstehen!”
They were screaming at me to get up. It took several seconds for me to realize what I was hearing was a civil defense siren, similar to the one we had in Iowa to warn us of an approaching tornado. But this one had a different wail—a sadder sound, if that is possible. What had happened to this city multiple times in the months and weeks before we got here was happening again. Stuttgart was going to be bombed.
While this realization was sweeping over me, Papa was dragging me from my bed, and Mommi had hold of Max. Papa threw open the door and we began to run down the attic stairs as if the hotel were on fire. We met guests on the third and second floors who were also hurrying out of their rooms.
I heard my father ask a man in blue-striped pajamas where we were supposed to go. That much I understood. I didn’t understand his answer.