There was a sense of controlled panic on the stairway as all the hotel’s guests made their way down to a wine and root cellar. We were the last to step inside it. The damp room had obviously been used many times over as a bomb shelter. Among the racks for wine, only one of which held a handful of bottles, there were overturned crates and old blankets to sit on and jars of water and an old-fashioned bedside commode. A kerosene lantern had been lit. Because the hotel was at capacity, there wasn’t enough room for everyone to sit. There were perhaps thirty of us in the little room. One woman, seated on one of the crates, held a screaming baby who refused to be comforted. She brought out her breast in full view of everyone and offered it to the child, but the baby would not take it. Max, standing at my side, stared at the woman and the breast and the crying baby with a dazed look. Papa glanced down at me and laid a finger to his lips, as though I needed to be reminded not to speak. Some of the people began to talk to each other in low tones. I only understood a word here and there.
I don’t know how long we stood and waited to see if a bomb would indeed strike the hotel. I wanted to ask Papa if we would all be buried alive in here if a bomb did hit the building and all its floors and doors and stairs came crashing down on us. I wanted to ask him if he thought it would hurt to die that way. But the only full phrases in German I knew were useless ones like “What time will dinner be served?” and “My coat is blue and my dress is red” and “The library is closed on Sundays.” I started singing all the words to the songs from the movie Holiday Inn, in my head, to keep my mind off the possibilities of what could happen to us if a bomb fell on the hotel.
Sometime later the infant stopped crying. He’d fallen asleep in his mother’s arms when at last we heard the all-clear sign. Apparently, the bomb scare had been just that. Planes had been spotted overhead, but their pilots had other targets in mind that night. Everyone began to shuffle out and I noticed for the first time that the hotel owner had been in the cellar with us, holding a small gray cat.
We got back to our attic room and lay back down on our beds. Papa whispered to Max and me in English that we had been very brave; he was very proud of us. He said again that tomorrow would be better.
“Were you scared?” Max whispered to me many minutes after the room was thickly dark and quiet again.
“Yes,” I said. “I was.”
“I don’t like the war,” he said, shivering.
“Come closer.”
He huddled nearer to me and I put my arm around him. I’m sure it was nearly dawn before I fell asleep again.
In the morning we went downstairs for breakfast, where we were served weak tea, a soft-boiled egg each, and the same tasteless brown bread we’d had the night before. Papa left to walk to the train station to see if there was a train to Pforzheim that day.
While he was gone and Mommi napped in our attic room, Max and I sat in the small common room on the ground floor of the hotel where a struggling coal fire took the chill off the room. There was nothing for us to do except play checkers. We’d found a set on an open cabinet shelf, and so we played over and over and over while we waited for Papa to return.
There were other people coming and going in the common room, so I could say nothing. The innkeeper came to feed the fire now and then and one time she turned to me and asked me a question, but her accent was different from Papa’s and she spoke the words too fast. I had no idea what she’d asked. The woman asked me the question again, louder, and Max came to my aid and responded that I couldn’t speak.
“Sie kann nicht sprechen,” he said, and then he said other words that I did not understand. The woman’s eyes widened with compassion and maybe sorrow, and I’m sure Max was telling her that I lost my voice in some terrible accident.
She walked away, and Max pointed to my throat and made a face like I’d been dropped into boiling oil at some awful moment in my life.
I smiled and mouthed, “Danke.”
Papa came back to the hotel at lunchtime and told us we might have to stay another night in the attic room while he continued to find a way to get us to Pforzheim. There wasn’t a train, and he’d looked for a driver to take us, but the few people he found who had a running vehicle did not want to use their gas for the ninety-kilometer round trip, even though Papa had money to pay for it.
The innkeeper fed us and the rest of her guests a lunch of watery lentil soup, and then Papa went back out to continue his search for transportation. Max and I begged him to let us come along with him, we were so bored, and he reluctantly agreed. We learned along with Papa that there would be no getting to Pforzheim that day. We did find out there was a bus leaving in the morning that was scheduled to stop in Pforzheim, and we bought tickets for four seats on it. That second night in the attic room, we all woke up every hour, expecting to hear the siren again. But it did not sound.
In the morning, we repacked our suitcases and went downstairs to eat the same meager breakfast as the day before. Papa thanked the innkeeper and we left. A new blanket of snow had fallen, and our footsteps were new and pretty as we started walking to a bus stop near the train station. Everything on the ground was pretty. It was only when you looked around at eye level that you saw how sad and ugly the destruction was.
I looked back only once at the little hotel. I’m not sure why. Maybe it was to remember in detail what it looked like so that when I wrote to Mariko later I could describe it. I can see it in my mind’s eye even now, all these years later. But I know the hotel isn’t there anymore. It was destroyed many hours after we left it, when five hundred Allied pilots flew their aircraft over a sleeping Stuttgart, opened their bay doors, and let the bombs fall.
19
My father had always spoken lovingly of his hometown. Max and I had seen his photographs of Pforzheim: the large house in which Papa had grown up; portraits of the family members who still lived in the city, like the watchmaking uncles; and the Sontag watch shop, situated on a beautiful Marktplatz where all the buildings looked like gingerbread houses.
The photos were in shades of black and white and sepia, and Papa had told my brother and me more than once, “Just wait until you see how pretty it is.”
He told us Pforzheim is on the edge of the Black Forest, and some call it the forest’s northern gateway. I had at first feared the name of this famed stretch of woods, but Papa had explained that there was a time long ago when the trees had been so thick, daylight could not reach the forest floor and so within the forest it seemed perpetual night. The forest had been thinned for its lumber, though, so now there were plenty of places where sunlight kissed the ground, but the name had remained: Schwarzwald. Black Forest.
I was thinking of our long-ago plans to visit Pforzheim someday as we approached the city. When Papa had said, “Just wait until you see how pretty it is,” he’d been certain that one day we would see it and it would indeed be pretty. But the war had come to Pforzheim, just like it had come to Marseille and Stuttgart and thousands of other places in the world. A city of eighty thousand, many of them watchmakers and jewelers, Pforzheim had been on the list of Allied targets because its inhabitants were being tapped to craft the precision instruments needed for the manufacture of German submarines, a detail Papa had not known. We soon learned it was still very much on the list of targets.
The city hadn’t been hit as hard as Stuttgart, and there was still a Christmas-card kind of beauty to the landscape around it, with all the pines and leafless birches swathed in a frosty white loveliness. But as we entered Pforzheim, the evidence of earlier Allied bombings lay everywhere. Papa watched from the bus’s front seat with Max beside him as the driver headed for the city center. Mommi and I were sitting behind them, so I couldn’t see his face. But I saw him draw a big breath when we passed an intersection where three of the four corners were piles of rubble. I tried to imagine what it would be like to drive into Davenport and see my birthplace this way. I couldn’t.
The driver dropped us off on a street where sandbags had been erected on its corners. Three structures with bombed-out windows stood sentinel over the bus stop. The buildings on the opposite side of the street looked fine. If you only looked at that side and ignored the Nazi flags flying out of several of the windows, you would not be able to tell the country was at war.
Papa had reminded me not to speak until we were safely at Oma’s house, so as we got off the bus and gathered our suitcases, I kept my mouth shut. The bus drove away and Papa looked about—getting his bearings, I guess.