“Can they really force you to help them make a bomb like that?” Mommi asked, tears in her eyes and a catch in her throat. “Can they force Elise and me to work for them?”
Papa didn’t answer her; he just put up a hand like he couldn’t speak of it anymore, and he stood and walked away. I was starting to realize—Mommi probably was, too—that the Nazis could make us do whatever they pleased. The picture of what it was like to live under Nazi rule was becoming clearer every day. I knew Papa was not a follower of this regime and that every time someone saluted him and said, “Heil Hitler!” it pained him to return the greeting.
I also knew the kindest thing I could do for him now was to get up the following dawn, ready to walk down to the watch shop, and say nothing about where I’d rather be.
So that is what I did.
Several times the next morning, as we readied ourselves for the day at the watch shop, Papa told me how sorry he was, how sorry he and Mommi both were, that I had to come with them today and learn how to make the fuses Hitler needed to keep his U-boats in the water, ready to torpedo Allied ships.
“It’s all right, Papa,” I would say in return, and he’d shake his head and whisper that it wasn’t.
The air was frosted and flurried with happy white confetti as we walked to the shop. Our feet crunched on frozen gravel and our breath came out in gauzy plumes. It was a beautiful morning. It was as though the world had forgotten it was at war.
Werner and Klaus had been made aware of our labor assignment: extra materials to make the fuses had been delivered to them late the previous afternoon. They did not welcome us to their work as we stepped inside and took off our coats, but they did welcome us. Werner’s wife, Matilde, had made ersatz coffee from ground acorns that she’d roasted on top of her stove and then percolated as though they were coffee grounds. The drink was nutty and smoky and there wasn’t enough sugar to make it palatable for me, but it was warm and I drank it anyway. And then we set to work.
I learned that day that a fuse acts as a sacrificial device. When too much electrical current flows through the fuse, threatening the circuit connected to it, the metal strip inside the fuse’s cylinder melts, so that the current is interrupted. The circuit is saved, as well as the apparatus it powers. The fuse, though, is destroyed, sacrificed in the line of duty.
Werner and Klaus and their wives and Helga had made thousands of them.
“Do you make these fuses as well as you make your beautiful watches?” Papa asked his uncles as we stood in the workroom and surveyed the assembly line they had created between the five of them.
“No,” Werner said softly. “We do not. But we are careful. And we will show you how to be careful.”
The rest of the morning the uncles showed us how to make fuses that were slightly less than perfect: a shortened wire here, a loose connection there. It took effort to produce a nearly flawless fuse.
And while we worked, all that day and the next and the next, my German family taught me the language.
I didn’t have the aptitude that Max had for learning languages, but my great-aunts and -uncles were patient as they taught me. Max was more than willing to go to the nearby grammar school, as his command of the German language was better than passable. Oma’s neighbors, as well as the uncles’ closest friends and fellow retailers, all knew where my parents had been the last two decades and where their children had been born. I didn’t sense the need to pretend I could not speak around them, and I appreciated their help in learning to communicate.
The first few days I wrote long letters to Mariko, telling her everything that had happened to us, knowing full well I couldn’t send them yet. No letters describing what we were experiencing would get past the censors. I was hoping that the war would end soon, and if I saved them up I could just send the letters all at once. Stacks of them. Maybe Mariko was doing the same thing, writing me long letters she couldn’t yet send but would someday.
We were becoming more fully aware of what the German armies had done in Poland, Holland, France, England, and other countries during our detention. We also knew that millions of European Jews had been deported from their homes and sent to labor camps, but now the rumor was that many were being killed there, not merely put to work. They’d had to wear yellow stars before they were rounded up, identifying them as Jewish, as though that label meant they were guilty of something terrible. I would think of my crumpled-up identification tag that I still had in my coat pocket and I would feel the dueling burn of shame and defiance. The more I grasped the German language, the more I could see how troubled my German family was by everything that was happening, including the relocation of the Jews and the tales of what was happening at those labor camps.
The uncles seemed neither in favor of nor opposed to the Third Reich, but I could see they loved Germany. They loved their home and the craft the Sontag family had perfected over the last century. But they, too, seemed reticent to talk about what the Nazi Party had done to the country. If you were a devotee of Hitler and his idea of a perfect world, you said what you wanted. If you weren’t, you said nothing.
Because I was not in school, I was only around people my parents’ and grandmother’s ages. I met one girl, though, fifteen like me, at the end of our second week. Her name was Brigitte, and she was the oldest daughter of a friend of Oma’s who owned a linens store that was located a few blocks from Werner and Klaus’s watch shop. Brigitte seemed happy to meet me when Oma introduced us, even though she spoke no English. She showed me her bedroom in the flat above the linens shop and her doll collection and the needlepoint tablecloth she was working on. She asked me questions about living in America; at least that’s what I thought she was asking. But I couldn’t tell her what America was like; I didn’t have enough German words for that. And she seemed so interested; that was the worst part about it. She wasn’t looking at me as if I were a monster.
On the walk home that evening, Papa told me to give it time. It wouldn’t always be this way with Brigitte, the one and only friend I had made. Every day I was learning more of the language, he said. Soon I would be able to understand everything Brigitte asked, and I would be able to answer her.
The next three weeks dragged on. We ate skimpy meals cobbled together from what Mommi could buy at the market and what Oma had stored in her cellar. I learned to eat rabbit and drink ersatz coffee and not gag. Four times we were sent to the cellar for air-raid threats. Four times we emerged after the all clear. I made fuses. I listened to Max tell us about his classes and his Hitler Youth after-school gatherings, which all boys his age were required to attend. If I had been in school, I would have been doing something similar.
We prayed for the war to end, for the rabbits to produce, for the air raids to cease, for the kerosene to hold out. For spring to come early.
Every day seemed the same until Papa was called in to see the officer who had finalized his return to Pforzheim. He had a message for my father.
Papa was wanted in Berlin in one week to work on a special project.
He would be there for an indeterminate amount of time.
His family was not to come with him.
20
In the months and years that followed the air raid on Pforzheim on the twenty-third of February—the same day Papa received those orders to Berlin—I would learn of the full scope of the attack. I would have a chance to read all the details that military correspondents and war department assessors and meticulous historians would pen about that night. It is one thing to read the account of an event, however. It is quite another to experience it.
Newsreels would announce to Allied civilian viewers, after the fact, that Pforzheim had been destroyed, as though it was a dangerous beast that had been successfully dealt with rather than a city of mostly ordinary people. More than eighty percent of its structures were destroyed or damaged in that one night of bombing. Ninety percent of the city center was reduced to ashes, including the Sontag watch shop. Some historians would say the destruction in Pforzheim was the greatest proportion of damage in one raid during the entire war.