Nearly eighteen thousand men, women, and children perished, dozens of them dear friends of Papa’s extended family. Some died immediately from the impact of one of the five hundred exploding incendiary devices that fell. Others died in infernos the bombs created and from which they could not escape. Some suffocated where they crouched because the bombs sucked all the oxygen out of the air. Some were buried in their cellars or couldn’t run fast enough out of their collapsing houses. Some burned and drowned in the two rivers that ran through the city, which in happier years had given Pforzheim a lovely pastoral beauty but during the bombing curdled aflame in a phosphorous stew.
We were lucky compared to the thousands upon thousands who were killed or injured. We’d run down to Oma’s root cellar when the siren sounded a few minutes before eight and huddled together as the earth around the foundation of the house began to shake when countless bombs met their targets all around us.
This raid was nothing like I could ever have imagined. It was relentless and malevolent, though it lasted less than half an hour. We could hear the whistling and the booming and screaming. Dust and dirt and bits of plaster rained down on us. The house above moaned in near anguish, as if in warning that it wouldn’t be able to protect us, that it might, in fact, collapse and kill us. I didn’t want to die beneath Oma’s house. I didn’t want to be crushed under its terrible weight. I hadn’t realized I was screaming until I darted to the narrow cellar staircase to flee the howling house. Papa’s strong arms were suddenly around my middle, pulling me back. I worked my way free of his grasp and lunged again for the stairs, falling onto them and cutting my lip. But I scrambled up and had nearly made it to the door when, again, I was pulled back, hitting my elbow on a joist and hearing it crack against it. Mommi was weeping and reaching for me; Oma was rocking back and forth, whispering prayers for deliverance as she held Max against her chest in a bear-like embrace.
“You can’t go out there!” Papa was shouting in English. “You can’t go out there!”
“I don’t want to die!” I screamed, and I tasted salt and blood in my mouth.
“If you go out there, you will! We have to stay here.”
Mommi had her arms around me then, as well as Papa, and they held me in a cocoon of their arms as the house continued to wail and the world outside continued to sound as if it were ending.
After the attack came the silence. My grandmother continued to pray, even after the bombing stopped and the house ceased its awful groaning. We waited a long stretch of minutes listening for the all clear from the civil defense siren, but it never rang out.
Papa told us we had to stay in the cellar until it sounded. We fell asleep against each other waiting for it.
Sometime later, I awoke. Mommi and Papa were also awake. My father was on the stairs, nearly to the door. He looked back at me.
“Stay here with your mother until I know it’s safe.”
Mommi put her arm around me and pulled me gently to her lest I try to follow Papa anyway. I would remember this one-armed embrace for years to come. It was the last time my mother touched me like that, a mother protecting her child. She would hug me, of course, in the subsequent years, but I never again felt her strong arm of protection over me like that. The embraces that would follow would always feel more like hesitant apologies, because her fragile soul had led us here. My mother had sent us, as the lady on the train had said, straight to hell. Mommi never said this to me in so many words, and I know it wasn’t true, but in the days and years that followed, I knew these were the feelings in her heart.
She and I watched Papa ascend the cellar stairs and open the door carefully, one inch at a time. Rays of muted sunshine struck him, and we knew then that whatever he was seeing was bad because the root cellar was under the house. How could the sun reach him? I smelled smoke.
“Oh God,” he whispered. Maybe to the Almighty. Maybe to Mommi and me. Maybe just to himself.
“What?” Mommi said in German. “What is it?”
Papa said nothing; he just took the last stair and stepped into the light and disappeared from our view.
Mommi rose, keeping her hand on me, so she could peer into the opening. Sunlight made her squint. The odor of ash and chemicals grew stronger.
She looked down to Oma and Max, who were still sleeping, then reached down to take my hand. “Stay right behind me,” she said in English.
We took the stairs slowly, she leading the way and I close behind. The old wooden steps creaked under our weight. As we got closer to the cellar door and the kitchen beyond, I could see Mommi’s golden brown hair was flecked all over with plaster dust from our night in the cellar. From the back she looked like an old woman. I probably looked the same.
Mommi emerged first from the cellar, and I felt her flinch, as her hand still held mine. Then we were both over the threshold and looking at blue sky where the kitchen ceiling should have been.
There aren’t adequate words to describe what it was like to see Oma’s house laid open like it had been torn apart by a savage animal. A few blackened walls still stood, and the staircase resolutely pushed its way to a second story that wasn’t there. But the rest of the lovely old house was a stark mix of char and rubble. Papa would tell me later that the house, being on the outskirts of the city, hadn’t suffered a direct hit. If it had, we would have likely perished in the cellar. But it had been caught in the impact of all the other nearby explosions and then the firestorm that engulfed the city, and that was enough to nearly destroy it.
Papa had clambered over the ruins of the big oak table and was kneeling on its splintered remains, his hands lying helpless in his lap. Mommi went to him, dropping my hand so that she could put her arms around him. I followed and climbed up next to him. Papa, who never cried, turned to me with tears streaming down his face.
“You never got to see it in the springtime,” he whispered.
I leaned into him and the tears began to fall from my own eyes.
Minutes later, Oma and Max also came up the stairs, and my grandmother sank to her knees in the ruin of her kitchen and began to weep.
Papa went to her. We all did. We crouched in the wreck of her kitchen and cried together.
When I was ten, a family in Davenport who lived relatively near us lost their home to a chimney fire. They got out with their lives and their beagle, but they lost all their possessions in that blaze. I remember how sad we all were, and how the neighborhood all pitched in to give them clothes and shoes and used furniture and extra dishes for the rental house they had to move into. Even toys and bicycles for their three children. They had lost everything, and all the neighbors had wanted to help shoulder the weight of that loss.
If Oma had lost her house to a chimney fire, I could easily imagine her Pforzheim neighbors doing the same thing for her, stepping in to help not just with donations but with the comfort of sympathy that reminds you when you are grieving that you are not alone.
We didn’t yet know that nearly all of Pforzheim’s homes had been lost in that raid. Thousands were dead; thousands more were injured. No one would come to shower my grandmother with care and compassion and casseroles.
“Mein Gott,” Oma said as the smoky fog cleared a bit and we could see down the little hill into the city.
It was unrecognizable. Parts of the city center were still aflame, and smoke rose everywhere. The incendiaries had created a firestorm that had swept through the city. Buildings that hadn’t been crushed by the sheer weight and power of the bombs had been food for the fiercest of fires.
Oma’s closest neighbor, Herr Hornung, called out to us from what had been the house’s front steps. He asked if we were all right.
Papa stood and helped Oma to her feet. “Ja, ja,” he said. “Und du und deine Frau?”
I couldn’t understand what Herr Hornung said in reply about him and his wife. I think he said they were all right, but I looked across the snow-covered vegetable garden to where the Hornung house should have been. It was gone. Herr Hornung and his wife surely had not been at home last night. The bomb that hit their home had taken out half of Oma’s house and just as much of the house on their other side, but it had completely obliterated the Hornung house.
Then Herr Hornung said something else and Papa looked from us back to Oma’s neighbor. “Wir alle?” Papa asked. All of us?
The man said, “Ja,” and then he said, I think, that anyone who could help was needed.
Papa said we’d be right along, and Herr Hornung hurried away.
Papa turned to us. “There are people trapped inside their houses and cellars and many wounded. Anyone who can help is being asked to come. Anyone.” He looked to Max and me.
“They are just children,” Oma said.
“No, we’re not, Oma. Elise and I can help,” Max said before I could figure out the right words.
“We can’t stay here anyway, Mutti,” Papa said. “It’s not safe. And we can help. Look. None of us are hurt.”
“But Werner and Klaus and their families!” Oma said, and a string of other words I didn’t understand.