Papa said we would do both. We would make sure the uncles and their families were all right, but we would also help with the rescue efforts.
My father scrounged in Oma’s half-standing garden shed for shovels, work gloves, and buckets. Oma was able to find us tea towels in the ruin of her kitchen so that we could make masks. I noticed that the barn was a flattened heap, the rabbits inside it surely all dead. We began to walk toward the smoking city, picking our way at times. As we got closer to the worst of the destruction, the extent of it became clearer. Oma faltered for a moment, unable to look at the city she’d lived in all her life in such a state. A noxious odor hung in the air.
“Come, Mutti,” Papa said, pulling her gently along. “We must do what we can to help. We can’t think about anything else right now.”
A table had been set up at the entrance to the oldest part of the city, and people whose own sheds and garages had been leveled were being handed shovels and spades, gloves and masks. The International Red Cross had arrived at dawn to set up a field mess hall for rescue workers. Someone else was giving directions to people to go to the rubble piles where cries for help had been heard.
Papa asked the man giving instructions about the street where the uncles’ shop was located and was told everything on that street was still burning. No one was going into that part of the city center yet. We could only hope that, like us, the uncles and their families had fled to a safe place.
Mommi and Oma were asked to help tend the wounded in a makeshift tent hospital a block away. Papa, Max, and I were put into a rescue group and handed gloves.
I couldn’t understand all the instructions we were being given. I just did whatever Max and Papa did. We were sent to a building that might have been three stories at one time. I did not recognize the street—there was no street, really—even though I felt familiar with this part of the city. We had walked through it every day for three weeks on our way to the watch shop. We stretched out our number so that we could become human chains to clear away debris and reach people who were trapped inside. Max and I and several other teens and adolescents were put into a chain for the smaller pieces of rubble.
For the next half hour we moved splintered wood, chunks of concrete, and bits of this and that as we made a path to get to the people faintly calling out from beneath the wreckage. Then from the front of the line I heard someone say they had found someone. I saw two men pulling a girl or young woman from an opening they had created in the ruin of the building. She was covered in dust and looked like a ghost. She wasn’t moving, and her head lolled at an odd angle. Even I could tell this young woman was dead. She had not been one of those calling out.
Two men bearing a stretcher took the body, laying it gently on the stretched canvas. They hoisted her up and began to pick their way past us and I saw the young woman’s face. My breath stilled. It was Brigitte. Max and I had been standing in front of the linens store and I didn’t even know it.
Brigitte! My one friend here.
I suddenly wondered if the bearers knew who she was. What if everyone who knew her was dead? What if there was no one left who knew her name? A sense of urgency overcame me. The bearers had to know that they were carrying the only girl my age who had been kind to me in Pforzheim, or at least who had had the opportunity to be kind to me. I took off after the stretcher, caught up with it, and touched the arm of one of the carriers.
“I know who she is,” I said to him in German. “Her name is Brigitte Scheffler.” There was so much more I wanted to say but I didn’t know the words and the stretcher-bearers didn’t have the time.
“Brigitte Scheffler?” the carrier said, making sure he’d heard me correctly. I had an accent; I knew the citizens of Pforzheim could tell German wasn’t my first language, but Papa had assured me they couldn’t always tell that meant I was American. The stretcher-bearer was an older man, perhaps older than Papa. He had a kind face, but he looked tired and the day was still young.
“Ja,” I replied, and I told him she’d been fifteen. Something in my voice must have given me away—not that I was English-speaking, but that this dead girl had been my friend.
“Es tut mir leid, Fr?ulein,” he said tenderly. Hearing him kindly say he was sorry almost made me weep.
I asked him to be careful with her. I couldn’t think of the word for gentle. He nodded and they took off.
The next few hours were a blur of dust and charred wood and rubble. A man and a little boy were found alive with minor injuries, but Brigitte’s mother and grandmother and two little sisters were brought up from the debris lifeless.
At noon we were served a quick meal of bologna and cheese sandwiches in the tent the Red Cross had set up. We had not eaten since supper the night before. I ate what was set before me even though the food tasted like ashes and dirt. Papa left us with Herr Hornung and went to see if there was news of Werner and Klaus. He came back an hour later and told us the street where the watch shop had been had literally been flattened. All that was left of that part of the city was smoke and ash and embers. He didn’t see how his uncles and their wives and Hilde could have survived if they’d still been in the building.
I was surprised Papa was being so forthright with Max and me. Perhaps the very real possibility that he’d lost so many members of his family all at once was too much for him. He was certainly not censoring what he said to us to protect our feelings. Perhaps in this situation, he felt it was ridiculous to even try.
As the afternoon wore on, we continued with our rescue efforts. Two more people were brought out alive, several others dead. Dusk approached and Herr Hornung told us we could stay with him and his wife at his sister’s place just outside town until we could make other living arrangements. He explained that’s where they had been the night before, taking care of her because she had fallen a few days earlier and broken her ankle.
I don’t think Papa had thought about what we would do that night until Herr Hornung extended this kind invitation. Papa thanked him and said we’d be most grateful. When the shadows got long, Oma and Mommi joined us. They’d been checking the makeshift morgue and the hospital for the uncles and their families but had not seen them. They looked as weary of death and destruction as we were.
We ate supper in the Red Cross mess tent because we knew the Hornungs would surely not have food enough for the five of us. Herr Hornung offered to drive us up to Oma’s in his car before the sun set to see if there were any clothes we could salvage, but he could only make it halfway because of the debris in the streets.
“Maybe we can try again tomorrow,” Herr Hornung said.
He drove us the handful of miles to the sister’s house, a tiny cottage that reminded me very much of the house in Iowa by the poultry barns, except this one was pretty and cozy. There were no extra bedrooms, so we slept that night, the five of us, on top of quilts on the dining room floor, in the same clothes in which we’d spent the day uncovering the dead and wounded.
Oma fell asleep crying into her pillow. I think she already knew her brothers-in law, their wives, and her niece Hilde were dead.
The next day we learned that all five of them had died in the firestorm. They had made it to the cellar of the watch shop when the bombardment began, but the smoke and phosphorus had seeped into the little underground room. The bombs continued to fall and they were soon unable to breathe. That is how they died, Papa assured us, when Max and I both started to cry at the news of their deaths. This was not a terribly painful way to die, Papa told us, not like being burned to death. They just ran out of oxygen. That’s all. They got light-headed and fell asleep and didn’t wake up.
He said this to comfort Max and me so we would not dream of the uncles and their families engulfed in fire, screaming as the flames consumed them. But I didn’t quite believe him that it was not painful. I still don’t know what it is like to die from lack of oxygen. I’ve never looked it up or asked a medical professional. I’ve never wanted to know if Papa had been giving us false hope that they had died quickly and painlessly.