Oma was so grief stricken at the loss of her family members that she didn’t accompany Papa and Herr Hornung to see if they could salvage anything from her house. She told Papa she had hidden jewelry and gold coins in the cellar when the raids first started last year, but that if it wasn’t safe to get them, she didn’t care.
Papa and Herr Hornung were gone for a couple of hours. Max and I wanted to go with them, but Papa said they needed the room in Herr Hornung’s car for what they might find. They came back with the jewelry and coins, which Oma clutched to her chest in silent gratitude, as well as a few kitchen things, some books that hadn’t been exposed to ice and the elements, a few photographs, and some clothes from the clothesline that had been hung in the ironing room—none of them mine. My unsent letters to Mariko were gone, as were Max’s precious cowboy book and Opa’s medals, which had been returned to Papa and which he’d brought back with him.
When a city is decimated by disaster, its people can do one of two things. Leave, to start over somewhere else, or stay and rebuild. But to start over, there needed to be a place in which to begin again. Where was such a place in a Germany at war? To stay and rebuild, there must be lumber and nails and workmen. There were none of those things.
In the days that followed, Papa endeavored to find us a place to live until he and Oma could decide what to do about the house. The military office where he’d been given notice of his transfer to Berlin was a ruin. Papa had no idea where the German officer was who’d told him to return in a week to get his travel documents. Papa had no desire to seek him out or find out what he was supposed to do instead.
“Let them come and find me if I’m that important to them,” he said to Mommi when she asked him about it.
On the day Papa was supposed to have boarded a train for Berlin, he was told by the local housing authorities—who’d been tasked with finding living quarters for thirty thousand displaced people—that he would not stay in Pforzheim. An apartment had been found for the five of us in Stuttgart. The housing authorities had been working in concert with the local military command, whose building had been demolished but whose officers were now stationed at an army compound in Stuttgart. Papa would earn a modest wage to pay the rent by working at the water-treatment plant, as the plan to send him to Berlin was now on hold, but not for long. There had been a temporary setback, but when they were ready for him, he was to be in Stuttgart, and prepared—as before—to leave at a moment’s notice. It was not an option, he was told. In addition, his family was currently a burden to Pforzheim, not a benefit. The watch shop was gone and there was no more available housing. We had to relocate to Stuttgart.
21
That first week back in Stuttgart is a bit of a blur to me all these years later. I’ve come to believe the blurring of memories is how the brain protects itself from an event that does not need to be fully remembered. When you lose so much, all at once, it can be too dense an experience to embrace and own, even though it’s a part of you and always will be.
The apartment in Stuttgart was a one-bedroom flat in the only part of the city that wasn’t in complete ruins, in a neighborhood called Vaihingen, about twelve kilometers—or seven miles—from the now-demolished hotel by the train station where we had stayed before. There was damage and destruction here, but not like in the city center, which was now a smoldering shambles. In the years to come, I would learn that Stuttgart had been bombed in fifty-three raids over the course of the war. Forty thousand structures were destroyed and more than four thousand residents killed, including our new flat’s former occupants—a young husband and wife who both labored at a munitions factory and who had been working the evening shift the night it was bombed. They’d been incinerated along with fifty others.
Our place was on the ground level, but only half of the first floor was devoted to our flat. The rest of the space was one long common room where in times past the boardinghouse had served its lodgers their meals. On the second floor was another displaced family from Pforzheim, a woman and her three young girls. Her husband was a U-boat submariner whom she hadn’t seen in two years. Above them was an old man named Herr Bruechner, whom we never saw unless it was to take his little dog out to lift his leg on the lone tree on our street. There was also a small attic room that was unoccupied.
Our flat contained only one bedroom. Papa had insisted Mommi and Oma share its bed and that I sleep on quilts on the floor in that room. He and Max slept in the living room, my brother on the saddest sofa I’d ever seen, and Papa on the floor, rolled up in the last blanket he’d salvaged from Oma’s house.
We had the clothes we had been wearing the night of the bombing and little else. But of all my losses, the one that daily pierced me was the destruction of those unsent letters to Mariko, which were buried now in the destruction of Oma’s house.
There had been a dozen of them hidden away in the room that had been mine. They detailed the exodus out of Crystal City, seeing the faint silhouette of the Statue of Liberty as we eased away from the coast of the United States, the undulating sway of the Atlantic Ocean, the dolphins playing in our wake, the sting of viewing Marseille in ruins, the icy beauty of Switzerland, the transition into war-wrecked Germany, that first air raid in Stuttgart, the fairy-tale beauty of Oma’s house, the watch shop, the uncles, a girl named Brigitte, and the ache of how much I missed Mariko and my old life.
* * *
? ? ?
On the first Saturday after the bombing, I had what would now be called a meltdown.
Papa had just come back to our tiny flat from a disappointing trek to Pforzheim. He’d gone to the makeshift morgue to see if there were any remains of the uncles and aunts and Hilde to bury. There hadn’t been. He found one pocket watch in the charred ruin of the Sontag Brothers watch shop. It was blackened and nonfunctioning and smelled of death, but it was all that was left of the family business and the lives that had been inside the shop when it exploded into flames. In the coming year, Papa would bury that watch in a Pforzheim cemetery and place a small granite slab over it etched with the names of the five Sontags who had died the night of the bombing.
I was staring at that burned pocket watch in Papa’s hand—Oma was softly crying behind me—when everything inside me that was hurting erupted like lava from a volcano. I screamed my anguish to my parents, in English, silencing Oma—who didn’t know what I was saying, only that I was shrieking it. I screamed that I wanted my letters to Mariko back. I wanted everything back that had been taken from me. I hated it here in Germany. I hated my parents. Hated everything.
I stormed out of the flat without a coat or mittens or a hat. It was the third of March, and the frosted gray afternoon was icy cold. My tears were freezing onto my skin as I stumbled down the street, wondering where the train station was because I wanted to find it and get on any train that would get me out of here. I had no money, but I didn’t care because I was going to get on a train if I had to sneak onto a baggage car. I was getting on a train to anywhere but here.
But I didn’t know where the train station was. My hands and feet began to stiffen with cold and I soon crumpled to the pavement by a light post, defeated and freezing and wanting to disappear.
Seconds later, a warm coat was around my shoulders and Papa was leaning over me and whispering to me that hot tea would be waiting for us back at the apartment and that he and Mommi loved me very much and would I please come back with him?
I leaned into him and sobbed harder. Love, when it’s lavished on you after you’ve said ugly things, is almost too painful to bear. “I’m so sorry, Papa,” I said in English. “I’m sorry I said I hated you. I didn’t mean it.”
He didn’t correct me for lapsing into English on a public street. He just held me tighter and whispered back to me in English, “I know you didn’t. We all know you didn’t mean it. It wasn’t about the letters, Elise. I know that. I know all of this isn’t about the letters you lost. I know it.”
I cried on that cold pavement with my father’s strong arms around me for many long minutes as I emptied myself of sorrows that I could no longer contain. Finally, when I could bear the cold no longer, I got to my feet with Papa’s help and we slowly walked back to the flat.