Papa stared at the letter. His cousin Emilie had sent it the week after the bombing, probably the same day she heard from Oma that her parents and sister were dead.
“Please let me go to her,” Oma pleaded.
Papa sighed. “Just for now? Please say it’s just for now.”
Oma breathed in deeply. “All right. Just for now.”
Two days later, Papa put Oma on the only train that day destined for Munich, a little more than two hundred kilometers away. We all went to the train station to see her off. It was the first warm day we’d had since Crystal City. All the ice and snow had melted, and a few hearty tulips were nosing their way out of the cold ground, unaware that while their bulbs slept during the fall and winter, their world had been turned upside down. Oma cried as she hugged us good-bye and told Max and me that she was sorry she couldn’t stay but she was too sad; her heart was breaking. This I understood. I understood all too well. Max and I cried, too.
“We will come to see you when classes let out for Max,” Papa said to her as he embraced her, as though it was just the school calendar that would keep us all apart.
“There is room for the four of you there, too,” Oma said softly in my father’s ear. “Perhaps when this is over and you are allowed to leave Stuttgart?”
“Perhaps,” was all Papa whispered back to her. I knew he was not ready to give up on Pforzheim. Papa told her to write to him the minute she could. She said she would.
Oma boarded the train while Papa took her suitcase to the baggage car. We waited on the platform until the train chuffed away, each of us no doubt whispering a silent prayer that she would arrive safely. Papa was fairly confident she would. The Allies didn’t usually drop their bombs in the middle of the day.
We returned to the flat and began a new existence without Oma. Papa told me he would continue my German lessons at night when he came home from work. I would continue my own studies in history and science and literature with the German textbooks he’d gotten for me at a used bookstore that hadn’t been bombed. In the afternoons, I could walk to the hospital alone and continue my volunteer work if I wanted, which is what I did.
A week after Oma left, I turned sixteen. Mommi gave me a new dress she’d been altering at the tailor shop. It was yellow, my favorite color, with little buttons that looked like lemon drops. Papa gave me a new writing tablet and my own fountain pen with a mother-of-pearl barrel. It was used, but sleek and beautiful. Max had saved some pfennigs and bought me a peppermint stick off a friend at school. There was no sugar or eggs for a cake, but Papa did manage to find a box of raisins that we ate by the sweet handful until they were gone.
The following day at work Papa heard that President Roosevelt had died. We would come to learn that the previous day, an ailing Roosevelt had been sitting in the living room of a Georgia cottage where he sometimes stayed to rest from the rigors of the presidency and war. Colleagues and family were in the room with him. He had been signing letters and documents after lunch while an artist painted his portrait, when he suddenly grabbed his head and cried out in pain. A blood vessel in the president’s brain had burst. He was dead within minutes.
On the day we found out the president had died, however, all we knew was that soldiers from Allied nations were marching into Germany. Would they continue to advance? Would the president’s death affect that?
“What will happen now?” Mommi asked Papa. He had just returned home to the flat with the news.
“I don’t think it will change anything,” Papa answered quietly. “The Allied armies are coming. The death of the president won’t stop them.”
“And they’re coming to do what?” she whispered, and Max and I looked to Papa with anxious eyes.
“To end the war, Freda,” Papa said. “They’re coming to end it.”
“But . . .”
“We know what the Allies want, Freda. Same as us. For the Nazi regime to be defeated and for an end to this madness. We’re on their side.”
“But will they know that when they get here? That we’re on their side?”
“We will show them. It will be all right.”
It was obvious Papa wanted us not to be afraid, and I was grateful for that, but I didn’t see how he could know for certain it would be all right. He could only hope that it would be.
“So . . . the war is going to be over?” Max asked Papa.
“Soon. Yes, I think it will be over soon.”
“And then we can go home?” I said, though even to me my words sounded na?ve. It wasn’t like we could just pack our bags and get on the next ship to America. My parents would have to apply to reimmigrate and be accepted.
“One thing at a time, Elise,” was all Papa said in answer to my question.
My parents spent the rest of the evening in pensive reflection, causing Max and me to do the same. Not being American citizens, Papa and Mommi hadn’t been able to vote for President Roosevelt, but I knew they admired him and how he carried their adopted nation through the dark days of the Great Depression, a time I had been too young to recall having lived through. Max and I remembered no other man as president. Roosevelt had been elected four times and had served for twelve of my sixteen years, and all of Max’s lifetime to that point.
Our new president, Harry Truman, was a man I didn’t know anything about. Papa told me he didn’t know much about the man, either, but he was certain the end of the war and its aftermath would show us all what he was like.
* * *
? ? ?
As the Allied troops marched ever closer to Stuttgart, Papa forbade Max and me from venturing any farther than a square block from the flat.
“We don’t know who is coming,” he told us.
“The Allies are coming,” I reminded him, forgetting for a moment that not every Allied soldier was an American.
“But we are not in an Allied country,” Papa reminded me. “You must trust me on this. Until we know who is coming, you must stay on this block. It is very important that you obey me on this. When the Allies come we need to be ready to show them we’re glad they’re here. You must do as I say.”
“Does this mean you’re not going to Berlin?” Max asked.
It had been many days since Papa had mentioned those orders that he remain in Stuttgart and await passage to Berlin.
“I believe the time for that has passed,” Papa answered. “I don’t think the German military will be calling upon me to help them now. Promise me you will stay near the flat.”
We both told him we would. When Papa went to work, Max asked Mommi what he was afraid of and she answered that Papa had heard at the treatment plant that French troops were headed our way, not American soldiers. Even before Papa’s arrest we’d heard the news reports of how France had been brutalized by invading Nazi armies, and now French armies were in Germany, apparently overtaking it city by city like France had been overtaken—with brutal force.
“What did the Nazi armies do in France?” Max asked innocently. He had heard only glowing reports of how wonderful the Germany military was, an entity to be proud of. My parents hadn’t wanted to jeopardize his safety and their own by countering what he’d been hearing in school and with the Hitler Youth. Mommi kept her answer vague.
“They took what didn’t belong to them,” she said. “That is why it is important that we stay close to the flat. The French soldiers might be feeling angry about what happened to their country during the war.”
Papa wasn’t the only one concerned about the armies marching ever closer toward us. Some of the more vocal Nazi Party members in Stuttgart were suddenly gone, having fled to smaller towns where they had family. Throughout the next couple of days, we heard explosions in the distance. The remnants of German troops still in Stuttgart were blowing up bridges to make the Allies’ advance more difficult.
The little school Max had been attending closed until further notice. Papa took down the portrait of Hitler in our flat—which we’d been told could not be removed without risk of arrest—and hid it under the bed. He also fashioned a flag out of one of his white T-shirts, in case we needed to hang it out the window of our building to indicate we were willingly yielding to the occupational forces.
Before the Allied troops reached us, though, one last tempest of bombs fell on Stuttgart, on the twentieth day of April. We flew to the flat’s damp cellar as we had several times before. Herr Bruechner from the third floor and his dog joined us. The woman and her three daughters had left two days before. Where they had gone, Papa did not know. I worried for them that they had tried to find a safer place to hide and had instead run right into the advancing army.