Like the endless night of bombardment on Pforzheim in February, this raid was also long and relentless. We huddled together as before and prayed we’d be spared. Herr Bruechner, who never said anything to us, held his little dog and sang hymns into its fur.
Sometime before dawn the world above us grew quiet again, but we stayed where we were until daylight. We emerged out of the cellar into the tiny foyer of our building, amazed and relieved that only the window in the front door was shattered, and nothing else. Our building had escaped unscathed. We stepped outside and saw that our street had been largely spared, but smoke rose all around us from other areas of the city that had not been so fortunate.
Papa left for a little while to see if there was anyone who needed help, and Mommi convinced Herr Bruechner to come inside our flat so that she could make him some blackberry tea and a piece of toast. Papa was gone for many hours. When he returned, he brought out the flag he had made and hung it from the foyer window.
“The city has fallen,” he said in a stern voice laced with fear. “The mayor has surrendered. The occupying troops are here. You must all stay inside.” He looked at Mommi. “All of you. Don’t open the door to anyone.”
I had never heard my father sound so afraid.
“What is happening?” Mommi asked. “What are the troops doing?”
Papa walked to where Mommi was standing and put his hands gently on her shoulders. I was standing just a few feet away from her. Max was beside me. “You and Elise.” He glanced at me and then turned back to my mother. “The two of you must not go outside.”
My father’s voice was trembling.
I could see in his eyes then what his heart feared. I was sixteen, no longer a child. I knew what he was trying to tell my mother and me. It was not safe for young German women and girls to be out among angry French troops now patrolling the city. Dread, as cold as ice, coursed through me. I could think of nothing worse than to be raped. Why would Papa caution Mommi and me about this unless it was happening? I began to tremble, too.
“Why can’t Mommi and Elise go outside?” Max asked, curiously concerned.
“Not you, either, son,” Papa said quickly, but his gaze flitted back and forth between Mommi and me, the woman and daughter he loved.
“Tell me it’s not true!” Mommi gasped, her voice a whisper.
But Papa nodded with tears in his eyes. “Stay in the flat. Just stay in the flat.” He looked to me. “All right, Elise? You only have to stay in the flat.”
I nodded, numb with shock.
For the next several days, Mommi, Max, and I did exactly that. We stayed hidden in the flat, behind drawn curtains, making as little noise as possible. Our street was not a main thoroughfare, but still, several times throughout the day, we heard a military jeep or a motorcycle drive by, or the occasional group of soldiers walking past speaking words we did not understand. But for the most part, we hunkered down in relative silence and isolation, waiting for Papa to return each nightfall and tell us the news of the day. As the week wore on, the incidences of assault upon German women were still occurring, though not as many as in those first few days. Still, Papa said it was not yet safe for Mommi and me to be seen outside. I began to wonder if this was to be my life now, stuck behind the window shades of a hostile world where nothing good happened anymore.
But then, on the last day of April, the same day that rumors began to abound that Adolf Hitler had committed suicide in an underground bunker, a postal truck arrived in Stuttgart, the first in weeks. In that clutch of mail Papa picked up at the post office was a tattered letter from Crystal City. Mariko had written me at last.
Her letter had been opened many times, read and reread, and slid into other envelopes to be forwarded to me across oceans. The letter itself, written on paper as thin as gauze, was barely six sentences long. It had been dated the first of December, five months earlier, had traveled first to Washington, D.C., and then to Geneva, then the post office at Pforzheim, and finally to Stuttgart. Mariko had written only what she was sure would not be censored.
Dear Elise,
My family and I are fine. I miss you so very much. I hope you are well. I think of you every day. Calista sends her love. I hope you will write me.
Yours affectionately,
Mariko Inoue
I cried and laughed and reread the letter a hundred times.
I wrote her that very hour, with Papa encouraging me to write only what she had written to me, and to save the many pages I had written earlier for another time, a time when the world was at peace again.
“Don’t tell her we were bombed out of Pforzheim,” he said. “If you do, she will likely never see the letter. Just let her know you have moved. Say nothing about how it happened.”
My words back to her were much like hers to me:
Dearest Mariko:
I was overjoyed to hear from you. I have a new address. My family and I are well. I also think of you every day and miss you more than I can say. I am sorry I missed your birthday. We are both sixteen now!
Please write back!
Love,
Elise
Papa promised to mail it as soon as the occupying forces reinstated postal service in Stuttgart.
I had forgotten what it felt like to be happy. It almost didn’t feel real. I had to keep reminding myself that my happiness was real; I did get a letter from Mariko. I was happy, and the war, which had been so adept at stealing everything I loved, could not steal this, because happiness is not something that can be taken from you. You can lose it, but no one can take it from you. Not even the thief that is war.
On the sixth of May, the same day Papa was able to post that return letter to Mariko, Germany surrendered.
The thief was dead.
22
I had seen enough of war to know that what it destroys over a period of years likely won’t be set to rights in just days or weeks or even months. I knew that when the German military laid down their weapons and the Allied bombs stopped falling, Europe was a broken place. I had seen how broken it was. I was living within that brokenness.
And yet from the very moment Papa came home with the news that Germany had surrendered, I hungered for evidence that my shattered world was now going to be mended. I wanted to see immediate evidence, however small, that it was happening. I’d been a pawn in a terrible competition that had had nothing to do with me, and I deserved to see change: not in the form of a ticket back to America, as I knew from what Papa had said that would take time, but at the very least, relief from hunger and fear and loss.
I didn’t belong in this place into which I had been dropped. I hadn’t been the enemy.
I was innocent and had been treated unfairly.
My universe had been reduced to our little corner of Stuttgart, and my eyes saw only my own woes. Perhaps I am even now rationalizing how I could have been unaware of the extent of the brutality at the Nazi-controlled concentration camps, and what had been happening to the deported Jews and other innocent people the Nazis had hated. Herr Goebbels didn’t tell us about the killings in his weekly radio addresses, and the news we got at Crystal City prior to coming here had always been late or censored. In the four months we had been in Germany, I hadn’t seen a camp or any incarcerated people. Perhaps I didn’t think I needed to see them because I knew—or so I thought—what it was like to be taken from your home, labeled an enemy, and dumped into a detention camp fenced by barbed wire and patrolled by armed guards. But the truth was I didn’t know the horrific extent of the brutality because I hadn’t bothered to ask or consider or listen, even when the opportunity to inquire presented itself.