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The French Army stayed in Stuttgart until the first week of July. No one was sad to see them go, least of all me. Two weeks had passed since the walk that was supposed to have been just ten minutes of longed-for sunshine. I wasn’t pinching the inside of my arm anymore to keep from letting loose my pent-up emotions. Instead, I now lay awake each night revisiting them: the fear, the shame, the anger, and the one other feeling that I could not name but made me feel like I was lost in a maze of mist and towering hedges.
It wasn’t that I wanted to relive those moments every night. They just crawled out from where I shoved them each sunrise and pressed themselves against my chest until I held out my hands—literally—as if to hold them, and admit they were real, I guess. And that they were mine.
I’d spent those two weeks in the flat, with moments of fresh air only when evening came and the street was empty because of the curfew, and Papa opened the front door. I sat just inside on the threshold with the rest of my family: they to enjoy the cool night air that chased out the lingering heat inside our apartment, and I reconnecting with the outside world. I had to become comfortable with it again; I knew this. My future was out there, far away, but most definitely outside the walls of the flat.
There were moments during those times at the threshold drinking in the evening, and then later on my blankets with my hands resting open over my chest, that I wondered if the person who’d been thrown down in the alley was still me. I felt as though I’d been one girl before the walk and another after it. But I didn’t know who that new girl was.
The American occupational forces marched in as the French were leaving, and they arrived in platoons by the truckload. Hundreds of them. Max very much wanted to walk out to the main thoroughfare to watch them roll in, as did many others. The Americans were going to be taking over a former military installation only a mile from our flat, where a panzer division and barracks had once been housed, and which the French and Senegalese troops had just vacated. Papa and Mommi came, too, and stood back a bit, to observe and keep an eye on Max and me. I was both hesitant and eager to be outside and to try to recapture my longing to be out in the world again. I told myself that I had taken that walk a few weeks earlier, and it had been uneventful, just a quick stroll around the block, like I had planned to do. I hadn’t gone farther. I hadn’t been dreaming of Manhattan and a yellow linen suit. I had been out for ten quiet minutes; that was all.
To further distance myself from the memory of that afternoon, I kept my eyes on what was happening now, watching the people of Stuttgart as the Americans arrived. The oldest citizens, the ones who perhaps remembered the Great War and that this wasn’t the first time Germany had surrendered to the United States and its allies, kept a distance with suspicious side-glances. The younger adults looked at the American GIs with fear and trepidation, perhaps wondering what kind of treatment they had in store, especially after living under French occupation for the last two months. But the children ran to the trucks and soldiers to greet them, as though it were a parade. Many of the American soldiers opened their packs and C rations and handed out candy bars and little tins of peaches and pineapple, things these children hadn’t seen in years. The youngest ones had never seen pineapple.
The heaviness that I’d been carrying inside me seemed to lift a little as I watched the American soldiers walking happily down the street, talking to one another as they joked with the children. A layer of my dark sadness seemed to peel away at the sound of my native tongue, and I began to cry.
One young GI—he might have been a few years older than me—saw me crying and said in broken German to me, “No fear, Fr?ulein. We will not harm. No fear.”
His kindness nearly overwhelmed me, and as fresh sobs erupted from me, I replied to him in English that I wasn’t afraid; I was just so very happy they were here, and that I was also an American and that I missed hearing people speak my language.
The soldier blinked at me wide-eyed, incredulous that a fellow American was standing on the streets of a ruined Stuttgart. I could see he wanted to stop and ask me how in the world I had ended up there, but he was in formation and could not stop. He turned to the man marching on his left and said something to him. That soldier turned to stare at me, too.
That second man I would eventually meet, in the course of time. It would be many months later, a few months after my seventeenth birthday. He would remember that day he marched into Stuttgart and his platoon-mate pointed out to him the poor American girl who’d been stuck in Germany during the war.
The second soldier’s name was Ralph Dove.
* * *
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A few days after the Americans arrived, a contingent of soldiers who were patrolling the neighborhoods came down our street to inspect apartment buildings one by one, including ours. They came right on in, announcing their arrival as they strode inside; they apparently did not want to knock first. The leader of the group—I didn’t know what his rank was then—said in broken German that he and his men were searching for suitable housing for many of the soldiers who were posted in Stuttgart now.
Papa greeted him in English, told him who he was, and offered to assist them in any way he could. This leader, happy to have found a German citizen who spoke English so well, told Papa he was needed as a translator and that whatever job he had now he was relieved of.
“You will be compensated,” the leader said, and he didn’t wait for Papa to say whether he wanted the job. He just went straight on with his questioning.
“Are you the landlord of this building?” he asked.
“Uh. No,” Papa answered. “I believe this building is, I mean, was owned by the housing authority. I’m not sure.”
“Who else lives here?”
“There was a mother and her three children who lived on the second floor, but I haven’t seen them since April. An older gentleman, Herr Bruechner, lives on the third floor. No one is living in the fourth-floor attic apartment.”
The leader then directed two of his men to go up to Herr Bruechner’s apartment and tell him he had two hours to vacate the premises.
“He . . . he’s an old man,” Papa said.
“I’m afraid he will have to have find other housing arrangements,” the leader said, as he signaled with his head for his men to continue with his instructions. Then he turned back to Papa. “Your family, Herr Sontag, will be allowed to stay in your apartment since you will be working for us. Your wife and daughter can take care of the rooms and the officers’ laundry.” He nodded toward the large open room across from our flat that wasn’t being used for anything. “You can serve them meals in there. Breakfast and dinner. Food will be provided for you to make it with.”
This, too, was not an offer of employment. But we knew if we didn’t agree, we would lose our home, such as it was.
“Um, yes. Of course. Thank you,” Papa said, his gaze darting from the man in charge to the stairs. “Herr Bruechner can live with us. Please. If that is all right? We’ll tell him he can stay with us. Please?”
The leader regarded my father for a moment and then nodded.
“All right, then,” the leader said as he wrote on a clipboard he held in his hand. Then he looked up at Papa. “You’ll need to come with us now, Herr Sontag. We have a lot more housing to secure today and we need a translator. We’ll have you back before curfew.” The man turned to Mommi. “The officers who will be billeted here will be arriving before nightfall. The rooms in this building need to be cleaned. Fresh linens for the beds will be delivered to you. Meals will start tomorrow.”
Mommi nodded and didn’t say a word.
As Papa leaned in to kiss her good-bye, he murmured in German, “It will be all right. We can do this. It’s all right. Go tell Herr Bruechner what is happening and that he can stay with us if he wants to.”
A moment later he and all the soldiers were gone, and the little building was eerily quiet.
“I’ll . . . I’ll go up and speak to Herr Bruechner,” Mommi said a moment later, her gaze still on the door, as if she couldn’t quite believe what had just happened. “You two start on the apartment just above us. Clean it well.”
“Yes, Mommi,” I said.
A couple of hours later Herr Bruechner, his little dog, and two suitcases had been brought down to our place. Mommi gave him the room she and Papa slept in, which meant the four of us would now be sleeping in the living room.