13
It was becoming common for the air raid siren north of town to go off all hours of the night. The loud, high wail rose in pitch as it washed over Delfzijl, sending people out of bed, through their homes, down stairs into their basements and cellars. People who lived in one-story brownstones ran across their streets to hide beneath their neighbors’ homes.
After Uncle Martin and I docked the boat from a supply transfer, the sirens started. We had been bombed twice in the last several months, with each attempt knocking out the harbor, which then had to be rebuilt by the German soldiers.
“I’m afraid the RAF will think we’re a major port now with all this traffic,” Uncle Martin said.
We had already docked the Lighthouse Lady, and didn’t have enough time to cast her off again. We ran from the port to the center of town and into the school’s front doors. We went down into the basement, which had become a community air raid shelter despite the Germans setting up headquarters on the first floor. We were the last to descend the stairs. About ten families huddled in the dark. Some were wrapped in bedsheets. Their forms shifted back and forth or paced in the large open room. Despite the dark, many of the shapes were familiar. Mort Stroud was the father of one of my classmates. Mr. Johansson worked at the butcher shop. Then I saw Mrs. Von Schuler, my homeroom teacher. The word Yeladim rang out in my head and recalled the shame I felt from throwing rocks at rats years before. She sat in the corner with a small boy sleeping in her lap.
For a long time no one in the basement spoke. We took our place sitting along the walls. Eventually Mrs. Von Schuler reached out a hand and patted my knee.
“You’re getting so tall. It’s hard to believe.” Her voice was the same as it always was, a sweet vocalization of affection.
I put my hands on top of hers. I’m not sure why. Because I felt she was scared. Because I wanted to apologize to her.
“Did you know your father used to bring me loaves of bread?”
I tried to make out her features in the dark.
“No.”
“Yes. He’d just show up with them from time to time.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“It was a nice thing for him to do.”
As my eyes adjusted I could see how worried she was. How scared everyone was. If my father were there, he’d tell some story to help the children forget about being away from home. He could quiet their fears. He had been gone for so long, without giving us a word or sign. My mother kept doing her rounds visiting every household in town. She stopped asking if anyone had seen him. She’d knock on the door and simply look into their faces. Her trips became silent, penitent. Every part of me hoped my father was safe, but at certain moments I was furious with him. For leaving us, having crawled off on his belly like a coward. Though in that basement, more than anything, I wanted to hear one of his stories. As we sat in the dark there were no voices to soothe our fear.
Four waves of bombers flew over Delfzijl that night, but none dropped ordinance on the village itself. We huddled together in our sleep vigil. “Maybe they’ll drop chocolate again,” the little boy in Mrs. Von Schuler’s lap whispered to her.
In the morning, Uncle Martin and I were the first to walk up the stairs into the slant of light coming through the school’s windows. Puffs of black smoke rose from the north. The sun caught and outlined it with yellow and glowing gray that rose into the air like a column of illuminated steam. From what we could tell, the bombers didn’t make a run over the city or port, but as we walked ten minutes north, we realized they had lobbed a volley along the shore, knocking out the air raid siren and the antiaircraft guns.
“They’re smart, they know where they’ve taken fire from and made sure to clear the path for their next run-through,” Martin said, as we looked at a pit of earth where a heavy flack gun bunker had been.
“You mean the British, right?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Are they bombing us because of all the new soldiers here?”
“God, I hope not,” Uncle Martin said.
Walking farther north of town, we saw the heap of twisted metal and splintered and burnt wooden posts that had been the siren. “At night from now on, we’ll either have to be on the boat out in the water or at your mom’s house. That’s far enough from town to be safe.”
“What about the bomb that almost cut our backyard in half?”
“I can’t explain that one,” he said.
We walked back into town. When we got to the main square, a group of people huddled together in a large circle. We pushed through them and saw two bodies on the ground. Both lay face-down with wet red holes in the backs of their heads. A man and a woman, side by side, shoulder to shoulder. We moved in closer. It was Gerard Van Den Bosch and his wife, Annie, the factory’s accountants. Annie’s dark blood-smeared hair was matted forward like a waterlogged blanket covering her face.
Everyone in the circle of people was hungry and scared. Hilda and Ludo stood across from us. Hilda looked down at the bodies. Ludo’s face was white, and he kept rubbing his palms together like he did when he was nervous. Ludo didn’t take his eyes off the bodies until he whispered something to Hilda and exited the circle. He walked about twenty meters and then started running in the direction of his home.
“What happened?” Uncle Martin asked the man standing next to us.
“Wouldn’t you know?” the man said, eyeing Martin’s German jacket.
“Tell me,” Martin said, a sharpness entering his voice.
“Soldiers dragged them out here and shot them.”
“What for?”
“A few soldiers went to hide in their basement during the raid and discovered Maud Stein hiding down there. They were hiding her.”
Maud was Jewish. She lived by herself in the apartment building downtown. She’d disappeared years before without a trace. “They killed them for that?” Uncle Martin said. He didn’t ask what the soldiers did with Maud.
At camp the counselors had said they would need one giant, violent push to clean and unify Europe. As a boy I had never thought to ask what that would look like, where the ugliness would actually fall.
That night, Ludo showed up at my house. He knocked on the door and stood back off the stoop. His body weight shifted back and forth on his heels.
“Ludo, come in.”
“Can we talk outside?” he asked.
We walked from the house back into the woods to the tree fort where, night after night throughout the past winter, I’d go trying to catch a glimpse of my father, always avoiding the pseudo grave of my brother. Ludo moved quickly, his spindly arm raised up in front of him, pushing away the low branches without paying attention to how they snapped back behind him. When we got to the fort, Ludo stopped and faced me.