Chapter 31 Alles Kaputt #2
A woman on the train with a headscarf and two chickens in a cage said, during a general discussion—how much more freely were people talking now! The Gestapo can hardly arrest everyone—“The Americans will have to feed us when they come, won’t they? They can’t leave us to starve.”
“That’s exactly what they’ll do,” a man opposite her said. “Feed us? Why should they? Would we feed them in their place? Hardly. We’re the enemy.”
The woman said, “Rubbish. My cousin in Frankfurt says that they’ve set up aid stations there, that they get soup and bread each day.
The soup has meat in it, too, not just potatoes.
There’s a law somewhere that says an occupying power must feed civilians, she says, and it must be true, or why would they be doing it? ”
The man snorted. “Pure nonsense. Feed yourself or starve. You’re not going to have a problem, not with chickens. Nor is anybody with a farm. You may as well own gold bars. What’s the price of eggs on the black market now?”
“I’m sure I have no idea,” the woman said stiffly.
“It’s the people in the cities that will suffer most,” the man said, “whatever the Americans do.”
“When the foreign laborers are sent back to their own countries,” the woman said, “things won’t look as pretty for us as you imagine. The vegetable farms around my place? That’s who’s doing the planting now. Well, how can it be otherwise, with the boys and men all gone to war?”
“The slave laborers, you mean,” another man said. He had a dark, saturnine face. “Send the Party members and the SS out to work on the land, then. That’s what I’d do if I were the Americans.”
“Then you do agree that they’ll do something,” the woman with the chickens said.
“Oh, they’ll do something,” the dark man agreed. “But we may not like it.”
Somebody had to do something, I thought, appalled, as we descended the train at the Nuremberg station into utter devastation.
Block after block we walked, always west, the direction from which the Americans would be coming.
They were rumored to be very near. The April sun was the warmest it had been yet, and Dr. Becker and I were both carrying our coats.
My arm ached with the weight, and I had to keep shifting the coat.
And I was still carrying the lighter one!
Poor Dr. Becker looked on his last legs, while my stomach had forgotten all its previous adjustment to low rations, lulled by the comfortable living at the Langbeins’, and was informing me that it was well past lunchtime.
We’d rashly eaten the last of Frau Langbein’s provisions this morning, along with the tea and single slice of bread with jam given to us at the convent.
She’d packed hard-cooked eggs in there along with everything else, and we’d shared the last two: half apiece.
Now, we didn’t have so much as a crust of bread.
We’d thought we could buy it in Nuremberg. How foolish that hope was looking now!
On we walked past the wreckage of building after building, only a narrow path cleared through the rubble.
A crew of women—laborers from the East, I thought, from their identical shapeless smocks—were passing bricks hand to hand in desultory fashion.
Was this the cleanup, then? It was little enough.
We came to a ruined house where a young woman with a baby on her back was digging in the rubble, and I stopped and said, “Good day.”
She looked up hopefully, registered us as refugees with no more to offer than she had herself, said, “Good day,” and went back to her digging.
“Is it all like this?” I said. “Nuremberg?”
She sat back on her haunches and stared at me. “What did you expect? Isn’t all of Germany like this?”
“So bad, though?” I asked. “Where has everybody gone?”
She waved a weary hand. “Here and there. Some stay where they are. See, there—” She pointed down the street. “The higher floor? See how it’s still furnished?”
I looked. Yes, there was a bed and table in one room, a kitchen in another. Intact, tablecloth and all, like a dollhouse—the front cut away.
“Somebody lives there?” I asked.
“I live there,” she said. “Many others are doing the same. The Welfare Society gives soup each day, if you know where to go. Too late for today, though.”
“Where is it better?” I asked.
She shrugged. “If I knew, I’d be there. Keep walking.”
So we did, through our thirst and hunger.
Gradually, the ruins became less, and we were in a bit of countryside again.
We walked down to the river, eventually, and drank from it, hoping it wouldn’t make us sick but too thirsty to really care, and took off our shoes and socks to cool our feet in the water.
It was a delicious sensation, and pleasant under the trees.
I wanted to stay, but knew we couldn’t. We’d get no food sitting here.
After several minutes of this internal back-and-forth, I said, “That’s enough rest, I think. Let’s keep on,” and pulled my dirty stockings over my now-clean feet.
Dr. Becker didn’t stir. He was lying back on the grass, his hat over his face, and a lurch of fear hit my stomach. “Dr. Becker!” I said, and shook him by the shoulder.
To my immense relief, he sat up. “What?” he asked, looking around. “What’s happened?”
Relief made me shaky. “I thought something had happened to you. You were so still.”
“Ah,” he said. “No. Still living.” He settled his hat back on his head. “Let’s go, children.”
They didn’t argue. They never did anymore. They put on their shoes and socks, shouldered their rucksacks, and we went on.
We came to the outskirts of another town then, a smaller one.
Some buildings were damaged, but not all, and there were soldiers in the streets, dragging logs and piles of rubble into place across the street—barricades, I supposed—and a group of SS in their black uniforms and high boots stacked sandbags and more rubble into circular piles at the side of the road.
“For artillery, perhaps,” Dr. Becker said.
“Or machine-gun nests.” Nobody paid any attention to us, yet I tensed anyway and felt Dr. Becker doing the same, as if at any moment one of the SS men would stand, point, and shout, “Jew!”
There was a faint rumble in the distance like faraway thunder, but the day was clear. Was it artillery fire? We had to get off the street, but how?
I knocked on a door and asked for bread and shelter, but was met with a shake of the head. The same thing happened at the next house, and the next. I asked, “Where does the mayor live?” and was pointed onward, so onward we went.
I was quite faint by this point with hunger and fear, and knew the children were flagging, too.
Dr. Becker was carrying Gerhardt now, and as thin as the boy was, that couldn’t be easy.
I took Dr. Becker’s rucksack and Andrea took Gerhardt’s without prompting, and we labored on under a sun that was warmer than ever, our feet nearly dragging.
Once, I stumbled and almost fell, but righted myself again.
Many windows were boarded over, and without them, the houses looked blank and unwelcoming.
Would we find no help at all, then? There had always been something before, meager though it might be.
A bed on somebody’s floor or in a barn, a bowl of soup, a piece of bread—something.
We came to another intersection, a larger one, full of more soldiers. I made myself stop instead of hurrying on and looked both ways. “There,” I said, and pointed. “That looks like the town center.” It seemed more hopeful than anything else we’d seen today, so we turned and walked on.
At first, I thought I was hallucinating the smell, imagining myself back in the homely kitchens of the palace. As we walked on, though, it became more distinct. There’s nothing, after all, like the yeasty scent of freshly baked bread.
“Down there,” I said. “Come.” And hurried around the corner to a tiny side street, my fatigue forgotten.
A half-timbered building stood at the intersection, its whitewash peeling a bit. A peaked red roof with dormer windows set into it like friendly eyes, and a weathered sign hanging from chains.
B?ckerei.