Chapter Twenty-One
Elsa entered Bremen with Klara but inside she felt alone.
So alone.
Sam’s company had been a constant, stabilizing influence.
Without him she felt strangely cut loose in a city that had been twisted into the unfamiliar.
Yet to describe Sam’s absence in this way inadequately expressed the true depth of the feelings engulfing her.
Grief at losing a future that they might have had together if things were different.
A sickening ache at having to accept what had to be.
However, it was his physical absence, in a city they’d never visited together, which really hurt her.
It felt as if he hadn’t existed at all .
. . as if he’d never walked the journey with her or held her in his arms. It felt as if he had died long ago .
. . lying on the straw in the barn where she had first set eyes on him as a snowstorm swirled outside.
If it had not been for the kindness of one farmer, who saw fit to feed and care for an enemy soldier, the man she had come to know would be no more than bones scavenged and scattered where he fell.
Fate and a kind heart had given him more years to live and in doing so changed her life.
How many people no longer existed due to the war?
How many new lovers never had a chance to meet?
How many lives had been changed for the better thanks to a chance meeting such as theirs?
She had been lucky to meet him in a land where luck had run out and she would always cherish those memories and hope that one day, when the war was over and their countries were friends again, he would remember her fondly and keep his promise to find her.
The only way to cope was to put all her energy into finding her family.
The once thriving port was largely in ruins now.
Targeted raids were a game of chance, as Elsa had recently come to learn.
The west of Bremen was particularly badly destroyed and only heaped more pain on Elsa’s heart.
This part of Bremen was where her aunt’s house was located.
She looked around her. The landscape was so changed that she could not even recognize which street might have once been hers.
Her last visit had been when she was a naive teenager.
Then, she had been accompanied by her parents carrying a basketful of gifts.
How to get there had not been her responsibility back then. How inadequate she felt now.
Together they wandered routes that masqueraded as streets. She saw herself reflected in the faces of many she encountered. It was not only she who felt like a shell with nothing left inside. Bremen’s soul was gasping its last breaths too. Would it ever recover?
Offices, houses and shops could no longer be distinguished from one another, each one no more than a broken skeleton of pitted bricks and hills of rubble.
Trees had been stripped bare of branches and buds, pitifully lining what had once been roads but were now, in places, merged with the rubble and glass of demolished buildings.
How could a city still remain a home, when there was no gas, water, trams or telephones?
Because people had nowhere else to go, was the simple answer.
Even now, some dust-covered citizens still tried to salvage furniture and clear debris, forming dishevelled lines, their hands grazed.
Nobody paid attention to the blonde woman with the dark-haired child. They had more to worry about than a child that may be a Jew. Germany was losing the war. It was as near as over. The beliefs and prejudices that had ruled their lives before were no more than ruins now.
Tall, concrete bunkers, with artillery guns on their flat roofs, still remained to provide shelter to those who had stayed and she made a conscious plan to use those as searching areas when the next raid came, hoping someone would know of her mother and sister.
It already seemed impossible. How was she going to find them in this abandoned battle scene of broken brick?
And how was she going to face them knowing that she had given her heart, body and soul to the enemy who had done this — that she was already missing him as if she had lost half of herself?
Soon she came across more familiar buildings.
The town hall, with its mixture of gothic and Renaissance architecture, had survived the bombing so far.
Its delicate sculptures and carvings, protected by large boards, lay hidden from the public’s weary eyes.
The large statue of Roland in the market square, with his sword and shield, also remained intact, a proud survivor of the bombing and a vivid, sad reminder of her happy childhood, when she had first set eyes on the protector of the city. He had failed to protect it this time.
‘What are we going to do, Elsa?’ asked Klara.
Elsa looked around her, still at a loss on how to locate her aunt’s street.
Crowded around one of the many arches of the town hall was a large huddle of civilians.
She could hear the sounds of bartering. Their craned necks and tiptoeing feet to gain a better view were familiar signs that a black market was thriving there.
The number of people gave her hope that her family might have survived by seeking shelter either in the high-rise concrete bunkers or dark catacombs and tunnels beneath the streets, which threaded their way through the ground like tree roots.
‘We are going to find out where the street my aunt lives is, and if it has survived. Hopefully it has and my mother and sister will be there.’
‘And if it didn’t survive?’
‘Someone there will know where they have moved to.’
She took Klara’s hand and continued walking, asking random strangers the directions to the street where her aunt lived.
Not all the people they passed were civilians.
Some were wounded German soldiers — had they given up fighting and abandoned the front line?
The police station, with its high-pitched red roofs and Neo-Renaissance decorations, had also survived.
Her heart rose as she approached the Schnoor quarter.
‘Look! The bombs did not destroy everything, Klara! Come on.’
This area of the city appeared unscathed.
Its narrow medieval houses and centuries-old cobbled streets brought a wave of nostalgia.
How much these buildings had seen over the years, she thought.
Today, they were full to bursting with families who had lost their homes.
Every building that had survived was now overcrowded, even the smallest of homes and the most run down of properties.
Eventually they arrived at the edge of the river that cut Bremen in two.
Beyond lay what appeared to be just the foundations of a city, its vertical structures scarred or demolished before being scattered across the ground.
The destruction was so complete that she could not even decipher her aunt’s area let alone her street.
It would be a miracle if anyone had survived at all.
Did her aunt’s body lie in the ruins? Were her mother and sister there too?
Elsa’s eyes brimmed with tears, blurring her vision and stinging her throat.
‘Are they dead?’ asked Klara.
Elsa swallowed hard and tears began to fall, leaving a wet trail of sadness down her cheeks.
It was a fitting symbol of the aching grief inside.
One man’s hunger for power and revenge had done this, she thought.
Once again her mother’s haunting words came to mind.
We only see the true man when he is given enough power to take.
‘I don’t know,’ she told Klara. ‘The house is gone. They may have hidden in a bomb shelter.’
Elsa dropped her gaze and silently turned away in search of a miracle that would tell her that they were still alive.
* * *
‘I’m sorry, we can’t help you.’ A man scribbled on a piece of paper.
He handed it to the anxious woman outside the booth and talked her through the drawing he’d made.
‘There is water on this street. Go early in the morning to avoid the queue.’ He flapped her away with his hand.
As far as he was concerned, their exchange had ended.
The woman hesitated, then moved away with her three young children grasping at her skirt.
She clutched the paper in her hand and, after a few indecisive steps, instructed her children to stay close and went in search of water.
Elsa watched her pass. The mother’s face was etched with worry and grime and her children were little better.
Their clothes were dirty, their shoes worn and their bodies far too thin to give an accurate impression of their true age. Klara looked no better.
The queue for the information booth shuffled forward two steps.
Elsa forgot the desperate mother and her exhausted children.
She was two steps nearer to the information booth, two steps nearer to discovering if her remaining family was in Bremen.
She had seen so much suffering throughout her journey, she was becoming numb to it.
The realization shamed her, but her family was too important for her to take on other people’s worries as well.
Suddenly, after several hours of waiting, it was their turn.
‘I’m looking for my mother, Gretchen Kalbach, and my sister, Frieda Kalbach. They came to Bremen a couple of months ago to stay with my aunt, Clara Reinhart. Frau Reinhart lived on Hardenbergstrasse.’
The man in the booth gave a slight shake of his head. He wrote down the names.
‘When did you last see them?’ he asked without looking up.
‘My aunt—’ she searched her memory — ‘six years ago. My mother and sister . . . January. We had moved to Gollnow, Pomerania, for work, but my mother and sister returned in January to live with my aunt. I’ve just arrived.’
He reached for a book and began to search the names. Elsa watched his finger race along the page, along with a growing anxiety that he might miss them.
He slammed the book shut. ‘They are not in here.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It means I can’t help you.’
‘Does it mean they are dead or does it mean they are alive?’
‘It means I can’t help you. I don’t know where they are as no one, including them, has given me their names.’ His face softened. ‘I’m sorry, but your situation is not unusual. People have been arriving and leaving for months. Documentation is in chaos. Shelter, water and food are the priority.’
Elsa stared at him. Someone in the queue told her to move.
‘Have you been to your aunt’s home?’
‘It is no longer there.’ Her tone sounded oddly monotone, as if it wasn’t her voice any more.
He scribbled on a piece of paper. ‘I’ll give you a list of useful sites.
A place to shelter for tonight. A place to secure temporary accommodation.
’ He licked the tip of his pencil and added more to the list. ‘A black-market site. A few shops that will take anything in payment — not just money. A water pump site.’ He looked up at her. ‘Is there anything else you want?’
‘I want my family back.’
He acknowledged her request with a tilt of his head. ‘We all do.’ He continued to scribble, his hands slightly trembling. ‘Including me.’