Page 2 of The Island Girls

‘Look, son, I’m a man of the sea. England is surrounded by it. I’m sure I’ll find work there, and even if we get a little head start on the Hun, I have more chance of saving my wife and children than I do if I stay here. Want to come with us?’ he’d added with a look of real fatherly concern that irritated the independent young Hans.

‘I’ll stay, I think. Take my chances. It can’t be that bad,’ he’d replied as he held up a hand to signal farewell, turning his boat back upstream again. But as he’d chugged slowly back towards the dock he knew so well, Hans had begun to wonder if his plans to become German might be simply scoffed at by the advancingWehrmacht. Who was he, anyway? Why would they want to take him? And what about Katrijn? She was Dutch through and through, with no hint of German blood. Would they accept her as well, simply because she was his wife? And when he’d seen her again that night, he still hadn’t been able to bear telling her of the things he’d learnt – that the city around them was virtually deserted, and people were fleeing the country any way they could.

Now, on this third day, with his boat safely tied up, Hans walked the deserted streets and alleys towards the attic room they called home, with the thought of at least gathering a few important belongings and keeping them safe in the small, enclosed cuddy cabin of his boat, just in case they should need to flee. He still hoped to meet Klaus’s German contact and explain that he himself was German, and save his family that way.

The battle noise still echoed around the city, much quieter today for some reason he’d yet to discover, but he made sure to keep it at a muffled distance from his path. As he walked through one dark alley and out into a slightly wider street, he was brought to a halt in shock as he saw the sky turn blood red above him. The grey, brown smoky clouds were mingling with red shot. In places, it almost looked like a floral display, but in others, all Hans could see was blood. Somewhere to the south, red flares were being set off into the skies over Rotterdam. Was this the surrender? Did it signal the end? In his gut, Hans knew – whatever he’d seen of the German wrath so far, it was about to get worse. Much worse. And he was still on the wrong side.

The planes seemed to come from every direction possible, bringing with them a crescendo of the dreadful noise of war. Through the smoke from the previous onslaught, they came in their dozens, from the north and the south, and when overhead, they rained bombs on the ancient city as indiscriminately as if they were farmhands scattering grain for the hens. Had the city been hens and had the bombs been grain, the feed would have been so plentiful that day as to smother the creatures to death.

He ran back to their apartment, crashing into people who seemed to have been shaken outdoors in their hundreds just like cockroaches fleeing the light. For the last three days, Hans had been in a state of high alert, but the start of the bombing that would be the destruction of Rotterdam had him quivering with fear like he’d never known. He raced up the street and flungopen the front door, hurling his way up the stairs three at a time until, without warning, the world exploded around him.

Hans was flung down one flight of stairs and lay there aching in every limb. The world had gone strangely quiet, as if he’d been thrown into the bottom of a deep pool and his eyes were blinded as if they were filled with salt water. The world stopped turning and slipped from a freeze frame into slow motion. When his sight returned, and he could hear again a little more clearly, the air around him roared and the staircase he was lying on was open to a gaping hole where the top three floors of the apartment building had been. Flames crackled at the foot of the stairs and dust and smoke and debris of varying sizes flew all about him.

He pulled himself up and kept going up the stairs and, though the part of his brain that wanted to survive screamed at him to go back down, he reached forward and opened the door to their room.

The wardrobe still stood on the edge of the room and the curtain flapped in the wind that howled through the broken glass where the front-facing window had been. But there in the middle of the room where the big bed had stood, and where he’d last seen Katrijn and Anika, there was nothing: a hole that dropped into an abyss of smoke, and flame, and rubble.

Hans lunged forward to the splintered edges of the wooden floor and peered down through the gloom, screaming their names into the black hole that was the grave of his wife and daughter. As the dust began to settle, he could see nothing below but an enormous pile of rubble and flames. He ran down the three flights of stairs again and ploughed into the midst of the debris, hoarse now from screaming for Katrijn and Anika, yet also knowing, somewhere deep inside, that they would never hear him. He pulled blocks of concrete and broken pieces of furniture and bricks and lumps of timber frame from the pile in the middle of what had once been the ground floor of his smallapartment building. His hands were torn raw and bloody, and the smoke and dust filled his eyes and lungs, but nothing would stop him from trying to find his family beneath the rubble.

He saw the baby’s fist first. Just a chubby little hand, clenched as always, on the end of an arm and sticking up from the rubble. He gently released Anika, pulled her clear and held her to his chest as if the nearness of him might revive her. She didn’t seem broken, even, except for a channel of dust-encrusted blood that had run down the side of her head from her ear.

He howled like a dying bear and sobbed as he clutched the tiny body close. Then, he found a torn fragment of curtain in the rubble and made a soft bed on the edge of the room and placed the body of his daughter safely there, as if to put her down to sleep. And his search continued until he found Katrijn. But her legs were firmly trapped underneath a steel girder, and her face had been smashed by bricks that had rendered her almost unrecognisable. Her hands were growing cold already, and her skin was paler than he’d ever seen it. He couldn’t pull her body out and hid his face in her chest and cried like a baby as the bombs still fell all around in the streets outside.

He did not know what to do with Anika’s body, and he couldn’t move Katrijn. She was already buried. So he brought the baby back to Katrijn and rested Anika in her mother’s arms, then covered them both with the curtain and hoisted a piece of tin over the top of them both, as if to protect them further. Then he climbed the precariously dangerous staircase back up to what was left of their little apartment.

For hours, he stayed curled in the corner of the room, crying their names, and roaring his anger at the air around him, while outside, Rotterdam was bombed to shreds. Then it was as if he woke up, knowing with clarity what he must do next. Hans reached into the wardrobe, now teetering on the edge of the cliff that his room had become, grabbed his small canvas bag fromthe cupboard and threw in the few spare clothes he could reach. He owned little of any value, but grabbed the two pictures that lay smashed under the windowsill: one of his mother and the other of he and Katrijn, taken last spring when they’d taken his boat down the river for a picnic in the meadows. That day was the first time they’d made love, gently, tenderly, in the open air of the cockpit because there wasn’t a soul around to see, or hear, or care.

As he turned to leave, clinging to the edge of the room around the huge hole in the floor, the deafening sound of the Luftwaffe planes overhead was smothered by the almighty noise of another bomb dropping just feet away from him, in the house that stood the other side of his staircase. Despite the terror he felt – or perhaps because of it – he flung himself down the stairs, three at a time, pulling the canvas bag behind him, missed his footing mid-flight and tumbled head first down a run of six stairs at once. A black shroud like night enveloped him and the deafening sounds ceased. But his reprieve only lasted a minute or two until he regained consciousness and the searing pain in his left leg brought him back from restful sleep into his nightmare again. He sobbed and coughed alternately until the buzzing in his ears stopped again and the noise of terror came back.

He got up to run but found the best he could manage was a painful limp. His whole leg felt as though it was on fire. When he stumbled out into the street, he saw that the staircase and the walls either side of it were all that was left intact of the two adjoining apartment buildings, which had now disappeared completely. There was just a fragile-looking stairwell left with rubble either side of it. The smoke and dust were beginning to clear from the base of his building and his heart stopped as he peered into the space to see if they were still there. But the two girls he loved were both now buried underneath several feet more of bricks and timber and rubble that had fallen deep intothe basement. And still the planes roared overhead, spreading fire and death like dragons from a horrible fantasy tale of tragedy.

Hans looked down at the bag he held, which signified everything he had left in the world. And though his heart whimpered,Lie down and die with them too, his head showed him the memory of the families preparing to flee at the mouth of the river. His boat. He still had his boat. He reached a hand wearily to the pocket holding his identify documents and, as another bomb fell across the street, he set off, dragging his injured leg and zig-zagging his way back to his boat, dodging the bombardment falling from the skies. The Nazi plan for Rotterdam must be nothing less than complete annihilation, he realised.

As Hans staggered around the last bend at the docks, he groaned in relief that his boat was where he’d left it earlier and he leant on the corner, doubled over to catch his breath. Moments later, he struggled down the steps and threw his bag forward into the cabin then painfully climbed back up to the stores where he kept spare supplies for his daily runs. He had two cans of fuel so, with a huge effort, he stowed those in the boat then went back for an empty water can. As he watched it filling from the tap – which miraculously still ran amidst the destruction – he counted the bombs as he heard them fall. One, three, nine by the time the container was full and he was screwing the lid on. He hauled it to the quayside and down the steps, placing it safely forward.

He felt sick to his core and didn’t know which was worse: his wretched broken heart, the excruciating pain in his leg, or the fear that the next bomb would kill him too. He stood on the deck of his launch and ran his hands through his hair, wincing as he found some small pieces of glass still lodged in his thick curls. The pain spread from his fingers to his heart and the achingemptiness in his soul which, without his girls, threatened to end him. He collapsed onto his knees in the cockpit and howled like a wounded animal until the anguish subsided to quiet sobs again. Sniffing, he wiped his face on his sleeves then raised his head to think about what he should do next. The way his mind took him from despair to rational thought and back again was like rolling on the roughest of seas in the smallest of boats.

Hans remembered he had a couple of blankets he always kept in the boat, together with several tins of food, and that would have to do. There was no more time for thinking or planning – and nowhere else to get anything from, anyway.

From the moment that they’d killed his family, the idea of handing himself over to the Germans to fight on their side had become enough to make him vomit. The Germans – everything that his father represented – had killed his wife and child and he would hate them forever for this. He could never join them. All Hans could do now was respond to his body’s insistence that he escape, survive, run away, and live.

He undid the line that signified his last permanent attachment to Holland and threw it into the cockpit, started the motor, and was turning away from the dock when he heard a shout behind him. Hans looked back along the smoky dockside to see Klaus running towards him, arms flailing, calling his name.

‘Stop Hans, Stop! Wait for me!’

For a moment that might have changed the whole course of his life, Hans hesitated, while he decided whether to ‘hear’ Klaus or not. He knew Klaus as a workmate but little else, and over these few days he’d learnt that Klaus intended to work for Germany. But they weren’t really friends, and Hans wasn’t sure he wanted this man’s company in a small boat for the next few days, especially now he’d completely changed his mind about hisplans. But if he left Klaus here in the dockside, he would surely die.

The better side of Hans’s conscience took over and he turned the boat back. He used the docking technique that had been his daily bread and held the launch almost motionless a few metres away from the wall. He looked at Klaus and lifted his chin a little in greeting.

‘Take me with you?’ shouted Klaus over the din.

‘You don’t even know where I’m going,’ called Hans.

‘Are you staying in Rotterdam, then?’ Klaus’s expression told Hans that he knew the answer already.

‘Of course not. But I’m going a long way – to England. And I only have enough food for one. Are you ready for a trip that far?’

‘England is my top choice of destination, Meyers. Take me with you, please?’ he said, holding up his bag and showing Hans the stash of food he’d brought with him. Hans realised now that if he’d not come for his boat when he did, Klaus would likely have stolen it anyway. But Klaus had brought with him more than twice the food Hans already had, and he was someone to share the night watches with, at least, whatever else happened when they reached England.

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