Page 57 of Hell to Pay
“Yes,” he said. “It happens sometimes. A kick or a nod—one never knows what’s coming. Generally, the kick.” He sighed. “How will this war ever be brought to an end, though, when they can still organize a response like this after such events? One could admire the efficiency if the results weren’t so horrific.”
I would have answered, but at that moment, the sirens began their unearthly wail, and then it came again: the humming thrum that I felt as much in my stomach now as in my ears.
Chaos. Where was the bomb shelter? People running for their children, their belongings, then rushing from the room, bumping into each other in their haste, shoving. A soldier’s voice: “This way! Calmly, please. This way.”
The planes must be nearly overhead now, the noise was so great. A woman hurrying beside me moaned, “Why do they attack us again? Why? What have we done?” An old man said, “There must be hundreds of them. What fools to bring us here to the airport. What a target we make!”
The bomb shelter, such as it was, was barely below ground, and had windows that would send shards of glass flying at the first explosion—if it didn’t simply bring the roof down. The people packed in anyway, pushing those ahead of them, as we could hear the explosions now. A bomb landed so close, we were showered with dirt, and I was shoved hard in the back. A thrill of fear as Dr. Becker’s words flashed through my mind.Trampled. Crushed. Suffocated.
I wasn’t trampled or crushed, though, merely pressed in the midst of the crowd as we felt the earth shake and waited for the direct hit that would take us out.
Perhaps fifteen minutes—terror doesn’t lessen, I’d discovered, but grows with the repeating—and then the all-clear sounded and we trudged back into the big room again without injury. We sat on our cots, exhausted, and Gerhardt said, “Papa? I’m hungry.”
Andrea said, “Papa can’t do anything about that. There’ll be food soon.” And Gerhardt subsided. How little I’d heard him say—had heard either of the children say. They knew how to be quiet, how to hide. Did they know anymore how to be children?
The welfare people served up lunch again soon enough. Another bowl of the noodle soup with small chunks of potato, another piece of the strange bread, more of the distasteful tea. What was it made of? Weeds, perhaps? This time, instead of the sound of my neighbors falling on the soup with gratitude, I heard grumblings. “Noodle soup again? Can’t they do better than that? I’ll bet it’s noodle soup again for dinner.” And, “They should have sent us to the villages, where there’s still decent food to be had.”
I said to Dr. Becker, “I think we should go.”
“I too,” he said. “The airport is too tempting a target. If they bomb again—and who can imagine they won’t?—one direct hit would kill us all. And I greatly fear being recognized. Too many people know me in Dresden, and it only takes one to inform. But where?”
I stood up. “I’ll do some asking. That’ll be safer for you.”
“They won’t tell you anything,” he said. “They probably don’t know anything themselves.”
I said, “I’ll go to the toilet first and comb my hair. Then they may tell me.” He looked at me in disbelief, but I wasn’t so young or naïve that I didn’t know that young men—and older men, too—will help a pretty girl more readily than they will anyone else. And I was a very pretty girl.
Or perhaps not. In the spotted mirror of the crowded toilet block, I gazed with horror at my reflection. My eyes were so red they looked full of blood, the bandage on my forehead was gray with dirt, my hair was fuzzed out around my wrapped braids, and I still had blood on my neck. I cleaned up as best I could anyway, though, and went in search of a talkative and susceptible soul.
Hopefully somebody blind.
“So you left?” Alix asked.
“Yes,” I said, “the next morning, which was Friday. I discovered from a helpful soldier, operating from pity, I’m sure, rather than attraction to my disheveled self, that all civilians would be forced to leave by Sunday—it had been Wednesday when we came—even as more were being deposited here after the latest raids and the rooms became even more crowded. The numbers being tossed around were terrifying. Two hundred thousand had been killed, Goebbels had reported, and how many displaced? It must be nearly all of Dresden. How much harder would traveling become once they were all on the roads?”
“Wait,” Alix said. “I thought they said twenty-five thousand dead.”
“Remember that Goebbels was the minister for propaganda. No, we had better go now, we decided, while there would perhaps be less of a crowd. We were able to get permission to travel west to Chemnitz—one needed official passes in writing—but unable to secure train tickets. The trains, I was told, weren’t running yet, at least not from Dresden itself. Perhaps down the line, they said.”
“Why Chemnitz?” Alix asked.
I shrugged. “We had to go somewhere, and it had to be somewhere to the west and south. The Russians, I’d heard rumored that day—you can’t imagine how the rumors fly about in a situation like that!—were already in Prague, barely a hundred miles away. It wasn’t true, but how were we to know? They would be coming, whenever they came, from the northeast, so we needed to go southwest. Both my parents had told me most urgently that I mustn’t be here when the Russians came, but it wasn’t as if one could simply step onto a train or into an auto and head west. The only idea I had, still, was to go to Frau Heffinger’s sister’s family near Bayreuth, north of Nuremberg. I’d met her sister once or twice, andshe’d been like Frau Heffinger, a cozy sort of person, and had made a great deal of fuss over me, so of course I liked her! They lived on a farm, and there’s always food on farms. And we wouldn’t endanger them as we would have if I’d been with my parents.”
“Your father’s relatives, though,” Alix said. “Couldn’t you have stayed with them? There must have been some around, and I’ll bettheystill had food.”
“I couldn’t go to my noble relations,” I said. “They were in Bavaria, as Bayreuth is also, but many were committed Nazis, even in the SS, and Father had been too well known. Somebody would have heard, even there, that he’d been about to be arrested on suspicion of treason. Dr. Becker’s friends and relations had mostly been in Dresden, and, of course, the Jewish ones were gone. He and the children had curly brown hair and brown eyes, too. Dr. Becker in particular had a larger nose, more apparent now in his thin face, and looked very worn.”
“Really?” That was Sebastian. “He had a big nose, so he had to be a Jew?”
“It sounds terrible,” I said. “I do realize that. Remember, though, that Aryan schoolchildren were shown caricatures of so-called Jewish features—the eyelids, the nose, the curly hair, even that rounded sort of receding hairline Ashkenazi Jews are likelier to develop—and taught to recognize them. It’s hard to imagine such a lesson, but there it was. Dr. Becker looked much older than his years—he can’t have been much above forty—but men up to age sixty were being conscripted now. Why was he not in the Army, and if a doctor, why not practicing? And why so shabby? We’d decided already to let out wherever we went that he had a bad heart, but the risk was still too great. Or what if one of the children slipped up and said something? No, we couldn’t chance bringing the Beckers to the notice of the SS. So we settled on Bayreuth. Ididn’t know exactly how one got there, but it had been close enough to Dresden for visits back and forth. And you must understand—we needed a destination. Nuremberg had been bombed much earlier than Dresden, and very heavily—that was where Hitler had held his largest rallies, so I expect the Allies wanted to wipe it off the map—but so had most German cities, from what I’d heard. I knew nothing about the conditions to the north of the city, but we needed to aim for somewhere.”
“Great,” Ben said. “Next chapter. Hey—there’s a gift shop here. We should check it out.”
“Dresden is traditionally known,” I said, “for its very fine porcelain.”
“Oh,” he said.
“Also,” I said, “it was the birthplace of milk chocolate. In 1839, long before the Swiss developed their recipe.”
