So much had been made of that failed attempt on Hitler’s life. The radio and papers were full of nothing else for months, most of which Annie disbelieved as propaganda. The authorities obviously thought they were mushrooms – best kept in the dark and fed manure. What she did regard as true, was that the Resistance had been involved. But they had not been told the names of individuals or groups who might have assisted in the plot so she couldn’t know if any of their old comrades were under suspicion.
Another aspect she had no doubt about was that as a backlash, the Gestapo arrested seven thousand people and of those, executed almost five thousand. And they boasted about that. She imagined the monsters in uniform walking blindfolded through crowds of people, their arms outstretched, stomping over and mowing down anyone who got in their way. They were eliminating everyone who dared to say, ‘this is not right’ or ‘there is surely a different way’ or ‘let me think about that’. They kept trying to brainwash them with the idea that they were creating a pure, Aryan race.
Well, Annie for one hated the thought of living in a world where everyone looked the same and agreed with each other. And she knew there were many others like her who craved the opportunity to be challenged in their thinking and learn about others’ ideas, philosophies, cultures and religions that differed from their own but were equally credible. And that was what she wanted for Walti, too. How she abhorred the thought of his little arm saluting Hitler or his chubby legs being taught to goosestep. She could not imagine any set of circumstances in which she would allow that to come about.
She also believed that Rommel had been involved in the plot and had not died of natural causes – either a heart attack or cerebral embolism from the injuries he suffered when his staff car was strafed some months previously, or so they were told. When he returned to his family home in Ulm after the assassination attempt, the town was suddenly swarming with SS watching his every move. And he was not posted elsewhere after that; he stayed at home for three months, which was unheard of for the Desert Fox. If he had remained in Hitler’s good books, he would have been buried in Berlin. As it was, he was laid to rest not far from the Minster, with his son saying that was his father’s request. It was, though, a full state funeral and a hero’s burial with a day of mourning. Annie was relieved when the citizens of Ulm were not rounded up, as she thought they might be, and ordered to stand outside the cemetery and look heartbroken. She knew she would not have been able to do that and her protestations could have led to a great deal of trouble.
There was so much she didn’t believe. They were told day after day that Germany was winning. Annie wasn’t a war historian, but she didn’t think the side close to victory would look as thin and ill and haunted as they did. Their food could not be rationed further, their clothes were in shreds, and often there was no electricity or water, cold or hot. They were scared, but couldn’t muster the energy to display how daunted and dogged they were.
They were still gathering a few potatoes and carrots from the garden, but it was not enough. So every day either Annie or Frau Wilhelm went out to look for food – sometimes two or three times a day. More often than not it was Annie, because Frau Wilhelm had become too emaciated and Herr Doctor was trying his best to treat patients. Annie had the boldness and determination to find something, anything, to feed Walti whose appetite was insatiable. At a little over a year old, he kept all of them amused with his cheeky grin and endearing ways. Last week he’d knocked over a cup that Herr Doctor had left on a low table and toddled to get the dustpan and brush and tidy it away. ‘Mutti,’ he’d lisped. ‘Walti sweeped.’ They’d all laughed and Herr Doctor threw the little boy up in the air, his hair flopping over his forehead as he landed safely in his Opa’s arms.
It was lovely, but Annie had a stab of anguish straight to her heart when she thought that it should have been Walther throwing and catching his baby son. He looked more like his Vati every day, too. Frau Wilhelm and Annie remarked on it all the time, perhaps too often for their own good as they inevitably become mournful again. But how could they avoid what was so obvious and what they wanted to see? The little boy’s eyes were the same pale hazel as Walther’s; his nose had the same ridge running between the nostrils; his hair was the same dark brown. Even at this young age he had the same build as Walther and, best of all, Annie was convinced he had the same sunny personality and love of fun.
Last week, she’d found Frau Wilhelm crying in the kitchen. She had a cloth in her hand and although tears streamed from her eyes and her nose was running, she had not faltered in her duty of wiping away the aftermath of the vegetables she had been scrubbing. ‘What is it?’ Annie had felt chilly with alarm. ‘Are you unwell?’
Frau Wilhelm had sniffed and shaken her head. Annie could tell that her mother-in-law felt embarrassed to be caught in such a state of distress.
Annie had taken her by the shoulders, looked into her face and asked her again, ‘Dear mother-in-law, what’s wrong? It’s okay. I still cry for Walther, too.’
‘Yes,’ she had conceded. ‘It is for Walther and…’
‘And?’
‘Selfishly, for myself.’
‘You are the least selfish woman I know,’ Annie had said. ‘So please tell me.’
At last Frau Wilhelm had rinsed the cloth and left it to dry next to the sink. ‘I worry that one day you will meet someone else and Herr Doctor and I will become insignificant to you. And Walti.’
Then it had been Annie’s turn to cry. ‘Oh, no,’ she’d managed. ‘Never. I would never allow that to happen. Look at me,’ she’d said in a firm voice. ‘We will always be one and the same family. Do you understand?’
Frau Wilhelm had wrung her hands and looked agitated. ‘It’s not that I don’t want you to find happiness again. But whoever your next husband might be, he probably won’t want us.’
Thoughts of a potential future husband had not crossed her mind. Now that she took a moment to consider that possibility it seemed highly unlikely. There was no longer any contact with her comrades from the university and she never spoke to any of the men who worked in the truck or diesel factories, especially after her frightening experience with Dietmar. Despite seeing another side to Horst, she shuddered when she thought of the Wehrmacht or the SS and knew if there were no other men on earth they would have to claim her screaming and kicking. ‘If,’ she’d told Frau Wilhelm, ‘I meet such a man one day, he will have to accept my situation completely or I will not accept him.’
‘Liebe Annie.’ Frau Wilhelm hugged her and held on tight.
‘And for now,’ she’d said, ‘Walti, Fred, you, and Herr Doctor are more than enough for me to concentrate on. And, of course, my memories of Walther.’
They’d smiled at each other, wiped their noses and gone back to their chores.
*
Annie left the house early in the morning in the hopes that she could avoid the queues and find something edible to bring home. She thought the same thing every morning, but was inevitably faced with lines of weary women, hunger, fatigue and worry etched on their faces. Walti had begun to cry for food and it was the most sickening sound she had ever heard. She rocked him, gave him most of her rations, turned him on his tummy over her knees and rubbed his back hoping to give him some comfort. Other times he was quiet and listless, too tired to kick a ball or turn the pages of a nursery rhyme book. At night they slept in the same bed to keep each other warm and she lay awake, panic surging through her.
She joined line after despondent line of women waiting and hoping, like her, for some kind of sustenance to take home. At Lange the Baker’s she stamped her feet, eager for the queue to creep forward. The woman in front of her had thinning hair that smelled sour and huge white flakes of skin on the shoulders of her coat. When she turned suddenly, Annie had to control a sharp intake of breath. Her eyes were deep in their sockets and ringed with purple stains, like squashed summer berries. Averting her face, Annie caught sight of her reflection in the empty shop window and realised that her own eyes were at least as ghoulish.
Of course none of them thought for one minute they would get a loaf of wheat bread or rye or pumpernickel. What they were hoping for was much more basic than that. A teaspoon of yeast or a handful of flour or the crust of a three-day old bread roll left over from either the barracks or one of the factory canteens. But not today – Frau Lange locked the door from the inside, turned the sign to read closed and shook her head; Annie thought she saw her crying. So they turned en masse and made their way to join the queue plodding towards the entrance of the next shop along. She craned her neck to see if the women coming out had anything that looked worthwhile and there did seem to be the promising shapes of tins and packets in their bags, so she waited patiently.
She knew that this general store would not have had much delivered but would be dependent on handouts for most of their provisions. It was not possible, though, to go on like this much longer as the Wehrmacht themselves were looking rangy and bedraggled. A group of them, trying to walk like bulls despite their lack of meatiness, pushed into the store and came out rattling tins of coffee and pressed pork under the women’s noses. A bent, frail woman, older than Frau Wilhelm, broke the line and shuffled towards the market, but the soldiers circled her, taunting her with filthy, degrading names. One of them held out a tin of peas and just as the woman made a grab for it, the despicable man pulled it back. His comrades cheered him on and he repeated the nauseating show with all the goods he had stolen from under their noses. Annie felt as if she would vomit, but strode up and pulled the woman free. ‘How would you like that to happen to your own mothers? Or grandmothers?’ she chastised them. ‘Shame on you,’ she shouted, her chin in the air.
For a split second they did look humiliated, but then they turned on her with jibes of what they thought she would do with them to get her hands on a packet of dried egg. She felt very frightened, her prominent bones rattling in her thin frame, but she held her nerve, huffed at them and steered the older woman away. ‘Thank you, thank you,’ the woman repeated, bowing her head. Annie watched her hurry away and wondered what she would do next time if no one came forward to help her.
Then she tried her luck at the newsagent’s where they sometimes had goods like biscuits and tea for sale. The queue was only eight-deep so she thought she might be successful. The woman before her was a clerk in the Town Hall who used to be the type never to have a hair out of place – plump and well-turned-out. Now she was neither. She began to chat to another woman and the gist of their conversation was that they didn’t hold out much hope of anything at the newsagent’s, but mentioned foraging in the forest. Annie’s eyes widened and she listened closely – she’d never heard of such a thing. It sounded feral and dirty and… godforsaken. Was that what they were now? Forgotten people scouring the back roads like animals? Stooping to pick through roots and branches for anything to put in their mouths? If they had come to this, she thought, then she was truly frightened for their lives and their souls.
She couldn’t listen to any more so made her way to the marketplace. Nothing there either. Guilt and remorse ate through her when she recalled how she had refused to buy the scrawny, ulcerated chickens on display there last year. If only they were available now, she would take one without hesitation.
There was nothing left for her to do. So with a heavy heart and a growling stomach, she made her way to the forest. And what she saw there was truly shocking. The day was already darkening when she arrived and as she stepped into the undergrowth, all light seemed to be left behind. She waited for her eyes to adjust and when they did, she could make out grey shapes bending and stretching behind every copse of trees. There were scuttling sounds and the crack of twigs breaking, the low murmur of voices pointing out fallen nuts and festering mushrooms. ‘There!’
‘Where?’
‘By your foot.’
‘I cannot see.’
‘There. Quickly, before someone else gets it.’
Steeling herself, she moved towards the dense interior and made herself known. Women with children, a few older or disabled men, stopped for a minute and stared. One or two who she’d seen around the town nodded then resumed their hunt. She joined them, finding acorns, berries, digging roots with her hands, pulling up weeds, brushing leaves and thorns away from her face and out of her hair. A man whose trousers were held up with a piece of string caught a mouse and without any compunction, bashed its head against a tree. The creature let out a thin squeal and its captor threw it into his bag.
It began to rain, but they carried on until they couldn’t see a thing. Then she followed everyone back to Ulm feeling repulsed and proud of herself in equal measures.
‘Annie!’ Frau Wilhelm was beside herself when she came in cold and dirty and pale. ‘We have been so worried. What has happened?’
Annie tried to play down her retelling of the queues, the soldiers, the forest but Frau Wilhelm was horrified. She ran for Herr Doctor who said he thought she was in shock so she was dried, fed thin soup by the trace of a fire and in lieu of hot, sweet tea, told she would have to make do with a shot of brandy. At last, she thought, something was going in her favour. It did the trick and helped her shivers so, happily, Herr Doctor prescribed another.
Whilst Frau Wilhelm fussed and fretted, Herr Doctor told them he had heard about the foraging from patients attending his surgeries with stomach cramps, headaches, skin rashes and vomiting.
‘We must do all we can to make sure you do not have to do this again,’ Frau Wilhelm said.
‘I thought we had,’ Annie answered.
Frau Wilhelm did not say anything, but took the bag into the kitchen, emptied the contents into the sink and picked over the spoils of her hunt. She did not throw any of it away.
Annie’s feet remained blocks of ice and she was sent to bed under as many blankets and eiderdowns as Frau Wilhelm could find. With sagging eyelids she listened to Walti calling, ‘Walti wants Mutti.’ But Frau Wilhelm shushed him with promises of a story and the last of the watery soup.
Before she succumbed to sleep, Annie forced herself to write about what she had seen and heard, felt and undergone that day. If she didn’t, she might convince herself in the morning that she had dreamt it, rather than knowing she had lived through a most horrendous nightmare.
*
31 December 1944
I refuse to insult this book with writing the trite message we used to greet each other with on this date every previous year. There is no time or energy for such superficial sentimentality. Herr Doctor is under the dust and debris of his surgery. Most of Ulm has been razed to the ground. The rubble is so thick and deep that walking through it is almost impossible. God alone knows when or what we will eat next.
Despite her grief, Frau Wilhelm carried on with household duties and minding Walti whilst Annie spent most of her time looking for food. They had to, there was nothing else they could do. Frau Wilhelm spoke of Herr Doctor with great sadness and when she had time to sit, she wrung her hands in agitation. They both tried not to cry, but kept soggy, balled handkerchiefs up their sleeves as without warning they would fill up with tears. All of their men had been taken from them and poor Walti was growing up without a father, grandfather or uncle to look up to.
Frau Wilhelm also cried for her cherished, spotless, old-fashioned home. The one she’d lived in for most of her life with Herr Doctor and Walther. Annie knew she dwelled on everything they shared there together and how she built such a warm, comfortable sanctuary for them as a family. Annie remembered how she generously gave up her trinkets and cuckoo clock, dark patterned carpets and much-loved kitchen to spend time helping her after Walther died. It must have been difficult enough for her to do nothing more than pop backwards and forwards to her own territory, but now there was not a brick left of her house to go back to. Nothing. Not a photograph or teaspoon or door handle or towel or rake could be salvaged. And not a trace of Herr Doctor although they know he had been there when the bombs hit, treating patients with what little he had. How Oma’s little house – Annie’s little house – escaped the devastation they had no idea, but they did not take that good luck for granted.
Amongst the wreckage in the streets, Annie sometimes glimpsed minute pieces of life as it had been lived – the handle of a coffee cup, a torn bookmark, a length of string very like the one that man in the forest had used instead of a belt, a dog’s collar, part of a brooch, a child’s bone teething ring. Somehow those things made her cry harder than the colossal demolished pit that used to be Ulm.
She could not comprehend that terrible air raid. Although the authorities would never admit it, they all felt sure it was nearly over so why did the Allies decide to punish them in that way? If they weren’t worth bombing years ago then why now when they were already on their knees with hunger and illness and exhaustion? If they could see them as they were in their everyday lives – dragging themselves around, living from hand to mouth, frightened, cold and on the brink of madness, they would take pity on them. But they were human beings so they must surely be able to imagine their plight?
Frau Wilhelm reminded her that the bombs destroyed the Gallwitz barracks. ‘Isn’t that a good thing?’ she asked, trying to convince herself as well as Annie.
‘It would have been, when the men in the barracks were more than starving spectres,’ Annie retorted, thinking of the Wehrmacht wandering around, what was left of their torn uniforms hanging off them, looking disorientated and rudderless. She sighed and flopped into a chair, bouncing Walti on her lap. ‘I don’t know any of the thinking behind it,’ she said. ‘None of us do. But couldn’t they have made a show of it instead of retaliating in such a cruel way?’
‘I know, Annie,’ Frau Wilhelm agreed. ‘A couple of military hospitals were obliterated, too. Herr Doctor—’ she choked when she said his name ‘—would never have sanctioned any hospital being bombed. All those poor helpless people. All the medicine and bandages and equipment. The nurses and doctors. It’s unthinkable. Herr Doctor could have used all of that in his surgery if it hadn’t been… If he wasn’t…’
She could not carry on and Annie hugged her, knowing the conversation would have to come to an end. But her mind kept racing and to herself she acceded that the truck factories and diesel plant were fair play – if it was nearly over then wrecking those kinds of places would accelerate the process. But their homes, shops, the market, their friends, their families, what little they had – everything was dust. Thank goodness the Minster was relatively unscathed and could offer a roof to the thousands who had lost their homes. That was where she would go to beg for some of the minute portions of food being distributed to the most needy. She would take Walti with her to prove she had a child who must be fed.
*
As always there were those worse off than them. They, at least, had a house to live in, a fire to keep them warm when they could get fuel and a kitchen to cook in when food was available. Of the thousands left homeless after the air raids, some sheltered in the Minster, some in any sort of makeshift shelter they could find or build, others had taken to walking towards places they thought might have more to offer like Munich or Berlin. Annie had seen them with the little they owned on their backs or in sacks, barely able to put one foot in front of the other. How they had the strength to get anywhere was a mystery to her. And others set up camp in the forests.
She’d seen them when she’d been foraging. They lived in industrious groups, clearing away swathes of undergrowth and using bits of sheets and tarpaulin to provide cover. Or they sat in twos and threes around fires on which they roasted creatures she couldn’t identify and didn’t want to think about. Most regarded her with hungry indifference, some looked antagonistic until she passed by without exchanging a word. One woman had picked up a large, pitted stone and stood with it primed and ready, daring her to intrude on her space. ‘There’s nothing here worth having,’ she’d shrieked. ‘Go away.’ So Annie had turned and hurried away as she’d been ordered.
But one afternoon she heard a shout, ‘Young Frau Wilhelm.’ Annie didn’t recognise the voice and couldn’t see anyone so spun around and around until a waif pushed her way through a clump of bushes and appeared in front of her. It took her a minute to recognise the child as Gisela, the little girl who’d helped them after Walti was born by delivering their rations. But gone was the thick hank of hair and in its place was a shaven scalp, which she scratched until Annie thought it would bleed. The pink cheeks were replaced by sallow hollows, the dimpled knees by bones so sharp they almost pierced her skin. Her mouth was stained green.
She held out her hand to Annie and said, ‘Come with me.’
To Annie’s shame, she hesitated. For one thing she could see the child was filthy and crawling with lice. For another she wondered if she was taking her to where she would be assaulted for the few berries and nuts in her bag. But that was not the way she wanted to live her life, by being suspicious and insular. That was not how she wanted the world to be so thought she must make a stand based on her principles and morals. She squared her shoulders, beckoned for Gisela to lead the way and followed at a short distance.
They stumbled over fallen tree trunks, through muddy streams, around crudely built camps. ‘Gisela,’ Annie said. ‘Why is your mouth green?’
Gisela turned, wiping her face on her ragged sleeve. ‘I am sorry, young Frau Wilhelm. It is grass.’
Alarm surged through her. ‘Grass?’ she said. ‘You have been eating grass?’
Gisela nodded her head. ‘Sometimes we have nothing else.’
Nestled in between a square of four trees was a shelter built from long strips of tree bark and hung with old blankets and rugs. Three men, who looked like brothers, were trying to make the structure more sound. Gisela introduced them to her as her father and uncles and Annie to them as her friend. That made her heart feel heavy.
‘Where is your Mutti and your Tanten?’ Annie asked.
Gisela shook her head and started to cry. Still trying to avoid touching the poor mite, Annie squatted down to her level and said, ‘What do you want me to do for you, Gisela?’ knowing full well there was very little within her power that could help.
‘Can you ask Herr Doctor to give me something to make my head stop itching?’ Gisela asked.
Of all the things she could have requested – her mum, books, a dress, food, a clean bed, shoes, all she could think about was having her most uncomfortable present dilemma soothed.
‘Herr Doctor is dead,’ Annie told her in a gentle voice. ‘And all of his medicines have been lost in the air raid. But I will ask Frau Wilhelm if she knows of a cure for you. Alright?’
‘Thank you,’ Gisela said and looked down at the dirt covering her thin, summer sandals.
‘I will come back,’ Annie promised, raising her hand in farewell.
She hadn’t gone far when she was startled by a rustle behind her. Ever wary that Dietmar might be lurking and waiting to grab her again, she gasped, turned and saw Gisela’s father. They both stood stock-still and sized each other up; Annie could see the pulse under the whiskers on the side of his neck hammering like a machine gun and she could feel that hers was a match for his. Through the slant of her eye, she looked around for a stick or branch she could use as a weapon.
Then, in a hoarse voice he said, ‘Take her. Please.’
Annie felt shocked and appalled. ‘I cannot do that,’ she said in an uncompromising voice. ‘She is your daughter.’
‘I have nothing to give her. She will die. I give her to you.’
‘But… But…’ Annie could not find the words to express her dismay. ‘I have very little, either, and she needs to be with you.’
‘What she needs is the chance to have a life. I give you my daughter so she can live.’
He must have been able to see that she was horrified, but took a step closer and said, ‘I am begging you.’ There were tears in his eyes.
Annie refused to continue the discussion, so started to run backwards, stumbled, turned from him and crashing through the forest, made her way home.
‘He is mad,’ Frau Wilhelm said. ‘How can we take care of another child when we can barely take care of ourselves? Perhaps you can take her to the Minster and ask the church to look after her?’
Annie shook her head. ‘Her father could have done that, but he wants her to be with a family.’
‘What’s left of a family, you mean,’ Frau Wilhelm said.
‘A family nevertheless.’
Frau Wilhelm sighed and found a fine-toothed comb and said that the best thing for head lice was to pull it through the hair and over the scalp every day. Then they would need to pick out each other’s lice and crack them between their fingernails. Herr Doctor used to give the patient something they could paint on their scalp, but that was gone now with everything else that might have helped.
The next morning, armed with the comb, Annie made her way back to the forest determined to show Gisela and her father how they could treat each other’s infestation – that and nothing else. But each step of the way she doubted her resolve and felt as though what she was actually doing was condemning the little girl to death. Or worse. If her father and uncles became ill or died, she might latch on to someone dishonourable, like Dietmar who would abuse her or sell her to the Wehrmacht who would ruin her completely. For the rest of her life she would wonder what had happened to Gisela when she abandoned her and not knowing would be torture.
If she had any indecision left when she arrived at the squalid camp, it disappeared when Gisela ran towards her, grabbed her hand and said, ‘Vati told me I am going to live with you.’
‘Where is your Vati?’ Annie asked.
‘They have all gone to look for food,’ Gisela said, but Annie could feel her father somewhere close by, watching and waiting. ‘Vati knows I will be gone by the time he gets back.’ She looked up at Annie eagerly.
This time Annie took her hand and said in a loud voice, ‘Yes, Gisela. You are coming home to live with me, Frau Wilhelm and baby Walti.’
At home, Annie and Frau Wilhelm scrubbed the little girl, picked over her hair, fed her a small bowl of soup, put her clothes with the rags and, after dressing her in one of Annie’s nightgowns, tucked her up in Oma’s old bed. Annie thought the worry of having another mouth to feed would keep her awake that night, but she slept better than she had done in ages.
*
Annie and Frau Wilhelm had been happy to have their house intact when so many others had lost theirs; now they found some comfort in the corner of their house that remained standing. They were reduced to living in one bedroom, part of the sitting room and a corner of the kitchen. They dug a hole in the garden to relieve themselves as the privy was in ruins and they washed when there was a bowlful of water from the taps.
But it was a miracle they were alive. Annie went over and over the air raid in her mind, tormenting herself with how different it could have been. Frau Wilhelm had been on her way to the Minster when the raid started and she’d picked up Walti and run the remainder of the way with him in her arms. ‘Oh, how funny he thought it was,’ she’d reported. ‘Bouncing along next to my chest, pointing at the planes, laughing at everyone running. And minutes before I had almost turned back for a scarf. Thank goodness I…’ She’d shaken her head in disbelief.
Annie had been with Gisela in a different woods to forage for food as she hadn’t wanted the little girl to catch sight of her father. But they had heard the planes overhead, a swarm of locusts destroying everything in their path. Smoke had gathered over the city, obscuring the rooftops so they had no inkling of what was being destroyed underneath. Even from that distance, the noise had been terrifying and they had cowered and covered their ears. It must have stirred up a memory in Gisela’s mind about her mum dying in the last raid, because she had clung to Annie’s skirt and cried for her mother. Annie’s first instinct had been to run back to Ulm to find Frau Wilhelm and Walti, but she’d steeled herself to think logically and stay where they were. Frau Wilhelm would protect little Walti. Her heart told her she would put his life before her own.
As soon as she’d thought the danger had passed, she’d grabbed Gisela’s hand and dragged her along as she ran towards home. Crowds had appeared from the woods all going in the same direction.
Streets that had been strewn with detritus from the last raid were now completely inaccessible. People with glazed eyes were wandering as if they had suddenly been planted in a place they had no recollection of seeing before. An old man, his vest in tatters, had lurched towards them and they’d scooted around him, only to see his ear hanging by a thread. A woman in a stained apron, with nothing on her feet, dragged one body after another from a bottomless heap. Against the remains of a wall, a man had sat slumped, his leg gone below the knee. But they hadn’t stopped; they had to find Frau Wilhelm and Walti.
The pile of rubble that had been their house hardly registered as Annie took one look at it and refused to believe her beloved son and mother-in-law were inside. She and Gisela had held on tight to each other and, blocking out the stinging from their torn, bleeding feet, flown to the Minster. There, hunkering in the corner of a pew, they’d found a trembling Frau Wilhelm cradling Walti on her lap. Relief had flooded through Annie and she sank onto the kneeler in front of them, slowly and deliberately. Candles shuddering in waves of aftershock cast shadows on the walls, the boarded windows, their hollowed faces. Gisela had put her arm around Annie’s neck and with her other hand, stroked first Frau Wilhelm’s arm, then Walti’s.
*
If she had only heard it the once she would not have been convinced, but it was repeated by so many different people she knew it must be true. Annie was out with Gisela and Walti scavenging for materials to use to breach their bombed house, when a woman joined them on their heap of bricks, clawed at her arm and said, ‘He is dead. It’s the truth.’
Annie’s initial thought was that the woman had gone insane, but in a gentle tone said, ‘Who is dead?’
Then it was the woman’s turn to look at Annie as if she was demented. ‘Hitler.’ She nodded and closed her eyes when she said his name. ‘Haven’t you heard?’
‘Let’s leave our pile here and collect it on the way back,’ Annie said to Gisela. ‘Come and hold Walti’s hand.’
She thought it best to go to the Minster and ask someone there if what the woman had told her was truth or rumour. But on the way she heard others shouting out the same information to each other. One man told another he’d heard it on the wireless. A crowd was dancing what looked like an impromptu hokey cokey. Rags were unfurled and waved out of what was left of windows. Then she allowed herself to believe it was true. A smile took over her face and her heart somersaulted. Taking the children, she raced for home. Without making a sound, the words played across her lips over and over again until she threw herself into the house and shouted to Frau Wilhelm, ‘Hitler is dead! It’s the truth.’
Later that evening, Annie and Frau Wilhelm were cleaning the last few bits of serviceable crockery as best they could and stacking them on the coffee table that was now put to use in the kitchen. It had lost a leg in the bombing, but Annie and Gisela had fashioned a new one out of a tree branch and it was less wobbly than they thought it would be. Walti had tried to help, but they had to keep a close eye on him to make sure he stayed safe. The little fellow loved Gisela and followed her around saying something that sounded like, ‘Gisela, Gisela. Walti wants.’
Gisela was never impatient with him, but treated him with fondness as if she were his big sister, which she was in every way except by blood. One, two, three she counted each spoonful she fed him and encouraged him to repeat the numbers after her – which he did in a little sing-song lisp. And she pointed out colours to him although now there wasn’t much to see except grey.
‘Do you think they will come for us?’ Frau Wilhelm asked. ‘Or will they think we colluded with the Nazis and leave us to die?’
‘They will come for us,’ Annie said. ‘They will understand we have been innocent civilians.’
‘Where do you think they will put us whilst they rebuild?’
At that moment it hit Annie that she and Frau Wilhelm had never discussed what would happen when the war finished – all they had kept in their sights was what had, for years, been the elusive end. Now it was tantalisingly within reach and their peculiar situation meant they would have to make decisions about the future. Well, Annie had decided on her options but she supposed the time had come to share them with Frau Wilhelm.
When they were sitting with their mending, Annie broached the subject and told her mother-in-law that she had been thinking about her earlier question. ‘I do not know where they will want to send us during the clean-up,’ she said, keeping her eyes on her stitches. ‘But I will stay in this shell of a house until Fred comes back. Because he will not know where to look for me otherwise.’
‘Yes, of course.’ Frau Wilhelm nodded and Annie was glad she took Fred coming back as a given, as did she.
‘Then he will want to go back to England to his Viola.’
‘That would be the best thing for him to do.’
‘And I will go with him.’ Annie put down her sewing and looked at Frau Wilhelm’s drained, gaunt face, tiny lines feathering out from her lips and eyes; unruly, greying eyebrows; a chipped, brown front tooth. But before she could find any words, Annie told her that she would be applying for her and Gisela to go with them. ‘Can you bear to leave and start over again in England?’ Annie asked. ‘I cannot imagine life without you.’
Frau Wilhelm’s hands quivered when she reached for Annie’s and for an instant she was as she had been, before the war began and took its toll on all of them. The cloudy film lifted from her eyes and she smoothed her hair with her fingers. ‘I told you once upon a time,’ she said, ‘that I love having adventures and that has not changed.’ She sighed in a manner that could almost be described as contented. Then they both picked up their mending again, stopping periodically to exchange a grin.
*
There was a soft knock at the door, followed by a pounding. Frau Wilhelm and Annie exchanged a look, trying to convey their anxiety to each other without passing it onto Gisela who was up late waiting for her longer hair to dry.
‘Horst?’ Frau Wilhelm mouthed.
Annie shrugged. Part of her longed to see him if only for a few minutes to let him know she was proud of him and so grateful that he rescued her from Dietmar. But a shiver crept up her spine when she wondered what he might want now. So many Wehrmacht soldiers were wandering the streets, wraithlike and aimless, looking for homes that had been flattened and families that no longer existed. She felt nauseous and wondered what she’d say or do if Horst and his comrades forced their way into the house and confiscated it for themselves.
Gisela and Frau Wilhelm stared at her, looking for guidance and reassurance. ‘I will go,’ she said and mumbled something about someone losing their bearings and wanting directions.
The pounding came again followed by a deep voice. It was Horst, calling her name. ‘Annie, Annie. Open the door.’
She pretended to fumble with the broken furniture they used for security. ‘Horst,’ she said. ‘Are you on your own?’
‘Annie,’ he commanded. ‘Do as I say. Now. I must see you.’ And then in a lower voice he said, ‘I mean you no harm.’
Pulling open what was left of the door, Annie was taken aback to see nothing outside but the black night. This was not the time to be playing schoolboy pranks, she thought. Then she could see that Horst was standing like a statue at the end of the path. He moved, jabbed his finger twice at the ground in front of her, turned up his collar and made to hulk off into the shadows.
‘Horst, wait,’ she said as she bent down to what looked like a pile of rags on the ground. But the bundle shuddered and she plucked open what was left of a brown, ripped, muddy coat and there was Fred, her brother, on the verge of drawing his last breath.
Disbelief, dread and elation hit her at once. ‘Frau Wilhelm. Gisela,’ she screamed. ‘Help us!’
As they were lifting Fred’s poor, skeletal body into the house, Annie caught sight of Horst’s shadow slinking away. ‘Horst,’ she called out. ‘Twice you have done the right thing for us. I will never forget that. Or you.’
He stopped for a moment and touched his hand to the brim of his cap, then he was gone.
Fred was so diminished and frail that he took up a fraction of the space in Annie’s small bed. There were fresh wounds and old scars all over his body and something was very wrong with his left arm – it hung at an angle and he winced whenever it was moved by accident or out of necessity. Try as they might to get him to eat, he could not drink much nettle soup and gagged after three small mouthfuls. But that seemed enough to sustain him because his breathing became steadier and before he closed his eyes to sleep he whispered, ‘Annie.’ It was the sweetest sound she had ever heard.
Annie stayed awake all night, staring at the brother who she told herself she had helped to keep alive with hope. Dawn broke pink and mauve and blue above their ruined city, and still she could not take her eyes from him.
*
By the end of May, Fred was well enough to come downstairs and sit, upright, in a cushioned chair. Walti loved him and took every opportunity to sit on his lap and pretend that his uncle’s whiskers scratched the tender skin on his palms. Gisela, shy at first, began to join in the games they played.
Annie left them to it and went out for food but came back with chewing gum and stockings. She tore open the packaging and told them about the American soldiers in their huge tanks and jeeps, throwing out treats to anyone who could catch. On the verge of hysteria, they laughed with the relief that came from knowing they had lived through the worst and that help was close enough to touch.
26 July 1945
I have dreamed about writing these words so many times, but now they are a reality. We are going home.