Terror. Pandemonium. Panic. Children wailed. People shouted, ‘Get down! Get down!’
Brussels: a city consumed by fear. People rushed out of their homes, spilling onto the narrow streets, crashing into each other with suitcases and rumours about tanks crushing women, Nazis with bayonets, Antwerp to the north in flames. My father had said the invasion would happen. Where was my father now?
Like so many frightened people, I ran too. A man carrying a typewriter pushed me aside. I fell against a woman who asked if I had seen her daughter.
‘Julie, she was just here, holding my hand. She was sucked up into the crowd. Do you know where my daughter is?’
I was swallowed into the mosaic of red shirts, blue trousers, cotton skirts. Clothes seeming to move in terror, not filled with people, but with ghosts floating inside the sleeves and coats. Ghosts with grey features, slackened jaws and hollow eyes.
I looked up and did not see clouds and spring leaves, but something much darker that seemed to shroud the entire city. Outstretched wings soared high above my head, and what looked like the belly of a dragon.
I broke away from the mob, pushing my way between men in clogs and woman carrying crying children and baskets of bread, forcing my way towards Hava’s house. I needed to get to Hava. Then I heard a low sound, a growl. The belly of the dragon dropped closer until it finally became a plane swooping down towards the street. Closer. Closer. Then, a burst of blinding light flashed from under the wings, spraying bullets all around me.
People called out and cried again and again, ‘Get down! Get down!’
Bullets shredded the back of a man who managed to throw himself over a small boy who shrieked, ‘Daddy!’ A woman’s jaw was severed from her mouth. Blood splashed onto my blouse. I fell to the ground, holding my arms. I wanted my father. I wanted Hava. I didn’t know what to do.
Seconds later, the bullets stopped. The plane disappeared. All was silent for a moment, a brief moment, as if the world took a deep breath. And then there was a scream. It was almost as if the wheels of a train had locked and strained against the railway tracks, a high-pitched sound like the wail of metal against metal. Tragedy embodied that scream: horror, conveyed in a single, anguished cry.
A woman held a small girl in her arms. She wailed, ‘Julie! Julie!’ The little girl’s arms dangled at her sides like winter vines. Her head lolled back, her legs were limp. The side of the girl’s face and the cobblestones beneath my feet were streaked with blood. She was dead.
‘Julie! Julie!’ The woman moaned and rocked the child in her arms. She looked at me, as if to ask if I might save her daughter. ‘Julie?’ she pleaded. I looked at the small curls on the girl’s shattered skull, turned, stumbled and skinned my knees. Blood dripped down my legs.
‘Julie! Julie!’
I stood up. I ran. More people shouted. I ran on. The silence had been replaced with howls of grief and pain. Trams ground their way through the thick crowd. More planes flew overhead.
‘Julie! Julie!’
The sound of the girl’s name rose above the calls and cries of other people. I felt that the little girl was chasing me, blood rushing down her face.
I pushed my way forward, squeezing between shoulders, arms, legs, and bundles of clothing.
When I reached the other side of the square, I stopped and leaned against a building and looked back. Like ants whose nest had been disturbed, people stumbled over each other, desperate to save what they could. They carried photo albums, bags of sugar, money, anything to help them out of the city, out of the path of the monster; to help them carry out with them what they knew and who they were.
The Nazis were coming. Belgium was under siege.
Run! I thought. Run! Run! They must not get me. They must not shoot off my arms!
I knew Hava would be in her house. I knew that is where she would be.
I ran down a familiar side street. I could see the windows of Hava’s home. They were dark.