The crowd didn’t disperse. They stayed on the dock for lack of anything better to do. Stella felt their hopelessness. It matched her own. The trains weren’t running and she had no gas, but she had to get back. Her kit was in Amsterdam and Francesqua’s list and the rest of it.
She let herself get jostled around with no sense of purpose. The children had taken it with them. It was a victory and she had to remember that. Plenty of people were on the dock with their children. They didn’t get away. Who knew what would happen now that the worst was just beginning.
Get yourself together. You’ll get back. It’s just a matter of time.
Stella took a breath and started thinking. Gas. Uncle Josiah got it. So could she. The crowd got thinner as she stepped off the dock and then a wave of screams and panic came over them, rippling in a heart-pounding crush. Bombers, a whole squadron could be heard in the distance and then seen. They were low and formed in a V. The crowd dropped down and Stella with them. The sound got louder. They were there and then gone, disappearing over the ocean.
“Thank God!” cried a woman.
“They could come back,” said a man.
“No, they won’t. They’ve gone to bomb the Brits.”
“That’s what they thought in Rotterdam.”
Stella got to her feet with the rest and she heard it again and again. Rotterdam. She grabbed a man’s sleeve and asked, “What happened in Rotterdam?”
“Haven’t you heard?” he asked.
She grabbed him with both hands. “What happened in Rotterdam?”
“Sweetheart, calm down.”
A woman put an arm around her shoulders. “Do you have family there?”
She nodded. She couldn’t speak.
“I’m sorry. It was bombed.”
Bombed.
Stella was on the ground, but the crowd picked her up. Their panic had turned to concern.
“Who’s there? Where were they?”
“Hotel,” she whispered. “They were getting on a ship.”
“Jesus.”
“Oh, dear.”
“What hotel?”
“What ship?”
She couldn’t answer. She couldn’t think. Uncle Josiah. Uncle Josiah.
A woman turned Stella to face her. Instead of saying anything, she gave her a stinging slap. “Where were they?”
“I…near the consulate,” said Stella.
“Oh, the center.” More whispering. The center was bad.
“When was it? When did it happen?”
“This afternoon,” someone said, and Stella started running. They called after her, but she didn’t stop. Gas. The cab. Now.
She found it unmolested where she left it, but there were no gas stations around. There were cars. Plenty of cars. She looked in the trunk. Nothing useful and then went running through the streets, looking for a hose. She found one three blocks over and she stole it. Another thing she didn’t regret.
The hose was old, but long, which was the most important thing. She searched through the cars near the cab and found one with a nearly full tank.
Thank you.
She used the last drops of gas the cab had to move it next to the car. Then she threaded the hose into the tank. Park-Welles never taught her that. She heard about it on one of Florence’s radio programs. The villain was going around stealing gasoline in the dead of night. Stella couldn’t remember why and it wasn’t terribly clear then, but she learned enough to suck that gas out of the tank and not poison herself, unlike the villain. He drank a tank and died. “Good riddance,” said Florence and they’d laughed themselves silly with their Tom Collinses in hand. Her mother called those shows rubbish. Stella couldn’t wait to tell her how wrong she was, because she was going to get to Uncle Josiah.
“What are you doing?” a man yelled and ran over to yank at the hose.
No matter. She was done. “I have to get to Rotterdam.”
The man’s furious face changed. “You have family there?”
She swallowed hard and wiped the hint of gasoline from her lips. “I do. I have to get there.”
“It is bad and you are so young.” He took her by the shoulders and said, “Don’t go. You don’t want to see it.”
She pulled back. “I have to. They need me.”
His face said there was a good chance they didn’t, not anymore, but he said, “Where were they? In the north?”
Her hopes soared. “In the center, near the American consulate.”
“My dear, the center, it is destroyed.”
The word stayed in her ears, playing over and over again. “All of it?”
“A good deal and on fire. The ships, everything.”
She shoved the hose into his hands. “When?”
“This afternoon.”
“When?” Stella screamed. “Three? Four?”
He stared her. “Earlier.”
She pushed him aside and jumped in the cab. He pounded on her window. “You will get hurt. There’s nothing you—”
Stella didn’t hear the rest. She was driving pell-mell out of IJmuiden. Later, she wouldn’t remember leaving the city or how she got to The Hague, through roadblocks and past tanks and Nazi troops swarming into the city. There were only flashes that remained. Dutch troops with their arms up. An SS pointing a rifle at her. Screaming at him. Driving through a field. Smoke. Fire in the sky. Rotterdam.
She got stopped for good in the outskirts next to a little blue house. The streets were too clogged to go further in. People were streaming in and out. She locked the cab and turned to see the flames glowing to the south. A woman grabbed her arm and pleaded, “Where is the hospital? Where is it?”
“I don’t know. What hospital?”
“Bergweg! Bergweg!”
Stella shook her off. “I don’t know. Where is the American consulate?”
“It’s gone. It’s all gone! Where’s Bergweg hospital?”
“I don’t know!” Stella grabbed a man passing. He had a bloodied face and a limp child in his arms. “The hospital? Are you going to the hospital?”
He stared blankly at her and then gave a slight nod. The woman had gone on to another person begging for directions. Stella chased her down and put her on the man with the child. “He’s going to the hospital. Follow him.”
“Thank you! Thank you!” She ran to catch up and Stella joined the people heading into the city, but they were moving too slow. She ran past them with no clear destination in mind. Uncle Josiah said a hotel. White? That wasn’t right. Whitman? No. Those were American names. The consulate. That was all she could think as she ran to the flames. The smoke got thicker and thicker and then she hit the first rubble, blasted buildings, skeletons with flame fingers reaching out of remaining windows. The Red Cross volunteers were carrying people out on stretchers, struggling over remnants of buildings and even bodies.
She heard shooting in the distance and an explosion up ahead, but she kept going, asking everyone where the consulate was. Had anyone seen a handsome American? No one knew. No one cared. She kept moving. Bodies in a row. A child being dragged away by a nurse from a dead mother. She couldn’t get anyone to listen. The Dutch were frantic. She didn’t know they had it in them. The Germans were moving through in their stiff calm way, following orders and seeing nothing they hadn’t been ordered to see.
Do it. They won’t care.
She ran up to a group of Wehrmacht, searching for the right insignia. Park-Welles’ demand that she memorize the Nazi ranks had been previously useless, but now she knew an Oberst when she saw one. He stood stiff and unyielding on a corner watching as his men tried to clear a road of debris so his vehicle could pass. He didn’t notice her walking up. Stella had the feeling he wouldn’t have paid her any mind if she had a gaping head wound or was spewing blood from a missing limb. She’d met him before in several incarnations, and they were always the same man, but she was about to surprise him.
She launched herself at his pressed immaculate sleeve and pleaded in German with a very strong American accent, “Can you help me? I’m trying to find the American consulate.”
He sneered and tried to swat her away. “Let go of me, you fool.”
“I’m an American,” she said. “I have to find the consulate.”
When she said American, something clicked. He wasn’t at war with America. He didn’t want to be at war with America.
“You are American?” he asked in the harsh tones of a man educated in Berlin and the army.
“I am. Please, I just need directions,” she said, making sure her blue eyes were wide and very obvious.
He didn’t melt or even defrost, but he did say in his clipped tones, “It is gone. Completely destroyed.”
“They blew up our consulate? Why? We’re not at war.” She made herself sound silly as if bombs could pick one building and leave next door alone.
A flicker of distaste went over his stern face, but Stella didn’t think it was about her. “It was not a target.”
“My family was in a hotel nearby. We were trying to get home.”
“Where were you?”
The tears came easily enough. God knew she had plenty waiting. “Amsterdam. I was late. I couldn’t find a ride here and now…”
The Oberst regarded her with a little less coldness. “How many were in your family?”
She swallowed and more tears spilled down her cheeks. She hated to say it. She didn’t want it to be the number. “Seven.”
“Seven Americans.” He gritted his teeth. “What hotel?”
Stella gave into the panic she was feeling. “I don’t remember. I can’t remember.”
That cracked his cold reserve and he took her arm to lead her back from a surge of people carrying the wounded on cobbled together stretchers. “I have been here before the war. Americans like certain hotels. This is usual.”
She nodded.
He began naming hotels. None were right and then he said, “Hotel Weimar?”
She clutched his arm, quite involuntarily. “That’s it. Where do I go?”
“I believe it will be destroyed.”
“But where?”
He pointed and she ran, dodging stretchers and Wehrmacht, crying women and firefighters covered in soot. But she didn’t find the Hotel Weimar. It wasn’t there to find.
In the distance, Stella could make out four stories of a partially collapsed building that had flames licking up the remaining section. One person said it was a bank. Another the hotel. It was hard to make out with all the smoke, but someone else confirmed. That wreck was once the Hotel Weimar.
She ran over a bridge that was partially intact, ignoring the bodies in the water, and joined people alongside the quay digging in the rubble beside the smoking hulk.
“I’m looking for an American. Have you seen an American?” she asked everyone until she found a man, wearing a Red Cross armband. He threw a huge chunk of stone masonry and nearly hit her. Stella screeched and jumped out of the way, tumbling down onto the jagged remains of the Hotel Weimar.
“I’m sorry.” He came to her and helped her up. “I didn’t see you.”
“I can hardly see anything.” Her lungs were burning again and her eyes streaming from the smoke.
“Come with me,” he said. “I need help. I think there are survivors.”
“I’m looking for an American man. Tall, handsome, blue eyes.”
He pushed her back. “I don’t have time for that.”
“He was a guest at this hotel. He was just married. His wife was here and her whole family,” Stella pleaded. “Please, I have to find them.”
The man grabbed another chunk and heaved it off the pile before looking at her, squinting and trying to see with only the flames from the hotel to light up her face. “I saw him. Eyes like yours?”
“Yes. Is he alive?”
“He is.”
Stella sank down, all the fight going out of her, and the man started digging again. “Be useful,” he said. “Start digging.”
“Where is he?”
“Others matter, too! Look around, girl! Dig! Help us!”
“I will, but where is he?” Stella yelled back, getting to her feet and finding her hands bloody from the rubble. They didn’t hurt. She didn’t feel anything.
The man pointed and went back to digging and cursing her selfishness. She was selfish. She had to find him. Know he was safe and then Judith and then Felix and the others. When that happened, she would dig.
Stella picked her way past more volunteers and firefighters who wanted her to go back, but she pushed past them to a road filled with rubble and thick with smoke. Fire was on both sides of the street, but the horror was beyond. Total destruction. Fires and collapsed buildings. She could make out what looked like the remains of a church tower, backlit with flames. Central Rotterdam was flattened. The ships in the port were on fire or sinking.
“You were looking for an American?” A woman appeared at her side. She wore the uniform of a Red Cross nurse, blackened with soot and stained with blood.
“Yes.” Stella had to drag her eyes from the hell before her. “Where is he?”
The nurse took her arm and pulled her away. “This way. He’s digging.”
He wasn’t digging. Not anymore. Josiah Bled sat in the rubble, thirty feet from a raging fire and cradling a body. Stella stood with the nurse and she couldn’t think what to do. The body. It was Judith.
“Get him back to work. We need his strength,” said the nurse.
“She’s dead.”
“Yes, and more will be if we don’t hurry.” She gave Stella a little push to get her stumbling over the rubble.
“Uncle Josiah?”
He didn’t look up. He pressed Judith’s body to his chest, rocking back and forth. Stella crept up and knelt by his outstretched feet, touching his ankle.
“Uncle Josiah,” she said. “It’s me, Stella.”
Josiah Bled looked up with a face that was almost unrecognizable. If he saw her, she couldn’t tell. Then he looked back down and stroked Judith’s bloody hair. Her face was concealed on his chest, but her left arm was broken in several places and the rest Stella couldn’t bear to look at.
“Never mind him.” The nurse took Stella under the arms and hoisted her to her feet. “Help me. I need you.”
“I can’t leave him.”
“He’s in shock. It doesn’t matter,” she said. “There are others.”
And so they dug, forming a line with firemen and ordinary people, to lift away the rubble to find the dead and living. Hours went by and then daylight, which made it all the worse. Then Stella could see what she missed in the night. The full destruction, the dead and the wounded. The fires were still raging and she’d coughed her throat raw. Her hands were torn up and so were her knees from falling, always falling. But it still didn’t hurt, because everything did. Uncle Josiah hadn’t only found Judith. He’d found them all. Felix, Klara and the boys. All dead, killed in the initial bombardment. They hadn’t been in the hotel. She could see that in the harsh light of day. They were in the street going somewhere. Maybe running back to the hotel or to an air raid shelter. The bombs had dropped and a building hit them with the blast, a bakery by the look of it. There were cake pans and specialty molds in the street along with ruptured bags of flour, coating everything white in stark contrast with the soot.
“I don’t think there’s anyone else alive here,” said a fireman. His face was streaked with tears and his hands shaky, but he took her hands in his gloved ones. “You should go to the hospital and see to these. You don’t want an infection.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said, looking at Uncle Josiah. He hadn’t moved other than to rock and beside him was Klara’s body. Stella had missed it in the dark. She may have stepped on the dead woman’s hand and the thought made her want to vomit. She would have if she hadn’t already three times before.
“How many are there?” the fireman asked.
“Seven, counting him,” she said. “What do we do now?”
“Take them to the Bergweg hospital for identification and then to Crooswijk,” he said.
“We know who they are,” said Uncle Josiah, speaking for the first time.
“Then straight to Crooswijk.” The fireman gestured to a man who was coming by with a handcart. It was monstrous. There were two bodies on it already. “Can you take another?”
The man with the cart looked at Judith and her mother. “I can take them. They’re not big.”
“No,” Uncle Josiah hissed, but he didn’t look up.
“I don’t think we want them buried here,” Stella said.
“You don’t have a choice. It’s warm and we don’t have the space…anywhere else. We’re talking about hundreds of people, young lady.”
“No,” said Uncle Josiah. “She goes to the hospital. I want her at the hospital.”
“Sir—” The fireman was going to say something else, but Uncle Josiah looked up with an expression of complete madness. It looked like he’d scratched at his own face, leaving bloody gouges in his forehead and cheeks.
Stella drew the fireman away and said, “He’s my uncle. They were married three days ago. Please, can they go to the hospital? I fear for his mind.”
The fireman looked back at Uncle Josiah, who was rocking again, and he put a hand on Stella’s shoulder. “We don’t know who they are. They’ll go to Bergweg.”
“Sir! Sir!” A priest came climbing over the wreckage. His face and hands were burnt and peeling. “Help! Please! There are girls in our vault. I can’t get to them. I need help.”
The priest tumbled forward over what looked like part of an oven and they caught him just as he was going down.
“Where is this?” the fireman asked.
“My church. The girls. Three maids. Someone said they hid down in the vault. I can’t get to them. Please. Please.”
The fireman directed some of his men to go further into the center to help with the digging. Then he and Stella carried Klara, her grandmother’s dear friend, out of the debris and laid her on the cart. It wasn’t careful or gentle as Stella would’ve wanted. It was quick and that was what the day demanded.
Stella put a hand out to try and take Judith, but Uncle Josiah showed her his face again. “No.”
So they took Hans, the youngest at twelve, and put him with his mother. The handcart went off to the hospital and they pulled out the rest of the Wahle family placing them on carts as they became available until only Judith was left. Stella knelt next to her uncle and leaned over to kiss the hand cradling Judith’s head to his chest. “We have to take her to the hospital.”
“The hospital?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t want her to go to the other place.”
She brushed the matted curls off his forehead and wondered if he knew she was dead. “I know. That’s why she’s going to the hospital.”
“I’ll carry her,” he said.
Stella looked up at the firefighter and he shook his head.
“It’s too far, but we’ll walk with her.”
Josiah swallowed hard and nodded. The firefighter gestured to a Red Cross nurse, who was helping a battered woman and child past. “I’ll help them. You help her.”
The nurse nearly objected, but she saw what was happening and relented.
“My name is Maria,” she said in Dutch with a Spanish accent.
“He doesn’t speak Dutch,” said Stella. “You can talk to me.”
“He is American?”
“Yes.”
“I speak English,” she said.
Gently, she told Josiah that they would take Judith from him and take her to a handcart. “You must let go, so we can do this.”
His hands relaxed, but Judith’s body didn’t move. In a horrible moment, Stella thought she was stiff, but she wasn’t. Her blood had seeped into Josiah’s clothes and onto his body, attaching her to his very skin. They had to peel her away, making a scratching, tearing sound that Stella would hear late at night for the rest of her life.
Once they got her free, Uncle Josiah got up stiffly. Stella thought he would object, but he let them carry Judith to the handcart and they laid her with Felix.
“To the cemetery?” asked the burly man handling the cart.
“No, to the hospital,” said Stella.
“Don’t you know who—”
“No,” Stella cut the man off and the nurse nodded, briefly touching Stella’s hand before going off in the direction the priest had gone.
Uncle Josiah didn’t move from the spot he’d been in. He stood there and stared at nothing until Stella went over and took his arm, leading him through the rubble to the handcart. He reached out to touch Judith but then pulled his hand back.
The burly man looked at Stella and said, “I can’t wait.”
She nodded and he went ahead with the cart, pushing it over rubble and broken glass. Stella and Uncle Josiah walked behind him, but Stella wasn’t sure her uncle would make it very far. He walked like his joints were welded and he couldn’t quite get them to bend. Stella kept one arm around his waist and held his hand. She wasn’t entirely sure he knew she was there.
They got past the bombed area and a truck waited. Bodies were stacked in the back like cordwood.
“No,” Uncle Josiah whispered.
“We have to get her to the hospital,” Stella said. “This is the way. Klara and her brothers are there. She won’t be alone.”
“Alone.”
Stella helped put Judith’s body on the pile after Felix and then some others on top of her. She could feel this thing she was doing hurt her uncle. She knew without looking, but it had to be done. More stretchers and carts came until the truck was full. Then it left, crunching over concrete chunks and a rocking chair that must’ve been blown out of a window somewhere. The truck took the Wahles away and left Uncle Josiah behind with arms loose at his sides, standing in the street, lost.
Sheets were for those that died at the hospital, but Stella got them anyway. She and a volunteer named Hendrick went through the bodies, getting the identification and jewelry off them and putting it in a little bag. Hendrick took pictures of each of the Wahles and wrote down the names that Stella gave him. He questioned why they didn’t go directly to the cemetery, but one look from Stella quieted him on the subject.
“Will you put them on the next truck?” Hendrick asked with a glance at Uncle Josiah who stood by during the whole thing like a statue.
Stella said yes, mostly to get him to move on. They were in the garden of the hospital where all the dead were and there was plenty for him to do.
“She should be covered,” said Uncle Josiah.
“I’ll go get sheets.”
“He said no.”
“I say yes.” Stella went inside and stole some sheets off a cart. It was wrong, of course, but she didn’t care. She did care a bit that they weren’t white hospital sheets, but flowered ones from someone’s house, but she wrapped the bodies in them anyway. Then she went to stand with Josiah, taking his hand. They’d have to be buried. The day was warm and the smell was already starting, but she didn’t know how to broach the subject.
“I know,” he said. “But not yet.”
Stella took his hand and pressed it to her chest. “I don’t know what to say.”
“She’s dead. There’s nothing to say. There never will be anything to say.”
“There will be someday,” said Stella. “You told me so.”
He stared down at his wife’s body wrapped in a faded daffodil print and asked, “What did I tell you?”
“After Abel, you said, ‘whatever causes night in our souls may leave stars.’”
“That was Victor Hugo,” said Uncle Josiah.
“And you,” she said. “It helped.”
“You didn’t love him.”
The more time went on, the less sure Stella was of that. “He loved me.”
“Yes, but you didn’t kill him,” he said. “I brought her to this.”
“No. You brought her to love. This is the Reich’s doing. Don’t take what they own.”
“I could’ve made them go to IJmuiden. You knew. You told me,” he said in a ravaged voice.
“I didn’t know and what you said made sense. I didn’t think they’d do this. They gained nothing by it. The queen was gone. The surrender imminent.”
A shiver went through him and Stella wrapped an arm around his waist.
“I thought I was so lucky,” he said.
“You were.”
“But not for long.”
“No, not for long,” said Stella. “But you had her love. That’s something to remember and cherish.”
“‘For she had eyes and chose me’”
Othello. Why did it have to be a tragedy?
“Maybe there’s a way to take them home,” said Stella.
“I am taking them,” he said.
She looked up at him, but his eyes were on the shroud. “Well, not for some time. Later, when it’s all over. There’s space at Prie Dieu. Grandmother will have a new section cleared.”
“I’m taking them to their home,” he said, turning to her with a new ferocity in his eyes. “They should never had been forced to leave it. I’m taking them back.”
“To Hallstatt? You can’t.”
“I will.”
“Don’t you want them close? The family will—”
Uncle Josiah turned her to face him, laying his hands heavy on her shoulders. “Don’t tell anyone about this.”
“We have to tell the family,” said Stella.
He shook his head, his eyes becoming familiar again, the uncle she knew, but different, changed. “We don’t.”
“They would want to know. Grandmother would—”
“I won’t be a tragedy.”
“It is a tragedy.”
He shook her with tears coming for the first time. “Then it belongs to me, Stella. Nobody else.”
“They will know something happened,” she said. “You can’t conceal this.”
“I can and I will,” said Uncle Josiah. “And so will you.”
“But—”
“We will never talk about it. I never want to talk about it.”
“You might change your mind.”
“I won’t. Promise me.”
Stella promised. She didn’t want to, but she did. She would keep it from the family and from Nicky. She would never tell and the name of Rotterdam never passed between the two of them again.
“You should leave now,” he said.
“What? I’m not leaving.”
“Why are you even here?” he asked but didn’t give her a chance to answer. “Of course. The children. You went to IJmuiden with them.”
“I did.”
His eyes went back to the shroud. “And it worked?”
“They got on the ship,” she said.
“Good. I knew you would do it.” Then he looked back at her face as if seeing it for the first time. “You’re not Micheline.”
“No, I needed to be someone else.”
“Can you be her again?”
Stella looked down at her hands. They were empty. She hadn’t brought her handbag with her. She patted her pocket and the keys were still in there. “I guess. I have to find the cab back. Everything is in there.”
“Then do that. Go back to Amsterdam and do what you do,” he said.
“What are you going to do?”
“I will get them into the morgue and help until I can arrange to bring them back to Austria.” Uncle Josiah sounded very sure and there really was no question. He would do it and she couldn’t stop him. No one had ever stopped Josiah Bled.
“I don’t think I should leave,” said Stella.
The sound of German voices echoed around the courtyard and they turned to see a trio of Wehrmacht walking in to see the damage they had wrought.
“You’re Stella Bled Lawrence,” said Uncle Josiah. “You have to go. Once they find out who I am, it won’t be hard to connect us.”
“I hate to leave you,” she said.
“I know, sweetheart. I know.”