“Of course they would be so lucky,” I said bitterly. “And I’m sure they offered to take in those displaced with all the spare room they still have.”
My voice dripped with sarcasm, and he glanced at me.
“You’re sure you don’t want to come with me?” he asked. “At least for a couple of nights? Get yourself acclimated to the city a little before going home?”
He had plans to stay in one of the few hotels still standing and had offered to let me sleep on the sofa the day before, after seeing my face when we’d both returned to the car during a quick stop in Luneburg. He’d had an errand to run there and I’d noted a small bookshop nearby.
While he’d hurried off across the street, I’d walked to the bookshop in hopes of finding a book to distract me when I was alone in my room, and maybe even a journal. I wanted to start documenting what I was seeing. Without friends to talk to and confide in, to entrust my fears to, I was lonely. I hoped that by keeping a journal I’d feel less so somehow. At least I’d have my words to keep me company.
The man at the front desk of the tiny shop had looked surprised to see someone entering his store, and not a little bit nervous. I’d given him a small smile in hopes of letting him know I wasn’t a threat and asked,“Zeitschriften?”
He’d nodded and pointed. “The journals are over there.”
“Danke.”
There were several to choose from. Most of them masculine looking, with sharp edges and serious-looking covers. Several had the Nazi insignia on them and I shoved those back in place hard, feeling my skin heat at the mere sight of the symbol.
And then I found it. Near the end of the shelf. It was slender, the leather soft. And on the front, tiny flowers were etched into the cover. I’d smiled and pulled it free, flipping the pages with my thumb and ducking my head as I’d breathed in, smelling the scent of the unmarked pages.
I moved along a wall of books, taking in titles, my heart sinking with each step. Nazi propaganda on every shelf.
“Fräulein?” the shopkeeper said.
When I turned, he pointed to the back corner of the store where a small selection of novels had been shoved and mostly obscured by books on Germany’s geography.
I smiled at the sight ofCold Comfort Farmby Stella Gibbons and pulled it from the shelf.
“I’ll take these,” I’d said to the clerk, who nodded and rang me up promptly.
As I walked back toward the car, I noticed a small, stately post office, several people coming and going out the front door. But as I passed the narrow alleyway behind it, I paused at the sight of several cloth bags stuffed and piled on top of one another, paper littering the ground around them. A gust of wind sent one of the pieces toward me and I knelt to see what it was, frowning when I saw it was a letter, addressed to someone in France.
Assuming the bags were waiting for someone to take them inside and sort them, I walked quickly behind the building and carefully slid the envelope inside the nearest bag. But the scent of something burning caught my attention and, curious, I squeezed past the stacks of bags until I found the source. In the far corner was a metal barrel, the flames inside it licking upward. At first I thought perhaps a homeless person had lit it and was living back here, the piles of bags providing protection from the elements, but then a bit of charred paper drifted up out of the barrel and landed on the ground beside it. An ugly feeling twisted inside my stomach. Glancing at a nearby back door, I hurried to the scrap and picked it up, finding exactly what I’d feared. Handwriting and a partial address. Beside the barrel, I now saw, were more bags. But these ones were empty. They weren’t sending or delivering the letters, they were burning them, collecting their citizens’ money and hope and playing a terrible trick on them.
A thump on the other side of the door made me drop the scrap of paper and hurry from the alley and around the corner.
It was then that I remembered the handful of letters I’d sent William. Or at least thought I had. Were they too now a pile of ash at the bottom of a barrel? Saddened and angry at the thought, I hurried back to the car to where Max was waiting to drive us onward.
“Not too much farther now,” he said.
I inhaled and nodded, a tremor shaking my body at its core.
Despite my running from Hamburg years ago, I had loved my city. Not the house I’d lived in with my family, with the expensive furnishings I was barely allowed to touch, or the fussy bedroom decorated by my mother that had felt more like a prison than a sanctuary. But the city I’d roamed as a girl had been beautiful. The parks and gardens, shops and cafés, the many street corners I’d hung out on with my friends, the alleyways Ruthie and I had run down, laughing, our footsteps echoing off the walls, our hair streaming behind us.
As we drove from the outskirts farther in, we were stopped every so often, our papers checked, eyebrows raised as they saw his credentials, and then offered me a smile. We were home, their grins said. We were welcome.
I’d never felt more scared.
“Where you headed?” a soldier asked, handing back our paperwork to Max.
He gave him the street name of my parents’ home. The man frowned and nodded.
“I believe that’s right on the border of the worst of the destruction. You may have to park and walk the last couple of streets. There are a lot of roads closed off due to rubble and the fear of buildings toppling.”
“Understood,” Max said. “Thank you. We’ll be careful.”
The closer we got to our destination, the more barren the city became.
Thanks to his intel, we knew the government had relocated many of the survivors of the attack the year before farther out or to other cities. It felt like a ghost town, and I wondered if the information both he and Uncle Frank had received about my mother still living at home was correct. But when I’d asked Max again as we’d crossed over the border into Hamburg, he’d told me simply that per all reports he’d received, she was still residing in our family home.
