‘I will find you.’
He kissed her then and, in that moment, despite her better judgement and experience of a world torn apart, she truly believed him.
Finally, unwillingly, they stepped apart and silently said their goodbyes with sad smiles. No words seemed adequate now. Klara reluctantly waved as they turned away and walked their separate ways.
Elsa tried to resist turning to look at him for one last time... but failed. His familiar determined gait, which she had come to know so well, was receding southwards and into the morning mist. Every step he took lengthened the distance between them. She felt a surge of panic that the details of his face were already threatening to fade from her mind. She battled the urge to run after him. This was how it must end. Their love was always going to be like an evanescent rainbow at the end of a dark rainyday. Beautiful, hopeful, but in reality it could never last. It was painful to accept. Too painful.
She stiffly turned, and as tears began to fall, she held Klara’s hand a little tighter and they began their own journey towards Bremen. She did not look back again; she would not torture herself by watching him go. Reality had already begun to worm its way back into her thinking. No one knew what post-war Europe would look like or how Germany would be punished. How could a promise be kept that he would return in such an uncertain new world? He had not realized, during their heartbreaking farewell, that she had not asked for his address. If there was a future for them, she had decided, the opportunity had to come from him. She wanted him to feel no pressure, no obligation to rescue them from a desolate Germany. She did not want him to see any correspondence as a pleading letter of rescue. If, after he returned to England and settled back into a new life, he still wanted her, he would return and she would be waiting for him with open arms.
Chapter Twenty-One
Elsa entered Bremen with Klara but inside she felt alone.
So alone.
Sam’s company had been a constant, stabilizing influence. Without him she felt strangely cut loose in a city that had been twisted into the unfamiliar. Yet to describe Sam’s absence in this way inadequately expressed the true depth of the feelings engulfing her. Grief at losing a future that they might have had together if things were different. A sickening ache at having to accept what had to be. However, it was his physical absence, in a city they’d never visited together, which really hurt her. It felt as if he hadn’t existed at all... as if he’d never walked the journey with her or held her in his arms. It felt as if he had died long ago... lying on the straw in the barn where she had first set eyes on him as a snowstorm swirled outside. If it had not been for the kindness of one farmer, who saw fit to feed and care for an enemy soldier, the man she had come to know would be no more than bones scavenged and scattered where he fell. Fate and a kind heart had given him more years to live and in doing so changed her life.
How many people no longer existed due to the war? How many new lovers never had a chance to meet? How many lives had been changed for the better thanks to a chance meeting such as theirs? She had been lucky to meet him in a land where luck had run out and she would always cherish those memories and hope that one day, when the war was over and their countries were friends again, he would remember her fondly and keep his promise to find her.
The only way to cope was to put all her energy into finding her family. The once thriving port was largely in ruins now. Targeted raids were a game of chance, as Elsa had recently come to learn. The west of Bremen was particularly badly destroyedand only heaped more pain on Elsa’s heart. This part of Bremen was where her aunt’s house was located. She looked around her. The landscape was so changed that she could not even recognize which street might have once been hers. Her last visit had been when she was a naive teenager. Then, she had been accompanied by her parents carrying a basketful of gifts. How to get there had not been her responsibility back then. How inadequate she felt now.
Together they wandered routes that masqueraded as streets. She saw herself reflected in the faces of many she encountered. It was not only she who felt like a shell with nothing left inside. Bremen’s soul was gasping its last breaths too. Would it ever recover?
Offices, houses and shops could no longer be distinguished from one another, each one no more than a broken skeleton of pitted bricks and hills of rubble. Trees had been stripped bare of branches and buds, pitifully lining what had once been roads but were now, in places, merged with the rubble and glass of demolished buildings. How could a city still remain a home, when there was no gas, water, trams or telephones? Because people had nowhere else to go, was the simple answer. Even now, some dust-covered citizens still tried to salvage furniture and clear debris, forming dishevelled lines, their hands grazed.
Nobody paid attention to the blonde woman with the dark-haired child. They had more to worry about than a child that may be a Jew. Germany was losing the war. It was as near as over. The beliefs and prejudices that had ruled their lives before were no more than ruins now.
Tall, concrete bunkers, with artillery guns on their flat roofs, still remained to provide shelter to those who had stayed and she made a conscious plan to use those as searching areas when the next raid came, hoping someone would know of her mother and sister. It already seemed impossible. How was she going to findthem in this abandoned battle scene of broken brick? And how was she going to face them knowing that she had given her heart, body and soul to the enemy who had done this — that she was already missing him as if she had lost half of herself?
Soon she came across more familiar buildings. The town hall, with its mixture of gothic and Renaissance architecture, had survived the bombing so far. Its delicate sculptures and carvings, protected by large boards, lay hidden from the public’s weary eyes. The large statue of Roland in the market square, with his sword and shield, also remained intact, a proud survivor of the bombing and a vivid, sad reminder of her happy childhood, when she had first set eyes on the protector of the city. He had failed to protect it this time.
‘What are we going to do, Elsa?’ asked Klara.
Elsa looked around her, still at a loss on how to locate her aunt’s street. Crowded around one of the many arches of the town hall was a large huddle of civilians. She could hear the sounds of bartering. Their craned necks and tiptoeing feet to gain a better view were familiar signs that a black market was thriving there. The number of people gave her hope that her family might have survived by seeking shelter either in the high-rise concrete bunkers or dark catacombs and tunnels beneath the streets, which threaded their way through the ground like tree roots.
‘We are going to find out where the street my aunt lives is, and if it has survived. Hopefully it has and my mother and sister will be there.’
‘And if it didn’t survive?’
‘Someone there will know where they have moved to.’
She took Klara’s hand and continued walking, asking random strangers the directions to the street where her aunt lived. Not all the people they passed were civilians. Some were wounded German soldiers — had they given up fighting andabandoned the front line? The police station, with its high-pitched red roofs and Neo-Renaissance decorations, had also survived. Her heart rose as she approached the Schnoor quarter.
‘Look! The bombs did not destroy everything, Klara! Come on.’
This area of the city appeared unscathed. Its narrow medieval houses and centuries-old cobbled streets brought a wave of nostalgia. How much these buildings had seen over the years, she thought. Today, they were full to bursting with families who had lost their homes. Every building that had survived was now overcrowded, even the smallest of homes and the most run down of properties.
Eventually they arrived at the edge of the river that cut Bremen in two. Beyond lay what appeared to be just the foundations of a city, its vertical structures scarred or demolished before being scattered across the ground. The destruction was so complete that she could not even decipher her aunt’s area let alone her street. It would be a miracle if anyone had survived at all. Did her aunt’s body lie in the ruins? Were her mother and sister there too? Elsa’s eyes brimmed with tears, blurring her vision and stinging her throat.
‘Are they dead?’ asked Klara.
Elsa swallowed hard and tears began to fall, leaving a wet trail of sadness down her cheeks. It was a fitting symbol of the aching grief inside. One man’s hunger for power and revenge had done this, she thought. Once again her mother’s haunting words came to mind.We only see the true man when he is given enough power to take.
‘I don’t know,’ she told Klara. ‘The house is gone. They may have hidden in a bomb shelter.’
Elsa dropped her gaze and silently turned away in search of a miracle that would tell her that they were still alive.
* * *
