‘I’m sorry, we can’t help you.’ A man scribbled on a piece of paper. He handed it to the anxious woman outside the booth and talked her through the drawing he’d made. ‘There is water on this street. Go early in the morning to avoid the queue.’ He flapped her away with his hand. As far as he was concerned, their exchange had ended.
The woman hesitated, then moved away with her three young children grasping at her skirt. She clutched the paper in her hand and, after a few indecisive steps, instructed her children to stay close and went in search of water. Elsa watched her pass. The mother’s face was etched with worry and grime and her children were little better. Their clothes were dirty, their shoes worn and their bodies far too thin to give an accurate impression of their true age. Klara looked no better.
The queue for the information booth shuffled forward two steps. Elsa forgot the desperate mother and her exhausted children. She was two steps nearer to the information booth, two steps nearer to discovering if her remaining family was in Bremen. She had seen so much suffering throughout her journey, she was becoming numb to it. The realization shamed her, but her family was too important for her to take on other people’s worries as well.
Suddenly, after several hours of waiting, it was their turn.
‘I’m looking for my mother, Gretchen Kalbach, and my sister, Frieda Kalbach. They came to Bremen a couple of months ago to stay with my aunt, Clara Reinhart. Frau Reinhart lived on Hardenbergstrasse.’
The man in the booth gave a slight shake of his head. He wrote down the names.
‘When did you last see them?’ he asked without looking up.
‘My aunt—’ she searched her memory — ‘six years ago. My mother and sister... January. We had moved to Gollnow,Pomerania, for work, but my mother and sister returned in January to live with my aunt. I’ve just arrived.’
He reached for a book and began to search the names. Elsa watched his finger race along the page, along with a growing anxiety that he might miss them.
He slammed the book shut. ‘They are not in here.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It means I can’t help you.’
‘Does it mean they are dead or does it mean they are alive?’
‘It means I can’t help you. I don’t know where they are as no one, including them, has given me their names.’ His face softened. ‘I’m sorry, but your situation is not unusual. People have been arriving and leaving for months. Documentation is in chaos. Shelter, water and food are the priority.’
Elsa stared at him. Someone in the queue told her to move.
‘Have you been to your aunt’s home?’
‘It is no longer there.’ Her tone sounded oddly monotone, as if it wasn’t her voice any more.
He scribbled on a piece of paper. ‘I’ll give you a list of useful sites. A place to shelter for tonight. A place to secure temporary accommodation.’ He licked the tip of his pencil and added more to the list. ‘A black-market site. A few shops that will take anything in payment — not just money. A water pump site.’ He looked up at her. ‘Is there anything else you want?’
‘I want my family back.’
He acknowledged her request with a tilt of his head. ‘We all do.’ He continued to scribble, his hands slightly trembling. ‘Including me.’
Chapter Twenty-Two
For the first time since his capture in 1940, Sam found himself walking towards a front line. Only this time he had no gun to protect him or uniform to denote which side he was on. As far as the Allied troops were concerned, he would be viewed as the enemy until he could identify himself. In the chaos of war, there would be no gentlemanly introductions and he would have to remain alert.
He walked alone for several days, the distant plumes of smoke, explosions and artillery fire of the front line his constant companion and guiding star. It was both heartening and terrifying to watch the evidence of battle grow in size and volume with each step he took. Bombing raids paved the way for the Allied advance. As he dived for cover, he had to admit that it still lifted his spirits that the front line was moving in the right direction. Soon they would march into Bremen. He prayed for the umpteenth time that his fellow Allied soldiers had not lost their moral compass during the horrors of the last few years and still stuck to the rules of war and would treat Elsa and Klara as the civilians they were.
He chose a small town to be his rendezvous with the approaching soldiers, as he hoped he would mix in with the community. A lone man approaching a front line in the open might be shot at before questions were asked. He was convinced further when he saw the local inhabitants fixing white sheets and cloths to broom handles and hanging them out of the windows in surrender. A nearby field was filled with at least a hundred bedraggled, war-weary German soldiers waiting to surrender to the approaching force in a decent manner. The Third Reich was in disarray as the soldiers who propped it up were now utterly fed up with how the war was going and wanted an end to it as soon as possible.
Sam walked slowly through the main street and watched the townsfolk hanging out billowing white bedsheets from their windows. He could see that they were as tired and weary as he felt, but he also saw genuine fear in their eyes. They did not know how they would be treated by the invading army, or if its soldiers were intending to seek revenge.
Sam heard the low rumble of tanks in the distance. There was gunfire too, but at this stage it was only spasmodic as this was a town with few organized defences. He discarded his stolen German identity papers. There was no going back. If a skirmish took place and the British lost, so would he — but that seemed unlikely now. In the far distance the large metal frames and relentless rolling tracks of tanks came into view, and walking beside and behind the convoy were British soldiers with rifles held in readiness. The gunshots had stopped. The town was surrendering without a fight, everyone tired of the bloodshed.
Something moved high up. It was the type of movement that kept you hypervigilant during army manoeuvres, and the skill of spotting flooded back through his body as if he had not spent so long imprisoned or out in the open air. A gun had appeared at a window, but then it quickly disappeared after the sniper realized the British soldiers were temporarily hidden by trees and a parked van. It appeared not everyone was willing to surrender and was still willing to fight for their motherland. A British mother would receive the news that her son was dead if Sam did not stop him. He had to do something.
The sniper had left the door of the house ajar, so Sam stepped carefully into the gloomy interior in search of the stairs. The ground floor of the house appeared abandoned. He listened for a creak of the floorboard above. The breathing seemed closer than that. He looked to his right and saw a mother and her child huddled on the floor by the sofa looking up at him. Were they afraid of the German sniper, the advancing army or him?Probably all three. The child began to whimper, so he held a single finger to his lips. The woman nodded and buried the child’s head into her breast to muffle any sound. He looked into the adjacent room. It was a kitchen whose cupboards had been ransacked, probably by retreating, hungry soldiers. No wonder the woman wasn’t taking sides.
Sam crept up the stairs to the room above. He stepped over an abandoned doll at the top and looked through the closest open door. The room appeared a cross between an unused bedroom and a storeroom. Amid the boxes and bottles knelt a bedraggled soldier, his rifle balanced on the windowsill. He looked young. He looked determined. But ultimately he looked misguided. Shooting from up here wouldn’t make a difference to the inevitable occupation.
Faced with his armed enemy, a sliver of doubt snaked through Sam. If he could avoid bloodshed and convince this man to surrender, then he would gladly do so. But as he stepped forward, the aged wooden floorboard creaked, alerting the sniper. He swung round and aimed the gun at Sam.
