War Girls Complete Collection Chapter 278

Chapter 25

L

ater in the afternoon, after a half-hearted reconciliation, they were taken to the colonel’s office again. When they entered the room, he was sitting at his desk, conferring with Sergeant Davis.

Davis got up and extended his hand saying, “Looks like you were spies after all, just not for the other side. I apologize.”

Lotte took his hand and shook it with a smile. “Your instinct was right.” She didn’t hold a grudge against him; he’d only done his job. And nobody could blame him for the hate he felt for everything German, not even Lotte.

They filled in routine paperwork to process their discharge from the Wehrmacht and receive new civilian IDs with the required stamp of the British authorities.

“Where are you headed now?” Colonel Barber asked.

“My family in Berlin,” Lotte replied, quick as a shot.

Gerlinde, though, hemmed and hawed. “I have no idea where my family is. They fled the Red Army in East Prussia.”

“Sorry, but our own soldiers have yet to enter Berlin.” The colonel’s jaw was set tight. “I can’t issue travel permits into the capital, and neither can I issue them for the Soviet zone.”

“Do you have relatives in some other place?” Sergeant Davis asked.

Gerlinde just shook her head with a dull expression, but Lotte said, “Yes, sir. My aunt lives near Munich in Bavaria.”

“Munich? Isn’t that in the American zone?” Davis said.

Colonel Barber unfolded a paper with a map of Germany, neatly divided into four zones. Red for Soviet in the east of the country, green for British in the north, blue for French and yellow for American in the south.

“Indeed it is,” he said, tracing his finger down to Munich on the southeast end of Germany. “It’s a long ways from here. You sure you want to go there?”

“Yes, sir. I don’t have anywhere else to go,” Lotte said and after stealing a glance at her friend, added, “Fräulein Weiler can come with me if she wishes. I’m sure my aunt wouldn’t mind.”

“Well, then. I’ll issue travel permits for the British and American zones.” The colonel stamped several papers and handed them over.

“Thank you so much, sir,” Lotte said as she glanced at her new papers, issued in the name of Alexandra Wagner.

He seemed to notice her hesitation and said, “I’m afraid we don’t have any records of your original identity. This is something you’ll have to fix once you find your family.”

“I will.” She smiled, a blessed wave of relief flowing over her.

“I can offer you a lift to Hamburg, but from there you have to make your own way. Hurry up to catch our transport, which is just about to leave. And take this, it should help on your trip.” He offered them a few packages of cigarettes.

“Thank you so much, Colonel Barber, but we can’t possibly accept this.” Gerlinde protested even as she leered greedily at the smokes.

“You can and you will. I can’t let our trusted spies go on foot, now can I?” He chuckled and shoved the cigarettes into Lotte’s outstretched hand. She quickly slid them into her bag, giving Gerlinde a warning stare. The cigarettes represented a valuable currency and under no circumstances would she allow her friend to smoke them.

Hours later, perched on a crates of supplies in the back of an open-bed truck, they approached Hamburg.

“Oh… my… God!” Gerlinde said, watching the utter devastation around them. They had known it would be bad, had seen Flensburg, near the Denmark border, in ruins. Had passed the towns of Schleswig, Rendsburg and Neumünster, all of them nothing but rubble.

But nothing had prepared them for the infernal sight the formerly beautiful, majestic Hanseatic city presented. Nothing but debris, destruction and drabness. Lotte closed her eyes and remembered how beautiful Germany used to be at this time of the year. Trees dressed in bright green leaves to celebrate the summer. Now they were but bare skeletons against the sky, impoverished and pathetic. Like the people on the streets, the trees were cloaked in ragged garments, and none of Hamburg’s past splendor existed to suggest even a shred of that grandeur.

What she couldn’t close was her nose. The odor of rotting carcasses invaded her nostrils and she gagged. Opening her eyes again, she saw her own agony reflected on Gerlinde’s face, deep wrinkles of sorrow etched into it. Nothing but misery greeted them. A world mostly devoid of able-bodied men; women stood in long lines, picking up brick after brick to clear the rubble from the ruins of the city.

“What a tragedy!” Gerlinde squeaked, unable to form more than those three words that stood for every awful thing they’d seen on their five-hour journey.

Only the children seemed content. Free of the constant threat of air raids or ground attacks they seemed as jolly as ever, running about the ruins playing hide and seek or tag.

“Stop, or I’ll shoot!” A pre-school boy mimicked what he’d seen from the soldiers occupying his nation and his opponent dutifully raised his hand, grinning like a fool. “Now it’s my turn.” He pried the stick used as a pretend-rifle from his friend’s hands and said, “Run!”

Lotte shook her head at the wondrous resilience of the youngest of her nation. After growing up amidst bombs and grenades they hadn’t lost their childish ways, and playing in these war-ravaged surroundings seemed to be the most natural thing in the world.

“Not a place to stay in, girls!” the driver advised as he dropped Lotte and Gerlinde off near the central train station.

He was right. Hamburg was a broken city, reeling from the effects of conflict. The Allied forces’ air raids had effectively obliterated the city. Gone were the large areas of parkland, and magnificent historic buildings, the boats on the Elbe River. Instead, an alien landscape confronted Lotte.

She blocked out the sight of city streets with scorched building facades cut up haphazardly by the bombs and firestorms as a sense of despair trickled deep into her soul. If Hamburg looked like this, how much worse off would her beloved Berlin be? The capital, the coveted prize of the winner? She’d heard on the radio that the Red Army and the last contingent of German defense – boys aged ten to fifteen – had fought a cruel and senseless battle in the streets of Berlin, tearing down what the bombs had spared.

Tears threatened to choke her at the pointless loss of so many young lives in the last days of a war that had already been lost.

“Let’s take a train out of here,“ she said to Gerlinde, who seemed equally as shaken.

“But where to?”

“Anywhere but here.”

Gerlinde turned around and looked at Lotte for a long time, the old habit of understanding each other without words returning, and she said with a deep sigh, “You’re right. Let’s find a place to stay for the night and decide what to do in the morning.”

Lotte tried an uncomfortable smile. Gerlinde knew that Lotte had no intention of traveling to Aunt Lydia in Munich before she’d found her family. But her friend wasn’t ready to pile another fight on top of a fragile reconciliation.

They walked into the train station but found that the railway tracks were still damaged, so no trains were running.

Slow desperation took hold of Lotte and drained all the energy from her. They’d come this far, and now they would be deterred by some stupid railway tracks?