Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,100
suffocation or fire, and Anna heard of people’s lungs bursting from shock waves when a bomb exploded. There were days when the trains stopped running, and Dr. Haffner had to stay in the city. Then, when the air raids began, Frau Haffner refused to go to their shelter. She grabbed a knife from a kitchen drawer and waved it at Anna. She dropped the knife, and Anna picked it up and put it back in the drawer. Without her husband there to reassure her, Frau Haffner became terrified of not being able to breathe in the confined space, and wanted the shelter’s steel doors left open. Anna closed the doors. They had a flashlight and some candles. Paul sat on Anna’s lap, an arm tight around her neck, and Vera and Bettina huddled against her. They begged to hear once again, from the beginning, the story of the princess who loved her father more than salt.
The ground shook, the sounds of sirens and ack-ack fire penetrated the shelter. Every bomb made a different sound as it fell through the air, and then there were shock waves, and the air trembled, and in the shelter it seemed that the candlelight wavered and the torch Anna held grew dim. But in the morning, Anna opened the shelter doors and saw that nothing in the immediate vicinity had been damaged in the air raid, and they went back to the house.
In the summer of 1944, a Polish prisoner was sent in Jean-Marc’s place to do the gardening. Anna heard from Baldur that the trees in the Tiergarten were being cut down to make space for food crops—corn and potatoes and beans—and she wondered whether Jean-Marc was working there.
Baldur was away for two weeks in Bavaria, training as a Luftwaffenhelfer, an assistant to the soldiers in the air forces. Then he came back to Berlin and was stationed at the flak tower in the Tiergarten. His mother was terrified that he would be killed, and out of fear and maybe penitence she tried to ensure his survival by fasting for entire days. She walked around with her elbows tucked in, a flightless bird, her lips moving without sound. She ignored her other children. Anna did everything for them. She combed the twins’ hair and chose the clothes they put on in the morning. She had been with the Haffner family for two years and the baby, Paul, was walking. He followed her around; he wanted her to stay with him at bedtime. Josef had nightmares and wet the bed. She had to change his pajamas when she woke him up to go to the shelter. The British air force bombed at night, and the Americans bombed day and night. When the weather got cold there was no coal—not that coal did not exist, but the railroads between the coal mines in the Ruhr Valley and Berlin had been bombed. By the late winter of 1944, food in the Reich was scarce. Frau Haffner stood for hours in a queue to receive what was always an insufficient amount to feed a large family. At the table, she made sure her children got larger portions than Anna. Some days, Anna got nothing to eat. Did she think Anna cared? She said she wasn’t hungry. Frau Haffner stared coldly at her.
Baldur, stationed at the flak tower in the Tier Garten, was at least fed. The flak tower was not what Anna pictured: a thin needle piercing the night sky, emitting flashes of citron light as its bullets raced toward the enemy aircraft. It was a substantial building with suites of offices and sleeping quarters and a medical facility. The antiaircraft gun was, Baldur said, the biggest in Europe. He was immensely proud of it. He didn’t want to come home; he wanted to remain on duty. Civilians were dragooned into service to defend Berlin. No one had seen Hitler for weeks.
Frau Haffner kept saying the bombs were unnecessary because they were going to starve to death. She measured, weighed, counted cans of meat, ordered her daughters not to share even a taste of food with Anna. Her family, she said, was her only concern. She had spoken to the authorities, she told Anna, and it was arranged that she would be moved. Someone else would have to take on the responsibility of feeding and housing her.
“Find her a warm coat,” Dr. Haffner said. “Give her at least a sweater and some wool stockings and boots.”