Krieg

“Karla has stopped breathing,” said the grandmother. She turned around and looked accusingly at her daughter. Friedel sat on the crate filled with things they had been able to save and stared up at the older woman, her green eyes dull and glazed over, unable to display any emotion.

“So what,” she finally said in a flat voice, “I can’t do anything,” Immediately the grandmother went into a tirade, bemoaning their fate in general and the loss of their home and everything they’d ever owned in particular. She lamented the uncertainty, not knowing if the train’s zig-zag course took them farther away from the Russian front or closer to it. Most of all, she complained bitterly about her daughter’s heartless attitude. “Don’t you care that your baby is dying?! You’re not even looking at her? Look at her! Have you no feelings?”

The truth was she was right, thought Friedel. Wearily she lowered her head into her hands and closed her tearless eyes trying to shut out the hurtful voice. There was nothing to be done, she thought bone-tired. They’d tried everything. They’d even given the baby diluted coffee and chewed up half digested bread; she needed milk, and there was none to be had on the train. The last time they’d stopped and tried to beg for some milk from the locals, they’d been turned down. There had been other trains with refugees.

If only she could have nursed her like she had the other two, but the breast infections and last-minute operations performed by the eighty-year-old physician took care of that. She had been lucky though. Most doctors, including her own family doctor, had been sent to the front. The woman physician who took her doctor’s patients was working around the clock. “I cannot, she’d said, I do not have the necessary equipment; you must go to the hospital,” and sent her away. There was no room at the hospital, no equipment to operate with either, and so in desperation, Friedel had called her mother’s old family physician; she knew he had to be around eighty and too old to be drafted.

She had ridden the streetcar to his practice, nearly out of her mind with pain and fever, trying to rest her grotesquely engorged breasts against her arms under her heavy winter coat to protect them from the rattling and jarring of the ride. Doctor Schwager had put her under within just minutes after her arrival, the usual kind smile around his crinkled eyes disappearing as he examined her. When she came to, she was all packed and bandaged, and she heard him retching in the adjoining bathroom. Her breasts had been full of pus.

An hour later she walked on unsteady legs to the streetcar stop. The streets were icy. She rode home. She didn’t die. Her breasts were badly scarred, but she had healed rather well.

What for, she wondered, could they really get away? And where to? What part of Germany would be left, not war-torn, not destroyed, and with what would they start over?

Her hands felt leaden, her whole body felt leaden; she was dead inside and had no soul. She was no longer capable of feeling panic as she had been the first few times she’d heard the sirens and had grabbed her four- and two-year-old and run, baby in arm, downstairs into the bomb shelter. There they’d sat huddled in blankets, silent– listening – waiting for the bombs to hit.

But after a while, even though they always ran and the terror in their bones never really left, she’d played ‘Skat’ with the others in the shelter.

If she felt anything, Friedel thought, if there was anything left in the muddled gray pool of what had once been her love, anger, excitement, fear or panic, it was a vague resentment for her mother and a slight surprise at not getting upset over her little girl dying.

Friedel looked up. Her mother had stopped her tirade and turned away from her. She had lost weight as they all had and was no longer heavy. Her father wouldn’t like it – if he made it back from the front. With effort Friedel raised her head to look at her other two, now five and three, on the mattress in the corner of the cattle car they all occupied. They were taking naps unbothered by the smells under the blankets everyone would share later. The children were thin and not very clean, but they could survive. The baby couldn’t.

The train slowed, and Friedel got up, softly pushing her mother away from the carriage. She bent over and picked up her baby’s scrawny limp body. The infant’s eyes were closed, the little hands: once clenched into angry fists when she cried, now unfurled. Gently pulling the blanket tight around her, Friedel sat down, and holding her close, began to rock. She heard someone weep and felt her hands getting wet. Then the baby in her arms began to squirm and she felt her feathery breath against her neck.

“Mother,” she said, “she’s alive.” The train lurched forward once and stopped. One of the old men assisting the engineer came and peered into the car. “We’ll be here for about four hours,” he announced, “you can go and find milk for the children.”

Artist’s statement

Regina John

“Krieg” simply is German for war, and this is my mother's story of our flight with 3 children and our grandmother from Koenigsberg (now Kaliningrad) as the city was being heavily bombed.

I begged her later to tell me the story, and she finally relented and allowed me to write it.

When I had finished and she read it, she looked at me with a far away look in her eyes and said: "Yes, that is how it was."