The Copper Series

by Suzanne Woods Fisher

  “Dos Amerikaners came to da camp,” she said, slowly thinking out her words.

  “Ja, ich weiss,” I said. Yes, I know.

  “Sprechen Sie Englisch!” she said severely, suggesting a thunderous temper. Speak English!

  “Yes, I know,” I repeated. I did know. The Americans had liberated Dachau on April 30th. I wondered what that had been like for her. Just an hour ago, I had seen where the Americans conducted on-the-spot executions of the Nazi S.S. guards. I wondered if Elisabeth had witnessed those executions, and how it felt to see those, who had killed so many, face their own death. There were so many things I wanted to ask her.

  As Elisabeth stared at the sights along the highway, I took the opportunity to look her over. She was so small but looked so old. Her wrists looked like a tree stick. She flicked back her hand to swat a fly and I suddenly gasped. There on the inside of her arm was a tattooed identification number. She looked sharply at me to see why I gasped and then crossed her arms together against her chest. Her body positioning right now—arms crossed tightly—seemed a metaphor for the shape her soul was in.

  We drove through the night. Elisabeth fell asleep but I tried to stay awake to keep the private company. Just before dawn, highway signs for Berlin finally started to appear. A hammer tripped in my mind and I remembered Robert’s article about Dietrich. I had hoped I would have been able to track down more information about Dietrich, but I didn’t have time nor opportunity to venture out on my own. Twice, I had tried to walk to the Bonhoeffer home but kept getting stopped by the American troops, grimly warning me to stay clear of the Russian soldiers. The Soviets were the first to surround Berlin in the last few days of the war and they were ruthless in how they treated Berliners, especially women. Entire sections of the city were closed off, condemned from damage.

  This morning, I wondered if a military jeep, driven by an American uniform, might have better luck than I had on foot. I tapped on the private’s shoulder. “Would you mind detouring through the city?“

  He obliged me and drove down some streets, close to where my childhood home had been. The city was just waking for the new day. We maneuvered around mountains of rubble, shoved aside to allow passage by motor vehicles.

  We drove down the street to find the Lutheran church that was the heart of my family’s life. It was gone; leveled to the ground. All that remained were a few burnt floor joists. The cemetery was undamaged so I hurried over; Elisabeth, barely awake, rubbing her eyes, followed behind me. I found my parents’ neglected graves, side by side.

  “Dat ist Seine Familie?” she asked, mixing German and English together.

  I nodded. “Auch Deine Familie,” I answered. Also your family.

  “Ich habe keine familie mehr,” she answered solemnly. My family is gone.

  “Aber ich bin doch Deine Familie. Nun sind wir eine Familie.” I told her. But I am your family. We are family.

  She only shrugged her frail shoulders. I looked at my parents’ headstones, caught by the overwhelming realization that I would most likely never stand at this spot again. I bowed my head and prayed out loud. “Dear Lord, Thank You for my mother who taught me about Christ. For my father, who taught me how to live my life. I thank You that they are in Your Holy presence. Amen.” I stayed glued to the spot for a long moment until Elisabeth yanked on my sleeve, wanting to go.

  On the way back to the jeep, a man stopped me to trade his Oriental carpet for a loaf of bread. I looked into his eyes and smelled his desperation. “Nein, ich brauche das nicht.” I don’t need it. His eyes glistened with tears. I reached into my pocket and pulled out a chocolate bar and a package of cigarettes that I had been given by an American soldier. The man hugged me in gratitude. On the Black Market, cigarettes were like gold.

  Suddenly, I heard someone shriek my name. “Annika? Bist du es? Meine liebe Annika?” Annika? Is it you? My dear Annika?

  I spun around to face Else Kauffman, the baker’s wife. She grabbed me and hung on to me, as if grasping for a lifeline. When she finally let me go, I saw her eyes dart down to Elisabeth, then recoil, shocked by the child’s appearance. “Frau Kauffman, this is my cousin, Elisabeth.” Quickly, she recovered and put a hand out to Elisabeth, who stared at her without expression. Our words tumbled over each other, trying to catch each other up on our lives. I asked about everyone I could think of, but soon, I had to stop asking. The answers were too difficult to hear.

  “Annika, you have heard about Reverend Bonhoeffer?”

  I nodded solemnly. Dietrich had been executed at Flossenburg, just weeks before the war had ended. Weeks before Hitler committed suicide. Weeks before Germany buckled in surrender. But that was all that I knew.

  Frau Kauffman knew details about his arrest and imprisonment; she told me of the letters smuggled out of prison and the conditions to which he had been subjected. I tried to cement every detail in my mind to tell to Robert. When Frau Kauffman exhausted herself of information, she clapped her hands to her cheeks. “Will we ever be the same? Will Germany ever recover?”

  I took her hands and made her look directly at me. “God has not changed, Frau Kauffman. He is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. He is still here.”

  I felt a hand on my elbow. Private Wheeler interrupted with an apologetic look. “It’s time to go, Mrs. Gordon.”

  Hurriedly, I gave Frau Kauffman my address in Arizona. “Please, keep in touch. And know that I am praying for you. For all of you.” I hugged her good-bye. “Don’t ever forget, Frau Kauffman, Emmanuel! God is with us!”

  A warm light returned to her eyes. “Ja, Ja, Annika. Ich habe nicht vergessen. Emmanuel.” I have not forgotten.

  On the way back to Potsdam, we drove past the Reichstag, the house of the German Parliament. Littering the walls were thousands of bullet pockmarks from the final hours of the war. It had been the location of the last stand of Nazi Germany. Five hundred meters away was the bunker where Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun had committed suicide and where their bodies had been burned, orders given to the Germans because Hitler feared what the Russians might do to his body.

  When I saw the flattened Deutsche Staatsopera, where I had attended concerts with my father, where he had tuned many pianos in his career, I reached my capacity for mourning. All of this senseless loss was now numbingly familiar. I couldn’t take another moment. I was ready to leave this war-weary country.

  I took one last picture, using William’s Mickey Mouse camera, of Private Ryan Wheeler next to his jeep. “God bless you,” I told him, meaning it, as I said good-bye.

  At noon, our plane left the runway to fly to England to join the President’s ships, I watched Germany recede into the distance and let the tears fall. For the first time in two-and-a-half years, I was ready to leave Germany behind. Really, truly behind me. And really, truly ready to embrace my new life. I was finally able to release that tiny little part of me that secretly longed to return to Germany.

  By August 2nd, we were back on the ships heading toward Virginia. The Icebox raised her wooly eyebrows and shook her head when she saw Elisabeth standing behind me. “Top bunk,” she ordered. To me, she muttered, “I don’t know who you’re sleeping with, missy, but you must got some kind of magic.” Then, to my horror, she gave me a sly grin.

  Chapter Five

  Elisabeth meant it when she said she was going to speak only English. Her intense determination reminded me of William, as he first started to develop language acquisition and lip reading skills. He had exhausted me, in a wonderful way. So did Elisabeth. She even practiced her English on the baffled sailors—who were already confused as to why a little skinny waif of a girl was on a Presidential Naval Ship. Soon, they grew weary of her halting questions and shooed her off, plying her with candy bars, apples and oranges.

  At least, I think they offered her treats as a bribe to leave them alone. She had collected a rather large stash of food that she kept squirreled away in her satchel. I didn’t let on that I knew about the stash; I wanted her to feel secure
about her food supply. It was the one gap in her hungry soul that I could help to fill.

  I still had work to do for the press corps but this time, I was translating German documents and newspapers into English. My brain ached, so did my hands from using the typewriter, and my stomach had yet to make peace with the ocean.

  Every time I stopped for a break, Elisabeth would tell me about Danny. I was an eager listener. If I asked her any questions about the last few years, her eyes would narrow and her lips would tighten, as if I was trying to pry national secrets from her. But Danny was fair game.

  I learned that he was a Jewish boy, a few years older than Elisabeth, who had been at the camp much longer than she had. Somehow, he had earned the respect of all of the prisoners, even some guards. While they worked, breaking up rocks during the day, Danny taught English lessons for all those who wanted to learn. He had such a remarkable ability for engineering that the prison guards asked his help to keep their cars running.

  Probably what kept him alive, I surmised.

  But more than anything else, Danny gave prisoners a sense of hope and purpose, a belief in looking to the future. “Danny sounds like Daniel in the Bible,” I said to her.

  “Ja! His mutter told him to be yust like Daniel. To help da people not forget God.”

  And Danny was only fifteen-years-old.

  “Does Danny want to come to America someday?” I asked Elisabeth.

  “Nein, um, no. He vants to go to Palestine. He vants to build rockets. Vhen he is alt genug, um,” she shook her head as if to correct herself, “uh, old enough.”

  Many of the liberated Jewish prisoners hoped to emigrate to Palestine, and not just those from Germany. Displaced Russian Jews, Polish Jews, and countless others no longer felt as if they had a country to which to return.

  “Danny will be pleased to know you’re getting so good at English.”

  “Ja. He told me I vas…” she struggled for the right word.

  “Smart?”

  She looked at me, puzzled.

  “Klug? Ich denke, dass Du sehr klug bist,” I said. Smart? I think you’re very smart.

  Her eyes glinted at me. “Vell, you is not so klug. You speak in Deutsch venn I told you to speak only in da Englisch.”

  I rolled my eyes, accustomed now to Elisabeth’s sharp tongue. I wondered how in the world Aunt Martha and Elisabeth would get along. They were both right about everything.

  With no explanation, I was told I wasn’t permitted to send or receive telegrams on the return trip. Something of import was transpiring. Tension on the ship mounted; an eerie quiet resonated until the reporters were finally briefed: Soon after President Truman arrived in Potsdam, weeks prior, he had received word of the successful atomic bomb test at Trinity Site, New Mexico. On August 6th, while the ships were skimming the Atlantic Ocean, an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan.

  As soon as the ships docked in Virginia and we were permitted to disembark, I hunted for a telephone booth to call Robert in his office but there was no answer. The judge’s nephew drove us to Union Station to catch our train. As the judge’s nephew grabbed our bags out of his trunk, I tried one more time. I knew this was my last chance to find Friedrich Mueller. “Did you know that some large fish are caught using small fish as bait?”

  Distracted as always, the judge’s nephew barely glanced in my direction. “Is that right?” he said, glancing at his watch.

  I sighed. I would have to be more direct. “Did it ever occur to you that if you found Friedrich Mueller, you might just find a lead to Heinrich Mueller?”

  The judge’s nephew snapped his head around and looked me straight in the eyes. At last, I had found a hook.

  I gave the judge’s nephew a fat envelope filled with every piece of information I could remember about Friedrich Mueller. “No promises, Mrs. Gordon,” he said, tucking the envelope in his suit jacket. Still, he did accept the envelope.

  Now, I was ready to go home.

  Before boarding the train, I hunted once more for a telephone booth. This time, Robert answered. “Robert? It’s me, Robert. It’s Louisa.”

  For a long moment, there was only silence on his end. Finally, he found his voice, husky with emotion. “Louisa! How are you? Where are you?”

  We both started talking at once. There was so much to talk about! I didn’t even know where to begin. “Robert, the bomb. So many people.”

  “I know. I know.” His voice sounded like I felt, heavy-hearted and conflicted.

  I glanced over at Elisabeth. She was sitting on the bench, watching people walk by, swinging her small legs. “Robert, I have to warn you. Elisabeth isn’t what I expected.”

  “What do you mean?”

  With a shock, I saw Elisabeth stealthily reach a hand into the purse of the woman seated next to her on the bench. She pulled out a candy bar and slipped it, unnoticed, into her pocket. “It might be wise to prepare Aunt Martha for a child who is starving for love but acts in the opposite manner.”

  “Like half the world.”

  The operator asked for more coins, so I fed in more until I had completely run out of change and we were forced to say a rushed goodbye. As I replaced the receiver on the hook, I smiled. It felt so good to hear Robert’s voice. I wished I could have heard William’s voice, too. I didn’t think about his deafness often, but suddenly it felt like an enormous barrier between us.

  I steeled myself to confront Elisabeth, intending to make her return the candy bar but the woman had left. The candy bar was eaten. Elisabeth smiled broadly, revealing chocolate-covered teeth. I sighed. Next time. Hopefully, though, there wouldn’t be a next time.

  The train trip was halfway to Arizona when the bombing of Nagasaki exploded on the pages of history. I had just witnessed such devastation I felt as if I didn’t really feel what I should have felt. When would this strange numbness wear off?

  America wasn’t numb, though. She was celebrating! By August 14th, the Emperor of Japan surrendered and the war in the Pacific was over. This world war was over! It was finally over.

  The last few days of the train ride were a sight to behold. In every town, celebrations filled the streets. Relief and joy were tangible. With each passing mile, I felt joy waken and seep back into my soul. Finally, the pages began to close on the most deadly war in human history.

  As the train crossed the border into Arizona, I could hardly sit still; I just paced up and down the aisles. Elisabeth told me I was annoying and to go into a different car, but I wouldn’t leave her. I had never felt so happy to be going home in all of my life. It really was home.

  I saw Robert and William waiting for us on the platform at the Tucson station, in almost the same spot as I had said goodbye to them, nearly six weeks earlier. In fact, it was almost the same spot as I had first said hello to Robert, meeting him for the first time, two-and-a-half years ago. I dragged Elisabeth down the platform steps and flew into Robert’s waiting arms. We hugged silently for the longest time, my face buried in his chest. Then I remembered my cousin. “Elisabeth! This is Robert. And this is William!” I hugged William so hard he started coughing.

  “Look, Mom!” He pulled away from me and held out the amplifier around his neck. “It’s the newest model. A Zenith Radionic A3A! Dad got it for me.”

  I admired his new amplifier. “Is it better?”

  He nodded solemnly. “Dog barks too loud.”

  “Then it does work well, William! Dog does bark too loud!” I laughed. I turned to Elisabeth. “Elisabeth, this is my husband, the Reverend Robert Gordon.”

  “Hello, Elisabeth,” Robert said, bending over to shake her small hand. “Welcome to Arizona. Welcome to our home.”

  She looked at him with serious eyes. As always, it was hard to read what she was thinking. “Vhat I call you?” she asked.

  “Robert would be fine.”

  “No. I call you da Reverend.”

  “Whatever you prefer.” He smiled at her. “What do you think of Arizona?”

 
; “Too hot,” she noted bitterly.

  “You’re absolutely right. It is hot. You’re in a desert,” Robert explained. “This is my son…,” he glanced at me and corrected himself, “our son, William.”

  William handed Elisabeth a package of Bazooka bubble gum. She looked at it suspiciously and smelled it. I don’t think she had ever seen such a brightly colored package before. “You chew it. And blow bubbles,” he explained. He blew a huge bubble to impress her. She cocked her head at him, watching curiously.

  “Guess what, Mom? Dad bought us root beer for dinner tonight!” William announced. “And Aunt Martha is making fried chicken!” He turned to Elisabeth. “You can have the drumsticks, if you want,” he added generously.

  William couldn’t have realized that offering food to Elisabeth would charm her.

  Robert tucked the suitcases under his arms as we walked to the parking lot, but not to the Hudson. “It’s a 1934 Chrysler Airflow,” he said with false cheerfulness. “I got a great deal on it. Really great.”

  The Airflow was an ugly looking car. A large steel box with a stubby front end that ended abruptly in an enormous grill.

  I felt a pang of sadness, missing the Hudson. “Roomy, inside,” I said, trying to find something positive to say.

  Robert nodded appreciatively. “Bigger inside than the Hudson. A good size for our family. Power is supplied to the rear wheels by the front mounted in line eight engine,” he explained knowledgably. “It’s really an engineering masterpiece.” He spoke to me as if I knew what he was talking about, but it seemed as if he was trying to reassure himself. He turned the key, but the engine wouldn’t start. He frowned, and tried it again and again. Finally, the engine turned over. “It’s…ahem…hasn’t been a very popular car for Chrysler. There seem to be some…uh…reliability problems.”

  Normally just a two-hour trip from Tucson to Copper Springs, it took us twice as long because the engine kept overheating. Waiting on the side of the road for the engine to cool off gave Elisabeth time to get better acquainted with William, which didn’t go as well as I had hoped.