A Bridge Across the Ocean

by Susan Meissner

  “Will I see you again?” Katrine asked.

  “I’m counting on it,” the lieutenant replied. And then he leaned in and kissed Katrine on the cheek. The gesture was so gentle and painfully beautiful that Annaliese felt an immediate ache in her gut.

  “Write me!” John Sawyer said as he got into his vehicle with the rest of his men. He drove off with a cheery honking of the horn. A feather-light snow began to fall as his jeep grew smaller in the distance.

  “You’ve only known him three weeks,” Annaliese said when Katrine joined her at the threshold.

  “It seems like longer.” Katrine shrugged, as if to suggest Annaliese surely knew that love didn’t take note of calendar pages.

  It might have been many long months before Katrine would have seen John Sawyer again had the Germans not mounted a fortified attack up and down the Belgian border. On the afternoon of the seventeenth of December, the local officials in Malmédy, knowing that a clash between the Allies and Germans was imminent, recommended evacuation.

  Since it was a Sunday afternoon, Katrine was not at the school when she and Annaliese saw through the front window civilians and Allied soldiers alike racing about to escape or prepare for what was headed their way. They did not know that a few kilometers south in St. Vith, a battle for control had already begun and the little village was being pummeled by artillery on both sides. Katrine’s childhood home was already gone; her grandfather had escaped with other villagers to a nearby slate quarry.

  “I don’t know where we would go,” Katrine said to Annaliese as the sound of multiple artillery rocked the air from somewhere close by and much of the town fled west.

  Annaliese pulled her sweater tighter around her. “I am fine with us staying here. I don’t want to run, Katrine.”

  “Let’s get the cellar ready.” Katrine pulled the front door shut and they gathered food and water and extra blankets to take with them. At a little after four thirty, they were just about to descend the stairs when a pounding sounded at the back door, loud and fierce.

  The two women froze at the entrance to the cellar.

  “Katrine!” A voice from outside the kitchen door called out.

  “It’s John!” Katrine ran to the back door and yanked it open. The lieutenant stood on the step covered in blood. He carried in his arms one of the men who’d also slept at the duplex, his olive-drab uniform jacket awash in crimson.

  The attack on John’s battalion that afternoon would later be known as the Malmédy Massacre. His convoy, traveling on the road between Malmédy and Baugnez, had been fired upon by an SS tank division that quickly outpowered them. The Americans surrendered, but instead of taking the nearly one hundred men prisoner, the SS officers had marched the Americans into a field and then begun to shoot them execution-style. Those who fell but showed signs of life were shot again. The bodies of those already dead were riddled with more bullets. Some of the Americans fled into a nearby café, but the Germans set the building on fire and then shot those who ran out. John had survived because dead comrades lay on top of him and their blood had spilled onto him. He’d held his breath until his lungs stung as the SS officers laughed and picked off those whose labored breathing sent puffs of white into the frozen air.

  The SS officers finally had no one left to kill. John waited until they began to return to their tanks and vehicles before crawling out from under the dead to see if any of his comrades were still alive. He’d found only one man with a pulse, a young sergeant named Warren, who’d been shot three times in the chest. Blood from his wounds had run past his neck and up underneath his helmet, making it look like he’d been shot in the head as well. As John staggered away with Warren in his arms, more than eighty Americans lay dead in the snow behind him.

  He’d made it back to Katrine’s house using anything he could for cover, a house, a stand of trees, a barn, all the while telling the young man named Warren to hold on, hold on.

  John told Katrine and Annaliese what had happened as the women rushed about the kitchen to get towels to stanch the young sergeant’s bleeding until they could get him to the local hospital. Annaliese understood enough of what John said to know SS officers had killed unarmed prisoners of war in cold blood. It wasn’t until Katrine turned the wounded man over to take off his coat that she saw that his eyes were open and vacant.

  “He’s gone, John,” Katrine said, softly, laying her hand on his arm.

  “No! He was alive when I found him!” John placed his fingers against the man’s slickened throat, feeling for a pulse. He grabbed the man by the shoulders. “Warren! Warren!”

  John shook the dead man harder and continued to shout his name. Warren stared back at him, his face slack, his eyes unblinking. The lieutenant pulled the body into his lap and cradled the man’s head and torso in his arms as he softly cried. Katrine sidled up to him and put her arms around him, folding John in close to her bosom.

  “You did all you could, John. You did everything right.” Katrine said other soft words to him, but Annaliese did not know what they meant.

  She sat on the floor across from them and watched her best friend comfort the grieving man, marveling at the depth of their newfound devotion to each other in the midst of horrific circumstances. She wanted with all her being to step into Katrine’s body and experience that kind of love.

  Four days after the massacre, and while John was still in the city, Malmédy was attacked by German troops that were repelled by American forces. On Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, the city was bombed repeatedly by American artillery in friendly fire meant to halt the German advance. Two hundred civilians were killed. Katrine and Annaliese emerged from the cellar to find the duplex leveled and much of the town destroyed. They met up with Katrine’s grandfather in Verviers with other evacuees, and from there made their way to Brussels, where John said he would meet up with her again when the war was at last over.

  Katrine wrote to John twice a week, whether she heard from him or not. As the weeks wore on she would sometimes get five V-mails from him at once and then a month would pass with no word at all. The cruelest of winters eased into spring as the Allies moved steadily east into the interior of Germany. As much as Annaliese wanted the world to be at peace again, she was afraid for the war to end. At some point she would need to move on with her life, and there seemed to be only a wide, dark sea ahead of her with no way to cross it. As long as there was a war, that vast unknown existed for everyone.

  On the seventh of May, Germany at last surrendered. In Brussels, as in every city in league with the Allies, joyful revelers took to the streets. Katrine began to count the days until John would meet up with her again in Brussels. While she waited, she took a job translating at Allied Forces headquarters, known as SHAEF. Annaliese made a modest income caring for an invalid neighbor across the street from the little house they rented. She earned enough to pay her share of the expenses, and the job didn’t require her to divulge that she was a German citizen. Katrine’s grandfather went back to St. Vith to rebuild the house he had lived in since he was a boy, after extracting a promise from Katrine that he would one day see her again.

  By the time John and Katrine were reunited in Brussels in August, it had been fourteen months since Annaliese had left Rolf. She wondered if he had been arrested or imprisoned as an enemy of the occupying forces. She lay in bed every night trying not to nurse the hope that he was sitting in a cell somewhere and learning what it was like to be trapped and forgotten. But he was a noncombatant Nazi who wore a uniform because he liked it. Had individuals like Rolf who hadn’t killed all those people at the camps been made prisoners of war? Surely he’d known all along what Hitler was doing to the Jews who had been rounded up all over Europe and sent away to the labor camps. Had they arrested him for knowing? Even if they had, she supposed that eventually he’d be released. Rolf was adept at smooth talk. It was why he had been assigned to the Ministry of Propaganda.


  As Annaliese had expected, Katrine married John Sawyer as soon as permission from his commander was granted. The ceremony was a rushed civil affair, since John was due to be billeted back to the States in September, and yet Annaliese could see how happy and at peace they both were. Katrine wore a blue silk suit borrowed from a coworker and carried a nosegay of white roses. After the courthouse ceremony, a party was held at a restaurant popular with American servicemen. Annaliese kept as low a profile as she could, keeping her wedding ring in view so that none of John’s American friends would ask her to dance or strike up a conversation with her and find out she was German. Katrine had already told John who she really was and why she’d run away from her marriage, and while he seemed genuinely moved by her predicament, she could see the conflict in his eyes at the thought of her being married to a Nazi official after all he’d seen the Nazis do. Annaliese wanted no one else to know.

  Katrine insisted Annaliese stay with her and John in Brussels for as long as she wanted. But both women knew the time was soon coming when John would be transferred back to the States and that Katrine would eventually follow him. What Annaliese would do then was a prospect neither woman wanted to imagine.

  When John suggested Katrine stay with her British grandfather after he returned to the States and until her own travel to America was secured, she came up with an idea.

  “Come with me to London,” she said to Annaliese. “We’ll go to the American embassy to plead your case so that you can join John and me in America. You can make a new life for yourself there and you can stay with us until you get on your feet. We will tell the people at the embassy what your husband did to you. It was wrong what he did, Annaliese.”

  “I could never . . . To come live with you is asking too much,” Annaliese said.

  “It’s not too much. It wouldn’t be for forever, just until you can make your own way. I will help you. John and I both will,” Katrine assured her. “And if it takes a while to get you to the States, at least Rolf will have a harder time trying to find you if you’re in England.”

  That had been the plan.

  It had started out just as they had hoped. There had been minimal interest in Annaliese’s German passport in Bruges, where the two women boarded a ferry to cross the Channel, and even less curiosity at customs in Felixstowe. They were met at London’s Paddington Station by Katrine’s maternal grandfather, a genial man obviously grateful that his granddaughter wanted to spend her last few months this side of the Atlantic with him.

  Wallace Goodwin lived in a quiet, woodsy suburb south of Windsor, and for the first week of their stay, he spent every minute he could catching up with Katrine. His job as an exporter eventually pulled him away, though, and as autumn fell over London, he was at home less often. The war had virtually stopped all trade with other nations and there was still much work to be done to reestablish lost economic ties. The trips to the U.S. embassy began not just for Katrine but for Annaliese as well. Katrine’s embassy visits were always long but relatively uncomplicated affairs. Annaliese’s singular woes were of little importance by comparison. After three months of quiet inquiry—she had to beg embassy officials not to try to contact the husband she was estranged from—she’d yet to find a compassionate soul willing to try to bend the rules of immigration for her.

  Katrine’s extensive travel arrangements began to come through just before Christmas, and by the first week of 1946, everything was in order. Wallace left for an extended trip to India a week before Katrine was to report to the army base at Tidworth, a detail that he was almost glad about since he’d already be gone when Katrine left for America. Wallace told Annaliese she could stay at his house while he was away, and if she happened to still be there when he returned in April, he’d help her find a room to rent. She looked so much like Katrine, he’d told her, it would be almost like having his granddaughter still there.

  Two evenings before Katrine was to leave for the first leg of her trip to America, she and Annaliese had taken Wallace’s car and gone to the cemetery to visit the graves of Katrine’s parents. The day had been bitter cold. A biting, freezing rain had started to fall when they got back in the car to head home so that Katrine could finish packing.

  Annaliese wanted to be happy for her best friend and what lay ahead, but her thoughts turned melancholy as Katrine drove on slick roads frosted with rain that had turned to ice.

  “Don’t despair, Annaliese,” Katrine had said, just before the world turned upside down. “There is always a place somewhere in the world where the sun is shining.”

  “Not for me,” Annaliese had replied, gloomily.

  Katrine had turned then, reached over with one hand, and touched Annaliese’s arm. “Especially for you.”

  Their gazes met and for a second there was only that shared moment of purest affection between them.

  And then suddenly the car was spinning, turning, tumbling off the road into an icy, brambled ditch, already dark with twilight’s first tendrils of shadow.

  Twenty-six

  RMS QUEEN MARY

  1946

  The luxury liner that had sported black and crimson paint before the war was still wearing its battle-gray camouflage when the war brides stepped off the bus that had transported them from Tidworth to the pier at Southampton.

  It was easy to see why the RMS Queen Mary had been nicknamed the Grey Ghost during her time as a troop carrier. The ship seemed almost on the verge of disappearing into its surroundings, its image melding into the colorless sky and water.

  “She was much prettier before the war,” Phoebe assured Annaliese as they walked across the macadam to gangplanks and more registration tables.

  She’s lovely, was all Annaliese wanted to say. The ship was her means to a new life without Rolf. She could sense, even as she stood gazing up at the smokestacks pointed toward the clouds, that the ship was a safe place. It was a temporary haven between two worlds—the one she was desperate to escape and the one far away that she knew nothing about.

  “Did you know there was one crossing during the war when sixteen thousand soldiers were aboard the Queen Mary? Sixteen thousand people on a ship built for three thousand. Can you imagine?”

  Annaliese shook her head.

  “I read about it in the Telegraph. The men had to take turns sleeping. And they slept wherever they could. On the deck, in the empty swimming pool, in the kitchen. Everywhere!”

  Annaliese smiled politely and gave no comment. She was itching to get aboard and be enveloped by the aura of welcome that seemed to be emanating from the immense ship. Douglas toddled between them, babbling and pointing and walking at far too slow a pace.

  “I suppose all the pretty furniture and paintings are still in storage. All of that was removed when she was made a troop carrier.” Phoebe seemed to sense Annaliese’s impatience and scooped up Douglas so that they could walk faster. “But still. It’s the Queen Mary! The Duke and Duchess of Windsor have sailed her many times. And Winston Churchill. And Hollywood movie stars. I can’t believe how lucky we are!”

  They arrived at the first of several checkpoints to pass through before crossing the gangplanks. Annaliese again had to show Katrine’s documents and again offer an explanation as to why her passport was in such terrible shape. And again she held her breath as each official scrutinized her documents and compared them with paperwork they had been provided with.

  Finally the women arrived at the last table, where cabin assignments and keys were being handed out alphabetically by last name.

  Phoebe grabbed Annaliese’s arm and pulled her toward the front of the table. “Please, can’t my friend Katrine room with me?” Phoebe implored. “She’s Belgian and doesn’t speak English very well.”

  The woman in the Red Cross uniform who was handing out room assignments smiled cordially but shook her head. “I’m sorry. Stateroom assignments have already been made, my dear. I am sure she will be
just fine in the room she’s been given. You can arrange to meet each other after meals and such.”

  “No!” Phoebe exclaimed. “She really doesn’t manage well without me. She needs me. Please?”

  Phoebe’s begging was drawing attention that Annaliese did not want thrust on her. She yearned to be as invisible as the ship against the gray February sky. “I will be all right,” she murmured.

  Phoebe turned on her and admonished Annaliese with her eyes to be quiet.

  But the Red Cross official had heard Annaliese speak.

  “She sounds able enough to speak English,” the woman said, a knowing smile on her lips.

  Phoebe leaned forward. “Please let her room with me. I’m afraid of the water. Terribly afraid. I’d feel much better if she were with me.”

  The matron consulted her list. “Well, there’s actually one empty bunk in the room you’ve been assigned, Mrs. Rogers. If you want to see about getting Mrs. Sawyer another key for the cabin, I suppose she can sleep there as well as anywhere. That’s up to her, though, if she wants to move.”

  Phoebe squeezed Annaliese’s arm. “You’ll switch, won’t you?”

  Annaliese nodded. “I don’t mind. Please, let’s just get aboard.”

  “You’ll have to go to her original room assignment to get her luggage when it’s brought up,” the matron called after them as they moved away. “B-24.”

  They moved away from the table toward a gangplank, every step feeling like both a gift and a stripping away. Seconds later Annaliese crossed from the walkway to the tea-brown planks of the promenade deck, Phoebe chattering all the while. Her heart ached with longing for Katrine and she had to steel herself against collapsing into tears. They found their cabin, A-152, down a carpeted hallway on the starboard side, after ascending a brass-railed central staircase. The room, like the hallway, was paneled in wood that needed polish, but it was beautiful nonetheless. Twin bunks on either side of the room had been made up with flowered sheets and blankets.