“It’s a body,” another girl suggested. Black hair, pigtails, and a crooked part down the center.
“It’s another bomb!”
It was too slow to be a bomb.
With the adolescent spirit still burning lightly in my arms, I walked a few hundred meters with the rest of them. Like the girls, I remained focused on the sky. The last thing I wanted was to look down at the stranded face of my teenager. A pretty girl. Her whole death was now ahead of her.
Like the rest of them, I was taken aback when a voice lunged out. It was a disgruntled father, ordering his kids inside. The redhead reacted.
Her freckles lengthened into commas. “But, Papa, look.”
The man took several small steps and soon figured out what it was. “It’s the fuel,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“The fuel,” he repeated. “The tank.” He was a bald man in disrupted bedclothes. “They used up all their fuel in that one and got rid of the empty container. Look, there’s another one over there.”
“And there!”
Kids being kids, they all searched frantically at that point, trying to find an empty fuel container floating to the ground.
The first one landed with a hollow thud.
“Can we keep it, Papa?”
“No.” He was bombed and shocked, this papa, and clearly not in the mood. “We cannot keep it.”
“Why not?”
“I’m going to ask my papa if I can have it,” said another of the girls.
“Me too.”
Just past the rubble of Cologne, a group of kids collected empty fuel containers, dropped by their enemies. As usual, I collected humans. I was tired. And the year wasn’t even halfway over yet.
THE VISITOR
A new ball had been found for Himmel Street soccer. That was the good news. The somewhat unsettling news was that a division of the NSDAP was heading toward them.
They’d progressed all the way through Molching, street by street, house by house, and now they stood at Frau Diller’s shop, having a quick smoke before they continued with their business.
There was already a smattering of air-raid shelters in Molching, but it was decided soon after the bombing of Cologne that a few more certainly wouldn’t hurt. The NSDAP was inspecting each and every house in order to see if its basement was a good enough candidate.
From afar, the children watched.
They could see the smoke rising out of the pack.
Liesel had only just come out and she’d walked over to Rudy and Tommy. Harald Mollenhauer was retrieving the ball. “What’s going on up there?”
Rudy put his hands in his pockets. “The party.” He inspected his friend’s progress with the ball in Frau Holtzapfel’s front hedge. “They’re checking all the houses and apartment blocks.”
Instant dryness seized the interior of Liesel’s mouth. “For what?”
“Don’t you know anything? Tell her, Tommy.”
Tommy was perplexed. “Well, I don’t know.”
“You’re hopeless, the pair of you. They need more air-raid shelters.”