The City in Flames by Elisabeth von Berrinberg Read Free Book Online Page A

alert to any noise like the engine of an airplane, picked up its approach. The short ravine lined with blackthorn bushes ahead was a good hideout. Leaving the cart behind, we ran toward the dense scrub to conceal ourselves from the plane. A flock of birds took noisily to the air.
    “They could give us away!” I said as we crawled deeper into the bushes.
    “Don’t be silly!” my sister answered. “They know where we are. Where else is there to go in the middle of a country road?”
    With our cart abandoned on the road, we awaited the attack. But none of the bullets came near us. The plane targeted the water barrel instead. Full of holes, the barrel leaked its water onto the ground.
    “Fink!” my sister shouted, waving her fist at the plane, which had long disappeared into the clouds.
    My mother, who had also spotted the airplane, quickly scanned the road through her binoculars. The rolling hills partly obscured her view, so she could not see us from her vantage point. But when she saw the plane dive toward the ravine, she knew that was where we had to be.
    “The pilot,” she answered our question now, “he wore a red scarf.”
    It didn’t matter to us what color scarf the pilot wore. We were too tired to care at that point, but my mother was trying to tell us how low the plane was flying.
    “I yelled at him and waved at him,” she continued, still excited.
    “What did you tell him?” my sister asked, trying to keep a straight face.
    My mother was not short of an answer: “I told him that he couldn’t shoot at you, that you were only a couple of innocent kids. ‘Here!’ I told him. ‘Shoot at me if you have to shoot somebody, but leave my children alone!’”
    My mother meant what she said. She stood out there in the open, waving at the pilot in desperation, hoping to save us from death. Only God knows what the pilot thought when he saw my mother standing there in the middle of an open field, waving at him.
    A thought occurred to us as to why only our water barrel was attacked, while we got away with only a few tears in our skin from the thorny bushes. After several mishaps at the fountain, we brought along a piece of unused stovepipe, complete with a curved knee. We used this to guide the water into the barrel without having to lift it from the cart. Lifting a hundred-liter barrel full of water was too strenuous for undernourished girls.
    A barrel mounted on a cart was quite innocent-looking by itself. But with a stovepipe attached to it, it may have resembled a piece of artillery from the air.
    So now that our water barrel had suffered from a case of mistaken identity, it was no longer of any use to us. We had lost not only our water supply for the day, but also our means to carry it in the future. One more hardship was added to our lives.

    Water barrel artillery
    Back to front

Chapter Twelve
Village Life
    Standing in line in Würzburg was a tiring experience, but here it was even more exhausting. The village was not prepared for the sudden rise in population, and more and more refugees arrived seeking shelter. This situation affected everyone. The bakers could not keep up with the demand for bread, and many times a long wait, often in a line the entire length of the main street, was in vain.
    Rules made by the shopkeepers were grudgingly obeyed by the villagers. One such rule allowed only one loaf of bread per family. Everyone knew each other, and no one was able to break this rule. But we were strangers, and we hoped that might be an advantage for us. We arrived at the bakery at different times. We stood at reasonable distances from each other and by no means let it be known we were related. With this plan we hoped to buy three loaves in one day. But the woman behind the counter noticed a certain resemblance between my sister and me. Identical twins. Of course! We should have known better. Well, we got two loaves among the three of us, and in only two hours of waiting, which was more than we hoped