Page 1 of Hell to Pay
1
PROLOGUE
The Royal Palace, Dresden
13 February 1945
The strangeness of it, like I’m in another life. A life lived in a book, felt from a distance.
The thrumming hum of the bombers, which seemed to reach into my very bones, has gradually died away. So has the weird music of the planes’ cargo: the bombs that whistled and sang their way down through the Dresden night. And the worst thing: the bone-jarring impacts that made the walls tremble and the brick dust fall around us, even here in the cellars beneath theResidenzschloss,whose massive sandstone walls have been standing for hundreds of years. The interior has burned once already, centuries ago. Fire once, again, always. Fire follows my family. My father’s only fear.
The explosions aren’t jolting through my chest anymore, though the ancient building still shudders around me. Outside, the winter night is cold and drizzly, but I feel hot and breathless, and when I look around the cellar, I see wide eyes and bodies shocked into stillness.
The whole thing has lasted, my watch faithfully reports, only fifteen minutes. The electricity has flickered again and again, but it hasn’t failed. As proof of our survival, the all-clear sounds its steady blare, loud enough to hear even down here.
It was bound to happen sometime,I try to tell myself.It’s happened everywhere else. Hamburg, Berlin, Frankfurt, Nuremberg … everywhere. Blockbuster bombs and incendiaries. Always the same.It doesn’t help.
For a confused moment after the siren fades, I think the planes have returned. There’s a sort of dull roaring sound that I can’t place, and the feeling of heat, of choking, hasn’t gone away.Rise above the weakness,I tell myself, as my parents have always told me.You mustn’t give into fear or pain, hunger or thirst. Those are passing sensations, and you are sixteen now and a leader, not a child anymore. You must be a model for others. That’s what it means to be a princess.
Across the cellar, my father sits upright. Unlike our remaining handful of servants, who rushed to the cellar in their nightclothes, he’s still fully dressed in shirt, jacket, and trousers, for he’d been awake, planning with my mother when the sirens began their rising and falling wail. The fear I felt during the raid was less than the fear I’d felt before it. I know that, because when I remember, the panic returns, and I have to force it back.
Report to Gestapo Headquarters, Continental Hotel, at 8:00 A.M. on 14 February.Nothing but a dry, businesslike note, and giving the address, too, as if everybody doesn’t know where the Gestapo do their work.
“Not an arrest,” my father told us, reading it. “A summons only.” We all knew better, including him.
When he stands up, though, from his makeshift seat, he is every inch the King, the unfrozen half of his face calm, the hand that still functions steady as he picks up a flashlight andsays, “Everyone stay where you are until I’ve gone to check whether it’s safe to leave.”
I stand, too, feeling like I can’t be in this stifling place with its weird, shifting shadows for another minute. “I’ll come with you,” I say.
“Stay here, Daisy,” my mother says. “Until we know it’s safe.”
“Father could need help,” I say. “Or a messenger. I can do that.”
Frau Schultz, the housekeeper, says loyally, “The princess shouldn’t go. I’ll go.”
“No,” says Herr Kolbe, my father’s batman, coughing hard even as he rises. “I will go with the King.”
“Or I,” says Franz, the underbutler, back with us from the war to the East that has cost him his leg.
“I’m young,” I say. “I can run, if running is needed. Your bunions are hurting more than ever today, Frau Schultz, and your lungs as well, Herr Kolbe.” I don’t mention Franz’s one leg. It doesn’t seem polite. I’m nearly twitching, though, with the need to escape. The air feels even warmer than before, and I can’t draw a deep enough breath.
My father doesn’t enter the debate. He says, “Come, then, Marguerite,” and heads into the shadows with me gratefully hurrying after. Up the steep staircase to the heavy door at the top, where my father takes hold of the handle and pushes, but the door doesn’t budge. He says, still calm, “Put your young back to use, then, and push.”
We shove the door open slowly, against resistance. I am small, but strong, and it finally gives beneath our weight and effort. It is as if the cellar were trying to imprison us, but of course that isn’t so. Something fell against the door during the bombing, that’s all. Something hard and heavy.
Stone. It’s stone. Stone from the corridor that leads fromthe kitchens. Stone that has fallen through a ceiling that isn’t there anymore.
The air is hotter here. My father says, “Shut the door again,” and we do. He says, “Help me get this rubble out of the way,” and I do that, too, my fingernails breaking as we shove, lift, pull to make a path.
“It’s good we have the axe in the cellar,” my father says. “We may need it to get out next time.” Still sounding so calm, while my own heart is beating into my throat and my breath is coming too fast from effort and strangeness and downright fear.
We hurry through corridors, through the vast kitchen, crunching our way over fragments of Meissen porcelain, dusted by a spilled bag of precious flour and, worse, broken eggs that have just come from the countryside today, their golden yolks taunting us with their uselessness. On we go, lit by my father’s torch and a weird glow almost like daylight, and then out the kitchen door. Where we stop.
Heat. Ash. Smoke. Flames—not just red, but yellow and white and shooting up to the sky—all around us, like a vision of Hell. Running figures everywhere. A mother pushing a pram whose wheels jolt over the uneven cobblestones; an old woman and a younger, probably her daughter, holding onto each other as they stumble along; a woman in a kerchief pushing a handcart with two children perched atop her bundles; and dozens more, all headed in one direction: to the river, the mighty, slow-moving Elbe that bisects the city. Dodging around a crater in the middle of the road that could swallow a car, and hurrying toward … something. Escape, I suppose, but what escape is there in grass and trees and flowing water? Women and children and old men, for the brothers and fathers and sons are gone.
And the silent, still figures sprawled on the cobblestones,an arm reaching out from beneath the rubble. I see a foot. Not a body. A foot. The horror of that moment of recognition.
“The railway station,” I say. “It’s the refugees, isn’t it? But why aren’t they in the tunnels? Why aren’t they?—”
