‘I love you too,’ I said, wanting to hold on to this moment forever.

We called her Johanna, after my father. He was so pleased when we told him. Tears filled his eyes as he held his newest granddaughter, cradling her head with care. Greta didn’t like this attention going to her new sister. She jumped up and down, her dark curls bouncing around her head, and pulled the new ribbon out of her hair in frustration. When that didn’t work, she grabbed at Vati’s trouser leg. Finally Mutti picked her up, whispering bribes of sugary delights to her.

I wrote to Tante Susie with the news of Johanna’s birth but did not receive a reply. She and Onkel Werner had refused to make contact with us since we left, although I had tried. I wondered what had happened to make her so bitter. Mutti had no idea either. Tante Susie had also cut her off. It made me very sad. The war had taken so much away that I felt we should treasure the family we had. Tante Susie had been good to me and I missed her boys.

*

Towards the end of summer, just as I was beginning to surface from the haze of exhaustion, there was a knock at the door.

Erich answered, and when I joined him, I found a very attractive woman in her thirties standing on the porch, deep golden hair peeking out from under her headscarf. Erich stood limp with shock. He looked like he’d seen a ghost.

The woman was white faced and distraught, dark eyes flashing. She pointed an accusing finger at me. ‘Is this the whore you married?’ she screamed.

I jerked back as if I’d been slapped.

‘Who is this?’ I whispered to Erich, clutching at his arm. Fear churned my gut and raced through my body like wildfire, standing my hairs on end. Something was terribly wrong.

‘This is Inga, my wife.’

‘But she’s dead.’

‘I most certainly am not,’ spat the woman. ‘And neither are you,’ she said, turning her wrath on Erich. ‘Alive and well, I see. The rumours were true. I had to see for myself.’

‘How can it be?’ Erich, still clutching the door, had found his voice. ‘I was told that you were dead.’ His voice was rough as if he hadn’t used it in a long time. ‘The children?’ I saw the desperation on his face. All I wanted to do was gather him up in my arms, protect him from this onslaught but I didn’t dare get involved, not yet.

‘They’re alive,’ she said flatly. ‘No thanks to you.’

Erich stiffened. ‘Are they here?’

Inga shook her head. ‘I came on my own.’

‘You’d better come inside. There’s a lot to discuss.’ I had to take control, determined to keep a cool, calm exterior for Erich’s sake.

Inga hesitated, then nodded and walked inside, head held high, pausing to take in her surroundings, assessing how we were living and what we had. Erich followed her in a daze. I could hear Greta crying in her bedroom.

‘Please sit down,’ I said, gesturing to the tiny dining table. ‘I’ll make some tea.’ I turned my attention to my shell-shocked husband. ‘Erich, can you get Greta and put her in the playpen? I don’t think she’ll go back to sleep now.’

I went to the kitchen to prepare the tea but I couldn’t help but glimpse back at Inga every so often, to make sure I wasn’t dreaming, to embed on my startled mind that this was real. I watched her remove her scarf, revealing hair swept back in a fashionable up do. She was thin, as most of us still were, and hardship had taken its toll in the lines of worry etched into her pale face.

Inga’s eyes narrowed as Erich brought Greta to the playpen, watching him enviously, greedily as he bounced our daughter in his arms, soothing her until he could put her down. He kept his back to Inga and didn’t return to the table until I arrived with the tea, taking longer than he needed to pacify Greta. He sat and stared at Inga while I poured. The tension rose in the room as they each took the measure of the other, neither speaking a word until I sat next to him, steaming cups on saucers in front of each of us, a plate of plain biscuits in the middle of the table.

‘Where have you been?’ said Erich finally, his voice wobbling dangerously. ‘I looked everywhere for you. Dear God, I searched a bombed bunker in Berlin full of dead people looking for you. Nobody had seen you in Sagan or Elend.’

‘What are you talking about? I sent you postcards and telegrams telling you when and where we were going. Don’t tell me you didn’t receive them.’

‘I received a postcard telling me you were going to Berlin and then on to Elend if Berlin wasn’t safe.’ He slammed his hands on the table in anger and frustration.

Inga didn’t flinch, only stared at him belligerently.

‘Then I received a phone call from the police in Berlin telling me they had found an envelope with my details on it in the public bunker at the Berlin train station. I went to find you and the children, to identify your bodies during the salvage operation, and I saw things that will never leave me. I expected to find your mutilated bodies, but I didn’t. I thought you were all dead and I wished I was dead myself.’

I remembered too well how he had felt and slipped my hand under the table to squeeze his knee in silent support.

‘I couldn’t believe when I received a telegram a few weeks later telling me that you had left Berlin and were in Elend,’ he continued. ‘I was overjoyed and arranged for leave to come to you and bring you back to München with me. Then we discovered that the telegram had been originally sent from Berlin, not Elend, a month before. You must have left then.’

‘No,’ said Inga, leaning forward in her seat. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. You’re just making this all up. I sent you that postcard towards the end of January. I never went to Berlin. We didn’t leave until the second week of February because we waited until Gottlieb could take us all the way to Elend. He drove us there and we arrived in Elend three days after we left Sagan. I sent you the telegram then with our address. It was mid-February. I never heard anything from you.’

Greta began to cry again, upset by the loud, angry voices. I stood quietly and went to her wondering how this was going to end.

‘I sent you and the children letters as soon as I received your telegram,’ Erich countered, face flushed with anger. ‘I never heard back from any of you. When I discovered the date, I thought maybe you didn’t arrive in Elend at all. I pulled all the strings I could to find you. I used military channels, investigators, the police and anyone who knew you but nobody had seen you anywhere.’ I watched him count on his fingers to demonstrate the ways he had tried to find her. ‘The military and police investigators we used both came to the same conclusion. They told me that you had perished while on the run from the Red Army – where, they couldn’t say, maybe in the air-raid strike in Berlin, maybe somewhere between Sagan, Berlin and Elend. I did everything I could to find out what had happened to you.’

‘You liar,’ spat Inga. ‘We were in Elend all along. Nobody came looking for us.’ She glared at Erich with such venom and hatred, I was suddenly afraid for him. I put Greta back in the playpen and returned to his side.

Erich stood abruptly and leant across the table towards Inga, his face contorted in fury. ‘How dare you call me a liar!’ he roared.

Inga recoiled but stared at him with loathing.

‘You have no idea what I went through to find you. If you’d left when I asked you to, none of this would have happened.’

The threat of violence loomed ominously over us, shimmering like the oppressive heat of the summer sun. I had never seen him so angry.

Greta was crying again, tears running down her little cheeks. My heart ached for her and I desperately wanted to pick her up but I didn’t dare move. She would have to stay there a little longer.

‘It’s all about you, isn’t it?’ shouted Inga.

My heart leapt into my mouth, afraid that this could escalate to something physical. I had to do something, before one of them reached for the other. I laid my hand on Erich’s arm but he didn’t seem to notice. He was shaking.

‘Erich, you’re scaring Greta.’ I pulled on his arm, trying to get him to sit down. That got through. He looked at me with the effort of keeping his temper under control and sat slowly.

He shook his head. ‘Why Elend? Why not Berlin like we agreed?’

‘Berlin wasn’t safe with the air-raids and the Red Army advancing. If you care to remember, Gottlieb’s family is from Elend, so we went there and waited for you. You never came. We couldn’t find you after the war and we assumed you were dead.’

Erich looked startled, like he’d been punched in the stomach. I felt similarly stunned. We had never imagined that the tables could be reversed and Inga and his children had thought him dead. The wind went out of him, understanding how that knowledge might have cost his family, especially his two children.

Inga looked smug. ‘It’s not all about you,’ she reminded him.

‘Where are the children now? Where are you living?’

Inga picked up her cup of tea and sipped, as if she had all the time in the world and this was just a friendly chat. ‘Still in Elend. Gottlieb’s mother is looking after them.’

‘You’re in the Russian Zone,’ I said, incredulous, unable to hold my tongue. ‘How did you get out?’

Inga shrugged, her icy glare barely thrown in my direction. ‘It’s not too hard, especially when I had a very good reason to try.’ She turned her attention back to Erich. ‘I met someone who said you were still alive, living in Bad Windsheim. I had to come and see for myself. It was worth the risk. When I arrived in Windsheim, I was told that you were living in Ickleheim with your wife.’ She put down the teacup onto the saucer with a loud crash. ‘I couldn’t believe it was true, that you would abandon us. I had to know for sure.’ She had tears in her eyes but they were tears of fury as well as pain.