Free The City in Flames by Elisabeth von Berrinberg Page A

white handkerchief. Before the Americans left, the soldier in charge pointed to the colander on my father’s head. “You can take that off now,” he said with a grin.
    Immediately we began to construct a flag of surrender. Minutes later, a white bedsheet mounted on a broomstick and attached to the chimney, blew proudly in the wind.
    A new phase in our lives had begun.

    “You can take it off now”
    Back to front

Chapter Seventeen
The Metal Battle: The Catfight Over an Airplane Wing
    Flowers of various sorts were blooming in the fields, the fruit trees were beginning to show their harvest, the vegetables were sprouting, and even the weeds were growing in abundance. Summer had arrived.
    The front had passed us. It was east of us now, making its way to Berlin.
    What a beautiful feeling! To walk about without fear of bombs, or the machine guns of low-flying planes. Now we could watch planes pass over us and perhaps even wave at them. I recalled the time when my mother waved at a pilot out of desperation, pleading with him not to shoot us.
    The black tar paper on our roof had long been in need of repair. The crows picked holes in it, and whenever my father sealed up the holes, the birds picked new ones.
    My father grew weary of sleeping with an umbrella every time it rained through the night. Sometimes he would place a pan on his stomach—mostly during thunderstorms, when the rain was especially heavy. But the steady drip, drip, drip kept all of us awake. That is, all of us except my father; one rainy night, after he had fallen asleep, he turned over. My mother’s resulting protests convinced him to resort to the umbrella.
    The holes in the roof eventually outnumbered the available pots and pans we had to set under the leaks. Since there was nothing else for us to do on rainy days, my sister and I invented a game, “Catch the Rain.” With a coffee cup in each hand, we leaped from one end of the cabin to the other, calculating the timing of each drip so it would land in the cup. For every drop we caught, we gave ourselves a point. To make the game more interesting, we decided to do it to music. The old hand-cranked gramophone, a bit outdated, but still in working condition, supplied us with a variety of tunes. Amongst them were songs sung by the much-celebrated voice of Enrico Caruso and “Schmaltz Hits” and “Who Rolled the Cheese to the Railroad Station?”
    It was a challenging game, and we were almost sad when the tar paper was replaced with metal from a plane that was hit in a dogfight with a German aircraft. It happened during our hibernation beneath the floorboards. A neighbor witnessed the scene. He claimed to have seen one of them go down, but he couldn’t tell which one.
    Afterward, the sun brought it to our attention. It caused a bright glare, a reflection we could see whenever the sun struck the bright object in the distant field at a certain angle.
    “It must be that plane that crashed,” we figured, and soon we set out to investigate. Getting close, we had our doubts about whether it was a plane and not another dud. The bulky mass rested in a vertical position, part of it penetrating the earth. We had seen our share of bombs, not only as they fell from the sky, but also at close range in Nazi exhibits, where they were set on pedestals as if they were art. We soon realized this was not a bomb.
    Black letters and numbers were stenciled on the olive-green paint that coated the metal, a heavy aluminum. None of the writing made any sense; it was foreign to us.
    “Just what we need for our roof!” my mother exclaimed.
    “Where is the rest of it?” I wondered, scanning the area. There was no trace of any other debris. It was only part of a plane that we found, probably a wing tip, from what we could tell by the shape of the metal.
    “We need tools to pry it loose,” my mother said.
    Equipped with a spade, to dig out the embedded part, and our clothesline, with which we planned to tow the wing away, we