Retreat: A Love Story

By John Guzlowski

Magda was a pretty young war widow on her lunch break. Hans was a soldier on furlough, a Bavarian farm boy Magda found wandering lost in Berlin. After two weeks together, she sent him on his way—back to the nightmare of the Eastern Front.

Nine months later, Magda is trying to survive as her city is bombed to rubble, while Hans is somewhere in the Ukraine, slogging through snow and mud to find his way back to her, struggling to maintain his humanity despite the horrors he has survived and the brutality he has witnessed—and perpetrated.

Retreat is a story of the terrible costs of war, of love amid crushing defeat, of complicity—and redemption.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kasva Press
• Release date: Mar 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9781948403245

John Guzlowski

Born in a refugee camp in Germany after World War II, John Guzlowski came to America with his family as a Displaced Person in 1951. His parents had been Polish slave laborers in Nazi Germany during the war. Growing up in “Murdertown” — the tough immigrant neighborhoods around Humboldt Park in Chicago — he met hardware-store clerks with Auschwitz tattoos on their wrists, Polish cavalry officers who still mourned their dead horses, and women who had walked from Siberia to Iran to escape the Russians. In much of his work, Guzlowski remembers and honors the experiences and ultimate strength of these voiceless survivors.An acclaimed poet, Guzlowski is also a respected teacher, literary critic, and author of both fiction and nonfiction. His recent poetry collection 'Echoes of Tattered Tongues' won the 2017 Montaigne Medal of the Eric Hoffer Awards as one of the most thought-provoking books of the year.Guzlowski received his BA in English Literature from the University of Illinois, Chicago, and his MA and PhD in English from Purdue University. He is a Professor Emeritus of English Literature at Eastern Illinois University, and currently lives in Lynchburg, Virginia.

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Chapter 1

Monday, January 17, 1944, Berlin

Four hours later, the British bombers were still over Berlin, hammering it to rubble and dust.

Through the cellar walls, Magda listened to the muffled heartbeat, thud, thud, thud, of their blockbuster bombs falling in the distance west of the city. A moment ago, she had thought she heard the wail of the all clear siren, but she was wrong. It was just a cry from one of the other women pressed together there in the cellar.

Opening her eyes, Magda looked around. There were scores of people, maybe a hundred. She could see them huddled against walls and lying in the open. Some were strangers who had run in from the street when the air-raid sirens first sounded, but most were neighbors from her building, and many of them were awake.

But they weren’t talking.

No neighbor said, Well, Oskar, what did you think of the ersatz coffee we had after dinner tonight?

Or, "Did you see that new film with Emil Jannings? Bismarck’s Dismissal? I liked him better in The Last Laugh."

There was no talk of coffee or movies or books or cocktail parties or weddings or birthdays.

The eyes of Magda’s neighbors met hers for a second or two and then turned to look at something else. After four hours of waiting for the bombs to fall and bury them, their eyes were empty of everything except fear. They weren’t curious about anything; they just stared at a shadow or a reinforced pillar or the form of a child sleeping peacefully on the floor in the dim yellow light. She knew that her own eyes must look the same to them as theirs did to her.

Early in the war, when the German planes were bombing London, Magda had often wondered what it must be like for the British to live with such terror and fear. Now she knew.

In front of her, her neighbors’ children were sleeping. The poor children… But at least they didn’t have to know what their parents knew.

The young could sleep anywhere, it seemed—some with their bodies pressed up against their mothers and fathers, and others with their heads pillowed on their arms in the large square in the middle of the cellar. For the children, the sirens signaled adventure, and they played themselves to sleep in the cellar, running hard, twirling, falling down and getting up, and then doing it all again. Their usually strict mothers and fathers let the boys and girls play and run. Magda knew why their parents were being indulgent. Like them, she felt the fear of what might happen any moment, a falling bomb signaling the end of play and life.

She wondered what the children would remember in the days to come, if there were days to come. She’d been four years old when the last war ended in 1918, and she recalled only a little—the grayness of everything and how silently her mother wept at night.

She felt her father stir next to her, and she stretched and sat straighter.

How are you, Father? she whispered.

He smiled and shrugged. As good as a crippled old man can feel in a cellar being bombed by the British.

Can I get you some water, a piece of bread? I still have some here, she said, reaching for the satchel next to her.

No, thank you, Magda. Just help me move my legs a little.

Yes, of course. She lifted herself up into a kneeling position so that she could put her hands on his metal-braced legs and gently rock them from side to side.

Ah, he said after a moment, much better. Haven’t I always said you’d make a wonderful nurse?

Yes, you have, and you probably remember what I always said when you suggested it.

I do. It was the suffering and death you talked about; you worried about nursing soldiers. And I always said, ‘Magda, don’t worry, there won’t be any more wars.’

Before she could say anything more, a baby cried suddenly, its cry a long, single strand of longing that threaded through the cellar.

Some of the people opened their eyes, others closed theirs.

A mother somewhere in the shadows hushed the baby, Shhhhh. Shhhhh, and after a moment its cries faded beneath the thudding of distant falling bombs.

Before I fell asleep, Magda said to her father, I was thinking about Hans Metzger and the letter he sent.

I could tell. It left you distressed, but at least it tells you he is alive and well. Plodding on in a soldier’s way, somewhere on the Eastern Front. That’s hopeful.

Yes, alive, but not here. I worry about him and I miss him, Magda said, and leaned back, closing her eyes.

She thought again about the letter. Hans had filled six sides of paper with his small print, and still it wasn’t enough. He told her about this and that, shoring up defenses, the cold of a Russian winter, the heat of the summer, about having too much time to think. She wanted more from him. If she had been a schoolgirl, maybe the words he wrote would have been enough to satisfy her, but she wasn’t a schoolgirl. She was twenty-nine and knew that pencil-scratched words on a piece of paper were never enough. She could dream about them, but the dreams were always cold and left her feeling hungry. She wanted more.

So what did she want from him?

She wanted too much—wanted what she couldn’t have. She wanted him here with her in Berlin, even in this cellar waiting for British bombs to fall, in the shadows of a corner among these staring neighbors and sleeping children. Magda wanted Hans’s greatcoat, his soldier’s coat, thrown over them. She didn’t care if it was filthy. It could be stained with grease or mud or sweat or even dried blood. It wouldn’t matter. It would give them the place they needed, a private, separate place, a place without fear or death. She didn’t want words from him. Words had no place in this world anymore.

Your friend, Hans Metzger was the way he signed the letter. It had disappointed her when she first read it, but now she realized that she didn’t care at all if he called her my friend or my lover or my sweetheart. Darling? Dearest? My treasure? My sweet doll? Words were worthless.

She wanted him with her, alive and out of harm’s way forever.

She wanted his breath on her cheeks, his hands in her blonde hair, the warm push of his arms and legs and chest against her arms and legs and chest. She wanted his breath under her blouse and on her breasts. She wanted that coat thrown over them while they found each other in the darkness beneath it, found each other in a way that would last longer than words and longer than breath, longer than all of the hard, impossible waiting since the last time she saw him and felt him inside her.

That’s what she wanted, but she knew her desires were impossible now, and she knew that maybe they would be impossible for all time. The letter from Hans was more than seven months old by the time she read it last night. His penciled words were the first she had heard from him since he left her last spring at the train station in Berlin, returning with the other Ostsoldaten, the soldiers destined for the East and the Russian front.

The train heading out that blue bright Sunday morning in spring was thirty-five coaches long, and each coach was packed tight with soldiers. She and the other women had stood there in the station and watched those passenger cars click slowly past them, trailing a cloud of white steam and black smoke. Some of the women wept as she did and some didn’t, but they all watched those staring faces in the windows of the cars. Some of the soldiers heading to the Russian front carried flowers—roses and daffodils and bachelor’s buttons.

Magda remembered what she’d thought as she stood there listening to the cars’ clicking grow fainter, while the women’s weeping and waving grew more fierce: It was a funeral.

When her husband Johann left Berlin in 1939 for the Polish borderlands and the war that became this war, he had also carried flowers; but he was smiling from the window of the train, his gray-blue eyes full of promise and hope, excitement and faith, and his long arms waved till she couldn’t see him anymore. He had been as excited as a boy, but he was dead now, buried in one of the large soldiers’ cemeteries west of Berlin. Few of the soldiers on Hans Metzger’s train to the war in the East had been smiling. Their eyes weren’t full of promise or faith or light or hope. They were just staring at the faces of the women who were weeping and beyond weeping.

She opened her eyes again in the cellar and wondered how many of the soldiers who had returned that day on the train to the Eastern Front were still alive. She was an office worker and a woman with an education, and she was good with numbers, and those were the sorts of numbers she thought about all the time. How many had returned with Hans to the East on that train that spring day in April? There must have been three thousand on the train. And how many were still alive?

All of them? Not likely. The news of the fighting from the East was not good. Maybe half were still alive, or a thousand, or five hundred? Such small numbers. She thought about how many had disappeared while fighting in the cold and swirling snow around Stalingrad. Nobody wanted to talk about those numbers. They were so big, and everyone knew someone, loved someone who had disappeared in the East, and Magda had heard rumors. She had heard that three hundred thousand had fallen. Others said it was even more. These numbers were so big, so big.

All of her thinking about numbers sat alongside this one letter from one soldier she had known for less than fourteen days and had thought about for the nine months since then.

What did it all come to? One and one and fourteen and nine. Such small numbers.

Hans Metzger.

She could not write to him in the cellar. She had brought paper and a pen down from her apartment, and there was enough light from the candles spread around the cellar, but she couldn’t write. She was afraid. There was fear in her eyes just like there was fear in the eyes of the other people in the cellar. There was fear in her hands and her fingers too, too much fear to hold a pencil and write a word like dear or hello. And there was fear for him too, fear of what might have happened to him between the day he wrote the letter seven months ago and yesterday, the day she finally received it.

But what would she say to him if she weren’t too afraid to write?

Maybe she would tell him about what she remembered of the perfect day they met, and what she thought when she first saw him. It was spring then, the end of April, and the first truly hot day so far that year. The winter had been brutal, and its cold and blizzard snows had bled into March and the beginning of April, ruining much of the spring. She was at her post at the Wertheim Department Store on Leipziger Platz, where she had been employed since her husband died and left her a widow. Her supervisor, Herr Mannheim, had asked her to carry some folders to the Reichsbank down the street during her lunch break, and she had relished the idea of strolling through the sunshine that splashed against the sidewalks and played back and forth through the branches of the linden trees.

The bank was not far, and she had just left the coolness of the store when she saw a soldier standing across the wide sidewalk near the curb.

He had a pack on his back, and there was a long rifle slung over his shoulder, but what first caught her attention was the coat he was wearing. It was gray and made from heavy wool, and it came down almost to his ankles. A coat like that on such a beautifully sunny and hot day in April made her feel the heat of the day even more, and she didn’t want to. She wanted to feel the day’s heat but not be oppressed by it. She didn’t want to perspire, and she could see that the soldier was sweating. She wanted to pass the soldier by and forget how uncomfortable he must feel, but then she noticed that he appeared to be lost. He had a bit of folded paper in his hand, and he was turning it slowly and thoughtfully as if trying to orient a map to where he thought he was.

She quickly walked up to him and didn’t say what she thought: You look much too hot in your ridiculous greatcoat, like you’re going to melt into a puddle of gray sweat here on the sidewalk.

Instead, Magda said, Sir, may I help you? You seem lost.

The question startled the soldier, and he dropped the paper he was holding and looked up at the same time.

She was right. He looked overwhelmed by the day’s warmth, as though the beautiful heat on Leipziger Platz would be his death. Under his steel helmet, his long, weathered face was flushed and covered with moisture. She wanted to put down the folders she was carrying and take off his helmet and unbutton the coat and the uniform jacket he wore under it. She wanted to make him comfortable. Instead, she bent down and retrieved his map.

Thank you, Fräulein, he said as he extended his hand politely, but Magda didn’t return his map to him.

Hmm, let me see this, she said, and surveyed the map carefully.

It was impossible for her to tell what it was a map of. Someone had apparently tried to draw a map in ink, but it had been folded and refolded so many times that she couldn’t distinguish one line from another. Clearly, the map had something to do with Berlin, she reasoned, otherwise the soldier before her wouldn’t be looking at it; but precisely what it had to do with Berlin was as unclear to her as it was to him. She had lived in Berlin all her life and knew it well, but this map could just as easily have been of Amsterdam or Zanzibar for all the relationship it seemed to have to Berlin.

Finally, she shook her head, smiled, and said, May I ask you what it is you are looking for, sir?

The young soldier didn’t answer at first. He seemed confused, wordless. Maybe the heat had indeed stunned him, made him stupid, she thought. He raised his right hand to his heavy steel helmet and took it off, lowering it slowly to his side. She wondered if he was doing this because he was hot or because he felt that he needed to be polite while speaking to a woman.

Thank you for your concern, Fräulein, he smiled back. I think I’m lost. I’m not sure where I am.

Where do you hope to go? Perhaps I can help.

If you could, I would be very grateful. I need to get to the Spandau District here in Berlin, Ludendorffstrasse specifically.

Her eyes tracked quickly across his face. His blue eyes and light brown hair accentuated the depth of his tan, and she could see that he was handsome. She looked down at his hand-drawn map again, turned it over, and realized that it was useless. He would never get there using it. Even Columbus and the great explorer Magellan working together would have been unable to make sense of it.

She smiled again, cocked her head a little to the left, and said, "You are lost. This is Leipziger Platz, near Potsdamer Platz, and the street you want is in Spandau. That’s far to the west, far in that direction."

That direction? he laughed slightly. That’s where I just came from. I think I’ve been walking away from Spandau for the last hour.

She was puzzled and looked at him closely.

Walking? You were walking to Spandau? Why not take the S-Bahn, the subway? Or the trams? Oh, it’s much too far to walk.

He took his gray pack off then and eased it slowly to the sidewalk between them. What she first took for shyness or stupidity was gone. She was surprised by how easily he spoke and how easily he smiled.

It’s my own fault. I arrived in Berlin by train early this morning from Warsaw, and when I got off the train, I asked an attendant, an older gentleman, at the station for directions to Spandau. He spoke so quickly and his German was so different from what I’m used to that I didn’t understand much of what he was saying. I asked him to please speak more slowly, but maybe he couldn’t understand my dialect. I’m from Bavaria, you see. What he said was all about taking such a train to such and such a place and then walking and catching a tram and walking some more. When I asked him to repeat what he’d said, he only spoke louder and faster, and then tipped his hat and turned to help someone else.

At that point you must have been more confused than ever.

Yes, exactly. I was shy after that about asking anyone else, so I thought it would be best just to walk to Spandau.

She looked at him in wonder. You were going to walk ten kilometers?

For a moment he didn’t say anything, just turned his head slightly and stared back. Why, yes. I’m a soldier. I march. I’m used to walking.

Of course, she said, and smiled again.

He smiled too, and his dark blue eyes met hers. He was younger than she was, maybe twenty-two or twenty-three, but she couldn’t tell for sure. Soldiers always seemed younger or older than they really were. The ones she had seen in Berlin on furlough or returning to the front always seemed younger. The ones she had seen in the newsreels from the front or in the picture magazines like Der Spiegel always seemed older. But she felt comfortable talking to this one. He seemed young and open, ready to take himself less seriously than some.

And, may I ask, what will you do in Spandau?

The sister of one of my comrades lives there. I promised him I’d see her and tell her how he was.

A sister? And after that? She knew she was being forward, and she hoped that this wouldn’t frighten him away. There was something about this young man that she wanted not to lose.

I’ll catch the train for Munich this evening and make my way back to my parents tomorrow. They have a small farm west of Munich. I have two weeks of furlough before returning to my unit.

Listening to his words, his straightforward description of his simple plans, she wondered if she detected any regret or sense of loss. He was going to Spandau and then to Munich and then to some farm west of there, and then he was coming back to Berlin and then going out again to the East and the war. She realized she was being stupid, thinking like a heroine in some romantic movie about love in wartime: A girl meets a soldier on an April street in Berlin. She is going one way with a folder in her hand; he is going another way with a rifle on his back. They exchange a few words, they smile, and they look into each other’s eyes…

If they were filming this as a scene for a motion picture today, in the background an accordion surely would be softly playing that soldier’s song she heard everywhere now, Lili Marlene, the one about a woman and her soldier on a dark street, a world at war pressing down upon them as they press into each other. Magda knew it was, finally, a ridiculous song, a woman waiting for her soldier—a soldier lonely, lost, and far from home. She and some soldier on leave meeting by chance on a street in Berlin? Their two shadows joining and melding into one? A love that was never fleeting? A heroine like Lili Marlene who rises out of the silent spaces, the very depths of the earth?

A stupid song and a foolish thought, sentimental and impossible.

Magda realized that she and this lost soldier would part here and now, and that would be the end of this moment. Their two shadows would never get a chance to meld into one; that was clear to her and surely just as clear to him. It would be clear to anyone.

The soldier bowed slightly and spoke again at last: Fräulein, thank you so much for your help. I think I would have walked all the way back east to the Ukraine if I hadn’t found you to set me in the right direction. Thank you.

She looked into his blue eyes again and extended her hand. He took it in both of his, and he held it for a long moment. His hands were warm and rough, scarred and calloused. She knew then that despite his smile and the lightness of his voice, he didn’t want to let go of her. She knew he wanted to hold on to her as much as she wanted to hold on to him. This was madness. She withdrew her hand quickly.

If you need more directions, she said, gesturing at the building behind her, I work here in the accounting office—the Wertheim Department Store on Leipziger Platz.

He raised his eyes, gazed at the building, and then looked at her. Yes, thank you for your kindness.

If you can’t find it, just ask anyone in Berlin. They will all point you in the right direction.

He smiled again, put his helmet on his head, and hefted up his pack. Thank you. Would it be too much to ask your name?

No, no, of course not. Magda Dressler.

He nodded and stared at her. In that stare she felt the distance he had come and the distance he must travel still. She saw too that he was older than she had first guessed.

And me, I’m Hans Metzger from Königsee, a village in Upper Bavaria.

She nodded and gave him a smile back, and he turned and walked past her then, west toward the Spandau district. She watched the slight sway of the pack across his shoulders, the rifle that he cinched closer as he walked.

She thought about him, and she thought about that rifle. She realized that she hadn’t found it strange to see a man carrying a rifle on a wide street in Berlin. She tried to remember back to when she had first seen someone with a rifle in the city. Before 1939 and the start of the war? Before 1933 when the Führer first came to power? It must have been even earlier—but those were men marching in parades or going off to some kind of military exercise or something like that. Now it was common: the soldiers who had come home to see their mothers and fathers and sweethearts all carried their Mauser rifles. She wondered why. So that they wouldn’t forget during the two weeks they were away that they were still soldiers, would always be soldiers?

Hans was ten meters away, and she kept watching him walk away from her. Fifteen meters? Twenty? Thirty-five? Small numbers growing larger and larger. That was always the way.

There wasn’t much traffic in the streets and most of it was military, but there were many people walking on the sidewalk on that wondrous April day. Like her, even with a war being fought in Russia and in Italy and in Africa, the people in the street had come out to breathe the warm spring air and feel the grace of the sun on their faces.

Spring drew a person out of her house, its dark winter corners. For what? To meet someone, to fall in love, to continue the world, to seed and plant its future? Apparently, Magda thought. Spring was a romantic in love with magic. Despite the war on so many fronts, despite the deaths beyond the borders of Germany, spring gave one the gift of hope and continuance and love. Spring was a fool.

Magda heard the voices of the men and women passing around her, talking about the beauty and wonder of this April day. Their voices seemed pleased, happy, soft, and even yearning. They seemed finally and fully awake after the hard, brutal winter that seemed to have started in October and ended only this morning at dawn.

She listened to the voices as she watched Hans Metzger walk away and disappear between the men and women whose voices murmured, Spring, spring, spring. Magda could hear those voices, but she couldn’t hear anyone singing Lili Marlene. No accordions either. Just crowds.

Even in wartime the streets were crowded. When the war started, she had thought the streets of Berlin would be quiet, empty, a cold autumn stillness everywhere and always, but that wasn’t the way it was. She couldn’t see Hans any longer, but a man with a thin black mustache walked past her carrying a thin black cane in his hand. He was, she felt, what the English would call jaunty or dapper. Tapping his stick on the sidewalk, he tipped his hat at two shop girls in white-flowered aprons rushing down the street. A chauffeur waited at the curb in front of the department store for his employer—probably a dowager lost in the store’s five floors of merchandise. The war hadn’t come to these people, this street, not fully, not yet.

She looked again down the street toward where she had last seen the soldier. Hans Metzger had disappeared, swallowed up by the crowds of shoppers and walkers enjoying the first breath of spring. She couldn’t even see the tip of his rifle or the wide sweep of his greatcoat.

And she expected never to see him again.

She returned from