“Here I’m going
Walkin’ with my baby in my arms…”
~ Rickie Lee Jones.
November 1943.
Days of heavy allied bombing have filled Berlin’s hospitals with the wounded, dead and dying. Elisabeth works round the clock for more than three days before finally leaving work after midnight for some much needed rest. After returning home, air raid sirens send her, Adele and Liesel from their apartment but an explosion collapses their building before they reach the relative safety of the shelter.
Gertrud sifts through the rubble the next day and finds their bodies, but is shocked that Liesel remains alive with a minor wound to her forehead. She takes her grandchild and travels by train to an orphanage in the town of Regensberg. She leaves Liesel with the nuns and returns to Berlin.
Back in the Mitte District, she finds her apartment building has been reduced to rubble along with the surrounding buildings as well. Out of options, she walks to the banks of the river Spree behind Monbijou Palace to roughly the same spot where Anna took her life years earlier, and throws herself into the unforgiving, black waters of the ancient river.
