An Elephant in the Garden

Content Warning: “The Terrible Consequences of War” includes descriptions of firebombing.

An Elephant in the Garden is the story of one family’s suffering and survival in Germany during World War II. Lizzie’s memories depict war as a relentless force upending lives, separating families, and leaving death and destruction in its wake. She recounts the day when her father, Papi, came home in his gray army uniform, describing his deployment to France as “the beginning of [the family’s] nightmare, everyone’s nightmare” (28). When Papi stopped coming home on leave and his letters ceased, Lizzie and her family did not know if he was alive or where he might be. Held as a prisoner of war by the Russians, Papi did not return until four years after the war.

The war also separated Lizzie and Peter; when they reached the Allied forces in western Germany, Lizzie, Mutti, and Karli were sent to a refugee camp. She recalls saying goodbye to Peter before being driven away in an army truck: “I clung to him and cried. He whispered in my ear that he would write, that he would come back for me and find me […] I thought my heart would break” (186-87). More than a year later and after losing track of Lizzie’s location, Peter finally found her in Heidelberg and kept his promise, but they both suffered during the intervening months, believing they would never see each other again.

Lizzie’s descriptions of life in Dresden as World War II dragged on depict other tragic consequences of the war. With the Russian army closing in from the east and the American and British forces moving in from the west, starving refugees poured into Dresden. Lizzie recalls seeing them every day “in their hundreds, outside the soup kitchens, lining up in the snow, or huddled together against the cold in doorways, their children crying” (51). The number of German war casualties mounted: “More and more husbands and sons and brothers were being reported dead or missing. It was common now, every week, for one of our school friends to learn the dreadful news that a father or a brother was not coming home” (31). With the bombing of Dresden, Lizzie, Mutti, and Karli became refugees themselves, joining thousands of others fleeing the burning city; before reaching safety in the west, Lizzie and her family endured week after week of cold, hunger, and physical exhaustion.

The RAF’s firebombing of Dresden most vividly captures the horrors of war. Wave after wave of bombers destroyed the city, encircling it in a ring of fire:

The flames from burning houses and factories were licking high into the sky, leaping from one building to the next, from one street to the next, from one fire to another, each fire […] seeking out another fire to be with, so it could become an inferno, so it could burn more furiously (72-73).

The concussive force of the bombs created a fierce, hot wind so strong that Lizzie, Mutti, and Karli “had to cling on to one another, so that the wind did not blow [them] back towards the city, towards the fire” (76). Lizzie remembers looking back at the destruction and realizing that “Dresden was no longer a city anymore. Rather it looked […] like one vast bonfire” (77). Emphasizing even more the grief and terror of the bombing for Lizzie is her memory of “shooting and screaming” in the burning city: “I knew this screaming for what it was, the shrieking of animals, of dying animals, and that it came from the direction of the zoo. They were shooting the animals” (74). Fleeing from Dresden was a “walk through hell” (78). Lizzie says, “I had never before witnessed human misery on such a scale. It is the sound of a people in despair that I shall never forget: the weeping, the sobbing, the screaming and the praying” (78). Although the novel is set in Germany during World War II, what Lizzie and her family endured is not limited to a particular time or place. The terrible consequences of war, a major theme in the novel, has universal meaning.