Occasionally, Ania and her sons pass groups of boys around their age, unaccompanied by any family. They are from the Jugend camps and lagers, the various Kinderlandverschickung (children-to-the-land) programs set up across the conquered east to remove children from the embattled cities. They are sullen creatures who have been without their mothers for too long, now half-molded into Hitler’s fantasy. The German youth should be as swift as a greyhound, as tough as leather, and as hard as Krupp’s steel. Ania knows Hitler’s rhetoric. I want a brutal, domineering, fearless, and cruel youth. . . . The free, magnificent beast of prey must again flash from their eyes. These boys make her nervous. When she sees them, she takes pains to melt away.
Ania and her children have only the clothes they wear, the coats on their backs, and a few extras: a good pot, a tin cup to share, a paring knife. She also has a small book of photographs and a sack of pilfered food: a blood sausage, a scrap of butter, one dry loaf of bread, a precious jar of last summer’s plums. Anselm has his favorite book, Wolfgang his precious pocketknife. Unfortunately, they have no papers. This is a problem. All along the road SS men are stamping, sorting, and turning people back. It is not only the sad-sack German soldiers at the front who are supposed to hold their ground against the enemy. The German civilians are supposed to stay too—a kind of human obstacle to the Russian advance. And so the SS devote their efforts to preventing flight. What cowards these supposed über-Nazis are, avoiding the front and hiding behind bureaucratic responsibilities! As if placing all these poor, terrified souls in the path of the Russians will change anything. The war is already lost in everything but name. At the front, only the last members of the Home Guard remain.
Whenever they hear word of a checkpoint, Ania and her boys are forced to tromp into the forest with every other paperless refugee. Their progress is painfully slow. They are not the only ones frustrated by this. The woods are full of anger and panic. Everyone talks about the Russians: they will eat German children, rape German women, burn German houses to the ground. At least these fantasies distract them from the cold. What is frostbite when compared to the threat of being eaten by a hungry Russian? They are suggestible masses, used to basing their beliefs and actions on ideology rather than experience.
As it is, the cold causes enough trouble: chilblains and frostbite, sores on the fingers and lips and eyelids that won’t heal. People strip clothing from the corpses of less fortunate refugees and huddle together in woodsheds and haylofts, pressing their bodies against those of strangers to survive. In the north, where the refugees are forced to cross the frozen Haff, there are rumors of horses stuck in the ice, and whole wagons of families who have disappeared into the freezing lagoon.
Ania is less afraid of the cold or the Russians than she is of being sent back. The Russians are not individuals but an army. And in her experience, armies are less interested in individuals than the individuals think they are. The stream of refugees is like blood from a severed arm—a troubling side effect, not a root cause. The Russian army is after the German army, not this human by-product of their fighting.
She and her boys move south as well as west, and the front grows closer. At night, they can hear the shelling and drumroll of the big guns. The more frightened travelers scramble to their feet at one, two, three a.m. and resume their march in the dark, clutching their sacks, pushing their handcarts. No one has wagons here. The horses are all gone. If the Nazis didn’t whisk them off to the front, the Russians have stolen them.
For a few weeks, Ania has noticed a sympathetic-looking woman among the crowd of fellow travelers. She is of average size with light brown hair that she keeps tucked under a grubby scarf. Her face is kind—not old, but timeworn—and intelligent. She has a son, a boy of about Wolfgang’s age, but smaller, and sickly. Ania has seen them several times sleeping in the abandoned barns and train stations in which they take refuge along the way. She finds solace in the woman’s presence: a reasonable-looking person, someone with whom she might have, in another lifetime, become friends.
Ania does not have warm feelings for the other familiar faces. The Polish grandmother in jarringly shiny men’s riding boots, the Ukrainian mother accompanied by six children and a dim-witted young man she smacks on the head and gives only the smallest portions of food, the bone-thin young woman with the lifeless baby wrapped against her chest, the old man pulling his listless, swollen-legged wife on a wheelbarrow. Her legs look like they’re going to explode, Wolfgang remarked when they first saw her. Ania can barely look at any of them. Instead, she concerns herself entirely with her boys: whether they need to stop, whether they are sick. For two weeks, Anselm suffered from terrible diarrhea and they had to camp in place. She is responsible. It was her choice to flee.
For the most part, people on this journey do not share. They do not establish camaraderie in their misery—their supplies are too meager, the mood too grim. They are fleeing from, not to, and the uncertainty of their destination renders them mute.
Then one night, the eastern front falls and the Russians overtake the village in which Ania and the others are hiding. The ground reverberates with the weight of human footsteps—an entire battalion approaches, accompanied by the rumble of tanks. Panic runs through the crowd sleeping in the nooks and crannies of the village. For the first time Ania can recall, people begin to run, even stampede. Shots are fired. And the road, narrow here in the village between the ancient barns and stables, becomes clogged with human beings.
Ania and her boys remain hidden in the hayloft where they have taken shelter. They are nearly the only ones left. “Shouldn’t we leave, too?” Anselm asks. He looks at her, eyes wide—he is anxious by nature and has developed a tremor on the march.
From the street below they hear screams. “Better to stay,” Ania says with confidence she doesn’t feel. But at least here they will be safe from the human avalanche.
When the Russians finally enter the village, the beams and girders of the barn shake. Several heavy artillery vehicles precede the soldiers and can barely fit down the narrow street. Without speaking, Ania and her boys creep toward the shuttered hay chute to watch. Only then does she realize they are not alone. The woman she’s noticed these last few weeks and her son are at the opening, already peering out. Without speaking, the woman shifts to make space for them, patting the floor beside her as if they are old friends.
Outside, the scene is one of absurd chaos. After the vehicles, the Russians press down the street on foot. They are in high spirits, shouting back and forth in their rough language, singing, and passing flasks. Scattered through the stream of soldiers are the last of the fleeing civilians, small and gray and terrified, clutching their bundles, pressing back against doorways, crouching, even covering their heads. But the Russians barely see them, and it strikes Ania as perversely funny—here are the troops that sent these masses scurrying ahead for weeks and now they simply march past. After all the panic, their disregard is almost insulting.
“They can’t be bothered,” the other woman says, as if she has read Ania’s thoughts.
“Look at that one.” Wolfgang points to a stocky, bearded soldier, singing, dancing a Russian jig.
“Like a trained bear.” The woman laughs.
The situation is weirdly cozy, with all of them clustered around the window, and they remain for hours, until the last of the Russians have passed. From time to time a soldier or two bangs into the barn below in search of livestock, knocking open the empty stall doors, firing unnecessary shots. In the loft, they hold their breaths. One particularly persistent man starts up the ladder, then is shouted down by someone outside. In the hayloft, relief makes them giddy.
Ania is the other woman’s name too, although she has always been called by her middle name, Gerda. “I knew there was a reason I liked you,” Ania says when she learns this. It is the first time she has made anything resembling a joke in God knows how long. The boy’s name is Olgar. He is sweet with bright eyes and a mischievous sense of humor. His cough i
s alarming. It sounds like a scraping Tomahawk plane. He doesn’t complain, though, and carries a pack of cards in his breast pocket. He teaches Anselm and Wolfgang to play poker while they wait.
When the last of the battalion finally marches past, Ania, her boys, and their new friends climb down the ladder.
In their wake, the Russians have left massive confusion. A farmer who guarded his pigs with a rifle has been shot; his pigs have been taken and his wife is wailing in the street. Another woman claims she has been beaten, and her two daughters raped. Several people have been trampled in the chaos. And they find three Ukrainians in German uniforms slumped at the bottom of a brick wall—apparent victims of an impromptu firing squad. The Russians show no pity, even for their own soldiers who have been captured and conscripted to fight for the Germans.
On the bright side, they have not bayoneted women through their private parts or cannibalized Germans or hatcheted the children and cooked them on spits as Goebbels forecast. Ania hopes they at least bayoneted a few SS men at the checkpoints. She leaves her boys with her new friend and helps pull the Ukrainians’ bodies off the street. They will be buried in the local graveyard unless someone comes looking for them. Which seems unlikely at best.
When evening falls, Ania and Gerda and their boys retreat to the hayloft. Gerda shares a heel of black bread and Ania cuts into the blood sausage she’s been saving. Outside, a layer of frost covers the village rooftops and they glitter in the moonlight. Smoke from a burning house billows toward the sky, and the boys take turns naming the shapes it makes. A mermaid, a leaping deer, a dog’s head. It feels like a celebration—of what, they’re not sure. Certainly nothing is over, and they have a long way to go. A celebration of camaraderie, then. It has been years since Ania felt such a thing.
A family of refugees from distant Galicia lights a fire in the woodstove downstairs with straw and foraged wood. The boys, basking in the rising warmth, fall asleep and the women talk. Mostly they speak of their journey west, sharing only the banalities: the nasty, apple-faced woman who screamed at passersby on the bridge, the family with scarlet fever, the way people flocked to a barrel of rotten chestnuts on the roadside like a swarm of flies. “No, like SS men to a checkpoint,” Ania corrects, and they both laugh. When was the last time she laughed? Anselm startles awake, unfamiliar with the sound.
In the morning, they set out together. When they reach Breslau, they don’t even bother with the train. They have heard that Karl Hanke, the gauleiter of Lower Silesia, has ordered the city evacuated so they can transform it into a military “fortress.” The crowd of people waiting at the station spills so far beyond the platform they can’t even see the tracks.
As they walk in the other direction, a train rumbles into the station: a line of open-goods wagons filled with what appears, at first, to be sacks of food.
“Mary, mother of God,” Gerda says, looking back. “Those are prisoners.” The sacks of food are human beings in striped uniforms, half covered with snow.
But Ania does not look back.
“Which would you rather: sit in an armchair and sew or kneel in a sunny garden and pull carrots?” Ania’s new friend introduces this game and they play often. “Which would you rather: eat Sauerbraten or fresh cream?”
It distracts them from their bleeding feet and grumbling stomachs.
Over the next weeks, they fall into a rhythm. Wake, share what little they have to eat, and play a game like this to still their minds. In the afternoon they submit to the bare necessity of walking, continuing toward the next piece of bread or moldy potato Anselm and Wolfgang manage to dig up, left over from last year’s harvest. Occasionally they come across stations set up by the National Socialist People’s Welfare, where boisterous volunteers hand out soup and propaganda: the Germans are merely waiting for the newest installment of weapons before they turn back the tide; the Russians are so desperate they are conscripting women; the supposedly kindly American troops advancing in the west are only the frontrunners—they are followed by Jewish Einsatzgruppen eager for revenge. That is why it is imperative to continue the fight. The Germans must triumph or be killed. No one believes it. The Germans are losing. This is clear from the flood of humans marching west.
In bits, the women learn more intimate details about each other. Gerda is an ethnic German, born outside Warsaw to parents who were both chemists. She studied music in the university, where she met her husband, a gifted trumpet player. He is now dead. Killed by the Nazis.
She shares funny, romantic stories about her husband—the time he serenaded her from outside her dormitory window at midnight and woke the matron, who ran outside brandishing a stick. How they honeymooned aboard a barge on the Danube. About the kitten he gave her when they first met. And while the children sleep, the women exchange darker, more painful stories about the families and homes they have lost. This way they fall asleep.
Gerda is heading to Dresden with her son, where she hopes to stay with her cousins. “Come with us,” she urges Ania. “I’m sure they will put you up, too.” It seems a promising destination. Florence on the Elbe, as it is known, a beautiful city still largely intact. Everyone says it is safe from Allied bombing on account of its lack of heavy industry, the International Red Cross station, and its cultural significance. There are also rumors that Winston Churchill has a favorite aunt who lives there, and that the Allies are preserving it so it might become the capital when the war is over. Ania is happy to go along.
It is January 1945.
Their journey to Dresden takes three weeks. They are not happy weeks: misery is the prevailing sentiment. But somehow, in Ania’s mind, they are lighter than the rest of the time around them—the years before and those that follow. They are like the last odd burst of energy from a dying man. The weather becomes kinder—it is cold but suddenly sunny. They are hungry, but they have their combined food and the little fat left on their bones—and they have their precious boys, while so many other women do not.
Every night, they fall asleep curled together—an economical row of bodies: Ania on one end, her friend on the other, and the boys in between. Sometimes Ania falls asleep midsentence. Somehow she is capable of this. She doesn’t battle the usual what ifs and hows and what thens that tend to dominate her thoughts at night.
And so despite everything that follows, this is the improbable oasis Ania returns to in her dreams.
Chapter Ten
Burg Lingenfels, August 1945
A week after the Grabareks came to Burg Lingenfels, the Russians arrived.
Their approach was eerily silent, a collection of dark figures climbing the hillside. Three of them fanned out like scouts in front of a platoon—but they were not a platoon. Though maybe they once had been. Now they were a kind of human wreckage: gaunt, tattered, hungry eyed.
For weeks in Ehrenheim, there had been talk of roving bands of ex-prisoners, released from one of the Nazi stalags. Nearly seventy thousand prisoners of war had been held by the Nazis in the camp at Moosburg alone: some French, some British, Dutch, and even American, but most were from the Red Army. Not only Russians, also Ukrainians, Estonians, Latvians, and other Baltic peoples, first conscripted by the Russians, then captured by the Germans. Many of these men were afraid to return home to lands now subsumed by Stalin’s Soviet Union. The Hausfraus of Ehrenheim were convinced they were all rapists, murderers, and degenerates—and that they were after revenge. No one talked about why.
Total hogwash, they’re men like any others, just hungry and mistreated, Marianne had said when her daughters returned from town with their heads full of such talk. The people of Ehrenheim know nothing about Russians.
The Russians had arrived in Weisslau in January and made themselves at home. Unlike many of her neighbors, Marianne had not fled. It would take more than a few drunken soldiers to make her leave the home she had been so happy in, the land that connected her to Albrecht. For the most part, the rumors of the horrors the Russians would inflict proved false. Yes, they came ba
nging on doors at night, looking for schnapps and women, but Marianne found them easy enough to dissuade. You had to push back. Show them you were not afraid. Once she had come to the door in her bathrobe brandishing a frying pan, and how the Russians had laughed. But they had not barged past. They were thieves, of course, but who could blame them? The Germans had killed twenty million of their countrymen. So they took everything from bicycles to kitchen kettles to feather pillows, and, most prized of all, any kind of radio. But they were not monsters. Marianne had not fled until it became clear that they would also take her estate.
But now, watching these men climb the hill to the castle, she felt a prickle of fear. They did not look like the Russian soldiers she remembered from Weisslau.
“Will they kill us?!” Elisabeth asked. “There are so many of them.”
Next to her, Katarina began to cry.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Marianne snapped. “They’re just hungry.”
Behind the girls, Benita had gone pale. Marianne thought of the apartment in Berlin where she had found her: the hideous man with the Kalashnikov guarding the door. The poor girl had her own experience of Russians. Marianne felt a pang of guilt. Benita was right to be petrified.
“You go down to the cellar,” Marianne said to her daughters. “I will greet them when they arrive.
“Go on,” she added, more kindly, to Benita. “You take care of the children.”
Wordlessly, Benita followed the girls.
“We will stay,” Frau Grabarek said. Marianne had almost forgotten she was there. In the week since she had arrived, she and her boys had barely spoken. Who knew what traumas they had endured? For the most part, Marianne just let them be.
“That’s all right—” Marianne began to protest, but stopped. It might be useful to have the boys here. And Frau Grabarek herself had a quiet, determined strength to be reckoned with.
The Women in the Castle Page 11