In the countryside around the lager, there aren’t any Jews. There is only the ghost of Otto Smeltz. In Ania’s mind, the boy has fused with the story she told. He has become an uncomfortable hybrid that she would rather not think about.
Ania also accepts Hitler’s statement that Poles and Slavs and easterners belong to a lower race, disproportionately represented in civilization’s criminal elements. In her training as a youth leader she learned the science of this: genetics and brain size and forehead measurements, statistics of their incarceration for stealing and rape and murder. The Völkischer Beobachter runs disturbing stories about their poor hygiene and laziness. They breed like rabbits and live on the best, most arable plots of land, much of which, until the last war, belonged to Germany. They need German order, modernity, and management. And Hitler is just the man to bring this to them—look at what wonders he has done for Germany’s crime rate! It is not just unemployment he has fixed; under his leadership the country has become a much safer, more peaceful, and more orderly place.
Weren’t you alarmed by all the racist talk? Hitler’s rants about the “Jewish virus” and “the noble German” . . . You can’t read more than four sentences by the man without knowing he was a racist fanatic, Ania’s daughter will press.
I didn’t notice is all Ania can say. And it is true, as outlandish as it sounds. She has never been taught that drawing distinctions between races is dangerous. In Germany, there is no great history of equal rights. For thousands of years, the population was divided into an impoverished and disenfranchised peasant class and wealthy, ruling aristocrats. The only teaching that gives her pause is the Christian precept of kindness and tolerance. But the churches themselves are not making much fuss about Hitler’s harsh rhetoric. Christianity is superstition, Hitler says—a palliative against life’s brutal realities.
This is before the war. Before the Jewish star badges, before the roundups and mass deportations and extermination camps.
And, really, Ania is busy with her own life.
This lager is where Ania has her babies: first in 1936, sweet Anselm, an easy infant, content to lie in his cradle while she washes and cleans and cooks. Ania has no mother around to teach her how to swaddle and burp him, how to apply salve to his chapped skin to keep it from splitting, how to add pea soup to his bottles to keep him full. So she has to learn these things herself. But she manages. And she takes pride in this.
In 1937, Ania gives birth to Wolfgang, who is more difficult. In her heart, she blames him for the downgrade in their quality of life. He is jaundiced at birth, and often sick. His stools are thin and endless—she has enough laundry to do without an extra ten diaper cloths a day. And she has Anselm, who is a toddler now, to run after—and all the other boys in the lager. Often she has to let Wolfgang cry himself to sleep.
When the boys are two and three, Germany invades Poland. No one wants war—it has been only twenty-one years since their last one!—but Ania believes the stories she reads in the German papers, which call it a war of self-defense. According to the papers, the Poles have made a number of incursions onto German soil, murdering innocent citizens and taking over their radio station in Gleiwitz. She is an intelligent woman, but she is not a skeptic. It must be true if the paper reports it.
Their next lager is also fine. It is 1940. Germany is at war. Most German papers still call it a war of self-defense. As allies of Poland, France and the United Kingdom have declared war on Germany. No one wanted it to come to this. But so far, for the Germans, it has gone swimmingly. This lager is in Luxembourg, which is now a conquered country, rolled over in the rapid and remarkably successful German invasion of France. But conquered is not how she and Rainer and the rest of the Germans they know think of it. Luxembourg has become “Luxemburg” and been welcomed into the Reich. Its people have little to complain about. Their casualties amounted to all of seventy-five when the German army invaded. And now they have the opportunities afforded to citizens of the Reich, including participation in these lagers. As long as they don’t speak French.
This time, the lager is housed in a modest barracks-like building. It is not as splendid as the one outside Saarbrücken, but it is comfortable. The work is good, life is wholesome, and the war still distant. Suddenly, from Paris, there is an influx of fine things: At Christmas, Rainer gives Ania silk stockings (where is she supposed to wear these?), and also a beautiful, sturdy watch. There is goose liver pâté for the boys to taste, and champagne for the adults. Regular food is now rationed more strictly—eggs and pork and milk are set aside exclusively for the troops. But the lager receives a portion of the food they help produce—flour, potatoes, barley, fresh fruit in the summer, carrots, and beets. It is a shame to be at war, of course, but Ania relishes the order and fullness of her life.
They are still in this lager when Germany declares war on Russia in 1941. This is an unsettling turn of events. Ania is not the only one to feel the first real grains of doubt. A preventive war, the Nazis call it. Better to attack than be attacked. But the German army is worn out. Anyone can see that it is dangerous for a country to wage war on two fronts. And the Allies have begun bombing in earnest—air raids are the new measure of urban life.
Ania knows Rainer will be called to the front, but even so, the order comes as a shock. She and her boys are to return home. But where is home? Herr Doktor Fortzmann is dead. Old Herr Brandt is dead. Rainer’s mother is an invalid. And their lager is to be shut.
The following week, Rainer must escort the lager’s boys to the train station, and from there he is to report for duty. On the morning he is scheduled to depart, he rolls over and climbs out of bed without even pausing to look at her. He has never exhibited affection for his wife and young sons in front of his charges, and he doesn’t change this. “Take care of yourself,” he says, nodding. So Ania is left to pack their belongings and find them a new home. Soon, she and the boys are on a train heading toward Dortmund, where her aunt Gudrun has agreed to take them in.
The trip is long. The RAF has bombed the tracks, and they sit in the September heat for hours awaiting repairs. Four-year-old Wolfgang is sick with scarlet fever. His body is as hot as a fireplace brick.
“The boy should drink much water,” an older man says kindly as he passes them on the platform in Frankfurt. He is followed by his wife, who wears a heavy winter coat and clutches a number of suitcases. They are Jews, Ania realizes when she sees their gold stars. The stars are a new requirement, and it is the first time she has seen one. For that matter, it is the first time she has seen a Jew in a long time. She is taken aback by the man’s kindness. In the absence of contact, her idea of Jews has unified with the images on the Nazi posters: beak nosed and nefarious. But this man and his wife look ordinary and sad. She thanks him and thinks suddenly of Otto Smeltz, her onetime friend and partner. Where has he ended up?
In Dortmund, life is not as easy as it was on the land. Aunt Gudrun sets her jaw when Wolfgang cries and beats Anselm’s knuckles with a ruler when he scuffs his feet, or forgets to say thank you, or accidentally breaks a dish. The bombings come in spates, sometimes every night for a week, then nothing for a month. They become accustomed to the routine of tramping up and down the cellar stairs half-asleep.
Anselm starts school and Ania and Wolfgang remain at home with Aunt Gudrun’s sharp tongue and demonstrative, beleaguered sighs. They eat boiled cabbage and potatoes and sleep under the thin blankets they brought with them from the lager, huddling together for warmth. On Gudrun’s crummy People’s Radio, Goebbels and Hitler proclaim their successes on the Russian front, but on the streets, other stories circulate. The German army is freezing and the battles are bloody. For every Russian they kill, two more spring up in his place. And there are even darker rumors: in the ghettos where the Polish Jews have been sent, people are dying of disease and hunger; the SS and local Poles are killing whole villages of Jews; and the Wehrmacht is shooting Russian prisoners of war, or worse, locking them up in starvation camps. Ania wou
ld like to tune in to foreign broadcasts, but she has no radio of her own, and anyway, if she tried, Gudrun would report her. Rainer sends back short, opaque letters: his boots are worn out, they are stuck in some small Russian town or another awaiting orders, a man in his unit comes from nearby Aplerbeck. What he is doing, how he feels—she can only guess.
One day, after nearly a year in Dortmund, Ania passes the local Winterhilfswerk—Winter Help—headquarters and notices a sign for blankets, coats, warm clothing, and other necessities. She hesitates—she and her boys are no charity case, after all—until several well-dressed women precede her. Inside, the canteen has been remade into a shop with piles of goods arranged for perusal, carefully sorted by size and type: warm wool coats and sweaters, feather beds, pillows and leather boots. Volunteers distribute tickets to those waiting: two coats per family, two pieces of bedding, shoes for everyone. What a windfall! Thank goodness she has arrived early enough for the best picks. She selects a lovely camel-colored wool coat with silver buttons for Anselm (much finer than any he has ever owned), a thick green wool cape for Gudrun, two feather beds, and a practical pair of shoes for each. The question of where all this has come from does not even occur to her until she checks out. Redistributed, the volunteer stamps on a paper listing the items Ania has selected.
“Redistributed from where?” Ania asks.
“From deportees,” the volunteer says curtly.
So these are belongings Jews sent east have left behind. The thought is dismaying. Some little boy had to leave this handsome coat. But then it confirms what the Führer has been saying—the Jews of Germany have made themselves unreasonably rich. Who would leave behind such a coat unless they owned an even better one they could bring along?
Bring where is an increasingly uncomfortable concept, though it is still outside the realm of Ania’s immediate concern.
In the beginning of the war, Ania imagined the resettlement camps to be humble, organized places like her lager, focused on reeducation and run with German efficiency. Early in her Landjahr training, she received a glowing booklet about a camp for Jews in Poland, a clean, orderly place, with a hospital and vocational training programs. The word resettlement conjured an image of a village emptied of its inhabitants, who had been resettled to another village, emptied of its inhabitants, who had also been resettled, and so on—with each population pushing farther into the wide and roomy east. A continent of people shifting to make Lebensraum, living space, for their bursting population. There is an easy logic to it. After all, there are eighty million people living on five hundred thousand square kilometers in Germany; Ania has memorized Hitler’s facts. They need more space, more resources.
But now, everyone knows the “settlements” are really just camps, and the camps are no better than the squalid “Jew houses” where the few remaining Jews in German cities have been confined. Last month when they “cleaned up” Dortmund, the citizens were told to cover their mouths with cloth or stay indoors while the soldiers marched the last Jews to the trains.
Many years later, in another lifetime, Ania will enter an American secondhand store with her daughter and be overcome with instinctive horror. Do you know where all these clothes come from? she will ask.
People who don’t need them anymore, her daughter will say with a shrug. Why do you ask?
When Rainer returns home on leave, he is distant, harder, and more aloof. This is to be expected, of course. How can you fight a war and come back cheerful? Ania knows this. But still, she misses his old jokes, even the ones at which she used to roll her eyes. And she wishes he would offer some affection to his sons. He addresses them with curt formality, sometimes even disdain. One day, when Anselm comes home from school in tears because an older boy has stolen his new pencil, Rainer boxes his ears. “Don’t let yourself be beaten again, you understand?” he says roughly. “The future is not for boys who don’t know how to fight.” Ania tries not to mourn the old Rainer, the one who knew how to inspire and instruct with humor, and to bring out the best in young men.
They make love, if it can be called that, only a few times. Rainer is rougher and less cautious physically. More than once, Ania bleeds afterward. But this too is to be expected, isn’t it, from a soldier on leave? She stifles her revulsion. It will only make her pity herself.
In the spring of 1943, Rainer is discharged from service. He has been wounded, and after three months in a Danish military hospital, shrapnel is still embedded in his knee. He cannot return to combat duty. So he is given a new assignment: to lead a lager in the Warthegau, a German district of conquered Poland. The boys will be older this time—ages thirteen to seventeen. And the lager will be part of the Wehrbauer “soldier farmer” movement used to hold the eastern territories. They are meant to bring modern farming practices to the backward Polish countryside and produce much-needed grain to feed the Reich. They will be at the forefront of Hitler’s Blut und Boden plan—members of a superior race united with superior soil (rich, black stuff that slides between your fingers like silk) and ready to defend it if attacked.
The assignment has a frightening, warlike ring to it, but then again so does living in Dortmund. The Ruhr is under constant siege now, and British and American bombs wreak havoc every night. Those people remaining in the city have become mean and desperate: they report one another to the Gestapo for not offering the proper Heil Hitler, or listening to foreign broadcasts, or for “defeatist” talk. “Our poor soldiers,” Ania says while reading the newspaper one night, and Gudrun gives her a harsh look. “Our brave soldiers,” Gudrun corrects. “You could go to prison for such talk.”
The presence of slave laborers has become ubiquitous—mostly Russian POWs working in the city’s coal and munitions plants. Tramping through the streets, they look thin and haunted—a hungry, miserable lot. But in Russia, German POWs receive the same treatment or worse, according to Rainer, Hitler, Goebbels, and every Nazi Kreisleiter. Ania is growing sick of men and their talk, though. In the last year, she has seen groups of female prisoners, too. Pretty and young Polish and Ukrainian girls are hawked at the train station for use as nannies and household help. And a group of malnourished-looking women in striped uniforms walk through the city to the munitions plant each morning. Jews from a temporary labor camp. Their presence has no German analog in Russia.
Rainer evidences no joy at the prospect of leading another lager. He wakes screaming almost every night. When the doctor prescribes pills to help him sleep, he takes them right after supper and falls immediately into a sluggish, absent state.
So again it falls to Ania to pack up their small family. They are allowed one bag each, just like the Jews. This gives her pause.
In the last year, Ania has heard new horror stories: of KZ inmates worked so hard they drop dead, of women and children shot to death in the woods, of giant ovens where Jews are gassed. She does not believe the worst of these. The Führer who dreamed up Landjahr lagers and one-pot Sunday dinners would never order such unconscionable things. It is one thing to deport the Jews, another to murder them. The stories smack of Allied propaganda—the kind written on the leaflets that the RAF drops.
But, all the same, they are unsettling.
In the future, when Ania tries to explain this to her daughter, words will fail her. She knew of the horrors and she didn’t. She half knew—but there is no word for that. She knew it the way you know something is happening far away in a distant land, something you have no control over: earthquake refugees living in squalid conditions or victims in a foreign war.
But it wasn’t a foreign war, it was your war! her daughter will insist.
True, Ania admits. But it didn’t feel that way.
Until the Warthegau.
For life in this new lager, Ania packs warm clothing, a small book of photos, blankets for the boys, nails, a hammer, a wooden spoon, a potato peeler, and her precious paring knife. This winnowing down to the essentials is good practice for the future, though she doesn’t know that yet. The lager
will be furnished, but these are items you can’t count on finding anymore.
The trip east is as spartan as the landscape. The Brandts ride in an army transport train, in a car reserved for “civilian settlers.” Their fellow passengers are a group of young women, members of the BDM, out spreading the “domestic culture and hygiene of Germandom” to the ignorant peasant peoples of the east, and many ex-soldiers like Rainer—injured men or those too old for active duty but still capable of farm and police work. She is the only mother with children. Wolfgang is sick for most of the trip. Anselm, at seven, stares out the window, fascinated by the military transports at the stations they pass. He has never seen so many SS men in their long, swishing coats and black boots.
Anselm is the one to point out the train in Schwerin: a long line of cattle cars stuffed with human beings, their frightened faces visible through the small windows at the top.
“Why are those people riding in the animal cars?” he asks.
“There aren’t enough civilian cars,” Ania suggests. The sight is jarring, though. In Dortmund, the Jewish transports from France and the Netherlands were overcrowded passenger trains; apparently it is not so in the east.
“Are there bathrooms in the cars?” Anselm persists. “Where are they going?”
“Maybe chamber pots,” Ania answers. “To camps in the east.”
“Enough questions,” Rainer barks. It is one of the few times he speaks.
“Look.” Anselm nudges her. He points his chin toward the first car, behind the engine, an open-goods wagon with no roof. In this one, Ania can see the people clearly. They are standing because it is too crowded to sit. Along the side, a row of faces stare out at hip height—children. With wide eyes, they watch as their train pulls ahead. When the two cars are side by side, Ania finds herself staring into one particular woman’s face. She is not old, not young, a mother holding a baby in her arms. For an instant, their eyes connect. And the woman’s gaze is so full of despair it takes Ania’s breath.
The Women in the Castle Page 24