It is late afternoon when they arrive. The sky is vast and gray. The station has no name, and there is no town or village anywhere in sight—only a fence surrounding long, low barracks beside a giant quarry. Ania is confused. She has understood the camp to supply labor for an SS farm. But this does not look like a farm.
Even Heiner seems cowed. They make their way along the fence toward what appears to be the front gate, flanked on both sides by rudimentary guard booths, from which two SS men emerge. “Halt!” one shouts.
Ania and the boys freeze.
An eerie silence follows, punctuated by the whirring and hammering of heavy machinery. The men continue their approach.
It occurs to Ania that she is expected to speak.
“We’ve come from Lager 428, in the Warthegau,” she says. “I am delivering trainees.”
The older of the two men holds out his hand for the papers. The younger one grins and nicks his chin toward Gerald’s swollen face.
The man glances up from the papers and eyes Heiner and Gerald, his gaze lingering on the black eye. Then he nods. Apparently they are in the right place.
He gestures for the boys to walk.
As they continue toward the gate, they can see the activity on the other side. Prisoners are sorting piles of stones and loading them into wagons bound for a cement works. A group of them pull an impossibly heavy-looking cart. And, as Ania watches, something becomes clear: they are all women.
Ania stops and stares.
“Move along,” the SS man barks, and Ania complies automatically. But she keeps her eyes on the women. As she watches, one of them sinks to her knees, causing confusion down the line—the others continue to pull, even though she is still attached to the rope of her harness. Her body sags forward but cannot completely drop. No one stops, and for a grisly moment, she is pulled along, in danger of being run over. Then the accompanying guard lunges forward and slices the rope that holds her and she tumbles to the ground. The woman behind her manages to kick her body to the side, out of the way of the wheel.
Without thinking, Ania stops and covers her mouth.
“Nha?” The younger guard grins. “Arbeit macht frie.” Ania can make out the words despite his Polish accent. A grim parody of what she once understood them to mean: Work will free you. Reeducation through labor, Hitler’s promise of redemption through hard work.
On the other side of the fence, the fallen woman gets to her knees. Ania’s whole body is swept with relief. She is all right! But then, in one motion, the guard smacks her with the butt of his rifle. She falls sideways, this time facing the gate.
“Frau Brandt!” the senior SS man says sharply. “Unterscharführer Pretski will take your boys to their quarters. You will follow me to sign the papers. There is a train due in half an hour that you can take back.”
As if underwater, Ania returns her eyes to the boys, these fifteen-year-olds she has delivered to this hell. “Heil Hitler!” Heiner says loudly and salutes. Gerald, more shakily, follows suit.
Ania knows what is required of her. But she cannot move her arm, or open her mouth.
Their eyes are all on her.
“Mach’s gut,” she says in something like a whisper as, on the other side, the woman is dragged away.
All the way back to the lager, Ania thinks of the boys. Of horrible Heiner and kind Gerald and the fact that she is the one who delivered them to that place. She thinks of Gerald’s unwitting mother, in some drab apartment, missing her son. And she thinks of Otto Smeltz, the first boy she betrayed. She is no better than those SS men with the babies. All these years she has been putting one foot before the other, imagining herself a good person, a good mother, someone laboring for a just cause.
And she thinks of the woman hanging from the cart, the way she fell, slumped at the waist like a rag doll. When she crawled to her knees and looked out toward Ania, her face was empty, filled only with pain and the most basic remnant of life. But once, it had been the face of a mother or wife. Possibly of a sister or an aunt or a best friend. And underneath the layers of time, the face of someone’s child, a girl some mother diapered and fed and held.
Above Ania, the moon is nearly full and the stars are as bright as always. Cassiopeia, Orion, Arachne . . . The names of the constellations return to her in her father’s voice. They are all in their places, a buffer against the chaos and indifference of the universe.
It is what is down here below them in the mud that is all wrong.
When Ania arrives at the lager, it is nearly three a.m. But she does not crawl into her bed. Propelled by a barely tamped-down horror, she packs her paring knife, a blood sausage, and a loaf of bread. Nothing sentimental. Only what they will need to survive. When she is done, she wakes her boys and leads them out into the dawn. Her urgency is so compelling they demand no explanation.
And so the night she delivers Heiner and Gerald to their fate becomes the morning Ania and her sons join the flow of displaced persons, severed from themselves.
Chapter Thirty
Frühlinghausen, December 1950
The Frühlinghausen Benita returned to was shockingly unchanged. On the surface there were amendments, of course. The mental hospital was gone, for example—the building had burned to the ground, and the patients, Benita thought with her new postwar black humor, had probably all been euthanized. There was no more foul-smelling fertilizer pit beside the cannery and no more dingy Krensig Strasse. The ancient, moldering thatched roofs had proved incendiary when a nearby stretch of train track was bombed. This was no surprise to Benita. For the last half century those cottages had been waiting for an opportunity to self-destruct.
But Frühlinghausen was still home to the same stupid people Benita had always wanted to escape. The once promising young Nazi mayor had turned into a beefy, middle-aged pig farmer with green-tinged glasses that made him look sinister. Fearless Fräulein Brebel, onetime leader of Benita’s BDM group, was now a middle-school teacher—so much for denazification! And the boys who had courted Benita were all either dead or married; running their family’s farms or working at the cannery. The stolid redbrick Catholic church Frau Gruber had dragged her children to every Sunday morning was once again well attended, its shattered stained-glass window replaced with an ugly pane of wavy yellow glass.
Of the Gruber family, only Gertrud and Lotte remained. Frau Gruber had died before the war began in earnest, and Benita’s brothers lay beside her in the town graveyard: Georg, the youngest, shot God knows where in Russia, and Hans, dead of an infection caught in a military hospital. Sophie, the second-oldest Gruber daughter, had married an American soldier and moved to a place called Kansas. This was both marvelous and galling to Benita. How could plain, quiet Sophie, who had always been so content in Frühlinghausen, have been the one to escape?
Lotte and Gertrud lived side by side in a row of new stucco cottages with matching lace curtains over the windows and tiny gardens full of practical plantings: potatoes, cabbage, carrots, and parsley. It made Benita want to cry.
“Tired of life in the castle?” Lotte said with a smirk when Benita first stepped off the train.
Gertrud was kinder. “Mother would be happy that you came back.”
But unfortunately Benita was staying with Lotte, whose children had already left home. Her daughter had married the local butcher, and her son was studying in Braunschweig to become a government clerk. The Grubers (now Freiholzes, thanks to Lotte’s unpleasant husband, Gephardt) were moving up in the world. Benita found this a good joke. But there was no one to share it with.
The beginning of December marked three months since Benita had been back. Lotte, who was always prickly, was now downright peevish. Whether this was because of Benita’s continued presence or Gephardt’s prolonged absence was impossible to know. Gephardt had gone south to see his ailing mother shortly after Benita’s arrival, and for the last two weeks Lotte had eagerly awaited his return. Maybe the delay brought to mind the long years she had spent raising children whil
e he did God knows what in a Siberian labor camp. Or maybe the constant effort of preparing a hot dinner in expectation set her on edge. Benita slunk around the house like a person trying not to wake a sleeping baby. But even so, she managed to get on Lotte’s nerves.
“Benita,” Lotte said when Benita let herself into the cottage one afternoon, “have you thought about applying for a job at Weseman’s?”
Benita had not even unwrapped her scarf.
Weseman’s had opened recently—a narrow grocery with no windows and a heavy smell of cigarette smoke, long shelves of canned and packaged goods. These were not in high demand in Frühlinghausen, where almost everyone still grew their own produce, canned their own fruit, and bought their meat from the butcher. Benita had set foot inside the place exactly once.
“Lotte, let poor Benita catch her breath,” Gertrud chided from the table where she sat cracking nuts for Christmas cookies.
“Isn’t that what she was just doing? Strolling around in the fresh air?”
“It’s all right,” Benita said, shedding her coat. She knew better than to bristle at Lotte’s barbs. “Are they looking for someone?”
“I should think so—I heard Trude complaining about the long hours—dawn till dusk and no one to fill in besides her and Horst. Apparently she never sees him anymore—though I don’t know if that’s really much to complain about.” Lotte slipped into an imitation of a man with a stiff back and pained face. Lotte had once been the class cutup, a brash, big-boned, and funny girl everyone was slightly afraid of, and she maintained a little of this demeanor as an adult.
“Lot-te,” Gertrud chided. “Horst is a nice man.”
“Who said he wasn’t?” Lotte cracked a walnut with particular violence.
She and Gertrud had their own way of communicating—a kind of closeness achieved through years of living side by side, sharing the profound and the mundane. Benita existed entirely outside its confines, a subject of their conversation rather than a participant. “Well, he is nice,” Gertrud said to Benita. “It’s true.”
Obviously they had discussed the job already; Benita was their mutual problem to solve.
“I’ll go tomorrow,” Benita said.
She had tried to find work already. First at the local kindergarten, but she had no experience. Then with Frau Kurtzdorf, the town seamstress, but she did not know how to work a sewing machine. She had even applied at a department store a long bus ride away in Bremel but was told she was too old. Too old! The portly Dutchman conducting the interview had given her a lascivious once-over even as he pronounced this. It made her furious and despairing in turn.
But what could she do but keep trying? Lotte needed money for coal and provisions. Gephardt either could or would not work; it was unclear which. In any case he contributed nothing by way of household income, and beneath her scornful demeanor Lotte was worn out. She worked long hours in the canning factory office. Benita could not blame her for wanting support, and she did not want to be a burden.
Standing in the small, chilly parlor with its familiar lamp on the table—the same one Frau Gruber had kept in a place of honor in her own dingy parlor—Benita knew she should sit down beside Gertrud and help shell the walnuts, that she should make conversation and inquire whether there was any news of Gephardt, or ask what the church had planned for the first Sunday of Advent or whether Gertrud’s children were over their colds. But she could not. “I have a headache—I’m going to lie down a moment,” she said instead.
“Of course you are,” Lotte retorted, raising her eyebrows in Gertrud’s direction. “That’s our Benita.”
Upstairs, Benita sank onto her narrow bed and looked at the photograph of Martin that hung beside it. In it, he was about nine; his arms were outstretched, his hair ruffled by wind. It was taken in the field below Burg Lingenfels. The grass rose to his knees, and Benita could almost hear the skylarks and swallows, the papery rustle of grasshoppers. It had been a beautiful, warm afternoon—a picnic with Marianne and Ania and all the children, at the end of their time living in the castle. There had been resistance to the plan in the beginning—Elisabeth had wanted to stay inside and read her book, Fritz had complained of a toothache, and Benita herself had wanted to go into Tollingen to shop for a new hat. But Marianne had prevailed—it was the perfect day for a picnic, she insisted. And she wanted to take photographs with her new camera. Photographs of a picnic! Both Ania and Benita had been appalled. In their experience, cameras were precious, delicate tools, reserved exclusively for formal portraits—not toys to be toted along to take pictures of sweaty, disorderly children running wild. But how right Marianne had been to insist! The day had been wonderful—one of the happiest of Benita’s life. And in the photograph of Martin running, Marianne had captured a rare and unguarded moment of joy. Here was the thing Benita was most proud of: She had raised a boy capable of such feeling. Somehow, despite everything, he could experience this.
Why did you decide to go back to Frühlinghausen? he had asked in his first letter, and she had answered as best she could: There was no reason for her to rely on Marianne’s hospitality any longer. And it was important to be near her sisters; Lotte needed her help with the house . . . She knew her answers were thin. But Martin seemed to have accepted them because he had not asked again.
In his last letter he had written of an invitation.
A wealthy classmate from an old family had asked him to spend the winter holiday skiing with them in Switzerland. He was reluctant to accept. I don’t want to leave you alone at Christmas, Mother, he wrote. I could stay with you in Frühlinghausen. Does Lotte have room? The thought depressed Benita. She hated the idea of him here among Lotte, Gertrud, and their families. He would have to sit beside Gephardt in the dingy church pew she had loathed as a child. He would have to eat with people who gobbled their food in silence and wiped their mouths with the backs of their hands. This was not what she had raised him to be.
No, she had insisted. Accept the invitation. You can come visit in the new year. It will be good for you to learn how to ski. So he would spend Christmas on the slopes of St. Moritz with some happy family of dukes and duchesses. It was better this way, but at the same time her heart ached. She would content herself with his image and letters and the knowledge that he was happy.
The next day she steeled herself for an interview at Weseman’s.
Lotte, being Lotte, had gone over first thing in the morning and laid the groundwork. God knows what embarrassing things she had told them. In any case, she reported, the owners were happy to meet with Benita. In fact, Trude Weseman remembered her from their days together in the BDM.
This startled Benita. She did not remember a Trude Weseman.
Lotte stared at her impatiently. Trude Schultz. She had married a Weseman.
A face presented itself to Benita: pale and large eyed, with pimply skin and dark hair pulled back into tight braids. Of course! Benita felt the stirring of hope. They had shared experience to go on—not friendship, but a connection: all those long hours with Fräulein Brebel, singing Nazi Volkslieder and slogging through arduous Sunday hikes. All that ridiculous homemaker training, stamping butter and aerating batter and generally learning skills the war would render useless. There would, maybe, be something to laugh about.
But when she arrived, she did not recognize the woman who opened the door. Over the years Trude had grown stout. And her pimples had given way to pockmarks. Her hair had gone prematurely gray. Benita realized with dismay that she had seen this woman around town once or twice already and not acknowledged their connection.
“Trude!” she said warmly, offering her best smile.
Trude nodded her head curtly, rejecting Benita’s familiar tone.
Had she felt snubbed by their recent encounters? Benita resolved to be particularly self-deprecating and complimentary. “How long it’s been since the days of Fräulein Brebel,” she said. “And you look wonderful. Not a day older.”
“I certainly look days older.”
Trude sniffed, shaking her head. “Come this way—Horst is in the parlor.”
Benita followed.
Had Trude not liked her as a girl? She could not remember. But often someone had been sweet on someone who was sweet on Benita and this had made for hard feelings . . . Maybe Trude had hankered after Paul Henike? Or Axel Pittman? Those years were a great meaningless fuzz in Benita’s mind. Following the woman’s stiff back down the hall, Benita reproached her teenage self. What had she done back then? And why had she cared so little?
In the parlor, Horst rose from behind a messy desk. He was a thin, balding man with stooped shoulders and a tired air, quite like Lotte’s imitation.
Benita extended her hand. “So nice to meet you,” she began. “Frühlinghausen is lucky to have your store.”
Trude made an impatient gesture. “Ach, sit down, sit down.” She waved away Benita’s words.
Stung, Benita complied. So did Horst. It was clear who was in charge. Horst offered an apologetic smile.
“So Frau Gruber—pardon—Frau Fledermann is looking for a position as a clerk,” Trude stated flatly. “What are the days we need help on our schedule?”
“Well.” Horst rustled the papers on his desk. “We could work around the times Frau Fledermann has available as—”
“Come, Horst,” Trude broke in. “What are the hours on the schedule in front of you?”
“I’m very flexible,” Benita offered. “I’m sure I could—”
“Do you have experience with a cash register?” Trude interrupted.
“Not with a cash register, no,” Benita began. “But I could learn—”
“So you don’t know it already?” Trude asked, as if this were preposterous.
“No.” Benita shook her head.
At his desk, Horst cleared his throat.
Trude let out a sharp bark of laughter. “So then—surely you did not think we would hire you out of charity?”
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