Miss Graham's Cold War Cookbook

by Celia Rees

Seraphina continued to stare straight ahead. Edith wondered again what her life had been before. There was an intelligence in those eyes and something altogether refined about her looks and demeanor that this terrible time had failed to erase. Whatever her past life, Edith doubted that she’d been destined to skivvy for the likes of Frau Schmidt. But such a job was highly sought after. If she lost this, she would lose everything. They would be queuing up to take her place. Probably were already. Frau Schmidt would have someone lined up, that was certain.

  “A Jew!” Miss Slater’s lip curled at the word and she gave a little shudder of disgust. “I might have known.”

  “How could you not have known?” Edith said as she took off her coat. “Did you not see the numbers on her arm?”

  Of course she hadn’t. Until this moment, Seraphina had been beneath her notice.

  “What is Seraphina supposed to have stolen?” Edith asked. She kept her voice even, as she would do in school.

  “Not supposed,” Miss Slater spat out. “Did. She was caught red-handed by Frau Schmidt.”

  Edith turned to the older woman. “And what was it that Seraphina was caught stealing?”

  “Potato peelings.”

  Edith looked from one to the other. “All this is about potato peelings?”

  “It’s against the rules,” Miss Slater countered. “Germans are not supposed to take food home. Even scraps and leftovers.”

  “Are they not? Where does it go, then?”

  Miss Slater shrugged. “Into the rubbish, I suppose.”

  “Or into Frau Schmidt’s basement.” She turned to the other German servants. “Is that not so, girls?”

  They said nothing, but Hilde’s ready color gave them away, and Frau Schmidt’s blustered denial died in her throat.

  “So, it’s all right for Frau Schmidt to take leftover food,” Edith went on, “and presumably the others, if Frau Schmidt can spare anything, but not Seraphina? Is that right?”

  She bit back her anger, determined not to lose her temper, but no one else was going to defend Seraphina, they were all looking away, eyes averted, and she wouldn’t—couldn’t—put up with what was happening here.

  Miss Slater’s face became stubborn, sullen. “It’s against regulations. She should be reported.”

  “I see. And none of us do anything against regulations? That’s a very fine watch, Miss Slater.” Edith took the girl’s arm. “Mind if I take a better look?”

  It was black market almost certainly. Miss Slater made to pull her arm away, but Edith’s grip tightened.

  “Swiss, if I’m not mistaken. And expensive.” She turned it to see the face. “Very expensive. Would you mind telling us where you got it?”

  “It was a gift.”

  “Oh, from whom?”

  “An admirer.” She shook her arm free. “I’ve had it ages.”

  “Really? And that’s a nice pendant you are wearing. I haven’t seen it before. Gold with what looks like a ruby at the center. It looks old.”

  “It’s a family heirloom, if you must know.”

  “So it will have a British hallmark, won’t it? Can I see?”

  Edith held her ice-blue eyes until she looked away.

  “How would I know?” She turned away in sulky petulance, a protective hand over the pendant. She rallied. “Look here, you’ve no right—”

  “I was merely proving a point,” Edith said, keeping her voice mild. “You have no right, either. Neither have any of you.” Her tone hardened as she looked around at the other girls. “How much do you pay in cigarettes for your laundry to be done? Your hair? The alterations to your clothes? We all do it but it is strictly against regulations. You could all be reported. I suggest we leave Seraphina alone, don’t you? Is it really worth ruining anybody’s life for a few potato peelings?”

  No one said anything.

  “I simply don’t have time for this. I have to get ready. I’m going out.” Miss Slater flung the riposte over her shoulder as she ran upstairs.

  “Who’s for a drink?” Angela turned back into the sitting room now the show was over. “I could do with one after that!”

  The others followed in a ripple of excited, nervous laughter, anxious to dispel the recent awkwardness and presumably hoping that Edith would not report the lot of them.

  Frau Schmidt shooed the German girls toward the kitchen.

  “Frau Schmidt, might I have a word?” Edith called the woman back. “I don’t want to see Seraphina suffer in any way as a result of this . . . misunderstanding. And I don’t want to see her being the only one stuck with the heavy work. See to it that it’s shared equally between the other girls, or better still I’d like to see Stephan doing a bit more, or I might start asking some questions of my own. Like what is he doing here, anyway? And why are you two camped in the basement? Which is, as I understand it, against the famous regulations. Seraphina? Will you bring my bag up for me? I don’t want dinner, and I have paperwork to do.”

  Edith turned for the stairs, noting with satisfaction Frau Schmidt’s defeated nod as she trudged down the steps to the basement.

  “Sit down, Seraphina.” Edith shut the door. “I want to talk to you.”

  Seraphina sat down, taking a fraction of the edge of the bed.

  “Did you take them?”

  “The potato peels? Of course. They all do. Frau Schmidt and the other girls. I wanted to make Kartoffelpuffer, potato pancakes, for my sister. She is hungry. Sick. She needs food. They all take food. I thought they would not mind.”

  “But they did.”

  Seraphina nodded.

  “One rule for them, one rule for you, eh?”

  Seraphina gave a weary shrug. “Hilde, and Magda, they say nothing, but Grete tells Frau Schmidt, who goes to Miss Slater.” She looked up at Edith. “I thought she is British and would be on my side. What is a few potato peels to you? I was surprised.”

  “We have our own share of bigots and anti-Semites.”

  “It is everywhere?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “I’d like to go someplace where that is not so.”

  Edith stared at the girl. She could think of no answer.

  “Tell me, Seraphina,” she said. “Where are you living?”

  “We have a place in a house.”

  “Not in a camp?”

  “No.” She shook her head vigorously. “I won’t live in a camp. I don’t care how bad the place is where we live. I’d rather live on our own.”

  Edith took out cigarettes. “Do you want one?”

  Seraphina took a cigarette but refused a light.

  “Here. Have the whole packet. Have two. And here’s chocolate. For your sister. She’s sick you say?”

  “Yes, very sick. She needs medicine, but I have no money, nothing.” Seraphina wiped at the tears that she’d refused to shed earlier. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “I’ll come and see her tomorrow. There, there,” Edith put her arm round the girl’s narrow shoulders and offered her handkerchief. “We’ll see what needs to be done to make her better. Meanwhile, you heard what I said to Frau Schmidt: if anything like this happens again, or if she gives you heavy jobs to do, I want to know. Really, that woman. I’ve a good mind to get rid of her.”

  “You can do that?” Seraphina looked at her with awe.

  “Oh, yes,” Edith snapped her fingers. “Like that.”

  All Germans were intensely vulnerable; every aspect of their lives subject to the Control Commission. As a Senior Officer, Edith could do more or less what she liked.

  “But you mustn’t.” Seraphina’s thin face grew deadly serious. “She is very powerful.”

  “Powerful, how?” Edith asked.

  “She knows many people. They can make trouble.”

  “For me?”

  Seraphina shook her head quickly.

  “For you?”

  Seraphina nodded just as fast.

  “Oh, I see. What kind of people, exactly?”

  “I—I
can’t say. But—” She lowered her voice, looking around like a hunted field mouse, as if Frau Schmidt might be lurking, ready to pounce. “This is not her house, although she says it is. She was just the housekeeper. I heard Grete saying. The family left when the British come. Then Frau Schmidt has the house to herself.” She paused. “Those little animals—in the parlor.”

  “The porcelain pieces?”

  Seraphina nodded. “They are special. Porzellan Manufaktur Allach. Made in Dachau for the SS.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know,” Seraphina said quietly, her small hands locked tightly. “Frau Schmidt tells me I must not touch, even to dust. Not that I would.” Her face puckered with loathing and disgust. “They cannot show the picture of Hitler anymore, but they keep these things that are not so obvious, to show they have not changed. If you look, you see.” She turned an ornament over and signed double lightning-flash runes in the air. The mark of the SS. “That Stephan.” She lowered her voice still further. “He is not Frau Schmidt’s man. He is hiding, she is helping him.”

  This all made sense. Edith could never quite square the elegant bedroom furniture, the pretty little pink stool in particular, with Frau Schmidt’s ample behind. And Stephan. He looked younger than Frau Schmidt, which wasn’t suspicious in itself, of course, but they seemed ill-suited. He didn’t like rough work, shirked most of it, and there was something about his attitude. The sullen resentment could be a profound distaste born of shock, as if he could not quite understand how this was happening to him.

  “Thank you, Seraphina.” The girl took it as her cue to go. “No, wait a moment. These Kartoffelpuffer. How do you make them?”

  Seraphina looked mystified. “They are poor people’s food . . .”

  “I collect recipes. Indulge me.”

  Edith picked up a pencil and rummaged in her bag for paper. She found the mess menu card and wrote the recipe on the back.

  What the girl had told her chimed with what Adams had said about the fear that still held sway here, of hidden forces under the surface. Like they’re afraid of something. As though the people we’re looking for still have influence and power. Seraphina hadn’t said as much, but that’s whom she meant. He is hiding. She is helping him. Did she mean hiding himself, or hiding someone else? And how exactly was Frau Schmidt helping? And the porcelain animals. Crafty. A little shrine to the old regime hidden in plain sight. If anyone recognized the mark, Edith could see Frau Schmidt sliding out of it as quick as you like. Oh, a misunderstanding! They belong to the people who lived here before I moved in!

  Small things, straws in the wind, but this was something she could give to Adams. And at last recipes for Dori. Vienna Steak and Kartoffelpuffer. Refugee potato pancakes. The matching of the recipes told its own story of luxury and lack.

  14

  Mietshaus Moltkestrasse, Lübeck; British Hospital, Hamburg

  18th January 1946

  Moltkestrasse Tea

  Pine needles chopped fine

  Boiling water

  Used to ward off hunger by those who have nothing else.

  Edith directed Jack to the address that Seraphina had given her, a warren of flats down the Moltkestrasse. Every room was crammed with displaced persons, from all over Europe, refugees from the East, ex-slave laborers, POWs whose countries were now under Russian occupation and who didn’t want to go home.

  They shared a concrete box with very little light. The windows were covered with rotting cardboard. The stove in the corner leaked smoke but gave out little heat. It was barely warmer than outside. Black mold peppered the wall above a tide line of green slime. There was a powerful smell of damp.

  A woman swathed in layers of clothing stirred a pot on the stove. She did not look up when they came in, just hunched deeper into herself. She was making soup from vegetable scraps and water. There was a battered can boiling next to the pan. She threw in a handful of something. Pine needles added their fragrance to the cold, damp air, permeated with wood smoke. The woman was no relation, Seraphina explained, they just shared the room. Her son lived there, too. He’d been hurt in the war. Seraphina tapped her temple.

  He was out, and pine tea would stave off his mother’s hunger. The soup was for him when he came back from scavenging for food scraps and wood.

  The Germans were supposed to receive 1,500 calories a day, although it worked out at more like 1,000. These people were getting far less. 600, if that. That meant malnutrition, even starvation. But coffee was being served in the mess at this moment with complimentary toast and jam. Then lunch, always substantial, often four courses. Everyone tucking in, girls complaining about their waistlines.

  They deserve it—that’s what they’d say—but no one deserved this. Since when did two wrongs make a right? And these girls were victims, for goodness’ sake. Would they never find any escape?

  The sister, Anna, lay on an improvised bed in the corner, a wooden pallet covered with a straw mattress and a mound of threadbare, ragged blankets. She was huddled under a filthy quilt.

  Seraphina apologized as Edith went over to examine the girl. “I have no way of washing, of cleaning.”

  “That’s quite all right, Seraphina.” Edith bent down. “Let’s take a look at you.”

  The girl’s eyes flickered open. They were a most astonishing china blue. Edith pushed back her long fringe. Her forehead was cold and wet, her fair hair dark with sweat. There were fever spots on her cheeks; her breathing was labored, difficult, with a worrying whistling note to it. Edith was no nurse, but this child was clearly very ill.

  Edith nodded to Jack. “Let’s get her out of here.”

  “Let’s be having you, chook.” Jack bent down and picked the girl up as if she weighed no more than a bundle of sticks. “There’s blankets in the back of the Humber.” He gave the keys to Edith. The child stirred in his arms. “There, there. Ssh. We’ll soon have you wrapped up and warm.”

  “Your sister is fair.” Edith turned to check on the girl in the back of the car, wrapped in brown army blankets, her head on Seraphina’s lap.

  “Yes. She is different, with blond hair, blue eyes. Pretty.” She gave the ghost of a smile. “Not like me. It saved us, really. We lived in Prague. My father worked in the University.”

  “Did he teach you English?”

  Seraphina nodded. “And I learn—learned,” she corrected, “at school. When the Nazis came, they arrested my papa. We were taken to Theresienstadt. My mother died there. My grandfather, grandmother also. Then they took us to Auschwitz. I did not see my father, or my brother. I don’t know if they live. My sister stayed with me. There’s a doctor on the ramp from the train. He sees her. He pulls her out of the line. She has hold of my hand and won’t let go. He calls a guard to split us up. Take her. Send me to the gas chambers. Then he asks if we are sisters. Yes, I say, twins although we look different. He is interested in this, so he takes me, too. He does all kinds of experiments on us, measuring, photographing, taking blood, other things, too . . . but we survive.” Seraphina broke off. Edith had never heard her speak about herself, what had happened to her. Perhaps she felt freer now she was outside Frau Schmidt’s house, released by the offer of some kind of hope, however small. “Then the Russians are coming, so they move us first to Buchenwald, then Dachau. Sometimes we walk, sometimes in trucks. I say to Anna, ‘We can’t give up now. The Germans are losing. We will be free soon.’ Then the Americans came and set us free.” She said this without a trace of irony. “My sister saved me. Now I must save her.”

  “Where are we going?” Edith asked.

  Jack was taking the road out of Lübeck, heading for the autobahn. As soon as they were out of the town, he put his foot down.

  “Not to the local krankenhaus, that’s for certain. It’s full to busting. She’s proper poorly. She goes in there, she won’t be coming out.”

  The hospitals were crammed, according to Roz who billeted with someone in Public Health. Row after row of waxy pale patients suffering
from TB, pneumonia, God knows what infections brought on by the winter and the living conditions. Either that, or suffering from some form of starvation: extreme emaciation or the distended limbs of hunger edema, the flesh indenting like putty when pressed. “I’m taking her to Hamburg. To my wench, Kay.”

  “Your Lindy Hopping partner?”

  Jack grinned. “That’s her.”

  “How do you know they’ll treat Anna? It’s a long way to go to find out the hospital is British Only.”

  “It’s mixed. Mainly us, but there’s a wing for the Krauts. They’ve got this program going on. Sharing Knowledge to Save Lives, they call it. The Krauts don’t know about penicillin, so our docs are filling them in. Better than using it all on squaddies with the clap.”

  The hospital in Hamburg was bigger and better equipped than anything available to them in Lübeck. Jack’s friend, Kay Winston, was tall and spare, her dark hair pinned back under her starched headdress. She appeared capable, even severe in her gray dress, scarlet cape, white cuffs, and cap but her blue eyes were kind. She wore a silver service badge on the right lapel of her cape, and two scarlet bands above the cuff signified her rank. Service stripes showed her time overseas. The effect was daunting. Edith could imagine Jack’s squaddies quailing.

  Her greeting was cool, professional. Jack introduced Edith.

  “Miss Graham. I’ve heard a lot about you.” Her look was sharp, shrewd, the twist of her mouth hinted at humor, but it required a considerable stretch to see her Lindy Hopping with Jack. “Let me look at the child. Lay her down there.”

  Jack took Anna into a cubicle and put her gently on the bed.

  Sister Winston’s examination was deft and sure. She called a doctor to her, a fair-haired young man in an army uniform under his flying white coat.

  He nodded to the nurse for the curtains to be drawn. Seraphina wouldn’t leave her sister, and she wanted Edith to stay with her.

  “Very well, they can stay.”

  The doctor took Anna’s pulse then listened to her chest, her back, asking her to breathe in and out.

  “Again. And again, please.”

  He tapped, two fingers on two fingers, and listened, his forehead creased in concentration.