A Woman of War

by Mandy Robotham

  I’ve always maintained the first cup of tea after birth is the best for any mother, no matter the quality of the brew, but it’s the same for midwives too. We held on to our cups across the table, and Christa couldn’t suppress her grin.

  ‘You’re hooked, aren’t you?’ I laughed.

  ‘How do you that again and again?’ she said. ‘It’s so intense!’

  ‘Well, it’s not always so dramatic,’ I said. ‘But you do get used to the high and lows. In fact, you get to depend on them. I do know some midwives who are quite happy to do all the routine care, but avoid birth. For me, it’s the pinnacle; it’s what I feed off. Birth is like a drug.’

  Swiftly, the camp images came into view. ‘Well, in the old days, before the war,’ I qualified.

  ‘And now?’

  ‘Well, let’s just say I’ve seen too many tragedies to think of those as enjoyable.’

  We both pondered the silence, hearing the household beginning to wake up, but I didn’t want to dampen Christa’s effervescence – she had just witnessed her first momentous birth, one she would never forget. She looked alive.

  ‘But I have to admit, that does go down as one of the most demanding, if only for a few short minutes,’ I said. It was Christa’s cue for a barrage of questions – why I did what, and when, the what-ifs and the consequences. By the time we crawled into our beds, I was exhausted, yet bathed in the balm of satisfaction I hadn’t felt since the early stages of the war, a salve to enjoy since this mother and baby were destined to stay together.

  We stayed a further three days at Frau Schmidt’s house, making sure the baby was feeding well, and supporting Sonia in her recovery. She was sore from the birth and moved slowly, while her mood seesawed between a contented, happy mother to the grieving widow she was. The children doted on their new brother, innocently telling their mother how much Papa would love the new baby – named ‘Gerd’ – when he came home. Sonia’s face creased but she wasn’t ready to deal with their grief just yet.

  Christa and I waved goodbye to a fractured household, although Sonia’s gratitude made us feel we had done something to paste some of the cracks together, for a short time at least. I began to wonder that she was related to Magda Goebbels at all, since she was warm and emotive, with very little reserve. She was married to a Nazi officer, but she had a human side nonetheless.

  14

  Renewed Ascent

  The journey back caused mixed emotions in both of us. Christa was clearly unhappy in the Goebbels’ household, more so since her brother’s death, and desperate to be nearer to her father. However, her wage was needed to send home and positions like hers were not easy to find with a war raging. Inside the car near the Goebbels’ porch, we hugged goodbye, unwilling to let go of our strengthened bond.

  ‘I’ll try to engineer a trip up to you,’ she said, pre-empting my thoughts again. ‘I’m sure I can manage something. Take care, Anke. Just keep safe.’

  The air down below was muted and foggy, but as we climbed through the mist, up and out into sunshine, there was that feeling again – the Berghof existed on another plane, a world beyond the beanstalk. The knot in my stomach, which had been noticeably relaxed at the Schmidt house, now started to tighten and twist. Seeing Eva didn’t concern me – I had neither missed her nor was unhappy about seeing her – but I hoped beyond everything that he was gone.

  Several cars were in front of the house, their drivers smoking and hovering, engines idling. People of note were leaving soon. I took my small bag and headed over to my chalet, my mind occupied with nothing beyond a bath and checking in with Eva. My eyes must have been fixed on the ground, because it was only at the last minute that I flicked them up towards the mountain caps and found myself in a trap.

  He was directly in my view, walking towards me, head also down, stature unmistakable. The sight of a German shepherd at his side confirmed what I feared. I could neither dart towards my room, nor turn and walk the other way without the aversion being obvious. Perhaps sensing another person, he looked up a second after I did, his distinctive features bearing slight confusion though not alarm. I, of course, recognised the Führer instantly, though his expression showed some kind of acknowledgement.

  I stopped in my tracks, unsure what to do. I had always thought of myself as a person unaffected by status, celebrity or false gravitas, and yet I was dumbfounded. Our eyes met, his dark and unyielding; mine undoubtedly like those of a startled fox. And that knot in my stomach, it was yanked hard, like a dog on a leash. Time stood still, for a second or two, until he broke the static air and nodded, as a way of saying, ‘Good day,’ clicked his tongue at the dog and took his eyes back to the ground, moving on.

  And that was my encounter with the Führer, not a syllable uttered – no fear exuded, no monster on show, no devilish glint in his eye. A man who showed common courtesy, to someone he had never met before.

  For some time, I lay on my bed, heart racing, conjuring all the things I had wanted to say to him – about my family, the camp, the suffering, the tortured women, the dead babies, more suffering – but didn’t. Above all, I thought about how my life was more like a warped fairy tale than anything of reality, then sensed a profound relief as I heard the engines retreat, one by one, into the distance.

  Inside the Berghof, it was as if the fervour of Christmas had come and gone; rooms reflected a heavy void, servants moved deftly and the kitchen noises reverted to a steady industry rather than the perpetual fury of the previous days. Frau Grunders was nowhere to be seen, and I ate lunch almost alone. Later, I reported to Sergeant Meier, barely suppressing the temptation to offer a mock salute. He seemed underwhelmed to see me.

  ‘Ah, Fräulein Hoff, you’re back.’ His left eye twitched irritably, and I wondered how lost he felt not being in the glow of the Führer’s presence.

  ‘It seems I am. Is there any news I need to know before I meet Fräulein Braun again?’

  ‘I think she’s been rather preoccupied with the company to be thinking of your visits,’ he said with a note of triumph. ‘I know she’s retired to her room currently, and has asked whether she can see you tomorrow.’ His smugness pulled up the bristles of his moustache, revealing unattractive, yellowing teeth.

  ‘As she wishes,’ I said without missing a beat. ‘Good day, Sergeant Meier.’

  So, more wasted hours in which to ponder. Over the years, I’d told impatient women time and again that pregnancy is a waiting game – I could hear myself repeating it endlessly – but it had never seemed that way to me, with a constant stream of births and women needing care. And yet waiting for one baby to be grown, cultivated and nurtured was painstaking and endless. Like a lifetime.

  I wasn’t sure of what mood I would find Eva in the next morning – vibrant at seeing her lover for more than just a few days, or melancholy at his leaving. She was all smiles as I arrived – ‘Oh, Anke, how lovely to see you!’ – but the facade soon fell and she drifted into a sadness and deflation. Yes, the baby was moving fine, and yes, she felt healthy, sleep sometimes elusive. There was a change in the bump during the last week or so, and she had clearly eaten well during the Führer’s stay; there were still three months to go but the baby had grown, along with the flesh around it. She was watching my face intently, translating my expression, as I laid on hands to read her abdomen.

  ‘Is everything as it should be? You look … perplexed.’

  I put on a smile. ‘No, everything’s fine, Fräulein Braun. It’s only that I sometimes get carried away in trying to map the baby’s position. It’s quite early days but I think the baby is head down. It might not stay that way – the baby is still capable of somersaults, but it’s a good sign it can go into your pelvis.’

  ‘Clever baby,’ she said, and gave it her familiar palming touch.

  I turned to go. ‘Will you require a check tomorrow?’

  ‘Yes, thank you.’ I turned towards the door, and heard her voice again, this time weak and needy. ‘Anke?’

  ‘Yes?’
She looked small and vulnerable, peering at me.

  ‘The baby. It will be … all right, won’t it? What you can feel, is … normal?’

  It was as if simply uttering the words could jinx the baby. I’d needed to reassure countless women of the same thing – whether it was their first, second or fifth baby, German women, rich or poor, educated or not, believed in a strange, cultivated myth that mere whims about a baby’s condition, even unpleasant thoughts, could influence their health and create disabilities. Without a window on the womb, it was a reliance on Mother Nature’s benevolence that was forced upon us, and increasingly we didn’t like the surprises she occasionally threw into the mix. The Third Reich had accelerated that fear a thousand fold. I knew exactly what Eva Braun was driving at.

  ‘Everything I feel and hear leads me to believe your baby is fit and healthy,’ I told her. And it was the truth, at that moment. As a midwife, I had learnt early on you could not give absolute promises. One winter night I’d worked a homebirth with an old-school midwife on the outskirts of Berlin. I was ready to take the lead, she said, and she would stay in the background.

  The woman in labour was normally anxious, but seemed reassured when, each time I listened to the heartbeat, I told her: ‘The baby is fine, everything will be all right.’ I felt a wave of satisfaction at my ability to calm her. Up until the baby emerged lifeless, a chalky white girl who had choked on her own cord, the lifeline pumping breath until those late stages. Through her tears, the woman looked at me in disbelief. She didn’t say a word, but she didn’t need to. I had promised what I couldn’t give, and it was a lesson hard learned.

  ‘You tell them “The baby sounds fine,” which is the truth at that moment,’ the midwife explained after, with kind but wise words. ‘Mother Nature is bigger than any of us, and only she knows.’ So Eva Braun’s baby appeared fine and seemed well, but my words were well chosen.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Eva, clutching at the hope. ‘Oh, and, Anke?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Please call me Eva. I think we are beyond niceties now.’

  15

  Waiting

  Nature moved at a faster pace than our lives over the next month. Spring flowers were in bud and the air distinctly warmer; the snow on the peaks opposite receded towards the tops, as if someone were unravelling a woollen hat from the bottom, keeping just the tips warm. Eva was well, so I spent daytimes on the main terrace in the sunshine, stalking the sun towards my own little terrace in the afternoon, shifting my chair around until finally the low, mandarin rays disappeared completely and I was forced to go inside or pull out my blanket and a light.

  I ate my way through the books on Frau Grunders’ shelves, the housekeeper near silent when I went to raid her parlour. She was almost in mourning since the Führer’s departure, as if her own son had left for the front. The whole house, it seemed, was in a state of depression.

  Eva’s health was stable but her mood was unusually labile. At times she was upbeat and childlike in her enthusiasm for life and the pregnancy, twittering about baby clothes, and upcoming visits from her sister, who always seemed to cancel at the last moment. ‘She’s so busy, what with planning the wedding,’ Eva said, making excuses for her ‘devoted’ sibling. On other days she was noticeably down, barely acknowledging me or the baby, and seemed to haul her increasing girth around as if it were an inconvenient suitcase.

  The maids could predict her manner from the flow of letters; in the early days of the war, Hitler had written to Eva almost every day he was away. Her mood, and her treatment of the staff, was genial and pleasant when his affection on paper flowed. On days without a letter – and those were becoming increasingly common as the war and the pregnancy wore on – they tiptoed into her room, wary of her bark and bite, sometimes sent packing with a sting of words and a thud of the woodwork.

  I continued writing my obligatory letters to my parents, Franz, and Ilse, even though it became harder to phrase the same sentiments again and again. Each week, I took my offerings to Sergeant Meier, who merely nodded as I laid them on his desk, and who always shook his head without expression when I asked him if there were any returns.

  To pass the time, I began making a wish list of practical items for Captain Stenz, should he ever appear again. I was strangely concerned he had been ghosted away to another part of the war and its fiery arena, fatally exposed. I surprised myself by how much time I spent looking towards the gates and hoping it was his car crunching on the gravel path. Despite the dark shade of his uniform, the menace of the skull bone insignia pinned to his collar, I did look on him as human, almost as a friend.

  Berlin, February 1942

  The snow was flurrying as I wound my scarf tightly at the hospital entrance. It was only three in the afternoon, but the sky was already a ceiling of dark sludge, little tornados of flakes whipping in the air. Despite the weather, I planned to walk home after a busy shift, then sink into a hot bath, a good book and sleep – in that order.

  He approached as I headed down the steps, the wide brim of his hat pulled low over his face. I started for a moment – he could easily have been Gestapo, with his belted mackintosh and black brogues.

  ‘Fräulein Hoff?’

  ‘Yes?’ I carried on walking, determined he wouldn’t catch the alarm in my face.

  ‘Minna sent me.’

  ‘Minna? Do I know her?’ I kept my head bent down, as any hesitation was a true giveaway.

  ‘She says the bottom is falling out of the market, and you need to come quickly.’

  My head snapped upwards, flakes settling on my nose. This was the code we had set for Nadia going into labour; it was too risky for me to be on-call for all the births in the ghetto, but if there were no women in the neighbourhood who felt confident with a breech, I’d said I would come. If Minna had sent for me, she needed my help.

  I stopped. ‘All right, how soon?’

  ‘She said to bring you immediately.’

  ‘It’ll take us a while on foot, just as long if we take the tram halfway.’

  ‘I’ve got a car, and passes,’ he said. ‘This way.’

  I hesitated. It was one thing walking alongside this stranger, another getting into a car with him. He caught my wariness.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said, ‘I’m not Gestapo, I promise.’

  ‘But you are German?’ There were blond flecks under his hat, and his features were undoubtedly Aryan.

  ‘As are you.’ He smiled, white teeth and a genuine warmth. His breath puffed into the icy, grey air. ‘I’m just trying to help, like you. Do what I can.’

  ‘And your name?’

  ‘No names,’ he said. ‘It’s safer.’

  Even in this fog of distrust, there was a point where you had to believe in some things, in people, and my gut told me I should follow. I had no choice if he what he said was true. Nadia could be in strong labour. Strong and quick.

  Whatever passes he possessed worked like magic, and we sailed through the checkpoints with few questions. The car reached the perimeters of the Jewish quarter, where we parked and walked the rest of the way.

  ‘Take my arm, Fräulein,’ he said as we headed into the flurry, bigger and more consistent flakes falling now. The sight of us would be more convincing from afar, a couple walking home through the snow to warmth and safety, skirting the Jewish quarter, arm in arm.

  We walked on, feigning an innocent conversation and slipping into the ghetto under a snow cloak. At Nadia’s door, he rapped four times, paused, and rapped twice again. A face I recognised as Minna’s brother appeared, and I sidled in.

  ‘Good luck, Fräulein,’ the man said, and turned back into the white storm. I felt a pinch of sorrow at seeing him go.

  The room had been cleared of everyone but Minna and Nadia’s mother. ‘Sorry to call like this,’ Minna said with true regret. ‘The old woman who’d volunteered was found dead this morning.’

  A kettle was on the boil and the bed sheet had been pulled back. The room was wa
rm enough, every contribution from the house having made it into the woodpile. Nadia was on the mattress, on all fours, head in her hands and her bottom in the air, clad in her knickers, swaying as a perfect pendulum.

  I had my Pinard to listen to the baby, but nothing more, although we had stockpiled sterile gloves in the house, and the inevitable towels, clean and folded, were waiting. I sat on my haunches beside Nadia as she went into a contraction, watching the twist of her pelvis as her groans rose to a crescendo, blowing fiercely into her hands. I resisted touching, even to offer massage on her back, as it was important with any breech to let mothers wriggle and writhe in reaction to the baby’s internal corkscrewing.

  Contraction over, I came on a level with her head, her black fringe wet and stringy.

  ‘Hey, Nadia, you’re doing so well. This baby really wants to come.’

  ‘I think so.’ She smiled weakly.

  ‘Can I listen to the baby? You might need to move a little – is that possible?’

  She flopped onto her side, and I came down and found the heartbeat, still at the top of her abdomen.

  ‘Baby sounds fine,’ I said. ‘No problems.’

  ‘What will you do?’ she said, beads of sweat falling into her eyes, anxiety rising in their blackness.

  ‘Me? Nothing, just watch and wait.’

  She seemed surprised I wasn’t armed with some mechanical tool to extract her baby, but she was also young enough not to have been at any births amongst her community.

  ‘What should I do?’ she asked.

  ‘Exactly what you’ve been doing, Nadia. Let your baby come through. Don’t resist, just open yourself to whatever feelings you have inside.’

  She nodded, childlike. But for one so young, she seemed to understand what I’d said, as if those pressures were already brewing. Instantly, she hoisted herself back onto her knees as another contraction took hold, and the groan turned into the slightest of moos. By her pitch, I estimated it wouldn’t be too long.