The Plum Tree

by Ellen Marie Wiseman

  “Didn’t you hear the announcement last night?” Frau Unger said. “Starting today, it’s against the law for German Jews to go out in public without wearing the Star of David.”

  “But why? What does it mean?”

  Frau Unger shrugged. “How do I know? I can’t keep up with the rules. There are too many. My poor husband nearly got arrested for shooting a wood duck. Can you imagine, throwing an old man in jail for trying to find his supper? Apparently, Himmler likes wood ducks.”

  Christine pictured Isaac and his family, standing in a ration line on the other side of town with stars on their coats. She looked up the long line in front of her. From behind, the people all looked the same. “I didn’t know the Kleins and the Leibermanns were Jewish,” she said.

  “It’s too late for them now,” Frau Unger said, shaking her head.

  “What do you mean?”

  “They can’t leave the country. One day, Hitler says to get rid of the Jews. The next day, he says they can’t leave.”

  Christine remembered the letter from Isaac’s aunt in Poland, and a hard knot formed in her stomach. After the stars came the ghettos. Is that what Hitler’s plan was for the German Jews too? It was already prohibited for them to deal with Aryan tradesmen, shopkeepers, butchers, doctors, cobblers, and barbers. The Nazis had even gone as far as making it mandatory for them to turn in their hair clippers, scissors, and combs. There had been a reduction in rations for the Jews; at the same time it was illegal for them to stockpile food. Hitler was making it impossible for them to survive. Now he wasn’t going to let them leave?

  Her first thought was to leave the ration line and hurry to the other side of town, to find out if Isaac and his family were still living there, or if his father had finally convinced his mother to leave the country. But she had to get bread for her family, because for the past week, the bakery and the store had been out. Regardless, she felt like a coward because she hadn’t gone to the other side of town since seeing the SS in the café. The Bauermans must have left by now, she told herself. With everything that’s been happening, I’m sure Isaac’s mother was finally scared enough to listen. With that thought, the knot of fear in her stomach uncoiled and crawled past her lungs, where it wrapped itself around her heart in a cold, tight ball of throbbing heartache.

  A few days later, another letter arrived from her father. This time, Mutti read it to everyone at the breakfast nook in the kitchen.

  Dearest Rose, Christine, Maria, Heinrich, Karl,

  Oma, and Opa,

  I’m sorry I haven’t written, but we’ve been on the move for months and have finally made camp for a few days. I pray that all of you are well and in good spirits. Did you get a plentiful harvest from the garden this year? I wish I could be home to help pick the pears and plums. What I wouldn’t give for a slice of brown bread spread with your fresh plum jam. If you haven’t already done so, don’t forget to tell Herr Oertel that he still owes you two bushels of firewood for the work I did for him last year. Tell him you’ll need it to get through the winter.

  Right now, I’m sitting in an anti-tank trench with five hundred other men. We dug the mile-long ditch this afternoon, and this is where we’ll sleep. We’re deep in the Ukraine and are being told that the northern troops will take Moscow before winter. Everyone here is hoping for an early end to the war, so we can get back to Germany before the Russian winter hits. Hopefully, the war will be over and I’ll be home with you by spring. Much love to you all.

  Heil Hitler,

  Dietrich

  Mutti passed the letter to Maria, who read it again and passed it to Oma, who passed it to Christine. Christine placed her thumb on a dark smudge in the lower left-hand corner, imagining it was her father’s thumbprint, from where he held the letter and reread it before folding it into the envelope. She imagined him sitting there, thousands of miles from home, leaning against the red Russian soil, exhausted and homesick. The anguish of missing someone she loved was as familiar to Christine as hunger and cold, but she couldn’t imagine the torture of being taken from her family and not knowing if she’d die before she got the chance to see them again. Blinking against her tears, she reread the letter.

  “What’s that?” Heinrich said, pointing at the French doors, his nose crumpled as if he smelled something rotten. Everyone looked. A cluster of white paper hung flat and wet on the dew-covered glass. As they watched, a second wrinkled wad slapped itself against another pane farther up. Then, a half dozen sheets came out of nowhere and stuck to the glass in a haphazard pattern, like the fall leaves Christine used to glue to her bedroom window. Mutti stood and opened the door, and a flurry of paper drifted lazily out of the sky and landed on the balcony, like a bizarre storm of jumbo snowflakes. The family hurried outside and snatched the falling papers from the air. Some of the sheets were blank, but most had lettering, and some were black and burnt around the edges, as if they’d been near a fire.

  “This is from Heilbronn,” Mutti said, holding out the sheet of paper so everyone could see. “It says, ‘From the desk of the Bürger-meister of Heilbronn.’ ”

  “This is too,” Maria said, holding the surviving half of a scorched page. “It’s from the school.”

  “Look,” Karl said, pointing toward the road.

  Down in the street, hundreds of scorched papers littered the cobblestones, while still more drifted from the sky. A swirl of pages caught in the breeze, traveled across the road, and landed against the garden fence in a shifting pile of paper and ash.

  “How far away is Heilbronn?” Christine asked.

  “About thirty-five miles,” Opa said. “If it’s still there.”

  CHAPTER 9

  By the middle of the third long winter of war, the United States had joined the war against Germany, and the Russians had launched a brutal counterattack. Rumors circulated through the village that Hitler had been so certain of a swift victory that the soldiers didn’t have the proper provisions or clothing to survive the Russian winter. Instead of dying in battle, they were losing their lives to typhus, exposure, starvation, and frostbite.

  To lose loved ones to war was one thing, but to lose them because the leaders who sent them cared so little they didn’t provide the necessary protection to survive? And to think that Vater had left with nothing more than the clothes on his back, despite Mutti’s insistence that he take a change of clothes, his long underwear, his good hat, and winter gloves. The army offered no news, and Christine’s mother, out of self-preservation, chose to accept that as a good sign, and she expected her family to do the same.

  Mutti took “The People’s Radio” into the kitchen so she could listen for news from the Eastern Front while she worked. At night, they left it playing to hide the voices of the Atlantiksender, the enemy radio station broadcasting announcements in German, on the old radio hidden upstairs beneath Mutti and Vater’s bed. Christine, Mutti, and Maria sat on the floor to listen to the illegal shortwave, their backs against the wall, blankets around their shoulders, the volume turned down. After German military music and official-sounding broadcasts, the announcer said in perfect high German that Hitler was lying to his people, that the Third Reich was losing the war, and that German soldiers were surrendering by the thousands and being sent to work in America, where they earned large wages. The Kriegsmarine in U-boats were encouraged to surface and surrender while they still had the chance. Glancing at each other with wide, dark eyes, Christine, Maria, and Mutti listened in silence until the newscasts were over.

  Within a month, the underground transmission found a way to broadcast over German frequencies, and the Nazis scrambled to counteract their efforts by beginning all broadcasts with a special announcement: “The enemy is broadcasting counterfeit instructions on German frequencies. Do not be misled. Here is an official announcement of the Reich authority.”

  With the arrival of warmer days, anti-American posters went up beside the rest, showing a black-and-white drawing of a six-armed giant made of airplane parts and riv
eted metal limbs. Beneath capitalized letters that spelled KULTUR-TERROR, the monster’s head was a pointed, white hood above a collar imprinted with the letters KKK. One arm was that of a convict holding a machine gun; the other held the U.S. flag in reverse. The torso was made up of a birdcage and held a black couple dancing above a belt that read: Jitterbug. A bass drum formed the pelvis, with a Jewish flag dangling between legs that looked like bloody bombs, stomping over the picturesque landscape of a German village. Christine wondered if the Americans put up posters that depicted Germans as monsters.

  On a warm morning in early April, Christine grabbed the egg basket and started out to the henhouse. In the past few weeks, she’d found three brown eggs in the nests of yellow straw. But now the weather had warmed, and she knew she’d find a half dozen or more. She was looking forward to surprising everyone with his or her own soft-boiled egg, a rare, large breakfast after the long, sparse winter. But when she pushed open the back door and stepped outside, she froze. The earth seemed to vibrate beneath her feet. A distant, rolling thunder—punctuated by strangled groans, metallic grinding, and mechanical screeches—came from the center of town. Instead of gathering eggs, she hurried back inside, set down the basket, and went out the front door.

  As Christine moved closer to the village square, the snarling and grinding grew to a chaotic roar punctuated by the rhythmic pounding of boots and hammers. From this side of town, two roads entered the square from the crest of a hill. The Gothic cathedral of St. Michael’s sat between the two roads, dominating the plaza with rows of arched windows, soaring barbed spikes, and a steep, orange-tiled roof. She entered the rear courtyard and followed the sidewalk along the towering sandstone walls until she reached the front of the church, where a granite cascade of fifty-four steps led down to the fanned cobblestones of the market square.

  At the top of the steps, she pressed her hands over her ears and surveyed the chaos below. Beneath swirling clouds of dust, a writhing swarm of Panzerkampfwagen, armored tanks, trucks, motorcycles, soldiers carrying rifles and bayonets, and Panje, horse-drawn wagons hauling anti-aircraft guns, crowded the open area. A colossal red-and-white flag with a black swastika in the center covered the middle three stories of city hall, with two smaller flags covering the gabled buildings on either side. Engines revved, wagon wheels banged across the uneven cobblestones, and horses’ hooves hit the street in uneven rhythm with the soldiers’ jackboots as they marched in black columns across the square. The tanks growled and vibrated, their giant tracks screeching and shuddering like massive, rattling chains trying to tear holes in the earth.

  Christine wanted to watch but she couldn’t stand the noise, so she turned and hurried into the church. The wooden front doors were as tall and thick as the trunks of ancient trees, and when she pushed them closed, the chaos in the square muted to a rumble. Inside, the vaulted stone ceilings looked like a giant network of painted spiderwebs held up by row after row of slim, gray pillars, each four stories high. The cavernous cathedral smelled like incense and wet stone, and it was cool and quiet, like the inner depths of a watery cave.

  The damp aroma brought back memories of childhood, when she and Kate used to come inside the cathedral to escape the summer heat. They’d meander through the gargantuan stone edifice, looking up at the high walls and exploring the side rooms, speculating about the long-dead people who’d carved and painted stone into saints and angels, but had also melted black iron into screaming skulls and twisted snakes. Behind the altar, an open pit in the stone floor was filled with bones from the cemetery that had been moved to build the church, the skulls and femurs and clavicles stacked in neat brown piles.

  Now, she turned right, through a squat, arched door just past the inner recess of the main entrance, and climbed a wooden staircase. Halfway up, the stairway narrowed as it circled around the bells and gears of the massive carillon. Staying close to the stone walls because there was no railing, she climbed faster and faster, hoping the bells wouldn’t ring before she reached the top. On the last step, she went out a narrow door onto the enclosed octagon catwalk, the highest point in the village. She hadn’t climbed up there in years, but it used to be one of her favorite places to sit on hot summer days, to catch the cool breezes that blew above the crowded buildings and narrow streets of the stifling village.

  From here, she could see over the roof of city hall and the five-story gabled houses enclosing the village square, toward the succession of green and blue hills that swept over the earth like a vast, rolling sea. Despite the swirling mass of dirt and dust below, the air at the top of the steeple was clear, and she could see for miles. To the west, the forest spilled down from the hills and across the valley until it hit the edge of the village, where it swelled and spread like a green, leafy wave. The wooded land was elevated just enough to see beneath the trees, and Christine could make out soldiers working on airframes, and row after row of wing panels and propellers. They were assembling airplanes beneath the dense camouflage canopy.

  To the south, a long line of tanks and military vehicles coiled out toward the open end of the valley, like a trembling black snake surrounded by plumes of grayish-yellow smoke. The tail of the snake disappeared behind the last foothill, but the dark head was moving toward town, a bottleneck building up at Haller Bridge. She could see the old air base in the center of the valley and a line of dark planes along a long swath of flattened green. Insect-sized men unloaded what looked like wooden X’s from tiny trucks and made a fence around the base, like a row of black cross-stitch in the grass.

  Down in the square, a group of soldiers used hammers and saws to build a wooden platform off the steps of city hall. Another handful erected metal flagpoles topped by eagles and swastikas, the Ho-heitsabzeichen, the national insignia, along the front of the stage. More stacked piles of wood on either side. The side streets and some sections of the square were cordoned off with ropes and metal barriers. Christine watched for a few more minutes, then raced down the steps and hurried home, her hope that the war had forgotten this quiet village shattered.

  She ran along the sidewalks, shocked to see that people were still going about their business, as if tanks and soldiers weren’t overtaking their village. Don’t they know that bombs and bullets will be next? Until now, she hadn’t realized that she’d expected panic, people running through the streets, boarding up windows and doors, loading belongings into carts and suitcases and fleeing town.

  Then she remembered Heilbronn. She slowed to a walk, every breath burning in her chest. No one is leaving because there’s nowhere to go, she thought. Every village and city she’d ever heard of had already been attacked. Heilbronn was the closest town. The day after she and her family had seen the burnt papers falling from the sky, the radio announced that fifty thousand people had been bombed out of their homes and seven thousand had died. She wrapped her arms around herself, her legs shaking as she skirted around others on the sidewalk.

  At her house, two soldiers towered above her mother in the open doorway, their broad backs toward the street. Mutti’s face floated between them, a white oval flanked by two pitch-black statues carrying submachine guns and Lugers. Christine moved along the fence until she was close enough to see the tight knit of their black uniforms and the reflection of the sun in their metal helmets and leather boots.

  “Frau Bölz,” one of the soldiers said in a firm voice. “When the alarm sounds, you need to find immediate shelter for your family. Keep buckets of sand and water on your staircase, in case your house catches fire. You must cover every window with black cloth, block out any light, so the enemy planes can’t see the village from the sky. Wardens will conduct checks at night, and failure to comply will result in severe punishment. There is a National Socialist rally tonight, and all citizens are required to attend. Soldiers will be in the streets, to make sure all residents come out of their homes. Failure to cooperate will result in your arrest! Heil Hitler!” Before Mutti could respond, the soldiers turned on their heels in unison an
d walked to the next house. Christine hurried toward her mother.

  “What else did they say?” Christine asked her.

  “They came to warn us,” Mutti said, her eyes glued on the soldiers knocking on their neighbor’s door. “They’re using the old air base behind the village, and it won’t be long before enemy planes start bombing it. We need to find a place to hide when the air raid siren goes off.”

  “Where can we go?” Christine asked. And if Isaac and his family are still here, where will they hide? she thought.

  Mutti stood thinking, forearms crossed limply over her chest, scratching her wrist and staring at the sidewalk. “Our cellar is too small for all of us,” she said in a lifeless voice. “We should talk to the butcher, Herr Weiler. His root cellar is big, and it’s the closest.” She turned into the foyer and hurried toward the bottom of the stairs. “Maria!” she called up the steps. “Christine and I have to run downtown. Be mindful of Heinrich and Karl, will you?”

  Christine and her mother rushed toward the shops at the bottom of her street, where people were finally starting to act like things had changed. Outdoor tables and chairs were pulled inside cafés, two old men were boarding up the windows of the bakery, and Frau Nussbaum was taking in her potted geraniums while her husband nailed their shutters closed. Two soldiers were putting up posters while people crowded around to see what they said. Christine and Mutti stopped to look.

  In jagged letters, the black and gray poster warned: Der Feind sieht Dein Licht! Verdunkeln! “The Enemy sees your light! Black out!” Below the words, a giant skeleton with an evil grin rode an Allied plane through a stormy night, a bomb raised in one bony hand, ready to hurl death and destruction on the German village below. Christine’s stomach lurched. She’d never seen anything so frightening in her life. Mutti grabbed her hand and pulled her away, nearly running as she led her along the sidewalk.