The Plum Tree

by Ellen Marie Wiseman

  “Mutti? Oma? Maria?” she yelled, racing through the halls. No one answered. She ran back downstairs and outside, then saw Oma standing near the woodshed, crying and holding her arm. Christine’s breath caught in her throat. Oma was too close to the burning barn, her small frame outlined by a high wall of orange flames. The skin on Oma’s wrist and right hand was raw and blistered.

  “Come away from there!” Christine yelled over the crackle and hiss of the fire. She led Oma toward the other side of the house. “Where is everyone?”

  “Maria took the boys to the store,” Oma said in a monotone, her eyes locked on the burning barn. “She left before the siren started. I don’t know where your mother is. I think she went looking for you.”

  Christine felt her chest constrict. If something had happened to her mother because she didn’t come back from picking apples when she was supposed to, she’d never be able to live with herself. “Where’s Opa?” she said, examining Oma’s injured arm.

  “In there,” Oma said, pointing toward the blaze. “He tried to put out the flames because he was afraid our woodshed would burn. But the barn wall fell on him.”

  Christine looked at the burning structure, her gorge rising in her throat. A group of Hitler Youth had appeared and formed a bucket brigade to finish dousing the flames closest to the woodshed. She wrapped her arms around Oma, blinking back tears.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said in Oma’s ear. Just then, Mutti came running toward them through the smoke-filled street, her hands and legs covered with soot, a trickle of blood dripping from her forehead. Christine went limp with relief.

  “Is everyone all right?” Mutti yelled, her face distorted with fear.

  “We don’t know where Maria and the boys are,” Christine shouted. Then she paused and placed a hand on Mutti’s arm, prepared to hold her up when she told her the news. “I’m sorry, Mutti,” she said. “Opa has been killed.”

  For a moment, she wasn’t sure what her mother was going to do. Would she scream, break down and cry, fall to her knees, go into shock? Christine held her breath, waiting for the words to sink in. For what seemed like forever, Mutti stared at them, her face a blank. And then, slowly, Mutti’s watering eyes cleared. She took a deep breath, pressed her lips together in resolve, and said, “I’ll go to the shelter to look for Maria and the boys. Stay with Oma.”

  Before Christine could protest, Mutti hurried down the street. Christine took Oma inside and made her lie down on the living room couch, covering her with a blanket. Neither of them spoke while Christine carefully washed and dressed Oma’s burned arm with a clean cloth. Oma pressed her lips together and closed her eyes, refusing to complain even though she had to be in considerable pain. Christine tried to keep her hands steady as she worked, trying to ignore the sounds of buildings collapsing, people yelling and screaming, and the clang-clang-clang of the Hitler Youth’s horse-drawn fire brigade, ringing in false hope above the mayhem.

  When the house filled with smoke and the sulfuric smell of the burning village, Christine opened the back windows and the doors between the rooms to create airflow. In the kitchen, she climbed on a chair to retrieve Vater’s bottle of plum schnapps, hidden in the back of a high cupboard, and took a long, deep swig, trying not to cough when the alcohol burned her throat. Then she took the bottle into the living room, where she persuaded Oma to sit up and drink two full shots of the clear liquid, the only medicine they had to ease her pain. After putting the bottle away, Christine swept the clumps of dirt and shards of window glass from the floor, wiped the film of ashes from the table, then pulled a dining room chair next to the couch so she could sit beside Oma.

  “You better clean those scratches on your arms,” Oma said.

  “Shhh . . . Don’t worry about me,” Christine said, stroking Oma’s cheek. “Try to rest.”

  Oma looked back at her with watery blue eyes, her thin, wrinkled lips trembling as she tried not to cry. Christine didn’t think she could bear seeing Oma weep, and was relieved when the exhausted old woman closed her eyes and fell asleep.

  After a growing breeze cleared most of the smoke from the room, Christine shut the windows in the back of the house, closed the living room door, and hung blankets over the blown-out front windows. In the near-dark living room, she turned the switch of a lamp. Nothing happened. She tried another lamp. Still nothing. She felt her way to the kitchen, found the oil lantern, lit it, and hurried back to the living room, where she set the lamp in the middle of the table and sat back down beside Oma. There was nothing else to do now, but wait.

  Finally, Mutti returned with Maria, Karl, and Heinrich, in an eruption of frantic voices and filthy clothes that smelled like the inside of a garbage-filled woodstove. Maria was crying, her hair disheveled and her eyes swollen. Karl and Heinrich sat sniffling at the end of the couch, smudges of soot mixing with their tears.

  “We weren’t near our shelter when the sirens went off,” Maria sobbed. “We went to a different one. I didn’t have time to come back for Oma and Opa! I had to take care of the boys!”

  “It’s all right,” Mutti said. “Who knows what would have happened to you if you hadn’t gotten to a shelter in time?”

  “I was going to leave the boys and come home,” Maria cried. “But the shelter started filling with smoke, and I was too afraid to go outside!”

  “You did the right thing,” Oma said. “You could have been killed, and then what would we have done? Your Opa lived a good, long life. He would have given it up for any of you.”

  Christine stared at her shell-shocked, grieving family, barely able to comprehend what her life had become. While she was living in constant fear of bombs falling on top of her house as she slept, her father had been taken away by the war, Isaac had been taken away by the Nazis, and now Opa had been killed by some unseen enemy, an enemy who dropped fire and death from the skies. She stood and started toward the kitchen.

  “Where are you going?” Mutti asked.

  “We could all use something to eat and drink,” Christine said, her back to her mother so she wouldn’t see that Christine was on the verge of falling apart. “I’ll make some tea and cut some bread.”

  “I’ll help,” Mutti said, standing.

  “You stay here,” Christine said. “They need you.”

  In the kitchen, Christine closed the door and went to the sink, where she rinsed her face and stared at the white porcelain, letting beads of cold water run down her forehead and drip from her chin. Then she made the mistake of licking her lips. Her mouth filled with the taste of smoke and ashes. She gagged and spit into the sink over and over, rinsing her mouth with handful after handful of water from the faucet.

  When the tang of death was finally washed from her taste buds, she soaked a cloth and twisted it out, over and over again, wrenching it hard enough to make her hands hurt. It felt like ice against her hot skin, numbing the bloody scratches on her arms and legs. She bit down on her lip, threw the cloth into the sink, and gripped the edge of the counter, trying to fight her grief and panic. But it was no use; she was drowning, with no bottom in sight. She let go and slid into a corner, crumpling between the wall and the cupboards like a frightened kitten. The men in her life had disappeared, and now she couldn’t help wondering if the Allies would succeed at wiping Germany off the face of the earth. It only made sense that Heinrich and Karl—and ultimately, she, Maria, Mutti, and Oma—would be next.

  CHAPTER 16

  Two days after the bombing, a wagon carrying rows of sheet-wrapped bodies passed in front of Christine’s house. When she heard the creak of the dry axles and the clip-clop of hooves against the cobblestone, she pulled back the curtains to watch through the broken living room windows. Following the makeshift hearse with their heads down, a group of women, children, and elderly people walked in slow motion, their hands clasped around Bibles, crosses, or bouquets of wildflowers. She wondered if the bodies had been pulled from the rubble, or dug out of cellars, or, as she’d heard someone say, hauled fro
m the banks of the river. So far, the casualty count from the bombing had reached two hundred and twenty-three.

  But there would be no burial or funeral or coffin for Opa. The Hitler Youth and a few old men had searched for his remains, but they hadn’t found anything: not a tooth or a belt buckle or a shard of bone. The spot where the barn had once stood was nothing but smoldering ash, the iron tools and wagon trusses melted into shards of twisted metal. Last night, Christine and her family had taken Oma to the cemetery on the edge of town to put black-eyed Susans on Opa’s parents’ graves, as a way to honor his memory. Afterward, they prayed around the dining room table, each sharing his or her favorite story of Opa. They vowed to put up a tombstone once the war was over.

  Earlier bombings had wreaked havoc on the outer edges of the village, but this last raid had left half of it in ruins. In an odd pattern, every street seemed to have three or four houses left unscathed, followed by a row of dwellings completely flattened. In addition to the church and barn beside Christine’s house, the destruction in the immediate area of Schellergasse Strasse included two houses behind theirs and four houses on the next street over. The ceiling of Herr Weiler’s butcher shop had caved in, and the windows in the café were gone, along with kettle-sized chunks of stone from the front façade.

  Within days of the bombing, a team of soldiers had constructed barracks next to the train station: three long, low buildings with metal roofs and windowless walls. Rumor had it that the structures had been built to house incoming workers, Jewish prisoners, to be used to rebuild the destroyed air base. The day after the barracks was finished, Christine was out in her family’s garden, sleeves rolled up, hair piled on top of her head, working chicken manure and wood ashes into the soil with a spade. The morning was unusually quiet, except for Heinrich and Karl making engine noises as they played with their wooden trucks on the walkway between the house and garden, and the thump and wallop of Christine’s spade hitting the hard dirt. Even the birds seemed to have left town. Just as the bizarre idea started to form in her mind that everyone in the village had either left or died, that she and her family were the last people alive, she heard a man yell, then again, closer this time, and then the dry, brushing shuffle of what sounded like a thousand feet, scuffing along the cobblestones. Christine froze, trying to figure out what she was hearing. Heinrich and Karl hurried around the garden fence to stand at the edge of the road, toy trucks dangling from their dirty hands. Christine set the spade in the earth and crossed to the edge of the garden.

  The ragtag formation of bald, skinny men lumbered up the street, a haggard multitude of reanimated skeletons wearing mismatched shoes and ragged uniforms. There were hundreds of them, vacant eyes staring at the ground, razor-sharp cheekbones in ashen faces. The majority of the prisoners had yellow stars sewn to their gray-and-white-striped shirts, but some wore purple or red inverted triangles, or a combination of the two. The lucky ones had hole-filled shoes or tattered boots without laces, while others were barefoot, even though recent nights had been cold enough to make the cobblestones feel like ice. The men shuffled forward in straight lines, putting one heavy foot in front of the other while SS guards walked beside them, yelling at them to keep going. Christine guessed there were about twenty soldiers in charge of four hundred men, but the SS carried submachine guns and clubs. When a guard got close, the workers moved a step or two away, trying to distance themselves while retaining formation. One of the prisoners, a short, dark-eyed man no bigger than a child, had a brown spray of vomit splashed down the front of his chest. Another left a trail of dark fluid from the leg of his pants. A few of them looked at her and the boys, their hollow, hopeless eyes unreadable. Is this what they’re doing with the Jews? Christine thought, her knees going weak.

  “Heinrich and Karl,” she shouted. “Go inside, right now.” But the boys ignored her, no doubt mesmerized by the ghastly spectacle. She turned and hurried out of the garden, determined to keep them from witnessing any more of this horror. Just as she reached them, the prisoner leaving the dark trail from his pant leg fell face-first to the ground. A guard rammed the butt of his rifle into his side, screaming at him to get up. Without a sound, the prisoner curled into the fetal position while the soldier hit him again and again, pummeling his shoulder, his thigh, his ribs. Finally, the man half rolled, half crawled to his knees, then pushed himself up on shaking arms, struggling to stand. Christine grabbed the boys by the shoulders and turned them around, herding them into the house. Mutti met her at the door.

  “What’s going on?” she asked, stealing glances around Christine as she led the boys inside.

  “It’s the Jewish prisoners,” Christine said, breathing hard. “The workers being used to rebuild the air base.”

  “Why was that soldier beating one of them?”

  “Because he fell,” Christine said.

  “He hit him because he fell?”

  “Ja, he fell, and if he hadn’t gotten up, I don’t know what would have happened.”

  “But they need them to work, don’t they?”

  “I don’t know,” Christine said, crying now.

  Mutti put her hand on Christine’s shoulder, her eyes glassy. Christine knew her mother had guessed what she was thinking. Wherever those starving, half dead-looking men had come from before arriving in their village, Isaac was probably there too.

  From that day on, the skeletal prisoners were marched by twice a day, at seven in the morning and seven in the evening, because if nothing else, the Nazis were organized and punctual. During the first week, Christine was caught unawares three times, twice on her way home from the ration lines, and once working in the garden. After the fourth time, she made sure she was inside during those hours, sewing, cleaning, or playing with her little brothers, anything to keep her mind off what was outside her front door. The sight of the prisoners was too much to bear, the hollow sections of her aching heart already overflowing with horror and shock. Her sleep was already filled with nightmares of their haunted faces.

  She couldn’t imagine those weak-looking men being able to work twelve-hour days, let alone marching to and from the air base twice a day. If one of the men faltered, the guards shoved him back into line and struck him with a club or the butt of a gun. She couldn’t comprehend the reasons behind it. They were ordinary men: husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons, just like her father and Opa used to be. And just like her little brothers, who would someday be men themselves, if Allied bombs, the Tiefflieger, starvation, or disease didn’t kill them first. Thinking of her father, she wondered, if he was a POW in Russia, was he being treated the same way? She prayed he was not. Was he nothing but a skeleton, waiting, as these prisoners seemed to be doing, for someone or something to put him out of his misery? How long could a person last in these conditions?

  Then, contrary to what Mutti had said about feeling powerless under Nazi rule, when confronted with starving prisoners on her own street, Mutti agreed that they had to do something, anything, to help. After all, before rationing had come into effect, Mutti had always been the first one to deliver food to any villager in need—Pflaumenkuchen to Herr Weiler’s ill father, Apfeltorte to Frau Müller when her husband passed, oxtail soup to Herr Blum, who “never seemed quite right.” Back in the days when they could afford a butchered pig, to be boiled in the portable wood-fired kettle in the backyard so they could make liverwurst and sausage, Mutti always made Christine and Maria deliver the metzelsüppe, pork broth, in little tin cans to their elderly neighbors. Christine had grown up hearing her mother say “it was understood” that you helped those in need.

  “I suppose we could spare a few slices of bread every week,” Mutti said. “And some hard-boiled eggs, maybe even some apples or potatoes.” They were in the cellar, stringing sliced apples along brown twine, to hang like Christmas boughs from the rafters to dry.

  “They march the prisoners along the retaining wall of the churchyard,” Christine said. “The guards are on the other side of the group at that point
. If we wrap the bread and apples in old newspapers, write “food” on the paper, and leave them on the steps, it should be easy for the men on the church side to pick them up without being seen.”

  “But if there’s one sign of trouble,” Mutti said, giving Christine a hard look, “or if we get to a point where we can’t spare the food, I’ll put a stop to it.”

  Christine climbed on a stool to hang apple-filled twine. “I’ll take it out at night, an hour or two before the sun comes up, so no one sees me.”

  Mutti froze, her brow furrowed as if reconsidering, her hand in midair, holding up the other end of the brown string. “What would happen if we got caught?”

  “They’d arrest us.” Christine took the twine from her mother and tied it to a nail, then climbed down from the stool. “That’s why I’m going to do it, not you.”