The Plum Tree

by Ellen Marie Wiseman

  “Do you have a better idea?”

  He frowned, shaking his head. “If we’re caught, we’ll both be sent to Dachau. Or, they’ll just shoot us.”

  “They’re not going to find you. Some of the other prisoners got away. They’ll think you were one of them.” She went to the door, pushed it open, and slipped outside. Before closing it, she leaned back in. “Just stay here. I’ll get you something to eat as soon as I can.”

  She fastened the latch and hurried inside to the kitchen. Her mother was there, doing laundry, metal tubs of hot water filling the room with steam and the smell of lye.

  “Where were you?” Mutti said, scrubbing a nightgown against the silver washboard with red hands. “I could have used your help stripping beds.”

  “I’m sorry,” Christine said, trying to keep her voice from shaking. “I forgot today was laundry day.” I went to get you a rooster, she almost said, then stopped herself, thinking of what she’d brought home instead. “It was such a nice morning, I took a stroll around the block.”

  Mutti stopped working and gave her a hard look. Christine knew how her mother felt about her wandering off without telling anyone. “After breakfast,” Mutti said, “I’m going to need your help.” She hunched over the tub and resumed scrubbing.

  “Of course,” Christine said. She set the breakfast table as slowly as she could without arousing suspicion, waiting until Mutti went out to the side balcony to hang out a load of freshly washed sheets. Careful not to take too much for fear her mother would notice it missing, she worked fast, grabbing a slice of bread from the table and a boiled egg from the pot on the stove, filling a small bottle with watered-down goat’s milk. She wrapped the egg and bread in a page of newspaper, then slipped out the kitchen door.

  In the henhouse, Isaac guzzled the goat’s milk, thin white rivers flowing from the corners of his mouth, running down his grimy chin. He took a bite of the bread, a bite of the egg, then stopped, one cheek stuffed with food, realizing she was watching with tears in her eyes.

  “It feels like we’re caught in a nightmare,” she said. “I don’t understand how any of this can be happening.”

  “It is a nightmare,” he said. “And morning isn’t coming for a long time.”

  CHAPTER 17

  At half past midnight, when she was finally certain that everyone was asleep, Christine crept to the backyard in her stocking feet. She opened the door to the henhouse and stepped inside, squinting at the feathery shapes of roosting hens high in the dark coop.

  “Isaac?”

  There was no answer.

  “Isaac?” she called, louder this time. Still no answer. She put a hand over her heart, feeling as if the air had been knocked out of her lungs. He was gone. Her first thought was to run out the door and go looking for him. Then, suddenly, he was in front of her, rising out of the shadows.

  “I was afraid you’d left,” she said.

  “I’m still here. But I shouldn’t be. I’m putting you and your entire family in danger. I need to leave.”

  “You’re not leaving. If you’re caught, they’ll shoot you. Besides, where would you go?”

  “I could sneak across town and hide in my own attic.”

  “And what would you do for food? Go shopping for sausage and bread? You have no money. You have no clothes. What if somebody sees you and turns you in? Besides, SS officers have taken over houses in your neighborhood. They’re probably having dinner parties in your dining room.”

  “Good,” Isaac said, scowling. “I’ll sneak down in the middle of the night and slit their throats while they sleep.”

  “You’re not making sense. You wouldn’t hurt a fly, let alone another human being.”

  “The Nazis aren’t human. They’re monsters.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. But for now, let’s just worry about getting you someplace safe. Come on, follow me.”

  She put a finger to her lips, then led him into the house, holding the door while he moved into the first-floor hallway. After a few steps, he stopped and pointed at his ruined boots. She waited while he slipped them off, gasping when she saw the open sores and weeping blisters on his filthy feet. He held the boots in one hand, then signaled her to move forward. They padded up the two flights of stairs, crouching against the walls and keeping their eyes on bedroom doors.

  In the third-floor hall, Christine opened a trapdoor in the ceiling and pulled down the folding attic stairs, cringing at every creak, her breath quick and shallow. When the steps were fully extended, she motioned for Isaac to climb up, then followed him.

  In the attic, she pulled the chain on the bare, dusty bulb that hung from the timber rafters. A dim light filled the room, leaving the far corners in inky shadows and casting black circles beneath Isaac’s eyes. The top story of the old house was nearly empty, except for a few boxes, an unfilled bookcase, and a lopsided chest of drawers that was missing its handles. A four-hole chicken roost sat against one wall, dried straw scattered on the floor in a patchy half circle. The air was filled with the not-unpleasant smell of old wood and warm dust.

  “Step lightly,” she whispered. “My parents’ room is right there.” She pointed toward the rear right-hand corner. “Sometimes my mother has us bring baby chicks up here so nothing will happen to them. But we don’t have to worry about that this year, because we don’t have a rooster. And we don’t have to worry about Mutti coming up here either.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “She was afraid of the attic when she was little because her Opa told her a ghost story about one of her uncles. I guess he was run over by a wagon and decapitated, and my Ur-Opa told Mutti that his ghost walks around up here with his head under his arm. Now it’s just a habit for her not to come up. Luckily, she didn’t tell me the story until I was old enough not to be scared.”

  “But now I’m scared,” Isaac whispered, smiling.

  Christine rolled her eyes, then tiptoed toward one end of the attic, motioning for him to follow. Under the west end of the roof, the wall looked the same as it did on the east, but as they drew closer, the outline of a short, square door became visible.

  “You’ll be cramped in here,” she said, pushing her fingertips into the crack and pulling on the edge of the door. “But during the day, if everyone is gone, or at least not on the third floor, I’ll come up and let you out to walk around. You can’t open the door from the inside, and I’m going to put that bookcase in front of it once you’re in there. You won’t be able to get out.” She looked at him, waiting for a response. There was none. “If there’s an air raid, I won’t be able to let you out.”

  “I’ll risk it.”

  The empty area behind the door was long and narrow, little more than three feet wide, and the steep slope of the roof made it impossible to stand upright. But the space ran the whole width of the house, so there was plenty of room for Isaac to stretch out.

  “I brought up an old blanket, and I’ll bring you whatever else my mother won’t miss. Maybe I can find some rags to make the floor a little softer, and here . . .” She reached inside the door and brought out a blue metal basin speckled with black spots. “I brought this up earlier too. My mother leaves it in the garden to gather vegetables. It’s the only thing I could find for you to use as a Klo.”

  “You don’t think she’ll miss it?” he said, turning the basin over in his hands.

  “She’ll assume it was stolen.”

  “Vielen Dank . . . for everything.”

  “I’m sorry you won’t be more comfortable. . . .”

  “If you’d seen where I came from, you’d understand how wonderful this is.”

  “Was it horrible, Isaac?”

  He set the basin on the floor next to the blanket. When he straightened, his face was tight. “It was a living hell.”

  “I’ve heard rumors that people are dying in Dachau. After seeing those starving workers being beaten and shot . . .”

  “It’s worse than that. It’s worse than you can imagine
. We thought we were being sent to work camps, but when we arrived, we saw the truth. By then, it was too late. We were trapped.”

  “What do you mean, you saw the truth?”

  “Are you sure you want to know?”

  “Nein,” she said, dropping her eyes. “But tell me anyway.”

  He sank to the floor and leaned against the attic wall, his bony wrists resting on his knees, his gaunt face a sickly, yellowish-brown in the dusty glow of the single bulb. Christine pulled her skirt around her legs and sat in front of him, her body trembling in anticipation of what he was going to say.

  “When we got off the train, the guards separated the women and children from the men, the young from the old, the sick from the healthy. They pulled my mother and sister away from my father and me like they were sheep being culled from a herd. They took our suitcases, our watches, the clothes we had on our backs, the hair from our heads.” He stopped talking and touched the inside of his left wrist, his brows knitted, as if he’d forgotten something. Then he went on. “When we were sent to our assigned barracks, I didn’t see any of the old men or young boys from the train. I figured they’d been sent someplace else in the camp. And I was separated from my father. I didn’t see him anywhere. The other prisoners tried to tell us what was going on. They said the SS in charge of guarding the camps were called Totenkopfverbände, Death’s Head Units, for a reason. We didn’t believe them. But in the morning, when the sun came up, we saw the chimneys. Then we knew they were telling the truth. When we saw the black smoke spewing into the sky, that’s when we understood what the Nazis were really up to.”

  Christine held her breath, not sure she wanted him to continue. He hesitated, and she could see the strain on his face as he struggled, trying to decide if he should tell her or not. But then he went on, his whisper high and forced, as if he’d been waiting an eternity to tell someone, anyone, the terrible truth. As if he were trying not to scream.

  “They’re murdering thousands of people. Along with Jews, they’re killing Gypsies, the crippled, the feeble-minded, the elderly. They’re gassing them and burning the corpses in giant ovens. Unless prisoners can be of some use, and then they’ll work them until they die.”

  Christine clamped a hand over her mouth, a nauseating mass uncoiling in her stomach, like an oil-covered snake climbing up from the sewers. Once the urge to vomit had passed, she swallowed and said, “Mein Gott. How is something like that possible? How can they get away with it?”

  “They tell everyone the same thing they told us. That we’re being sent to work camps. It makes sense of course; there’s a war going on. Everyone knows that, to the Nazis, the Jews are nothing but free labor.”

  “And when you couldn’t find your father, you thought he’d been killed right away?”

  “Ja,” he said. “For months I thought my father had been sent to the ovens. I wasn’t sure about my mother and sister either. We could see a section of the women’s side of the camp through the fence that separated the barracks, but I never saw either one. I looked every day.”

  “How did you find your father?”

  “For the first four months, I had to work in the fields digging stones out of the ground with my bare hands. Eventually I was moved to the quarry, and that’s where I finally saw him. I wanted to run over to him, but we couldn’t even speak. The guards were always watching.”

  “Did you talk to him at all?”

  “We only saw each other at the quarry, but we’d try to reach for a shovel or a wheelbarrow at the same time, or brush each other’s shoulders when we passed, just so we could touch. Every time my father saw me, he put his hand over his heart and smiled.” Tears fell from Isaac’s eyes. She put a hand on his arm, but he flinched and drew away.

  “Not once, not once in eleven months have I taken off these clothes!” he said, jabbing himself in the chest with his fingers. “They treated us like animals! Every so often they’d hose us down and re-shave our heads, but we had nowhere to wash. There were no bathrooms, only a ditch in the yard outside the barracks. Our living quarters were filthy and overcrowded. Men died from typhus and dysentery every day. The day I arrived in Hessental to rebuild the air base was the first time I had used a real outhouse since we left home. And the rations are bigger here. Back in Dachau, they gave us one ladle of broth and one slice of old bread a day. We lived off insects and rodents. Men would fight over the shriveled body of a dead mouse.”

  “No more, Isaac. Bitte,” she said. “I can’t stomach any more.”

  “I shouldn’t have told you. It’s just that I . . . I never thought I’d be here. I thought I’d never see you again. I was certain I was going to die in that horrible, stinking place.”

  “It’s all right. It’s all right. You’re safe now.”

  He pushed the heels of his hands into his eyes. After a few minutes, he exhaled, long and loud, his shoulders dropping, as if he’d been deflated. “What about your father?” he said, wiping at his eyes. “Was he drafted?”

  “Ja. We haven’t heard from him in two years. He was with the Sixth Army in Stalingrad. Now we don’t know if he’s alive, if he’s a POW, or . . .”

  “I’m sure he’ll return safe and sound.”

  There it is again, Christine thought. Someone saying what the other person needs to hear. Nevertheless, she was grateful. With all that Isaac had been through, he still worried about her feelings.

  “Tomorrow morning I’ll bring you more hard-boiled eggs, with bread and plum jam. I’ll bring you fresh clothes, and a basin with hot water and soap.”

  “It sounds like heaven. You’ve saved my life. How will I repay you?”

  “I’ll think of something,” she said, giving him a weak smile. Then she stood. “For now, you should get some rest.”

  Isaac ducked into the crawl space, then turned around on his knees, watching as she pushed the door closed.

  “It’s going to be really dark in there,” she said. “I’ll get you a candle as soon as I can.”

  “It’s fine,” he said. Then he put out a hand to stop the door, brushing her fingers with his own. “I want you to know something. It was thoughts of you that kept me from going insane. I never stopped loving you. Not for an instant.”

  “Or I you,” she said, grasping his hand. “Or I you.”

  CHAPTER 18

  That night, Christine’s sleep was filled with nightmares. She dreamt she was being chased through a bombed-out village in the dark while fires burned and children called her name. She couldn’t find any of them, and whoever was chasing her wanted her dead. The last thing she remembered was her father calling from inside a burning building, his voice crying out in agony as he burned alive. She woke up trembling and covered with sweat. It was dawn.

  Unable to go back to sleep, she got up, got dressed, and went out to the chicken coop to gather eggs. Back in the kitchen, she boiled two eggs for Isaac’s breakfast and sliced off her daily portion of brown bread. She made a tin of hot tea and placed the slices of crusty bread, the boiled eggs, a saucer, a fat candle, and a box of matches in a wicker basket. Then she took off her shoes and crept through the halls up to the attic, pulling the ladder door closed behind her. The empty bookcase was light and slid easily and silently, and the door opened with little effort. Isaac was still asleep, his head and shoulders near the open door, his mouth slack. He must be exhausted, she thought, hesitant to wake him. But she needed to get back downstairs before everyone got up and started looking for her. She knelt on the floor and gently shook him by the shoulder. He startled, unsure of his surroundings, and grabbed her wrist.

  “Isaac,” she whispered. “It’s all right. You’re safe.”

  His face relaxed, and he let go. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I forgot where I was.”

  “Macht nichts, I’ve brought you some breakfast. But I have to get back downstairs before Mutti gets up.” She set the basket inside the door and fished out the saucer, the candle, and the matches.

  “Danke, Christine.”
>
  She handed him the candle and matches. “So you don’t have to eat breakfast in the dark.” He got up on his knees and lit the short wick, then set the burning candle in the saucer she’d placed on the floor. “Did you sleep well?”

  “Better than I have in a long time.”

  “I’ll be back later today.”

  “I’ll look forward to it.”

  As quickly and quietly as possible, she closed the door, slid the bookcase back in place, and hurried down the ladder. She held her breath as she folded up the steps and pushed the attic door back in place, alert for any noise coming from the bedrooms. On her tiptoes, she gave the attic door one last shove. And then she heard it. The squeak of mattress springs in her mother’s room. She flew down the stairs, her hand gripping the banister in case she slipped on the polished steps. Just minutes after Christine put the rest of the eggs on to boil, her mother walked through the kitchen door.

  “Good morning,” Mutti said. “How many eggs did we get today?” In one efficient motion, her mother put her apron over her head, tied the strings behind her back, and went to the stove to look in the boiling pot.

  “Only ten, I’m afraid,” Christine said, hating that she had to lie. “But someone else can have my share. I’m not that hungry this morning.”

  Mutti placed a hand on Christine’s forehead. “You do seem a bit flushed. Are you feeling ill? Is that why you’re up so early?”

  “Nein, I feel fine. I just couldn’t sleep, so I decided to get an early start.” She turned away and reached into the cupboards for the plates, afraid her mother would read the truth in her eyes. “Will we be working outside today?” she asked, trying to sound nonchalant. “Don’t Karl and Heinrich need to clean the goats’ pen? And isn’t it time for us to plant a second crop of peas and radishes?”

  Mutti went to the sink to fill the teakettle. “Nein, not today. Oma wants to transplant some black-eyed Susans onto Opa’s family plot this morning. You know I can’t let her do it alone.”

  “Of course not. But I’ll stay here and work in the garden. That way, we’ll be sure to get a fall harvest. The weather is perfect.”