The Plum Tree

by Ellen Marie Wiseman

  “Ja,” the Lagerkommandant said. “His name is Sturmscharführer Stefan Eichmann. He was a guard in Dachau, on the men’s side of the camp. He was directly responsible for a number of prisoners’ deaths. Killing Jews was sport to some of them, and he always won.”

  CHAPTER 38

  Christine lifted the iron latch on the wooden door leading out to the backyard, taking a moment to relish the familiar scents coming up from the cellar stairs: cool cement, vinegar in oak barrels, onions, earth-covered potatoes. She smiled, hearing the chickens on the other side of the door, clucking and scratching in the red dirt and spring grass. Stepping out into the fragrant afternoon, she wound her way between the apple and plum trees, heading toward the back corner of the fenced yard.

  And there it was, right where she had planted the pit the day before she and Isaac were sent to Dachau: a leggy, young plum tree, its slender branches filled with clusters of buds and lavender blossoms, its leaves shimmering in the warm breeze. You survived, she thought, her throat tight. She reached out to touch the soft petals of an open blossom, her bare toes digging in the soft grass. Suddenly, someone grabbed her from behind and she gasped, playfully fighting off the strong arms around her waist. It was Isaac.

  “Come inside, Frau Bauerman,” he said, pulling her hair aside so he could kiss her neck. “Your mother made all your favorites, despite the fact that I think she’s still upset we got married while we were away helping the Americans. I told her we went to the next town over and had a quiet ceremony in a nice church, but she’s making plans for a proper celebration.”

  Christine turned and pushed her mouth into his, then drew back. “Let her plan whatever she wants, as long as we get to use the tablecloth on our wedding table.”

  “You still have it?”

  “It’s been in my room this whole time. After Mutti decided we had to use Herr Weiler’s root cellar for a bomb shelter, I snuck down there in the middle of the night before the first air raid, to get the tablecloth and your lucky stone. I was going to surprise you with them when you were in the attic, but I never got the chance.” She kissed him again. “It’s amazing and wonderful to be home, isn’t it?”

  “Ja,” he said. “But don’t forget, the Americans paid us to testify. They want us to come back to Dachau, for a few more months, until the trials are over.”

  “I know. And I would do it again for free.” She laid her head on his chest for a moment, then looked up into his chestnut eyes. “I love you.”

  “I love you too.”

  She sighed, then turned and touched the plum blossoms again, Isaac’s arms still around her waist. “Look,” she said. “It’s alive and bearing fruit.” Then she moved his wide, warm hand down to her belly and held it there, smiling. “Just like us.”

  He turned her around to face him. “Any ideas for names yet?”

  “If it’s a girl,” she said, “I’d like to name her Maria. If it’s a boy, Abraham, after your father.”

  He kissed her once on the lips, then gazed down at her, his eyes soft. “Danke,” he said.

  “For what?” she said, beaming up at him.

  “For surviving. I never would have been happy with anyone else. You ruined everyone for me.”

  “Christine!” Vater called from the second story kitchen window. “Come and eat!” Beside him, Mutti and Christine’s brothers smiled and waved.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The seeds for The Plum Tree were planted in my childhood, during numerous family trips to visit my grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins in Germany. Somehow, even at an early age, I knew that experiencing another culture and seeing a different side of the world, living for weeks in the half-timbered house where my mother grew up, was a privilege that would make a difference in my life. But I had no idea it would inspire me to write a novel.

  My mother’s German village was like a fairy tale, with its rolling hills, tidy orchards, sprawling vineyards, medieval cathedrals, and delicious food, all set against a backdrop of church bells, cobblestone streets, and stepped alleys. Every visit was an adventure, from exploring castle ruins to sleeping beneath a giant Deckbed (feather bedcover). Later, as I learned about WWII, it was hard to imagine such horrible things happening in such a beautiful place. I realized my Oma was an extraordinary woman, having struggled to keep her children alive while her husband was off fighting and, once the war was over, somehow feeding and clothing a family of seven during continued rationing and extreme food shortages that didn’t improve until 1950. Opa’s stories about the Eastern Front and his escape from two POW camps fascinated me. Above all, I was awed that my Americanized mother, the woman in heels and sunglasses, chief of the firemen’s auxiliary, member of the PTA, who bought her kids bell-bottoms and loved cookouts and boating, had spent her childhood living in poverty and fear in Nazi Germany. She grew up wearing dresses made from bedsheets, bathing in a metal tub with water heated on a woodstove, running and hiding in a bomb shelter for nights on end. Having lived the typical American childhood, I could hardly comprehend what she had endured. I wanted to know everything and would often ask my mother to repeat her stories, hoping she’d remember more details. There are so many I couldn’t fit them all into the manuscript.

  Along with my family’s history, there were a great many books that were helpful to me while writing The Plum Tree. Among the memoirs that mirrored and expanded on my mother’s stories were: German Boy by Wolfgang W. E. Samuel, The War of Our Childhood: Memories of WWII by Wolfgang W. E. Samuel, and Memoirs of a 1000-Year-Old Woman by Gisela R. McBride. I also relied on Frauen: German Women Recall the Third Reich by Alison Owings. To understand the Allied bombing campaign, which had become a deliberate, explicit policy to destroy all German cities with populations over 100,000 using a technique called “carpet bombing”—a strategy that treated whole cities and their civilian populations as targets for attacks by high explosives and incendiary bombs—I read: To Destroy a City: Strategic Bombing and Its Human Consequences in WWII by Hermann Knell, Among the Dead Cities: The History and Moral Legacy of the WWII Bombings of Civilians in Germany and Japan by A. C. Grayling, and The Fire by Jörg Friedrich. Among the many horrific air raid stories in these books were the firebombing of Hamburg in July 1943, dubbed “Operation Gomorrah,” which killed 45,000 civilians, and the firebombing of Dresden in February 1945, which killed 135,000 civilians. All of these books include some of the most haunting scenes I’ve ever read about what it was like to be a German civilian during the war.

  To understand what it was like for civilians and POWs after the war, I read: Crimes and Mercies: The Fate of German Civilians under Allied Occupation by James Bacque. For information involving persecution of the Jews and the horror of concentration camps, I read: Night by Elie Wiesel, Eyewitness Auschwitz by Filip Müller, and I Will Bear Witness by Victor Klemperer.

  Four novels I’ve read and enjoyed have also helped guide me through this period in history: Those Who Save Us by Jenna Blum, Skeletons at the Feast by Chris Bohjalian, The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, and Sarah’s Key by Tatiana de Rosnay.

  It is important to note that although characters in this novel endure many of the same trials as my mother and her family, Christine is not my mother. Nor are any of the other characters members of my family. But I hope the fictional Christine and Mutti have at least some resemblance to my Oma’s and mother’s monumental courage, resilience, and compassion.

  Although The Plum Tree is a work of fiction, I strove to be as historically accurate as possible. Any mistakes are mine alone. For the purpose of plot, Dachau was portrayed as an extermination camp, while in reality it was categorized as a work camp. Undoubtedly tens of thousands of prisoners were murdered, suffered, and died under horrible conditions at Dachau, but the camp was not set up like Auschwitz and other extermination camps, which had a deliberate “euthanasia” system for killing Jews and other undesirables. Also for the purpose of plot, the attempt on Hitler’s life led by Claus von Stauffenburg was moved from July 1944 to th
e fall of 1944.

  Please turn the page

  for a very special Q&A

  with Ellen Marie Wiseman!

  How did you come up with the idea for this book?

  This is not an easy question to answer, but I’ll do my best. My mother came to America alone, by ship, at the age of twenty-one, to marry an American soldier she had met while working at the PX outside her German village. Just over a decade had passed after the war, and Germany was still rebuilding. Her family was dirt poor, and the lure of an ideal life in America was powerful enough to make her leave her family and marry a man she barely knew. Alas, her American dream was no fairy tale. The American soldier turned out to be dishonest and cruel, and my mother had nowhere to go for help, living on an isolated farm twenty minutes from the nearest village and with no car or driver’s license. Somehow she persevered, giving birth in quick succession to my sister, my brother, and me. Eventually my parents divorced, and my mother took me and my siblings back to Germany, hoping to start over. But it wasn’t meant to be. My father insisted she return to the States, even though he had no interest in being part of our lives. Luckily, my mother met and married a caring man who took us in as his own. I grew up traveling to Germany to see my grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, longing to live in their beautiful world full of tradition and culture.

  Then, when I was a junior in high school, I learned about the Holocaust. To say it was difficult to wrap my head around those atrocities happening in my amazing, beautiful dreamworld would be an understatement. WWII was our history teacher’s favorite subject, and he was obsessed with teaching us as much as possible about what happened to the Jews. It didn’t take long for some of my classmates to start calling me a Nazi, saluting and shouting “Heil Hitler” in the halls. That was when I began to understand the concept of collective guilt. I asked my mother questions about what it was like during the war, about Opa’s role, and about the Jews. I soon realized that in her own quiet way, Oma had tried to help, risking her life to set out food for the passing Jewish prisoners, even though she could barely feed her own children. Opa was drafted, fought on the Russian front, and escaped two POW camps. For over two years my mother and her family had no idea if he was dead or alive until he showed up on their doorstep one day. He was a foot soldier, not SS or a Nazi. My mother took me inside the bomb shelter where she and her family had hid, terrified and hungry, for nights on end. She told me stories about food shortages and ration lines, jumping in a ditch with her pregnant mother to avoid being shot by Allied planes, and developing earaches from the constant wailing of the air raid siren. But I was too young to understand or explain to my peers that being German doesn’t make you a Nazi, that protesting something in America is easy compared to protesting something in the Third Reich, or to ask them what they would have done if they had had to choose between someone else’s life and their own. My American father had taught me that evil has the ability to reside in the heart of any man, regardless of race, nationality, or religion, but I didn’t know how to make those points. I didn’t know how to tell my friends that collective guilt as opposed to individual guilt is senseless; that retrospective condemnation is easy. Most of all, I knew no one wanted to hear that my family had suffered during the war, too.

  Then, over twenty years later, after another conversation with a close friend (ironically one of my former high school teasers) about how much responsibility the average German held for bringing Hitler into power, inspiration struck. I needed to write a novel about what it was like for an average German during the war, while still being sensitive to what the Nazis did to the Jews. But I also knew my book needed a twist if I wanted to sell it. Then I remembered how James Cameron used a love story to tell the bigger story of the ill-fated Titanic. And so the romance between a young German woman and a Jewish man was born. Together with stories from my mother’s life in Nazi Germany, I knew the entire novel, from beginning to end. I finished the first dreadful draft of my novel in three days, in longhand, on a legal pad. After that, it took over four years of research and revisions before it was ready. While the wartime experiences of my main character were those of an ordinary German, what she did trying to save her Jewish boyfriend is extraordinary. In reality, she very likely would have died for her efforts. But that wouldn’t have made for a very satisfying story.

  You said the book is loosely based on your mother’s life growing up in Germany during the war. Which of the events are true?

  It’s probably easier to say what isn’t true, which would be the main character’s having a Jewish boyfriend and being sent to Dachau. The poverty, hunger, bombings, jumping in a ditch to avoid being shot by Allied planes, risking their lives to put food out for the Jewish prisoners, not knowing if her father was dead or alive for two years, his escape from a Russian POW camp—all of that is true. After the war, American soldiers occupied Oma’s house, and she did throw away the can of peanut butter they left because she thought it was poison.

  What kind of childhood did you have?

  Thankfully I have very few memories of my real father, because none of them are pleasant. Once my mother remarried, I had a wonderful childhood, traveling extensively, boating, swimming, reading, and playing outdoors. I had a vivid imagination back then, imagining terrifying creatures around every corner: kidnappers, ghosts, vampires, monsters from the deep. One of my favorite things to do was walk to the general store to buy a nickel candy bar and a scary comic book. As a teenager I devoured Stephen King, Anne Rice, and Dean Koontz. I suppose that explains my fascination with the monsters who ran the concentration camps. I always thought my first novel would have an element of paranormal or horror, but I guess you can’t get much more horrific than WWII and the Holocaust.

  Did you study creative writing?

  I went to a tiny school, four hundred students in K–12, and there were no creative writing classes offered. I didn’t go to college either, choosing instead to be a wife and mother.

  Did you have a mentor?

  After years of working alone on my writing, I wanted to find out if I was wasting my time. I had no idea if I had any writing talent to speak of. After all, I’d never taken a creative writing course, there were no local writers’ groups, and I don’t have a college degree. The only place I had to turn to was the Internet. I will be forever thankful that my search led me to William Kowalski, award-winning author of Eddie’s Bastard (HarperCollins). He became my editor, teacher, mentor, and friend. His faith in my work bolstered me during difficult times and pushed me to believe in myself.

  How many rejections did you receive before you found an agent?

  Seventy-two, over a period of two years.

  What roadblocks did you have to overcome to get your book published?

  In November 2008, a few months before I started sending query letters to agents, my husband and I lost our business due to some very unpleasant circumstances beyond our control. Closing our business forced us into bankruptcy, both for the business and ourselves, and we had to look for jobs for the first time in twenty-six years. It was an extremely difficult time, but I was determined to follow my dream. In between worrying about our future and talking to lawyers, I sent out queries. During the first round, the manuscript was rejected twice because of word count (280,000). I stopped querying and spent ten months cutting and revising, during which time, while we were still in the midst of financial and legal battles, my sister passed away. For a while, I couldn’t write. But then I realized I’d worked too long and hard to give up. Somehow I found a way to cut the manuscript down to a reasonable length and started querying again. Around this time we realized we had to sell our home of twenty years and began a seven-month stint of DIY renovations so we could get as much as possible from the sale. By January of 2011, I’d gotten seventy-two rejections and was about to give up. Then I thought I’d try one more time. That query was the one that got my agent, who sold my novel in three weeks, just two months after we sold our house. Now, looking back, I realize wri
ting and trying to sell my novel is what kept me sane.

  Who would you like to see play Christine and Isaac if The Plum Tree is ever made into a movie?

  Scarlett Johansson and Jake Gyllenhaal. And I think Leonardo DiCaprio would make a great SS villain.

  A READING GROUP GUIDE

  THE PLUM TREE

  Ellen Marie Wiseman

  ABOUT THIS GUIDE

  The suggested questions are included

  to enhance your group’s reading of

  Ellen Marie Wiseman’s

  The Plum Tree.

  Discussion Questions

  1. Christine and her family were not members of the Nazi Party. When the war started in 1939, the population of Germany was over 80 million, with 5.3 million being members of the Nazi Party. The party reached its peak in 1945 with 8 million members. Many of these were nominal members who joined for careerist reasons, but the party had an active membership of at least a million, including virtually all the holders of senior positions in the national government. Not all Germans or all military were party members. Does this surprise you? Did you think all Germans were members of the Nazi Party? What do you think most people believe? Why?