by Maria Hummel
Liesl held Jürgen in the dark and monitored each shallow breath. As she drifted, willing his fragile life to endure, the memories came.
In one, it was an autumn morning in the villa, in the bedroom she shared with the baby. Frank had already left for his deployment in Weimar. Gas masks, a gift from Herr Geiss, lumped on her dresser. The warped, empty faces lined up next to her wedding photo like ghoulish spectators.
She was staring at the masks, pondering the best place to store them, when Ani pushed open her door. He padded in and hovered over the baby dozing in the cradle. His blond hair stuck out in all directions, and his eyes were gluey and unfocused.
“Where do the people in my dreams go when my dreams are over?” he asked, picking up one of the masks, poking his fingers through the eyeholes. The scent of the black rubber rose.
Liesl put her arm around Ani and drew him toward her. She gently took the mask from his hands and set it out of reach.
“Whom did you dream of?” she said.
“Mother,” he said, then frowned. “And . . . people. We were lined up in the Kurpark. To drink from the fountain.”
A good dream, then, Liesl thought, relieved. “That’s easy,” she said. “They’ll come back tonight, only with new faces and places.”
Ani had been pleased by the rhyme. “New faces and places,” he had repeated, leaning into her. “So I’ll see them again?” His chin lifted, his expression anxious and buoyant at once.
“Yes, you’ll see them again.”
When they were girls in Franconia, Uta liked to dive down in the small cold lake where teenage girls and young children spent the hot days, while their parents and brothers worked in the fields. Uta would buckle her back, feet flashing, and disappear for what seemed like forever, then come up with a closed fist, grinning.
“Look,” she shouted at Liesl, wiping the streams from her eyes. With her hair slicked by water, her face looked more rugged, almost boyish. She opened her fist to show a handful of glittering pebbles and silt. “That’s the bottom.”
“No, it’s not,” Liesl said, because she wasn’t brave and she didn’t like to dive. “It’s only the bottom if you leave it there.”
Before they could fight, some younger child called to them, and Uta let the water wash her hand clean.
There was never enough time to argue. She and Liesl were needed elsewhere. They charged side by side toward shore, toward rescue.
That was the moment Liesl remembered most of all: the noisy togetherness of it, and the drag of the lake against her shins, and how they’d had to step high, so high, to run.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In the spring of 1942, my father’s mother died in childbirth, leaving his father alone to care for three boys under the age of six. They lived in a villa in a small city in the heart of Nazi Germany.
When I started writing this book, I knew these facts: the death, the widower, the orphans, the era. I also knew that my grandfather remarried within months and was drafted in 1944 to work at a hospital in Weimar. In early 1945, with the Russian army advancing, he deserted his post as a radiologist and made his way back to his family on bicycle. En route, he stayed in an attic in Thüringen, where he stowed a packet of letters from his new wife in the wall. He buried his gun in the ground outside. He was soon to cross into the American zone.
In the 1980s, a Thüringen couple renovating their home found the letters in the wall and contacted my uncle, who still lives at the villa where my father grew up. In this way, these urgent wartime missives from a new wife and stepmother to her new husband made their way back to our family, and, ultimately, to me.
While I translated these letters with my father, I began reading other accounts by women and children in the Nazi era, among them Winfried Weiss’s A Nazi Childhood, Irmgard A. Hunt’s On Hitler’s Mountain: Overcoming the Legacy of a Nazi Childhood, the anonymously penned A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City, Dagmar Barnouw’s Germany 1945: Views of War and Violence, and Alison Owings’s landmark oral history, Frauen: German Women Recall the Third Reich. Like many children and grandchildren of Nazi-era Germans, I was obsessed with two questions: What did they know about the Holocaust, and when did they know it? Like many, I felt it important to sort this out so I could know how to judge them and my own inheritance.
My father is a good man, who has always expressed clear love and devotion for his parents and his children. My grandparents died when I was young, but they also struck me as generous and kind, and my grandmother, rather courageous for single-handedly raising three small kids at such a harrowing time. When I started working on this book, I obsessed over the idea of complicity, how “good” people could nonetheless participate in one of the most brutal regimes in contemporary history. The questions What did they know, and when did they know it? were key to this investigation. How was it possible that my grandfather worked so close to Buchenwald and still insisted he had no knowledge of the crimes committed in that camp? How could my grandmother be such a loving mother to her stepchildren and not teach them what the Germans had done? My father claims he learned about the Holocaust only as a teenager, at an exhibition at the Paulskirche in Frankfurt, half a decade after the end of the war.
Hindsight is always a delicate issue in historical novels. The author and the reader often have a distilled set of facts about an era that the characters do not possess. Perhaps no era is more traveled and judged by readers than World War II, and so we collectively assume that all books about Germans in the 1940s will be books about complicity or resistance to their government’s murderous practices. In fact, most books are. The narrative we get is the one we expect.
Yet the more I thought about my grandmother’s letters, the more I realized they weren’t about Naziism. Or rather, that Naziism shadowed her world, but it was illuminated by the antics and accidents of three small boys, by conveying through code that she was sending secret supplies to her husband for his imminent desertion. Yes, she was afraid—of denouncement, of the ever-increasing air raids, of enemy invasion. And yet her narrative was not about totalitarian law, the bloody battles, the Jews and the camps. It was about family, and, paradoxically, it was about protecting her new sons’ innocence in a time when the sky was literally falling.
The more I wrote, the more I knew I had to change my fundamental questions. I could not use hindsight as a knife to slice through the past and find anything but what I expected to find. Instead of asking, What did they know, and when did they know it? I began to ask, What did they love? What did they fear? and in place of a prefabricated fable, a complicated human story began to emerge.
It was painful to write from this perspective. It was painful to keep the Holocaust offscreen, to mention Jews only a few times in the book, and then go to dinner with my Jewish friends and family. I used to sit across from them and think, There is a lake of blood between us, but right now, in this chapter I am writing, I am pretending it doesn’t exist. Many times, I tried to change the story to allow my main characters to think or do something that showed their heroism in the face of the cruel Reich, and every time I had to cut the scenes to be faithful to their lives at the time. It is perhaps possible only for a perpetrator’s descendant, far away in America, to rewind the psyche like this. One cannot simply undo the murders of one’s grandparents.
As I was making these discoveries on the page, my infant son fell gravely and mysteriously ill. Thousands of ulcers appeared in his GI tract and failed to respond to dozens of medical treatments. He was full of bleeding holes. As I spent the next few years in and out of the hospital with him, I began to wonder about the chronically ill and disabled children I saw on the pediatric ward and how they would have fared in Nazi Germany. I wondered where such innocent frailty fit inside the Third Reich. The answer was, of course, another horror: Hadamar, an institution not far from my father’s hometown that killed and burned thousands of the mentally ill and handicapped. What did they love? What did they fear? When these questions addressed Ani, th
e book spun against the dark void of Nazi pitilessness, even for their own children.
I could not have written this book without my father’s willingness to share his family stories, in conversation and on the page. Thank you, Dad. I have always admired you with all my heart. I also want to thank my mother for her lifelong passion for history and truth-seeking. To my brothers Paul, Thomas, and Peter (my go-to Euro scholar), thank you for decades of encouragement, wisdom, and good-humored teasing. My uncles Ulrich and Gerwin also helped generously with reconstructing their childhood history—thank you.
Heartfelt thanks also go to the following invaluable readers: Rita Mae Reese, J. M. Tyree, Katharine Noel, Malena Watrous, Glori Simmons, Jeff O’Keefe, Melanie Abrams, Bruce Snider, and Sarah Frisch. Thank you also to the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley and my workshop cohorts there.
Thank you to the Stegner program at Stanford University for giving me the time to complete this, and special thanks to Eavan Boland for her inspiring translations, After Every War: Twentieth-Century Women Poets, in which I first began to hear how the voices of German women were shaped by war.
I’m ever grateful to my agent, Gail Hochman, for her bighearted support of this novel, to my editor, Dan Smetanka, for his brilliant eye on the final draft, and to Counterpoint Press for taking risks on so many books that need to exist.
Deepest thanks to Bowie and Bruce, for teaching me how to write like a mother. Thank you, Kyle, for showing me how to be a storyteller, for giving me the hours I needed, for your constant faith, mischief, and love.