The Good at Heart

by Ursula Werner

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  To Geoffrey

  In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquillity will return again.

  —Anne Frank, translated by Barbara Mooyart-Doubleday

  – Prologue –

  1938

  The daisies won her over. Hundreds of miniature daisies, gänseblümchen, raised their heads over the blades of grass and waved to her in the light breeze blowing across the lake. Little else was growing on the property—a young apple tree, a large chestnut just off the road, a cherry tree in the middle of the lawn, a tall willow down near the lake. The rest was grass strewn with daisies.

  From a distance, the lot had looked inhospitable. Edith had already begun to set her mind against it as they approached. The dilapidated wooden fence that surrounded the property and the cloud of dust that followed their car along the dirt road did not convey welcome. More disheartening were the train tracks that paralleled the road not fifty yards from the property line. Edith had no idea what the local train schedule was like, but even one train a day barreling past would be one too many for her nerves.

  But when she saw the daisies, she forgave the property its faults. She took off her shoes and woolen stockings and grazed her bare feet across the delicate daisy petals before stepping gently into the green velvet blanket of their leaves. Oskar took her hand, and together they walked across the length of the lawn to the edge of the lake. A narrow beach of small gray pebbles met the water in a thick border of willow reeds. They looked for swans, and saw instead a pair of small black grebes nesting near the shore. Across the lake, the coastline was blue-green forests dotted with white towns. Beyond that rose the pearl-gray outlines of the Swiss Alps.

  This was it, Edith knew.

  When Oskar first shared his dream of a vacation home with Edith, back in their earliest years in Berlin, it had been just that—a dream. Oskar’s government job paid hardly enough to cover the rent for their small apartment. Still, in the darkness of night, long after the last oil lamp had been extinguished and the front door bolted, Oskar and Edith lay under the feathers of their down comforter and built their house. In quiet whispers they built it, stone by stone, tile by tile, window by window, year after year.

  They were just imagining the interior when the Black Hand killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, on their fourteenth wedding anniversary, catapulting Europe into war. In the few months before Oskar was called away to the front, they lay in bed and worked on the entrance hall: a thick mahogany front door carved with foxes and cats, ivy and lilies; an Italian marble floor, pale pink with streaks of cream and light brown; three antique ebony tables set with fresh flowers, no matter the season. While Oskar was commanding foot soldiers in France, they worked on the kitchen, planning most of it through heavily censored letters: the heavy oak bench spanning the northeast corner and surrounding the breakfast table, large and ponderous for baking projects and boiled eggs in hand-painted eggcups; the south wall lined with cabinets, one of which—the one on the far right, where they would keep the liqueurs and chocolate—would be locked, out of the children’s reach; the cast-iron stove, coal-burning. They would keep the unsightly coal pile in some out-of-the-way place, perhaps a cellar.

  On their daughter Marina’s fifth birthday, they added a skylight to the roof of the master bedroom, for midnight stargazing and daytime raindrop races. When their son, Peter, died of pneumonia before his third birthday, their grief sowed an entire garden of roses and red currant bushes, daffodils and dahlias, carpets of purple and black pansies dotted with pale-blue forget-me-nots. Slowly, over the years, as Marina outgrew her dirndls and her braids and then moved to an apartment of her own with her new husband, the house took shape room by room, carpeted with deep crimson Persian rugs, shaded with Belgian lace curtains, each detail painstakingly considered, no expense spared.

  Oskar was promoted.

  They began to look at properties. Oskar focused on the countryside surrounding Berlin, so they could be near Marina’s family and see their grandchildren. But Edith increasingly wished herself and her family as far away from Berlin as possible. The city was changing in dangerous ways; she feared its effect upon her family. She was silent when Oskar took her to see the various lots he had surveyed. He did not press. She would speak, as always, when she was ready. And indeed, one night, under the feathers, she whispered, “Wouldn’t it be lovely to have a view of the Alps?”

  Oskar was an accommodating man. He began looking south. And now they were surveying this property on a large lake, the Bodensee. Oskar turned to Edith. “It is a good piece of land with a good view of the mountains.”

  Edith smiled at him. “I like the daisies.”

  They began construction immediately. They started with the garage, which was to be right by the road, near the train tracks—the house would be closer to the lake. They had just completed the roof over the cement walls that would enclose their car when another war broke out.

  Day One

  * * *

  JULY 18, 1944

  – One –

  The day the German army opened fire on its own citizens in Blumental was the day of Pimpanella’s miracle. It was a cool summer morning, with the first promise of sun after four drizzly, cold days. Rosie woke early, hopped out of bed, and ran downstairs. Ever since she turned five, she had been allowed to check for eggs in the henhouse. She loved crawling into the small plywood hutch that housed the four chickens, reaching into each nest, and gently wiggling her fingers between the straw and the burlap, feeling around for that small, smooth oval, still warm from being under the hen’s puffed chest, the shell slightly soft.

  Rosie also loved the hens, Pimpanella especially. Spindly little Pimpanella was the closest thing Rosie had to a pet; she was the only chicken who did not peck at Rosie’s feet in the outhouse. And Rosie protected Pimpanella against her grandfather. The last time Opa was home from Berlin, he declared Pimpanella useless because she had never been able to produce an egg. “A poor excuse for a fowl,” he called her. He chased Pimpanella around the yard with a stewpot lid, yelling at her to pull herself together and do her part for the war effort.

  This morning, Rosie crawled up the short ladder and crept into the dusty coop. She made her way around the circle of nests: first Nina (one egg), then Rosamunde (also one), then Hanni (none, but she had a habit of laying her eggs any old place), and finally Pimpanella. Rosie’s older sisters, Lara and Sofia, didn’t even check Pimpanella’s nest anymore because in the entire year they’d had her, they had never found anything. But Rosie had faith in Pimpanella, even if no one else did. You had to believe, Rosie thought. You had to believe in good things because there were too many bad things to scare you if you didn’t. Like when you saw soldiers with only half a face at the bakery in Berlin. Or when you saw the soldiers missing an arm or a leg. Or both.

  Rosie gently patted Pimpanella’s entire nest, starting at the side nearest to her. Nothing. Undiscouraged, she started over, this time digging down a bit deeper with her fingers. Halfway through, on the edge of the tam
ped-down hay where Pimpanella usually sat, there it was—an egg, buried under about three centimeters of straw. Then, to Rosie’s surprise and delight, she found another, right next to the first one. Two eggs! Twins!

  It was a glorious day. Rosie would have to remember to bring Pimpanella some carrot tops as a special treat. For now, she gathered all the eggs up carefully in her pajama top and walked back uphill to the house. The small square building stood at the northern end of their property, right by the road that ran along the train tracks into town. Its stucco walls held layers of ivy and honeysuckle, which wound their way around the blackened oak window frames up to a clay tile roof. Given the green cloak of these vines, and how tiny the house was compared to the vast garden surrounding it, anyone passing by the property along the lake path to the south might overlook the structure altogether.

  For the Eberhardt family, however, the house was enough. Though cramped, it could hold five people, sometimes six or seven if Rosie’s father came home from the eastern front, or if her grandfather came south from his job in Berlin. The last time Rosie’s father was home, he was so skinny he looked like a ghost, and he woke up every night screaming. He didn’t stay long. The war wanted him back.

  When Rosie entered the kitchen, it was empty except for the smell of warm bread. She deposited the eggs in the basket on the table. From the big hand on the clock, she knew she was late.

  Rosie ran outside to the front of the house, where Sofia was waiting for her. The 8:00 a.m. train whistled in the distance. The girls didn’t have much time. Their daily race to see who would be first to the underpass would have to start right now.

  Sofia looked at Rosie. “You’re not even dressed yet.”

  “There wasn’t time,” Rosie said. “Quick, the train is coming!”

  “All right, but you don’t get a head start just because you’re barefoot. Ready . . . set . . . go!”

  It did not take more than several seconds for Sofia, two years older and at least a head taller than Rosie, to pull out in front, blond braids flapping against her shoulders. Racing just a few steps behind her sister, Rosie balled her fingers into fists. Her grandfather had told her that helped your speed. She was almost at Sofia’s feet.

  “Coming to get you, coming to get you,” Rosie taunted. Sofia took a quick glance backward, stuck her tongue out, and sped up for the final few meters. She rounded the corner at the base of the bridge a few steps before Rosie, just as the three-car train shook the steel girders over their heads. The girls stood there, bent over and breathing heavily.

  “Look, Rosie,” Sofia said. “The barricade is gone!”

  Two mornings ago, at the end of their race, Rosie and Sofia had almost crashed into an enormous pile of tree trunks that had been piled under the bridge. Someone had chopped down all the trees from a nearby thicket and stacked them on top of one another. Even today, the copse of trees that had yielded them still looked naked and embarrassed. Their leftover stumps stared blankly up at the stark sunlight, as if in shock from the trauma of decapitation.

  For the past two days, that makeshift wall had blocked all traffic on the narrow road that ran along the Bodensee between the towns of Blumental and Meerfeld. Everyone knew the barricade was Captain Rodemann’s doing, and the smoldering hatred they already bore him for disrupting their lives grew to a blaze.

  * * *

  Captain Heinrich Rodemann, the seventeen-year-old leader of the Twenty-Sixth Battalion of the Hohenfeld foot patrol, had high expectations for his own military fame. He had always imagined he would make his name on a battlefield, even though he had entered the war only eight months earlier. Like the Führer whom he so proudly served, Heinrich Rodemann was not at all concerned about the recent Allied invasion of Normandy. He had great faith in the German military machine, for he shared with the Führer that intensity of ego that urged him to fight with greater strength and resistance the closer the end appeared to be.

  In late June, when Berlin sent Rodemann south to investigate rumors of a possible French incursion on German soil, the overeager captain took the assignment very seriously. He decided to establish headquarters in a small town on the west end of the Bodensee. Blumental was ideally located for his purposes. No one seemed to know exactly if or when French troops would appear, but Captain Rodemann was committed to the engagement, eager to exercise his pubescent military muscle. His foot soldiers set up camp in the vineyards around the Catholic church of Birnau, to the east of town, while he took the best room in the town’s only inn, the Gasthof zum Löwen. Twice a day, the captain sent out scouting teams to ascertain whether there was any sign of the French; twice a day, his hopes were dashed with negative reports. To pass the time, he marched his troops around the marketplace. They stomped past the pigeon-stained bronze statue of Albrecht Munter, first mayor of Blumental. They paraded through the small commercial district distinguished by one newsstand, one jeweler, a clothing store, a pharmacy, a butcher, and the bakery of the three Mecklen sisters. They strutted down the lake promenade, where the metal chairs and tables of outdoor cafés rested wearily against one another, resigned to the rust that claimed more of their frames with each summer storm.

  To ease the pain of his frustrated ambitions, Captain Rodemann commandeered chickens, fresh milk, and local produce from the farmers, and he practically emptied the vintner’s wine cellar. But not even these amenities could assuage his growing impatience and mounting irritation. He sent daily telegrams to Berlin, describing in exaggerated detail the reconnaissance efforts undertaken in the previous twenty-four hours and bemoaning the continued absence of signs of a French offensive. After three weeks, Berlin had had enough, and Rodemann was ordered to move his troops out. On his own initiative, Rodemann decided to erect an impediment that would hinder the French, should they ever arrive. He ordered his men to set up a barricade. They filled the underpass with headless tree trunks.

  Nobody dared to move them, at least not immediately, and not in daylight. Deliveries that usually arrived via the southeast road were rerouted along a smaller dirt path intended for the farmers and shepherds who used the grass fields near the Birnau forest. By the end of the barricade’s first day, a hay wagon had collided with a meat van, two oversize trucks were stuck in the mud next to the sheep pastures, and the bewildered sheep had been introduced to an entirely new vocabulary of epithets. Grumbling about the situation began quietly, in conversations between two or three people, then spread through flocks of women at Mecklen’s Bakery and six-packs of men at the town tavern. By the end of the second day, everyone had run out of patience, and a resolute group of Blumental citizens, fortified by several pints of beer, dismantled the pile of logs under cover of darkness.

  * * *

  Marina Thiessen was outside in the yard, talking to her neighbor across the fence, when Rosie ran up the gravel driveway.

  “Mutti, Mutti! They unblocked the road!”

  “Rosie, hush.” Marina held up her hand and gave her daughter a stern look. “I’m speaking with Frau Breckenmüller about it.”

  Rosie liked Frau Breckenmüller. She lived next door and had the pink cheeks of a fairy-tale grandmother. Rosie also liked Herr Breckenmüller—even though he was a fisherman and often smelled like fish—because he had helped her grandfather hang a swing in the apple tree. Last summer, after Rosie pestered her opa all morning about the swing, Opa had marched over to the Breckenmüllers’ to borrow some rope. Rosie remembered Herr Breckenmüller leaning on the fence next to her, puffing quietly on his cigar, a half smile creeping up his cheek, while Opa threw the ropes over the apple tree branch to secure the wooden board.

  “Sure those knots are tight, Oskar?” Herr Breckenmüller had asked.

  “Stop yammering at me, old man,” Opa had growled. “Don’t you think I know how to tie a knot?” Herr Breckenmüller had smiled and winked at Rosie. He knew something he wasn’t telling.

  “Okay, then,” Opa had said, grabbing the two ropes on each side of the swing. “Let me just try it once, Ro
sie, and then it’s all yours.” He took a few steps back, the seat of the swing dangling beneath him, then kicked up his feet and briefly pulled himself into the air before firmly depositing his bottom on the wooden plank. The knot in the rope unraveled immediately, landing Opa in the dirt with a loud thud.

  “Scheisse und verdammt nochmal!”

  Rosie had never seen her grandfather get so angry, and for an instant she had been afraid. He stood up slowly, still cursing loudly and rubbing his backside. But when he turned and saw Rosie, his face changed immediately. She saw the skin that had been fixed in tight ripples around his mouth and eyes become smooth and relax back into the sheepish smile of the Opa she knew.

  Herr Breckenmüller tried hard not to laugh. Then he stamped out his cigar and walked slowly over to the apple tree. “It takes a fisherman to know his way around ropes,” he had said, winking at Rosie conspiratorially.

  This morning, Rosie ran over to the apple tree so she could swing while her mother was talking.

  “Yes, Karl helped them take down the barricade early this morning, before he went out in his boat,” Frau Breckenmüller said. “I tried to talk him out of it. I didn’t want him involved.”

  “The authority of Captain Heinrich Rodemann is so sacrosanct.” Her mother clenched her fists and pushed them into the pockets of her apron. “Of course we should be careful not to disturb the grand military edifice of dead trees erected by that great officer, never mind that he is nothing more than a pig!” Marina spat out the word. Frau Breckenmüller gasped and quickly reached across the fence to cover Marina’s mouth with her hand. Rosie slowed the swing.

  “You’re not immune, you know,” Frau Breckenmüller cautioned, “just because your father works for the Führer. Remember the Rosenbergs. People can disappear overnight.”