Mikhail shook his head. “It is very dangerous. They could have taken you to prison as well,” he said.
“Maybe I could have found them there.” Fritz breathed calmly. He was not afraid.
“Let’s go to the jeep,” Mikhail said. The stern tone had left his voice. A soldier brought the bicycle, and Mikhail loaded it into the back of the jeep. “Get in. I’ll take you home.”
39
Oma Clara jumped up when Fritz entered the living room. Irmi screamed, “Fritz, where have you been?”
“I went to Nirow to the Russians’ headquarters.”
“No,” Irmi blurted out. “You wouldn’t dare.”
“Yes, he did dare.” Mikhail stood in the doorway. He walked over to Oma Clara and shook her hand. “Fritz is very brave!” Hearing Mikhail using that word to describe him gave Fritz a pleasant shudder. No one had ever called him that before.
“Mikhail is the Russian commander in Nirow now,” Fritz explained. “He is the Russian who lived with us in Schwartz for a short while.”
“Fritz is a very determined young man,” Mikhail began. “I can understand why he is so upset, and I am sorry for his …, your loss. Unfortunately, it is not in my power to get his mother back. But I will see to it that your daughter sends you a letter so that you at least will know they are well.”
Irmi sat down on the chair. “I can’t believe you did this, Fritz.”
“When will the letter come?” Fritz asked.
“I don’t know, Fritz. But I promise that you will get a letter,” Mikhail said. “You know where to find me if it doesn’t come.” He held out his hand, and Fritz shook it.
“Thank you!” Fritz said.
“Thank you for bringing the boy back.” Oma Clara shook Mikhail’s hand again.
Irmi stepped forward. “I can walk him out,” she said.
“I am so glad you’re back, boy,” Oma Clara said after the door to the hallway had closed behind Irmi and Mikhail. Her voice sounded soft, not angry. Oma Clara took one step toward him but stopped when he didn’t move. “I want you to know that I love you, and your sister, and your mother. I miss her as much as you do.”
Fritz looked at Oma Clara. She wiped her cheek with the back of her hand. He could tell that she was worried what he would do next. Oma Clara stepped closer, opening her arms. He embraced her.
40
Fritz shook soil off the carrot before he placed it to one side. Then he pulled another carrot out of the ground and adjusted the position of his knees to reach into the next row. He loved the smell of the moist soil. He would leave three plants standing untouched so they could flower and produce seeds for the following year. With his thumb he rubbed the dirt between his fingertips. At the edge of the garden the gooseberries had reached the size of small plums, their minute black seeds visible through the transparent gray-green skin. He needed to get gloves to protect himself from their thorns. Mama would make jam out of the sour fruit if there was enough sugar for canning.
Fritz woke up with a start. It was still dark outside. He tried to hold on to the warmth and sunny colors of his dream, but it was cold in his bedroom. Fritz dressed quickly. Even inside the house he could see his breath.
When he entered the warm kitchen, he was greeted by the delicious smell of doughnuts. “Good morning!” Oma Clara waved the wooden spoon, sending little drops of dough flying before she dropped a dollop of dough into the hot oil. She fished a doughnut out of the pot and placed it on a cooling rack. “Here, you want to help by sprinkling the powdered sugar over them? I traded goose lard for the powdered sugar.” She offered him a sieve. He scattered the sugar over the shiny yellow doughnuts as she fried more of the yeast balls.
“Did you see what happened overnight?” Oma Clara motioned toward the window. A thick layer of snow covered the barnyard. “We’re lucky that storm didn’t knock out the electricity.” Fritz put down the sieve to look outside. Small mounds of snow had gathered on the windowsill. “When spring comes, I will start a garden,” he said.
“Oh, a garden is all pain, very little gain,” Oma Clara said. “I usually just trade for what I need with Frau Bauer next door.”
“But I am very good with plants,” Fritz said. “I raise tasty tomatoes. We could sell them.”
Oma Clara focused on the next doughnut. “Really?”
“The space between the stable and the water tank is the perfect place for a garden. Not too much wind and lots of sun,” Fritz added.
“Maybe we can trade tomatoes for geese. Then you can also watch those.”
He looked up at her, but she laughed and nudged him. “I got you there for a moment,” she said. “Don’t worry. No geese. Just the garden!”
Fritz sprinkled another shower of powdered sugar onto the doughnuts. He should have asked her earlier.
Just as he was wondering when it was time to try the first doughnut, he heard a knock on the door. It was Konrad, who had come to hear about the trip to Nirow. The boys sat down at the kitchen table, and Oma Clara placed the plate with doughnuts in front of them. “Grab them while they’re still warm. I’m going to leave you boys alone so Fritz can tell you how he almost brought us all into the devil’s kitchen by visiting the Russians,” Oma Clara said, shaking her head at Fritz. Then she smiled and quickly mussed his hair before she left.
“He promised you a letter. That’s good,” Konrad said after he had listened to Fritz’s account.
“Yes,” Fritz answered. “But I wish I could have seen them.”
“You’re so lucky that you met that same Russian again,” Konrad said. “I wish I had a promise of a letter from my dad.”
Suddenly Fritz felt selfish and added, “Thank you for getting me the bike!”
Oma Clara had returned to the kitchen and set down a basket of firewood near the stove. “You haven’t finished them all!”
“I’m stuffed.” Konrad leaned back. “Thank you, Frau Lendt.”
“Those were delicious, Oma.” Fritz wiped the powdered sugar from his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Why don’t you two go sledding? It’s Sunday. No school. We have lots of snow outside, and there’s a sled in the barn.”
“Want to go sledding?” Fritz asked.
“Sure,” Konrad said. “I love sledding.”
The two boys passed the cemetery on their way toward the hill on the south end of the village, and Fritz suddenly remembered how, back in Schwartz, he and Paul had had to push the Russian on his motorcycle.
“What’s the matter, Fritz?” Konrad said, looking closely at his schoolmate.
“Oh, I was just thinking of the day I had to push a drunken Russian up a hill on a motorcycle. At the end he pulled his revolver.”
“That must’ve been scary,” Konrad said.
“It was,” Fritz said, and with the images of the scene, once again came the terror he had felt when Paul had yanked him between the Russian and himself.
How different it was to be with Konrad.
“We had bad experiences with Russians, too,” Konrad said. “When we were on the trek, moving along the frozen beach of the Baltic Sea, we were attacked by Russian airplanes. They flew very low and shot at us. Since we were on a beach, there was no place we could hide. My mother screamed and pulled us under the wagon.” Konrad took a deep breath.
The two stories lingered between them. Fritz and Konrad continued to walk silently. When they reached the bottom of the hill, Konrad also grabbed the rope to the sled and together they headed up.
41
The letter arrived two days later. It was a Wednesday afternoon as the three of them were sitting in the living room. Oma Clara was mending socks, Irmi was knitting, and Fritz was finishing his homework. Fritz knew it right away when the doorbell rang. He flew to the door and took the letter from the postman’s hands. In the living room he handed it to Oma Clara. They sat
down at the dining table, and Oma Clara began to read:
Dear Family,
We cannot tell you where we are held. But Lech and I are together. That gives us strength. Don’t worry about us. We are healthy. There will be a trial, and as there is no evidence against us I am hopeful that we will come home soon.
Irmi and Fritz,
Please help Oma Clara as much as you can.
Love,
Mama
P.S.: Note from Lech: “Fritz should get the dog out of the wood!”
“Why is it so short?” Irmi asked.
“They probably can’t write more. I’m sure if she could have, she would have,” Oma said, and folded the letter back into the envelope. For a while they sat silently around the dining table. Fritz took the envelope and reread the letter, looking for more than the words said. Mama and Lech were together. They were healthy. Mama thought that they would come home soon. He let the words slowly sink in. It was good to hold the paper that had recently been in Mama’s hands.
Then Oma Clara finally spoke. “I am so glad we got this note. Thanks to you, Fritz,” she said, smiling. “I hope that she is right and they will come home soon.”
“What does it mean ‘get the dog out of the wood’?” Irmi asked. “We don’t have a dog.”
But Fritz had already gotten up and was on his way to the back room. He dressed in his quilted jacket and boots before going out to the barn, where he picked up Lech’s carving tools and the piece of wood he had been working on. It still looked more like a pig than a dog.
Back in the living room, Fritz flattened a piece of newspaper on the table and placed the carving tools in a row in front of him.
“What are you doing?” Irmi looked up from her knitting.
“I’m going to work on my carving,” Fritz said.
“In the living room?” Oma Clara asked.
“It’s too cold in the barn,” Fritz said, pointing to the newspaper he had spread out to protect the table. “This will be a dog,” he continued. “Lech showed me how to do it, and I want to finish it before they return.”
Fritz picked up the carving knife and looked around the room. It seemed brighter than he remembered. He felt the warmth radiating from the yellow tile oven. In the corner stood the grandfather clock, its hands frozen forever at a quarter past four. How he had laughed when Lech had wondered if Oma Clara’s sofa and chair were upholstered with an old brown poodle’s fur. A small red stain remained on the wall from a bug Irmi had squished with a scream. A fine lace of spider webs hung between the windowsill and the Bakelite radio Oma Clara refused to switch on. This was the place where Oma Clara and Irmi shared his hope for Mama’s and Lech’s return. This was his home now.
Author’s Note
This novel is fiction, but the background of what Fritz experiences in 1945 is based on historical facts and inspired by events of my father’s childhood in East Germany. The Second World War, which the German Reich began in 1939, and the genocide that the Nazis pursued against Jews and other groups that the regime had declared racially inferior, caused widespread death and destruction throughout Europe. More than sixty million people died, among them more noncombatant civilians than in any other conflict in human history.
When the Soviet army advanced toward Berlin in the spring of 1945, their forays into German towns and villages were accompanied by looting, pillaging, and violence. Many of the soldiers wanted to take revenge for what the German army had done to Russians and other Soviet people during the invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany. The Russian and the German people had been indoctrinated with hate propaganda about each other by their governments during the war. Many inhabitants of the eastern provinces of Germany left their homes in fear of the Soviet army to flee westward on treks.
On May 8, 1945, the Second World War ended in Europe with Germany’s capitulation. France, Great Britain, and the United States divided the western part of Germany into three zones of occupation, which in 1949 formed the Federal Republic of Germany. The eastern part of Germany between the Elbe and Oder rivers stayed under Soviet occupation. On October 7, 1949, the Soviet occupation zone became the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany, a socialist state that remained under the influence of the Soviet Union. The two Germanys were reunited in 1989, when the wall in Berlin and the border between the two Germanys opened.
After the end of the war the Soviet occupiers disassembled large parts of East German industry and infrastructure to send it to the Soviet Union as reparation. They also quickly installed a Communist government, working together with German Communists, some of whom had been in Soviet exile or in prison during the war. On September 2, 1945, Wilhelm Pieck, the leader of the German Communist party in the Soviet occupation zone, announced an agrarian reform, which expropriated all land belonging to former Nazis, war criminals, and farmers who owned more than a hundred hectares. Larger estates were converted into collective peoples’ farms, and farmland was distributed among peasant farmers and refugees.
The Soviets maintained ten “special camps” in their zone, several on the grounds of former Nazi concentration camps. Many of the prisoners were Nazis and war criminals. But due to the concern among the Soviets that National Socialists would continue their fight against them in an underground movement, an increasing number of innocent people were arrested, and sometimes only a whiff of suspicion or anonymous accusations resulted in imprisonment. About one-third of the prisoners did not survive the catastrophic living conditions in the camps.
My father was born on a farm in a small village northeast of Berlin, in what later became East Germany. His grandparents committed suicide before the Russians reached their village. At the time he and his sister were younger than Fritz and Irmi in my story, so they could recall only a few details. But they did witness how their mother was taken away at gunpoint. She spent four years as a prisoner in one of the Soviet “special camps.”
My grandmother and aunt remained in East Germany, but my father left in 1961 to settle in the West—before the wall was built and traveling between the two Germanys became more difficult. After 1989 I went back to the village where my father was born and interviewed several eyewitnesses of the Soviets’ arrival and occupation. Most of their stories were more gruesome than the one I tell in the book. But there were also a few stories of friendly Russians who liked children and handed out sweets. An entire generation of Germans in the East and West who were children in 1945 grew up with the trauma of war in their families’ history; many of them lost their fathers and their homes in the war. Although the Germans who were adults during the Third Reich can be blamed for supporting a racist, violent, and insane regime that brought on a destructive war of epic proportions, children were pawns in the events. They had to learn to live on despite their loss, grief, and fear. Fritz found a way to survive.
Most of the academic works and eyewitness accounts I have used are published in German and written for adults. For those readers who would like to learn more about the history of the Soviet zone of occupation, I recommend Norman M. Naimark’s book The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–1949, published in 1995 by Harvard University Press.
A Conversation with Monika Schröder
Q: How did you become a writer?
A: I did not grow up wanting to be a writer. I was born in Germany and speak fluent German. As a child, I loved to read but felt discouraged by the writing required of me during my school years in Germany. Narrative writing was not taught, and I assumed that published authors had a God-given gift for composition that I lacked. It wasn’t until the summer of 2005, as an elementary-school teacher at the American Embassy School in New Delhi, when I took a class on teaching writing that I became excited about the possibility of becoming a writer. The instructor asked me to compose a narrative inspired by a family story and I chose to write a short story about a boy named Fritz, based on my father’s
experiences at the end of World War II. With encouragement from the instructor and my husband, I continued writing about the boy, and out of these episodes—and after many revisions—came my first book, The Dog in the Wood.
Q: How did you conduct the research for the book?
A: The main resource for the book was my father. My questions about his past always triggered very emotional responses. I lived in India at the time, so we usually talked on the telephone, and our conversations often ended in tears. He remembers his grandfather’s frantic attempt to defend the village; how they rode together on a horse cart while the old man yelled at other farmers to help build trenches to slow down the Russians’ advance. My father also recalls that due to a shortage in caskets, his grandmother had to be buried in the wooden dowry chest that was kept in the attic. He also told me about the Russian officers who stayed in their house, and the Soviet tank that was stuck on the slope by the pond near the garden.
As in every work of historical fiction, the dates of key events had to be accurate. I listened to a recording of Hitler’s insane last speech from Berlin, during which he asks the German people to envision the rebuilding of German cities while Allied bombs are hitting the building the speech was being broadcast from. I made sure that Fritz could have really heard Admiral Dönitz’s radio address after Hitler’s suicide two days before the Russians arrived.
In recent years, several books about the experiences of my parents’ generation of “war children” have been published in Germany. In the early 1990s, after Germany’s reunification, when traveling to the East became easier, my father and I visited Schwartz and interviewed eyewitnesses about the Russians’ arrival. Some of their anecdotes found their way into my book.
Q: Germany was divided after World War II and your father left East Germany to move to the west. Were you still able to visit your relatives in East Germany?
The Dog in the Wood Page 10