“Do what?”
“Touch us. When they know we don’t want it. It’s…it’s a way for them to pretend to themselves that they are powerful. Important.”
Renate turns her head slightly, looking up at her mother’s face at the angle from which she saw it most often as an infant. In some ways she wishes she could simply go back to those days: to shrink and fatten and soften, lose her hair and her grown-up clothes, lose the aching need for nicotine and friendship and Rudi Gerhardt’s perfect, long-lost lips.
“But they can’t touch your mind,” her mother continues, nodding now as though she’s trying to convince herself. “They can only touch your mind if you let them. And they might change what they call us. But they can’t break us apart. We will remain a family. We’ll stay together. No matter what happens.”
She strokes Renate’s cheek again. “Yes?”
Renate hesitates. Then she nods. Inside, though, she is still hearing the man’s voice: A Jew’s leftovers. She is still seeing his fingers on her mother’s face. He has, she realizes, more than simply touched her mind. He has cut into it, the way he might cut into an apple with a knife.
10.
Ilse
1937
APRIL 10
DAM-GROSSER, EAST PRUSSIA
Dear Renate:
I will never send this letter to you. In all likelihood, I won’t keep it at all. I will finish it, and burn it, and scatter the ashes in the vegetable garden the other girls and I have planted behind our house. And yet as I go through my days in this strange German-but-not-German town, I find myself writing it anyway.
At first it was just in my head, so subtly and naturally that I didn’t realize it was a letter at all. When I did, of course, I tried to stop. But this little mental pen—I picture it as the fancy jade one you once gave me for Christmas—just continued scribbling away, and the more I ignored it the more insistently it scribbled. Last night it actually kept me awake—and this after a morning spent sowing a ten-hectare potato field, with no help but a German farmer and a doddering workhorse named Bobik. I finally dragged myself up before dawn and down to the darkened kitchen to let the words out onto the page.
Which leaves me here, at half past three in the morning, composing a letter I can’t seem to not write, to a person to whom I know I can no longer write.
Ilse chews on the tip of her pencil, rereading what she’s written in the flickering light of the single candle she has lit. She sounds, she knows, utterly insane—she can all but hear her former best friend laughing in derision. And yet the truth is that there have been moments in these past weeks when she has never felt quite so sane; so certain of her purpose on earth. What she and her fellow Arbeitsmaiden are accomplishing in this tiny Polish border town astonishes her on a daily basis, while confirming everything she’s ever believed about the revolutionary truth of their movement.
There are twelve of them in the labor camp, six per bunkroom, with Campleader Kass in her own little room at the end of the hall. The house was formerly a rectory; rickety and timeworn, it groans and hisses at night like an overworked old woman. A few of the Labor Maidens are convinced that it’s haunted. Indeed, a few days after arriving—when it all still felt like a holiday—they’d held a secret séance at midnight, holding hands and chanting improvised runes to summon whatever restless spirits might be sharing their residence. In the end, though, none appeared, and the ritual only served to make their own five thirty a.m. summons to work and breakfast that much harder.
Five-thirty, she thinks now, checking the clock by the window. It reads 4:05—barely an hour before the rest awaken. Shifting a little in her chair, she resumes:
Our first order of the day is to make our bunks and clean our rooms so that they pass the Lagerführerin’s daily inspection. You would be amazed at how neat I’ve become; I can now make perfect hospital corners and tuck a sheet so tightly that a Pfennig will bounce off it. Since a significant part of our mission here is to impart German cleanliness and order to our German farming households, Lagerführerin Kass insists that we ourselves model those qualities at all times.
After inspection we troop outside for flag raising, singing, and exercise (all of which I know you’d loathe, particularly at that hour). Then it’s time for breakfast, by which point we are all ravenous since we’ve already been up for nearly two hours. We all line up in the kitchen and are given our plates by whichever of us Service Maidens are on cooking duty that day. After eating, we divide up according to our respective assignments and work until nine. Then it’s on to our bicycles and off to our main mission: serving the Volksdeutsche of Dam-Großer.
For me, this has mainly meant digging potatoes. I can hear you laughing at this image, but I am quite serious: Over the past week, I’ve spent twelve to fourteen hours per day in the potato field of a Volksdeutsche family named Michalski (that even their name sounds Polish gives you a sense of how confusing this world is). My duties consist of digging holes, dropping seed potatoes into them, and then covering them back up again. Row by row. It sounds easy, but I can honestly say it’s the hardest work I’ve ever done. The soil is still cold and hard from the last snowfall, and the potatoes, though small, feel like leaden weights by midday. By sunset my back aches like that of an old woman, while my arms and legs feel like I’ve been at a daylong track meet. On top of that, my hands are so chapped and raw from working in the camp laundry this week that the mere act of gripping something—a potato, a spade, the old workhorse’s leather reins—makes them bleed.
I had a hard time getting out of bed after the first two days. It wasn’t just the physical soreness, either. It was the overwhelming dreariness of this kind of existence. Between the starkness of the field, the muddy slogging, and the ceaseless ache of my limbs, I almost couldn’t face another day of it.
But I forced myself to rise. I will admit to fighting back tears during the first hour. But then I reminded myself of the millions of good people who, for centuries and generations, have devoted their entire lives to such work. And not just to feed themselves and their families, but to feed all the rest of us too! The thought made me—a privileged city girl who is only here for a few months—feel very small and ungrateful indeed. In fact, I resolved to change my attitude immediately by forcing myself to whistle instead of weep. After a while Herr Michalski joined in with me, even adding some harmonizing chords and trills.
And Reni Renate, something strange and amazing happened after that. It wasn’t that the work became any less physically taxing, but I began to feel the most extraordinary sense of contentment. It came from a sudden, overwhelming sense of connection: not just to Herr Michalski, but to all those generations of Germans who had tilled this very land before us and—for all I know—might even be a part of it now. And for the first time, I felt as though I understood that oft-used term Blut und Boden. It is more than a slogan. It is a sacred truth: as Germans, our blood is the soil we till. And the soil is in the blood in our veins.
I can see you rolling your eyes here, in the way you always did when I talked like (as you and Franz called it) a “one-hundred-and-fifty-percent Nazi.” And in truth I must have looked idiotic even to Herr Michalski, because just as I’d had this revelation he suddenly stopped whistling and gave me a rather odd look over his shoulder.
“What is so funny, then?” he demanded.
Realizing that there was no way to explain myself in a way that wouldn’t send him scurrying for a Labor Maiden who wasn’t barking mad, I improvised. “Oh,” I said. “I was just thinking how grateful I am that our Führer gave us this opportunity to be here.”
And believe it or not, his weathered face actually lit up.
“The man is a miracle from heaven,” he said. “For all of us.”
Shifting uncomfortably in her chair, Ilse tries for a moment to reclaim the jolt of sheer joy she’d felt in the field. But while the memory
of the day itself comes easily enough—the pebbly soil beneath her fingers, the hay-sweet scent and soft nicker of the swaybacked workhorse, the craggy lines of the German farmer’s face—the feeling itself seems to hover just beyond it; a luminous life raft of well-being bobbing and dancing away atop a swelling sea of revulsion and confusion.
Still (she reminds herself) she had felt it. And that, she reminds herself sternly, is why I am here. That’s what makes everything else—even what happened today—worth it.
Leaning back in her chair, she sets her pencil down and rubs her aching neck. Technically she isn’t supposed to be downstairs until six—even on days when she’s on breakfast duty. Tonight, though, after hours of tossing and turning beneath her rough-but-tightly-tucked sheet, she’d known that she had to get up, that if she spent another moment in the crowded room—with Josepha whimpering in her sleep and Susi snoring below her and Petra somnolently passing gas that smelled like beef sausage—Ilse would finally have let out such a howl of frustration that she’d have woken the entire floor.
So shrugging into a cardigan and woolen socks, she’d scooped her notepad from her wall cubby and noiselessly lowered herself to the cold wood floor, pausing just long enough to ensure that no one else was awake before carefully tiptoeing into the hallway and down the back stairway. Shifting again in her seat, she wonders whether she should have entertained her farm family’s offer of putting her up with them, rather than remaining here with the camp.
The Michalskis are good people, after all. But like most villagers here they are quite simple—not to mention lamentably ignorant of their Nordic heritage. When Ilse first saw their modest farmhouse she’d actually thought the Service Board had matched her with a Polish family by mistake. The décor was cheap and tawdry, the tables groaning with false flowers. There were horrid little knickknacks everywhere—a google-eyed duo of ceramic frogs watched over by a gaudily colored shepherdess; a bisque “piano baby” with its dimpled rear end in full view. The parlor had even sported one of those eyeball clocks Ilse and Renate used to laugh about together, this one shaped like a little Negro genie whose white eyes rolled around to show you the time—enough, Ilse had written Renate in her head, to give you nightmares!
She’d found the house physically sanitary enough at least, as the Michalskis do well enough to keep a maid. Unfortunately, said maid—Marzia—also happens to be Polish, which means that her idea of cleaning doesn’t even approach the rigorous German standard the Service Maidens have been charged to impress upon their respective Volksdeutsche households. As she’s since discovered, having Marzia around also makes it that much harder to maintain a German-speaking environment, as the housekeeper speaks next to no German and Frau Michalski and the children prefer Polish to begin with.
Still, Ilse has done her best given the circumstances; when she’s not farming with Herr Michalski or helping his wife awaken her long-dormant Hausfrau instincts, she sings the children German songs or reads to them in their mother tongue, usually from the Grimms or Struwwelpeter. It’s clear they don’t understand everything. But they at least seem engaged, laughing at Ilse’s impressions of thumb-sucking Conrad and fidgety Phil. They also leap at the chance to put on puppet shows together, especially if they involve Punch-and-Judy-style head-whacking. They’re particularly enamored with one of their own invention called The Villagers Chase the Jew Out, based on the popular board game Juden Raus!
Unfortunately, though, not all the chasing in Ilse’s life here is make-believe. The Dam-Großer Labor Service outpost is still fairly new, and some of the villagers—particularly the Poles—are clearly resentful of its presence. Just last week, two Service Maidens were unceremoniously knocked from their bicycles on their way back from their respective assignments in German households. Neither was seriously injured, but both were badly shaken up—one to the point that she was sent home to Munich to recuperate.
According to Lagerführerin Kass, such assaults stem from a belief on the part of some of the villagers that the Reich Service League is both “meddlesome” and “anti-Polish,” though of course nothing could be farther from reality. (Our hard work benefits everyone, Ilse wrote Renate mentally, Polish and German alike.) What’s more, to Ilse’s mind these were not mere “boyish pranks,” as Lagerführerin Kass seemed inclined to write them off. Rather, they struck her as deliberate, targeted assaults on the Reich itself, and she found it unfathomable that their perpetually harried-looking camp leader didn’t seem more perturbed by them. “If we as the Reich’s emissaries can be attacked like this, with impunity, what’s to stop it from happening again?” Ilse had asked her. “And what sort of a message would that send? Not just to the villagers, but to Warsaw?” Everyone knew the Polish government—long angling for war with Germany—was actively seeking chinks in Germany’s national defense system, particularly in these smaller border towns.
Despite its obvious logic, however, this line of reasoning got Ilse precisely nowhere with Lagerführerin Kass, who seemed more intent on protecting her camp’s relations with the villagers than protecting the girls entrusted to her.
“Marita and Lies were ultimately unharmed,” she told Ilse, “and the Burgermeister assures me that the boys’ families have been spoken to.”
“The mayor?” Ilse sputtered. “Do you really think that someone with a name like Szczepański is going to come down hard on the Polish thugs who knocked our sisters to the ground?”
“Fräulein von Fischer,” the Lagerführerin said, her jaw tightening slightly. “I understand your concerns. But I must request that you trust my judgment on this matter, and that it is being handled responsibly and properly.”
Then, more gently (if inevitably): “You really must learn to let these things go.”
* * *
And she had tried—Ilse truly had tried. In addition to her daily farm and farmhouse duties she threw herself into preparing for the bonfire her group was planning for the spring solstice, modeled on an ancient Norse ritual of Orasta. The other girls contented themselves with weaving ivy candleholders and wreaths, but Ilse composed a special verse for the event, and received permission from Lagerführerin Kass to not only read it aloud but to make copies to pass out to other attendants:
Hail to the offerings of coldest winter
Hail to the offspring of night
With hair of sunrise yellow and cheeks of peach hue
They dance in eternal Spring’s light!
But as she’d walked back from the mimeographer’s yesterday she became aware of a group of Polish boys walking far too closely behind her. She ignored them for as long as she could, but when one of them called out with a shrill, mocking Sieg Heil her indignation came slamming back.
Ducking into a nearby meat shop, Ilse pointed at the rude gang through the window and asked the butcher to write down the names of its members. When he claimed not to understand German she fetched the tailor next door, a bespectacled little man who initially offered his assistance with an indulgent smile, though it faded slightly upon hearing her request.
“They’re gone now,” he pointed out, indicating the empty street.
“He saw them,” she insisted, pointing her chin at the worried-looking meat vendor. “He knows who they are.”
After a whispered conference with the butcher, the tailor turned back to Ilse: “He’d like a promise that none of them will be hurt,” he said, his smile now one of apology.
Why shouldn’t they be hurt? Ilse wanted to snap back. Why not, when Marita cried for the whole night after they set upon her, and Lies had to be sent home like a delinquent in disgrace?
Instead, she pulled herself up to her full one-hundred-and-fifty-eight-centimeter height. “I want to make it quite clear,” she said stiffly, “that I’m a representative of the Reich, and that the Reich doesn’t negotiate when it comes to justice. If you fail to comply with my request, then I’ll be forced to report you—both of you—t
o the Hauptsturmführer’s office.”
Hauptsturmführer Wainer was the highest-ranking Party representative in the village. Ilse had never met him, but from the mixture of apprehension and deference that usually accompanied mention of his name she assumed he was someone to be reckoned with—an assumption further confirmed by the way the tailor’s smile now evaporated completely.
“Report us for what?” he asked, blinking rapidly behind his spectacles.
“For—for aiding and abetting anti-Reich activities,” Ilse improvised. “It’s a very serious charge. People are sent to the camps for less in Berlin.”
She actually had no idea if this was true, but it had its desired effect: still blinking furiously, the tailor launched into another rapid-fire, whispered consultation with the butcher, this one accompanied by equally terse shrugs and head shakes.
Finally, he turned back. “You have paper?” he asked.
She handed over the little notebook she carried with her. “Do you have a telephone?”
* * *
A half hour later she was pedaling down Dam-Großer’s Hauptstraße, the damning notebook page carefully folded in her pocket and her heart beating somewhere near her throat. To her amazement, after being put through to the Hauptsturmführer’s office by the village operator and briefly explaining her mission, Ilse had been offered a meeting with the commander that very afternoon. “He had a four-thirty cancellation,” the secretary explained. “I’d take it, if I were you. The next opening isn’t for over a week. Do you have our address?”
* * *
The Hauptsturmführer’s office was in a large villa in the town’s center, which up until recently had been Burgermeister Szczepański’s home. The first-floor parlor has been converted into a reception/secretarial area, in which a dark-haired young woman was typing so painstakingly it made Ilse wince just to watch it. Ilse couldn’t help noticing that the girl also wore an exceptionally low-cut blouse, a rare sight in a town where many dressed with turn-of-the-century modesty. She appeared both aware of her exposed cleavage and blithely unconcerned by it: as she hunted, squinted, and pecked at her keyboard she’d periodically reach a hand around her back to yank the neckline back into place. Watching her, Ilse was reminded of the way Trude Baumgarten would hike up her skirt in school and pretend to be adjusting her stockings, when everyone knew she was showing the boys her legs. And they’re not even very nice legs, Ilse remembered Renate hooting. Don’t they remind you of two skinny, hairy, white turnips?
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