Beside her, Wolfgang throws up.
In that moment, Ania understands that they are headed to a terrible place.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The Warthegau, 1943
The lager in the Warthegau is in a converted slaughterhouse. No matter how many times Ania scrubs the floors, the walls, the wide kitchen table, it stinks of blood.
And the boys here are tougher than those at the previous lagers. Some are orphaned. Most are from big industrial cities. They have been sent here to escape the bombing, but also because they exhibit a certain kind of physical and mental promise. They are here to provide labor for the local farms and to seed the east with good German citizens, and also to be hardened into future SS men. This is a new development. “If this is the task, what is my role? And what about Anselm and Wolfgang?” Ania demands during one of her early arguments with Rainer.
“You begged me to come along,” he says coldly. “It was your choice.”
“But I didn’t know what I was choosing!”
“I told you it would be different” is Rainer’s response. And Ania is blindsided by the truth of this. Her desperation to leave Gudrun’s apartment and bomb-besieged Dortmund made her stupid. She should have asked more questions. She will rue her lack of curiosity, her ability to see things only as she wanted to, for the rest of her life.
Rainer has been given a handful of new materials, and he shares them with Ania for the first time once they are installed. They are full of fiery quotes from Hitler and the handsome Reich’s youth leader, Baldur von Schirach.
“Those who want to live, let them fight, and those who do not want to fight in this world of eternal struggle do not deserve to live.”
“He alone who owns the youth owns the future.”
“I want brutal, domineering, fearless, and cruel youth. . . . The free, magnificent beast of prey must again flash from their eyes.”
All the friendly rhetoric of togetherness is gone, along with any celebration of a wholesome, simple way of life.
“‘Cruel’?” Ania asks Rainer. “Are these boys really supposed to be cruel?”
Rainer gives a noncommittal shrug. This new Rainer is stern and silent all the time—less like a partner and more like an unreliable roommate. At night he drinks vodka and grows moody and speaks to the boys in a sarcastic snarl. Ania is a little bit afraid of him.
As far as she can tell, the lager boys are cruel and domineering already. This is not their first lager—many have been living in youth homes where they have been sent to escape the bomb-threatened cities for years. In their free time, which is plentiful, they improvise hard games: a ball toss in which the loser is beaten on the back with sticks, a race in which the winner walks on the other boys in his hobnailed work boots. Everything is a contest of strength and power—they beat one another black and blue over who sleeps on the top bunk, who takes the first freezing bath, who has to muck out the latrine. The same boys always win. When Ania attempts to stop them, Rainer intervenes: “Why?” he asks. “They will need to be hard.”
“But they can still be human, can’t they?” she asks.
This is the first time Rainer slaps her. It comes out of nowhere. He is standing beside her as she washes the dishes and, at first, when his hand arcs toward her face, Ania thinks it is a plate flying out of the sink. She steps back in shock.
“Don’t talk that way,” he says as she raises a hand to her bloodied lip. “For your own good.”
There is no more strolling through green wheat fields at dusk singing German folk songs. There are no more Sunday-morning hikes and campfire games. There is no more decent heating, clothing, or food.
Rainer broods and sulks and spends hours polishing his boots. His face has become set in a bitter expression. He has no passion left—not for the ideals that they set out with, not for Hitler, and certainly not for Ania. Here in the Warthegau, he doesn’t even attempt intercourse. He sleeps in a spartan room off the boys’ dormitory, while Ania shares a room off the kitchen with their sons. One night before he slapped her she knocked on his door, in a combination of loneliness and determination. Can I come in? she asked, blushing, holding her nightgown at the throat. But when Rainer opened the door, he only looked at her with a kind of weary pity. It’s late for conversation, Ania. Go to bed.
Ania’s days involve long shuffles through the mud to the post office where their rations and supplies are delivered. Like a goat, she tows cartons of potatoes, flour, and salt pork in a cart with a shoulder yoke. She keeps Anselm and Wolfgang beside her in the kitchen. Rainer does not approve, but she insists. Her boys are too young to run around with the others. And it isn’t only their age that makes them vulnerable—they are softer than the rest. Hitler has not yet weaned them of their mother. She can see that Rainer is embarrassed by this.
One day, Ania comes upon a group of boys behind the barn forcing the smallest, youngest ones to swallow live toads. “Stop it!” she yells, despite Rainer’s instructions. “Stop this nonsense! You are not animals!” They turn their astonished faces toward her. Some are transparently relieved, others challenging. Heiner Mohrer, one of the largest and meanest of the group, curls his lip and tips an imaginary cap. “Of course, gnädige Frau,” he says. But she can hear them restart the game as soon as she is out of sight.
Rainer makes Heiner something like an assistant. He is as tall as Rainer and broader, from a family of Hamburg dockworkers, all of whom died in the bombing. He routinely picks on the small boys, knocking the wash they are carrying to the ground, tripping them as they rise from the table. And he speaks rudely to Ania. “You are looking fine today, Frau Brandt,” he says in the insolent manner of a boy who knows a certain kind of women. In another life, before the Warthegau, Rainer would have boxed the ears of anyone who spoke like that to his wife. But the new Rainer pretends he doesn’t hear.
The land around the lager is as bad as the place itself. The fields stretch on and on and, at this time of year, are nothing but kilometers of frozen mud. The village, a cluster of modest, thatch-roofed houses, is mostly empty. The simple country folk who built these homes have been “resettled” farther east or sent to work as laborers in the Reich. Of the original occupants, only a handful are left.
“How did they choose who would stay?” she asks Herr Beinecke, a local man turned member of the Nazi Order Police. He scowls at her. “It was easy,” he says. “We eliminated the partisans.”
The word has become a sort of catchall: Communists and Jews and Polish nationalists and anyone who is not ready to work for the Nazis. “Were there so many?” Ania asks.
“Almost everyone,” Herr Beinecke replies.
Now she hears that the townspeople were not “resettled” but driven into the woods and murdered by local Hilfswillige, or “volunteers,” and a traveling SS Einsatzgruppe. The Hilfswillige are the only locals still alive. To “volunteer” apparently meant not to die. She learns all this from the youngest boy in the lager, Gerald Eisenblatt, a sweet, out-of-place fifteen-year-old from Essen whose mother, a widowed seamstress, sent Ania a letter early on: Thank you for caring for my son. He is a good boy. I promise he will cause you no trouble. And I appreciate in advance all you will do for him. Ania could imagine her, poor woman, small like Gerald, wan with worry, her fingers covered with needle pricks. And in her own loneliness, she felt kinship. In an attempt to protect Gerald from the others, Ania invites him to help her in the kitchen as often as she can. He tells her things the boys see around the countryside and hear from the farmers on whose land they work.
“And what about the women and children of the partisans?” she asks Gerald, though in her heart she already knows. He glances at her as if to assess what she can handle. “Eliminated,” he answers. Ania does not doubt that he is telling the truth. She can feel the steady crackle of cruelty in the air.
It makes her frightened of the locals who still live in the town, and of all the members of the Wehrmacht and SS who pass through. At night she dreams about the dea
d townspeople whose simple houses and belongings are left: the bucket hanging on the edge of a gate, the single sunflower growing in a small garden, the laundry line stretched between a tree and a windowsill.
The Brandts have lived at the lager for a year when the orphans come. Little ones. Two- and three-year-olds, and one infant. They arrive in the back of an SS transport truck, supervised by a young officer who finds it funny to give them swigs of whiskey from his flask. The babies look surprised and spit it out. One of them cannot walk—he is a big, handsome boy who pulls himself around on his bottom, taking everything in with his wide, imperturbable eyes. They are staying only one night. The lager, it turns out, serves as a rendezvous point. Members of the Brown Sisters, a female division of the SS, will come for the babies.
Ania is aghast.
“Where will they take them?” she asks. “Orphanages? Foster families?”
The SS man shrugs. “The Brown Sisters will decide.”
“Decide what?”
“Where they will take them.”
“Stop with the questions, Ania,” Rainer barks.
While she waits, cold spreads up from her gut. Ania hopes that the Brown Sisters, as women, will be sympathetic. But she is not optimistic. The BDM girls she has met in the east have been a hard lot, tough or lonely enough to want to come here and instruct the recalcitrant locals in “proper cooking” and hand-washing and God knows what else. These BDM women are suspicious of her as the wife of a lager leader, which is unheard of here in the east. And the Brown Sisters are a level up from the BDM women she has met.
Ania throws herself into caring for the babies, who are hungry, cold, and wet. The boys of the lager are out assisting a local Wehrbauer as he slaughters his pigs. Anselm and Wolfgang act as her assistants, tearing an old sheet into diaper cloths, mixing a thin gruel to feed the orphans, playing peekaboo. Ania rocks the ornery ones to sleep, swaying gently, humming as she once did with her own sons. The SS men drink vodka and watch. At one point, the youngest soldier stands over a baby lying on a blanket and nudges it with his boot.
“For God’s sake!” Ania says, snatching it up, and the man laughs.
Her favorite is a roly-poly one who looks to be almost two but still can’t walk. When she lifts him, he reaches his little hand up from time to time to fondle her ear. When Ania turns to smile at him, he looks surprised, as if he thought her ear belonged to someone else.
When the Brown Sisters arrive, there are only two of them: a meek, moonfaced girl who can’t be much older than eighteen and says almost nothing, and her superior, who introduces herself as Sister Margarete. She is a short woman with a clipped manner, unmarried and childless, but full of exact information about how to deal with babies. Which is: harshly. She makes no remarks about the sweet dimple on this one’s chin, or the way another puts his hand to his head. To her, they are clearly cargo to be transported. The cold in Ania’s gut turns into panic.
Margarete observes the babies and takes notes. She measures their height and weight, the length of their foreheads, the circumferences of their skulls. And she does not allow Ania to help her handle them, preferring the assistance of the SS men, who seem as dismayed by this as Ania is.
“Where will you take them?” Ania asks.
“Different places,” Margarete answers.
“To foster parents?”
“If they are suitable.”
“And if they aren’t?” Ania tries to ask it casually. She can feel Rainer’s eyes telling her to shut up.
“That is confidential,” Sister Margarete snaps.
“We can keep them,” Ania says. The words come out in a rush. “We can care for them here with the boys until the war ends.”
Sister Margarete fixes her with an intent look. “That is impossible,” she says. “And the idea is inappropriate for a person in your place.”
Ania looks down and bites her lip. Let them all be suitable, Ania prays. Please God, let them all be delivered to kind homes. She is afraid for the little dark-haired girl—so pretty with her big brown eyes, but not very German looking. Sister Margarete spends extra time on her measurements.
Ania picks up the chubby one and holds him close. He reaches immediately for her ear.
When Margarete has finished her measuring, she announces that she and her assistant will not spend the night. They would like to reach Posen before dark.
“So will you take them all?” Ania manages, despite the hard ball in her throat.
“These four,” Margarete says and gestures as if she is speaking about a few cuts of meat. Already she and her assistant have taken the first of the babies out to their car, the back of which is filled with metal washtubs lined with blankets, improvised bassinets. In her arms, one of the babies starts to shriek. “Scharführer Meister and Unterscharführer Haberman will take the others.”
“The others” are the roly-poly boy in Ania’s arms and the little dark-haired girl.
“Where?” Ania asks, above the babies’ crying. “Where will you take them?” Her voice is loud and growing hysterical.
“Ania.” Rainer puts a hand on her arm. The boy in her arms begins to cry.
The younger of the two SS men shrugs. “Chelmno. Unless we take them to the forest and shoot them first.”
“No!” Ania nearly chokes. “You can’t.”
“Don’t frighten the woman,” the older soldier says to his compatriot. “We’ll take them to a camp.”
When the man reaches for the baby, he clings to Ania, wailing louder. But this makes no difference to the man, who peels him from her arms.
On Ania’s other side, Rainer holds her fast.
In the years to come, Ania will remember this as the end of Ania Fortzmann. Not at the moment when she took her sons and stole out into the predawn to disappear into the west. Not in the ruined bomb cellar under the Dresden Hauptbahnhof when she took the papers from her dead friend’s dress.
For years, she will sift through this memory of the babies, through the racket of her own tears and the screaming and Rainer’s voice telling her to shush—looking for some lost grain of action. She will try to remember running after the SS man, prying the baby from his arms, or at least attempting this. It doesn’t matter that the outcome would have been the same. It would have made a difference to her.
But it isn’t there.
She simply stood and watched and wept. And she let them go.
Shortly after the Brown Sisters’ visit, Rainer receives orders requesting two of his best boys to report for duty at a nearby labor camp. They are shutting it down and moving its prisoners farther west into the Reich. The boys are to assist with the prisoner transport. Rainer selects Heiner, the bully, and Gerald Eisenblatt.
But on the morning of their departure, Rainer doesn’t come out of his room.
“You’ll have to do it,” he says when Ania knocks on his door. He is lying in bed, one arm thrown across his face, still in his nightclothes.
Ania stares at him, appalled. “I won’t,” she says.
Rainer turns and faces the wall.
So Ania, creature of duty and slave to her own fear of punishment, takes them herself. Arthur Greiser, the leader of the Warthegau, is known for his harsh response to insubordination, and she has her own sons to think about.
She kisses her sons and tells them to stay in their room, pretend they are sick.
And as dawn is breaking, Ania and the two boys set off. A weak gray light illuminates the road through the winter haze. There is always haze here, a dulling white cloud of steam that rises from the manure in the fields and hovers in the air.
Heiner sees the journey as an opportunity for unfettered bullying, which he begins by tossing pebbles at Gerald’s narrow back. “Stop it!” Ania commands. “Stop it this instant.”
But Heiner just laughs. “What will you do—send me back?”
“I will tell whoever is to oversee you.”
“What, that your ‘best and brightest’ don’t follow your orders?” H
e hoots with delight at his own cleverness and begins flinging even larger stones at the smaller boy. Gerald yelps and turns to hit Heiner with his own stealthily palmed rock. In an instant they have fallen into a flailing heap.
“Stop! Stop it!” Ania shouts, slapping at Heiner’s back. They are on a long stretch of uninhabited road and her voice sounds like the chirping of an irrelevant bird. She can only stand and stare at them. Gerald is beyond her help. By what sleight of hand did her enthusiasm for national service, for shaping young men and building community, turn into this?
“You should be ashamed,” she says, speaking equally to herself.
When they stand, Gerald is bleeding. His lip is split, and he has a black eye. She takes the handkerchief from her pocket, spits on it, and wipes his cuts.
They continue the rest of their walk in merciful silence, occasionally interrupted by Heiner’s tuneless whistling. From Gerald she hears a quiet, choked breathing sound. His face has swollen to a livid purple; she tries not to think of his mother. It will be up to Ania to explain his condition to the authorities.
The station at Kutno is packed with people. Since Stalingrad, the Russians have been advancing. The chickens are coming home to roost. Everyone in the east knows it, never mind what Hitler and Goebbels and Der Stürmer tell them to believe. Here are the first waves of evidence: wizened grandmothers, bedraggled young women and babies, old men with long faces and an air of desperation, all fleeing before the advancing Russian troops.
Ania and the boys are the only ones waiting on this side of the tracks. The camp where they are headed is farther east. Hitler has ordered Germans in the territories to stay put, but meanwhile Himmler quietly moves their prisoners deeper into the Reich.
“Will we take the prisoners west by train?” Gerald asks.
Ania has no idea. Truthfully, she has not given the details of their task much thought. Ania has become skilled at not thinking beyond her own sons.
The Women in the Castle Page 25
