The German Girl

by Lily Graham

  ‘Still sleeping. Malthe says she has bronchitis. Like you said, she’s half starved – all the bones on her ribs are showing; she probably hasn’t eaten anything much for days.’

  Trine winced.

  Lisbet looked at her. ‘She’s going to be all right, don’t worry.’ Then she picked up a small pad where she’d jotted down some notes. ‘Malthe’s left some instructions for you – though he says with your experience, most of it you’ll already know. Lots of rest, fluids, that sort of thing. He’ll come and check in on her again in a few days. But she should be fine.’

  Trine thanked her, grateful for the vote of confidence. It had been some years since she’d cared for anyone besides herself, and the dog. And Bjørn looked after her more than anything.

  Lisbet turned the gas down on the hob to let the soup simmer, then dipped a spoon in the pot, blew on it, tasted it, then added more salt. ‘She was speaking German – in her sleep, I don’t understand it much, even after all these years with you trying to teach me, but she kept saying one word over and over.’

  Trine frowned. ‘What?’

  ‘Jürgen.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Trine, and pain flashed across her face. ‘That’s her twin.’

  Lisbet’s eyes widened. ‘Her twin,’ she breathed. ‘Oh…’

  Trine nodded, fear clutching her heart. ‘They were inseparable.’

  After Lisbet left, Trine went to check in on Asta. She was sleeping more comfortably, probably from whatever medication Malthe had given her. She was still flushed with fever but she had been put in a clean nightdress by Lisbet and had been given a wash, for which Trine was grateful.

  Her hair, though, was still a dank and matted mess.

  Malthe’s instructions were to spoonfeed her soup and water and to crush her medicine into the food. There was an awful lot of it, which he’d left on the bedside table, with instructions written in Lisbet’s neat schoolteacher’s hand.

  Bjørn lifted his golden head and yawned, his heavy tail thumping the bed at seeing her. She smiled, and patted his head. ‘You haven’t left her side, eh, boy? I think she’ll like you when she meets you. Come on, let’s go, you have needs too,’ she said, and he jumped off and followed to the kitchen, where she left the door open so he could do his business, while she filled a bowl with water and went to fetch towels, shampoo, and a brush. It wouldn’t make Asta feel much better, but it would help Trine – like Lisbet, she too found it hard to be idle.

  A bark from outside made her pause, and she popped her head round to investigate. Bjørn had his lead in his mouth and he darted toward her hopefully.

  ‘Oh, Bjørn, I’m sorry, not today.’

  There was the sound of footsteps and Trine startled; they were coming from the direction of the barn, but whoever was there remained in shadow. Bjørn let out a low bark that soon turned into a joyful yipping sound when he recognised who it was.

  ‘It’s just me – sorry,’ said Oliver, a young man of around seventeen with short blond hair and green eyes. He was Lisbet’s son.

  ‘My mum sent me over – told me that I should look at the animals. I’ve checked in on Millie already and fed her.’ Millie was Trine’s horse. There wasn’t much call for a horse out in Snekkerston, but considering Uwe had threatened to shoot her when she said she was leaving him, the horse had come with her. Oliver rode her on the beach sometimes.

  ‘I can take Bjørn for his walk.’

  Trine leant against the door of her house, and smiled her first smile of the day. ‘I swear that woman is a mind-reader, thank you.’

  Oliver grinned. ‘I don’t mind. Bjørn and I are old friends.’

  ‘That you are,’ she agreed, as Bjørn did his best to jump into the boy’s arms, like he had when he was a pup. Oliver laughed at the dog’s antics.

  Then he looked at Trine, and his face suddenly turned serious. ‘Is it true – what my mother said, about your niece?’

  ‘What part?’ asked Trine.

  ‘That she’s here – that she escaped from Germany?’

  Trine nodded. His eyes were full of questions, but she had no answers, for either of them. Perhaps he realised he was prying, because he looked away, giving Bjørn his attention.

  ‘I hope she gets better soon,’ he said, then fixed the lead onto the dog’s collar, and the two started to walk towards the harbour.

  ‘Oliver?’ Trine called.

  He stopped, and looked back at her,

  ‘My niece – well, I don’t know what’s she’s been through – but I can imagine that—’

  ‘It’s a lot,’ he agreed.

  She nodded. ‘She might need a friend, someone her age.’

  He nodded. ‘I can be that.’

  Trine washed Asta’s long dark blonde hair, rinsing it with a jug of warm water over a basin. There were twigs and mud and all sorts of things tangled up into the strands, and she had to replace the water twice. Part of her was worried about waking her, while another wished she would, so that she could get answers to all the burning questions that were tormenting her. Where were Fritz, Frieda and Jürgen – why was Asta here by herself, and so thin, so sick, so starved?

  What had happened?

  But she didn’t wake, and Trine was left alone with her thoughts, as she diligently teased out every snarl and snag in her niece’s hair. It took ages, until finally it lay around her pillow in a soft, clean halo, drying quickly in the heated room.

  Oliver brought Bjørn back not long afterwards, and the dog settled next to Asta, giving the girl several sniffs, at her new fresh scent, before resting his head on her lap.

  Trine smiled, then stretched. The night before she’d slept in the chair; tonight something a bit more permanent would need to be arranged. She lived in a single-roomed cottage, so it would have to be the kitchen bench. She got up and fetched a pink-and-green patchwork quilt that she’d made several winters before to pass the long, dark hours, along with a pillow from her wardrobe. She was just about to leave, when she felt a prickle on the back of her neck; she turned around, and blinked in shock.

  Asta was awake, and staring at her hard. She sat up, like a wounded, frightened animal, touching the nightdress, and looking around in distress. She was half-delirious, mumbling, and terrified. Nothing she said made sense.

  ‘No, stay in bed,’ called Trine, as Asta crawled out of the bed, frantically searching for something. She knelt beneath the bed, looked behind the door.

  ‘Asta?’ asked Trine, coming forward slowly, her hands raised in peace.

  The girl whirled around, swaying on unsteady feet. A hacking cough ripped through her tiny frame, and she bent over, almost double.

  Trine rushed over to help her.

  ‘Mutti,’ cried Asta, calling for her mother, then seemed to look uncomprehendingly, glancing around. ‘Where am I?’ she asked, blinking. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘It’s me, Asta, your aunt, Trine,’ Trine replied.

  ‘I need to go, Mutti, I can’t stay in bed,’ she said, not hearing, not understanding. ‘We just left him, I have to go find him,’ she said, looking up at her, with her eyes glazed, and full of tears. They spilled over, coursing down her cheeks. ‘Oh God, we just left him. I screamed and screamed for him to turn back, to stop… but he wouldn’t, he just wouldn’t,’ she moaned, her thin body shaking with fierce sobs.

  Trine felt her body go cold, her knees start to shake. ‘You left who, Asta?’

  Asta didn’t say anything, she just sobbed all the harder.

  Trine shook her softly. ‘Tell me.’

  Asta stared, unseeing, at her.

  ‘Jürgen.’ Then her face crumpled again. ‘Oh, Mutti, he – he’s dead.’

  12

  Elmshorn, 1938

  ‘Esther, stop it,’ hissed the tall man who’d introduced himself as Hershel as the van backed out onto the road for the next leg of their journey. They were heading across Germany, towards Southern Jutland, which bordered Denmark. He had long grey curls either side of his face, known as peiyes i
n Yiddish, which marked him out as a Hasidic or Orthodox Jew.

  ‘You’ll scare the kids,’ agreed Ruth at the back.

  The man called Lars, another Hasidic Jew, shook his head. ‘But she’s right. We paid good money for this, everything we owned. I knew he was a stinking, thieving liar… but I didn’t take him for a damned idiot.’

  ‘Well, what do you expect?’ snapped the Ruth. ‘He is the only one who agreed to take us. No use complaining now, especially after what happened.’

  ‘What happened?’ asked Asta.

  Esther looked at her in shock, as her patterned scarf slipped further away from her hairline. She pulled it back, impatiently, adjusting it with a clip.

  Privately Asta wondered if they were so worried about being caught, shouldn’t they try to blend in more? They seemed so concerned that the twins’ presence put them in danger – but with their fake birth certificates and normal attire, surely they stood a better chance as their appearance didn’t announce who they were before they even opened their mouths?

  ‘You aren’t serious – you really haven’t heard?’ she breathed. A hand came up to clutch at her throat. Asta could see, just at the edge of a neckline, several thick clumps of what looked like rows of necklaces. Had she put on every piece she owned?

  Asta shook her head, and Esther and the others began to speak, almost all at once. ‘A few nights ago, the SS organised a nationwide attack – a pogrom – against all Jewish-owned businesses,’ said Lars.

  Ruth began to quietly cry. ‘Oh, poor Ida.’

  Esther whispered to the twins, ‘Her friend, he owned a stationery shop. They killed him,’ she said simply, and the stark horror of that washed over them.

  ‘So much glass, so much blood,’ said Hershel sadly. ‘A night of crystal – that’s what they’re calling it because of all the broken glass – and all the broken lives. I heard the commotion – I used to work as a lawyer before they changed the laws so I’d got a job in my friend’s shop, a tailor’s. Well, luckily, we’d closed for a break. As I was coming back I saw the SS – saw them dragging out men and women… we heard tell they were taking people to detention camps in the east.’ He sighed and closed his eyes. ‘Concentration camps. I managed to get home by sheer plain luck and that’s when I told my wife, Esther, that we need to get out, now.’

  It was the same with Lars and Ruth. He ran a tobacconist’s in Hamburg. ‘Luckily, Esther phoned just in time, and I slipped out of the back door,’ he said, looking up at his brother-in-law. So much of their escape had been about luck that day. ‘How come you didn’t hear about it?’ he asked the twins. ‘I mean, it was everywhere – even on our horrible censored stations.’

  Ruth nodded, and looked at the twins in confusion. ‘If not that – why else are you leaving Germany?’

  ‘Well, our hell started a week earlier,’ said Jürgen.

  Asta nodded. ‘See… they took our parents to Dachau – the labour camp – for not changing their paperwork. That’s what one of the nurses at the hospital where they both worked told us.’

  Hershel was surprised. ‘They were still allowed to work?’

  Asta nodded. ‘Our father served in the war so he was allowed to practise medicine until the laws changed again but they got around that by taking jobs at the Jewish clinic; our mother is a nurse. I think they knew it was only a matter of time before even that loophole was taken away – even so, he refused to change his passports and paperwork.

  ‘Well, anyway, the nurse that came to warn us, told us that the SS were looking for us too – to take us, perhaps, we weren’t sure… so we ran away, we didn’t hear anything about the pogrom. We’re from Hamburg too,’ she added.

  Esther swore. ‘Filthy bastards.’

  ‘Your parents didn’t think to use the Kindertransport?’ asked Ruth.

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Jürgen.

  ‘Well, in Europe and other places where news has been spreading about Hitler and his plans – his hatred of the Jews – there have been so many refugees seeking asylum they’re starting to organise refugee transports of Jewish children. They can’t help everyone, but they’re trying their best to get the children out to places like England,’ explained Hershel. ‘The churches are big drivers for it.’

  Ruth nodded. ‘That’s what we just did. We have a friend, a priest, who lived near us – he arranged for a family to take our boys. Soon they will be on their way to England. Imagine, even the Catholics want to help us! Couldn’t your parents have done the same – a friend in England, maybe?’

  The answer was of course, obvious, considering the twins were sitting in the back of a van with them.

  ‘We didn’t know anyone there,’ said Asta, simply. ‘Besides, up until the morning they were taken, our parents still believed that things would get better.’

  Esther sighed, then to her absolute shock, she reached over to squeeze Asta’s hand in sympathy. ‘Oh, zeeskeit, sweetheart. It wasn’t just them – we were all like that. No one considered that the alternative was true. That things were only just starting to get worse, and now…’ She didn’t say what they were all thinking: now it might be too late.

  ‘Shhh, don’t speak like that,’ reprimanded Ruth. ‘This is it – this is our chance. We just have to trust it.’

  Esther raised a brow. ‘I think for that to happen we’ll need a miracle.’

  ‘Well,’ said Ruth, her dark eyes teasing, ‘I’d say Jews were long overdue a break, wouldn’t you?’

  And to the twins’ surprise, all of the adults began to laugh. When Herman banged on the wall from the driver’s side and shouted at them to keep it down, they pressed their hands into their mouths and laughed harder still. The twins didn’t. For two people who had spent half their lives pulling practical jokes, they couldn’t think of anything less funny than this group of people desperately wishing for a miracle to save their lives.

  They made one stop in the night, and to their horror, it was to collect even more passengers. Their driver, Herman, didn’t let them get out or relieve themselves. He simply scowled, and shoved them back with a thick red arm, ushering in another couple with his other. ‘Too many eyes, come on,’ he said, as a frightened couple of around the twins’ grandparents’ age climbed inside the crowded van sometime after dawn. This time, Esther didn’t give them a hard time, but she looked mutinous all the same.

  The couple’s names were Sofie and Goran Rosenberg. Unlike the others, they weren’t Orthodox Jews, nor were they from Hamburg but the countryside around it.

  Somehow, they all made space for them amongst the tins and jars and brown paper packages of cured meat.

  It wasn’t long before they too were sharing their story. ‘Goran hasn’t worked for three years; he was let go, like so many others, I suppose. We’ve got by through my sewing. But they stopped that – when they found out that some of my clients were gentiles, they took away my sewing machine. What right did they have to it? It was my mother’s…’

  ‘Thieves,’ spat Lars. ‘That’s all they are. They took money from my tills too – I mean, how do they even justify any of it?’

  ‘Because to them we are not people,’ said Esther.

  ‘What animal sells tobacco?’ asked Lars.

  And they grinned.

  ‘You’re right, though,’ said Sofie. ‘It’s not logical. I heard they’ve got these pamphlets that tell you how to spot a Jew, and what to be afraid of – they’re making us out to be monsters.’

  ‘It’s true,’ said Asta and told them about what had happened at her school – how the teacher had tried to make her think that she was inferior due to the size of her head – and how incredible her mother had been, not simply dismissing it, but actively proving to her how ridiculous that theory was. Asta bit her lip and looked away. Jürgen held onto her tightly. It hurt to mention their beloved Mutti, to wonder where she was, what was happening to them.

  ‘They’re the monsters,’ said Esther.

  Jürgen and Asta nodded.

  ‘I
t used to be so different, I never felt like an outsider – like anyone thought we were less. Most of our friends were “gentiles”,’ said Sofie, curling her fingers into air quotes. ‘And then one day we were these outsiders, something to be scorned, and mocked or feared.’

  ‘Oh, well, you’re lucky, of course, that was simply not the case for us,’ said Esther, touching her headscarf. ‘I don’t think we’ve ever really been treated all that well. Polish Jews – and Hasidic to boot, we weren’t even treated well by our own kind – they saw us as something beneath them, like people stuck in the past – and now…’ She broke off. ‘Well, it made no difference, did it? We’re all fleeing from our own homes in the middle of the night.’

  Asta looked at the floor. Esther was right. It was true – hadn’t she once looked at them – the more Orthodox Jews who refused to give up their old-fashioned ways – as the ‘problem’? Hadn’t she only a few hours ago judged them for refusing to change – to give up their head coverings and side curls? She could see how silly it was thinking that her family or any others who didn’t display their religion were ‘more German’. The line separating them was made of thread. No matter what you felt in your own head or heart, the Nazis painted them all with the same tarred brush.

  No one said anything. What was there to say? They’d all learnt about the cost of prejudice, and how damaging it really was.

  Sofie opened up a satchel; inside were two cake tins. She lifted the lid off a green tin with a triangular pattern along the rim, which was full of small pies. ‘They’re chicken and mushroom,’ she said, handing the tin round. Esther pressed one into each of the twins’ hands. ‘Eat, eat. You two look half-starved,’ she said, with a frown.

  At Sofie’s frown, Esther explained, ‘They’re not ours – in case you think you’re thinking of judging us for that.’

  Sofie looked up, aghast. ‘I – I wasn’t.’

  ‘Esther!’ barked Hershel in reproach.

  She put her head in hands for a moment. ‘Forgive me, I feel so much stress it is leaking out of me, sitting like acid bubbling beneath my skin turning everything I say sour. I just meant…’ She gave an apologetic half-smile, half-grimace. ‘If they were mine, they’d probably be a bit fat… there’s no way I would ever be accused of having children who look hungry.’