“What would you like, today?” he said.
“Meat, if you have any.”
Franz went back inside and returned with a small parcel of minced meat wrapped in a page torn from Das Reich.
She peeled back the newsprint, peered in, lifting the contents to her nose. “What is it?” It had an odd smell.
“It’s meat,” he said. “Three hundred grams, full of good stuff.”
“Is it horse? Mule?”
“It’s a mixture. Do I ask what you’re putting in the bread?” He gave her his broken-toothed grin. “I’ll take one of your loaves.”
She glared at him. “A third of a loaf.”
“A half. Take it or leave it.”
She opened her bag, pulled out one of her loaves and cut it in half with a penknife. Franz grabbed the half loaf and slammed the door in her face.
Her second call was to the Ruhwald Schrebergärten allotments beside the golf course, just across the main road from her apartment block. She visited two plots, exchanging generous slices of bread for vegetables. Her last call was to an allotment owned by Hans Klein. A tousled-headed, barrel-chested ex-soldier, Hans lived in the same block as Gretchen. He had lost his right leg above the knee in the Russian campaign and had been fitted with a false one made of metal. Heavy and unarticulated, he walked by swinging it, pivoting on his good leg.
Hans spent all his time at the allotment, although his vegetable patch was overgrown and in need of attention. What he did there all day, every day, was a mystery to Gretchen. Certainly not tending to the soil.
She found him in the cabin sitting in his old armchair, his metal leg stretched out before him, resting on a wooden kitchen chair.
“What does our Gauleiter have to say today?” she asked. The high-pitched, nasal voice of Dr Joseph Goebbels coming from Hans’s Volksempfänger radio was instantly recognizable.
Hans gave her a blank look. “The people of the Fatherland have nothing to fear.” His deep voice rolled around her like ocean waves. “The Wehrmacht is driving the Americans out of Italy into the Adriatic Sea. The final glorious victory in the Mediterranean will be ours.”
“And what about Berlin? Will the bombings stop?”
He switched the radio off. “Berlin will always be the pride of the Reich. Our brave soldiers will protect us. Our anti-aircraft batteries are to be improved; new ones added. We just have to remain strong, to knuckle down and work together tirelessly.”
“Of course. Tirelessly.”
He gave her two onions and three potatoes in exchange for a thick slice of Kommissbrot.
“And what of the western war?” she asked.
“The advance of the Americans and the English has been halted at Caen in Northern France.”
“So they won’t ever reach us here?”
“The Western Allies are weak. They will fail to take France. And they will never break the Westwall.”
“Of course.” She wondered how much of this he believed. It was impossible to tell from his expression or the way he delivered the news. “And the Soviets?”
“The Gauleiter didn’t mention them. The last I heard they were bogged down somewhere in Poland.” He handed her a copy of Völkischer Beobachter, a couple of days old. “I saved this for your husband.”
“Thank you.”
“How is Herr Schuster?”
“Much the same. I live in hope.”
As she left the cabin, he gave her a bent-arm Hitler salute, which she ignored.
4
Hans was an enigma. He had sacrificed a limb for the Reich, but he didn’t seem depressed or angry – or even resentful. He’d never said anything to suggest that he was anything less than a committed Nazi. How could a man lose a leg, see Germany under attack from two sides, the inevitable loss of the war approaching fast, and still remain faithful to the Führer? It made no sense.
Gretchen’s husband, Oskar, had been a geography teacher before the war, a well-read, cultured man. She thought of Hans as rough and uneducated. But she found him attractive, for some reason. He had a sense of humor, a sardonic smile and a rumbling laugh. She could only guess at his age. She thought he might be 40 to 45, five or ten years her junior. Perhaps that was the attraction. She tried not to think about what it would be like in bed with a man with a leg missing.
When she arrived home, she found Frau Niedermeyer, the postwoman, on her doorstep. She had no mail for Gretchen, but she had news that she was bursting to tell.
Breathlessly, the words poured from her lips while she stood between Gretchen and her front door. “You will recall I told you that our troops are defending the city of Caen. Well, they have now been under constant attack for at least two weeks. They have been fighting bravely, and in the last few days they have counterattacked successfully. The Americans and the English have suffered heavy losses and are retreating.”
Gretchen was skeptical. “Where did you hear this news?”
“Postcards home from our brave soldiers. They say that the Allied offensive will falter unless they can secure a port on the western coast. Antwerp or Calais would be their best choices, but our forces have both of them tied up like a drum. Antwerp is secured by an impenetrable Kriegsmarine blockade!”
“Thank you, Frau Niedermeyer, that’s wonderful news. Now if you don’t mind, I must attend to my husband.” Gretchen pushed past the postwoman and opened her door.
“There’s more!” said Frau Niedermeyer.
“Another day, perhaps,” said Gretchen, and she closed the door in her face.
She found Oskar sitting in his chair where she’d left him. He hadn’t touched the water or the food. She helped him from the chair and gave him a drink of water. Then she took him to the toilet.
“You must be hungry,” she said, seating him at the table. “I’ll make you something to eat.”
Before lightly frying Franz’s doubtful meat in a pan, she went through it carefully, extracting several small bones. She shuddered. They were far too small for mule; they looked too small even for cat or dog. Some of her store of vegetables she chopped and added to the pan. Then she brought the mixture to a good temperature. A couple of slices from the bread loaf completed the meal. There was barely enough for the two of them, but she gave Oskar the lion’s share and watched him carefully as he shoveled it into his mouth.
When the food was all gone, she wiped his moustache and beard. She washed the plates and cutlery in the sink. Then she stood Oskar up and moved him onto the sofa by the window. He smiled in anticipation and took his seat. She opened the window and placed a handful of breadcrumbs on the sill. They waited together.
Within minutes a large pigeon flew across from the adjoining block and perched on the windowsill. Gretchen watched her husband’s face light up in delight as the bird pecked at the breadcrumbs. When all the crumbs were gone, the pigeon tilted its head and stared in at them for a moment before taking to the air in a noisy flapping of its wings.
“He thanked us,” said Oskar.
“Clever bird,” she said. “He knows where to find food.”
He smiled. “Lucky bird.”
“Yes, Oskar, he’s free to fly wherever he wants. He’s lucky.”
Oskar closed his eyes for a moment. Then they opened wide and he said, “A loaf of bread cost a million marks. A million! Do you remember?”
“Yes, and three million a couple of days later. When was that? Nineteen thirty or thirty-one?”
“My father sold his tools… He should never have sold his tools…”
Gretchen bit her lip. She’d heard that story many times before. “What did we do wrong, Oskar? What terrible transgression put Germany in the hands of these monsters and drove God to punish us so mercilessly?”
Oskar closed his eyes again, apparently thinking deep philosophical thoughts. He looked peaceful and contented. Then his mouth opened and he threw up, losing his meal all over his beard and down the front of his shirt.
Gretchen swore under her breath. She cleaned him up
and put him in his spare pajamas, all the time thinking what a shame it was that the food had been wasted. Was she evil to think that way? She put him to bed. Perhaps he could sleep through his hunger.
As she washed his soiled pajamas, a button fell off. She wondered if the extra rye in the Kommissbrot had upset his stomach. Or was it the meat? She began to feel queasy at the thought of what might have been in the meat.
5
In the early evening, Martha Engels, the daughter of an old friend, came calling. She pulled a man’s woolen jumper from a bag and handed it to Gretchen. “It’s Paul’s. I thought Oskar could wear it.”
Gretchen asked about Martha’s fiancé, fighting somewhere in France. She knew the last letter Martha had received from him was dated 1943.
“No news is good news,” said Martha.
“Is it?”
“Of course. If anything had happened to Paul, I would have heard. The Wehrmacht always send notifications home when a soldier is injured or…”
Martha prattled on about the army, her fiancé and their plans for the future. Gretchen tuned in to her memories for a moment. This tall, blonde, garrulous beauty was so like her mother, it was uncanny.
“…What do you think, Gretchen?”
Gretchen held the jumper up to the light. “It’s a fine jumper, but won’t he miss it when he comes home?”
“He has a newer one. This one barely fits him.”
Gretchen nodded. “Thank you, Martha. There’s enough wool here to knit two small garments. We could have one each.” She gave her friend a third of a loaf.
Later, two of Gretchen’s neighbors called to the apartment.
Gertrud Carlson was a small, mousey individual with eyes that were hooded and perpetually downcast. She offered a man’s watch, its glass cracked, its face brown from age.
“It’s broken,” she said. “It belonged to my father-in-law. I’m sorry to part with it, I hope you understand.”
Gretchen handed it back. “I can’t take this.”
Frau Carlson looked on the edge of tears. “I have nothing else.”
“It doesn’t matter. You can give me something next time.” Gretchen cut Frau Carlson a thick slice from the loaf and handed it to her.
Frau Carlson mumbled tearful thanks and scuttled away. Frau Tannhäuser, the undertaker’s wife, rolled her eyes in disapproval and offered a single earring. Frau Carlson had broken an unwritten rule by accepting charity, and Gretchen was complicit.
Frau Tannhäuser, was a portly woman who wore a sour expression and floral prints made from enough material to make a good-sized pair of curtains.
Gretchen said, “What can I do with one earring?”
“It’s real silver. I’ll let you have the other one next time.”
Gretchen gave her the last piece of the loaf. “How is Herr Tannhäuser?”
“Busy. He’s finding it difficult to keep up. And he’s stockpiling coffins. You understand…”
“And young Anton? How old is he now?”
“He’s twelve. Like any active youngster, the Hitler Youth fills his every waking moment.”
Frau Tannhäuser asked about Oskar’s health. She seemed genuinely concerned, but after she’d gone, Gretchen wondered how sincere she really was. Schadenfreude was a powerful antidote to jealousy. Would the undertaker’s wife be so solicitous in the future, when Gretchen had no bread to trade?
As darkness fell, Gretchen began to unravel the woolen jumper, gathering the thin wool into a ball, careful not to break it. There was a knock on the door. Gretchen put down the garment, opened the door, and Dora stepped inside.
Dora Hoffmann was an old schoolfriend, once a robust, buxom woman, now a haggard shadow with barely a pick of flesh on her bones.
Gretchen gave her the foal. “For Inge,” she said. “It’s not much, I’m afraid.”
Dora touched Gretchen’s arm. “It’s plenty. Inge and I thank you. She would starve if it weren’t for good people like you. How’s Oskar?”
“Much the same. He lives in his own world.” They could hear him in the bedroom, snoring open-mouthed. “He remembers nothing of the war, and he has no idea what’s coming.”
“I envy him,” said Dora. “He’s probably better off than the rest of us.”
After Dora had gone, Gretchen prayed for an end to the war, for the Americans or the English to come and end it. For liberation. They needed to come in such numbers that the city would have to surrender. Too many of the defenders were SS men or Gestapo, committed to fighting to the last bullet. Such ideas were defeatist, of course, and couldn’t be spoken out loud. Not even to Hans. Especially not to Hans.
Oskar woke up. Gretchen swore under her breath. He would be awake for hours; she would get no sleep that night. She read the newspaper until she fell asleep in her chair.
6
Dora cycled home. She lived in an old house on Schiller Strasse, once the home of a wealthy family, now a rundown ramshackle tenement divided into seven apartments. She parked her bike on the ground floor and headed up the stairs. The top floor had been subdivided into two unequal units. Professor Hepple, an old man, occupied the lion’s share of the floorspace. His daughter had lived there, but Dora was aware that she had left the city a year earlier. The old man had retained two bedrooms; Dora had just two rooms.
The attic space was home to Inge, a 14-year-old Jewish girl in hiding from the Gestapo. A ladder and a hatch gave access to a single room 8-foot wide by 20-foot long. Inge shared the space with a colony of bats. The roof leaked when it rained, having lost several tiles. A bare lightbulb provided the attic’s only light, and there was a single electric socket. It had floorboards and plywood walls to give it the rough appearance of a room.
Their diet consisted of vegetables and the bread that Gretchen supplied three or four days a week; Dora was wary of eating meat ever since she’d had a bad experience in the early days of the war.
The air was rank. Inge’s toilet was a bucket that she lowered through the hatch each morning on the end of a rope to allow Dora to empty it in the bathroom that she shared with her neighbor, Professor Hepple.
Moonlight streaming through the holes in the roof caught hundreds of dancing dust particles. Inge waited until Dora had removed the hatch cover before emerging from the gloom at the back of the attic. The movement stirred up the dust. Inge sneezed twice.
“Gesundheit, child,” said Dora. She turned on the radio.
Inge climbed down the ladder and Dora handed her the small loaf, an onion, and a carrot. Inge made a face. “Another onion?”
“It’s nourishment,” Dora whispered. “You have to eat. Onions are full of goodness.” Inge was naturally thin, but her muscles had atrophied. She was pale as a ghost, having hardly seen the sun in three years.
Inge wrinkled her nose in disgust. “Onions are horrible. I hate them. They taste revolting and they give me bad breath.”
“They’re full of good nourishment. I’ve told you before.”
“Yes, and I’ve told you before I don’t like them.” Her voice rose. “Why do you force me to eat things that I don’t like?”
“Nobody’s forcing you, Inge.”
Inge’s voice rose another notch. “If you give me nothing else to eat, isn’t that forcing me?”
“Keep your voice down!” hissed Dora. “I’ve given you bread and a carrot.”
Inge’s voice dropped again. “That’s not enough. I’m hungry all the time.”
“I’m sorry,” said Dora. “I’ll see what else I can find tomorrow. Put the onion in your pocket. You may be glad of it later tonight. What have you been reading?”
Inge ignored the question. She took a bite out of the bread.
“Are you still reading Friedrich Schiller?”
Inge grunted.
“You read him at school, didn’t you?”
“We had to learn The Song of the Bell by heart.”
“He was a great poet.”
“I suppose.” She chewed the bread many
times before swallowing it. “Can’t you find me something younger to read?”
“You don’t like my library?”
“None of the books you’ve given me are—”
They both heard a loud creak from a floorboard outside the door. They froze. A man’s voice called out, “Are you all right in there Fräulein Hoffmann?”
Inge climbed back up the ladder and slid the wooden hatch into place.
“Fräulein?” Professor Hepple rapped on her door.
She turned up the volume on her radio. A news programme. She opened the door.
“I thought I heard voices.” He peered past her into the room.
“That was my radio. Sorry if I disturbed you,” she said, smiling at him.
“Were you in the attic?”
“I thought the reception might be better up there.” Her face was a picture of innocence. “Are we expecting an air raid tonight?”
“I don’t think so.” He had a puzzled frown on his face.
“There was no mention of one on the radio, but we don’t always get any warning.”
“I wouldn’t worry. We’re lucky to be so close to a shelter.”
“Good night, Herr Professor.”
“I hear noises from the attic from time to time when you’re not home…”
“We have bats,” said Dora.
“Bats. How do they get in and out?”
“There are small holes in the roof, tiles missing.”
Hepple sucked air through his teeth. “We should report that to the landlord.”
“Good idea,” she said. “Now I’ll bid you good night.”
“Good night, Fräulein.” The nosy neighbor retreated. As she closed the door, Inge, in the attic, sneezed again.
“Gesundheit!” Hepple called out.
The Road to Liberation: Trials and Triumphs of WWII Page 51
