Max

by Sarah Cohen-Scali

  ‘We’re going to talk openly now,’ she said to them. ‘You’ve worked hard and now it’s only fair that you should enjoy yourselves. I was young once, too, and I know perfectly well that you’re all only thinking about one thing…meeting the boys at the camp next door.’

  Giggles, stifled laughter, blushing cheeks.

  ‘Well, now you have the chance to do it, not only with my blessing, but with that of your families and of the Führer as well. There will be no restrictions, other than that of offloading the fruit of your visits to the neighbouring camp. Your children will not be recorded in the official civil registry. You will give birth to them in a Lebensborn Home, where they will be raised as good Germans, true National Socialists. They will be in good hands, I can assure you. They will constitute the generation of future leaders. The state will alleviate you of any concern you may have about them. You will have no moral or economic responsibility. As for your partners, you will have no further connection with them. And you will have only one further duty: to marry and to have more children.

  With this, she stood up and handed out a contract to each of the girls. They all signed, including Heidi, despite all the questions she still had but hadn’t dared to ask.

  They returned to the bunkroom in a state of total euphoria. ‘Fantastic! We don’t need to sneak out anymore. Do you realise how lucky we are? We’re going to combine duty and pleasure!’

  Heidi had trouble falling asleep that night. She replayed the events of this remarkable evening over and over in her head. A pledge to the Führer. To serve the country. To give him her child. She had signed up for all this at once. She had no regrets. Not at all. She was just worried about the practical aspects. In order to give a child to the Führer, you first have to make one, and to make one, you have to…She suddenly blushed, all alone in the dark, terrified, the sheets drawn up under her chin. Then she was overcome by a rush of joy; she felt hot, cold. A picture of someone came into her mind. The camp mistress was right. Admittedly, she wasn’t experienced like some of her friends, but, just like they did, she had feelings, a body, a heart, and recently she had noticed a particular boy. They had exchanged looks, smiles. One day, she had even made an effort to build a shelter by herself in record time, because she knew he was watching. So, if it was with him…She finally fell asleep, full of hope.

  But it wasn’t with him…It was with another, several others. In the neighbouring camp, the boys had been doing this kind of thing for a while. Sexual exercises were just another kind of sport for them.

  ‘Frau Inge, they…they…’ Her voice cracked with emotion. ‘They…’

  Unable to finish her sentence, Heidi turned and stared into space. As usual. Mother remained silent too, squeezing Heidi’s hand as hard as she could. She was holding me against her, burping me, and I could feel her tears on my check. Tears are hot. And salty. One of them slid onto my lips and spoiled the taste of the milk. Yuck! It made me gag and, it was bound to happen, I vomited on Mother’s beautiful white blouse—and she didn’t have her handkerchief to protect it.

  The word Heidi hadn’t been able to say was ‘raped’. (Don’t forget: even though I’m only a baby, I know a lot.)

  So what? What was the problem? Why didn’t she just grit her teeth, like Mother? And keep her eyes on the portrait of the Führer, like Mother? Wasn’t there one in the boys’ camp? That’s impossible! And isn’t Helmut the outcome anyway? Blond. Blue eyes. Perhaps not as tough and hardcore as I am, but with a mother like that, it’s not surprising.

  I’m screaming because I’ve vomited. Helmut’s screaming because he’s hungry. He hasn’t had any breastmilk while his mother was snivelling, telling her story. He’ll end up with rickets. Herr Ebner gets very annoyed if he finds out a baby has rickets.

  ‘Oh my goodness! What is going on here?’ Josefa exclaims when she comes to check on us again.

  Change of neighbour. About time.

  After Helmut, it’s Ella. A girl, a pleasant change, especially as she’s cute. Her eyes! They’re not just blue, they’re turquoise. Real gemstones. I’m even a bit jealous, I have to admit, because I haven’t forgotten what Doctor Ebner said in the laboratory where he did my postnatal examination: that he would have to check later whether my eyes were in fact twice blue. Ella’s obviously won’t need checking. Her eyes are at least four times blue. Her little bald head, perfectly smooth, not a strand of hair to be seen, suggests that her hair will be more golden than honey-coloured. And she has an adorable little mouth, well defined and pouty.

  Ursula is her mother. She’s very young, too, about seventeen. But nothing like Heidi. She’ll burst out laughing at every opportunity. She’s what you call a bonne vivante. And a chatterbox as well. You don’t need to worm information out of her; she tells everything to everyone. When Josefa sent Heidi back to her room, Ursula came and sat next to Mother without asking. Once again the rappelling cord, the magic cord, is working at full capacity: I can tell Mother would have preferred to be alone. She’s still thinking about what Heidi told her. She feels sorry for her. Just how sorry, I’m not sure. What a spoilsport Heidi is! In any case, during this last session we’re granted in our mothers’ arms before sleeptime, I’m happy to have Ella as my neighbour. The only thing annoying me is the tobacco smell; it really upsets my system. Ursula stinks of cigarettes because she went outside and smoked one secretly before feeding time. It’s very bad for her milk. Verboten! Forbidden! Josefa must have a cold not to be able to smell it.

  Mother is still quiet, preoccupied; she stares at me, caressing the end of my nose, my cheeks, kissing me. Every now and again, she cuddles me very close, as if she’s frightened I’ll be taken away from her. It’s as if she’s confused me with Heidi, whom I think she would have liked to hug and comfort earlier. She was right to refrain from doing that. It would have been inappropriate. But it doesn’t mean she has to suffocate me! Meanwhile, Ursula starts up straightaway.

  She comes from the Rhineland. Her parents have disowned her and she couldn’t care less. She never got on with them. At school she was a terrible student, always going out, especially with boys—she liked a bit of action, as they say. Whatever, she always had to lie, hide, skip school. Until the morning her life changed forever. As the Rhineland had just been annexed, the principal of her school—a Jew!—was replaced by an Aryan. As soon as he arrived he gathered all the girls together outside, and Ursula expected him to launch into the same old speech: I aim to improve the deplorable state of this establishment, you must study, get good marks, absentees will be punished severely, blah blah blah…But he said no such thing.

  ‘From now on I want you to be aware that you are truly German women,’ he announced, ‘and that the main duty of a German woman is to give as many children as possible to the Führer. There’s no need to be married, as they insist in decadent countries. So don’t reject the advances of young men, and, henceforth, be intimate with them as often as possible.’

  Ursula and the other girls couldn’t believe their ears. Instead of poring over dusty boring books, they were being asked to…(She doesn’t blush like Heidi at this point in her story; she bursts out laughing.) That same morning, during a German class, the students had to do a dictation entitled ‘Biological Marriage’. For the first time, Ursula didn’t make a single mistake, despite all the difficult words, agreements, double consonants, and she received an excellent mark. She even learned this dictation by heart and recited it to her mother, without noticing how uneasy her mother was becoming, fidgeting on the couch, trying to avoid eye contact with her daughter. ‘Now or in the future, we all have to abandon ourselves to the spiritually rich experience of procreating with a healthy young man, without worrying about the shackles of the outmoded institution of marriage.’

  Ursula didn’t need to be asked twice to follow these instructions to the letter. All the more so because she was already pregnant—although she didn’t know who the father was—and was indeed wondering how to break this catastrophic news to her paren
ts. She didn’t need to worry, the catastrophe was suddenly a blessing. She was transferred to the RAD (Reichsarbeitsdienst, the Reich Labour Service) and, given her situation, she was relieved of any duties like sweeping, emptying of buckets, peeling of potatoes or scrubbing the floor. Her only tasks were to dust the portraits of the Führer and do a few desk jobs. Then she landed here, at the Home. And, bingo, now little Ella is with us. And I’m pretty sure she’ll soon have a bunch of half-brothers and -sisters…

  But Ursula really needs to be careful; she’s so clumsy! She wanted to stand up—she can’t sit still—and, forgetting that she was holding her baby, she almost dropped poor Ella. Thank goodness Mother was quick off the mark and saved the day.

  Mother is extremely annoyed. All she wants is for Ursula to get lost. Her wish is granted soon enough: even though we are still allowed half an hour more with our mothers, Ursula takes it upon herself to deposit Ella with Josefa, as if she was getting rid of a large parcel or some other cumbersome object. I’m sure she’ll head to the park for a smoke. Or else she’s going to meet someone. She loves hanging around the building next door—you know, the one I told you about, where the intercourse happens, where there are always plenty of SS officers.

  It looks like Mother is going to have some time by herself for a bit. No one comes and sits near us. She’s so nervous! An undesirable effect of the magic cord is that all her nerviness gets transmitted to me. If she keeps on like this I’ll get colic…Here she goes, off to pace the room, rocking me in her arms so I fall asleep. But she’s not rocking me, she’s shaking me. And anyway I don’t want to go to sleep. Not yet. I like getting to know my buddies, finding out their stories.

  I yell really loudly so she stops swinging me around. But she doesn’t seem to get the message and keeps on striding across the room. I don’t like this at all. I’m getting giddy. Finally, she comes to a halt in front of a wall of portraits: one of our Führer, nicely displayed in a magnificent frame, decorated with gold mouldings, and one of Reichsführer Himmler, of Speer, the Reich’s architect, of Gœbbels, the Minister for Propaganda, and of Ley, the head of the German Labour Front. That should calm her nerves…Well, it doesn’t. What on earth is the matter with her? I can feel her heart beating furiously; she’s breathing in spasms, sweating, gulping, with difficulty, as if she had a big lump stuck in her throat. And then she’s back on the move. She starts roaming the room again and stops in front of the mottos written in gold letters and framed above the piano, the list of principles all the mothers must adhere to in order to serve the country:

  1) There is no nobler job for a girl than to be a wife or a mother.

  2) A woman must be neither intellectual nor independent.

  3) The social standing of a woman is determined by the number of children she has brought into the world.

  4) A woman must not work outside the home.

  Mother goes tense; she grabs my fingers and squeezes them so hard it hurts. Then she turns rapidly and glances at the door, terrified, as if she wanted to escape.

  Her fear is being transmitted to me. I feel awful, really awful.

  So there, I’ve got colic. It’s so painful. My intestines are in turmoil.

  I scream at the top of my voice.

  ‘What’s the problem?’ asks Josefa, alerted by my cries.

  ‘Oh nothing, nothing at all,’ says Mother, trying to control her trembling voice. ‘Max had a bit of acid reflux earlier. He…He’s feeling a little queasy.’

  ‘All the more reason not to shake him like that!’ Josefa retorts.

  Finally someone sensible; she can see I’m fed up with being carted around. And she’s not even aware of the bad vibes I’m getting from Mother.

  ‘You look tired, Frau Inge. Would you like me to put our Little Emperor to bed now so you can get some sleep?’

  Josefa stares at Mother without blinking, waiting for an answer. She can sense—perhaps not as subtly as I can, but enough anyway—that something is not right. Mother is not radiant. She is not displaying her regulation smile. She is not exhibiting correct behaviour.

  ‘Give him to me,’ Josefa insists. ‘Clearly, a good night’s sleep will do you a world of good.’

  Panic. Even though Mother is distressed, she wants to keep me with her as long as possible, as usual. She refuses Josefa’s offer, on the pretext that her malaise has passed, and goes and sits opposite the fireplace. Next to Frau Gertrud and her son Rudi.

  Frau Gertrud is an old woman. She must be at least thirty. She’s already got four children, whom she had with her husband, a very respected Obersturmführer. His overseas missions were so frequent that Frau Gertrud ended up getting bored, so to amuse herself…(I keep using ellipses in the stories about the mothers, what sort of a fixation is that, I wonder?) To avoid a scandal, Frau Gertrud wrote to Max Sollmann and he let her give birth here, free of charge. In exchange, she’s going to leave Rudi here. Debt squared, end of story.

  Hey, what’s happening? I can hear Josefa getting angry. She’s got it in for Frau Gisela. Frau Gisela is a Sister like Mother. But she didn’t have to grit her teeth in the sexual intercourse building. On the contrary…Do you get what I mean? She was silly enough to fall in love with the father of Léni, her daughter. So she’s never without a photo of him, always staring at it, daydreaming. She’s always sighing, wiping away tears, hanging out for the twice-daily mail, hoping to receive a love letter, which never comes. She’s worse than Mother with all the nicknames for poor Léni, who, if you believe Gisela’s nonsense, is the spitting image of her father…Josefa has just confiscated the photo and reminded her that it is strictly forbidden to have one, and even more so to show it around. (Just like it is strictly forbidden to take photos of us, the babies.) It is particularly poor form to speak about our fathers here.

  In the end it would have been better if Frau Gisela had had to grit her teeth, like Mother did. At least the suffering would be over, whereas now it is never-ending.

  Enough for tonight. It’s Heidi and Frau Gisela’s fault that Josefa is in a foul mood. And, even though it’s not time yet, she announces that we have to leave.

  Anyway, I can’t tell you in detail about every single one of the women here. It would take too long. They all have such vastly different backgrounds and there are constantly more and more of them. Soon, when the war starts, French, Belgian, Dutch women will join our German women. They’ll come from everywhere, and they’ll all be inseminated by SS men!

  Aryan seed. Despite the range of receptacles, they’re all handpicked and the final result is a unique product: us, the army of the future.

  The children’s victory will follow an armed victory—that’s Reichsführer Himmler’s motto, hanging on the wall of our nursery.

  Goodnight. I’m still too young to sleep through the night, but I’ve got plenty to think about over the next three hours.

  It was worth waiting a week, it really was.

  I’m so excited, so emotional, that I don’t know how to tell you what has just happened to me. I’ve got to take some time out to calm down. The shock has been so great that everything in my mind is muddled. Even though I have a dolichocephalic head, proof that I’m of the superior Aryan race, I feel like it’s not big enough. Is there a spot in my brain that could receive and retain forever the marvellous experience I have just had? I would like to engrave the memory of it and keep it intact, indelible.

  I have just been baptised.

  But not in a church and not in a traditional way. I wasn’t sprinkled with a few drops of so-called consecrated water by someone muttering incomprehensible Latin prayers. Not at all. I stayed here, at the Home, where baptism has been replaced by a new ceremony called Namensgebung: ‘name-giving’. And who do you think presided over this? In person?

  Yes, you guessed it.

  That was the surprise, the extra present, and I hadn’t deluded myself about harbouring this secret wish. It was my reward for being born on the 20th of April like our Führer, and Mother’s reward as t
he champion milk supplier. Her record is 27.88 litres of milk in one week!

  The three days of preparation were like a military offensive for the staff: Doctor Ebner, Josefa, the secretaries, the director. The nurseries, already very clean, were scoured from top to bottom until the walls and the floor shone like mirrors. The laboratory, the delivery rooms, the labour rooms, the offices, the kitchens and outhouses were not exempt from this massive clean-up. Outside, the gardens underwent a fair bit of landscaping. What’s more, for the gardening team, the preparations began well before the big day. They mowed the lawns, clipped the hedges, put in new garden beds, hosed down the gravel on the paths so it would sparkle in the sunshine, and watered the flowers. The normal workforce, from Dachau, was doubled. The result is spectacular: the lawns are emerald-green, the beds of tulips and crocuses are in bloom, and the hedges and bushes are trimmed to within a millimetre.

  Ebner was constantly on the prowl, ordering people around, keeping an eagle eye on everything: from the far reaches of the property right up to the little rooms on top of the building, which are used to store stocks of food and sundry supplies. He even allowed—and this is truly out of the ordinary—a few prisoners into the Home to back up the cleaning teams. (But it was only a ‘one-way’ trip, if you see what I mean…Code word.)

  All the Mothers were issued with new outfits: cream-coloured shirts with puffy sleeves and brown skirts decorated with a thin, red satin ribbon along the hem, to signal the red of our flag. As she was receiving a personal honour from the Führer, Mother wore a slightly different outfit: a white embroidered shirt with a swastika armband on the right sleeve and a black skirt cinched around the waist by a large, elegant belt. We babies were dressed in short one-piece romper suits, flared at thigh level, with puffy sleeves and a Peter Pan collar. A little red and black Reich flag was stuck on the end of each bassinet.