The Plum Tree (13 page)

Christine nodded, forcing herself to smile, wondering if, like her own, the grin on her sister’s face was fake.

On the first day of winter, a swarm of Wehrmacht soldiers in
feldgrauer,
field gray, uniforms, driving and riding in horse-drawn wagons, descended on the village. Like a scourge of locusts, they dismantled iron fences and metal railings from around houses, churches, and cemeteries. They pilfered flagpoles, streetlamps, and ornamental signs from inns and bars, all of it to be hauled away and melted down, made into bullets and bombs. Before they left, they went door-to-door collecting pots and pans, along with any other metal they might have overlooked.

After a quick discussion with Oma to decide which of their few worn utensils they could live without, Mutti held her tongue when she handed the soldier at their door a battered saucepan. Christine stood in the doorway beside her and saw her mother’s face drop when she noticed the hanging bell from her garden gate in the soldier’s hand.

A few days later, Christine and her family stood shivering in front of their house, hands in their coat pockets, watching a group of soldiers lower their church’s bells onto a horse-drawn wagon. Oma cried when the soldiers shouted, “Yah! Yah!” and whipped the thin horses struggling to move the heavy load. Finally, the wheels creaked and turned. The animals dropped their heads, harnesses clinking and hooves sliding across the cobblestones, and dragged the wagon to the top of the hill. Mutti put her arm around Oma, who buried her face in her hands. Later, Vater said it’d be impossible for the soldiers to take the carillon from the steeple of St. Michael’s, due to the sheer height of the bell tower and the fact that the largest of the three bells weighed over four tons.

On the Sunday before Christmas, a silent snowfall greeted the family as they stepped out the front door on their way to church. Karl and Heinrich whooped and shouted, spinning in circles on the road, squinting toward the sky and holding out their tongues to catch the thick, slow-moving flakes. Christine and Maria went into the snow-covered street to join their brothers while their parents and grandparents stood near the garden fence, taking a moment to watch the four children twirl together in the snow, their long, dark coats spiraling around them like whirlpools of cocoa being stirred into milk. Laughter reached Christine’s ears, and for a fraction of a second, she imagined she was getting used to the heavy ache of loss anchored to her heart.

But then, the tranquility of the moment was destroyed by the accelerated growl of an army truck. The vehicle careened around the corner and headed toward them at high speed. Christine and Maria pulled the boys out of the way, gripping their coats and hurrying toward their parents. They all stared, trying to catch their breath, as the truck slid to a stop in the slush and the passenger door flew open. A soldier in a black uniform jumped out and approached the family, a rifle over his shoulder, his face void of emotion. He stopped in front of Vater and raised a gloved hand in the air.

“
Heil
Hitler!” he said, clicking his heels together. He held out a white envelope stamped with a black, spread-winged eagle atop a swastika inside a wreath of oak leaves.

“
Heil
Hitler,” Vater muttered, briefly raising his hand.

“Welcome to Hitler’s army, Herr Bölz!” the soldier shouted. “You are to report to headquarters in Stuttgart tomorrow morning, at nine o’clock sharp!
Heil
Hitler!” Then, without waiting for a response, the soldier spun around and climbed back into the vehicle.

The army truck bucked and roared, notched tires slipping and catching on the snow-covered cobblestones. Christine and her family stood huddled together, hunched shoulders and winter hats dappled white by growing layers of snow. Vater stood motionless, staring at the envelope in his hand. Eventually, he put an arm around Mutti, who leaned into him, eyes closed, fingers pressed to her trembling lips.

“Do you have to go, Vater?” Maria asked.

“I have no choice,” Vater said, stuffing the unopened envelope into his jacket pocket and kissing his wife on the forehead. Christine could tell her mother was trying hard not to cry, but her chin started to quiver and tears slipped from her eyes. Karl and Heinrich clung to Mutti’s wool coat.

“Don’t cry,” Vater said. “Everything will be fine.” He patted Karl and Heinrich on their heads, smiled at Oma and Opa, then touched Christine and Maria on the cheeks. “Come now. It’s time for church.”

Vater put his arm around Mutti and led her across the street. Maria took the boys’ hands and followed her parents up the sandstone staircase to the raised churchyard, along the front walk, and through the entrance. Christine followed partway, then stopped, feet rooted outside the oak doors.

“Come, Christine,” Opa said, putting his arms around her and Oma. Heinrich held the door open, and they walked inside as a family, holding onto one another as if one of them might blow away at any minute.

In stark contrast to the cold, gray day outside, the inside of the church was warm and glowing, filled with candlelight and the smell of aged wood and melting beeswax. Unlike the Gothic cathedral of St. Michael’s, this modest church had been built with rough-hewn pillars and timber beams. Inside, it resembled a half-timbered barn, with exposed rafters, oversized trusses, straw-colored stucco walls, painted ceilings, and a plank wood floor. A rear staircase led to second-floor balconies made from girders and joists that extended out over the nave.

For over five hundred years, this small, solid church had endured. Christine tried to imagine the people who had once sat where she was sitting now, praying for strength and peace and a loved one’s safe return. She ran her hand over the worn, varnished surface of the wooden pew, wishing she could channel the spirit of someone who’d lived a hundred years ago. Someone to guide her and tell her she’d survive this pain, no matter what. Someone to tell her that everything would be all right in the end. Besides wars and plagues and funerals, the church had seen centuries of weddings and baptisms, Easters and Christmases. Its beams and rafters had been decorated with flowers and candles, fragrant evergreen branches, swaying boughs of ribbons and berries. She closed her eyes and tried to draw strength from the thickset walls, the towering windows, the sturdy pews, the sacred altar.

Just then, the immense pipe organ began to play, and the voices of the choir swelled around her, filling the church with ancient hymns. Hymns that had been sung before she was born, and before this war. Hymns that would continue to be sung long after the war was over. Would her father be alive then? Would any of them be? The hair rose on her arms, and her heart swelled in her chest, overwhelmed by love and fear and wonder and sorrow. She thought about the thousands of people who had sung and played and listened to the same songs before her, people who had lived through the pleasures and hardships of life and were now at rest in the village cemetery.

Every day, thousands of soldiers were dying on the battlefield. Thousands of civilians were being killed by bombs. Why should her family be any different? Why would her father, or any of them, out of the millions suffering, be spared? They were nothing but numbers to the people who had started this war. The hymn’s chorus came to a crescendo, and she couldn’t control her emotions any longer. Hot tears fell. Her world was falling apart, and there was nothing she could do about it.

C
HAPTER
8

A
t the beginning of 1941, the fierce battles of war had not yet reached Christine’s village. But everyone could feel them coming, like a storm in the distance that rumbled and swelled in the clouds.

During the month of January, the nearby villages of Wurzburg, Karlsruhe, and Pforzheim were bombed. Now, people on the streets looked at each other with anxious eyes that said: “Did you hear? Do you think we’re next? Will tonight be the night?”

From the third floor window in the hall outside her bedroom, Christine could see the flickering glow of burning cities, like red, pulsating mushrooms along the night horizon. If the wind was right and she opened the window, she could hear the hollow thump-thump of dropping bombs echoing through the earth, like the giant fists of an angry god.

During the first days of February, new posters went up along the stone walls and stucco façades of the winding avenues, to warn people that traitors—those who listened to enemy broadcasts, read enemy newspapers, or believed enemy propaganda—would be sent to the gallows. In the daily ration lines, where Christine sometimes stood for hours only to find that everything was gone, everyone looked over both shoulders before whispering to the person standing next to him or her. She was shocked when she heard people repeat the newest jingle: “Dear Gott, make me dumb, that I may not to Dachau come.”

The first letter from her father arrived in the middle of March, and Mutti read it to the family in a trembling voice.

My dearest Rose and family,

Words cannot express how much I miss all of you. I pray that you are well. I want you to know that I’m in good health. Our training is vigorous, but we get plenty to eat. Even so, I can still taste the liverwurst and Griebenschmalz sandwich you made for my train ride to Stuttgart. Now that my instruction period is complete, I will be sent to the Eastern Front to lay communication wires for the advancing Sixth Army, along with the Corps of Engineers who must change the railroad tracks to the correct gauge to facilitate our supply trains. I’ve signed up for a compulsory savings plan, which we’ve been told will give us a good return at the successful conclusion of this war. Take care of each other. I will write as often as I can. I love you, and will see you again soon.

Heil Hitler,

Dietrich

They were sitting around the table, eating the bland meal that had become the core of their winter diet: watered-down goat’s milk, boiled potatoes, and turnip soup. Though no one could believe it, they missed the days when Mutti used to leave cow’s milk in an earthen crock on the cellar steps for three days, until it soured and turned into the consistency of pudding. When it was just right, they’d all sit around the table, the crock in the middle, to dip their spoons in the cream, alternating this with bites of boiled potatoes and salt. The boys used to grumble and grouse, but now that it’d been over a year since they’d had cow’s milk, Christine was certain the curdled milk would have seemed like a treat.

“Why did Vater sign ‘
Heil
Hitler’?” Maria asked.

“He had to,” Opa said. “Soldiers’ letters are read before they’re mailed.”

“When is he coming home?” Karl whimpered.

“He’ll come as soon as he can,” Mutti said.

“Mutti,” Christine said. “Someone stole our rooster. He was here last night, but now he’s gone.”

Mutti folded the letter into the envelope and slid it into her apron pocket, her lips pressed together. “Well then,” she said, “there’ll be no new chicks this spring, and no chicken stock or meat until we get another one.”

As winter turned to spring, Mutti checked the mailbox on the front of the house every day, hoping there’d be another letter from Vater. Eventually she checked only every three days. Finally, she asked Christine to do it, because she couldn’t take the disappointment.

On her way to pick up their rations, Christine took a different route every day, checking backyards and the open doors of chicken coops to see if she could spot their missing rooster. She found it hard to believe that any of their neighbors would take it, but during war, it seemed, the old rules didn’t apply.

By the end of May, over half the fields surrounding the village lay unplowed and unplanted, because the only men who hadn’t been drafted into war were too old to walk behind plow horses or carry heavy seeders for any length of time. A few farmers’ wives were doing their best to keep the farms running, with the one horse they were allowed to keep and the help of a Polish
Kriegsgefan-gener,
POW, or a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old girl from the Labor Service Camp outside Sulzbach.

Christine felt sorry for the young girls riding their bicycles back and forth to the camp in their matching blue work dresses, their eyes downcast, their hands and faces scraped and smudged with dirt. They were from the Stuttgart Bund Deutscher Mädel, League of German Girls, a Nazi group for single girls aged fourteen to seventeen. Called “Labor-year girls,” the city girls were required to spend part of spring and all of summer in government service, the young ones working on farms and living in camps run by women who belonged to the Nazi Party, while the older ones became air raid wardens or auxiliary firefighters.

There was a small group of Bund Deutscher Mädel in Hessental that met at the high school, but thanks to Christine’s father’s being born in Italy, she and her sister weren’t allowed to sign up. The enlisted girls wore uniforms and had meetings in the school once a week, to put together care packages for soldiers and make straw slippers to send to hospitals. Christine and Maria agreed that they wouldn’t mind helping the soldiers, but they were relieved not to be eligible, because it was the BDM girl’s duty to pledge her allegiance to Hitler and the Nazi Party.

Sometimes Christine saw the Deutsches Jungvolk, for boys aged ten to fourteen, and the Hitler Jugend, Hitler Youth, for boys aged fourteen and up, line up for roll call in the school yard wearing their brown shirts, dark ties, and swastika armbands. Their duties included clearing the streets in winter, carrying mail, singing patriotic songs, hiking, playing war games, and, once they hit a certain age, being drafted into the Wehrmacht. Parents were warned that if their children were eligible and did not join one of Hitler’s youth groups, they’d be put into an orphanage.

In June, Hitler invaded Russia, and within a week, posters went up depicting Russians as fat, slovenly men with a bottle of vodka in one hand and a whip in the other. At the beginning of summer, the government announced a meager monthly payment to German women for mending military uniforms. Once a week, Christine and Maria walked to the train station to pick up wicker baskets full of ruined jackets, overcoats, shirts, and pants, their arms and shoulders aching by the time they carried the heavy load back home. For hours on end, the women sat together in the living room, repairing the shredded trousers, torn shirts, and riddled jackets. The types and colors ranged from black to green to brown, with different variations of cut and design. But the majority of uniforms in need of repair were green, the color of the
Heer,
or regular army, and the
Frontkämpfer,
battlefront soldiers. Opa pointed out that there were no uniforms from the
Goldfasan,
or golden pheasants, the derogatory term the old men had come up with for the high-ranking Nazi Party members who wore brown-and-red uniforms and spent the war in relative peace and luxury at home.