The Plum Tree (14 page)

Christine concentrated on making perfect, tiny stitches, trying not to think about the man who’d been wearing the uniform. But the more she struggled to keep her mind on something else, the harder it was to keep the nameless faces from forming in her mind.
What became of this poor soldier? Is he as damaged and torn as this sleeve or this trouser? Is he dead? Do his mother, his sister, his wife know what has happened? Could this have been my father’s uniform?
By evening, Oma would nod off, mouth open, hands poised in mid-stitch. At first, one boxcar on every length of cars was filled with damaged uniforms. By the end of the summer, there were four boxcars full on every train.

On a gray morning in early September, a fine mist hung in the air. Christine made her way to the end of the bread ration line, squinting against the cold condensation on her lashes and brows. In her haste to get to the bakery before the bread was gone, she hadn’t bothered to grab her coat, because the previous four days had been unseasonably warm and sunny, the last efforts of a hot summer. She gathered her sweater beneath her neck with one hand, embarrassed to see that everyone else had long coats and umbrellas. But then something else caught her eye, and she forgot about being cold. In the ration lines, there were people with yellow cloth sewn to their jackets, old women and young girls, teenagers, babies, toddlers hanging on to their mothers’ hands, all of them with the yellow stars over their left breast. Christine hurried to the end of the row and tapped the shoemaker’s wife, Frau Unger, on the shoulder.

“What’s going on?” she asked. “Why are they wearing stars on their coats?”

“Didn’t you hear the announcement last night?” Frau Unger said. “Starting today, it’s against the law for German Jews to go out in public without wearing the Star of David.”

“But why? What does it mean?”

Frau Unger shrugged. “How do I know? I can’t keep up with the rules. There are too many. My poor husband nearly got arrested for shooting a wood duck. Can you imagine, throwing an old man in jail for trying to find his supper? Apparently, Himmler likes wood ducks.”

Christine pictured Isaac and his family, standing in a ration line on the other side of town with stars on their coats. She looked up the long line in front of her. From behind, the people all looked the same. “I didn’t know the Kleins and the Leibermanns were Jewish,” she said.

“It’s too late for them now,” Frau Unger said, shaking her head.

“What do you mean?”

“They can’t leave the country. One day, Hitler says to get rid of the Jews. The next day, he says they can’t leave.”

Christine remembered the letter from Isaac’s aunt in Poland, and a hard knot formed in her stomach. After the stars came the ghettos. Is that what Hitler’s plan was for the German Jews too? It was already prohibited for them to deal with Aryan tradesmen, shopkeepers, butchers, doctors, cobblers, and barbers. The Nazis had even gone as far as making it mandatory for them to turn in their hair clippers, scissors, and combs. There had been a reduction in rations for the Jews; at the same time it was illegal for them to stockpile food. Hitler was making it impossible for them to survive. Now he wasn’t going to let them leave?

Her first thought was to leave the ration line and hurry to the other side of town, to find out if Isaac and his family were still living there, or if his father had finally convinced his mother to leave the country. But she had to get bread for her family, because for the past week, the bakery and the store had been out. Regardless, she felt like a coward because she hadn’t gone to the other side of town since seeing the SS in the café.
The Bauermans must have left by now,
she told herself.
With everything that’s been happening, I’m sure Isaac’s mother was finally scared enough to listen.
With that thought, the knot of fear in her stomach uncoiled and crawled past her lungs, where it wrapped itself around her heart in a cold, tight ball of throbbing heartache.

A few days later, another letter arrived from her father. This time, Mutti read it to everyone at the breakfast nook in the kitchen.

Dearest Rose, Christine, Maria, Heinrich, Karl,

Oma, and Opa,

I’m sorry I haven’t written, but we’ve been on the move for months and have finally made camp for a few days. I pray that all of you are well and in good spirits. Did you get a plentiful harvest from the garden this year? I wish I could be home to help pick the pears and plums. What I wouldn’t give for a slice of brown bread spread with your fresh plum jam. If you haven’t already done so, don’t forget to tell Herr Oertel that he still owes you two bushels of firewood for the work I did for him last year. Tell him you’ll need it to get through the winter.

Right now, I’m sitting in an anti-tank trench with five hundred other men. We dug the mile-long ditch this afternoon, and this is where we’ll sleep. We’re deep in the Ukraine and are being told that the northern troops will take Moscow before winter. Everyone here is hoping for an early end to the war, so we can get back to Germany before the Russian winter hits. Hopefully, the war will be over and I’ll be home with you by spring. Much love to you all.

Heil Hitler,

Dietrich

Mutti passed the letter to Maria, who read it again and passed it to Oma, who passed it to Christine. Christine placed her thumb on a dark smudge in the lower left-hand corner, imagining it was her father’s thumbprint, from where he held the letter and reread it before folding it into the envelope. She imagined him sitting there, thousands of miles from home, leaning against the red Russian soil, exhausted and homesick. The anguish of missing someone she loved was as familiar to Christine as hunger and cold, but she couldn’t imagine the torture of being taken from her family and not knowing if she’d die before she got the chance to see them again. Blinking against her tears, she reread the letter.

“What’s that?” Heinrich said, pointing at the French doors, his nose crumpled as if he smelled something rotten. Everyone looked. A cluster of white paper hung flat and wet on the dew-covered glass. As they watched, a second wrinkled wad slapped itself against another pane farther up. Then, a half dozen sheets came out of nowhere and stuck to the glass in a haphazard pattern, like the fall leaves Christine used to glue to her bedroom window. Mutti stood and opened the door, and a flurry of paper drifted lazily out of the sky and landed on the balcony, like a bizarre storm of jumbo snowflakes. The family hurried outside and snatched the falling papers from the air. Some of the sheets were blank, but most had lettering, and some were black and burnt around the edges, as if they’d been near a fire.

“This is from Heilbronn,” Mutti said, holding out the sheet of paper so everyone could see. “It says, ‘From the desk of the
Bürger-meister
of Heilbronn.’ ”

“This is too,” Maria said, holding the surviving half of a scorched page. “It’s from the school.”

“Look,” Karl said, pointing toward the road.

Down in the street, hundreds of scorched papers littered the cobblestones, while still more drifted from the sky. A swirl of pages caught in the breeze, traveled across the road, and landed against the garden fence in a shifting pile of paper and ash.

“How far away is Heilbronn?” Christine asked.

“About thirty-five miles,” Opa said. “If it’s still there.”

C
HAPTER
9

B
y the middle of the third long winter of war, the United States had joined the war against Germany, and the Russians had launched a brutal counterattack. Rumors circulated through the village that Hitler had been so certain of a swift victory that the soldiers didn’t have the proper provisions or clothing to survive the Russian winter. Instead of dying in battle, they were losing their lives to typhus, exposure, starvation, and frostbite.

To lose loved ones to war was one thing, but to lose them because the leaders who sent them cared so little they didn’t provide the necessary protection to survive? And to think that Vater had left with nothing more than the clothes on his back, despite Mutti’s insistence that he take a change of clothes, his long underwear, his good hat, and winter gloves. The army offered no news, and Christine’s mother, out of self-preservation, chose to accept that as a good sign, and she expected her family to do the same.

Mutti took “The People’s Radio” into the kitchen so she could listen for news from the Eastern Front while she worked. At night, they left it playing to hide the voices of the Atlantiksender, the enemy radio station broadcasting announcements in German, on the old radio hidden upstairs beneath Mutti and Vater’s bed. Christine, Mutti, and Maria sat on the floor to listen to the illegal shortwave, their backs against the wall, blankets around their shoulders, the volume turned down. After German military music and official-sounding broadcasts, the announcer said in perfect high German that Hitler was lying to his people, that the Third Reich was losing the war, and that German soldiers were surrendering by the thousands and being sent to work in America, where they earned large wages. The Kriegsmarine in U-boats were encouraged to surface and surrender while they still had the chance. Glancing at each other with wide, dark eyes, Christine, Maria, and Mutti listened in silence until the newscasts were over.

Within a month, the underground transmission found a way to broadcast over German frequencies, and the Nazis scrambled to counteract their efforts by beginning all broadcasts with a special announcement: “The enemy is broadcasting counterfeit instructions on German frequencies. Do not be misled. Here is an official announcement of the Reich authority.”

With the arrival of warmer days, anti-American posters went up beside the rest, showing a black-and-white drawing of a six-armed giant made of airplane parts and riveted metal limbs. Beneath capitalized letters that spelled KULTUR-TERROR, the monster’s head was a pointed, white hood above a collar imprinted with the letters KKK. One arm was that of a convict holding a machine gun; the other held the U.S. flag in reverse. The torso was made up of a birdcage and held a black couple dancing above a belt that read: Jitterbug. A bass drum formed the pelvis, with a Jewish flag dangling between legs that looked like bloody bombs, stomping over the picturesque landscape of a German village. Christine wondered if the Americans put up posters that depicted Germans as monsters.

On a warm morning in early April, Christine grabbed the egg basket and started out to the henhouse. In the past few weeks, she’d found three brown eggs in the nests of yellow straw. But now the weather had warmed, and she knew she’d find a half dozen or more. She was looking forward to surprising everyone with his or her own soft-boiled egg, a rare, large breakfast after the long, sparse winter. But when she pushed open the back door and stepped outside, she froze. The earth seemed to vibrate beneath her feet. A distant, rolling thunder—punctuated by strangled groans, metallic grinding, and mechanical screeches—came from the center of town. Instead of gathering eggs, she hurried back inside, set down the basket, and went out the front door.

As Christine moved closer to the village square, the snarling and grinding grew to a chaotic roar punctuated by the rhythmic pounding of boots and hammers. From this side of town, two roads entered the square from the crest of a hill. The Gothic cathedral of St. Michael’s sat between the two roads, dominating the plaza with rows of arched windows, soaring barbed spikes, and a steep, orange-tiled roof. She entered the rear courtyard and followed the sidewalk along the towering sandstone walls until she reached the front of the church, where a granite cascade of fifty-four steps led down to the fanned cobblestones of the market square.

At the top of the steps, she pressed her hands over her ears and surveyed the chaos below. Beneath swirling clouds of dust, a writhing swarm of
Panzerkampfwagen,
armored tanks, trucks, motorcycles, soldiers carrying rifles and bayonets, and
Panje,
horse-drawn wagons hauling anti-aircraft guns, crowded the open area. A colossal red-and-white flag with a black swastika in the center covered the middle three stories of city hall, with two smaller flags covering the gabled buildings on either side. Engines revved, wagon wheels banged across the uneven cobblestones, and horses’ hooves hit the street in uneven rhythm with the soldiers’ jackboots as they marched in black columns across the square. The tanks growled and vibrated, their giant tracks screeching and shuddering like massive, rattling chains trying to tear holes in the earth.

Christine wanted to watch but she couldn’t stand the noise, so she turned and hurried into the church. The wooden front doors were as tall and thick as the trunks of ancient trees, and when she pushed them closed, the chaos in the square muted to a rumble. Inside, the vaulted stone ceilings looked like a giant network of painted spiderwebs held up by row after row of slim, gray pillars, each four stories high. The cavernous cathedral smelled like incense and wet stone, and it was cool and quiet, like the inner depths of a watery cave.

The damp aroma brought back memories of childhood, when she and Kate used to come inside the cathedral to escape the summer heat. They’d meander through the gargantuan stone edifice, looking up at the high walls and exploring the side rooms, speculating about the long-dead people who’d carved and painted stone into saints and angels, but had also melted black iron into screaming skulls and twisted snakes. Behind the altar, an open pit in the stone floor was filled with bones from the cemetery that had been moved to build the church, the skulls and femurs and clavicles stacked in neat brown piles.

Now, she turned right, through a squat, arched door just past the inner recess of the main entrance, and climbed a wooden staircase. Halfway up, the stairway narrowed as it circled around the bells and gears of the massive carillon. Staying close to the stone walls because there was no railing, she climbed faster and faster, hoping the bells wouldn’t ring before she reached the top. On the last step, she went out a narrow door onto the enclosed octagon catwalk, the highest point in the village. She hadn’t climbed up there in years, but it used to be one of her favorite places to sit on hot summer days, to catch the cool breezes that blew above the crowded buildings and narrow streets of the stifling village.