The Plum Tree (24 page)

Within days of the bombing, a team of soldiers had constructed barracks next to the train station: three long, low buildings with metal roofs and windowless walls. Rumor had it that the structures had been built to house incoming workers, Jewish prisoners, to be used to rebuild the destroyed air base. The day after the barracks was finished, Christine was out in her family’s garden, sleeves rolled up, hair piled on top of her head, working chicken manure and wood ashes into the soil with a spade. The morning was unusually quiet, except for Heinrich and Karl making engine noises as they played with their wooden trucks on the walkway between the house and garden, and the thump and wallop of Christine’s spade hitting the hard dirt. Even the birds seemed to have left town. Just as the bizarre idea started to form in her mind that everyone in the village had either left or died, that she and her family were the last people alive, she heard a man yell, then again, closer this time, and then the dry, brushing shuffle of what sounded like a thousand feet, scuffing along the cobblestones. Christine froze, trying to figure out what she was hearing. Heinrich and Karl hurried around the garden fence to stand at the edge of the road, toy trucks dangling from their dirty hands. Christine set the spade in the earth and crossed to the edge of the garden.

The ragtag formation of bald, skinny men lumbered up the street, a haggard multitude of reanimated skeletons wearing mismatched shoes and ragged uniforms. There were hundreds of them, vacant eyes staring at the ground, razor-sharp cheekbones in ashen faces. The majority of the prisoners had yellow stars sewn to their gray-and-white-striped shirts, but some wore purple or red inverted triangles, or a combination of the two. The lucky ones had hole-filled shoes or tattered boots without laces, while others were barefoot, even though recent nights had been cold enough to make the cobblestones feel like ice. The men shuffled forward in straight lines, putting one heavy foot in front of the other while SS guards walked beside them, yelling at them to keep going. Christine guessed there were about twenty soldiers in charge of four hundred men, but the SS carried submachine guns and clubs. When a guard got close, the workers moved a step or two away, trying to distance themselves while retaining formation. One of the prisoners, a short, dark-eyed man no bigger than a child, had a brown spray of vomit splashed down the front of his chest. Another left a trail of dark fluid from the leg of his pants. A few of them looked at her and the boys, their hollow, hopeless eyes unreadable.
Is this what they’re doing with the Jews?
Christine thought, her knees going weak.

“Heinrich and Karl,” she shouted. “Go inside, right now.” But the boys ignored her, no doubt mesmerized by the ghastly spectacle. She turned and hurried out of the garden, determined to keep them from witnessing any more of this horror. Just as she reached them, the prisoner leaving the dark trail from his pant leg fell face-first to the ground. A guard rammed the butt of his rifle into his side, screaming at him to get up. Without a sound, the prisoner curled into the fetal position while the soldier hit him again and again, pummeling his shoulder, his thigh, his ribs. Finally, the man half rolled, half crawled to his knees, then pushed himself up on shaking arms, struggling to stand. Christine grabbed the boys by the shoulders and turned them around, herding them into the house. Mutti met her at the door.

“What’s going on?” she asked, stealing glances around Christine as she led the boys inside.

“It’s the Jewish prisoners,” Christine said, breathing hard. “The workers being used to rebuild the air base.”

“Why was that soldier beating one of them?”

“Because he fell,” Christine said.

“He hit him because he fell?”

“
Ja,
he fell, and if he hadn’t gotten up, I don’t know what would have happened.”

“But they need them to work, don’t they?”

“I don’t know,” Christine said, crying now.

Mutti put her hand on Christine’s shoulder, her eyes glassy. Christine knew her mother had guessed what she was thinking. Wherever those starving, half dead-looking men had come from before arriving in their village, Isaac was probably there too.

From that day on, the skeletal prisoners were marched by twice a day, at seven in the morning and seven in the evening, because if nothing else, the Nazis were organized and punctual. During the first week, Christine was caught unawares three times, twice on her way home from the ration lines, and once working in the garden. After the fourth time, she made sure she was inside during those hours, sewing, cleaning, or playing with her little brothers, anything to keep her mind off what was outside her front door. The sight of the prisoners was too much to bear, the hollow sections of her aching heart already overflowing with horror and shock. Her sleep was already filled with nightmares of their haunted faces.

She couldn’t imagine those weak-looking men being able to work twelve-hour days, let alone marching to and from the air base twice a day. If one of the men faltered, the guards shoved him back into line and struck him with a club or the butt of a gun. She couldn’t comprehend the reasons behind it. They were ordinary men: husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons, just like her father and Opa used to be. And just like her little brothers, who would someday be men themselves, if Allied bombs, the
Tiefflieger,
starvation, or disease didn’t kill them first. Thinking of her father, she wondered, if he was a POW in Russia, was he being treated the same way? She prayed he was not. Was he nothing but a skeleton, waiting, as these prisoners seemed to be doing, for someone or something to put him out of his misery? How long could a person last in these conditions?

Then, contrary to what Mutti had said about feeling powerless under Nazi rule, when confronted with starving prisoners on her own street, Mutti agreed that they had to do something, anything, to help. After all, before rationing had come into effect, Mutti had always been the first one to deliver food to any villager in need—
Pflaumenkuchen
to Herr Weiler’s ill father,
Apfeltorte
to Frau Müller when her husband passed, oxtail soup to Herr Blum, who “never seemed quite right.” Back in the days when they could afford a butchered pig, to be boiled in the portable wood-fired kettle in the backyard so they could make liverwurst and sausage, Mutti always made Christine and Maria deliver the
metzelsüppe,
pork broth, in little tin cans to their elderly neighbors. Christine had grown up hearing her mother say “it was understood” that you helped those in need.

“I suppose we could spare a few slices of bread every week,” Mutti said. “And some hard-boiled eggs, maybe even some apples or potatoes.” They were in the cellar, stringing sliced apples along brown twine, to hang like Christmas boughs from the rafters to dry.

“They march the prisoners along the retaining wall of the churchyard,” Christine said. “The guards are on the other side of the group at that point. If we wrap the bread and apples in old newspapers, write “food” on the paper, and leave them on the steps, it should be easy for the men on the church side to pick them up without being seen.”

“But if there’s one sign of trouble,” Mutti said, giving Christine a hard look, “or if we get to a point where we can’t spare the food, I’ll put a stop to it.”

Christine climbed on a stool to hang apple-filled twine. “I’ll take it out at night, an hour or two before the sun comes up, so no one sees me.”

Mutti froze, her brow furrowed as if reconsidering, her hand in midair, holding up the other end of the brown string. “What would happen if we got caught?”

“They’d arrest us.” Christine took the twine from her mother and tied it to a nail, then climbed down from the stool. “That’s why I’m going to do it, not you.”

“I don’t know,” her mother said. “Maybe it’s not worth the risk. . . .”

Christine put a hand on her mother’s arm. “How will we live with ourselves if we do nothing?”

Mutti’s eyes filled, and she rested a hand over Christine’s. “You’re right. And maybe, hopefully, someone will show the same kindness to your father.”

The next morning, after Christine had snuck out under the cover of darkness to leave newspaper-wrapped bread on the steps leading up to the churchyard, she and Mutti left the shutters closed so they could watch without being seen by the guards. When the time came, they peered between the painted wood slats, silent and barely breathing, waiting for the workers to appear in the street. Finally, the first row of pale faces came into view. Mutti placed a hand over her mouth.

Outside, one of the Jewish prisoners looked over his shoulder, checked the position of the guards, then picked up the package. Christine heard her mother’s sharp intake of air. Her heart hammered in her chest. The prisoner worked fast, unwrapping the bread and tucking the newspaper into his pants. He took a few big bites, chewing quickly, then passed the slice of rye to the next man in line. Christine grabbed her mother’s hand as a guard moved up the ranks on the opposite side, his rifle hung over his shoulder, moving closer and closer to the row of men with the bread. But then, in the next second, the bread was gone, four men having shared it before the guards could see anything. Christine and her mother gave each other weak smiles.

Within days, Christine heard rumors that other women in the village were putting food along different sections of the prisoners’ route. She prayed it was true. After a while, she and Mutti decided to believe it, because even when the guards saw the prisoners picking up the food from the church steps and eating it, they did nothing to stop them. No announcements were made that the practice was to be stopped, no posters put up warning of punishments for feeding the Jews. Christine wasn’t sure if a bit of humanity still remained in the guards’ hearts or if they knew they couldn’t stop it. After all, they couldn’t arrest the whole village.

When the weather turned cold and the sky turned winter gray, Christine and Maria, with the help of Mutti and the boys, took the doors off the kitchen cupboards and nailed them over the broken windows on the front of the house, hoping that, between the shutters and a thick layer of blankets, it would be enough to keep out ice and snow.

Before the war, the first snowfall of winter used to fill Christine with a peaceful solace, the soft drifts blanketing every rooftop and tree branch in the village. It seemed like a time for reflection, a slow, quiet cleansing before the muddy rebirth of spring. But now, this year especially, the snow seemed cold and dry, reflecting the way she felt inside. Now, the icy shroud made everything flat and lifeless, like a charcoal-gray etching of a village where everyone had either vanished or died.

With no more word from Vater, Mutti’s resilience began to wear thin, and she wasn’t eating again. Christine watched her at every meal, making sure she finished her plate, like a worried mother hovering over a sick child. And poor Oma tried to hide her pain, but it was easy to see her relentless grief, mourning her husband of fifty-seven years. Maria, always strong like her mother, appeared to be tolerating everything better than Christine, but the strain on her face was apparent, especially when she thought no one was looking. Karl and Heinrich seemed to accept things better than everyone, possibly due to the fact that they had been so young when it all started.

As the winter wore on, the yelling and shouting from the men guarding the Jewish prisoners increased, along with random gunshots that echoed through the narrow streets. When Christine and her family heard the firing, they stopped what they were doing and looked at each other. After working all day at the air base, the prisoners were being forced to shovel snow after every storm, and it seemed as though the guards’ tempers grew shorter according to the weather. The colder it was, the more likely Christine was to see patches of coagulated blood, the white banks along the streets stained a deep maroon by the blood of a man executed for a crime as slight as talking, stumbling, or falling down. It was madness.

By the end of the winter, the family’s food reserves were running low, and Mutti made the decision that they had to stop feeding the prisoners. In the cellar, they were down to a couple of pounds of potatoes, some scraggly carrots, a bag of dried apples, and two jars of plum jam. No eggs were left in the salt-water jar, and it would be two months before the hens started laying again. Flour and sugar were no longer available, and the bakery had shut down. With nothing to sell, most of the stores had closed. Seeds from the garden had become precious, because no one had sold them in two years. The only seeds would be the ones they’d saved from the previous summer. Coal and wood had been declared national resources, making the fuel to heat and cook scarcer than ever. At the end of March the government cut rations in half. Now, food was all they thought of, it seemed, and all their time and energy was devoted to acquiring it.

More than ever, Christine wondered about the cities. How were those people surviving without canned and dried vegetables from gardens, pickled eggs, or an aging hen from a backyard flock? Even here, where most people were used to living off the land, rumors flew of villagers foraging the woods, digging up roots and berries, quarreling over mushrooms and nuts. The forests were nearly stripped bare of trees, and deer and rabbits were long gone. There was talk of people eating rodents. And even though the punishment for trading in the black market was death, as the long winter turned into a wet spring, Christine heard of women trading their wedding dresses for sugar, their blankets and pillows for milk and eggs, and, out of desperation, their bodies to the officers, for cigarettes or coffee, which in turn they could barter for a loaf of bread or a tin of milk to keep their children alive.

While Christine’s family counted the days until planting, the month of April passed in what seemed like a continuous downpour, the streets and sidewalks running with soot and ash-filled water, the garden nothing but mud. On the other hand, the chickens—surviving on worms, insects, weeds, and grass—started laying, and her family was thrilled to have eggs for breakfast. When the hens were up to a dozen and a half a day, enough for everyone in her family to have at least two apiece, Christine went back to leaving boiled eggs on the church steps for the prisoners.