“Miraculous!” he announced, pulling a slim packet of stapled papers from the drawer. “Here it is—his Fragebogen.” He extended it to her. “For what it’s worth. God knows what people make up on these things.”
Marianne scanned the pages. Address, birthday, education (he had finished school at fourteen), party membership (joined 1942). Member of the Reserve. And then there it was. On the third page. Ordnungspolizei. District Kiel, District Mecklenburg, District Lublin.
Her eyes stuck on the word Lublin. That was where Freddy Lederer had been.
“Not good?” Peterman asked, seeing her face. “Let me see.” He took the papers from her hand and looked them over. “Not even a member of the party until ’42, probably because they made him when he was called up,” he said, flicking his finger against the page. “A nobody. I wouldn’t have sent you one of the real crazies.”
Marianne shook her head. In her mind’s eye, she saw Freddy’s face again—a sweet, unserious man, transformed by despair. The “Jewish Action” he had witnessed was carried out by a unit of the Ordnungspolizei. All those children marched into the woods holding their mothers’ hands.
Concern spread over Peterman’s face as he watched her. “Did he do something to you?”
“No.” Marianne looked at him. “But they did terrible things in Lublin.”
“Ah.” Peterman looked confused. He stared at the paper, searching for information that would clarify her response. Finding nothing, he lifted his eyes to hers. “So what do you want me to do?”
Marianne stared at him.
“Tell him to finish chopping whatever trees he has felled,” she said. “And then not to come back.”
Peterman sighed. “He’s being transferred to a French camp at the end of the month, anyway.”
Marianne leveled her gaze. “Tell him.”
Every day the American and British radio programs broadcast new and grisly stories about the Nazis and the horrors of the camps they had liberated. But almost no one listened. The citizens of Ehrenheim made excuses: they had no radios, no money for newspapers; they were too busy clearing rubble, rustling up food, mourning their dead. Or they maintained that it was all Allied propaganda. Look at how the Americans treated their German prisoners—locking them in open-air cages along the Rhine! they argued. What was the difference? Marianne was enraged by their disinterest. Didn’t they want to know what happened in the camps, especially if—as they all insisted—they didn’t already? Anyway, the idea that they had been ignorant was hogwash. Wasn’t that why the German troops had fought until the bitter end? And why the Ehrenheimers had holed up in the castle, terrified of the advancing Americans? They were afraid they would be punished for their country’s sins. Goebbels and Himmler and Hitler himself had all but spelled it out in their absurd exhortations over the past year and a half: fight until the bitter end or pay the price. For what we’ve done was implicit. They had known but not known. That was closer to the truth. That was something Marianne understood.
In any case, she and her children listened to the radio. They needed to understand what their fathers had died fighting, especially Fritz, whose sense of right and wrong was fickle at best. They listened to reports of rotting piles of bodies, gas chambers, and sadistic guards. And of the arrests of high-ranking Nazis, like Ilse Koch, the wife of the commander of Buchenwald, rumored to have turned the skin of executed Jewish prisoners into lampshades. In Lüneberg, Josef Kramer and forty-five other camp guards and workers were set to go on trial in September. Grisly pictures of camp victims ran in the papers, side by side with glamorous photos of Irma Grese, a sadistic concentration camp guard, rumored to be Kramer’s mistress.
Could you see a person’s soul in their face? Marianne and Albrecht had often argued about this. Yes, she had insisted. Didn’t you know from the moment you saw Hitler’s photograph that he was bad? Albrecht wasn’t sure. If it was so obvious, he pointed out, how did he fool the rest of Germany?
Some people are better than others at reading the signs, Marianne had said with a shrug. She was half joking, half serious. The conversation came back to her when she saw the photos of Irma Grese. The image on the paper’s front page was of a woman who could have been a starlet, with her coy smile and stylish hairdo, while the mug shot inside revealed a repellant bully with a look of stupid hardness in her eyes—the same person, seen two ways. But even in the first one, if you looked closely, you could see the cruelty at the edge of her mouth, and the meanness in her gaze. And this was the version that sold papers.
In town, the Americans were showing a film: footage of the liberation of Buchenwald. Everyone was required to attend except for Opfers. Marianne went anyway. Wasn’t it her—and every German’s—responsibility? She made a demonstration out of her commitment, standing tall and solemn at the front of the line.
She already knew, of course. But it was one thing to know from documents and stories, horrifying in their own right, and another to see. When the movie began, Marianne had to dig her nails into her palms to keep from throwing up. Here on the screen were actual bodies, heaped like scraps of fabric. Here were fathers and mothers and children, starving and naked, lying in piles. Here were victims staring into the camera as individuals with all the sadness and despair of unique lives.
For all the horror of the official reports she and Albrecht had seen, with their language of “extermination” and “elimination,” they could not come close to conjuring this. How could they? There was no point of reference. Later, such footage would come to be so familiar it became unseen—a kind of placeholder for human evil. The first black-and-white glimpse of barbed wire, dirt, and nakedness cautioned viewers, Look away. But in this moment, in the first unveiling, it was like nothing she or anyone else had ever seen. And it was impossible to look away. She looked and trembled in her seat.
Exiting the theater, two girls walked in front of Marianne. Young women, really, maybe sixteen and seventeen. As they jostled through the doors in the midst of the solemn crowd, Marianne overheard them talking about silk stockings—one of them had ruined her last pair. Now where would she ever get new ones? She pouted. “Not from the Jews,” the other said, and they both giggled.