“Oh.” Elisabeth harrumphed in disappointment. “I thought it was an invitation.”
The children did not understand their mother’s quest. They were, in fact, discomfited by it. Now that school had begun, such as it was, taught by the sorriest lot of old maids and barely literate numbskulls (all the old teachers had been defrocked as fervent Nazis, this being Ehrenheim), they were surrounded by people who mourned Hitler in secret and viewed Albrecht as a traitor. The children craved distance from their father’s reputation.
“Who is Ania Grabarek?” Katarina asked politely.
“I don’t know,” Marianne confessed. “Do you remember him, Benita? Pietre Grabarek? ”
Benita shook her head with disinterest. Of course Benita didn’t remember. The girl had no interest in politics.
“The wife of Pietre Grabarek,” Marianne mused aloud.
Suddenly an image came to her: a short man, dark haired, bearing urgent news. He had brought word of Kristallnacht as it was unfolding across Germany. A Polish envoy, or some sort of diplomat. An associate of Connie’s rather than Albrecht’s.
“I think maybe I do remember,” Marianne said. “He came late—straight from Munich.”
Benita shrugged and kept her eyes on the buttons she was counting. “Could be.”
“He was a particular friend of Connie’s,” Marianne persisted.
“That doesn’t mean I would know him,” Benita said.
“No.” Marianne looked down. “Well, we will find out who she is soon enough.”
Chapter Eight
Burg Lingenfels, August 1945
To Ania Grabarek, it was clear that the woman leading them out of the Tollingen Displaced Persons Camp was accustomed to giving orders. She had a wide, confident stride and the sort of commanding tone Ania was not used to hearing from members of her own sex. Even her name conveyed forcefulness: Marianne Falkenberg von Lingenfels.
“Your father was a brave man,” the woman said over her shoulder to Ania’s boys. “It is my honor to host his family.”
Ania glanced at her sons with their pale, thin faces. They looked stricken. Fear and confusion had rendered them mute. Poor Anselm had barely spoken since Dresden, and Wolfgang—Wolfgang, her baby, her fierce one—had fallen into the sullen glower of a trapped animal.
Frau von Lingenfels moved on to the next subject. Then suddenly she stopped. “What’s this?” They were passing a low building from which people emerged like ghosts, covered in acrid-smelling gray chemical dust: the camp’s delousing hall.
“Decontamination,” Ania answered.
“Horrible!” Frau von Lingenfels exclaimed. “There must be a more humane way!” She was clearly a do-gooder, an advocate. It made Ania wary.
At the gate, a young man in a UNRRA badge waved them past. This was the agency in charge of Europe’s DP camps—the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration: it seemed to Ania a miracle that such an agency could exist. The line of new entries waiting to be processed stretched down the road. Every day more people arrived from the east: ethnic Germans expelled from territories annexed by Russia and Poland, some who had settled there at Hitler’s urging, some whose families had lived there for centuries; Russian Cossacks who had fought alongside the Nazis; Ukrainian nationalists who had fought against the Russians; and anyone else fearing Stalin’s wrath. Last month the camp had run out of beds. Now, new arrivals waited to be assigned local “hosts,” who would provide them a place to sleep under their own roofs. Usually, these hosts were reluctant at best. But not Marianne von Lingenfels. She had volunteered to host the Grabareks. In fact, she had sought them out. They were meant to be grateful, Ania understood. But she wasn’t. She preferred the anonymity of the camp.
“You speak without an accent,” Frau von Lingenfels said as they started in the opposite direction of the waiting people. “Are you originally German?”
Ania nodded.
“Ahhh,” the woman said. “But your husband was Polish?”
Ania nodded again.
“And you speak German, too?” Frau von Lingenfels continued, turning to the boys. “What are your names?”
The boys remained silent. Anselm sent an anxious look in his mother’s direction, Wolfgang glared at the ground.
“This is Anselm and this is Wolfgang,” Ania supplied.
The woman remained oblivious.
“Well, you will meet two other young men about your ages at our castle: my boy, Fritz, who is eight, and his friend Martin, who is six—another child of a resister. I am sure you will become great friends.
“Burg Lingenfels is not a castle as you might imagine,” she continued cheerfully. “It’s not grand. We live in the kitchen, really, because the rest of the place is empty and damp. And there’s no more fine furniture—no one has lived in it for ages. But it has its advantages. A roof, for instance!” She laughed. “And a great big oven we can light when it’s cold. And there were once little princes and princesses living in it. Learning to joust and eating off golden plates and whatnot. Or anyway, my children like this idea . . .”
Ania let the woman’s words roll over her. They were going to a castle, to live with a “widow of the resistance,” as Marianne von Lingenfels referred to herself. Thrushes sang from the grass. Poppies bloomed in the field. There was no checkpoint, no scrape of strafers, no tromp of boots. This was the important thing.
“Before the war, the castle belonged to my husband’s great-aunt,” Frau von Lingenfels continued. “She didn’t live in it, but she organized parties there, and picnics. She was something of an eccentric. Your father met her once—he was there for one of her parties.” She grew serious. “That was the only time I met him. Did he tell you anything about it? Countess von Lingenfels? Albrecht, my husband? Or Connie Fledermann?”
“No.” Ania shook her head.
“Your husband was in the Polish Foreign Office before the war?”
“He was in the military.”
“Ahhh.” Frau von Lingenfels nodded. “And then in the Home Army?”
Ania nodded.
“Was he arrested by the Nazis or killed in the fighting?”
“He was sent to a camp.”
A look of remorse, even pity, crossed the woman’s face. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Albrecht always felt guilty that we were not able to do more to support the Home Army, that he was imprisoned before the uprising.”
Ania was silent. No checkpoints, no strafers, no stomping boots, she reminded herself.
Dinner consisted of potatoes, cabbage, and mushrooms the children had gathered in the forest, and, luxury of luxuries, three boiled eggs. At the camp, the Grabareks had eaten thin gruel and spinach soup every day. This was a more lavish meal than they had seen in half a year. The eggs, apparently, were a gift from the farmer at the base of the hill, a man named Herr Kellerman, whom Frau von Lingenfels referred to as “our hero” with a glibness Ania understood was meant to be kind.