“But the eggs should be for you, not us,” Ania said stiffly, dredging up a trace of manners she had learned in another life. Anselm and Wolfgang looked alarmed.
“Nonsense,” Marianne said. “You need them. We take turns.”
Besides Frau von Lingenfels, there were her two daughters—one dark and solemn, the other lighter haired, tall, and skeptical. And her son, a sturdy boy of about Wolfgang’s age who would not sit still, and another woman and her son. The last two were confusing to her. Benita and Martin Fledermann. They too were refugees, Ania understood. Their husband and father had also been executed by Hitler for his role in the July 20 conspiracy. The rest of the connection was lost: Frau von Lingenfels had grown up with him, or her husband had grown up with Frau Fledermann, or someone had known someone as a child.
The von Lingenfels children spoke too fast. Frau von Lingenfels assumed too much. Their words raced over Ania like water from a hose. They too had come from the east, from Silesia. First, they had gone to Berlin. There had been an illness. There was a list of widows. Other wives of resisters. She, Ania Grabarek, was the second one they had found. The first was Frau Fledermann.
Anselm and Wolfgang kept their eyes down. Ania nodded and ate.
Frau Fledermann and her son were also silent. Both were pale and blond and beautiful—she in the fragile way of an injured bird, and he like a blinking, quietly startled fawn. They were not at ease here either. This made Ania like them.
When the von Lingenfelses were done telling, they began with the questions.
“Were you taken to a Children’s Home, like Martin?” Fritz asked Anselm. “Were you in a KZ?”
Anselm shook his head no.
“Were you in Warsaw when it was bombed? Was it worse than Berlin? Were the Russian soldiers as cruel as everyone says?”
Anselm and Wolfgang shook their heads, focused on their eggs. No, no, and a shrug.
They fielded the questions with one-word answers, shoveling food into their mouths. In the last months, they had become animals, used to sleeping in the open, foraging for sustenance, guarding against predators.
Ania felt exhaustion settle over her. If she closed her eyes for even a moment, she was certain she would fall asleep.
“Enough,” Frau von Lingenfels announced, pushing back her chair. “We are overwhelming our guests. Elisabeth and Katarina, wash up. Fritz and Martin, bring in water. Grabareks, go to bed.”
With relief, Ania led her boys upstairs to the small room they had been assigned above the kitchen. In the middle, two mattresses were covered with sheets and two blankets each. When was the last time Ania and her boys had slept on sheets? The beauty of it, this simple sign of order and cleanliness, tightened her throat. She remembered learning to fold sheets as a girl, to wrap them around the mattress, pulling the corners just so—a realm of knowledge rendered meaningless over the previous months.
“Mama . . .” Anselm’s voice floated out of the darkness. Disconnected from his body, which had grown tall and wiry, it sounded childish: a reminder that he was only nine. “Are you going to tell them . . . ?”
Ania jolted awake.
“Tell them what?” Wolfgang demanded before she could speak. “That you don’t want to stay here? That you want to go back to the camp?” His voice was surprisingly harsh. Of the two, he was the leader despite the fact that he was younger.
“No,” Anselm said meekly. And then: “Mama?”
Ania was silent. Through the dark she could feel both boys waiting for her to respond.
Outside, an owl hooted in the dark. “Hush,” she said finally. “Time to sleep.”
Chapter Nine
The Warthegau, January 1945
In sleep, Ania returns to the march. Not so much in her dreams as in her memory. It waits there for her to relive—a weird middle point, the journey from one life to another, her personal metamorphosis.
The road to Breslau teems with refugees. Mothers, children, old people, sisters . . . all flee before the advancing Red Army. Some are from as far away as the Black Sea and have been on the road for months. There are few men among them—only the crippled, sick, and elderly. The war is not over yet and the rest of the men are fighting—for the Germans, the Russians, the local partisans, or whoever is the most expedient to fight for. Even more of them are dead.
Occasionally, Ania and her sons pass groups of boys around their age, unaccompanied by any family. They are from the Jugend camps and lagers, the various Kinderlandverschickung (children-to-the-land) programs set up across the conquered east to remove children from the embattled cities. They are sullen creatures who have been without their mothers for too long, now half-molded into Hitler’s fantasy. The German youth should be as swift as a greyhound, as tough as leather, and as hard as Krupp’s steel. Ania knows Hitler’s rhetoric. I want a brutal, domineering, fearless, and cruel youth. . . . The free, magnificent beast of prey must again flash from their eyes. These boys make her nervous. When she sees them, she takes pains to melt away.
Ania and her children have only the clothes they wear, the coats on their backs, and a few extras: a good pot, a tin cup to share, a paring knife. She also has a small book of photographs and a sack of pilfered food: a blood sausage, a scrap of butter, one dry loaf of bread, a precious jar of last summer’s plums. Anselm has his favorite book, Wolfgang his precious pocketknife. Unfortunately, they have no papers. This is a problem. All along the road SS men are stamping, sorting, and turning people back. It is not only the sad-sack German soldiers at the front who are supposed to hold their ground against the enemy. The German civilians are supposed to stay too—a kind of human obstacle to the Russian advance. And so the SS devote their efforts to preventing flight. What cowards these supposed über-Nazis are, avoiding the front and hiding behind bureaucratic responsibilities! As if placing all these poor, terrified souls in the path of the Russians will change anything. The war is already lost in everything but name. At the front, only the last members of the Home Guard remain.