But it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered after the news. Martin was dead. This was what the captain told her. He was among a number of “orphans” from a Nazi Children’s Home sent on the last train to Buchenwald. The captain delivered the news matter-of-factly. He was not a man to mince words, and even if he had wanted to, he did not speak enough German.
Benita stared at him and felt the world darken around the edges. Everything she knew seemed to fall away until she was left perched on some last, invisible outcropping of solid land in a great and empty universe.
After that, when the captain came to her, she left her body—the body that no longer meant a thing to her, that would soon turn to rot. Instead, she went to her boy, to her little Martin, and curled around his sleeping form, stroked his fine blond hair, and kissed the crown of his sweet head. She hummed the lullabies she used to sing at night when he was frightened and crawled into her bed. And she filled him with all the love he would ever need in his next life.
That was the end of Benita Gruber, the girl who grew up at 7 Krensig and dreamed of marrying a rich man. That was the end of Benita Fledermann, Connie’s wronged wife, silly little chicken locked up in her flat, feasting on her own disappointment. The grim details of Connie’s execution, the time in prison, the miscarriage of her daughter—these were nothing compared to the loss of her son. For Benita, “The End” that Germans spoke of in the years to come boiled down to this.
Chapter Thirteen
Burg Lingenfels, December 1945
Martin was too young to remember Christmas before the war. The stories Elisabeth and Katarina told sounded as improbable as fairy tales to him. Roasted goose for dinner, Glühwein, and baked Zimtsterne, oranges pierced with cloves. Packages filled with new socks, hair ribbons, chocolates, and books. Once, Elisabeth told him, her father gave her a real white rabbit in a painted cage.
Martin was especially interested in the parties—so many people coming together in celebration, rather than fear. The only large gatherings he could remember took place in bomb cellars or rallies or on crowded, terror-filled streets.
“We will make a fine Christmas this year,” Marianne announced on the first day of December. Never mind that it was freezing and that food, even here at the castle, was in short supply. This was her plan. On the first Sunday of Advent she was determined to bake a Stollen. Everyone was skeptical, not only on account of the rationing, but on account of never having seen Marianne bake. But she insisted. She had been setting aside flour and sugar for this purpose since September.
So the children decorated the kitchen. The girls crafted delicate stars out of straw and bits of yarn from an unraveled sweater and hung them on freshly cut evergreen boughs.
“Dear Lord, we thank you for all that we have when so many people have nothing. We have each other, we have food, we have our health and a roof over our heads,” Marianne had begun saying before dinner each night. This was new. Before—meaning before The End, not before the war, but certainly before she came to the castle—Marianne had not been a religious woman. Elisabeth and Katarina did not like this new piety. But Martin enjoyed the sound of Marianne’s voice listing the things they had to be thankful for, talking about the misery of others. It was always good to know there were people more miserable than you.
“Do you believe in God?” he asked his mother one night as they fell asleep in their little room above the kitchen, his breath puffing out in white clouds.
“I don’t know,” she said, and even in the dark he could sense that his question had brought tears to her eyes.
It made him angry—her readiness to cry. She was always on the verge of tears, trembly, red eyed, and uncertain. It had been worse in the days after the Russians came, but even now it took almost nothing to set her off. Including, apparently, the mention of God.
Martin believed in God, though. How could he not? It was unbearable to imagine there wasn’t something better out there, a divine balm for all the havoc he had seen here on earth. He believed in God not as an explanation, but as a salve—a wise, stern figure on a throne in the clouds, watching out for those below. Nice job he did for the last seven years, Elisabeth said when he admitted his belief. But it wasn’t God who caused the war and all the horror. It was people, he thought. He knew better than to argue with Elisabeth, though. God ruled only in heaven, he would have said. But apparently Elisabeth expected to see more of his hand on earth.
Outside the temperatures reached record lows. Snot and breath and tears froze as soon as you stepped outside. All over Germany people were starving. A taste of their own medicine, the British radio declared. During the war we starved so Germans could eat—let them reap what they sowed. It was the first time Martin thought of enemy children—not just soldiers but boys and girls.
Fair enough, Marianne said, though you could see uncertainty in her eyes. Bastards, Fritz swore, and was sent to his room. In Berlin, people chopped down what was left of the bombed-out Tiergarten for firewood. And in cities all over the country, people were rumored to be eating slugs and rats and other small animals. Every weekend townspeople from Tollingen and Momsen flocked to the land to beg for scraps of food.
Here in the castle, though, they were warm and relatively well fed. They didn’t venture far from the kitchen and their small rooms above it. There was frost on the damp north wall of the great hall and ice at the bottom of the moat, but their lamps burned bright and the giant oven blazed with Herr Muller’s firewood. They took turns sitting against it, warming their backs. And everyone wore clothes on top of clothes.
In the months since the Grabareks had arrived, life at the castle had become more comfortable and orderly. Frau Grabarek was a good cook. She knew how to turn coarse meal into palatable porridge, how to boil syrup from sugar beets, how to bargain shrewdly on the black market. She would return home from town with real wheat flour for baking, sugar, and even black tea. She was also more practical than Martin’s mother or Marianne: She made the boys chew spruce bark to ward off germs and mended the holes in Martin’s pockets and undershirts that no one else noticed. She thought to rub lanolin on Martin’s chapped cheeks, and when he developed a nagging cough, she made a poultice for his chest. She was a caretaker of regular, bodily needs. In this way, she reminded him of Frau Vortmuller from the Children’s Home, who sometimes he secretly missed.
The Grabarek boys, Anselm and Wolfgang, were even more silent than their mother, which was fine with Martin, who grew tired of Fritz’s endless chatter. And they knew real survival skills: how to find potatoes missed in the harvest, how to trap rabbits, how to lie.