The trip is long. The RAF has bombed the tracks, and they sit in the September heat for hours awaiting repairs. Four-year-old Wolfgang is sick with scarlet fever. His body is as hot as a fireplace brick.
“The boy should drink much water,” an older man says kindly as he passes them on the platform in Frankfurt. He is followed by his wife, who wears a heavy winter coat and clutches a number of suitcases. They are Jews, Ania realizes when she sees their gold stars. The stars are a new requirement, and it is the first time she has seen one. For that matter, it is the first time she has seen a Jew in a long time. She is taken aback by the man’s kindness. In the absence of contact, her idea of Jews has unified with the images on the Nazi posters: beak nosed and nefarious. But this man and his wife look ordinary and sad. She thanks him and thinks suddenly of Otto Smeltz, her onetime friend and partner. Where has he ended up?
In Dortmund, life is not as easy as it was on the land. Aunt Gudrun sets her jaw when Wolfgang cries and beats Anselm’s knuckles with a ruler when he scuffs his feet, or forgets to say thank you, or accidentally breaks a dish. The bombings come in spates, sometimes every night for a week, then nothing for a month. They become accustomed to the routine of tramping up and down the cellar stairs half-asleep.
Anselm starts school and Ania and Wolfgang remain at home with Aunt Gudrun’s sharp tongue and demonstrative, beleaguered sighs. They eat boiled cabbage and potatoes and sleep under the thin blankets they brought with them from the lager, huddling together for warmth. On Gudrun’s crummy People’s Radio, Goebbels and Hitler proclaim their successes on the Russian front, but on the streets, other stories circulate. The German army is freezing and the battles are bloody. For every Russian they kill, two more spring up in his place. And there are even darker rumors: in the ghettos where the Polish Jews have been sent, people are dying of disease and hunger; the SS and local Poles are killing whole villages of Jews; and the Wehrmacht is shooting Russian prisoners of war, or worse, locking them up in starvation camps. Ania would like to tune in to foreign broadcasts, but she has no radio of her own, and anyway, if she tried, Gudrun would report her. Rainer sends back short, opaque letters: his boots are worn out, they are stuck in some small Russian town or another awaiting orders, a man in his unit comes from nearby Aplerbeck. What he is doing, how he feels—she can only guess.
One day, after nearly a year in Dortmund, Ania passes the local Winterhilfswerk—Winter Help—headquarters and notices a sign for blankets, coats, warm clothing, and other necessities. She hesitates—she and her boys are no charity case, after all—until several well-dressed women precede her. Inside, the canteen has been remade into a shop with piles of goods arranged for perusal, carefully sorted by size and type: warm wool coats and sweaters, feather beds, pillows and leather boots. Volunteers distribute tickets to those waiting: two coats per family, two pieces of bedding, shoes for everyone. What a windfall! Thank goodness she has arrived early enough for the best picks. She selects a lovely camel-colored wool coat with silver buttons for Anselm (much finer than any he has ever owned), a thick green wool cape for Gudrun, two feather beds, and a practical pair of shoes for each. The question of where all this has come from does not even occur to her until she checks out. Redistributed, the volunteer stamps on a paper listing the items Ania has selected.
“Redistributed from where?” Ania asks.
“From deportees,” the volunteer says curtly.
So these are belongings Jews sent east have left behind. The thought is dismaying. Some little boy had to leave this handsome coat. But then it confirms what the Führer has been saying—the Jews of Germany have made themselves unreasonably rich. Who would leave behind such a coat unless they owned an even better one they could bring along?
Bring where is an increasingly uncomfortable concept, though it is still outside the realm of Ania’s immediate concern.
In the beginning of the war, Ania imagined the resettlement camps to be humble, organized places like her lager, focused on reeducation and run with German efficiency. Early in her Landjahr training, she received a glowing booklet about a camp for Jews in Poland, a clean, orderly place, with a hospital and vocational training programs. The word resettlement conjured an image of a village emptied of its inhabitants, who had been resettled to another village, emptied of its inhabitants, who had also been resettled, and so on—with each population pushing farther into the wide and roomy east. A continent of people shifting to make Lebensraum, living space, for their bursting population. There is an easy logic to it. After all, there are eighty million people living on five hundred thousand square kilometers in Germany; Ania has memorized Hitler’s facts. They need more space, more resources.
But now, everyone knows the “settlements” are really just camps, and the camps are no better than the squalid “Jew houses” where the few remaining Jews in German cities have been confined. Last month when they “cleaned up” Dortmund, the citizens were told to cover their mouths with cloth or stay indoors while the soldiers marched the last Jews to the trains.
Many years later, in another lifetime, Ania will enter an American secondhand store with her daughter and be overcome with instinctive horror. Do you know where all these clothes come from? she will ask.
People who don’t need them anymore, her daughter will say with a shrug. Why do you ask?
When Rainer returns home on leave, he is distant, harder, and more aloof. This is to be expected, of course. How can you fight a war and come back cheerful? Ania knows this. But still, she misses his old jokes, even the ones at which she used to roll her eyes. And she wishes he would offer some affection to his sons. He addresses them with curt formality, sometimes even disdain. One day, when Anselm comes home from school in tears because an older boy has stolen his new pencil, Rainer boxes his ears. “Don’t let yourself be beaten again, you understand?” he says roughly. “The future is not for boys who don’t know how to fight.” Ania tries not to mourn the old Rainer, the one who knew how to inspire and instruct with humor, and to bring out the best in young men.