They make love, if it can be called that, only a few times. Rainer is rougher and less cautious physically. More than once, Ania bleeds afterward. But this too is to be expected, isn’t it, from a soldier on leave? She stifles her revulsion. It will only make her pity herself.
In the spring of 1943, Rainer is discharged from service. He has been wounded, and after three months in a Danish military hospital, shrapnel is still embedded in his knee. He cannot return to combat duty. So he is given a new assignment: to lead a lager in the Warthegau, a German district of conquered Poland. The boys will be older this time—ages thirteen to seventeen. And the lager will be part of the Wehrbauer “soldier farmer” movement used to hold the eastern territories. They are meant to bring modern farming practices to the backward Polish countryside and produce much-needed grain to feed the Reich. They will be at the forefront of Hitler’s Blut und Boden plan—members of a superior race united with superior soil (rich, black stuff that slides between your fingers like silk) and ready to defend it if attacked.
The assignment has a frightening, warlike ring to it, but then again so does living in Dortmund. The Ruhr is under constant siege now, and British and American bombs wreak havoc every night. Those people remaining in the city have become mean and desperate: they report one another to the Gestapo for not offering the proper Heil Hitler, or listening to foreign broadcasts, or for “defeatist” talk. “Our poor soldiers,” Ania says while reading the newspaper one night, and Gudrun gives her a harsh look. “Our brave soldiers,” Gudrun corrects. “You could go to prison for such talk.”
The presence of slave laborers has become ubiquitous—mostly Russian POWs working in the city’s coal and munitions plants. Tramping through the streets, they look thin and haunted—a hungry, miserable lot. But in Russia, German POWs receive the same treatment or worse, according to Rainer, Hitler, Goebbels, and every Nazi Kreisleiter. Ania is growing sick of men and their talk, though. In the last year, she has seen groups of female prisoners, too. Pretty and young Polish and Ukrainian girls are hawked at the train station for use as nannies and household help. And a group of malnourished-looking women in striped uniforms walk through the city to the munitions plant each morning. Jews from a temporary labor camp. Their presence has no German analog in Russia.
Rainer evidences no joy at the prospect of leading another lager. He wakes screaming almost every night. When the doctor prescribes pills to help him sleep, he takes them right after supper and falls immediately into a sluggish, absent state.
So again it falls to Ania to pack up their small family. They are allowed one bag each, just like the Jews. This gives her pause.
In the last year, Ania has heard new horror stories: of KZ inmates worked so hard they drop dead, of women and children shot to death in the woods, of giant ovens where Jews are gassed. She does not believe the worst of these. The Führer who dreamed up Landjahr lagers and one-pot Sunday dinners would never order such unconscionable things. It is one thing to deport the Jews, another to murder them. The stories smack of Allied propaganda—the kind written on the leaflets that the RAF drops.
But, all the same, they are unsettling.
In the future, when Ania tries to explain this to her daughter, words will fail her. She knew of the horrors and she didn’t. She half knew—but there is no word for that. She knew it the way you know something is happening far away in a distant land, something you have no control over: earthquake refugees living in squalid conditions or victims in a foreign war.
But it wasn’t a foreign war, it was your war! her daughter will insist.
True, Ania admits. But it didn’t feel that way.
Until the Warthegau.
For life in this new lager, Ania packs warm clothing, a small book of photos, blankets for the boys, nails, a hammer, a wooden spoon, a potato peeler, and her precious paring knife. This winnowing down to the essentials is good practice for the future, though she doesn’t know that yet. The lager will be furnished, but these are items you can’t count on finding anymore.
The trip east is as spartan as the landscape. The Brandts ride in an army transport train, in a car reserved for “civilian settlers.” Their fellow passengers are a group of young women, members of the BDM, out spreading the “domestic culture and hygiene of Germandom” to the ignorant peasant peoples of the east, and many ex-soldiers like Rainer—injured men or those too old for active duty but still capable of farm and police work. She is the only mother with children. Wolfgang is sick for most of the trip. Anselm, at seven, stares out the window, fascinated by the military transports at the stations they pass. He has never seen so many SS men in their long, swishing coats and black boots.
Anselm is the one to point out the train in Schwerin: a long line of cattle cars stuffed with human beings, their frightened faces visible through the small windows at the top.
“Why are those people riding in the animal cars?” he asks.
“There aren’t enough civilian cars,” Ania suggests. The sight is jarring, though. In Dortmund, the Jewish transports from France and the Netherlands were overcrowded passenger trains; apparently it is not so in the east.
“Are there bathrooms in the cars?” Anselm persists. “Where are they going?”
“Maybe chamber pots,” Ania answers. “To camps in the east.”
“Enough questions,” Rainer barks. It is one of the few times he speaks.
“Look.” Anselm nudges her. He points his chin toward the first car, behind the engine, an open-goods wagon with no roof. In this one, Ania can see the people clearly. They are standing because it is too crowded to sit. Along the side, a row of faces stare out at hip height—children. With wide eyes, they watch as their train pulls ahead. When the two cars are side by side, Ania finds herself staring into one particular woman’s face. She is not old, not young, a mother holding a baby in her arms. For an instant, their eyes connect. And the woman’s gaze is so full of despair it takes Ania’s breath.
Beside her, Wolfgang throws up.
In that moment, Ania understands that they are headed to a terrible place.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The Warthegau, 1943
The lager in the Warthegau is in a converted slaughterhouse. No matter how many times Ania scrubs the floors, the walls, the wide kitchen table, it stinks of blood.
And the boys here are tougher than those at the previous lagers. Some are orphaned. Most are from big industrial cities. They have been sent here to escape the bombing, but also because they exhibit a certain kind of physical and mental promise. They are here to provide labor for the local farms and to seed the east with good German citizens, and also to be hardened into future SS men. This is a new development. “If this is the task, what is my role? And what about Anselm and Wolfgang?” Ania demands during one of her early arguments with Rainer.
“You begged me to come along,” he says coldly. “It was your choice.”