“But I didn’t know what I was choosing!”
“I told you it would be different” is Rainer’s response. And Ania is blindsided by the truth of this. Her desperation to leave Gudrun’s apartment and bomb-besieged Dortmund made her stupid. She should have asked more questions. She will rue her lack of curiosity, her ability to see things only as she wanted to, for the rest of her life.
Rainer has been given a handful of new materials, and he shares them with Ania for the first time once they are installed. They are full of fiery quotes from Hitler and the handsome Reich’s youth leader, Baldur von Schirach.
“Those who want to live, let them fight, and those who do not want to fight in this world of eternal struggle do not deserve to live.”
“He alone who owns the youth owns the future.”
“I want brutal, domineering, fearless, and cruel youth. . . . The free, magnificent beast of prey must again flash from their eyes.”
All the friendly rhetoric of togetherness is gone, along with any celebration of a wholesome, simple way of life.
“‘Cruel’?” Ania asks Rainer. “Are these boys really supposed to be cruel?”
Rainer gives a noncommittal shrug. This new Rainer is stern and silent all the time—less like a partner and more like an unreliable roommate. At night he drinks vodka and grows moody and speaks to the boys in a sarcastic snarl. Ania is a little bit afraid of him.
As far as she can tell, the lager boys are cruel and domineering already. This is not their first lager—many have been living in youth homes where they have been sent to escape the bomb-threatened cities for years. In their free time, which is plentiful, they improvise hard games: a ball toss in which the loser is beaten on the back with sticks, a race in which the winner walks on the other boys in his hobnailed work boots. Everything is a contest of strength and power—they beat one another black and blue over who sleeps on the top bunk, who takes the first freezing bath, who has to muck out the latrine. The same boys always win. When Ania attempts to stop them, Rainer intervenes: “Why?” he asks. “They will need to be hard.”
“But they can still be human, can’t they?” she asks.
This is the first time Rainer slaps her. It comes out of nowhere. He is standing beside her as she washes the dishes and, at first, when his hand arcs toward her face, Ania thinks it is a plate flying out of the sink. She steps back in shock.
“Don’t talk that way,” he says as she raises a hand to her bloodied lip. “For your own good.”
There is no more strolling through green wheat fields at dusk singing German folk songs. There are no more Sunday-morning hikes and campfire games. There is no more decent heating, clothing, or food.
Rainer broods and sulks and spends hours polishing his boots. His face has become set in a bitter expression. He has no passion left—not for the ideals that they set out with, not for Hitler, and certainly not for Ania. Here in the Warthegau, he doesn’t even attempt intercourse. He sleeps in a spartan room off the boys’ dormitory, while Ania shares a room off the kitchen with their sons. One night before he slapped her she knocked on his door, in a combination of loneliness and determination. Can I come in? she asked, blushing, holding her nightgown at the throat. But when Rainer opened the door, he only looked at her with a kind of weary pity. It’s late for conversation, Ania. Go to bed.
Ania’s days involve long shuffles through the mud to the post office where their rations and supplies are delivered. Like a goat, she tows cartons of potatoes, flour, and salt pork in a cart with a shoulder yoke. She keeps Anselm and Wolfgang beside her in the kitchen. Rainer does not approve, but she insists. Her boys are too young to run around with the others. And it isn’t only their age that makes them vulnerable—they are softer than the rest. Hitler has not yet weaned them of their mother. She can see that Rainer is embarrassed by this.
One day, Ania comes upon a group of boys behind the barn forcing the smallest, youngest ones to swallow live toads. “Stop it!” she yells, despite Rainer’s instructions. “Stop this nonsense! You are not animals!” They turn their astonished faces toward her. Some are transparently relieved, others challenging. Heiner Mohrer, one of the largest and meanest of the group, curls his lip and tips an imaginary cap. “Of course, gn?dige Frau,” he says. But she can hear them restart the game as soon as she is out of sight.
Rainer makes Heiner something like an assistant. He is as tall as Rainer and broader, from a family of Hamburg dockworkers, all of whom died in the bombing. He routinely picks on the small boys, knocking the wash they are carrying to the ground, tripping them as they rise from the table. And he speaks rudely to Ania. “You are looking fine today, Frau Brandt,” he says in the insolent manner of a boy who knows a certain kind of women. In another life, before the Warthegau, Rainer would have boxed the ears of anyone who spoke like that to his wife. But the new Rainer pretends he doesn’t hear.
The land around the lager is as bad as the place itself. The fields stretch on and on and, at this time of year, are nothing but kilometers of frozen mud. The village, a cluster of modest, thatch-roofed houses, is mostly empty. The simple country folk who built these homes have been “resettled” farther east or sent to work as laborers in the Reich. Of the original occupants, only a handful are left.
“How did they choose who would stay?” she asks Herr Beinecke, a local man turned member of the Nazi Order Police. He scowls at her. “It was easy,” he says. “We eliminated the partisans.”
The word has become a sort of catchall: Communists and Jews and Polish nationalists and anyone who is not ready to work for the Nazis. “Were there so many?” Ania asks.
“Almost everyone,” Herr Beinecke replies.