Now she hears that the townspeople were not “resettled” but driven into the woods and murdered by local Hilfswillige, or “volunteers,” and a traveling SS Einsatzgruppe. The Hilfswillige are the only locals still alive. To “volunteer” apparently meant not to die. She learns all this from the youngest boy in the lager, Gerald Eisenblatt, a sweet, out-of-place fifteen-year-old from Essen whose mother, a widowed seamstress, sent Ania a letter early on: Thank you for caring for my son. He is a good boy. I promise he will cause you no trouble. And I appreciate in advance all you will do for him. Ania could imagine her, poor woman, small like Gerald, wan with worry, her fingers covered with needle pricks. And in her own loneliness, she felt kinship. In an attempt to protect Gerald from the others, Ania invites him to help her in the kitchen as often as she can. He tells her things the boys see around the countryside and hear from the farmers on whose land they work.
“And what about the women and children of the partisans?” she asks Gerald, though in her heart she already knows. He glances at her as if to assess what she can handle. “Eliminated,” he answers. Ania does not doubt that he is telling the truth. She can feel the steady crackle of cruelty in the air.
It makes her frightened of the locals who still live in the town, and of all the members of the Wehrmacht and SS who pass through. At night she dreams about the dead townspeople whose simple houses and belongings are left: the bucket hanging on the edge of a gate, the single sunflower growing in a small garden, the laundry line stretched between a tree and a windowsill.
The Brandts have lived at the lager for a year when the orphans come. Little ones. Two-and three-year-olds, and one infant. They arrive in the back of an SS transport truck, supervised by a young officer who finds it funny to give them swigs of whiskey from his flask. The babies look surprised and spit it out. One of them cannot walk—he is a big, handsome boy who pulls himself around on his bottom, taking everything in with his wide, imperturbable eyes. They are staying only one night. The lager, it turns out, serves as a rendezvous point. Members of the Brown Sisters, a female division of the SS, will come for the babies.
Ania is aghast.
“Where will they take them?” she asks. “Orphanages? Foster families?”
The SS man shrugs. “The Brown Sisters will decide.”
“Decide what?”
“Where they will take them.”
“Stop with the questions, Ania,” Rainer barks.
While she waits, cold spreads up from her gut. Ania hopes that the Brown Sisters, as women, will be sympathetic. But she is not optimistic. The BDM girls she has met in the east have been a hard lot, tough or lonely enough to want to come here and instruct the recalcitrant locals in “proper cooking” and hand-washing and God knows what else. These BDM women are suspicious of her as the wife of a lager leader, which is unheard of here in the east. And the Brown Sisters are a level up from the BDM women she has met.
Ania throws herself into caring for the babies, who are hungry, cold, and wet. The boys of the lager are out assisting a local Wehrbauer as he slaughters his pigs. Anselm and Wolfgang act as her assistants, tearing an old sheet into diaper cloths, mixing a thin gruel to feed the orphans, playing peekaboo. Ania rocks the ornery ones to sleep, swaying gently, humming as she once did with her own sons. The SS men drink vodka and watch. At one point, the youngest soldier stands over a baby lying on a blanket and nudges it with his boot.
“For God’s sake!” Ania says, snatching it up, and the man laughs.
Her favorite is a roly-poly one who looks to be almost two but still can’t walk. When she lifts him, he reaches his little hand up from time to time to fondle her ear. When Ania turns to smile at him, he looks surprised, as if he thought her ear belonged to someone else.
When the Brown Sisters arrive, there are only two of them: a meek, moonfaced girl who can’t be much older than eighteen and says almost nothing, and her superior, who introduces herself as Sister Margarete. She is a short woman with a clipped manner, unmarried and childless, but full of exact information about how to deal with babies. Which is: harshly. She makes no remarks about the sweet dimple on this one’s chin, or the way another puts his hand to his head. To her, they are clearly cargo to be transported. The cold in Ania’s gut turns into panic.
Margarete observes the babies and takes notes. She measures their height and weight, the length of their foreheads, the circumferences of their skulls. And she does not allow Ania to help her handle them, preferring the assistance of the SS men, who seem as dismayed by this as Ania is.
“Where will you take them?” Ania asks.
“Different places,” Margarete answers.
“To foster parents?”
“If they are suitable.”
“And if they aren’t?” Ania tries to ask it casually. She can feel Rainer’s eyes telling her to shut up.
“That is confidential,” Sister Margarete snaps.
“We can keep them,” Ania says. The words come out in a rush. “We can care for them here with the boys until the war ends.”
Sister Margarete fixes her with an intent look. “That is impossible,” she says. “And the idea is inappropriate for a person in your place.”
Ania looks down and bites her lip. Let them all be suitable, Ania prays. Please God, let them all be delivered to kind homes. She is afraid for the little dark-haired girl—so pretty with her big brown eyes, but not very German looking. Sister Margarete spends extra time on her measurements.
Ania picks up the chubby one and holds him close. He reaches immediately for her ear.
When Margarete has finished her measuring, she announces that she and her assistant will not spend the night. They would like to reach Posen before dark.
“So will you take them all?” Ania manages, despite the hard ball in her throat.
“These four,” Margarete says and gestures as if she is speaking about a few cuts of meat. Already she and her assistant have taken the first of the babies out to their car, the back of which is filled with metal washtubs lined with blankets, improvised bassinets. In her arms, one of the babies starts to shriek. “Scharführer Meister and Unterscharführer Haberman will take the others.”
“The others” are the roly-poly boy in Ania’s arms and the little dark-haired girl.
“Where?” Ania asks, above the babies’ crying. “Where will you take them?” Her voice is loud and growing hysterical.
“Ania.” Rainer puts a hand on her arm. The boy in her arms begins to cry.
The younger of the two SS men shrugs. “Chelmno. Unless we take them to the forest and shoot them first.”
“No!” Ania nearly chokes. “You can’t.”
“Don’t frighten the woman,” the older soldier says to his compatriot. “We’ll take them to a camp.”
When the man reaches for the baby, he clings to Ania, wailing louder. But this makes no difference to the man, who peels him from her arms.
On Ania’s other side, Rainer holds her fast.
In the years to come, Ania will remember this as the end of Ania Fortzmann. Not at the moment when she took her sons and stole out into the predawn to disappear into the west. Not in the ruined bomb cellar under the Dresden Hauptbahnhof when she took the papers from her dead friend’s dress.
For years, she will sift through this memory of the babies, through the racket of her own tears and the screaming and Rainer’s voice telling her to shush—looking for some lost grain of action. She will try to remember running after the SS man, prying the baby from his arms, or at least attempting this. It doesn’t matter that the outcome would have been the same. It would have made a difference to her.
But it isn’t there.
She simply stood and watched and wept. And she let them go.