CHAPTER FIVE

WEISSLAU, JULY 20, 1944

For Marianne the twentieth of July had unfolded slowly.

It was hot in Weisslau. The children mooned around in the late Grossmutter von Lingenfels’s parlor, a cave of faded tapestries and heavily shaded lamps. They loved to lounge on the horsehair sofa in their light summer clothes, sucking penny candies and leafing idly through the collection of ancient illustrated books: Greek myths, Bible stories, German folktales, and obscure scientific tomes. And Fritz spent an unseemly amount of time examining prudish drawings of the human body in a great Victorian medical encyclopedia. Grossmutter would have been appalled. Their activities in the parlor always struck Marianne as slothful, and vaguely debauched.

On this day, the children were sorting a pile of scrap metal they had collected: valuables they planned to turn in to the local Nazi district head as their small contribution to the war effort. Marianne had no patience for such Nazi nonsense, especially when it involved turning her children into little warmongers. She had managed to keep them out of the youth groups despite Fritz’s wheedling (he hated to be excluded from the local Hitlerjugend Sunday hikes and football matches), but even so they were caught up in the obsessions of their peers. Collecting scrap metal seemed particularly idiotic to Marianne. And it always led to squabbles—who had found what and how much they would get in exchange. As if any of them really needed pocket money. They were lucky out here in Weisslau—on the land, with their own source of food and no bombs to worry about. This was the fifth year of the war, and in the cities it was ugly now. There, children needed all sorts of things (safety, a roof over their heads, enough to eat, and coal to burn in their furnaces through the winter). It had been nearly a year since the bombing of Hamburg, yet the stories and images of the aftermath were still grim. The newspapers ran tales of orphaned children living in the city’s remains, surviving on rats and fetid water; of people who had boiled to death in the canals as they tried to escape the firestorm. It was difficult, of course, to discern truth from propaganda, and Marianne trusted nothing the Nazi press printed. But still, the photographs were shocking—the inner city transformed into a gray and cratered landscape like the surface of the moon. And she had seen firsthand the faces of those who had fled to find work and housing in the south: they were blank with shock.

On this particular afternoon, Marianne could not tolerate the children’s bickering. All night, all week really, she was held in suspense. Any day now “the plan” was to unfold. Uncle Ulrich will join us next weekend, Albrecht’s latest telegram from Berlin had read. Please prepare his favorite Semmelkuchen. They had decided on the code words together. Since then sleep had been a delicate web she was too big and too clumsy to be caught in—she clutched at strands of it like a falling woman . . .