Chapter Seventeen

Gretchen

Gretchen Himmel. With a flash of understanding, I remembered becoming Gretchen Himmel.

At first I only pretended to believe that I was German. But the more I lied, the more real it became. I first spoke German to make the punishment stop, but soon I was thinking in German. Marching with the other children, reciting long poems and songs about Hitler and the Reich. We were born to rule the world. I was proud to be one of the chosen.

Larissa disappeared and Gretchen emerged …

Gretchen knows that the woman I called Baba was not my grandmother. She stole me from my parents, who are decent German farmers. The man who called me daughter was a bandit. The woman I called mother was a spy. That girl is not my sister. She is an evil slave and she was trying to trick me. She is being punished for her crimes. Jews are rats. They deserve to die. I can hardly wait to go back home, to my real parents. My name is Gretchen. I’ve seen my birth certificate and it says Gretchen Himmel. It is a relief to leave the confusion behind.

I am bathed, then dressed in a crisp white blouse and blue tunic and shoes that pinch at the heel. My hair is clean and combed and braided. I sit by myself in the back seat of a long black car and breathe in the clean scent of freshly polished leather. The car stops at a huge farmhouse in the country. The fields around it go on for miles and are tended by slaves. The driver is a soldier in a dove grey uniform and he opens the door for me with a smile. He says, “I am sure you are glad to be home, Gretchen.”

I step out of the car and gulp in the country air. A blond girl in a pale pink dress pushes open the door of the house and runs to me. A sad-eyed blond woman follows close behind.

“My big sister has finally arrived!” the little girl says.

Before I know it, she has wrapped her arms around my waist. She is crying or laughing, I don’t know which. “I am so glad you’re home,” says Eva in German.

Is this my home? I don’t remember it. But I don’t remember many things. I am relieved to be safe, in a place called home.

Eva tugs me by the hand, pulling me to the open door of the big farmhouse. The blond woman walks a few steps behind us. She has barely greeted me, but Eva tells me she’s our mutti. I watch her through the corner of my eye and see that she’s wiping a tear away from her cheek.

The door of the house opens up to a big entryway that smells of bleach. My heart pounds, but Eva squeezes my hand.

She leads me into a room just beyond the entryway and I gasp. Two walls are lined from floor to ceiling with books, most in German, but some in other languages too. I hunger to touch them. The books call to me. Above the fireplace is a huge portrait of Hitler, our leader and saviour. On the mantel is a framed picture of a sad-looking young man in a dark uniform.

“That’s our Geert,” says Eva.

“He is very handsome,” I say.

The woman who is supposed to be our mother stands behind us and regards the photo. I can hear her sniffle. “Your brother was handsome,” she says. “And brave. He died while fighting for the Fatherland.”

She leaves the room and Eva and I are alone. “Mutti has been so sad since Geert died. Maybe she’ll cheer up now that you’ve come.”

I don’t remember Geert, and now he’s gone. That makes me feel guilty. “I am sad that our brother died too.”

Eva looks at me strangely, then blinks. “You’ll like it here,” she says. “There’s lots of food.”

“Your father is on his way,” said Miss Barry.

I blinked once, slowly, and looked around. I was on the sofa in the staff room at the library. I looked down and saw that I was holding a glass of water. I took a sip. Miss Barry brushed a wisp of hair out of my eyes. It was such a gentle gesture that I almost wept …

Eva is right. There is a lot of food. Apples and mushrooms and noodles and sauce, meat and stuffing. Mutter places it all on the dining room table. But whatever I put in my mouth sits like a lump of coal on my tongue. Mutter makes chocolate cake with icing to entice me. She makes biscuits in the shape of men and draws on a face in white icing. Eva loves it all and gulps down every bit. I force myself to eat even when it makes me feel ill. I want the hurt to go away from Mutter’s eyes.

I have my own room with a giant four-poster bed, but I cannot sleep. Dark uniformed men dine at our table and talk together until the wee hours of the morning. I hear clinking of glasses and roars of laughter. I rarely see Vater except at these meetings. Eva and I put on our prettiest dresses and go downstairs to greet the guests. Vater introduces us as his “two flowers for the Fatherland.”

When I am finally able to go back to my room, I sing a song of nonsense words to block out the noises, but I cannot sleep.

In spring the OST woman arrives at the farm in the truck. She smells bad and I do not like her, but the next time I see her she no longer wears the OST badge and she is clean. Mutter tells us to call her Cook. Eva and I play outside together. We collect lilacs to give to Mutter. She puts them in a vase and sets them in the middle of the kitchen table. She says Cook will like them. Mutter prefers bought ones for the dining room.

We are not allowed to go into the fields where the slaves are. I see a slave come to the door. Cook bandages its wound. Mutter doesn’t see that. Neither does Eva. I should tell Mutter about it, but for some reason, I don’t.

Mutter begins to take Eva on errands but leaves me at home. When they are gone, I open up the book room and breathe in the scent of old paper. It makes my heart ache to smell it, but somehow it makes me happy too. I climb up on the desk and draw out a book with gold lettering on the spine. The one beside it crashes to the ground, bending the pages.

My heart pounds when I hear footsteps. It is only Cook. She picks up the book and puts it back on the shelf. She takes the one I am holding and puts it away too. She examines the books. Her eyes light up and she takes one down and hands it to me.

“You can look at this storybook until they come home,” she says.

The title is not in German. “Popelyushka!” I say. Cook smiles.

Another time, I sit under the lilac bushes and whisper my nonsense song under my breath. Cook comes up to me. I notice that her hands are red with work and her eyes look tired and sad. I feel sorry for her even though she is an animal. I say in German, “Would you like to hear me sing?”

She nods.

I sing again my secret song. Cook weeps. On the second verse, with a tear-filled voice, she joins in. She sings the entire song with me.

How can she know my secret language? “You know my kolysanka,” I say. She tries to hug me but I push her away. Mutter has told me to stay away from the slaves.

Cook swallows back her tears, and then in harsh, precise German she says, “This is not your home.”

I am shocked speechless.

But she isn’t finished. There is more. “I will protect you.”

The harsh ringing of a telephone jarred me back to the present. I blinked and looked around. The past was so real, yet here I was, lying on a sofa in the staff room of the library. I could hear Miss Barry’s voice, talking to someone on the other end of the telephone. Then her voice faded …

When Mutter and Eva come back from their errands, I am bursting to tell them what Cook said. She should be punished for her crime. But for some reason I say nothing. The next time Eva and Mutter go away, Cook invites me to share a meal in the kitchen with her. It is slave food — a thin soup with black bread. I take one spoonful of the thin broth and begin to weep. I try to remember what the soup reminds me of, but my memory has been washed clean.

We are to go to a rally and Mutter has told me to be ready for when they get back. I put on my pink dress and Cook braids my hair. I wait. And wait. And wait.

I walk through the house and see that drawers have been left open and belongings are scattered on the floor. I feel the ground tremble.

“The Soviets are coming,” whispers Cook. “We must leave this place.”

I do not want to go. This is my home. The room of books is here. The lilac tree is here. Mutter told me to wait. Cook picks me up and carries me out the door. I scream and pull her hair. She drops me on the ground and I fall hard on my back. “Come with me if you want to live,” she says. And she begins to walk away.

I follow her, begging her to wait up. I run after her through the fields and I see that the slaves are all gone. When I mention this, Cook turns on me, her face red with fury. “Slavs,” she says, “Not slaves. Those people are Ukrainian. They’re just like you.”

I don’t believe her, but this is not the time to argue. She tells me her name is Marusia, not Cook.

We hide behind bushes as Soviet soldiers comb the fields, rooting out the other Slavs — the other stolen people. We are to be brought back to the Soviet Union and punished for letting ourselves be stolen by the Germans.

We walk through forests and countryside studded with landmines. We see villages burning and hear bombs exploding. I do not expect to live.

We join a group of ragged survivors. “Your name is Nadia now,” Marusia tells me. “You will never be Gretchen again.”

“But why Nadia?” I ask her.

“The name means hope,” she says. “It was the middle name of my little sister. She was stolen by the Nazis too.”