Hedwig was sitting in the cramped front room of the apartment with her five brothers, quizzing Reiner on Air Raids. It was Reiner’s homework, but all the boys were listening – all except one-year-old Kurt, who was drifting off to sleep on her lap. Kurt was too young to understand about bombs or fire or death, and when he had been given a picture book about air raids, he had torn it up and cheerfully stuffed the pieces into his mouth. Hedwig wished she could do the same with Reiner’s quiz.
As she ran through the list of questions, she was trying to keep order as the three others attempted to compete. Wolfgang, who at eleven was younger than Reiner, but brighter, kept butting in. The oldest, Peter, bent over his schoolwork, contributing answers in a tone of bored superiority that infuriated his younger brother. Even little Ludi, who at five was too small even for the Pimpf, the junior section of the Hitler Youth, but had regular air-raid lessons at kindergarten, kept jumping up and trying to interrupt.
‘Stop it, Ludi. It’s my homework!’ shouted Reiner, with a mounting flush on his cheeks. ‘I need to get it right because there’s a big drill coming up!’
Reiner always found himself left behind by his cleverer brothers. He was hopeless at school. Perhaps that was why the HJ meant so much to him. It played to his strengths, which were running, fighting and swimming. Placing a soothing hand on Ludi’s head, Hedwig continued.
‘What do you do if you see a fire, Reiner? Who would be the right person to tell? What do you do if someone’s injured? How would you deal with poison gas?’
War was by far the boys’ favourite subject. It occupied their every thought. Even when they weren’t studying it, they were playing it in a variety of military board games: Tanks Forward, Without a Propeller, We Sail Against England – a new one involving U-Boats – and Bombs Over England, a game where Heinkel bombers attacked London Bridge. That was Wolfgang’s favourite and when Hedwig told him she had seen London Bridge and hoped it wouldn’t be bombed, he stared at her in disbelief.
But who needed board games now that the whole of the city had turned into one big practice site? Mock air raids and blackouts went on all the time in Berlin. In a recent drill, soldiers trussed up in decontamination suits had hosed down the streets as if clearing poison gas. The Luftwaffe had been co-opted to drop smoke bombs for a more realistic effect and fire engines raised their ladders up the side of buildings to stage rescues. The Hitler Youth dedicated a couple of evenings every week to air-raid drill and Reiner’s battalion had a large-scale exercise coming up. When war came, it would be the HJ that the city relied on to coordinate the air-raid precautions, check the blackouts and sirens and cope with the casualties. That was why Reiner’s homework mattered so much, and why Hedwig needed to drum the answers into his head.
She was devoted to her brood of brothers. Sometimes she felt she was never happier than when ensconced in this drab and cramped apartment, parrying their backchat and adjudicating over their arguments. There was Peter, at seventeen serious and ambitious, Reiner and Wolfgang always fighting, Ludi, a burly miniature of their father, and tiny, boisterous Kurt, who called for Hedwig before his mother and whose care Mutti seemed quite happy to delegate.
Perhaps that was why she loved Kurt with a special passion. With his little jutting chin and his air of absolute confidence, it was clear that he would not stay a baby for long. The way he slammed his palms on the table of his high chair, demanding attention, he might have been commanding a battalion of soldiers, rather than a single harried sister. Yet although he was fast leaving infancy behind, his nails were still tiny pink shells and his hair soft as feathers. He watched his brothers constantly, observing their playing and their fights, clamouring to be included. He rarely cried and Hedwig’s possessive pride manifested itself in small acts of preferential treatment. She saved the lumps of sugar that were provided with tea for staff at the Ahnenerbe and crumbled them up for Kurt when his brothers were not looking.
In the evenings when she was not taking Faith and Beauty classes, Hedwig cooked and washed the plates, and after her father departed for the nearest Kneipe, divided her time between homework, storytelling and keeping order. Not to mention patching Kurt’s clothes, which had been shed by four brothers before him like the skins of a snake. This humdrum existence could not be less like the gracious, elegant life that the Faith and Beauty Society was preparing her for. Here in Moabit there was no art, or dancing, or conversation to speak of, unless you counted their father bellowing at the children or Mutti moaning about the amount of washing she had to do. There was no music, apart from the light dance music on the radio that Mutti used to drown out the squabbling of the boys. And yet it could not suit Hedwig better.
Ploughing through the pages of questions on Reiner’s list Hedwig felt a pang of sympathy for him. It had been the same for her in the BDM – endless lists of questions that she could still reel off like some leaden poetry imprinted forever in her mind. What is the date and place of the birth of the Führer? What are the clauses of the Treaty of Versailles? What is the date of the Beer Hall Putsch? What is the significance of 10th November? – the answer to that was Martin Luther’s birthday, rather than Kristallnacht, which had raged through the city last year.
At times it seemed that citizens of the Reich spent their entire time answering questionnaires. The girls at the Faith and Beauty Society marvelled at the form issued by the office responsible for maintaining the racial purity of the SS for women hoping to marry. It was seven pages long and spelt out cumbersome requirements for the hopeful girl, including the precise date that she learned to walk, and photographs of herself in a bathing suit taken from three angles. Some of the queries seemed as daunting as a university examination.
‘Is the woman positively addicted to housework?’ was one. How did you answer that?
‘Does she hold fast to the values of German womanhood?’
And the one that had particularly floored Hedwig: ‘Does she cherish the high ideals of German philosophy?’
God knows how she would ever answer them, yet with any luck there would be no need. The only question she was interested in just then was the one that Jochen had mentioned the other evening in the restaurant. I’m going to ask you something. If Jochen’s request was what she suspected, it would be both thrilling and terrifying in equal measure.