Rosella Postorino - The Women at Hitler’s Table

During that time, when Germany was a gridlock of wounds, my mother would pull back her lips as she slicked down the end of the thread, on her face a turtle expression that made me laugh, my father listening to the radio after work, smoking Juno cigarettes, and Franz napping in his crib, his arm bent and his hand by his ear, his tiny fingers curled over his palm of tender flesh.

In my room I would do an inventory of my sins and my secrets, and would feel no remorse.

I can’t make heads or tails of this,” Leni moaned. We were sitting at the cleared table after dinner with open books and pencils provided by the guards. “There are too many hard words.”

“For example?”

“Salivary alym—no, amyl—wait.” Leni checked the page. “Salivary amylase, or that other one: peps—err … pep-sino-gen.”

A week after our first day, the chef had come into the lunchroom and handed out a series of textbooks on nutrition, asking us to read them. Ours was a serious mission, he said, and we should be knowledgeable as we carried it out. He introduced himself as Otto Günther but we all knew the guards called him Krümel, or Crumbs, maybe because he was short and skinny. When we arrived at the barracks in the mornings he and his staff would already be working on breakfast, which we ate immediately, while Hitler ate at around ten, after being briefed on news from the front. Then, at around eleven, we had what he would have for lunch. When the hour-long wait was over they took us home, but at five in the evening they returned to pick us up to taste his dinner.

The morning Krümel gave us the books, one of the women flipped through a few pages and then pushed her book away with a shrug. She had broad, square shoulders disproportionate to her slender ankles, which were left bare under her black skirt. Her name was Augustine. Leni, on the other hand, went ashen, as though they had announced a big exam and she was certain she would fail. As for me, the task was a consolation—not that I thought it was useful to memorize the phases in the digestive process, nor felt the need to make a good impression. In those diagrams, those tables, I recognized my age-old thirst for knowledge so strongly that I could almost make believe I wasn’t losing myself.

“I’ll never manage to learn this,” Leni said. “Do you think they’ll quiz us?”

“The guards sitting at the teacher’s desk and giving us grades? Don’t be silly,” I said, smiling at her.

Leni didn’t smile back. “Maybe the doctor will ask us something at our next blood exam, surprise us with a question!”

“That would be funny.”

“What’s so funny about it?”

“It’s like we’re peeking into Hitler’s innards,” I said with incomprehensible cheerfulness. “If we make a rough estimate, we can calculate when his sphincter will dilate.”

“That’s disgusting!”

It wasn’t disgusting, it was human. Adolf Hitler was a human being who digested.

“Has the professor finished her lesson? When the lecture’s over we can applaud you.” It was Augustine, the woman with square shoulders dressed in black. The guards didn’t order us to be quiet. At the chef’s request, the lunchroom was to be a schoolroom, and his request was to be respected.

“I’m sorry,” I said, lowering my head, “I didn’t mean to bother you.”

“We all know you studied in the city, okay?”

“What do you care what kind of studies she did?” another woman, Ulla, broke in. “In any case, she’s here now, eating just like the rest of us. Delicious food, no doubt, dressed with a drizzle of poison.” She laughed, but no one joined her.

Narrow of waist, firm of bosom, Ulla was quite a dish—that’s what the SS guards said about her. She liked to clip out photographs of actresses from magazines and glue them into a scrapbook. At times she would leaf through them and point them out to us one by one: the porcelain cheeks of Anny Ondra, who had married Max Schmeling, the boxer; Ilse Werner’s lips, soft and plump as she pursed them to whistle the refrain of “Sing ein Lied, wenn Du mal traurig bist” on the radio, because all it took to keep from feeling sad and lonely was to sing a song. Especially, Ulla admitted, to German soldiers. But her favorite was Zarah Leander, with her high-arched eyebrows and the little curls framing her face in the movie La Habanera .

“Coming here to the barracks wearing elegant clothes is a good idea,” she said to me. I wore a wine-colored dress with a French-cut collar and puffed sleeves. My mother had made it for me. “This way, if you die, at least you’ll already be in your good dress. They won’t even need to prepare your corpse.”

“Why do you all keep talking about such horrible things?” Leni protested.

Herta was right: the others noticed my appearance. Not only Elfriede, who had scoured the checks on my dress on our second day there and was now leaning against the wall as she read her book, a pencil between her lips like a burned-out cigarette. It seemed to weigh on her, having to stay seated. She always looked like she was on the verge of leaving.

“So you like this dress, then?”

Ulla hesitated, then answered me. “It’s a bit chaste, but the style is almost Parisian. And it’s definitely much nicer than the dirndls Frau Goebbels wants to make us wear.” She lowered her voice. “And that she wears,” she added, pointing with her eyes to the woman next to me, the one who had stood up after lunch on the first day. Gertrude didn’t hear her.

“Oh, what nonsense.” Augustine slammed her palms on the table for emphasis and turned away. Unsure how to conclude her dramatic finale to the conversation, she decided to move closer to Elfriede, though Elfriede didn’t take her eyes off her textbook.

“So do you like it or don’t you?” I asked again.

Ulla reluctantly admitted: “Yes.”

“Fine. You can have it, then.”

A thump made me look up. Elfriede had snapped her book shut and folded her arms over her chest, the pencil still in her mouth.

“So what are you going to do, strip down like Saint Francis right here in front of everyone and give it to her?” Augustine snickered, expecting Elfriede to back her up, but she just stood there staring at me, expressionless.

I turned back to Ulla. “I’ll bring it to you tomorrow, if you like. No, wait, give me time to wash it.”

A murmur spread through the room as Elfriede pulled away from the wall and moved over to sit across from me. She let her textbook thud to the table, rested her hand on it, and began to drum her fingers on the cover, scrutinizing me. Augustine watched her, certain she was about to pass judgment, but Elfriede said nothing. Her fingers fell still.

“She comes here from Berlin to give us handouts,” Augustine said, piling it on. “Wants to give us lessons in biology and Christian charity, to prove she’s better than us.”

“I do want it,” Ulla said.

“It’s yours,” I replied.

Augustine tsked. I would learn she always did that to express her displeasure. “Oh, please …”