Jackie French: Hitler's Daughter

‘How could someone as dumb as that run a country?’ asked Mark.

‘I don’t know,’ said Mum vaguely. She glanced at her watch. ‘It’s still pretty early.’

‘I don’t mind,’ said Mark. He kissed her hurriedly. ‘See you.’

‘See you tonight. Don’t worry if I’m a bit late. I need to get the books done before the stocktake,’ said Mum. ‘Have a good day. Don’t get too wet. Are you sure you’ve got your homework? How about your lunch money?’

‘Yep, I’m sure. Bye Mum.’ The car trundled slowly back down the muddy road.

It was Tracey’s mum’s turn to pick up Anna today. Mark hoped they’d be early too…yes, there was the green truck, pulling out of Anna’s driveway down the road.

Mark watched as Little Tracey hugged her mum and dashed for the bus shelter. She was wearing her old yellow raincoat with the tear in the sleeve. Anna followed more slowly, the hood of her jacket shading her face.

‘We got here early so Anna can go on with the story,’ announced Tracey. ‘She said she would. Didn’t you, Anna?’

Anna nodded. Her hood had slipped back, so her fringe hung limply against her forehead. ‘If you want,’ she said offhandedly.

‘Yeah,’ said Mark, trying not to sound too enthusiastic. After all, it was just a story. Anna told lots of stories…‘Better get a move on before Ben gets here and wants to put the Red Baron in it or something.’

‘Ben’s not coming today. He’s got a cold. His mum rang my mum so I could tell Mrs Latter not to wait for him…’ Anna pushed her wet hair back out of her eyes.

‘Go on then!’ urged Little Tracey impatiently.

‘I’m not sure where to start,’ admitted Anna.

Mark stared. Anna always knew where to start. She’d never been stumped with a story before.

‘What did Heidi have for breakfast?’ demanded Little Tracey. ‘Did she have any pets? A dog? Or a horse?’

Anna relaxed. ‘I can tell you that,’ she said. ‘She had bread for breakfast—hot rolls coiled up into shapes with seeds on them. Sometimes they were caraway seeds and sometimes they were poppy seeds and once, for her birthday, the cook made her a bread roll in the shape of a cat, with a tail and poppyseed eyes and whiskers.

‘Like this.’ Anna traced a rudimentary picture of a cat in the mud with the toe of her shoe. ‘And she liked it so much that her father ordered the cook to make her a bread cat every Monday, or a frog or a goat or a donkey. And once, for Easter, she made a sheep, too, with a whole lot of little baby lambs.’

‘Did Heidi eat them?’

Anna nodded. ‘She could eat them because every Monday morning there’d be another one. And she had milk for breakfast, too, with some sugar in it.’

‘Then what did she do?’ asked Little Tracey. ‘Did she go to school?’

Mark leant back against the wall of the bus shelter. Anna’s face was absorbed, as it always was when she told a story, her hands flying and gesturing as though they wanted to tell the story too.

‘No, she didn’t go to school.’

‘Why not?’ asked Mark, suddenly interested.

‘Because,’ Anna hesitated. ‘Because people might discover Hitler had a daughter. Or they might tease her about the mark on her face or maybe…maybe Hitler himself had hated school so he said his daughter didn’t have to go. She had lessons with Fräulein Gelber instead.’

‘Didn’t she go anywhere?’ asked Little Tracey, disappointed.

‘She went to Church, I think,’ said Anna hesitantly. ‘I don’t think she went every Sunday. Maybe it was only once or twice…I don’t know.’ She shook her head. ‘It’s just not working.’

Mark considered. ‘How about start with, As far back as she could remember,’ he suggested. ‘Mr McDonald got us to start an essay with that last term. You know: “As far back as I can remember…”’

Anna took a deep breath. Her fingers looked white and cold and she shoved them in her pockets.

‘As far back as Heidi could remember…’ she began.

As far back as Heidi could remember there had been Fräulein Gelber. Fräulein Gelber looked after her. She was tall and thin, with hips that looked like she had a coat-hanger in her skirt, and she had dark hair pulled back and wore narrow skirts that meant she couldn’t run or walk too fast.

There was Frau Mundt, who was a widow, whose hands smelt of butter. Frau Mundt looked after her sometimes, when Fräulein Gelber visited her family.

Frau Mundt wore flowered dirndls under her apron. Once she took Heidi on her knee and told her a story.

‘We had no money, no work, no bread,’ she said. ‘Even if you had money, it was worth nothing in those days! A wheelbarrow full of money wouldn’t buy you a loaf of bread.

‘We begged. It was horrible, but we had to beg just to get food to eat. The occupying troops, the French and the Belgians, took all we had. They had whips and they whipped us off the sidewalks so we had to walk in the gutter. They threw us in the mud. That is how it was then, after the Great War.

‘Then it was 1932. My Willi had a motorbike. It was an old motorbike, from before the war, but sometimes we got a little petrol, and I sat on the back seat and we went to hear the Führer give a great speech. He wasn’t the Führer then but it was so wonderful—thousands of people, oh, so many people cheering.

‘And he told us how he wanted to be on the side of the unemployed—that was people like us, like me and Willi. He would save us, he would get us jobs, he would make Germany proud and free again, and I was cheering with everyone else while the tears ran down my cheeks.

‘And that night I prayed that this great, good man would get all the votes so we could get out of need. No one else promised what he did. He was the only one who gave us hope. This good man…and everything that he promised, he has given us.’

It was only then that Heidi realised Frau Mundt was talking about Duffi.

Duffi was the Führer. He was her father too.

No one said he was her father, of course. She never called him Vater. She called him Duffi and he hugged her whenever he visited, which wasn’t often, and he brought her dolls with long blonde hair that made her cry secretly at night, because they were beautiful and she was not.

If she looked like the dolls he would have let her call him Father.

‘But… but how did she know she was his daughter if he never said?’ objected Mark. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt.’

Anna shook her head. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘She just did know. She lived there in his house—or the house he visited sometimes, anyway, when he wasn’t in Berlin—and he called her “my little girl”. “How is my little girl today? Has she been good for Fräulein Gelber?” Somehow she just knew .’

In the mornings she did her lessons with Fräulein Gelber and in the afternoons they walked.

Fräulein Gelber knew the name of every tree and every flower, and even the names of the grasses too.

‘That’s a cuckoo’s call!’ cried Fräulein Gelber, or, ‘Listen, there’s a thrush.’

Sometimes they took bread down to the carp in the pool by the bridge. One of the carp was big and black and gold. He was maybe two hundred years old said Fräulein Gelber as they threw the bread into the water for the fish. (The fish mostly ignored it, so Heidi wondered if they really liked bread at all.)

When Heidi found hedgehogs freezing that winter Fräulein Gelber let her keep them in a basket by the hearth of the stove and Heidi fed them on bread and milk.

‘They will probably die anyway,’ said Fräulein Gelber indulgently, but she let her look after them. The hedgehogs didn’t die, and in the spring Heidi let them go in the garden. She hoped that maybe they’d remember her and come back to her sometimes. It would be good to have friends, even if they were hedgehogs. But the hedgehogs scuttled away and Heidi didn’t see them again.