Jackie French - Hitler's Daughter

‘From Duffi?’ asked Heidi.

Fräulein Gelber shrugged, as though to say that all orders came eventually from Duffi, but this letter was from someone else.

‘Where will we go?’ asked Heidi.

Fräulein Gelber told her. The name meant nothing to Heidi.

‘We will look it up on the map this afternoon,’ said Fräulein Gelber. ‘It will be a nice place. You will like it.’

‘But WHY do we have to go?’

‘It will be safer there,’ said Fräulein Gelber, but she didn’t say for whom. She smiled. ‘It is much nearer my family,’ she added. ‘Only two, three hours away by bicycle.’

‘Will they visit us?’ asked Heidi eagerly.

Sometimes Fräulein Gelber had let Heidi read her mother’s letters or her sister’s, or even her brother’s, as a treat. Her father had died, many years before, and that was why Fräulein Gelber had to work. He had been a friend of Duffi’s.

But Fräulein Gelber had told her often that it was an honour to work in the Führer’s household. ‘I could have married,’ she had explained to Heidi. ‘I have had…oh, several offers. Several men have pleaded with me to marry them.’

‘Why didn’t you?’ asked Heidi, hoping that Fräulein Gelber would say, ‘I didn’t want to leave you.’

But instead she said, ‘To give up my work, after all the Führer has done for us? That I couldn’t do.’

‘I don’t think they will visit,’ said Fräulein Gelber now, in a voice that told Heidi not to ask why.

Suddenly a thought occurred to her. ‘Will Duffi be at the new house?’

Perhaps that was why they were going, so they could be with Duffi. Maybe Duffi missed her. Maybe he had said…

‘No, of course not,’ said Fräulein Gelber. ‘He is in Berlin.’

‘But will he visit?’

‘ Vielleicht . Perhaps,’ said Fräulein Gelber.

Other people packed for them. Heidi only had to pack her dolls and her special books.

Half of her wanted to leave the dolls behind—the pretty, perfect dolls—but Duffi had given them to her and, besides, she’d have had to explain to Fräulein Gelber.

They travelled to the new house by car the next day. Their move must have been arranged even before Fräulein Gelber had been told.

Three soldiers came to help them.

One of the soldiers drove their car, another rode behind on a motorbike, and the other drove the car with their luggage.

Fräulein Gelber didn’t know how to drive—most women didn’t know how to drive back then, and anyway, the guards were to look after them and make sure nothing happened to them on the way.

It was only an hour’s journey, but it was the first time Heidi had ever been in a car. (No, there had been one time before, when Duffi had taken her for a drive. He had pointed out a lake and geese and made her laugh by making the goose noise, but that was so very long ago it was hard to remember.)

She had never been so far before. There was so much that was new to see: the fields that were much like the fields she knew, but yet different, and pale brown cows, and once, a pair of goats in an orchard. The goats had climbed up onto a table and were stretching up to eat the trees, and Heidi laughed and pointed them out to Fräulein Gelber.

She would have liked to ask the soldier to stop the car so she could watch the goats, but she had been told already that she was not to talk to him.

No one said why she had to be silent, but she guessed. The driver was not to know who she was.

Suddenly there was a humming, far up in the sky, like bees in the plum blossom, but too sharp to be bees. The humming deepened, closer and closer, and then engines could be heard.

The driver glanced at Fräulein Gelber, then pulled the car in under a tree, so they couldn’t be seen from the air. The car behind pulled in close to the hedge, and so did the motorbike driver.

‘Bomber,’ said the driver briefly.

The enemy plane seemed to come slowly, slowly, slowly; then suddenly the plane was almost above them, and coming fast.

‘Perhaps we should get out and lie on the ground, just in case they see the car,’ said Fräulein Gelber nervously.

‘Too late,’ said the driver. ‘They’d see us move.’

Heidi craned to get a better look out the window.

Would they hear the sound of a bomb falling before it hit their car and killed them, Heidi thought in sudden terror?

Fräulein Gelber pulled her back, as though just seeing the plane might make her more vulnerable, but Heidi caught a glimpse of it anyway, too high up to make much out, and then there was its black shadow flying across the grass beyond the trees.

How could death come so quickly over the trees? wondered Heidi. She watched the shadow till it was out of sight, and the engine noise had faded to humming again.

Fräulein Gelber took her hand. Fräulein Gelber’s hand was damp and clammy, and shaking, too. The driver started the car, and they drove off again.

More trees and fields, and once, a village, with a church at one end of the square and a cafe at the other, with no bomb damage at all that Heidi could see, except for one house on the outskirts, half ruined, and the windows filled up with cardboard instead of glass.

‘Stray bomb, probably,’ said the driver, nodding at it. ‘Sometimes they have a few spare that they haven’t dropped on targets and they drop them anywhere, so that they don’t use up so much fuel carrying them back home.’

Home was England. England was the enemy. Sometimes Heidi wondered what it must be like to be English. Were they evil people or just stupid? How could they possibly win against all of Germany, against Duffi. It was such a little island on the map.

The road twisted out of the village, past a farm, and then another, with pigs rolling in the fresh black mud, and then down another road, past two ancient oak trees like giant dark umbrellas across the road, and they were there.

The new house was small, or at least it seemed so to Heidi after the big house where she’d lived before. It crouched under the trees like it, too, was hiding from the bombs.

But it had three bedrooms upstairs (narrow twisting wooden stairs): one bedroom was for Heidi and one was for Fräulein Gelber. The third was to be their schoolroom, where all their books would go. It had a big kitchen with a cold, paved floor and an even bigger cellar that you got to by going out the kitchen door and down some steps.

Fräulein Gelber inspected the cellar thoroughly. She didn’t say why, but Heidi knew that the cellar was where they would go if enemy planes flew overhead. Bombs might crush the house, but the cellar would be safe.

The cellar smelled sweet and musty. It had bins of apples stored in old dried leaves, and shelves with jars of jam and sauerkraut and honey, and cabbages all in a pile and two sacks of potatoes with just a few taken out of one, and a sack of golden onions, their skins floating off like yellow autumn leaves.

‘Where are the people who lived here before?’ asked Heidi, but Fräulein Gelber couldn’t say.

‘That’s none of our business,’ she said, though Heidi thought it was. It seemed odd to be wandering through rooms that other people had lived in not long ago eating their onions and plum jam, and then not even to know what they’d been like or where they were now.

Only Heidi and Fräulein Gelber were to live in the house. Sergeant Amchell lived in the barn.

He was old, with a long salt and pepper moustache that looked like it would fall out if he blew his nose too hard. He had been wounded in the leg in the last war, so he limped just like Heidi.

She hoped he’d notice that she limped, too, and maybe joke about it—the two of them with only two good legs between them—or something friendly like that, but he kept to himself and tended the giant cabbages in the garden instead of standing to attention at the door like the other guards she’d known. Mostly he pretended he didn’t see her when she smiled at him, or hear her when she said ‘ Guten Morgen ’.