Jackie French - Hitler's Daughter

He was the only guard they had now.

The first night in the new house Fräulein Gelber lit the candles and sat her on one of the hard dark chairs in the sitting room.

‘A woman will be coming tomorrow to cook the food, and to look after the house,’ said Fräulein Gelber. ‘Her name is Frau Leib. She is just a farm woman, but I want you to be polite to her, even so.’

‘Of course,’ said Heidi.

Fräulein Gelber hesitated. ‘Frau Leib has been told you are my niece, the child of my sister who was killed in the air raids.’

Heidi looked up. ‘Was your sister killed in the air raids?’ she asked in alarm.

Fräulein Gelber’s sister was married and lived three streets away from her mother. She had sent Fräulein Gelber a scarf last Christmas. Heidi had secretly hoped that one day someone from Fräulein Gelber’s family might send her a present too, but they never did. Perhaps Fräulein Gelber had never mentioned Heidi in her letters. Or maybe they thought she had everything she needed and didn’t need presents.

‘No, of course not,’ said Fräulein Gelber. ‘My sister is quite well, apart from a slight case of grippe last month. But it’s best if that’s what Frau Leib continues to believe.’

Fräulein Gelber hesitated again. ‘I don’t want you speaking too much to her, you understand?’

‘I understand,’ said Heidi.

The rain pounded on the roof of the bus shelter like it couldn’t wait to get down from the sky. One of the cows moaned softly, a sad, wet complaint about life in general.

‘Go on,’ urged Mark.

‘The bus,’ said Anna.

Mark looked at his watch.

‘We’ve got another five minutes at least,’ he said. ‘Go on!’

Anna took another breath, and began the story again.

Frau Leib had grey hair, not speckled grey like Fräulein Gelber’s—whose hair looked a bit like a hen’s feathers, Heidi thought sometimes—but grey all over like a saucepan, and tight curls that looked like they were made of metal too, they were so firm about her head.

Frau Leib’s hands were large, with red knuckles. Her skirt was much longer and wider than Fräulein Gelber’s, the sort of skirt you could use for carrying apples or cabbages from the cellar, and an apron from her neck to her knee, a ‘kittel’, that seemed welded to her waist no matter what else she wore.

Heidi never saw Frau Leib without her apron; whether she was coming or going, she still had it on. It looked bigger than she was, all bunched up at her sides, as though at one time Frau Leib had been even larger than she was now.

Frau Leib lived on the farm just down the road, the one with the pigs in the black mud. Her husband worked the fields with their young grandsons and two of their daughters-in-law. Their sons were away fighting, except for one who was in a prisoner-of-war camp in America (America was the enemy now, too).

Herr Leib was in the Nazi Party—one of the first members in the whole district—so his wife was supposed to be trustworthy.

She also liked to talk.

Frau Leib talked in a dialect so thick it was sometimes hard to understand, but that didn’t matter, because she said so much that you could leave half of it out and still have enough for conversation.

‘I talk as the pig’s snout grows,’ said Frau Leib with a grin that showed the dark gaps in her back teeth, meaning that she talked as thoughts flew into her head, and there were a lot of thoughts under Frau Leib’s grey curls.

‘What happened to your face, girl?’ she demanded, as soon as she saw Heidi. ‘A burn? Is that what it is? The bombs?’

‘I was born with it,’ said Heidi quietly.

Frau Leib’s great arms came round her and she hugged her to her apron, which had just the faintest smell of pig. ‘You poor darling,’ she said. ‘I will give you some ointment. It’s pig lard, with chickweed and other herbs. It is my grandmother’s recipe and she got it from her mother, so it is very good. It takes scars like that away so fast you’d think the boar was after them to get its fat back!’

‘Thank you,’ said Heidi, as she was released from the apron, though she knew the ointment wouldn’t do any good. If there had been a way to remove the mark Duffi would have arranged it years before.

But there were some questions even Frau Leib knew not to ask. Whoever had organised the house for them had made it clear that Fräulein Gelber—and Heidi—were people of importance. Their clothes, their food, their lack of ration cards, the guard, the provisions that arrived for them every second Monday were proof enough of that.

But even if Frau Leib didn’t ask questions, she still liked to talk.

‘Listen to the frogs in the pond!’ said Frau Leib, her fat fingers firm around the knife handle as she chopped through thick bacon while Heidi peeled the potatoes for the soup. (Heidi had never had bacon before—Duffi didn’t like people to eat meat. But they ate it now.) ‘If the frogs croak like that at night it will rain in the morning.’

‘Are there fish in the pond?’ asked Heidi. She was allowed in the kitchen often now to help Frau Leib. Together they made the beds, and dusted too.

‘Just the frogs,’ said Frau Leib.

Frau Leib had five children: ‘Lisl, oh, I had such a hard time having her,’ said Frau Leib. But at that Frau Leib halted a while, as though she had remembered how young her listener was. And there were Franz and Josef and Helmuth and Erna.

She also had two grandsons who worked the farm, and another two who were only babies, too young to help at all.

‘But oh, we need the help,’ said Frau Leib, shaking her head so her chins wobbled but her metal curls stayed firm. ‘All the fine strong men are in the army, and just old men and boys to help us now.’

If the farm had been bigger, she explained, the boys—her sons—might have been given a deferment from the army, so they could help the Führer by growing food for the soldiers of the Reich.

‘Of course, they are proud to be fighting too,’ said Frau Leib hurriedly, with a sideways look at Heidi. ‘We all have to do what we can.’

Several times Heidi noticed Frau Leib slip a little flour or a twist of sugar into the pocket of her coat that was hung by the back door when she came to work. But Heidi did not speak of it. She and Fräulein Gelber had more than they needed, and she now knew from Frau Leib that most people were going hungry, even here in the country with the cows and goats and pigs.

Frau Leib took their scraps to feed to the hens, and the dishwater to feed to the pigs. ‘It will just go to waste else,’ said Frau Leib reasonably, as she slipped a piece of leftover sausage into the hens’ bin that they could very well have had for lunch the next day.

‘Could we keep hens?’ Heidi asked Fräulein Gelber.

Fräulein Gelber shook her head. ‘They are dirty things,’ she said. ‘Besides, Frau Leib will sell us all the eggs we need.’

It was funny with Frau Leib in the kitchen. No one had ever talked to Heidi so freely before. Sometimes Heidi thought that Frau Leib wasn’t talking to her, but was just talking because she was uncomfortable when her mouth was still.

Did Frau Leib talk even when she was walking home by herself? she wondered. Did she talk to the starlings and the thrushes and the blackbirds perhaps…But it was good to listen to Frau Leib’s conversation. There was so much to learn that no one had ever mentioned to her before.

‘…and the blacksmith keeps the cows shod—oh yes, the cows must have shoes just like the horses if they are to work—and the scythes whetted…You have never seen the blacksmith work? But all the children hang around the forge after school! The banging and the clanging and the hot fire…you must come down this afternoon then…but perhaps not,’ said Frau Leib, pushing the broom and remembering.