The Willow Wren by Philipp Schott (free ebook reader for iphone txt) 📕

The following week Theodor came home from school visibly crestfallen. On Monday, after the fall of France, his class had been asked to write an essay outlining why Germany had decided to invade France. Theodor had gotten a bare pass, which was shocking and humiliating to someone who was otherwise a straight A student. He had outlined the basic rationale for the invasion the way the teacher wanted: Germany had offered peace to France and England after the successful conclusion of the troubles with Poland, but they had refused. This then raised the suspicion that they were secretly preparing to attack Germany, as revenge for the fall of their Polish ally and to remove Germany as a competitor before it became too strong. The French and English deeply desired to cement their victory in 1918 for all time, but the Führer knew that it was his sacred duty to prevent the German people from remaining on their knees forever. Theodor also deftly excused the invasion of neutral Holland and Belgium, reasoning that a less well-defended side door into France actually saved lives. Then he made the statement that took his mark from an A to a D: “While we can justify the invasion of Netherlands and Belgium from a military perspective, why did we also have to invade poor little Luxembourg?”

Theodor was generally much more attuned to the way most people thought than I was, and he was four years older after all, but when I found out what he had written, even I could see that this was an unwise question to ask. Sometimes we Schotts feel the need to argue even just a little bit so that we can assert our intellectual pride and independence. Even ten-year-old Schotts.

The teacher was furious and instructed Theodor to show what he had written to Papa and bear whatever consequences that drew. Papa was by then well known in the district as the Ortsgruppenleiter (“local group leader”). Imagine the Ortsgruppenleiter’s son questioning the Führer’s wisdom! How embarrassing for Herr Schott.

Herr Schott was somewhat more than embarrassed. I was perversely curious to hear how this conversation would unfold, but Papa told me to leave the room and close the door behind me while Theodor stood before him, head bowed, trembling as he held the paper that Papa had just handed back to him. Naturally I listened at the door. However, I could not hear much as Theodor was mostly silent and Papa used his exceptionally steely quiet voice, the one we all found more terrifying than when he shouted at us. Because shouting was connected to passion it was instinctively understood as irrational and likely to dissipate, whereas the cold tone he adopted when he was even angrier seemed to imply a permanent reassessment of our character and quality. Theodor was pale when he left the room. Through the briefly open door I could see that Papa had picked up the newspaper and that his hands were shaking very lightly.

Chapter Six

Spring 1941

A year later, in the spring of 1941, the war was still remote for us, although not as abstract as it had been in the beginning. Rationing had started, and Papa was now constantly at the Ortsgruppe, even for supper almost every night. The news was all of victories, however, so the general mood felt like a mixture of quiet resignation to the present and quiet optimism for the future. Yes, there was a war and it was becoming a nuisance in many ways, but the whole unpleasant business would soon be done with. It would be several years yet before I learned what a horrifying understatement “unpleasant business” was, especially with respect to the victims of the malevolent machine the Nazis had set in motion, howling just out of my earshot.

The Party was insinuating itself more and more into every aspect of life and I am sure that nobody believed this would be reversed when the war ended. This happened gradually, incrementally, like a slowly rising tide. When people are focused on their own lives, as people tend to be, they sometimes do not notice what disappears under that tide unless they happen to look over to a certain spot and then think to themselves, “Hmm, didn’t there used to be X over there . . . ?”

Little boys certainly did not notice much of this, but one example of an obvious change that we did notice was that the Nazis insisted that all normal radios be turned in lest the people be bewitched by foreign lies. So the only news we got was from the Volksempfänger, which translates as the “people’s receiver.” They even inspected the homes of people suspected of not having followed this edict. The Volksempfänger was constructed so that it could only be tuned to official German state radio, although some of the older boys at school claimed to know other boys, not at our school of course, who had figured out how to modify them. This was most assuredly not to listen to enemy news but rather to get better music.

Swing jazz was very popular among the teenagers. State radio played a lot of Wagner and it told us that the Luftwaffe was on the verge of bringing Britain to its knees. There had been no mention of how the Battle of Britain had turned out the previous fall. Why, on March 8 we had even bombed Buckingham Palace! King George must have soiled his pantaloons with fright. In retaliation the RAF had apparently launched a bombing raid on Bremen in northern Germany, but this was presented as the feeble act of a pesky bug that our mighty forces effortlessly swatted away, while no doubt stifling a yawn. That enemy aircraft could fly over Germany at all and even drop bombs struck us as bizarre. An aberration no doubt.

Because Papa was at the Ortsgruppe every