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

was destroyed in Stalingrad.” Mama maintained an equally even and equally hard tone. “A small victory in Tunisia does not outweigh a massive defeat in Russia.”

I knew about Stalingrad. It was the first defeat that had been announced by the government. So many men had been lost that they could not hide the fact. A quarter million soldiers killed, injured or captured. Papa must have been forewarned that the news would be publicly announced so that day he took the Volksempfänger into his study, the holy inner sanctum that none of us were ever permitted to enter. But I soon found out anyway.

Papa’s face flushed scarlet. He set his cup down with exaggerated precision and then stood up. I braced myself for what I knew was coming, and I could see Theodor doing so as well.

“Stalingrad means nothing,” he shouted, the veins on his neck bulging. “The Russians were lucky. Nothing more. Reich’s Minister Göbbels has now declared total war in response. We will no longer hold anything back. If the enemy fights with no restraint, then they will see what we can do when we fight with no restraint! We will push back against the Russians and at the same time we will bomb England into submission. They will sue for peace. Churchill will fall and his successor will understand that they must make common interest with us against the Bolsheviks!”

For a moment Mama looked like she was ready to say something in response, but she did not. She just stared hard at him and let him start shouting again.

“We must stay united! We must back the Führer in deed, word and thought! It cannot be like last time again! If your negativity triumphs, Luise, the Russians will overrun us, and they will have no mercy! None! Every woman will be raped and . . .”

“Wilhelm! The boys!” So, she did know we were there.

“They need to hear this too! Every woman will be raped, and every man, woman and child will be enslaved! There will be no more Germany.”

I had no idea what “raped” meant, but it did not sound good.

“You know that I don’t want Germany to lose either, but these morons are making it more likely, not less likely.”

“Luise!” He slammed his fist on the table, making the cup and saucer jump and clatter. Theodor and I winced but stayed absolutely still, looking straight ahead.

“No, Wilhelm, I’m going to speak now! Yes, they are making it more likely that we will lose the war because their ideology is getting in the way. It’s distracting them and making them focus on the wrong things. Their Aryan shit is going to be the undoing of them and this country. What garbage! Aryan purity! Look at us for example! You might have blue eyes, Wilhelm, but you are hardly Siegfried of the Nibelungen, and the kids and I, with our short legs, our brown eyes, our brown hair, our darker skin . . . Only Johann has blue eyes. Nobody is blond. Nobody is tall. Nobody is fair. For all I know we could be part Mongol or even —”

“Luise!” He shouted even louder now, his face redder than I had ever seen it before and his comb-over flying about like stalks of wheat in a gale.

“— even part Jew. Those inconvenient Hörschelmanns, if you go back far enough —”

Right then three things happened in rapid succession. Papa made a motion as if to strike Mama but then pulled his hand back, Oskar began to cry in the next room and the air raid siren went off again. It only sounded for a minute — probably the work of an understandably jumpy radar technician — but it was enough to tip the scene into absolute chaos. I could no longer sort out the screaming, crying and shouting. It became an indistinguishable vortex of sound circling my head at high velocity, squeezing me and compressing me as it spiralled inwards into me. I put my head down on the table, closed my eyes, covered my ears and began to rock. I might have started crying too, it was hard to tell.

When it felt safe to open my eyes and uncover my ears the house was weirdly quiet. Only Theodor was left in the room. He was looking at me with his head cocked.

“Are you okay, Ludwig?”

“Yes, I think so. It was too much. Much too much.” At times it felt as if each of my senses was a funnel, gathering inconceivably large amounts of light, sound and smell and then pushing them into my brain, causing it to overflow with sensation. That other people could master and sort this kind of excessive input was a wonder to me. I had long known that I was different, but it was only at times like these that this difference felt like a disadvantage.

I paused and looked around. “Where is everyone? What about the bombs?”

“There were no bombs. It was a false alarm. Papa went to the Ortsgruppe anyway and Mama is with Oskar.”

“They were really angry with each other.” I said this quietly, not wanting Mama to overhear.

“Yes.” Theodor got up and left the room.

Chapter Nine

Summer & Autumn 1943

There were many more false alarms that spring and summer. If we had seen little of Papa before, we saw even less of him now. We still went to school when it was in session, but it became difficult for me to visit the forest as Mama had become very anxious about any of us being too far away from a bomb shelter. Life became worse in almost every way.

Our relative prosperity and Papa’s position had protected us to some extent from the worst aspects of the rationing system, but this was no longer the case. As the situation deteriorated Papa felt that it was even more important that we did our part and were model citizens of the Third Reich. This meant Mama now often cooked with ersatz Fleisch, meaning