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

fake meat made from cooked rice mashed and fried in mutton fat, or ersatz Fisch, which was also mashed rice but mixed with onions and the oil from tinned fish. Baking bread became challenging as wheat supplies were mostly diverted to the army, but housewives swapped ideas for substituting ground horse chestnuts or pea meal or potato starch. Ration cards did permit the purchase of some normal bread, as well as meat, eggs, butter and so on, but the amounts were steadily cut back and luxuries such as cream and chocolate were only available on the black market. I must confess though that I loved the ration cards. They were large rectangles of cardboard with neat little squares marked out for each month’s allotment of the rationed foodstuffs. Something in the symmetry and in the abstract small-scale representation of real-world goods appealed to me. The squares were steadily cut out as you used up the card. Even restaurants would snip out the appropriate square if, for example, they used some butter to cook your meal with!

Mama may have grumbled about the restrictions, but she was very clever in making the best of what was available. In fact, she was particularly good at figuring out what the neighbours most lacked or most desired. Then she would hoard enough of whatever that was in order to make a good trade. For example, Frau Klempner three doors over had a sister in the country who regularly sent her fresh eggs, but somehow she always ran out of butter before month’s end. Mama was able to save enough of our butter to swap for the eggs. Or there was Frau Mendel who kept Balkonschweine — literally “balcony pigs,” which is what we called rabbits. Livestock was not permitted in the city, but rabbits were because in the strict and inflexible Nazi way of accounting for all things, some bureaucrat deep in a cavernous ministry in Berlin had deemed rabbits to be pets and not livestock. And they remained classified as such long past the point where anyone looked at them with anything other than a ravening eye. At least once a month Mama would find something from our rations that we could do without so that she could barter for one of these delicious balcony pigs. Any squeamishness we children might have had about eating something cute had long since been abandoned.

These stories seem almost charming now — plucky burghers doing their best in hard times — but please believe me that it was in no way charming to live through. What happened to Frau Scheffler made that very clear. She was a friend of Mama’s and a core member of the regular trading circle in this part of Connewitz. She was a tall, thin, bird-like woman with a large nose. I remember that she always wore a black kerchief on her head. Although this made her look somewhat imposing, perhaps like a witch, I remember her particularly because she became the occasional source of chocolate when even Greta at the Ortsgruppe did not have any more for us. Frau Scheffler was always very kind to us and had a shy smile when she handed over a little chocolate. The story was that she had a son who was an officer in occupied France. Somehow, he was able to obtain desirable foods, including the chocolate, and he regularly mailed parcels of these to her. Everyone assumed that he had looted the delicacies. That there was anything left to loot by that point in the war seemed strange, but nobody in the trading circle questioned this story. The Gestapo, however, were keen to question everything about it. One day in October Frau Scheffler disappeared, arrested on a charge of black-market trading and profiteering.

“Wilhelm, can’t you do something for Heike?” Mama asked as soon as Papa appeared that evening. “She didn’t do anything very wrong, or at least nothing that everyone else isn’t doing anyway.”

“I cannot and I will not. Eggs for butter and milk for bread is one thing, but a luxury goods smuggling and trading enterprise is quite another.”

“But it’s Heike. You know her. The children know her.”

“The law is the law, Luise. It’s all I could do to prevent you from being brought in for questioning as well. I like fine food as much as anyone, but this all has to stop.”

That night there was no shouting. Both of them seemed tired and resigned, which in some ways worried me more than when they were angry.

Frau Scheffler was executed the next day. She was hung at the gallows on Markgraffenstrasse. She was a widow and her only child was her son in France, so her sister had to come from out of town to claim the body. If there was a funeral, I did not hear about it.

It was a “Goldener Oktober,” which is a common expression in German, as in, “I hope this will be a golden October” or “Last year we had such a wonderful golden October.” I suppose “Indian summer” is similar in English, but it implies that there was a cold period first, whereas golden October does not imply this. In any case, the October of 1943 was golden. Obviously this refers to the colour of the leaves, especially when lit by the low slanting late afternoon or early morning light, but there is more to it. I think fine dust particles are stirred up by the harvest which lend the air itself a subtle golden glow in the sun. This was certainly the case in my forest by the Pleisse.

Mama was so distraught by Frau Scheffler’s death that she did not leave her bedroom at all the following day, so I saw this as my opportunity to slip out and visit my trees and my birds. I suppose I was sad about Frau Scheffler as well, but it was more the idea of sadness in my mind than the actual feeling of it. I do not know why