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

“Yes, she is having a hard time. But even if he did not kill himself, he would be dead or he would be a prisoner, and our situation right now would be the same,” I reasoned.

“I suppose.”

“Do you miss him?”

“Miss him? Well, I haven’t seen much of him the last three years or so, so I’ve had some time to get used to it. When I was little though he was actually a good father. He was very good in math and always helped me with my homework when I was having trouble. Other fathers totally ignored their kids or beat their kids. He never did that.”

“No, it was Mama who would hit us when we were bad!”

“Ha, that’s funny isn’t it. The Nazi was soft, and the anti-Nazi was hard! Well, in child-rearing anyway. I think he enjoyed his self-image as the kindly and wise pater familias. He did have quite a temper though, just not a violent one.”

“That is true. I remember him shouting at Mama. He did not shout at me, but I was more afraid of his stern voice and cold disapproval when he was angry than I was afraid of the back of Mama’s hand. Papa would stay mad at me for days while Mama would hug me an hour after giving me a spanking.”

Theodor nodded and changed the subject, indicating that we should take a different path today to find wood as the old area was surely picked through by now.

Chapter Thirty-Two

July 1, 1945

Theodor did not have to swim the Mulde anymore. At the stroke of noon on July 1, Major Kozlov and a squad of smartly turned-out Red Army soldiers, two of them carrying large red Soviet flags, marched up the bridge where they met an American officer (not Colonel Armstrong) and a small group of GIs. Across the bridge a larger number of American soldiers were sitting in the backs of trucks. I could see them smoking and laughing. I thought I spotted the Black soldiers I had met in May, but I couldn’t be sure. A brief conversation appeared to take place on the bridge, followed by a handshake and some saluting. This was a replay of exactly two months prior when Colditz had been handed over to the Russians.

I will confess to not having been especially attuned to the political situation, so this development surprised and confused me. It occurred to me that this might mean that I would finally have access to the forest again, but I knew enough to realize that the departure of the Americans from the west bank of the Mulde was probably not, on balance, a good development.

Theodor was beside me and read the bewilderment on my face. He paid much more attention to the news and rumours and was generally better at talking to people and listening to them. “The rest of Saxony plus Thuringia, Halle-Merseburg, Anhalt and Magdeburg are being handed over to the Russians. This is because of a deal between Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin last winter. The Russian zone of occupation is increasing in size by at least a third today!”

“But why? Why would the Americans do that?”

“I hear that during the war the Allies were worried the Russians would push much further west than they ultimately did, and that they thought that they had actually got the better deal, that the Russians would have to give up some of their gains, rather than the other way around. But then Dönitz let the western front collapse. Clever man. There wasn’t much fighting here, was there? The Americans more or less just walked in, right?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I can tell you, it wasn’t that way in the east. ‘No surrender to the Bolshevik Hordes’ was our motto!”

We jumped in alarm as the American trucks made loud backfiring noises. They were starting up and getting in gear. One of the Black soldiers waved in our direction, although possibly not at me specifically as there was a cluster of children with us on the east bank watching. The trucks backfired some more, belched dark grey smoke and then slowly rumbled off to the west. We could still hear them for a long while and we watched, straining our eyes, as their plumes of dust and smoke became smaller and smaller. The Russian squad in the meantime placed their flags on the far side of the bridge and then stood sentry as a column of their trucks, as well as a few tanks, drove across before splitting into two groups, one following the now vanished Americans and the other heading north, towards Schönbach, Grimma and presumably points beyond. Our little group watched this too, heads swivelling silently back and forth. Then all was quiet again, but for the murmur of the river below and the chirp of an unidentified bird in a nearby shrub.

“What will happen now, Theodor?”

“I don’t know. I suppose I don’t have to swim anymore, but now with the Russians over there it may not be any better there for food anyway.”

“Yes, it will be. I know a place.”

Chapter Thirty-Three

Summer 1945

I expected more warnings from Mama about going into the forest, but in fact it was Theodor who cautioned me about the possibility of unexploded munitions or grisly remains. Mama was curiously flat in her emotions and said very little to us. I know that she cried a lot in the days after the letter from Papa, but it was as if those tears had drained all the feeling from her, emptying her and hollowing her. She had an unfocused way of looking and slowness of response that reminded me of the armless old soldier, one of the elderly Volkssturm recruits, I had seen in the market. Mama’s pregnancy was also slowing her down and making her tired. She spent a lot of time in the bedroom. Theodor was good with Clara, Johann and Oskar, so this gave