Hitler's Daughter (3 page)

It was only a story, Mark told himself that night after dinner. Just a story, nothing more. It wasn’t true—but there were true things in it.

Maybe that’s what puzzled him, Mark decided. None of Anna’s other stories had had true things in them before.

The creek bubbled and twisted, brown and muddy in the growing dark just like the thoughts inside him. Mark could see it from the lounge room window, and from his bedroom. You could even smell it from the house: year-old wombat droppings and cow shush, and rotten leaves and bark, all brewed up together like that herbal tea stuff Mum sometimes drank and Dad would never touch.

When he was younger Mark used to watch the floods and wonder what it would be like to float
down them on a raft. He’d float right out to sea perhaps and then along the coast, or maybe out to an island with palm trees and white sand.

But of course any raft would be torn to bits in the flood. You’d be drowned in a whirlpool or snagged by a log. It was fun to pretend though. Sometimes pretending could feel real.

And some of Anna’s story
was
real. The bits about Hitler, and the Jews.

‘Dad?’

‘Mmm?’ Dad didn’t quite look up from the pamphlet he was reading about a new cattle drench. ‘Mark, if it’s trigonometry, ask your mum. You know what I’m like at maths.’

‘No, it’s not homework. I was just wondering.’

‘Just let me finish this bit will you…wondering what?’

‘Why Hitler was so down on the Jews,’ said Mark in a rush.

Dad blinked and put the pamphlet down. ‘What brought this on?’

‘Oh, just something at school,’ said Mark. Which was true in a way, he reflected.

‘No idea,’ said Dad, glancing down at his pamphlet again then looking dutifully back up at Mark. ‘How about asking Mrs Holster at school?’

Mrs Holster was the school librarian.

‘Okay,’ said Mark, disappointed.

Dad looked at him a bit helplessly. ‘It wasn’t just the Jews he killed,’ he said. ‘It was anyone who disagreed with him, too. That all you wanted to know?’

Mark shook his head, thinking. ‘Dad?’

‘Yes?’ asked Dad, a bit warily.

‘If you were Hitler…’

‘If I was
who
?’ Dad began to laugh.

‘No, Dad, I’m serious. If you did things like Hitler did—really bad things—what do you think I should do?’

Dad looked at him more sharply. ‘You mean, should you go along with me because I’m your father, no matter what?’

‘Yeah, that’s about it,’ said Mark.

‘I don’t know,’ said Dad slowly. He put his paper down, as though for once he was seriously trying to answer Mark’s question. ‘I suppose I’d want you to do what you thought was right.

‘But…’ Dad hesitated, then went on. ‘If we do ever disagree about things, I hope we’ll still be able to talk about it. Still meet and be a family, no matter how much we argue.’

‘Okay,’ said Mark.

‘Does that answer your question?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Mark truthfully. ‘Hey, what would you do if I was a mass murderer? You know, chopped them up with a chainsaw or something.’

‘Stop your pocket money,’ said Dad, grinning. ‘And I’ll tell you straight, kid—you murder one more person and there’ll be no television for a fortnight. And if you try burying the bodies under your mum’s roses I’ll send you to your room. And you’d better clean the blood off my good chainsaw too.’

‘No—really.’

‘Dunno,’ said Dad, serious again. ‘Try to work out why you did it. Be sad for you. Be sad for your victims. Try to get help for you. Wonder how your mother and I failed you.’

‘Would you turn me into the police?’

‘Yes,’ said Dad slowly. ‘I suppose I’d have to. That’s a hell of a question, Mark.’

‘Would you still love me? No matter what I did? Even if I killed hundreds and hundreds of people?’

‘Yes, of course we would, you dingbat. Or maybe we’d love you in a different way. What’s brought all this on anyway?’

‘Oh, nothing,’ said Mark.

The rain chattered onto the ground, and dribbled along the wet barbed wire round Harrison’s paddock till it trickled down in short ploppy streams. It seemed even louder in the bus shelter.

The cows chomped sadly at the wet grass. Today the air was still, so the rain fell straight and clear.

‘It’s never going to stop,’ said Mark. ‘It’s going to go on and on and we’ll have to get a boat to school and all the cars will float away…’

‘Really?’ asked Little Tracey, wide-eyed.

‘No, of course not really,’ said Mark. ‘Hey Anna I was wondering. Have you told anyone else this story? The Hitler one?’

‘No,’ said Anna shortly. ‘It’s just between us.’

‘Oh,’ said Mark, vaguely pleased.

‘Are you going to tell us more?’ Little Tracey bounced up and down.

‘If you like,’ said Anna.

It was soon after Heidi had asked Fräulein Gelber about the Jews that they had to move house.

‘Why do we have to go?’ asked Heidi, half scared and half excited.

Fräulein Gelber waved a letter, typewritten, with a sprawling signature at the bottom, but too quickly for Heidi to read what it said.

‘From Duffi?’ asked Heidi.

Fräulein Gelber shrugged, as though to say that all orders came eventually from Duffi, but this letter was from someone else.

‘Where will we go?’ asked Heidi.

Fräulein Gelber told her. The name meant nothing to Heidi.

‘We will look it up on the map this afternoon,’ said Fräulein Gelber. ‘It will be a nice place. You will like it.’

‘But WHY do we have to go?’

‘It will be safer there,’ said Fräulein Gelber, but she didn’t say for whom. She smiled. ‘It is much nearer my family,’ she added. ‘Only two, three hours away by bicycle.’

‘Will they visit us?’ asked Heidi eagerly.

Sometimes Fräulein Gelber had let Heidi read her mother’s letters or her sister’s, or even her brother’s, as a treat. Her father had died, many years before, and that was why Fräulein Gelber had to work. He had been a friend of Duffi’s.

But Fräulein Gelber had told her often that it was an honour to work in the Führer’s household. ‘I could have married,’ she had explained to Heidi. ‘I have had…oh, several offers. Several men have pleaded with me to marry them.’

‘Why didn’t you?’ asked Heidi, hoping that Fräulein Gelber would say, ‘I didn’t want to leave you.’

But instead she said, ‘To give up my work, after all the Führer has done for us? That I couldn’t do.’

‘I don’t think they will visit,’ said Fräulein Gelber now, in a voice that told Heidi not to ask why.

Suddenly a thought occurred to her. ‘Will Duffi be at the new house?’

Perhaps that was why they were going, so they could be with Duffi. Maybe Duffi missed her. Maybe he had said…

‘No, of course not,’ said Fräulein Gelber. ‘He is in Berlin.’

‘But will he visit?’

‘
Vielleicht
. Perhaps,’ said Fräulein Gelber.

Other people packed for them. Heidi only had to pack her dolls and her special books.

Half of her wanted to leave the dolls behind—the pretty, perfect dolls—but Duffi had given them to her and, besides, she’d have had to explain to Fräulein Gelber.

They travelled to the new house by car the next day. Their move must have been arranged even before Fräulein Gelber had been told.

Three soldiers came to help them.

One of the soldiers drove their car, another rode behind on a motorbike, and the other drove the car with their luggage.

Fräulein Gelber didn’t know how to drive—most women didn’t know how to drive back then, and anyway, the guards were to look after them and make sure nothing happened to them on the way.

It was only an hour’s journey, but it was the first time Heidi had ever been in a car. (No, there had been one time before, when Duffi had taken her for a drive. He had pointed out a lake and geese and made her laugh by making the goose noise, but that was so very long ago it was hard to remember.)

She had never been so far before. There was so much that was new to see: the fields that were much like the fields she knew, but yet different, and pale
brown cows, and once, a pair of goats in an orchard. The goats had climbed up onto a table and were stretching up to eat the trees, and Heidi laughed and pointed them out to Fräulein Gelber.

She would have liked to ask the soldier to stop the car so she could watch the goats, but she had been told already that she was not to talk to him.

No one said why she had to be silent, but she guessed. The driver was not to know who she was.

Suddenly there was a humming, far up in the sky, like bees in the plum blossom, but too sharp to be bees. The humming deepened, closer and closer, and then engines could be heard.

The driver glanced at Fräulein Gelber, then pulled the car in under a tree, so they couldn’t be seen from the air. The car behind pulled in close to the hedge, and so did the motorbike driver.

‘Bomber,’ said the driver briefly.

The enemy plane seemed to come slowly, slowly, slowly; then suddenly the plane was almost above them, and coming fast.

‘Perhaps we should get out and lie on the ground, just in case they see the car,’ said Fräulein Gelber nervously.

‘Too late,’ said the driver. ‘They’d see us move.’

Heidi craned to get a better look out the window.

Would they hear the sound of a bomb falling before it hit their car and killed them, Heidi thought in sudden terror?

Fräulein Gelber pulled her back, as though just seeing the plane might make her more vulnerable, but Heidi caught a glimpse of it anyway, too high up to make much out, and then there was its black shadow flying across the grass beyond the trees.

How could death come so quickly over the trees? wondered Heidi. She watched the shadow till it was out of sight, and the engine noise had faded to humming again.

Fräulein Gelber took her hand. Fräulein Gelber’s hand was damp and clammy, and shaking, too. The driver started the car, and they drove off again.

More trees and fields, and once, a village, with a church at one end of the square and a cafe at the other, with no bomb damage at all that Heidi could see, except for one house on the outskirts, half ruined, and the windows filled up with cardboard instead of glass.

‘Stray bomb, probably,’ said the driver, nodding at it. ‘Sometimes they have a few spare that they haven’t dropped on targets and they drop them anywhere, so that they don’t use up so much fuel carrying them back home.’

Home was England. England was the enemy. Sometimes Heidi wondered what it must be like to be English. Were they evil people or just stupid? How could they possibly win against all of Germany, against Duffi. It was such a little island on the map.

The road twisted out of the village, past a farm, and then another, with pigs rolling in the fresh black mud, and then down another road, past two ancient oak trees like giant dark umbrellas across the road, and they were there.

The new house was small, or at least it seemed so to Heidi after the big house where she’d lived before. It crouched under the trees like it, too, was hiding from the bombs.

But it had three bedrooms upstairs (narrow twisting wooden stairs): one bedroom was for Heidi and one was for Fräulein Gelber. The third was to be their schoolroom, where all their books would go. It had a big kitchen with a cold, paved floor and an even bigger cellar that you got to by going out the kitchen door and down some steps.

Fräulein Gelber inspected the cellar thoroughly. She didn’t say why, but Heidi knew that the cellar was where they would go if enemy planes flew overhead. Bombs might crush the house, but the cellar would be safe.

The cellar smelled sweet and musty. It had bins of apples stored in old dried leaves, and shelves with jars of jam and sauerkraut and honey, and cabbages all in a pile and two sacks of potatoes with just a few taken out of one, and a sack of golden onions, their skins floating off like yellow autumn leaves.

‘Where are the people who lived here before?’ asked Heidi, but Fräulein Gelber couldn’t say.

‘That’s none of our business,’ she said, though Heidi thought it was. It seemed odd to be wandering through rooms that other people had lived in not long ago eating their onions and plum jam, and then not even to know what they’d been like or where they were now.

Only Heidi and Fräulein Gelber were to live in the house. Sergeant Amchell lived in the barn.

He was old, with a long salt and pepper moustache that looked like it would fall out if he blew his nose too hard. He had been wounded in the leg in the last war, so he limped just like Heidi.

She hoped he’d notice that she limped, too, and maybe joke about it—the two of them with only two good legs between them—or something friendly like that, but he kept to himself and tended the giant cabbages in the garden instead of standing to attention at the door like the other guards she’d known. Mostly
he pretended he didn’t see her when she smiled at him, or hear her when she said ‘
Guten Morgen
’.

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.