At first our bites are modest, as though we’re not being forced to eat it all, as though we could refuse this food, this meal that isn’t intended for us, that is ours only by chance, of which only by chance we’re worthy of partaking. But then it glides down our throats, reaching that pit in our stomachs, and the more it fills that pit, the bigger the pit grows, and the more tightly we clutch our forks. The apple strudel is so good that tears spring to my eyes, so good that I scoop bigger and bigger helpings into my mouth, wolfing them down until I throw back my head and gasp for air, all in the presence of my enemies.
MY MOTHER USED to say eating was a way of battling death. She said it even before Hitler, back when I went to elementary school at Braunsteinstraβe 10 in Berlin. She would tie a bow on my pinafore and hand me my schoolbag and remind me to be careful not to choke during lunch. At home I had the bad habit of talking nonstop, even with my mouth full. You talk too much, she would tell me, and then I actually would choke on my food because it made me laugh, her tragic tone, her attempts to raise me with a fear of dying, as if every act of living exposed us to mortal danger—life was perilous, the whole world lay in ambush.
WHEN THE MEAL was over, two SS guards stepped forward. The woman on my left rose from her chair.
“Sit down! In your place!”
The woman fell back into her seat as though they had shoved her into it. One of the two braids coiled at the sides of her head loosened from its hairpin, dangling slightly.
“None of you have permission to stand up. You will remain here, seated at the table, until further orders. If the food was contaminated, the poison will quickly enter your circulation.” The SS guard scrutinized us one by one, examining our reactions. We didn’t breathe. Then he turned back to the woman who had stood up. She wore a dirndl, so perhaps she had risen out of deference. “Don’t worry, an hour will be enough,” he told her. “In an hour’s time you’ll all be free to go.”
“Or dead,” remarked his comrade.
I felt my rib cage constrict. The girl with blotchy skin buried her face in her hands, muffling her sobs.
“Stop it,” hissed the brunette sitting beside her, but by then the other women were also crying, in tears like sated crocodiles—perhaps an effect of their digestion.
In a low voice I said, “May I ask your name?” The blotchy-faced girl didn’t realize I was talking to her. I reached out, touched her wrist. She flinched, looked at me dumbly. All her capillaries had burst. “What’s your name?” I whispered again.
Unsure whether she had permission to speak, the girl looked over at the guards in the corner, but they were distracted. It was almost noon and they may have been getting hungry themselves, because they didn’t seem to be paying attention to us, so she whispered, “Leni, Leni Winter?” She said it as though it were a question, but that was her name.
“Leni, I’m Rosa,” I told her. “We’ll be going home soon, you’ll see.”
Leni was little more than a child—you could tell by her pudgy knuckles. She had the looks of a girl who’d never been touched in a barn, not even during the weary languor after a harvest.
IN ’38, AFTER my brother Franz moved away, Gregor brought me here to Gross-Partsch to meet his parents. They’re going to love you, he told me, proud of the Berliner secretary whose heart he had won and who was now engaged to the boss, like in the movies.
I enjoyed it, that trip east in the sidecar. “Let us ride into the eastern lands,” went the song. They would play it over the loudspeakers, and not only on April 20. Every day was Hitler’s birthday.
For the first time, I took the ferry and left town with a man. Herta put me up in her son’s room and sent him upstairs to sleep in the attic. When his parents had gone to bed, Gregor opened the door and slipped under my covers. No, I whispered, not here. Then come to the barn, he said. My eyes misted over. I can’t. What if your mother were to discover us?
We had never made love. I had never made love to anyone.
Gregor slowly stroked my lips, tracing their edges. Then he pressed his fingertip more firmly and more firmly still until he’d bared my teeth, coaxed them open, slipped in two fingers. They felt dry against my tongue. I could have snapped my jaw shut, bitten him. That hadn’t even occurred to Gregor. He had always trusted me.
Later that night I couldn’t resist. I went up to the attic and this time it was me who opened the door. Gregor was sleeping. I brought my parted lips close to his, let our breaths mingle, and he woke up. Wanted to find out what I smell like in my sleep, did you? he asked with a smile. I slid one, then two, then three fingers into his mouth, felt it water up, his saliva wetting my skin. This was love: a mouth that doesn’t bite, or the opportunity to unexpectedly attack the other like a dog that turns against its master.
I was wearing a red beaded necklace when, during the ferry ride home, he clasped my neck. It had finally happened not in his parents’ barn, but in a windowless ship cabin.
“I NEED TO get out of here,” Leni murmured.
“Shh …” I stroked Leni’s wrist. This time she didn’t flinch. “Only twenty minutes left. It’s almost over.”
“I need to get out of here,” she insisted.
The brunette beside her had angular cheekbones, glossy hair, a harshness in her eye. “You just can’t keep quiet, can you?” she said, wrenching Leni’s shoulder.
“Leave her alone!” I said, almost shouting.
The SS guards turned toward me. “What’s going on?”
All the women turned toward me.
“Please …,” Leni said.
One of the guards walked over to her. He clamped his hand on Leni’s arm and hissed something into her ear. I couldn’t hear what it was but it made her face twist grotesquely.
“Is she ill?” another guard asked.
The woman in the dirndl jumped up from her chair again. “The poison!”
The other women also shot to their feet when Leni began to retch. The SS guard stepped aside just in time as Leni vomited on the floor.
The guards rushed out, screamed for the kitchen staff, interrogated the chef—the Führer was right, the British were trying to poison him!—some of the women clung to one another, others sobbed against the wall, the brunette paced back and forth with her hands on her hips, making a strange sound with her nose. I went over to Leni and held her head.
All the women were clutching their bellies, but not from spasms—they had sated their hunger and weren’t used to it.
THEY KEPT US there far longer than an hour. After the floor had been wiped clean with newspapers and a damp cloth, an acrid stench hung in the air. Leni didn’t die, she simply stopped trembling. Then she dozed off at the table, her hand in mine and her cheek resting on her arm, a little girl. My stomach tensed and churned, but I was too exhausted to fret about it.
When it was clear there was no longer cause for alarm, the guards woke Leni and led us single-file to the bus that would take us home. My stomach no longer protested; it had allowed itself to be occupied. My body had absorbed the Führer’s food, the Führer’s food was circulating in my bloodstream.
Hitler was safe.
I was hungry again.