Wunderland(67)
Five-thirty, she thinks now, checking the clock by the window. It reads 4:05—barely an hour before the rest awaken. Shifting a little in her chair, she resumes:
Our first order of the day is to make our bunks and clean our rooms so that they pass the Lagerführerin’s daily inspection. You would be amazed at how neat I’ve become; I can now make perfect hospital corners and tuck a sheet so tightly that a Pfennig will bounce off it. Since a significant part of our mission here is to impart German cleanliness and order to our German farming households, Lagerführerin Kass insists that we ourselves model those qualities at all times.
After inspection we troop outside for flag raising, singing, and exercise (all of which I know you’d loathe, particularly at that hour). Then it’s time for breakfast, by which point we are all ravenous since we’ve already been up for nearly two hours. We all line up in the kitchen and are given our plates by whichever of us Service Maidens are on cooking duty that day. After eating, we divide up according to our respective assignments and work until nine. Then it’s on to our bicycles and off to our main mission: serving the Volksdeutsche of Dam-Gro?er.
For me, this has mainly meant digging potatoes. I can hear you laughing at this image, but I am quite serious: Over the past week, I’ve spent twelve to fourteen hours per day in the potato field of a Volksdeutsche family named Michalski (that even their name sounds Polish gives you a sense of how confusing this world is). My duties consist of digging holes, dropping seed potatoes into them, and then covering them back up again. Row by row. It sounds easy, but I can honestly say it’s the hardest work I’ve ever done. The soil is still cold and hard from the last snowfall, and the potatoes, though small, feel like leaden weights by midday. By sunset my back aches like that of an old woman, while my arms and legs feel like I’ve been at a daylong track meet. On top of that, my hands are so chapped and raw from working in the camp laundry this week that the mere act of gripping something—a potato, a spade, the old workhorse’s leather reins—makes them bleed.
I had a hard time getting out of bed after the first two days. It wasn’t just the physical soreness, either. It was the overwhelming dreariness of this kind of existence. Between the starkness of the field, the muddy slogging, and the ceaseless ache of my limbs, I almost couldn’t face another day of it.
But I forced myself to rise. I will admit to fighting back tears during the first hour. But then I reminded myself of the millions of good people who, for centuries and generations, have devoted their entire lives to such work. And not just to feed themselves and their families, but to feed all the rest of us too! The thought made me—a privileged city girl who is only here for a few months—feel very small and ungrateful indeed. In fact, I resolved to change my attitude immediately by forcing myself to whistle instead of weep. After a while Herr Michalski joined in with me, even adding some harmonizing chords and trills.
And Reni Renate, something strange and amazing happened after that. It wasn’t that the work became any less physically taxing, but I began to feel the most extraordinary sense of contentment. It came from a sudden, overwhelming sense of connection: not just to Herr Michalski, but to all those generations of Germans who had tilled this very land before us and—for all I know—might even be a part of it now. And for the first time, I felt as though I understood that oft-used term Blut und Boden. It is more than a slogan. It is a sacred truth: as Germans, our blood is the soil we till. And the soil is in the blood in our veins.
I can see you rolling your eyes here, in the way you always did when I talked like (as you and Franz called it) a “one-hundred-and-fifty-percent Nazi.” And in truth I must have looked idiotic even to Herr Michalski, because just as I’d had this revelation he suddenly stopped whistling and gave me a rather odd look over his shoulder.
“What is so funny, then?” he demanded.
Realizing that there was no way to explain myself in a way that wouldn’t send him scurrying for a Labor Maiden who wasn’t barking mad, I improvised. “Oh,” I said. “I was just thinking how grateful I am that our Führer gave us this opportunity to be here.”
And believe it or not, his weathered face actually lit up.
“The man is a miracle from heaven,” he said. “For all of us.”
Shifting uncomfortably in her chair, Ilse tries for a moment to reclaim the jolt of sheer joy she’d felt in the field. But while the memory of the day itself comes easily enough—the pebbly soil beneath her fingers, the hay-sweet scent and soft nicker of the swaybacked workhorse, the craggy lines of the German farmer’s face—the feeling itself seems to hover just beyond it; a luminous life raft of well-being bobbing and dancing away atop a swelling sea of revulsion and confusion.
Still (she reminds herself) she had felt it. And that, she reminds herself sternly, is why I am here. That’s what makes everything else—even what happened today—worth it.
Leaning back in her chair, she sets her pencil down and rubs her aching neck. Technically she isn’t supposed to be downstairs until six—even on days when she’s on breakfast duty. Tonight, though, after hours of tossing and turning beneath her rough-but-tightly-tucked sheet, she’d known that she had to get up, that if she spent another moment in the crowded room—with Josepha whimpering in her sleep and Susi snoring below her and Petra somnolently passing gas that smelled like beef sausage—Ilse would finally have let out such a howl of frustration that she’d have woken the entire floor.