piles for medical books.
Mutti hurried to me. “I found rose-scented soap…and a toaster.”
“Don’t you worry about Father, Mutti? He’s going to be denounced. I can feel it.”
Though my parents were both products of German blood and could trace their pure German ancestry back to 1750, my father could not hide his lack of enthusiasm for the Party. He still put his traditional striped German flag in our front window next to Mutti’s new red Party one, though Mutti was always moving his to a side window. No one noticed it in the sea of swastikaed flags hung outside every building, but it was only a matter of time before someone turned him in.
“Ja, feind hirt mitt, Herta,” Mutti said. The enemy is listening.
She pulled me closer. “Don’t worry about that, Kleine Kuh. Focus on work.”
“I’m allowed only dermatology—”
Mutti pressed her fingers into my forearm. “Stop it. You’ll be working with the best and brightest soon. You can go all the way.”
“Someone needs to rein Father in.”
Mutti turned away. “What will people say if we have these things in our home?” she said, shaking her head at the toaster in her hand.
We paid for the items we’d chosen: the toaster, the scrapbook, the paintings, and a mink stole with the glass-eyed heads still attached, a luxury item Mutti was willing to risk lice for. The soldiers threw in a doctor’s framed diploma Mutti said she’d use to display her Aryan blood certificate and some canvas running shoes for me. All for only ten marks. We seldom had bread to toast, and Mutti could not afford to go anywhere she could wear such a mink, but the smile on her face made it all worthwhile.
—
I WAS HAPPY TO HAVE those new running shoes for a sleepaway trip I was chaperoning the next week at Camp Blossom, a camp situated in a pine forest half a day’s train ride north of Düsseldorf. It was run by the Belief and Beauty Society, which was affiliated with the BDM, the Bund Deutscher Mädel or the League of German Girls, the female wing of the Nazi Party youth movement. The Belief and Beauty Society was for older girls only, to prepare them for domestic life and motherhood. This sleepaway trip was intended to transition the younger ones into the organization, and my job as unit leader was to look after the girls in my cabin—not an easy job.
Unit leaders received day assignments, and I was sent to the craft hut, a blatant mismatch, since I considered painting amateurish watercolors and weaving gimp lanyards a complete waste of time. Plus, my considerable talents lay outside the art world. With my extensive medical training, I should have been running the camp health clinic, but one serves where one is needed. At least the hut looked out over the lake, which reflected the reds and oranges of the trees surrounding it.
Pippi, another girl assigned to work the craft hut, joined me there one afternoon. I’d known Pippi since we’d both joined BDM, and though she was a few years younger than I, we were good friends, well on our way to being best friends, something every other girl seemed to have. Pippi and I had done everything in BDM together. Earned our badges and leadership cords. Taken turns carrying the flag in at meetings. At the camp we shared meals and even tidied up the worktables in the craft hut together.
“Let’s hurry,” I said. “It’s about to rain.”
Pippi took the scissors from the tables and plunked them into the metal cans around the room. She was terribly slow about it.
She nodded out the window. “Look who’s waiting.”
At the edge of the woods, two boys stood, one blond, one dark-haired, next to a rowboat pulled up onshore, a deep rut in the sand behind it. I recognized them, unit leaders from the adjacent boys’ camp, dressed in camp uniform khaki shirts and shorts. They were part of the boat crew. Handsome boys, of course. No camper of low racial value was allowed at any German youth camp, so everyone was attractive, guaranteed to be racially pure. There’d been no need to measure our heads and noses with calipers and craniometers. We’d all submitted pure genetic histories.
They fiddled with the boat’s oarlocks, taking glances back at the craft hut.
“You know what those boys want, Pippi.”
Pippi checked her face in the mirror above the sink. Next to it a poster fixed to the wall with tacks read: REMEMBER YOU ARE GERMAN! KEEP