A Woman of War. Mandy Robotham

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       8

       A New Confinement

      I ate breakfast the next morning in the servants’ quarters. I was introduced as Fräulein Braun’s companion, yet no one asked where I had come from, or about my life during or before the war; everyone’s history, it seemed, had been washed away by the turmoil.

      We had agreed I would see Fräulein Braun briefly each morning after breakfast, and once a week for a full check. In between, I would see her only if she needed me or had questions – this was all made clear in my first meeting with Sergeant Meier, who proudly introduced himself as I returned to my room.

      ‘And I needn’t make it clear you cannot leave the complex without Fräulein Braun,’ he added, ‘or her express permission – in writing.’

      He gave a reluctant smile, his small, neat moustache rippling, wire-rimmed glasses sitting astride a short, pointed nose, topped by oiled, cropped hair. His creeping arrogance and the way he wore his sombre SS jacket made me shiver; I had seen a hundred SS guards wielding heavy coshes, lined up before a thousand powerless women. Before the war, this man had been small and insignificant. Conflict had granted him gravitas, and he basked in it.

      ‘Given where I have come from, Sergeant, I’m under no illusions about my place here,’ I said. ‘I’m still a prisoner, engaged in slave labour, however you want to dress it.’

      ‘Very comfortable slave labour, Fräulein,’ he said without skipping a beat. ‘Just remember that. And your family. Good day.’

      The rest of January and into February passed slowly. The house was quiet, and I could only assume its chief resident was conducting the war from elsewhere. Fräulein Braun and I soon settled into a routine: I would go to her room after breakfast, enquire about her night, how the baby was moving, and if she wanted me to listen to the baby’s heartbeat. Once or twice a week I performed a full check, with her blood pressure and urine. She was healthy and there were no obvious problems.

      The weather was bitterly cold, but on clear days the views were spectacular across the wide valleys below the house, and I was itching to venture further afield. Strangely, though, I never once thought of talking my way past the guards and out into the world. At times, it didn’t feel like a prison; I was treated with respect by Fräulein Braun, engaged in conversation with the other servants, and was tolerated by Frau Grunders. It was the constant spectre of my family’s future that kept me in check. If there was the tiniest chance that my compliance would allow even one of them to survive, it was a small price to pay.

      I spent hours wrapped in my blanket in the corner of the wide, stone terrace attached to the main house, drinking in the winter sun and reading. On still days, the space was dotted with tables and striped sun umbrellas, giving it the feeling of a hidden and exclusive resort hotel. Fräulein Grunders had granted me blissful access to her bookshelves, and I was hungrily eating my way through volumes of German and English classics – Austen and Goethe, Dickens and Thomas Mann. The skies buzzed with small aircraft, possibly fighters, but up here, surrounded by the purest air, there was no hint of a war raging across the world; our cotton clouds bore no resemblance to the gun smoke below.

      The war, in fact, seemed a lifetime away. Aside from the young jackboots who patrolled the complex, smoking in their breaks, there was no hint of anything untoward in the world at all. They were bored and eager to chat, wearing the guns slung across their shoulders like elaborate trinkets. In the camp, we’d had scant news from the outside world – only when a new inmate had been brought in did we learn which borders had fallen, or what new countries had been occupied. There were no newspapers, nothing by which we could judge our place in the great scheme. I presumed it was intentional, since our ignorance contributed to the regime of fear, to their ability to leverage our lives, and that of our families. Anything to isolate our humanity.

      High on up in the Bavarian hills, we also seemed to be in a news black spot. I sometimes glimpsed a newspaper on Sergeant Meier’s desk and harboured a ravenous hunger for the print on its pages. But I also knew it was pure propaganda – as the daughter of a politics professor I had been taught to have a healthy disrespect for the media. ‘In the pocket of the politicos,’ was one of my father’s more familiar groans. ‘Always read between the lines, Anke. Accept nothing on face value.’ Any Nazi newspaper these days – slavishly controlled by Goebbels – was more fiction than fact.

      In the servants’ hall, there was a small radio set, one of the Reich’s People Receivers, but it was rarely switched on, and conversation was limited to enquiring about immediate family who weren’t away in the war, or the plentiful meal in front of us. In fact, everything about the Berghof made it seem as though the war was an elaborate figment of our imaginations: the quality of the furnishings, the luxuries of soap, shampoo and even shoe polish, which were refreshed in my room regularly.

      Inevitably, my waist started to fill out, my ribs gaining a fleshy coating, so that I could no longer tap on them like a xylophone and produce an echo. In the mirror, I noted a subtle change in my face, a gradual colouring coming into more rounded cheeks, and my hair became thicker, acquiring a slight sheen. I looked almost healthy. It was the old Anke I saw, but not one I recognised. My outer and inner selves were at strange odds with each other.

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