her hand. She was crying. Her face was all scrunched up like a mouse’s.
Heidi approached timidly. She didn’t know what to do when someone cried.
‘Fraulein Gelber?’ she asked at last. ‘What’s the matter?’
Fraulein Gelber thrust her handkerchief back into her pocket and tried to make her face look normal. ‘It’s my brother,’ she said. ‘They’re sending him to the Russian front. Oh, Heidi, it is insane, insane. He will die there, I know he will. We can never win this war now.’
Then suddenly she looked frightened, her eyes red in her swollen face. She looked up at Heidi as though she had remembered who she was. She tried to smile.
‘I’m being so silly,’ she said. ‘Please forget I said that, Heidi. Please forget I said anything at all. I am just worried for my brother—who would not be? But of course he will come back safely. Of course Germany will win the war.’
Fraulein Gelber fumbled the letter into the pocket of her jacket. ‘It’s time for lessons,’ she said. ‘You are a very lucky girl, you know that? All these wonderful things that you’re learning.’
‘Yes,’ said Heidi. ‘I know that I’m lucky.’
Anna stopped.
‘Go on,’ said Mark after a while.
‘There was another time, another time that Heidi realised something was wrong.’
It was one of the women in the kitchen. A big woman, who came to do the scrubbing. Her bottom looked as wide as a table and she had lots of hair, bits of which stuck out in spite of being tied back.
She was crying, and the others were all comforting her.
‘I didn’t know,’ she kept saying. ‘I didn’t know. They took her away. They said it was for the best, she would be cared for.’
Frau Mundt saw Heidi listening and ran across the kitchen to her, and took her hand. ‘Freya isn’t well. Come on, I’ll take you upstairs.’
Frau Mundt led her up the stairs, away from the sobbing below.
‘Frau Mundt, what’s wrong with her?’
Frau Mundt hesitated. ‘She has just found out that her sister is dead.’
‘When did she die? In the air raids?’ Even Heidi knew about the air raids.
‘Not in the air raids. She has been dead, oh, six months maybe.’
‘I didn’t know she had a sister,’ said Heidi.
‘Her sister, she was not quite right. In the head you understand, not clever like other children. So they took her to a special school. And now Freya has found out her sister is dead. No one told them she had died, not till the family wrote to say that they would visit next month. And now she thinks they killed her sister there.’
‘Did they kill her?’ whispered Heidi.
‘No, of course not. Of course they didn’t,’ said Frau Mundt, just a bit too firmly. ‘Freya has just been listening to stories—silly stories, you know how people talk. But sometimes, sometimes things like that have to happen. It’s for the good of everyone. We cannot have weaklings in the new German race. People like Freya’s sister mustn’t be allowed to have children. It is like with the Jews.’
‘What are Jews?’ asked Heidi. The word was familiar—she’d heard it before. She’d even read it in Duffi’s book, the big, boring one that Fraulein Gelber kept on the mantelpiece and made her read a page from each day.
The book talked about the ‘Jewish problem’ but Heidi had never known quite what it meant.
Frau Mundt bit her lip. ‘You should ask Fraulein Gelber about that. But it is all nonsense what they say. Nonsense. The Jews are simply being sent to work, that’s all. The Jews are rich, everyone knows that. It’s time they were made to work. Come on now, hurry upstairs.’
Later, during their walk, she asked Fraulein Gelber: ‘Fraulein Gelber, who are the Jews?’
Fraulein Gelber scarcely hesitated in her stride. ‘The Jews are different. They are different from us. That is why the Fuhrer wants to separate them. So they can’t endanger the lifeblood of the German people, so they can’t weaken it.’
‘What happens to them?’
‘They are sent to camps. Places to work.’ She looked at her sharply. ‘Who has been telling you about the Jews?’
‘No one. Well, Frau Mundt. But she said I was to ask you.’
‘Well, I’ve told you. They are different from us. That’s why they have to be sent away.’
‘Are there any Jews near here?’
‘No, of course not. But if one did escape and come near here, the guards would catch them and send them back. There is no need to worry.’
‘I’m not worried,’ said Heidi.
Anna’s voice stopped.
‘But what happened then?’ demanded Mark. ‘Go on!’
Little Tracey nudged him. ‘The bus,’ she said. ‘Come on. The bus’s here.’
chapter five
Mark Wonders
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
‘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
