Hitler's Daughter

curls.

‘What happened to your face, girl?’ she demanded, as soon as she saw Heidi. ‘A burn? Is that what it is? The bombs?’

‘I was born with it,’ said Heidi quietly.

Frau Leib’s great arms came round her and she hugged her to her apron, which had just the faintest smell of pig. ‘You poor darling,’ she said. ‘I will give you some ointment. It’s pig lard, with chickweed and other herbs. It is my grandmother’s recipe and she got it from her mother, so it is very good. It takes scars like that away so fast you’d think the boar was after them to get its fat back!’

‘Thank you,’ said Heidi, as she was released from the apron, though she knew the ointment wouldn’t do any good. If there had been a way to remove the mark Duffi would have arranged it years before.

But there were some questions even Frau Leib knew not to ask. Whoever had organised the house for them had made it clear that Fraulein Gelber—and Heidi—were people of importance. Their clothes, their food, their lack of ration cards, the guard, the provisions that arrived for them every second Monday were proof enough of that.

But even if Frau Leib didn’t ask questions, she still liked to talk.

‘Listen to the frogs in the pond!’ said Frau Leib, her fat fingers firm around the knife handle as she chopped through thick bacon while Heidi peeled the potatoes for the soup. (Heidi had never had bacon before—Duffi didn’t like people to eat meat. But they ate it now.) ‘If the frogs croak like that at night it will rain in the morning.’

‘Are there fish in the pond?’ asked Heidi. She was allowed in the kitchen often now to help Frau Leib. Together they made the beds, and dusted too.

‘Just the frogs,’ said Frau Leib.

Frau Leib had five children: ‘Lisl, oh, I had such a hard time having her,’ said Frau Leib. But at that Frau Leib halted a while, as though she had remembered how young her listener was. And there were Franz and Josef and Helmuth and Erna.

She also had two grandsons who worked the farm, and another two who were only babies, too young to help at all.

‘But oh, we need the help,’ said Frau Leib, shaking her head so her chins wobbled but her metal curls stayed firm. ‘All the fine strong men are in the army, and just old men and boys to help us now.’

If the farm had been bigger, she explained, the boys—her sons—might have been given a deferment from the army, so they could help the Fuhrer by growing food for the soldiers of the Reich.

‘Of course, they are proud to be fighting too,’ said Frau Leib hurriedly, with a sideways look at Heidi. ‘We all have to do what we can.’

Several times Heidi noticed Frau Leib slip a little flour or a twist of sugar into the pocket of her coat that was hung by the back door when she came to work. But Heidi did not speak of it. She and Fraulein Gelber had more than they needed, and she now knew from Frau Leib that most people were going hungry, even here in the country with the cows and goats and pigs.

Frau Leib took their scraps to feed to the hens, and the dishwater to feed to the pigs. ‘It will just go to waste else,’ said Frau Leib reasonably, as she slipped a piece of leftover sausage into the hens’ bin that they could very well have had for lunch the next day.

‘Could we keep hens?’ Heidi asked Fraulein Gelber.

Fraulein Gelber shook her head. ‘They are dirty things,’ she said. ‘Besides, Frau Leib will sell us all the eggs we need.’

It was funny with Frau Leib in the kitchen. No one had ever talked to Heidi so freely before. Sometimes Heidi thought that Frau Leib wasn’t talking to her, but was just talking because she was uncomfortable when her mouth was still.

Did Frau Leib talk even when she was walking home by herself? she wondered. Did she talk to the starlings and the thrushes and the blackbirds perhaps…But it was good to listen to Frau Leib’s conversation. There was so much to learn that no one had ever mentioned to her before.

‘…and the blacksmith keeps the cows shod—oh yes, the cows must have shoes just like the horses if they are to work—and the scythes whetted…You have never seen the blacksmith work? But all the children hang around the forge after school! The banging and the clanging and the hot fire…you must come down this afternoon then… but perhaps not,’ said Frau Leib, pushing the broom and remembering.

‘It’s the fat that makes a good pig,’ explained Frau Leib one day, as she worked the pastry on the thick marble board. ‘The fat not only gives flavour, you understand, it helps the meat keep well. A sausage without fat is tasteless, but it also dries out, and sometimes goes bad. But not all food will put fat on a pig of course. Fat produces fat—that’s what you have to remember. Corn is good, because corn is yellow like fat is yellow.

‘And you want to know a secret?’ asked Frau Leib, her red hands bashing the bread dough. ‘You want to know why in all these years our cows have never lost a calf? Never!’

‘Please,’ said Heidi, though she knew by now there was no need to say anything to keep Frau Leib talking.

‘The secret is beer!’ said Frau Leib triumphantly, giving her dough an extra good push. ‘You give the cow a good drink of beer as soon as it has calves, and it makes the milk flow and makes her mellow, you understand, so she looks after her calf better. A good bucket of beer, that’s what you need…’

‘I have brought you a present,’ Frau Leib said one day, as she took off her hat and gloves and coat and hung them on the peg by the door.

‘What is it?’ demanded Heidi.

Frau Leib smiled. ‘It’s in my coat pocket.’

Heidi peered into the pocket. There was something in the bottom; something small and warm.

‘A rabbit!’ she cried, lifting it out. The rabbit was soft and black and white and twitched its nose.

‘It’s a doe,’ said Frau Leib, smiling. ‘When she gets bigger you can breed it to our buck and then you’ll have lots of rabbits, and I’ll show you how to make rabbit pie.’

‘Look at its whiskers!’ cried Heidi delighted. ‘Thank you, Frau Leib!’

‘You’re a good girl,’ said Frau Leib, and Heidi knew it wasn’t because she was polite, or helped make the beds, but because she had said nothing about the things in Frau Leib’s pockets.

Heidi helped Frau Leib in the mornings, and often in the afternoons now as well. Fraulein Gelber had arranged all the schoolbooks in the third bedroom, but she no longer seemed as interested in lessons as she was before.

She didn’t even make Heidi read pages from Duffi’s book. She read her letters from home over and over, and several times Heidi found her crying. But now she wouldn’t explain why.

Fraulein Gelber still liked to walk, and they did walk once a day, but not along the lane: ‘In case someone sees us and asks questions,’ said Fraulein Gelber. They walked across the fields instead.

The fields had belonged to their house. Frau Leib’s husband worked them now. They walked across the Leibs’ fields too. There was a wood not far away and once they saw a deer, grazing delicately by the edge of the trees, and once a wild pig, a ‘wildschwein’.

The wildschwein did not look at all like Frau Leib’s pigs. It was black and hairy with big shoulders and a tiny back and even its snout was crooked. It stared at them with tiny eyes, and then it ran away.

Heidi asked Fraulein Gelber why the wild pig was so different from Frau Leib’s pigs, but Fraulein Gelber couldn’t say. ‘It’s just the way things are,’ she said.

There were wild mushrooms in the fields in autumn and the leaves in the wood fluttered like yellow butterflies and stuck to Heidi’s shoes. Frau Leib made mushroom omelette as a treat, because even for them, eggs were getting scarce.

Sometimes city women came out and tried to trade things, like a cushion or a good saucepan, for an egg. Or even jewellery for a ham.

Frau Leib told Heidi all about the city women, but she didn’t say whether she traded with them or not. It was illegal to trade food. Everything was rationed; but Heidi suspected that she did, even if Herr Leib didn’t know.

One day when she and Fraulein Gelber were out in the fields, a plane flew down so low she could see the pilot’s face, or rather, his helmet, which mostly hid his face. All she could really see were his mouth and chin, white below the brown helmet.

She almost wanted to wave, he was so close. If she’d yelled ‘Hello’ he might even have heard her above the