I see myself in the train station window. I have the kind of looks that just fit in, dishwater hair that whitens with the summer sun, pale blue eyes. Once my plainness bothered me; here it is a benefit. The two other station workers, the ticket girl and the man at the kiosk, come and then go home each night, hardly speaking to me. The travelers pass through the station with the daily edition of Der Stürmer tucked under their arms, grinding cigarettes into the floor, not caring who I am or where I came from. Though lonely, I need it that way. I cannot answer questions about the past.
No, they do not notice me. I see them, though, the soldiers on
leave and the mothers and wives who come each day to scan the platform hopefully for a son or husband before leaving alone. You can always tell the ones who are trying to flee. They try to look normal, as if just going on vacation. But their clothes are too tight from the layers padded underneath and bags so full they threaten to burst at any second. They do not make eye contact, but hustle their children along with pale, strained faces.
The buzzing noise grows louder and more high-pitched. It is coming from the train Id heard screech in earlier, now parked on the far track. I start toward it, past the nearly empty coal bins, most of their stores long taken for troops fighting in the east. Perhaps someone has left on an engine or other machinery. I do not want to be blamed, and risk losing my job. Despite the grimness of my situation, I know it could be worseand that I am lucky to be here.
Lucky. Id heard it first from an elderly German woman who shared some herring with me on the bus to Den Hague after leaving my parents. You are the Aryan ideal, she told me between fishy lip smacks, as we wound through detours and cratered roads.
I thought she was joking; I had plain blond hair and a little stump of a nose. My body was sturdyathletic, until it had begun to soften out and grow curvy. Other than when the German had whispered soft words into my ear at night, I had always considered myself unremarkable. But now Id been told I was just right. I found myself confiding in the woman about my pregnancy and how I had been thrown out. She told me to go to Wiesbaden, and scribbled a note saying I was carrying a child of the Reich. I took it and went. It did not occur to me whether it was dangerous to go to Germany or that I should refuse. Somebody wanted children like mine. My parents would have sooner died than accepted help from the Germans. But the woman said they would give me shelter; how bad could they be? I had nowhere else to go.
I was lucky, they said again when I reached the girls home. Though Dutch, I was considered of Aryan race and my childotherwise shamed as an uneheliches Kind, conceived out of wedlockmight just be accepted into the Lebensborn program and raised by a good German family. Id spent nearly six months there, reading and helping with the housework until my stomach became too bulky. The facility, if not grand, was modern and clean, designed to deliver babies in good health to the Reich. Id gotten to know a sturdy girl called Eva who was a few months further along than me, but one night she awoke in blood and they took her to the hospital and I did not see her again. After that, I kept to myself. None of us would be there for long.
My time came on a cold October morning when I stood up from the breakfast table at the girls home and my water broke. The next eighteen hours were a blur of awful pain, punctuated by words of command, without encouragement or a soothing touch. At last, the baby had emerged with a wail and my entire body shuddered with emptiness, a machine shutting down. A strange look crossed the nurses face.
What is it? I demanded. I was not supposed to see the child. But I struggled against pain to sit upright. Whats wrong?
Everything is fine, the doctor assured. The child is healthy. His voice was perturbed, though, face stormy through thick glasses above the draped cream sheet. I leaned forward and a set of piercing coal eyes met mine.
Those eyes that were not Aryan.
I understood then the doctors distress. The child looked nothing like the perfect race. Some hidden gene, on my side or the Germans, had given him dark eyes and olive skin. He would not be accepted into the Lebensborn program.
My baby cried out, shrill and high-pitched, as though he had heard his fate and was protesting. I had reached for him through the pain. I want to hold him.
The doctor and the nurse, who had been recording details about the child on some sort of form, exchanged uneasy looks. We dont, that is, the Lebensborn program does not allow that.
I struggled to sit up. Then Ill take him and leave. It had been a bluff; I had nowhere to go. I had signed papers giving up my rights when I arrived in exchange for letting me stay, there were hospital guards... I could barely even walk. Please let me have him for a second.
Nein. The nurse shook her head emphatically, slipping from the room as I continued to plead.