AllFreeNovel
Share Us
PROLOGUE
The authorities had given the child a new name soon after she arrived. She had lost track of how long she had been there but knew she had been nearly ten years old when they had first brought her here, because she had been looking forward to her tenth birthday party. Her mother had promised cake and games. Here, no one celebrated their birthday. No one made a cake or bought anyone a present. As a result, ages, like names, became unimportant. Survival was all that mattered. ‘You’ve been lucky,’ they told her, but she didn’t feel lucky.
Her duties were simple but relentless. At five she rose, washed her face and hands, and put on her uniform – grey serge with a grey cotton apron. Once dressed, she went to the dining hall – an echoing white room with a high ceiling and a polished floor. Its windows had been bricked up, so the time of day, or of year, had no meaning. The only light came from overhead metal light fixtures. Breakfast was laid out on a steel trolley and consisted of a small piece of bread and glass of milk. The child ate alone at a long refectory table.
After breakfast she worked down in the subterranean laundry in the basement until bedtime. Here she boiled sheets, pulling them out of the scalding water with tongs as long as her arm. After that she pushed them through a mangle, turning a large wooden handle to squeeze out the water, and hung them to air on the overhead rails. Once dry, they were ironed, folded and stored. Storing was her favourite part of the day, for she was allowed out of the steaming basement, to wander the shabby corridors, pushing a trolley of folded linen, delivering it to the wards and staff bedrooms.
The child had learned to avoid the eyes of the other inmates. Most of them were troubled; many wailed or screamed as if in pain. All were painfully thin. It upset her to see them suffering so, particularly the other children. Most swiftly disappeared. The little Jewish girl with nut-brown eyes, who had cried herself to sleep, was gone within days. She was told the child had died suddenly and had been buried in the hospital cemetery.
And so, she learned to close her mind to the suffering of others. Survival was all that mattered. She had shown herself to be willing and able, and in the end, they had let her live because ‘she was one of the lucky ones’.
At night, her subconscious took her to places that frightened her – recurrent dreams in which she was being driven through the night, and of children screaming. These nightmares always ended the same way – with her waking in the half-light, a fine sweat on her brow.
One day, something happened that reawakened some small part of her memory. She had been placing piles of folded sheets onto the shelves of the wide cupboard on the upstairs landing when through the window she had noticed a woman with golden hair standing outside the hospital, staring up at the building and weeping. The woman seemed familiar – the cast of her profile, the curl of her hair. The child placed a hand on the glass, and called out; but the woman neither heard, nor saw her. Instead, she turned away, climbed into her car, started the engine and drove off. For a moment, the child felt a rush of sadness and loss that almost overwhelmed her. But her natural sense of optimism rose to the surface. Everything would be all right, she told herself, becauseshewould survive.
PART ONE
THE PROPAGANDA WAR
1920–1933
Anyone who spreads his ideology by terror and brutality against all force will one day gain power and thereby also the right to bring down the state.
JOSEPH GOEBBELS, 1926
1
MUNICH
September 1920
Minki Sommer stood in the grand entrance hall to Munich’s Ludwig-Maximillian University, and inhaled the faint scent of furniture polish overlaid with male sweat. For a girl who had been brought up an only child, and had attended an all-girls school, her arrival at this bastion of education was both exhilarating and nerve-wracking.
Born and brought up in Augsburg, Minki was the only child of Greta and Gunther Sommer. Gunther owned a steel factory supplying raw materials for the armaments industry, and his fortunes took an upturn when Germany went to war in 1914. But tragedy had struck a year later when Minki’s mother died of cancer. Her father had buried his grief in his work and sent Minki away to a convent school.
When the war was over in 1918, Gunther was gloomy about Germany’s financial stability. ‘Our economy is totally destroyed,’ he often told his daughter. ‘If I wasn’t in steel, I don’t think I’d have survived the last four years. As it is, my business is booming.’
As was the custom at the time, Gunther expected his only daughter to care for him and their house when she left school, but Minki had other ideas.
‘I really must finish my education, Papa. I want to go to university and study English.’
‘Go to university! What a ridiculous idea. You’re a lady, and will one day marry. Until that time you should be at home looking after me.’
‘And Iwilllook after you, Papa, I promise – as soon as I get my degree. After all, it’s what Mother wanted.’
Minki’s mother had been a great beauty, and the love of her father’s life. The invocation of her name had the desired effect on her father – as it often did.
‘I wasn’t aware Greta had ever expressed a view about these things,’ he replied, looking puzzled.
‘Oh yes,’ Minki insisted, ‘Mutti often said she hoped I’d go to university.’ It was not true, of course, but Minki hoped this small lie would be swiftly forgotten. A good Catholic, she would go to confession that evening and ask for forgiveness.
Her father capitulated, but only with the proviso that she lodge with a respectable professor of his acquaintance. And so Minki had got her way – the first of many such successes, as it turned out – and found herself on the verge of a new independent life away from her controlling father’s influence.
Minki’s first term at university set the course for the rest of her student life. She worked hard, and quickly rose to the top of the class. Her fellow students were mostly men and, far from resenting her academic supremacy, they were soon under the spell of the tall, willowy blonde with turquoise eyes, and a pale, almost ethereal complexion. Although inexperienced with members of the opposite sex, Minki soon discovered she could use her looks to get her own way. Men seemed powerless to resist her. But it was her sense of humour – and especially an ability to laugh at herself – that made her irresistible to the only other female in the class.
Leila Hoffman was shorter than Minki by a head. She had long wavy dark-brown hair, worn in an untidy bun on top of her head, and kind brown eyes. No one would have described her as beautiful, but she was pretty, with a neat symmetrical face and delicate bone structure. As the two girls grew to know one another, Leila – who still lived at home with her parents – became intrigued by Minki’s upbringing, which was so different from her own.
‘How old were you when your mother died?’ Leila asked one day, as they walked through the city centre after a lecture.
