The island was virtually a Fraueninsel, or Island of Women.
The school therefore gave me a warm welcome, and being a wind-beaten islander by birth, I blended into this world with a great ease. After a month in Amrum I had not only acquired a Frisian friend but also started to sing in that bizarre language that still resounds in my head, like a ragged flag on a rusty pole. No doubt I should donate my skull to the United Nations Museum of Extinct Languages.
Frau Baum wasn’t too happy about having another mouth to feed in the house, although I know Dad sent her a decent amount of money to cover my keep. And they certainly weren’t poor. Herr Professor Dr Baum was a high-ranking and well-paid official in the Millennial Reich. He was seldom in Friesland. One often forgets that the commotion of war generates a monstrous tangle of red tape; he rarely got a break from his rubber stamping and filing. Their home in Amrum had initially served as the family’s summerhouse, but it now seemed wiser to keep the Frau there with the children until the Germans had won the war.
British Spitfires flew over the island almost on a daily basis, making a big racket on their way to bombing Hamburg or Berlin. The boys in the village had fun counting the planes and cheered heartily if they reckoned two or three were missing on the way back. Amrum wasn’t a target, of course. It was an island outside the war zone, a natural air-raid shelter. I’d actually found a peaceful island in a continent at war, and I tried to make the most of it once I’d recovered from my collapse, although Heike and I would naturally have to wage a war against the Frau.
46
Heike and Maike
1941
We shared a bedroom, a white-plastered cave with a square porthole set deep in the wall and two mattresses on wooden legs as thick as tree trunks, and gradually Heike started to loosen her tongue. She told me about her beautiful family life before the war, on the fourth floor in Prenzlauer Berg in Berlin. Her father was a tram driver and her mother worked at night in the box office of a theatre. ‘She was far too fond of cabaret and that kind of thing, but fate punished her for not following the Führer wholeheartedly. We must all stand together.’ Yes, of course, I thought, picturing my father.
Heike briefed me on the exact meagre rations she received. Which certainly didn’t increase with my arrival. The little children got to sip skimmed milk while we were expected to drink water. And every single morsel of meat was counted. The Berlin girl knew that ‘under martial law’ everyone was entitled to a minimum amount of food. But Frau Baum would have stolen the pfennig off a dead man’s eyes. Day after day we went to bed hungry, hungry to school. But I, of course, was a wind-beaten islander, who had been reared in the food chest of Iceland and knew that the sea always carried some nourishment to shore. Heike gawked at me with big eyes when I fried the first piece of freshly fished seal for her. And finally I won her over when we secretly managed to open some shells in a boiling pot. In return I offered her a share of the native friend I had acquired on my own. Her name was Maike, blond with squinty eyes, red cheeks and a quivering laugh full of fresh sea breeze. She lived close by in a redbrick house, with her mother, grandparents and brothers. Her father was abroad, a perfect family man whose new job at the front was to drop firebombs on small English towns.
After school we would walk along the shore in search of food, Heike, Maike and I. To the north was Sylt Island, which stretched like a white streak on the steel-green sea. We wrestled against the terns (they arrived earlier there than they did at home), hunting for their delicious eggs, and ate sun-dried seaweed and even roasted some eel on a skewer. When we saw an inquisitive seal approaching, Heike dreamed of stealing Maike’s father’s rifle, while Maike had the good idea to collect driftwood. The shortage of firewood was a perpetual problem in Amrum, but to our surprise there was plenty of it floating on the white shore.
We collected it all on a tiny trolley, which we towed back to Maike’s house across the sand with great effort. There we sawed it to pieces singing this jolly refrain:
That was how I teamed up with the devil without having the faintest idea of it. On the cold periphery of the Thousand-Year Reich a little Icelandic girl was lending a hand to the cause by sawing wood to fuel the furnaces of Hitler’s machine, singing a bloodthirsty Nazi song:
Then we went from house to house and traded the wood for freshly baked bread. But when our Frau caught wind of this, she demanded to see the spoils we carried home. The fact that her tenants were being fed in another house obviously didn’t reflect too well on her housekeeping. Our first windfall went straight into her larder and only earned us half an extra slice of bread the next day.
Apart from the Tieck family, Frau Baum was the only German in the village and was disliked by the islanders. The Frisians are actually not unlike Icelanders: freethinkers and independent spirits believed to be the descendants of the Wends, fearless ocean Vikings who had sailed bravely across the globe and never counted their bread in slices. We decided to take our future spoils to Maike’s house, where we made our own larder in a small cubbyhole. This was where we headed straight after school and held feasts right until dinnertime. Bread and cheese had rarely tasted this good. But as soon as the Frau noticed our diminished appetites. she took further measures.
‘I’m not putting any food on the table for full stomachs.’
‘We just had a tiny piece of rye bread at Maike’s,’ said Heike.
‘You’ve no business eating in other people’s houses when your place is at my table. Everyone has to think for himself. This is wartime we’re living in. Besides, I think I know how you get your bread.’
‘But we get so… sometimes we’re still… left hungry here,’ Heike dared to say.
‘Everyone feels some hunger in times of war!’ Frau Baum snapped as she loomed over us, Heike and me, her three children and two heads of cabbage in a kitchen that had stunk of sour boiled cabbage since my arrival. ‘We all have to make sacrifices.’ No doubt she’d noticed that I’d glanced up at the face of the Führer as he watched over our meal from the middle of the wall, because she added: ‘For the Führer and the Fatherland.’
She then gave us a brief lecture on the German nutrition strategy. People in her house had to live frugally because our troops needed all the food they could get; it was sent to them at night in special provision carriages across the lands they had swallowed that day. Here everyone had to make sacrifices, and the Führer himself provided the best example because he had denied himself meat a long time ago and ate solely vegetables for all his meals. For the first time I felt a tinge of sympathy for this well-combed man who denied himself meat and women for the love of his adopted land. The Frau had told us previously that he had no wife because he was ‘married to Germany.’ That night I asked God to take good care of Mum, Grandad and Grandma Georgía and Grandma Vera and Dad, too, yes, and… Adolf Hitler.
I’d spent only a week in the land of war, and the Führer had already crawled into bed with me.
47
Red Lips, Black Shoes
1941
Frau Baum sniffed out our driftwood business and managed to confiscate our trolley. We therefore had to search for other shore treasures. Maike taught us how to read seagulls, and bit by bit we turned into two-legged beach rats and observed these companions of ours in the sky as they hunted for food and other goodies. And naturally they found plenty on those shores. Submarines were busy torpedoing ships, and the currents of the North Sea took care of spreading their cargoes all the way from Skagen to the south of Ostend. Once, we found a half-broken barrel of herring, and on another occasion, fifteen hundred lightbulbs that wouldn’t screw into any lamp. It was hilarious to see the birds struggling with those glistening glass pears. Our most valuable catch, though, was two wooden boxes full of shoe polish in small jars, which we transferred to Maike’s deposit and then sold on the black market, without the Frau ever finding out. She did, however, once mention at dinner how shiny the villagers’ shoes had become. We managed to suppress our grins as I answered, ‘Yes, that’s because of the feast.’