Skeletons at the Feast Read Online Free PDF Page A

they had only been away on a holiday.
    Anna presumed that her mother had been disabused of this notion by now, as they trekked through the snow in the woods and away from the caravan of refugees, trying to catch up to Helmut.
    But perhaps not. This was a woman, after all, who had always maintained a completely illogic faith in her fuhrer and a naive ability to compartmentalize what she deemed his good and his bad attributes. Back in 1940, Anna recalled, the very summer when Jewish friends of her parents from Danzig would appear, homeless, on their doorstep, Mutti had insisted on hanging in the parlor the signed, framed photo she owned of Hitler. They had taken the Jewish family in without a moment's hesitation, and Mutti had seen no inconsistency in celebrating the fuhrer and offering shelter to her friends. Even now, after Soviet shells had pummeled her brother's estate a mere twenty-five kilometers farther east, she could still sound like a star-struck little girl when she talked of Hitler's blue eyes, or the entire afternoon she had spent on the Schlossplatz in 1940 because the man was staying at the Hotel Bellevue and she was hoping to steal a glance of him. She hadn't been alone. There had been very big crowds that day--including Mutti and her sister-in-law and some other women from the corner of Poland that, thanks to Hitler, recently had been returned to Germany--and they hadn't been disappointed. They had gotten to stand within yards of their leader when he had walked from the hotel to the Cafe Weber; they had, as one, thanked him for reuniting them with their country.
    This was why Mutti still seemed to expect a miracle from her fuhrer. The estate, Kaminheim, on which she had grown up as a little girl had always been a part of Germany and she had viewed herself as a German. Then, in 1919, it was on land ceded to Poland and she was supposed to become a Pole. All the Germans there were. Or they could relocate. But her family wasn't about to leave Kaminheim. There was no place else for them to go, nothing else for them to do. They grew sugar beets. It was what they did. And so, with the signing of a treaty in a palace outside of Paris, she went from being the daughter of Prussian farming gentry to a disliked little foreigner. A minority. An alien. A part of a discredited nobility. Initially, like most Prussians, Mutti's parents--Anna's grandparents--had thought this Hitler character was decidedly low-rent. There were rumors that he'd once been a paperhanger, that he'd painted bad still lifes and tried to sell them on the street. The man might not even have been completely sane. But then he got people working again and he built those highways. Gave Germans back their pride. And then, best of all, he gave them back Prussia. All of Prussia. Not just a kidney-shaped patch of earth surrounding Danzig, separated from the rest of Germany by a vast tract of Poland. Sadly, Mutti's parents died before the reunification in 1939. For most of the war, Mutti had lamented that her mother and father hadn't lived to see the return of their precious Kaminheim to Germany; now, however, Anna wondered if Mutti wasn't relieved on some level that neither had they been forced to witness their treasured land occupied by what her mother considered the savages from the east.
    Finally, between the explosions and the pathetic cries of a little boy calling out not for food but for a lost dog named after food ("I want Spaetzle, Mommy! Please, please, we can't go on without Spaetzle!"), over the sound of the birdsong--still, somehow, there were birds--she heard Helmut yelling their names and high-stepping his way toward them through the snow. It sounded as if he had found another spot on the river where the ice seemed thick enough for their horses and wagons.
    "Are there other people there?" their father asked him.
    "Yes, but not many. Not yet."
    He said the spot was no more than fifteen minutes farther. There was a steep hill just ahead and it might