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Prairie Schooner 77.4 (2003) 134-148



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Easter 1943

Jenna Blum


in the Obersturmführer's car

Anna has never given much thought to the Obersturmführer's mode of transport to and from KZ Buchenwald. In her mind, he simply appears in die Bäckerei: not there one moment and demanding all attention the next. If forced to conjecture, she would speculate that he drops out of the clouds, ejected from the doors of some dark carriage, or that he materializes from the ground itself, like an emissary from the brothers Grimm.

In actuality, his chariot is a Mercedes, a sleek black staff car that seems to Anna to be as long as the bakery's front room. Its ornaments gleam even in the muted light of this overcast April morning; two Nazi flags flutter on the hood. As the Obersturmführer hands Anna into the cave of the back seat, she allows herself the small pleasure of inhaling the smell of well-cared-for leather, boot polish, and cigarette smoke. She thinks for a moment of her father Gerhard.

Then the Obersturmführer lowers himself in beside her with a grunt, the leather squeaking under his weight. The young driver closes Anna's door and races around to attend to the Obersturmführer. Anna can't see his hair beneath the peaked uniform cap, but his face has the naked, lashless look of the redhead. Anna wonders whether he was driving that first afternoon a year ago, when the Obersturmführer came to interrogate her as to whether she had been feeding the prisoners at the camp quarry. Has the driver been idling within this steel cocoon throughout subsequent evenings, smoking and peering at the bakery windows, picturing his master's activities inside? He looks through the windshield, expressionless, but she thinks she's glimpsed a gleam of prurient interest. She stares with hatred at the vulnerable hollow between the tendons of his neck, just below the skull.

The driver starts the engine and maneuvers the staff car around [End Page 134] the holes in the road. Anna turns to watch the bakery's thick gray walls and darkened storefront recede from view. For a moment she's terrified. Then they are passing the villas on the outskirts of the city, and Anna cranes at her neighbor's houses: like die Bäckerei, they are in glum disrepair. The Weisbadens' home looks as though it hasn't been inhabited for months; starlings swoop in and out of a nest beneath the eaves. Anna is seized by the sudden certainty that the townsfolk have all been evacuated, that she and the Obersturmführer and the driver are the only people left in Germany. She begins to feel carsick.

The Obersturmführer pays little attention to her. He is in something of a temper. His briefcase acting as a surrogate desk on his knees, he shuffles through documents, tossing some aside and scratching his signature on others so viciously that the nib of his pen tears the paper. He purses his lips, emitting pfffffts of irritation. He glares through the side window, then pinches the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. He mutters phrases under his breath. He unbuttons his uniform tunic and shrugs it off. Then he swears.

Look at this, he says.

Anna isn't certain whether he's addressing her or the driver, but she looks anyway: one of the Obersturmführer's shirt cuffs bears a brown scorchmark.

It's a disgrace, the Obersturmführer says. After I was assured by the Brauns that she possessed impeccable credentials. What kind of laundress can't even handle an iron? What do you think, Karl?

I don't know, sir, the driver says. His voice is surprisingly froggy.

I think she falsified her papers, that's what, the Obersturmführer says. I think she was a Jew. A Jewish laundress who can't iron a shirt - the joke's on me, eh, Karl?

I suppose so, sir, the driver says.

The Obersturmführer raises his cuff to eye level, squinting at it.

Jew or...

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