Inge’s War

Description

“An extraordinary saga.” —David Grann, New York Times bestselling author of Killers of the Flower Moon

The mesmerizing account of a granddaughter’s search for a World War II family history hidden for sixty years

Growing up in Paris as the daughter of a German mother and an Irish father, Svenja O’Donnell knew little of her family’s German past. All she knew was that her great-grandparents, grandmother, and mother had fled their home city of Königsberg near the end of World War II, never to return. But everything changed when O’Donnell traveled to the city—now known as Kaliningrad, and a part of Russia—and called her grandmother, who uncharacteristically burst into tears. “I have so much to tell you,” Inge said.

In this transporting and illuminating book, the award-winning journalist vividly reconstructs the story of Inge’s life from the rise of the Nazis through the brutal postwar years, from falling in love with a man who was sent to the Eastern Front just after she became pregnant with his child, to spearheading her family’s flight as the Red Army closed in, her young daughter in tow. Ultimately, O’Donnell uncovers the act of violence that separated Inge from the man she loved; a terrible secret hidden for more than six decades.

A captivating World War II saga, Inge’s War is also a powerful reckoning with the meaning of German identity and inherited trauma. In retracing her grandmother’s footsteps, O’Donnell not only discovers the remarkable story of a woman caught in the gears of history, but also comes face-to-face with her family’s legacy of neutrality and inaction—and offers a rare glimpse into a reality too long buried by silence and shame.Praise for Inge’s War:

“Books about World War II — and there are so, so many — tend to focus on the big names . . . Less common are books about the ordinary citizen whose life was laid waste by the war — and even less common, at least in this country, are books about the ordinary German citizen . . . Through O’Donnell’s meticulous reporting and sensitive, compelling storytelling [Inge’s War] becomes the gripping story of anyone navigating life in a war zone . . . a riveting and important story, one that focuses so tightly on Inge and her family in its level of detail — physical, temporal and emotional — that it becomes universal.” —(Minneapolis) Star-Tribune

“[The] wider-lens view of German suffering offers the book’s most compelling perspective . . . [Inge’s] life is an illustration of how women will shoulder in silence the burden of sadness bred by events beyond their control.” —The Telegraph (London)

“A wartime memoir that not only charts the survival of a family but bravely examines the inherited horrors of a conflict that scarred a nation . . . O’Donnell writes with an arresting clarity and a deep empathy for the women who are ordinarily forgotten from history; the women whose lives are destroyed by the trauma of war and silenced by the peace that comes in its aftermath.” —Irish Times

“Outstanding . . . An illuminating and highly personal family memoir . . . [O’Donnell is] an honest writer, who scrupulously avoids glamorizing or exculpating her family . . . Library shelves are packed with war stories of outstanding heroism or cruelty, but few tread the path of Inge’s War . . . O’Donnell paints a portrait of millions of unseen, unrecorded citizens.” —The Herald (Glasgow)

“Svenja O’Donnell has woven together a magnificent tale that grips the reader like a novel.” —Libération (Paris) 

“Vivid and meticulously researched . . . An incisive and multilayered account of family trauma, the dangers of nationalism and anti-Semitism, and the plight of refugees. This exceptional account transforms a private tragedy into a universal story of war and survival.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“The author, a graceful, eloquent writer, follows a trail that sometimes takes her through deeply troubling terrain, and she amply reveals the cruelty and compassion that characterize times of war. Haunting family stories that serve as a metaphor for human suffering everywhere.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) 

“Enlightening and timely . . . This compelling testimonial details the deprivations German citizens faced during the war and reveals a dark part of Danish history . . . [It] deserves a wide audience.” —Booklist (starred review)

“A story that reads like a novel filled with fascinating history and excellent detective work.” —BookPage

“Too often the most dramatic, fascinating human stories are lost to history because they are never documented. Thankfully, Svenja O’Donnell has rescued the extraordinary saga of her grandmother, a saga filled with love and betrayal and secrets, a saga that illuminates the nature of war and memory. Using her remarkable skills as a reporter and writer, O’Donnell has recorded this story so meticulously and beautifully that it will remain forever in our consciousness.” —David Grann, New York Times bestselling author of Killers of the Flower Moon and The Lost City of Z

“A lyrical, engrossing and essential read.” —Sathnam Sanghera, author of The Boy with the Topknot

“A superbly nuanced reclamation of history and family secrets.” —Brian Van Reet, author of SpoilsSvenja O’Donnell grew up in Paris with a German mother and an Irish father, before attending university in the United Kingdom. As Bloomberg‘s UK political correspondent, she was awarded the Washington-based National Press Club’s Breaking News award in 2017 for her coverage of the Brexit referendum. She has travelled all over the word for assignments and has appeared on BBC, Sky News, and France 24. She holds master’s degrees in English and art history from the University of Edinburgh.

Chapter 1  A little black album
  
There is a photograph of my grandmother, taken when she was twenty-five, which my mother first showed me when I was still a child. Dark curls tied back by a silk scarf, eyes set in a round face with high Slavic cheekbones, she was beautiful, and she knew it. Hers was a delicate prettiness that she retained throughout her life, but this picture showed something that I couldn’t quite define. Though her mouth was laughing, her eyes suggest defiance, and the wariness of a woman older than her years. By then, she was already a mother, had loved, lost, and fled her home and rebuilt her world from scratch. She was in search of a new beginning, an ordinary life, free of the upheavals and the trauma of the one she’d left behind. Looking at it again, knowing what I do now, I think of how the future must have seemed to her back then, still so young, having already lived through so much.
  
My grandmother and her husband lived in Kiel, on Germany’s North Sea coast, where my mother and her sister Conny were raised. Since we lived in Paris, my brother and I saw them only a couple of times a year. We spoke German to them and they knew no other language. Everyone referred to them as Mutti and Vati, the German for Mum and Dad. For all the motherliness of her nickname, my grandmother kept her grandchildren at a distance. She was a woman to whom criticism came more easily than praise. My mother and she weren’t particularly close. Aged eighteen, my mother had packed up her car and driven to Paris, where she had stayed for good. Kiel, she told me, was a city she had never belonged to, and whose people made her feel like a changeling. It was only much later, once I had started my search, that her words started to make sense.

I didn’t see my grandmother until a few months after my trip to Kaliningrad. I had returned to Moscow full of curiosity about her emotional reaction, and what it was she wanted to tell me, but the demands of a busy journalist’s life soon put it to the back of my mind. It was only when I returned home for a holiday, and decided to spend a few days visiting my grandparents in Kiel, that I remembered the strangeness of the moment we had shared, the questions it had raised: I wanted to find the answers. 

I arrived at their home, a small but comfortable flat in a modern block, in time for the daily ritual of afternoon coffee. Vati, a giant of a man, greeted me with an all-enveloping hug, while my grandmother, more reticent, kissed me on the cheek in greeting. They ushered me out to the garden and into their new pride and joy, a Gartenhaus, a glorified shed containing a small table and four overstuffed chairs, a concession to al fresco dining in a city where the wind from the North sea usually made it too cold to sit out doors for very long. It stood at the bottom of a neat lawn that they shared with a neighbour, bereft of plants save for a single, neatly trimmed shrub. The wood of the Gartenhaus was new and smelt of pine sap and fresh varnish, the blinds on its windows painted forest green. We sat – elbows tucked in, for space was tight – and I noticed that the fabric of the chair covers, a green stripe, matched the colour of the coffee cups.  

Everything about it was neat and predictable; nothing in it explained the emotion my grandmother had betrayed, just a few months before, when I had called her from Kaliningrad. But something between us had changed. I felt it in the squeeze of her hand when I arrived, in her delight at the Russian shawl I’d brought her: our new, indefinable, shared sense of place. A door had been opened, if only by a crack, into a past she had hitherto kept silent. Instinct told me to tread carefully, so I bided my time, and waited.
 
 

They went to bed early, leaving me alone in their living room. I unfolded the sofa bed and looked around me at the photograph albums and framed portraits, the ordinary signs of a long, shared family life: my mother and her sister on their wedding days. My brother and I receiving our university diplomas. Vati on a sailing holiday, at the helm of a boat. There were very few knick-knacks; every three years or so, my grandmother had the urge to throw things out and start anew.

I looked through the bookshelves for something to read, eventually taking up a glossy, coffee-table volume about German castles. I soon grew a little cold, and, seeing the Russian shawl I had bought draped over an armchair, went to pick it up. A small black leather photograph album fell from its folds. It contained twenty pages at most and had an envelope tucked in the front. Inside was a card with a black border, an order of service from the funeral of my great-grandmother Frieda, who’d died in 1968, and a crumpled cutting from a German newspaper, dated 1995. I laid it out flat and read the headline: ‘A Night of Death on the Baltic Sea.’

It was a commemorative piece to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff, a transport ship that had been torpedoed by the Red Army in January 1945. The journalist set out the facts with meticulous bleakness: the ship had carried a few soldiers, but of its 10,000 passengers, most had been civilians, women and children fleeing the Soviet advance on East Prussia. It had sunk in the Baltic Sea, at the height of winter; only a few hundred survived. I had heard of this tragedy before, and knew my mother, grandmother and her parents had also fled Königsberg by sea, on another ship. Had whoever compiled the album put the article next to the notice of Frieda’s death, as a reminder of her luck in having survived?  I put the envelope and its contents aside and turned to the album. 

Its opening page was blank apart for a single inscription, in green ink, ‘Unsere Omi’, ‘Our grandmother’, written in a hand I recognised as my mother’s. The first photograph took up an entire page: a portrait of a group in formal attire with an adolescent girl in a white dress, whom I recognised as my grandmother, sitting front and centre. But it was the caption that made my heart jump: Königsberg, April 1939, five months before the start of the war. I flicked through the rest of the photographs. There weren’t many from those years, six perhaps, in black and white, much-faded snapshots of ordinary life. A large, old-fashioned business card reading ‘Alfred Wiegandt, Königsberg Pr. Spirits, Wines, Wholesale, Liquor manufacturer’. A group walking in an unfamiliar landscape of dunes, somewhere by the sea, the caption beneath identifying the place by its old Prussian name of ‘Rauschen’, the men in summer suits, the women in cotton dresses. Five people sitting round a dining room table draped in tablecloths and decorated with a vase of flowers, one of whom I recognised as Frieda, smiling in a black velvet dress, and a somewhat portly man who must have been my great-grandfather Albert, in a comfortable leather armchair in the corner opposite. A picture of an old gentleman with a Kaiser Wilhelm moustache, captioned ‘Onkelchen’ – Uncle. I turned another page; the date written beneath had jumped forwards to 1962.

I turned back to that first group picture. It was too formal a picture to have been a birthday; the hot-house flowers and ornaments on a display trolley, carefully framing the party, had an air of solemnity. Two young men stood at the back, looking slightly bored; another in the uniform of the Luftwaffe, the German air force, was standing next to a girl in white satin with a corsage of artificial flowers, staring into the camera. The older people looked a little drawn, my great-grandparents on either side of their daughter, Frieda in a dark dress with a ruffled white collar, Albert in white tie; I noticed that his moustache was clipped into the style made infamous by Hitler. Inge’s hair was styled in heavy, old-fashioned plaits wound round her head that made her look older than her fourteen years, and she wore a dress of white gauze embroidered at the neckline. She had the gawky stance of the adolescent, her shoulders hunched, trapped in a body that was not quite a woman’s, nor still a girl’s. I recognised her expression from the memory of my own teenage years, one of mutinous boredom.

The next morning at breakfast, my grandmother noticed the album on the coffee table. She smiled and went to sit on the sofa, picking it up, opening it at the first page, and bid me sit beside her. And she started to tell me the stories of her lost world.

It was April 1939. They had planned the party weeks in advance, but Inge already wished it was over, and there was still dinner to endure. Her mother and the dressmaker had made such a fuss at every detail of her confirmation outfit, from selecting the best white silk organdie, to picking the embroidery at the collar; but Inge thought the result old-fashioned and dowdy. She had seen the dress she really wanted in one of the fashion magazines she and her friend Lotte poured over for hours, after Lotte’s older sister had finished with them. It had been part of a feature on the looks favoured by film stars, a long, elegant design of peach satin with a sweetheart neckline, the sleeves barely covering the shoulders, which was draped at the hip and finished in a long fishtail. She had cut the picture out carefully and shown it with reverential awe to Frieda, who burst out laughing.
‘Liebchen, you are far too young for a dress like this! Besides, your confirmation is a serious occasion, not a film party.’ She’d heard the peals of laughter through the sitting-room door as Frieda recounted the incident later to her friends.

Her cheeks still burned at the memory of that laughter as she stood in church that morning, waiting for the service to end. Only the pastor made her smile, when he told her how pretty she looked.
‘Not long now until you get your first ballgown!’ he said, with a wink. He was a large man, whose imposing physique was tempered by a friendly and jovial manner. Her parents always spoke of him with affection and respect. Recently, though, she’d heard her father tell Frieda in hushed tones at home, that the pastor would have to start being more careful. She wondered what her father had meant, but guessed it must be because of the way he had started saying his prayers during the Sunday service every week.

The Wiegandts were Lutherans, the majority faith in Königsberg at the time, an undemanding, sober denomination that required little of them save attending church on Sundays. Unlike many others of his cloth at the time, their pastor was not shy of openly adhering to his robust Christian principles. He saw clearly through Nazism’s xenophobic rhetoric, and the hundreds of decrees which had restricted Jews’ public and private lives in the six years since the Nazis had been in government. He could not ignore the burning of synagogues, the smashing of Jewish businesses, the persecution of the disabled, of political opponents, of homosexuals, or any groups singled out for not falling in with their creed. From the day Hitler gained power, the pastor’s sermons had changed. He extolled the virtues of peace and tolerance as never before, his oratory becoming more impassioned as the months went by. Every service would end with him leading the congregation in the Lord’s Prayer, adapting its closing line. The Wiegandts would wait for it, eyes closed, not daring to look up or at each other as the full force of the pastor’s voice was directed towards any Nazi official present. He’d done it again in her confirmation service that morning, when he’d spotted her mother’s second cousin in his Luftwaffe uniform, his fashionable wife on his arm.

‘And deliver us from this evil.’

Albert’s brow had furrowed when he first saw the young man. Frieda tried to calm him down as he raised his voice, hearing him say ‘These young men think war is just a game.” Inge knew her father had fought in the last war. He still limped from a piece of shrapnel that had wounded him in the knee, and caused him bouts of rheumatism. Her mother, she knew, had been a nurse on the Eastern Front, but she couldn’t imagine either of them in war. The romance of it did not fit with her staid, middle-aged, respectable parents. They spoke of it very little and with horror but to Inge, the thought of war was at least an exciting one, compared with the dullness of their world. She thought her cousin looked very handsome in his pilot’s uniform, and his blonde wife, in her white satin dress, just like the women she admired in magazines.

Her uncle Max, she thought, would have been able to make her father feel better by telling a joke. She felt a pang, remembering that Uncle Max was no longer there. He was not really a relation but her father’s best friend, but she’d called him ‘uncle’ ever since she was a little girl. He ran a fashionable club in the centre of town, where Königsberg’s smartest people went to drink, have dinner and dance. Every other Tuesday, Max, Albert and two other old friends would meet in a private room there to play chess and talk politics, far from eavesdroppers, late into the night.  She’d asked her mother what they talked about for so long, and why Albert would often come back looking worried and agitated. ‘Politics,’ Frieda had said. ‘They’re best left alone.’ Inge knew her parents did not much like Hitler, though they were very careful when they spoke of him to others; her mother had explained to her that it was dangerous to tell people, even friends, what they believed. But Max refused to keep a low profile. ‘I’m not going to make that ape-like salute they tell us to do,’ he said.

A year ago, her father had come home early from the club one night, his face full of worry, to tell Frieda that Max had been taken away. He sat on the sofa, with tears in his eyes and Frieda’s arm round his shoulders, as he told her what the old barman had said. The previous Saturday evening, a senior Nazi official had dined at the restaurant. He and two other men had walked up to Max, and greeted him with a ‘Heil Hitler!’, snapping up their arms; the barman thought they’d done so deliberately; Max’s opinions about the Nazis were well-known.

‘Herr Max, he just raised his hat, as he always did, Herr Wiegandt,’ the barman said,  ‘and returned their greeting by saying “Good evening, gentlemen.” Nothing would have made him Sieg Heil, Herr Wiegandt, but you know, it’s just a hand gesture, and it might have saved him!’

Early on Tuesday evening, before Albert’s arrival, police had come to take him away.

‘You must go to Max’s wife,’ Frieda said.

‘Yes.’ Albert had replied. ‘But we must be very careful now.’

US