GRECIA HACIA 480 a C.

Having established a sense of the protagonist’s victimization by Hitler, the narrative moves swiftly from Hitler’s appearance in the clinic to their evacuation from Berlin to Rundfliess in East Prussia due to heavy bombing in 1942. The narrator begins this section by ironically noting that: “Tens of thousands” of Hitler’s “broodmares and their offsprings” [sic] were evacuated “to the very eastern limits of the country” only to later be “abandoned and forgotten when the Soviet army broke through” (p. 24).61 The story of their journey spans the temporal levels of their evacuation in 1942, their trek from East Prussia to former Czechoslovakia in 1944, to Gera in 1945, and finally to Stuttgart in 1946 and takes up surprisingly little space in the text as mentioned earlier. What the narrative does do, however, is tell the parallel stories of those persecuted by the Nazi regime and those who were not. In an early scene describing their train journey from Berlin to Königsberg, East Prussia the child protagonist is described as having “happily” swung in her hammock. The present narrator notes that other trains containing troops and “trains hauling boxcars, probably filled with the Jewry of northern Europe, sped by, as if they had preference to bring occupants, hundreds of thousands, to their deaths” (p. 25). Within this particular scene highlighting German culpability, the child protagonist, her mother and sisters are described as innocent based on being “oblivious to all of this” (p. 25) The topic of German expellees and refugees is

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thematized in a wider perspective on their stay in East Prussia immediately in the next paragraph. The narrator begins with a discussion of the demography and history of Rundfliess in the Masurian region of former East Prussia where they would live until the Russians arrived, although this description is irrelevant to the story of their stay there. She points out that Germans had lived there since the fourteenth century, the region became part of the German Empire in 1871 and approximately 2.5 million Germans lived there in 1939; until 1945 nearly seventy-five percent of the population was German (p. 26). Highlighting the beauty of the area from which Germans had been expelled, it is described as being a vacation area in today’s Poland because there are 2,700 lakes in the region and “huge pine forests” (p. 26). The inclusion of such information is an implicit criticism of the expulsion of ethnic Germans from the area who had lived there for centuries and participates in contemporary discourse on German expulsion.

The village of Rundfliess is described as seemingly peaceful and apparently cut off from events of the war, although it was only sixty miles away from one of Hitler’s military headquarters, the Wolfsschanze (Wolf’s Lair) (p. 35). 62 The family’s time there is portrayed as a happy one in their “cozy cheerful house” (p. 29). Despite the proximity to the Wolfsschanze and the fighting on the eastern front, the family is described as apparently unaware of the events of the war because they had no radio or newspaper and were, therefore, supposedly uninformed. However, the fact that her mother’s brother, Kurt, who was stationed on the eastern front visited them there more than once, calls this into question; the family most likely had some information on the progress of the war through him. The inhabitants of the village are also seemingly oblivious to events connected to the war. The narrator claims that as a child she heard no one speak about the landing of the Allies in Normandy in June 1944 and the assassination attempt on Hitler. She also claims that no one believed “the

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Russians were advancing in the southeast or fighting ‘next door’ in Lithuania” (p. 35). A number of childhood photographs are included in this chapter featuring the house, the child protagonist, her mother and sisters smiling into the camera in the idyllic countryside which reinforce the narrator’s claim to having been “living in some kind of bubble” and thoroughly content in the midst of a violent war in the east (p. 31).

The benign description of the town and the happy family living in a house there (that had likely been confiscated because the previous owners had hurriedly left behind personal belongings and furniture) problematizes the impression created by the narrative that the town was unaffected by Nazi ideology and the events of the war. As Mary Fulbrook notes, there is ample evidence of “atrocities against civilians in the occupied territories as well as on the eastern front” (2011, p. 169). The present narrator does, however, acknowledge that things were not as they appeared and comments that she wonders today if the previous owners left the house “voluntarily (unlikely) or were taken by force” (pp. 29-31). In retrospect she claims to feel guilty today that their wonderful time there might have been the “result of others dying so [they] could live there” (pp. 29-31). Immediately after this admission, however, it is clear that their stay there was intended to be a longer one. The narrator comments that her mother had their furniture sent from Berlin and she began to sew curtains for the house. (p. 31). She is described as having “settled in as if she were going to live in Rundfliess for many years to come” and that they had adopted two dogs and started a garden (p. 31). The description of the family living in a quiet town far removed from Nazi ideology in an area which had been seventy-five percent German at the end of the war creates the impression that, with the one exception of the confiscated house, they were untouched by National Socialism and unaware of crimes on the eastern front. The photographs in this chapter featuring a very happy looking family reinforce this but obscure the fact that they were actually living there on borrowed