The Kingdom of Shadows

THREE

“ Ganz verruckt.” Liesel looked over the new arrivals. “That one there is completely crazy.”

The hostel director’s car had returned from the train station. From an upstairs window, Liesel and Trudi watched the driver unloading the few bits of luggage. The shadow of the SS black flag danced over the white, pebbly gravel.

They could see Frau Hegemann giving the two new girls her welcoming speech. The words duty and honor figured in the spiel at least three times. Liesel had thought Frau Hegemann was a bit cracked, too, when she had looked into the woman’s eyes. Some of these old bats’ knees trembled every time they thought about the Fuhrer.

That same crazed spark was in the eyes of one of the girls below. It was a look that swept away the whole world. Even the girl that carried around those burning eyes no longer really existed, except for a womb committed to the greater glory of the Reich.

“You’re right.” Trudi giggled. “When her time’s come, she’ll probably go marching into the delivery room.”

Liesel snorted in disgust. “Who could get it up for somebody like that? Even SS officers are men, just like other men.”

“Are they?” Trudi peered at her. “How do you know? They’re supposed to be different.”

“‘Different.’” She shook her head. “They all get hard and stupid when they see a pretty woman. That’s what they all want to stick their kleinen Manner into, not some silly bitch who’ll be singing the Horst Wessel Lied when she should be bouncing her tail up and down.” What men wanted, she knew, was herself; they wanted her golden hair spilling into their faces as her breasts moved against their sweating torsos. She was the best-looking girl in the Lebensborn hostel; none of the others could really compare to her. Trudi and all the other girls would have to settle for whatever men Liesel had rejected as being unworthy of the gift of her body.

The summer before, when her breasts had grown so much, so that she could cup them in her hands when she stood stripped to the waist in front of her dresser’s tiny mirror, her hands no longer her own but the grasp of a man whose face she had not yet imagined – then she was sure of her beauty and the power that came with it. The cold part inside her head, that never slept in its calculations, knew what it was worth; it could get her all she deserved.

Others saw how beautiful she had become. A Party photographer came out and took her picture, and it appeared on the cover of Das Deutsche Madel, the official journal for all BDM girls. The words inside had described her as the perfect Germanic girl, the model for all others to aspire to. She had been annoyed that they hadn’t given her name, but even so, all the other girls in her Bund chapter had known who it was.

That was when the news about the Lebensborn came, first whispered from one girl to another, then confirmed by the older women who were the BDM leaders. Reichsfuhrer SS Himmler’s marvelous idea, to create a way in which every German girl of good Aryan breeding could present to her Fuhrer the greatest possible gift, a new life, a child that would be part of the future race of heroes. Without worrying about the old world’s outmoded notions of marriage and sexual morality, and with the seed of those whose German blood ran purest, who had proved themselves worthy to father the elite of the world to come.

She had been told that there would be no tie between her and whatever SS officer might choose her to bear his child; the Lebensborn program was not in the business of fostering petty emotional dependencies. Liesel was only eighteen, and she already knew that things did not work that way, or if they did, they could be made to work another way. Her way…

“The other one’s not so bad.” Trudi brought her nose right up against the window glass. “She’s kind of pretty.”

Liesel looked down at the other girl who had gotten out of the car. She stood waiting demurely to take her suitcase from the driver’s hand, only to have him shake his head and tell her that he would carry all the luggage inside.

She’s not used to that, thought Liesel, watching. To having people do things for her. She hadn’t been either, when she’d first arrived at the Lebensborn hostel, but it had only taken her a second to know that it was what was owed to her.

“She’s all right, I suppose.” Liesel drew back from the window. “In a cheap kind of way.”

This latest arrival might be a problem, if she had any idea of how pretty she really was, and if she put on airs about it. Then Liesel would have to smile and be nice to her, until there was the perfect chance to put her in her place.

She would have to be careful. It annoyed her to have to think about these things, but she already had plans made, and there wasn’t room for a competitor in them. No one would spoil that shining future she saw ahead.