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The Orphanage by Waltrudis Buck

Color image of an institutional dormitory with two child-sized beds and a wooden table with three stuffed animals on top under a worn wooden window; title card for the 2024 Memoir & Essay Contest finalist, "The Orphanage" by Waltrudis Buck.

Waltrudis Buck’s longform essay, “The Orphanage” is both family memoir and an excavation of the past, as Buck, at sixty, returns to her childhood homeland on the edge of the Black Forest in Southwest Germany. Visiting with her elderly mother (the last living witness to that time in her life), she asks about the long-ago period, after World War II, that she and her sister spent in an orphanage, despite having two living parents and a younger brother at home. Buck’s narrator tells us that their village is a “bedroom community” of Dresden, where “[n]early all its inhabitants, 17,000 people, mostly women, children, and old people, burned to death or suffocated beneath the rubble.” She and her family survived, but she still has many questions about her time at the orphanage—why, how, and precisely when?

What stands out in piece is that Buck’s narration is told in third person. As the daughter, later introduced as Anna, endeavors to reconstruct the circumstances that led her parents to leave the girls at the church-run orphanage, the third-person narration allows the author to step back and consider herself as a character. Buck’s perspective still maintains the omniscience of a first-person narrator, but allows the reader to treat the essay’s two main characters, the daughter and the mother, on more equal footing. 

It also allows the writer to drop hints as to the trauma the daughter has experienced in her lifetime, without lingering or becoming overly sentimental (“The daughter can’t bear noise.”). The mother, who constantly rebuffs the daughter’s questions with, “I don’t remember,” seems unwilling or unable to help. Buck cleverly plays with ideas of memory, and the lack thereof, for both women. This third-person narrator allows Buck to tell a very difficult story with a bit of narrative distance, even in scenes told in flashback. Without the immediacy of a first-person narrator, Anna, can be the version of Buck that sometimes shows instead of tells. Buck doesn’t shy away from letting us know how the daughter is feeling, but the essay’s prose doesn’t idle there. The more the daughter must contend with the memories, the more the author allows the dialogue and story to speak for themselves. 

In her craft column, “Making yourself a character in your story,” Nicole Breit writes, of the third-person narrator in creative nonfiction, “The fear of exposure that goes along with revealing the private details of our lives can be intense, even paralyzing. Writing ourselves as characters who exist apart from us can help sidestep that very common fear.” Toward the end of the essay, the daughter comes face to face with what she had been searching for—concrete proof that answers some of her questions. Buck has given us enough subtext and detail to feel deeply for her characters, while allowing herself, as the writer, to watch from afar. —CRAFT


 

Nothing hangs together. There are big holes in the daughter’s memory. She cannot fathom the passage of time. Half a century ago when she was ten, sixty was an old woman. She does not think of herself that way. It is an astonishing fact which makes no sense to her. 

She stops eating and looks up. “When were we there, mother? Miriam and I? What year was it when we were in the orphanage?” 

“Oh, I don’t remember that.” 

The two are sitting at the dining table in a niche of the living room adjacent to the kitchen. The parents had planned the house carefully for practicality. The money for it was earned hard. When it was built, thirty-five years ago, the street ended in a cul-de-sac. Beyond it were meadows and gardens, privately owned plots, stretching up to the edge of the forest. 

Now, in the evening, when the daughter stands on top of her bed to peer out of the skylight in her old room under the eaves, she has to look far over the tangle of rooftops before she can rest her eyes on the narrow strip of green remaining before the dark wall of the trees. Looking south, she can adjust her position so nothing remains in her vision but a ribbon of luminous sky above the blackness of the trees.

The Black Forest. She was at home in the woods when she was a child. She reads in the paper that many of the firs are dying from acid rain. But when she is inside it she cannot tell. It seems to her the same as always.

To the north lies the nearest city to which her village has become a bedroom community. It was firebombed by the British on February 23, 1945, only weeks before capitulation, in one of their infamous terror bombings. Nearly all its inhabitants, 17,000 people—mostly women, children, and old people—burned to death or suffocated beneath the rubble. The daughter was five years old and thinks she remembers seeing the wall of fire in the distance through the glassless hall window, the panes having been blown out by the air pressure. She remembers the warning sirens and Miriam refusing to go down into the cellar. Miriam screaming, “I won’t go down anymore! I don’t care if I die!” 

That was in the old apartment, the one with the bakery on the ground floor. Only two houses were ever hit in her village, both of them on that night, one right across and one diagonally across from their apartment. She remembers playing in the rubble days after it happened. She remembers a piano standing in the ruins.

“I don’t remember,” repeats the mother. “I don’t remember when you were there.” 

She is going to be ninety in a few months. A round birthday! I should come back, make the trip from the States again, thinks the daughter. For the party. Who knows how much longer? She sighs. It is stifling in the room, but the mother likes the large window above the short end of the table closed. The evening sun makes the daughter squint. She sits facing the mother, whose back is against the wall that separates the area from the kitchen.

“Was I in school?”

“I don’t know. I don’t remember.” The mother takes a sip from her wine. She likes a glass of red wine with her supper. She carefully, meticulously, cuts the crust off a slice of bread with a small, sharp knife that has a cream-colored handle. These knives come in their own little plastic etui because they are so very sharp. They are Christmas presents from the local savings bank. She keeps the crusts for birdfeed. Nothing wasted. At breakfast she soaks them in her coffee and spoons them out, making soft slurping noises. The daughter tries to shut out the sound, to tolerate it, because she knows the mother cannot hear it and that she would be appalled if she knew. 

The mother scrapes the breadcrumbs off the linen tablecloth with the edge of the knife and wipes them onto her piece of bread. The daughter watches silently. She has learned to set the table. For breakfast and supper, the mother likes a wooden board rather than a plate, and she likes two knives, neither of which are eating knives.

Every evening they have the same supper: bread and butter, cold cuts, cheese, gherkins, mustard—sometimes radishes or tomatoes. Tonight, they have homegrown tomatoes from the garden behind the house. 

During the war, and after, the mother kept her children alive with what she grew in a garden, which she worked for a woman and her blind brother. Allowed to keep half of the land for her own use in exchange for her labor, she became an expert gardener, taught by necessity. The daughter remembers helping, weeding, picking string beans off the vine, sitting in the plum tree, playing with Miriam in the tool shed. She remembers the quince tree, which bowed its branches to the ground laden with fruit, and the tangy sweet taste of the quince jelly her mother cooked from it. She liked it better than the blueberry jam. But she liked gathering the blueberries in the woods most of all. Whole days spent in the forest. The mother knew where to find the berries, the good places, where they grew in abundance. Her mother had shown her, just like she had learned from her own mother when she was still a child. Small berries, dark-colored, almost black, zesty, tasting of the woods, not like the large, flavorless ones she buys in New York at a famous market on Broadway and 74th near where she lives.

When they walk up to the cemetery and take a shortcut through a small stretch of wood, the mother points to the ground and says, “Look at it, it used to be as clean as a whistle, as if a broom had swept through it.” 

The daughter understands she means that people used to get their firewood in the forest, that the wood sustained them during the devastation of war. She knows because she remembers gathering fir cones in big sacks (only the open ones, so good for starting the fire), blueberries in metal milk cans for pies and pancakes and jam, the tiny nuts from the beech trees to be pressed into oil, backbreaking to pick off the ground (let the children do it, they are closer to it), raspberries and blackberries, too, to be made into preserves, and mushrooms in the fall, chanterelle and edible boletus. Only if you were sure. Every season there were reports of poisonings.

“A slice of onion would be nice. On top of the tomato. It goes well,” says the mother. 

“I’ll get it.” The daughter gets up and fetches a homegrown onion from the kitchen. They are tiny this year.

“I must have been in school,” says the daughter. “The war was over in 1945. I started school in ’46. Unless. Was Ulli born?”

The mother does not answer. She looks pained. It is painful for her to chew. Right after the meal she takes her teeth out.

“Don’t you remember?”

“I think it was later. I don’t know.” She cuts bite-sized pieces off her open-faced sandwich with the paring knife and puts them in her mouth. That’s how she eats. Sometimes she licks the knife, which infuriates the daughter.

“You will cut yourself.”

“No, I won’t,” the mother always answers petulantly. “You were supposed to eat with the staff. You were supposed to sit with them. Not with the children. We paid. We had to pay. It was a lot of money then.”

“How long were we there?”

“I don’t know. Not long. We came and got you.”

“I wish I could ask Miriam. I wish I had asked her what she remembers. We never talked about anything,” says the daughter sadly.

“Oh my Miriam! Sometimes I could scream. When I’m alone, often I scream out loud,” says the mother. She does not look at the daughter when she says this, as if she expected no response. Words of anguish, uttered with no direction.

The sun has turned red. The daughter gets a stemmed glass from the antique corner cabinet and pours herself some wine. When the mother looks up at her, the daughter takes it as a request to refill her glass. She does, and a few drops spill on the tablecloth. Little drops, like blood. They spread out on the cloth and turn lavender.

“It doesn’t matter,” says the mother. “It has to go into the wash anyway. It’s due.” 

She washes a great deal, whenever there is enough to fill the machine. Only recently her son bought her a dryer. She used to hang the wash on a line out back in the garden or in the cellar and resisted the idea of a clothes dryer for a long time. 

She still irons all the linen, mountains of cloth napkins and handkerchiefs, and the big pieces, the sheets and tablecloths, which she used to put through the mangle before she had a clothes dryer. Every Thursday her widowed son-in-law brings her his handkerchiefs to wash. They are soiled with brown blotches from his taking snuff. She gets them spotless and irons them into piles of neat squares. Her arthritic hands can barely hold the iron. 

Clothes boiling in a huge pot on the kitchen stove. Being poured into the tub sitting atop two backless chairs. The same tub Mother fetches from the attic Saturday nights to bathe the children. Poking the wash with a wooden stirring spoon because the water is so hot at first. She gets to stand on the footstool next to Mother who uses the washboard. She gets to wash the handkerchiefs, rub the cloth together in the sudsy water. It feels slimy from the snot. The handkerchiefs billow up like snails floating in the sudsy water. She likes to poke them and see them billow. Mother’s hands, red and raw, moving up and down on the washboard.

That was a long time ago, in the old apartment, the one above the bakery which filled the halls with bread smells, the one that overlooked the valley, in the art nouveau building that looked like a castle because of its turrets and oriel windows. The house where the daughter was born, her brother too, but not Miriam, the firstborn. You could hear the sound of the fast-flowing river in back of it, down in the valley where the woods rose from its banks, climbing up the mountain like the undulating back of a mysterious creature. This is the wood the daughter has always thought of as her wood. It is at the other end of town from where the mother lives now. Even now she feels like having come home when she takes a walk there.

“I remember a photograph,” says the daughter. “One of those small square ones with the scalloped borders. You know the ones? The old ones. Miriam and I are standing outside somewhere, on a dirt road, I think. I don’t remember if there is a wood behind us or a house, but it’s from when we went to see Aunt Bianca. It was a long hike from the orphanage. I remember the wood. A small deciduous wood. Passing it. Walking through it. They must have allowed us to go there by ourselves. We must have been old enough. I think we went at least twice to visit Aunt Bianca.” 

The mother remains silent.

It was a good memory. She could feel the happiness now. It was as if she could feel it in her limbs and her forehead. The happiness of walking with her sister. Safe with her sister, Miriam. Walking through a small deciduous wood. Light and airy, not like the pine woods across the valley and up beyond the house of her birth, the wood which she loves better than any other.

“If I could find that photo, I could see how old we were,” says the daughter. I wonder who took it. She is looking at the big, framed photographs which cover the wall behind the mother, who calls it her gallery.  

The framed photos are portraits of the mother’s children and grandchildren and others. By now it covers most of the wall. 

Her daughter-in-law, Ulli’s wife, is in a photo with the daughter’s daughter, who is already an adult in the picture. Her son-in-law, the important one, Miriam’s husband, the one who takes snuff, is shown with the mother herself. 

There is no photo of the daughter’s husband, the American. The mother liked him, but she met him only a few times during the twenty-five years he was married to her daughter. She liked him even though he was a poor provider. After the divorce he lived in a car for a while, vagabonding through the United States from one state to another, from one coast to the other. Miriam used to tell her sister that he should have been a wandering monk, begging for his daily sustenance, because he was fascinated by all things spiritual and scientific and did not believe in possessions. “But then there would be no Kate,” the daughter said. He charmed the mother by praising her cooking. She named a glazed hazelnut loaf after him—Bill cake—and made her daughter take one on the plane for him whenever she visited without him. He came along to Europe only twice. By now the mother has forgotten the recipe.  

In a group shot with her son’s children is Ulli’s new lover, who he plans to marry after the divorce. She is Polish and looks like a young version of mother herself, but not as beautiful as his present wife. His present wife, Sara, is a painter. The mother does not approve of her lax housekeeping. The wife’s “slacking off” does not “sit well” with the mother. “Not sit well,” the phrase sticks in the daughter’s mind as she looks at Sara’s beautiful face. The daughter-in-law-to-be will sit better with her, though the mother wants the son all to herself.

She does not like the photo of herself. It is a candid shot in color taken on her terrace in New York. Her hair looks unkempt and there is a deep line between her nose and her upper lip. When she looks in the mirror, she does not see this line. Her mind wipes it out. Or perhaps it is simply that she doesn’t wear glasses when she looks in the mirror. Everybody else likes the photo. 

The photo of Miriam is an enlargement, a close-up in starkly contrasted black and white. Her head is thrown back dramatically, her arms are angled behind her head. She is looking into the sun. The picture exudes joy and defiance. Great joy and desperation. It was taken in Spain by her lover when she was recovering from cancer and her husband could not cope. 

At least she had him, thinks the daughter, at least she had her lover. She remembers him as handsome, slight, extraordinarily charming, elegant, with copper-colored hair, a South American. She remembers her sister’s bad breath when she was ill and the red Karmann Ghia she drove so recklessly that summer at the Costa del Sol.

Her sister’s husband has lunch with his mother-in-law once a week. Once a week he sits where the daughter sits now and sees his dead wife’s picture taken by her lover.

“I know who took it,” he said one time and laughed a little. He was in the hospital being treated for depression and delusions when she died of an aneurysm. She was almost fifty-eight then. Sixty-six days from being fifty-eight. I would be dead for two years now, thinks the daughter. 

“She would have remembered so much more than me,” she says, “Miriam. Being two years older. I wish I had asked her. I wish I had asked Miriam. I wish we had talked. We never talked. I remember playing at the orphanage.”

Shiny lacquered wooden blocks. Small blocks in different shapes and colors. Thick slanted ones, and thin triangles, squares, columns, diamonds, thin dark-blue rectangles good for building beds, tiny little doll beds. Blue, yellow, red and green, smooth to the touch. So beautiful and clean.

“I remember playing.”

“You always played,” says the mother. “What time is it?” She does not want to miss her program, a sitcom about two bachelors with adopted and natural children. There are a lot of shows on German television portraying men as homemakers. The wives have died, or left them, or they never had any to begin with. The daughter thinks it curious. A new family constellation, the modern German family. And lots of graphic, unmarried sex. She looks away during the sex scenes. They would never show this in America, she tells her mother.

The mother moves to the easy chair by the television. The pain in her knees makes her draw in the air sharply as she gets up from her chair at the table. For a long time she refused to wear her custom-made orthopedic shoes because she did not like the way they looked. “Still vain,” she used to say with an impish smile, like a willful child. She is five foot two, probably smaller now. The daughter remains at the table for a moment, sipping her wine. She looks out at the sky, a rose-colored expanse. The sun has gone down.

A warm cozy room. Hiding, playing with the lacquered blocks, hiding behind something, a large square column, playing dollhouse, making rooms full of furniture. Little rooms inside an empty cube, full of furniture, made from the shiny colored blocks. Little rooms for dolls. There are no dolls. A woman’s presence, a woman who lets her hide and play. Who wishes her well. A nurse, or a teacher, perhaps. A woman. Not having to go out into the grass. Then she has to stop. She has to go. Somewhere. She does not want to leave. She does not want anybody to touch her toy room. On a different day it is gone. She cannot find the blocks even to start anew. But that day she did not have to go out into the wet grass. Because of the woman, she thinks. Or because her throat hurt.

“Do you want your glass over there? Do you want more wine?” asks the daughter. The mother does not hear, she is involved in the sitcom.

The daughter, whom I want to call Anna now, gets up and clears the table. She closes the kitchen door behind her, but she can still hear the television. When she is finished washing up, she takes a plastic pail with organic garbage to the compost heap, which is in the upper right corner of the garden behind the house. The mother insists on it. She adds water to the pail and has her take it up there several times a day.

It has been raining earlier, a fine soft summer rain. Anna longs to be up in the woods and breathe the scent of pine, which is strong when the needles are wet. The little narrow path of flagstone, rimmed with grass and sloping up to the compost pile, is slippery. Halfway up there is a dark red slug at the edge of the path, dark-red, almost brown. Her knees pull up. She steps funny, like a bird. Her stomach tightens. 

Bare feet. Tall grass. Cold, early, early morning. Dawn. “We had shoes! We brought shoes!” Taken away so as not to be different. “We want our shoes! We are guests!” Miriam’s challenging voice. Demanding. “We are guests! We want our shoes! You took our shoes!” Barefoot in the grass wet from dew. Stepping high. Spindly legs pulling up, knees to chin. High. Eyes pinned to the ground. There could be slugs. Slugs. Not to touch the ground. Like a bird. Up! Quick! On tiptoe. Barely touch the ground. Quick! Don’t know what is underfoot. Where it is mowed you can see, but not in the tall grass. Big baskets filling up with pears and apples, partially rotten and wormy. Feet, raw from the cold.

Anna wipes her shoes on the terrace doormat before she steps into the living room.

“Close the door,” says the mother. “The neighbors complain about the television.”

“Why don’t you use your hearing aid?” The daughter goes into the kitchen to rinse out the pail. Then she joins the mother in front of the television.

“Is this all right?” The mother looks at her, frightened.

“Just a little softer,” says Anna. “Aren’t you wearing your hearing aid? Can you hear?”

“I can hear,” says the mother, sounding bitter. She likes her daughter to watch television with her, but when she is alone, she has it blasting away. Coming down from her attic room, Anna can hear it in the stairwell. Then she cringes and steels herself before entering because she does not like to bug her mother about it. The daughter can’t bear noise. Once she gave away a large refrigerator that came with her new condo because she could not bear the high-pitched tone it made. 

“You can make it a tiny bit louder,” Anna says. “It’s all right, it can be a little louder. Just a little bit. Can you hear? Would you like a chocolate?” 

She pulls the antique footstool, which looks like a tiny, cushioned, needlepoint rocker, in front of the mother’s upholstered easy chair then fetches the box of chocolates from the kitchen: dark, bittersweet chocolate filled with brandy, her mother’s favorite  

“When it’s over, I’ll wash my hair. You’ll set it,” says the mother and lays down the remote control for just a moment to take a chocolate.

“Right.” 

“You’ll put rollers in for me?”

“Yes, of course. I’ll put them in for you.” The daughter settles into an easy chair and stares at the television.

Hair shorn off. The redheaded girl. Long red hair, curly, down to her shoulders. Shorn off. She thinks some paste was applied to her head. She thinks some burning hot paste was applied to the redheaded girl’s head. That cannot be. Why does she think that? Probably shorn off. Just shorn off. Because of the lice. A big room with many beds. Many beds in rows. Girls, whispering. Sybille. The one with the red hair. They stand next to their beds. Like soldiers. If you wet the bed, everybody is made to know. The bed-wetters have to strip the sheets off their bed while everybody watches, standing next to their beds. Like soldiers. She thinks she wet the bed a little. Just a little. Nobody noticed. Anna is not a bed-wetter. She feels like laughing. Something is funny. She thinks her bed was next to her sister’s. Maybe not. Sister! Sister! Yes, next to her sister’s. Now she remembers.

Later the mother sits at the dining table, this time facing the window. The curtains are drawn. A white towel is spread in front of her with setting foam and hair rollers, narrow prickly plastic tubes in bright colors. The towel looks as if it were from a different era. It is unusually large and thin, made of a fine linen weave with big monograms embroidered, white on white, at both ends. Anna brought a few of these towels from an estate sale in Newport, R.I. when she worked for a New York auction house. They were left over after the sale. She did not have to pay for them. The mother points to the towel.

“Yes, I know, I gave it to you, from the auction. You still have it,” says Anna and thinks, The towel is still here and my sister is dead

Then she remembers Carol, her boss at the auction house, who had taken her to the jazz festival after work. The sounds and pulsing rhythms had swallowed her up, transported her to a region far removed from the eternal song of her dark woods, yet strangely familiar. She had loved the sensuous throb of Marshall Brown’s saxophone and the way Pee Wee Russell’s cheeks puffed out into taut, red, round little pillows. 

As she parts the mother’s thin hair into neat sections and rolls it up, she remembers dusky, smoke-filled clubs crowded with patrons squeezed around tiny tables, enveloped by the heat of the beat and the body heat of so many in such close proximity commingling with the smell of alcohol and cigarettes and wax, the latter emanating from candles flickering in red glasses in the center of the tables, like so many fireflies. Small clubs in Greenwich Village and the West Fifties, where Marshall used to play and where Carol used to take Anna after Carol and one of the musicians had become lovers. Anna never understood why Carol took her along, made a point of inviting her. Carol, who was middle-aged and divorced, who had a twelve-year-old son, Carol who coughed and smoked nonstop and was hospitalized for emphysema more than once. Perhaps because Anna was European, young and naïve, and did not see anything unusual in a white woman sleeping with a black man. For her that was America. 

Later, when Carol had a different lover, a wealthy buyer and regular client at the auction gallery, Anna was shocked because this man was enormously fat. One time a few of the girls—women working in offices were still referred to as girls then—discussed how it was physically possible to have intercourse with someone as big as Falstaff. “There are ways and positions,” Carol had said. “You would be surprised.” And added, “He’s been very good to me.” Anna has never forgotten this. She could not imagine.

 “Yellow!” says Anna and the mother hands her a yellow roller. The yellow ones are the skinniest. There are not enough of them. They always run out of the yellow ones because the mother’s hair is short and wispy.

Miriam’s hair was thick and the color of ripe corn. Worn in a single braid down her back, folded like a sling and tied up with a wide taffeta bow. “Monkey swings!” Not at the home, not there. Surely, no taffeta bows at the home where they took your shoes. Why did you leave us there, mother?  Miriam braiding her sister’s hair, her thin, curly, wispy hair, her mother’s hair, into tight skinny pigtails. 

“Ouch! Not so tight!” 

“It must be neat,” says Miriam. 

Why did you leave us there, mother?

“Tighter!” says the mother. “Margot rolls them tighter.” Margot, Anna’s cousin, lives upstairs on the second floor with her husband. Margot’s mother has the other attic room. She is ninety-five and getting senile. She comes downstairs to play cards with the mother almost every afternoon. Her hearing is worse than the mother’s. The mother complains that she has to yell.

“It’s no longer a pleasure to play cards with Ida,” she says.

“She is your sister,” says the daughter. “I wish I still had Miriam.”

“Sometimes I scream out loud,” says the mother.

When the daughter puts the green hairnet over the rollers, crossing it in back and tying it into a tiny bow on top of the mother’s hair, she laughs. She remembers her daughter telling her that grandma looked like a turtle with the hairnet. They had laughed. The mother had joined in. She remembers a wave of love flooding through her at that moment, love and compassion for her mother.

“You look like a turtle,” says Anna and cannot recapture the feeling. “Remember how we laughed when Kate was here?” 

Kate had spent three months at her grandmother’s, doing fieldwork for her master’s thesis, something to do with post-war reconstruction of local identity. Now when Anna has business in the village, grocery shopping, or going up to the cemetery to water her father’s grave, or accompanying the mother to church on Sundays, people stop her and ask about Kate.

“How long are you here for?” they say. “How is Kate? How is she doing? Such a lovely girl.” 

Nobody mentions Miriam anymore. Anna has the feeling that people go out of their way not to mention Miriam. Miriam who has been dead for four years already. Sometimes she brings up her name. “Miriam used to…” this or that, just to say her name.

The next day at lunch, out of the blue, the mother says: “I remember now. Ulli was a baby. I refused to let him go. He was too little to go.”

It is a hot day. The door to the terrace is open and the huge striped awning above it is unfurled all the way to provide maximum shade. Fred, Margot’s husband, is playing a wistful song on the accordion up on their veranda above the awning.

“Why did we have to go at all?” asks Anna. 

“We had nothing to eat. There was nothing to eat. We had no food.”

The daughter thinks that starving perhaps was not so bad. “Rather at home and hungry,” she says. 

“You wouldn’t eat the beets, just wouldn’t eat them. You sat in front of your plate and wouldn’t eat them. You have no idea. People have no idea what we went through.”

“I’ll go up to the cemetery after lunch,” says Anna. “Water the grave.” She knows her mother will not object. She can water the grave and then walk up into the woods to the stone house. She told Kate that maybe she wants her ashes strewn there when she is dead. It is called the stone house, but it is just a bunch of rocks underneath a group of tall beech trees, huge rocks, up at the water divide. She used to play there with Miriam when they were little.

“Are you going to the stone house?” asks the mother. 

“I thought I might.”

“That’s what I thought,” says the mother.

“Why don’t you lie down. I’ll clean up,” says Anna. “Perhaps you want to lie on the terrace.”

“I can rest better in my bed,” says the mother. “It’s cooler in there too. Don’t stay too long.”

“I won’t,” says Anna.


Two weeks later, when Anna is back in New York, Ulli, her brother, faxes her some correspondence he has unearthed. Anna stares at the date. 1947. I was seven, she thinks, a homesick seven, and sits down to translate it into English. 

25. June 1947

To the Honorable
Councilor of State Prof. Dr. Schmidt
T ü b i n g e n  !

Dear Sir,
If I trouble you with this letter today, it is only out of a great need and because I don’t know where else to turn. Until today, I, my wife, and our three children, ages 9, 7 and 1 and ½ years old, have been barely surviving on standard rations. I was denied a special ration allowance for heavy labor, even though it would have been justified by hours of travel on foot or by bicycle to my customers, by having to eat in restaurants, and working long hours late into the night.

I do not have any relatives abroad, and black-market transactions are out of the question for somebody in my profession which demands absolute correctness.

I can no longer bear to watch my children, who were healthy, mentally vibrant, and had grown straight and tall, deteriorate more and more. My two girls of nine and seven years old are both malnourished. The younger one is showing signs of rickets (back), which can hardly be cured with radiation lamps and Vigantol, but only with adequate nutrition. 

In my need I turn to you, the head of our state, and beg you: Please give me the opportunity to place my children for a period somewhere where they can truly eat their fill every day. My circumstances don’t allow me to put them in a sanatorium at a daily rate of 6 – 10 Marks, a price which still does not guarantee that the children will get enough to eat. 

I am convinced that to you, Councilor of State, possibilities are open which can truly help my family.

I am non-PG1, have been at the front for six years, my wife and I are Protestants.

I am thanking you in advance for your kind efforts.

Very sincerely yours,

 


State Secretary’s Office
for the French Occupied Districts
of Württemberg and Hohenzollern                                    Tübingen, July 10, 1947

State Dept. of the Interior
—Welfare Dept.—

Mr. M—
Re: Placement for your three children.

Your letter of June 26, 1947, addressed to the Councilor of State, Prof. Dr. Schmidt, has appropriately been forwarded to me. I shall instruct the Welfare Organization of the Protestant Church to see whether in the framework of their children’s drive the two older children can be placed. Whether it is possible to place a 1 ½ year old child is still being checked. I’m sorry to inform you that as far as the State is concerned there are no possibilities to provide recuperative stays. I am retaining the option of further communication.

On the authority of the governing director

 

August 16, 1947

To the
Gustav Werner Institute
R e u t l i n g e n
P.O. Box 68

Re: Placement of my children.

I received your letter of August 11th and thank you for your willingness to take my children for a few months. For my two girls I am happy to avail myself of your offer and shall take them—as soon as their clothes are readied—on Saturday, the 23rd of this month, to your home in Lossburg-Rodt. Both girls are still healthy, only malnourished. I am enclosing the two questionnaires you requested.

My wife and I could not bring ourselves to put our 1 and ½ year old boy into your home in Hülben. He is so very small, which is to say, young, and, especially considering the cooler and cold time of year ahead, lacking entirely in clothes and shoes. For this reason alone, it is impossible for us to put him into your home.

I send my regards with a grateful heart. 

Yours M—

Enc. 2 questionnaires

 

Lossburg-Rodt, November 10, 1947

Dear Mr. M—
Today I would like to answer your letter to Miss Bernstein. Apparently, your wife did not find everything to her satisfaction during her visit. I can assure you that on our part nothing was left undone to benefit your children.  Of course, if medical treatment was necessary for physical abnormalities which only you were aware of, and if your children were supposed to be here for a recuperative vacation, then you should not have brought them to a Bruderhaus Home, and, furthermore, should not have assumed that the daily ration fee known to you could possibly be used for extras. At the time we were simply instructed by our management in Reutlingen to provide two places for your children for a limited stay as a special favor to your family.

Your children were always happy, Miriam gained 6 pounds, Anna stayed the same. Both are lively and in good spirits and give us pleasure.

The termination of their stay is being prepared for the 15th of this month.

Best Regards



1. PG stands for Partei Genosse, which means party member under National Socialism.


WALTRUDIS BUCK (writer/actor) earned an MFA in fiction writing at Hunter College in 2003. Some of her poetry and short stories have been published in Hunter’s Olivetree Review. Her one-act, Water Without Berries, was workshopped at Ivoryton Playhouse for their Third Annual Women Playwrights Initiative 2019 and won an Ellie Award. Her novel, The Berlin Girl, can be found here.

As an actor, she has worked extensively in Regional and Stock. On screen she has been directed by Tyler Perry, Woody Allen, Oliver Stone, Todd Haynes, Barry Levinson, and Sofia Coppola among others. 

 

Featured Image by Lucho Morales, courtesy of Unsplash.

Author’s Note

I wrote “The Orphanage” at Hunter College in a biography class while getting an MFA in creative writing. I had grown up in post-World War II Germany with minimal education. We were starving. It was hard enough to come up with the money for higher schooling for my brother; we girls were supposed to get married. When I escaped to America, I pursued acting. In Germany at that time, America was thought of as the land of milk and honey, where the streets were paved with gold, where anything was possible. How the tables have turned.

Having worked in regional, stock, dinner theatres, the occasional film and TV show, I decided I should finally get an education and managed to get admitted to Hunter. I had studied acting with some of the best in the business—my three favorite teachers were Lee Strasberg, Uta Hagen and Kim Stanley—I saw no point in taking acting at Hunter, but concentrated on writing classes, poetry, playwriting, and memoir. It became clear to me very quickly that the skills required for acting are pretty much identical to those for writing. 

For example place is a good place to start. Kim Stanley was a particular stickler for place. Rehearsing a scene for her, you might have to spend days working on place before she would allow you to speak a word of dialogue. She used to complain, “I’m at a play and the actors are up on stage instead of in their places.” It is indeed amazing how specific everything becomes, how much richer, the goodies I would never have thought to incorporate without sense memories connected to place. 

Sense memories were given a great deal of attention in Strasberg’s classes. Not only do they conjure up intimate details, they also uncover long forgotten feelings. I find the most powerful sense memories go back to my childhood: the sight of a doll my sister loved, the scent of pine trees in the woods, the sound of the river, the velvety touch of moss on the ground. Sense memories help me create a rich and truthful world. 

In essence, all three taught the same things, but Uta’s emphasis was on the action. You had to know what your character’s action is, which meant, what does your character want and what does he/she do to get it? It was best if you could articulate it with one verb. She made us explore what the obstacles facing our characters were. What’s in their way? How do they overcome it? 

As an actor you only need to know your own character’s action, but as a writer I should know it for all my characters. In acting, the finished product is the physical performance: mind, body, and soul, visible to the audience. In writing all you have are words, words, words, but for me, they are created from the same source.

 


WALTRUDIS BUCK (writer/actor) earned an MFA in fiction writing at Hunter College in 2003. Some of her poetry and short stories have been published in Hunter’s Olivetree Review. Her one-act, Water Without Berries, was workshopped at Ivoryton Playhouse for their Third Annual Women Playwrights Initiative 2019 and won an Ellie Award. Her novel, The Berlin Girl, can be found here.

As an actor, she has worked extensively in Regional and Stock. On screen she has been directed by Tyler Perry, Woody Allen, Oliver Stone, Todd Haynes, Barry Levinson, and Sofia Coppola among others.