The Women at Hitler’s Table. Rosella Postorino

company that managed railway sleeping and dining cars. In ’37 he had been hired by the Führer to pamper him during journeys on his special train. The train was armored with light antiaircraft cannons to respond to low-altitude attacks and was equipped with elegant suites, Krümel said. They were so elegant, in fact, that Hitler jokingly called it “the Hotel of the Frenetic Reich Chancellor.” Its name was Amerika, or at least it was until America joined the war. Then it was downgraded to Brandenburg, which sounded less grand to me, though I didn’t say so. Now, lodged in the Wolfsschanze, Krümel cooked over two hundred meals a day for Hitler’s staff, also pampering us tasters.

      We weren’t allowed to enter the kitchen, and he would come out only if he had something to tell us or was summoned by the guards—for example, because Heike reported a strange taste in the water, which Beate consequently noticed. The women leapt to their feet—headache, nausea, stomachs churning from distress. But it was Fachingen spring water, the Führer’s favorite! “The water of well-being,” they called it, so how could it harm anyone?

      One Tuesday, two kitchen helpers didn’t show up for work. They had fevers. Krümel came to the lunchroom and asked me to give him a hand. I don’t know why he chose me, maybe because I was the only one who had studied his books on nutrition—the other women had soon grown bored with them. Or maybe it was because I was from Berlin, like him.

      The Fanatics turned up their noses at his choice. If someone was to have access to the kitchen, it should be them, the perfect homemakers.

      One day I had heard Gertrude ask her sister, “Did you read about the young woman who went into a Jew’s shop and was kidnapped?”

      “No, where did it happen?” Sabine asked, but Gertrude went on: “Just imagine—the back of the shop led to an underground tunnel. Passing through it, with the help of other Jews the shopkeeper took her to the synagogue and they all raped her, all at once.”

      Sabine covered her eyes as though witnessing the assault. “Really, Gerti?”

      “Of course,” her sister replied. “They always rape them before offering them in sacrifice.”

      “Did you read that in Der Stürmer?” Theodora asked.

      “I just know it happened, and that’s that,” Gertrude replied. “We housewives aren’t safe anymore, not even when we go shopping.”

      “That’s true,” said Theodora. “It’s a good thing all those shops were closed down.”

      Theodora would have defended tooth and nail the German ideal of mother-wife-homemaker, and it was precisely because she was its worthy representative that she asked to speak to Krümel. She told him about the restaurant her family had run before the war. She had experience in the kitchen and wanted to prove it. The chef was persuaded.

      He handed us each an apron and a crate of vegetables. I rinsed them in the large sink while Theodora cubed some, sliced others. With the exception of scolding me for not rinsing away all the grit or because I had left a puddle on the floor, she didn’t speak to me on the first day. Like an apprentice, she spent her time shadowing the assistant chefs, sticking so close behind them that she hindered their movements.

      “Out of the way!” Krümel ordered her, when he nearly tripped over her feet.

      Theodora apologized, then added, “How better to learn than by watching? I can barely believe I’m working side by side with a chef of your caliber.”

      “Side by side? Out of the way, I told you!”

      Over the following days, though, convinced she was now a full-fledged member of the team, out of professional ethics she decided to take me into her confidence. After all, I was her coworker—or rather, my blatant incompetence made me her underling. And so she told me about her parents’ restaurant, a small establishment, not even ten tables. “It was charming, though. You should have seen it.” The war had forced them to close it down. She planned to reopen it, though, when the war was over, and with several more tables. On the outer edges of her eyes, her wrinkles formed tiny flippers, making them look like two little fish. Her restaurateur dreams filling her with enthusiasm, she began to speak excitedly, the flippers on her face moving so quickly I almost expected to see her eyes spring from her face, dive through the air, and plunge into the pot of boiling water in front of her.

      “But if the Bolsheviks arrived it would be impossible,” she said. “We could never reopen the restaurant. It would be the end of everything.” All at once, the flippers went still. Her eyes were no longer swimming. They were age-old fossils. How old was Theodora?

      “I hope it’s not the end of everything,” I dared to say, “because I don’t know if we’re going to win this war.”

      “Don’t even think that way. If the Russians won, we would be doomed to destruction and slavery, the Führer said so himself. Hordes of men being marched off to the Siberian tundra. Didn’t you hear him say so?”

      No, I hadn’t.

      I REMEMBERED GREGOR back in our old living room in Altemesseweg. He got up from the armchair we had bought from a secondhand shop and went to the window, sighing. “Russian weather.” Soldiers used that expression, he explained to me, because Russians attacked even in the worst conditions. “They can endure anything.”

      He was on leave and spoke to me about the front—he did that sometimes. He told me about the Morgenkonzert, for example, which was what they called the symphony of explosions the Red Army performed at dawn.

      In bed one night, he said, “If the Russians arrive, they’ll show no mercy.”

      “Why do you think that?”

      “Because the Germans treat Soviet prisoners differently from the others. The British and French receive aid from the Red Cross, and in the afternoon they even play football, while the Soviets are forced to dig trenches under the surveillance of soldiers from their own army.”

      “From their own army?”

      “Yes, men who are lured into it by the promise of a piece of bread or an extra ladleful of broth,” he replied, turning off the light. “If they do to us what we’ve done to them, it’s going to be horrible.”

      For a long time I tossed and turned in bed, unable to sleep, and all at once Gregor embraced me. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have told you those things, you shouldn’t know about them. What good does knowing do? And for whom?”

      I lay awake even after he had fallen fast asleep.

      “WE’LL DESERVE WHAT they do to us,” I said to Theodora.

      She glared at me with contempt, then went back to ignoring me. Her hostility darkened my spirits. There was no reason for me to feel that way—she wasn’t someone I wanted a connection with. Actually, I had no connection with any of the other women either. Not with Augustine, who needled me—Made a new friend, have you?—or with Leni, who heaped praises on the food as though I’d cooked it myself. I had no connection with those women, apart from a job I never would have imagined for myself. What do you want to be when you grow up? Hitler’s food taster.

      Nevertheless, the Fanatic’s hostility made me uncomfortable. I wandered through the kitchen more clumsily than usual, and out of distraction burned my wrist. A shriek escaped me.

      At the sight of my skin withering around the burn, Theodora suspended her silent treatment, grabbed my arm, and turned on the faucet. “Run cold water over it!” Then she peeled a potato as the chefs continued their work. She patted my wrist dry with a towel and rested a slice of raw potato on the burn. “It’ll soothe the irritation, you’ll see.” Her motherly care touched me.

      Standing in a corner as I held the slice of potato on my wrist, I saw Krümel toss something into the soup and chuckle to himself. Noticing I’d spotted him doing it, he raised his finger to his lips. “It’s not healthy to go entirely without meat,” he said. “You learned that for yourself in those books I gave you, right? That stubborn man can’t get it through his head, so