The Living and the Lost

by Ellen Feldman

Genres: World War II; Jewish Fiction; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

From the author of Paris Never Leaves You, Ellen Feldman's The Living and the Lost is a gripping story of a young German Jewish woman who returns to Allied Occupied Berlin from America to face the past and unexpected future

“A deeply satisfying and truly adult novel.” —Margot Livesey, New York Times best-selling author of The Flight of Gemma Hardy

Millie (Meike) Mosbach and her brother David, manage to escape to the States just before Kristallnacht, leaving their parents and little sister in Berlin. Millie attends Bryn Mawr on a special scholarship for non-Aryan German girls and graduates to a magazine job in Philadelphia. David enlists in the army and is eventually posted to the top-secret Camp Ritchie in Maryland, which trains German-speaking men for intelligence work.

Now they are both back in their former hometown, haunted by ghosts and hoping against hope to find their family. Millie, works in the office responsible for rooting out the most dedicated Nazis from publishing; she is consumed with rage at her former country and its citizens, though she is finding it more difficult to hate in proximity. David works trying to help displaced persons build new lives, while hiding his more radical nighttime activities from his sister. Like most of their German-born American colleagues, they suffer from conflicts of rage and guilt at their own good fortune, except for Millie’s boss, Major Harry Sutton, who seems much too eager to be fair to the Germans.

Living and working in bombed-out Berlin, a latter day Wild West where drunken soldiers brawl; the desperate prey on the unsuspecting; spies ply their trade; werewolves, as unrepentant Nazis were called, scheme to rise again; black markets thrive, and forbidden fraternization is rampant, Millie must come to terms with a decision she made as a girl in a moment of crisis, and with the enigmatic sometimes infuriating Major Sutton who is mysteriously understanding of her demons.

Atmospheric, The Living and the Lost is a story of love, survival, and forgiveness of others and of self.

A Macmillan Audio production from St. Martin's Griffin

Release date: September 7, 2021

Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

Print pages: 256

Reader says this book is...: emotionally riveting (1) heartwarming (1) historical elements (1) realistic characters (1) rich setting(s) (1) tearjerker (1) terrific writing (1) thought-provoking (1) tragic (1) unputdownable (1)

Sample

One



Berlin had never been so quiet. Cars and trucks lay in useless pieces. Even bicycles were scarce. There was a rumor that a Soviet soldier had shot a woman who’d refused to yield hers. Smart-stepping boots no longer echoed on the pavements. People trudged the streets dour and mute. The city had been cowed into silence. The hush was as unsettling as the physical devastation. The rest of Germany had been bombed. Berlin had been obliterated.

She’d been in the city for only forty-eight hours, and the shock of the destruction, wreaked first by Allied planes, then by fierce fighting between the Wehrmacht and the Red Army, and most recently by Soviet rape and pillage, was still raw. Some neighborhoods looked like moonscapes, all dirt and craters and dusty shadows that when she got closer turned out to be Trümmerfrauen, the sullen, silent women who picked up broken bricks, pieces of pipe, and other debris and passed the wreckage along from hand to hand in a weary assembly line of forced labor, forced if the women wanted ration cards to eat. But what amazed her even more than the ruin was the Russian roulette aspect. Here and there, parts of buildings still stood, though walls or roofs had been blown away, exposing to cold and rain and prying eyes old bedsteads, broken toilets, and desperate inhabitants still clinging to what was left, because where else could they go? Sometimes one side of the street was nothing more than a pile of rubble while a building across the way stood untouched, the architectural details still handsome, or garish, the glass of the windows unshattered, the Biedermeier breakfronts like this one in the parlor of the flat gleaming in the setting winter sun that spilled into the room. The breakfront had caught her attention as soon as she’d stepped through the sliding doors to the parlor. It was standing between two tall French windows that opened onto Riemeisterstrasse. She told herself Berlin was full of Biedermeier chairs and tables, secretaries and breakfronts. There was no reason to think this was a piece from her own past. But reason had nothing to do with it.

She started across the room. The woman in the rusty black dress that hung on her scrawny frame as if on a scarecrow—Millie was willing to bet that in happier times she had liked her schnitzel and kuchen—dogged her steps. A girl, about four or five Millie guessed, though these days with all the malnutrition it was hard to tell, clung to her mother’s dragging skirt. The child’s eyes, when she stole a glance up at Millie, were saucers of fear in her thin washed-out face. Don’t be afraid, Millie wanted to say. I won’t hurt you. Then she caught herself. Who was she kidding? Of course she was about to hurt the child. She was about to devastate the entire family.

The woman moved to step in front of the breakfront, as if to protect it from Millie, and the stench of sour body odor grew stronger. These days soap was as hard to find in Berlin as food, and what little there was crumbled into hard gray pebbles the instant it met water. Breathing through her mouth to avoid inhaling the smell, a trick a medical student back in the States had taught her, Millie ran her fingers over the birch and ebony inlays. The wood felt smooth and familiar beneath her touch. Berlin might be full of Biedermeier breakfronts, but how many had elaborate geometric inlays and ebony columns with brass capitals? The piece was too elegant for this solidly kleinbürgerlich flat. Middle-class, she corrected herself. She was here to speak German to the Germans, not to wander down her own linguistic memory lane.

“It is, how do you say in English, a fake,” the woman said.

Millie took a step away. Even breathing through her mouth, she couldn’t escape the smell. She reminded herself it wasn’t the woman’s fault, but that didn’t make the odor, or the woman, any less offensive. Whose fault was it that there was no soap in Berlin?

“Fälschung.”

“You speak German?” the woman asked as if she’d been tricked.

“Apparently. But fälschung or authentisch, it’s part of the inventory.”

“It is a family piece,” the woman insisted. “Of sentimental value only,” she added in an unsentimental voice.

A family piece. Of sentimental value. Millie knew something about that. She turned from the breakfront, crossed the sitting room, and started down the hall. The woman tried to bustle ahead, but Millie blocked her way. She did not want to be shown the apartment, as if she were a prospective renter or boarder, as if she were a supplicant. We come as conquerors, not as oppressors, General Eisenhower had announced, and though Millie was officially sworn to the second part of that sentence, she wasn’t about to forget the first. More to the point, she was determined not to let any German she came in contact with forget it.

She made her way down the hall. The dining room was crowded with a heavy carved table and too many chairs. No Biedermeier elegance here. The kitchen was primitive, but she didn’t intend to do much cooking. She wasn’t in the military, only attached to it, but she would still have access to various messes and officers’ clubs, requisitioned restaurants, and that wondrous outpost of American prosperity, the envy of the world or at least of the inhabitants of Berlin, the PX. So would the roommate she’d been told to expect.

In the first bedroom, a massive four-poster was piled high with eiderdowns. Again, the woman tried to run interference, but Millie took a step around her, put her hand on the eiderdowns, and pressed down several times, testing the mattress. She knew she was taunting the woman, and she felt a small flash of shame, but not enough to stop. The woman’s hand lifted, as if she wanted to slap Millie, then fell to her side. The child moved closer and wound her arms around her mother’s leg. Now Millie was ashamed. Goading a grown woman, a grown German woman, was fair play, or at least justified. Intimidating a child, even a German child, was unconscionable. Except that the German child was likely to grow up to be a German adult.

She moved on to the bathroom. It was spartan but immaculate. The woman was a good housekeeper. That couldn’t be easy with all the dust the Trümmerfrauen kicked up collecting the rubble and wheeling it along the broken roads.

She entered the next room. The woman followed with the child still clinging to her thigh. The bed here was smaller but still piled high with eiderdowns. She didn’t bother to test the mattress. She’d made her point. She moved on to the last room. The small chest of drawers and narrow bed were painted white with pink and blue flowers. A stuffed bear, the cross stitches of his mouth set in an eternally winsome smile, was propped up against the pillow. Is that your teddy? The words were almost out of her mouth before she swallowed them. The child really was testing her resolve. She didn’t want to taunt her, but she was determined not to be seduced by her. Giving a wide berth to a dollhouse that stood in a corner, she walked to the window, looked out into the bare alley where a few weeds sprouted among the rubble, then turned, left the bedroom, and made her way back down the hall. She was not going to look at the breakfront again, not so much as a glance, but her eyes had a will of their own. As she passed the doorway, her head turned to take it in one more time. The piece was so handsome it was almost an affront to the city, and the times.

She and the woman stood facing each other in the entrance hall. The fear she’d read in the woman’s faded blue eyes when she’d opened the door and seen Millie’s uniform had hardened into hatred. Millie could feel the rage coming off her, acrid as the smell of her unwashed flesh and greasy hair. That was all right. That made it easier. The woman’s hatred was like a stick poking her own to life.

“Three o’clock tomorrow,” she said in German. “You, your family, and your personal effects must be out by three o’clock tomorrow.”

“But the child…” the woman began.

“Three o’clock tomorrow,” Millie repeated and was out the door before the woman could protest any further. If she was going to worry about a child, she had better candidates for her pity than that little girl, who, even after all these years, even after everything that had happened, still had a teddy bear to cling to.

She made her way down the stairs slowly. She told herself she was being careful because there was no light in the stairwell, but she knew it was more than that. The shadow of the child followed her all the way.

Pulling open the door to the street, she stepped into the falling dusk. The winter solstice was still a month away, but the shortening days made the ruined streets feel even more ominous. The rubble wasn’t as bad here as in some parts of the city. Zehlendorf, a borough of handsome villas, cobblestone streets, lakes, parks, and upstanding German citizens, had been of no strategic value, except perhaps for those upstanding citizens. It had been spared the worst of the bombing. But it still felt broken.

She crossed the street and stood looking up at the French windows of the flat she’d just requisitioned. The woman appeared in one of them and stood staring down at her. Even at this distance, Millie could feel the rage. Again, she told herself that was all right. That was welcome. The woman’s hatred banished the shadow of the child that had stalked her down the stairs.

She’d been in Berlin only two days, but in Germany for a week. The experience was not what she’d expected. She didn’t mean the hardship. She’d been warned of that. The unwanted sympathy, her own, not the Germans’, was the problem. It was easy to hate from a distance. She was surprised to find how much energy it took close up.

As she went on staring up at the window, two GIs turned the corner onto Riemeisterstrasse. One of them took a last drag of a cigarette and flicked the butt to the street.

Suddenly four small boys appeared out of nowhere. Three were wearing torn trousers that were too thin for the winter weather. The fourth was in shorts. All four of them dove for the cigarette butt. The scuffle didn’t go on for long, a few punches, some wild kicks, violent curses. The boy in shorts pulled away from them, ran halfway down the block, and turned back to look at the others. They stood watching him but made no move. Honor among thieves, or at least a code of behavior among scavengers. The winner took a small tin box from the pocket of his shorts, opened it, and placed the cigarette butt inside. The incident was something else she’d been in Germany long enough to understand. Kippensammlung, or butt collecting. Children, and sometimes able-bodied men, if any were left, and the elderly as well, collected cigarette butts, removed the remaining tobacco, rolled it into new cigarettes, and sold them on the black market. They weren’t as valuable as American cigarettes—four cents a pack at the PX, ten dollars on the black market, fifteen for Pall Malls, which were longer—but they were profitable.

She looked from the boys back up at the windows of the flat. The woman was gone, leaving only the memory of the encounter. She hadn’t found requisitioning the flat as painful as people had told her it would be, but neither had she found it as satisfying as she’d expected.


Copyright © 2021 by Ellen Feldman