Fräulein M.

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At St. Luisa’s Home for Girls in western Berlin, birthdays were observed, not celebrated. Berni’s eighth, which fell in the winter of 1923, came and went with neither singing nor candles on a wooden Geburtstagskranz. Instead, the nuns burned money.

“They treat us like livestock,” Berni hissed into her little sister’s good ear that morning at breakfast. They were eating dry slices of Vollkornbrot with nothing to improve its taste: no meat, no butter, no jam. “Kannst du mich hören?” This was Grete’s least favorite question, but Berni could never help asking.

Grete, who was five, tugged a lock of blond hair over her left ear. It was smooth and pink as a shell, with fewer grooves in it than in other ears. “I can hear you,” she muttered with a glance at the sisters’ table. “You needn’t speak so loudly.”

Berni took a bite of bread and wrinkled her nose, tasting a distinctive tinge of fish. On Friday mornings, the stink of pickled herring seeped into everything in the refectory: the girls’ hair, their bread, their thin gray dirndls. Having served breakfast, the cook and her staff peeled open tins of Voelker’s fillets to prepare a meatless dinner of herring salad. The one aroma that could cut through the fishy air was the comforting smoke from burning pine logs. But that winter the stack of firewood in the circular rack had dwindled.

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