Lost Pages: Hunger

My grandmother never used a potato peeler.  It was too wasteful.  True German housewives used knives to get thinner peels.  I have never known hunger or war, so I work at my kitchen sink, thick chunks of potato peel dropping from my peeler.  In front of me, my window glows with reflected Minnesota snow, and my American husband chops peppers beside me.  In the corner, a huge refrigerator hums, its belly brimming with food.

Still, I see my grandmother’s potato peels spiraling from her knife.  There were transparent, so thin that her potatoes emerged bumpy, eyes intact.  A mountain of potato peels grew from her knife in her lifetime.  Like every other woman in her East German town, she peeled potatoes to boil every day and grated them for dumplings on Sunday.

Before my parents and I left Germany when I was thirteen, I visited her in Gera every year for at least a week.  I remember sitting on a creaky kitchen chair, swinging my legs, as my grandmother unwound potato peels into a chipped enamel bowl cradled in her lap.  It was summer, and it was morning.  The white net curtains brushed against the panes of the open casement window.  Outside, a delivery truck crashed through the potholes in the cobblestones.  A pot of salted water waited on the table.

Her hand released memory as she uncovered pale potato flesh.  She told me how, during the war, her stream of peels grew longer.  More potatoes, less meat.  Then potatoes were rationed: five pounds per person per week in ’42 down to four pounds by ’44.  In ’45, after the war was over, even potatoes were hard to find.  Her knife stopped for weeks.

She fed her three youngest children two slices of bread each day.  She sprinkled the bread with salt and pepper and told them to close their eyes and conjure up the taste of liverwurst.  Sometimes, she could get a few grams of yeast to spread on top.  Once Gina, who was eight, came home bearing a bouillon cube, a gift from her piano teacher who’d had a package from America.  She made soup for five.

My legs hung still.  I strained to imagine years without cake or sausage.  Grandmother turned toward me, peering over the tops of her bifocals, quiet for a moment.

Then she talked about my father.  When he returned in ’46, well-fed and strong, from his US POW camp, he was twenty-two.  She sent him out on his old bicycle - the tires were so worn that he had to patch them every ten kilometers - to Gauern where her cousins had a farm.  He could work at the farm for a day, harvesting hay or digging turnips, eat his fill at their table, and maybe earn a few potatoes to bring home.  When they didn’t have any to spare, he could steal potatoes in the village fields.  Once he got arrested, but another time he escaped with a whole sack.  They feasted then.  Potato soup, potato pancakes for days.

How could my father have stolen?  She shook her head and bent closer to her knife saying: We would do anything for food.  It was a terrible, terrible time.

She dropped the last potato into the pot and lifted the bowl from her lap.  I stared at the blue and white squares that marched across the wax tablecloth until the pattern hung suspended in the air, permeated with dramatic memories, the energy bent totally on food, getting it, hoarding it, making it last, fixing the same three ingredients in a different way.  Mock whipped cream made from soaked wheat kernels, fake coffee from roasted grain.  From my grandmother, from my parents, from my aunts and uncles, I heard stories about hunger.  That was what impressed me most about war.  There were occasional stories about wooden shoes replacing scarce leather, jackets stuffed with newspaper for warmth, bombing raids, a cousin who died in street fighting the day before the ceasefire.  Stories about fear and cold.  But the food stories pulsed with the longing of the teller.

I believed I had heard all of my grandmother’s stories over the years, but I was wrong.  She never told me about her first grandchild.  I found out about him just last year.  Alice gave birth to him in ’46 and named him Siegfried after my father who was still a prisoner of war.  Little Siegfried was a quiet baby, too weak to cry.  His mother had no formula and her own body could not feed him on her scant ration of bread.  He starved slowly; it took three months before he died.

I was lucky, born in ’53, after the hunger years.  Raised on buttered bread with cream cheese and smoked ham, apples and oranges most of the year, Italian ice cream in summer, and buttercream torte in winter.   As a child, I sat in front of my Sunday dumpling, mashing it into a pool of rich, dark gravy, grateful and uneasy at the same time.  How could this plenty last?

Fear of hunger and war, those inseparable twins, surrounded me.  The world behind me was an abyss of chaos, and I knew I had barely  escaped.  When would the thin ice of civilization crack and open another crater, this time in front of me?  I was weak and untested; I would not be able to bear the pain of an empty stomach clenched around memories of food.

Decades later, I remain untested.  My luck has held; I live in a country unscarred by war for a hundred years.  I can afford to slice thick slabs of potato peel into the sink.  But my grandmother’s transparent peels curl through my memory, as fragile as the chance that determined the year of my birth.  I remain afraid.  I cannot fast, because the first hunger pangs trigger a flood of panic.  What I eat is never trivial.  I make a feast out of each meal.  Eating is not inconvenience; cooking is not drudgery.  As my hands slip across rough potato peels, slide along satiny green beans, tap an egg against a sharp frying pan edge, they remember hunger.