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.
