Hexe

By Skadi Winter

A young girl, born during the coldest winter people could remember in a remote German village shortly after WWII, tells the story of her childhood. Growing up under the care of her grandmother, she soon learns that by the end of war, bombs had destroyed countries and people but that it would take much longer to destroy a system of deceit. Like Lemmings, her people had followed false prophets to the edge of the abyss. While she struggles to come to terms with hatred and violence surrounding her, she develops a close and passionate love for her grandmother, an extraordinary and proud woman. At the end, it is her grandmother who nurtures her wounded soul and broken heart by showing and teaching her the ways of ancient heathen wisdom of her people. It is a journey of a young girls soul-searching for love and understanding to survive a time of violence, hatred, and prejudice to learn that even wars cannot change the eternal rules of crime and retribution.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Aug 19, 2013
• ISBN: 9781491801352

Skadi Winter

Based on my high school education, very early in my life I developed a passion for learning languages and travelling. I grew up during times before the Internet and i-Phones spoiled the subtle poetry of words and read my first book at the age of five—the stories of Wilhelm Busch. I worked as a medical secretary in different sectors of the health service in Germany and England for over thirty years. Like for many women of my generation, following dreams was more often than not possible due to financial and personal circumstances and prejudice against a gender, which still has no idea how to overcome fears to stand up in a world dominated by men. I am a grandmother of eight lovely grandchildren from mothers of four different nations. I tell them stories about a world full of colors, and am grateful for their critiques, which I value very much. I am thankful to live in this world and time and, finally, take my dreams out of the cupboard to fulfill them.

Book preview

CONTENTS

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

About The Author

I would like to thank my editor, Christine Rayner, who with great expertise and patience believed in me and supported me and answered all my questions, no matter how silly they seemed.

CHAPTER ONE

That winter was one of the coldest my grandmother could remember. It was minus 15°C and snow covered the little houses which huddled around the ruins of the village church near the German-French border, as if seeking shelter from the wind. The air smelled of peat and wood, collected by the women in the nearby forest and used for heating and cooking—if they had anything to cook, in those tough, war-time days.

It was January, 1945, almost my 10th birthday. I was a ‘winter child’, as my grandmother used to say. Country-born people believed cats born during the coldest months of the year were often weak and sickly, but if they survived they grew stronger than the others.

The little stove in our kitchen gave out so much heat that my cheeks were burning. My wet clothes hung on the washing line strung across from one corner to the other. It was the only room in the house with a stove, which was why my grandmother had made me a bed on the old sofa, along the back wall. The other rooms were freezing.

I loved my bed. I cuddled down, listening to the comforting sound of my grandmother knitting by the light of the kitchen lamp drawn down from the ceiling. By time she went upstairs, I was always sound asleep, so never felt afraid to be left alone in a dark room. After the front and back door were secured, my grandmother and her sister—who had been bombed out of her house the previous year—sat mending old socks at the kitchen table. It had become routine to barricade homes in the village, after rumours spread that runaway prisoners of war, mostly Poles and Russians, had escaped their SS guards, fled the approaching allied forces and were rampaging through the area, searching for food and women to rape. As a young girl in that tiny, remote village, I had no idea what ‘rape’ meant. The older children loved to re-tell these rumours, using words that were more frightening to me than Grimm’s fairy tales of the big bad wolf.

One evening, as I pondered all these things and listened to my grandmother’s mumbling and grumbling above the noise of the crackling fire, a loud knock at the door made us all jump. We stayed silent, hardly daring to breathe, hoping that by just ignoring the battering it would go away. I felt the tension rise in the room, even though I could not really understand it. Instinctively, I pulled my tattered blanked up to my eyes and tried to fight my fear, by focusing on the crackling fire in the stove.

After what seemed a long time, my aunt, always the braver of the sisters, got up and slowly walked across the room. As she moved the old chest of drawers blocking the door and opened it, there was nothing but an awful silence. Once I felt I could breathe again, the word ‘rape’ was spinning in my head. Whatever it meant, it seemed the most dreadful thing was going to happen.

Nobody in the room moved—me under my blanket; my grandmother on her chair, sitting as upright as if she had swallowed a stick; my aunt in the doorway. We were all frozen in time, either from the icy blast blowing into the room, or from fear, or both. All of a sudden, my aunt raised her right arm, the old sock with a needle stuck in it still in her left hand, and shouted ‘Heil Hitler’ in a loud and brave voice. Immediately, my grandmother jumped up and hissed ‘you stupid fool, you’ll get us all shot!’ My teeth began to chatter, fear choking me like a thick cloud. My aunt started to walk slowly backwards into the kitchen, followed by a huge shadow on the wall. I closed my eyes and, when I opened them again, saw a tall, black soldier in an American uniform emerging from the shadows, like the genie out of Aladdin’s miraculous lamp.

None of us had ever seen a black man, or an American soldier, let alone such a giant.

My aunt started to talk, breaking the spell by babbling incoherent, silly words. She said we were kind people, not Nazis—at least not the ones fighting against the rest of the world. The soldier did not seem to understand a word she said. Neither did I, but he must have felt the desperation and fear in the room, for he made comforting noises, as if talking to a small child, raising his hands in a defensive manner and saying, ‘shh, shh. All is OK. OK. All right’. Then he started to smile, exposing the whitest teeth I had ever seen. I thought: anything is better than rape!

The excitement of this encounter subsided and after that life continued pretty much as usual. Hordes of soldiers of different nationalities and colours hurried busily through the village, confiscating paintings and books relating to Hitler; objects considered too valuable to remain in the care of their German owners. As the weeks passed, the white bed sheets which had hastily been put out of windows, or flown from roof tops as makeshift banners of peace and goodwill, friendship and trust, disappeared from village homes. A flu epidemic killed the weak or malnourished, the rest survived, despite shortages of food and other essentials. Suddenly, everybody was building, mending, or clearing broken stones which had tumbled all over the streets and alleys during those last bombing raids.

It was then that I first heard the word ‘hexe’, not in a fairy tale, not as a swear word directed at an old crone who had upset some of the younger children. It was while I was out with other children looking for pots, clothes, or chairs in the houses which had been left empty when their owners fled, or died, during the last days of the war, that the word flew into my face like a fist.

‘Your mother is a whore and your grandmother is a hexe’, the girl said again, sticking her little nose up into the air, like the Führer when he spoke to his people. I blinked and stared at her. What was she talking about? We were friends, we went to school together, we played together, we lived in the same village. Yet at this moment, she might just has well have arrived from another planet. I took a step backwards and nearly fell over a broken bucket, dropping the cup containing? the rose ornaments I had found. I held my breath in the cold air. Silence.

Hexen existed in fairy tales. Even I knew by now they didn’t really exist. OK, so my grandmother had no teeth, she wore her grey hair up in a bun underneath a black head scarf and had deep wrinkles around her mouth and eyes—but a hexe? Was the girl mad? Should I laugh, or ignore it?

I had no idea what the word ‘whore’ really meant, except that it was a very bad word, never to be said to a girl or a woman. My grandmother had told me my mother had left in the last days of the war, to search for work to keep food on our table. Nobody knew where she was, or what she was doing. Did my grandmother know? Whenever I asked her, she simply said, ‘The gods know. Bad times’. My grandfather and my father were also still away, somewhere in Russia.

The word ‘hexe’ was different. I had a clear view what a witch was. A hexe was evil. A hexe gave the poisoned apple to Snow White. She fed Hansel, fattening him up so she could cook and eat him. Hexen put bad spells on people and danced around the Devil’s Rock near the village on Walpurgis Night and turned children into ugly frogs.

I was angry and hurt that anybody would dare to call my beloved grandmother a hexe and I took a step forward, my cheeks burning. I lifted my arm and slapped the girl who had called her that awful name. Then, feeling relieved to have done something to defend my family’s reputation, I turned on my heel and started to run… across the rubble, past the school house, past the sad church which had lost its bell tower. I ran home to my grandmother. As I ran, I saw the world through a veil of tears, although I did not let them flow.

CHAPTER TWO

Back in the familiar kitchen, I collapsed on my familiar old sofa, my mind buzzing. Grandmother a hexe? She couldn’t be. She was good, she cared for me and everybody who needed her help. She grew wonderful-smelling herbs and flowers in her garden and, when I had a fever, she fed me cool strawberry compote, or made cough syrup from onions and sugar. My grandmother was gentle, soothing me when I fell and scraped my knee. She sang me that sad song about Mariechen sitting in the garden with her baby in her arms; Mariechen who drowned herself in grief at the loss of the soldier lover who never returned from war.

As I sat down at the table to eat, a glance from my grandmother was enough to remind me to wash my hands, which I dutifully did, before tucking into the tasty potatoes fried with onions and herbs. The fire was crackling in the stove, the gentle spring air coming in through the slightly open window, a smell of awakening soil, mixed with the peat fire. My glass of milk, still warm from our only cow, was a comfort and I thought, ‘Good. All is good’. I had slapped that stupid girl for what she said and I loved my grandmother. My little world had found its balance again. Surely, my mother would come back soon and all thoughts of ‘hexe’ and ‘whore’ would be forgotten.

Most of the wartime rubble in the streets was now cleared, but people desperately tried to cope with the shortage of food. Some lucky ones, like my grandmother, found work on farms in surrounding villages, getting milk and potatoes in exchange. It was a boring diet, but my grandmother used herbs from her garden to supplement the food—garlic, marjoram and chives which she had dried the year before—eggs from a farmer down our road.

One mild evening, as a gentle breeze carried the smell of hyacinths, narcissus and turned soil, the farmer knocked at the door. My grandmother let him in and I went to wait in the next room. I didn’t like this rough old man, who I had once seen kill a pig. It had made me feel sick. His face was weatherbeaten, from years toiling in the sun, wind and rain. He had big hands and smelled of cow dung. His wife had died of a ‘woman’s disease’, whatever that meant, and he lived in a big farmhouse with his son and daughter.

The farmer had wonderful horses, which he took to the village well each night. They had large brown eye, and they danced and snorted as he led them to drink. I always wished I could stroke them, but he growled at us children to ‘move away’, his voice dark and frightening. I thought, ‘if I ever have a horse, it will become my friend and I will ride it across the fields, the wind playing in my hair.’ Still, a man who kept horses couldn’t be that bad, could he?

The farmer sat down on the kitchen chair, took off his cap and laid it on his lap. My grandmother busied herself filling a kettle with water and putting it on to the stove, before also sitting down. I stood quietly, looking through the gap in the doorway, waiting to hear why he had come. What did he want from my grandmother?

‘Lina’, he said, ‘you know I have another son who was at the Russian front during the war. We haven’t heard from him since it ended. I know you do the cards. Tell me, is he coming back?’

My grandmother did not say a word. I heard her feet shuffle on the wooden floor, heard a drawer being pulled open and the chair squeaking. ‘Who said I do the cards?’ she asked.

‘Hermine, your good friend and neighbour told me. You did the cards for her’, the farmer answered. ‘You know, I thought about your husband. He won’t be coming back. It’s been quite a while, all the others have come back by now. Did you ever do the cards for yourself?’

‘None of your business,’ said my grandmother.

‘And did you ever ask the cards where your daughter is now?’ asked the farmer ‘What she is doing? They say that she sells her honour to British soldiers, or whoever pays, in return for a pair of silk stockings.’ I held my breath and heard my grandmother go to the door, open it and shout. ‘Get out! Don’t you ever come back, you hear?’

‘Why are you so touchy? You are a good woman, a wise one and everybody knows you work hard, bringing

Reviews for Hexe

[lettypearl · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a dark, almost mystical story of a young girl growing up with her grandmother in a remote German village shortly after WWII, trying to understand and deal with the violence, hatred, and prejudice of the time. Her grandmother is different than the other villagers, although she has suffered just as much, if not more, as a result of the war. She gains strength from the ancient wisdom of those who came before. The girl struggles with these things, but learns from her grandmother that revenge and retribution do not provide the answers, but that the consequences of injustices inflicted follow the perpetrators. Although quite dark, I thoroughly enjoyed reading this beautifully written book. Thank you, Skadi Winter!

[uvi_poznansky · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Written in the voice of a young girl, Frigg, growing up in a German village during WWII, HEXE is an intimate, heartfelt account of her life. In this story, fiction becomes so true, so rich with historical facts, and so imbued with fairytale traditions, that it ushers us into the time and place it describes, making them a reality. Originating from German, the title packs a lot of meaning into its short utterance: HEXE is the act of doing witchcraft, of working miracles. Fittingly, this is exactly what this story encapsulates: the passing of mystical traditions from the grandmother, Lina, to her young granddaughter, Frigg. “Once, when I asked her why she got up so early, she said, ‘The veil is the thinnest during the Witching Hour, the time of magic, when souls find souls. The herbs you cut during the witching hours are the most powerful. They carry the magical mist.’” This unique relationship is set against the background of turmoil, witnessed as the girl watches a mob dragging her mother in the street. It is heart-wrenching to read, “A wild crowd was jeering at something being dragged along on a rope. It took me a moment to understand what was going on… The world started to spin. A mist descended in front of my eyes and my heart seemed to stop.” It is awe-inspiring to realize the courage of the grandmother to stand up against the brutes, and save the victim from their hands.Later, looking at her grandmother, the girl says to herself, with an endearing touch of honesty, ‘She is getting really old now. I wish she would stop telling me these tales.’ Which is when she learns a lesson from her grandmother: ‘Superstitious minds are troubled minds. Superstitions are born out of fear of the unknown, the unexplained threatening the routine of life.’ Aside from the writing, I want to mention the beautiful presentation of the print edition. In the tradition of old manuscripts, the first letter of each chapter is presented in a font that seems to come out of an old witchcraft book. I simply love this attention to detail, offering us the beauty of an old glyph as a gateway to the a world of magic.Five stars.