Posted by BDM Historian

My translation of the Suse Harms book "Summer Days in Heidersdorf" went over well with readers, so I have decided to translate the text of another period book for everyone's reading enjoyment. This time around, I'm translating Wolfgang Federau's book, "Sybille and her Soldier", which was published in 1940. The original book features illustrations by Willy Widmann.

Chapter One
A Letter - just for Sybille

It was sheer luck; a rare coincidence; it was even an unbelievable, magical, lucky coincidence, thought Sybille who was trying her hardest to find a word that would properly sum up the occasion. An occasion that could have happened yesterday or tomorrow or any time, maybe not at all, but which was happening now, at such a lucky time. This morning, which Sybille had off from school and when her mother had just left home to go shopping which, now that ration cards had to be used, always took a lot of time since they had to be presented and cut out.

Sybille would have gladly done this task for her mother, of course. She had even offered to go, though not without some effort since she was in the middle of a really good book Hanni had loaned her. But her mother had just smiled and thanked her. "Very nice of you, my girl," she'd said, "but you should enjoy your unexpected holiday." And then she'd left, and Sybille had returned to her room, partially thankful and partially with a guilty conscience. Who knows: if she had been more insistent or more sincere in her offer, her mother may have well taken her up on it.

But now she was glad she'd stayed home, because shortly thereafter, the door bell had been rung and the mail carrier had stood in front of her door, digging laboriously in his big leather bag with the large flap and said: "I've got a letter for Miss Sybille Beise. I'm at the right place, aren't I?"

"Yes," Sybille had answered and turned red from excitement and embarrassment, and at the same time she had gotten quite annoyed with herself for turning red. But then she took comfort in the fact that it was rather dark in the hallway and that the letter carrier couldn't see that she'd turned read or that her hands were shaking when she took the letter. "Thank you," she breathed and quietly closed the door. And that moment, the door handle still in one hand, and the letter, a real field post letter, in the other, she would never forget.

Unfortunately, it really stayed just a moment. When she turned, Peter, her brother, stood next to her. "What's going on?" he asked intrusively with his usual curiosity and inquisitiveness.

"Well," Sybille said with fake indifference, "Just the mail."

"For mom?" Peter wanted to know. It seemed like an unnecessary question to him - after all, out of the three, who besides mom got any mail in the first place? Only mom always wrote letters, here and there, to all sorts of relatives they knew, didn't know, or had never met, and to the brother of daddy, their dear, wonderful daddy who'd been dead for so long and whom they couldn't think of without feeling sad. "You have to stick together; you have to nurture the relationship with family and with the extended family," was mother's opinion, and that family was the basis of the whole state and the whole people. Peter always nodded earnestly, even though he only half understood this wisdom, be. But his mother was happy because he was listening and agreeing, and he liked to make her happy, especially if it was so easy and didn't require any sacrifices on his part. But internally, he disagreed, especially if he thought of aunt Natalie whom nobody liked because she was strange and had a spiteful tongue, and uncle Herbert who always complained and never brought any presents for the children when he came to visit, but instead complained about everything and treated mother as if she were a little girl and didn't know what she needed to do or how she should behave.

Anyway: "For Mom?" Peter asked a second time, because, even though he wasn't interested in the answer which couldn't be anything other than yes anyway, he didn't want Sybille to think that she could just walk off without answering.

"No, it's for me." Sybille answered haughtily and threw her head back so that her two auburn braids flew back. The hour of triumph had come. Like a queen, like Brunhild, she walked - no, she strode (Queens stride, walking is for lowly humans) past Peter to her room.

Peter was no sailor, he had an interest in flying and had been working on his second large glider model for weeks. Regardless, no matter how much Sybille was bragging, it couldn't shock him. "Importance!" he said snottily and put into the word all the contempt a boy is obligated to feel toward a girl, even if that girl happens to be a good four years older than him. After all, she's still just a girl.

Sybille pretended she didn't hear him. She disappeared, before Peter could add anything more spiteful, and he annoyedly stomped off into the brook cupboard which, with mother's permission, had become his workshop. This was his own realm where he could be safe and where nobody, not Sybille and of course not mother either, would dare disturb him. This was where he could pursue his ideas and plans - if there was no hammering or gluing going on, there always was a special reason. For example, he couldn't get over a sad experience he'd had during the last field exercise. They had excluded him from all patrols and told him to stay well hidden in a depression in the sand. When he'd finally come up with the courage to complain about this treatment, he'd been told: "Patrols? You? Completely out of the question. Your hair is so bright, they can see you coming from 300 meters in the dark. You'd give us away!"

So that had been the reason, and now Peter was puttering about fervently in his little realm. He had clipped a few strands of his white-blond hair which were now lying neatly in small glass saucers and he tried to treat them with watercolors and even ink to turn them black, or brown like Sybille's braids, or at the very least dark blond. Unfortunately, his labors didn't seem to be getting anywhere, and especially the lock of hair he'd treated with black ink looked, honestly, rather disgusting. But the other colors proved equally unsuitable, particularly since the color washed out as soon as it touched water, and the hair turned back to white. He struggled with his fate of being excluded during maneuvers and having been cursed with a sister who'd been given such nice brown hair and didn't even need it, while he was walking around with white-blond hair and had to put up with being called Whitehead even by the troop leader.

Meanwhile, Sybille sat in her room in the white, comfortable wicker chair, held the now opened letter in her hand and suddenly started to feel strange. A soldier was writing to her, one she had never met in person, one named Ludwig Zelter. She'd never heard the name before and spoke it quietly. "Ludwig," she whispered and thought it was a nice and nicely sounding name. He wrote to Miss Sybille Beise, and that was her. She was fourteen years old and a student in the fifth grade of the Girls' Secondary School - the Obertertia, as it used to be called - and the teachers already addressed her and the other students as "Miss". And a teacher she knew from elementary school and whom she'd recently met on the street had greeted her very politely as if she was a right lady. This soldier, however, he wrote plainly and simply. "Dear Sybille," he wrote. And he didn't call her "Miss" or anything, and she wasn't upset about it, she even thought it was quite nice - so warm, so comradely, and this would allow her to respond the same way. It was almost as if this soldier wasn't so far away, so many hundreds or thousands of miles from her hometown.

"Dear Sybille," he wrote. "I received the care package that you and your fellow students have sent to me, and shortly thereafter I've also gotten the other one, the book and chocolate you sent me yourself. I was very happy to get both, and I wrote a letter of thanks to your class, but now I want to write you separately. You said in your letter that you would like to send a soldier, any soldier, a little something every now and again, a little greeting from home which, after all, is his home as well. Your letter did me especially well because it just so happens that it's very much like you hoped: the one who got your letter is someone who's not getting mail from anyone else. My parents are both dead and, unfortunately, I have no siblings. So it's nice to know that there's someone far away back home who's thinking of me - even if that someone is a fourteen year old girl which, by my calculations, you would be, and therefore still a half or whole child. But wait, I have to correct myself: I'm not really alone because I'm a soldier, and as such, I'm a part of an Army that is marching to defend and protect its people and Fatherland. And that means I'm not alone after all, because all soldiers have comrades and comrades are people whom fate has forged into a strange kind of community, because if something good happens to one, the other is happy as well; if one is wounded, the other's heart feels for him. Comrades laugh together, and they work together, and they fight together, and maybe they even die together. And sometimes I think, even though I don't have any siblings, we're much closer than any two blood brothers can be. They know me so well, in every detail, that they can guess my every move, my every thought before I can do or think them. And so, in a sense, I'm not alone at all. There's a little circle of others who, previously, all lived their own personal lives, and now we're one and we belong together, and that makes even the most difficult times easy.

I don't know if you can even understand this at such a young age, dear Sybille. If not, then your mother - I'm sure you have a good, concerned, loving mother - then she can probably explain it to you much better than I could ever try to. But I think that probably won't be necessary. In this time in which we live, where once again the future of our people is in the balance, in this time the boys and girls grow up sooner than those in previous decades. And even a fourteen year old girl will understand, if not with her mind, then at least with her heart, what I'm getting at and am trying to express so awkwardly.

You wrote that I should tell you about myself and about life out here. Well, there's not a whole lot to tell. We're somewhere in the West and are doing our duty. You'll probably say - or at least think - that isn't a whole lot. But it's a lot more and a lot more difficult than you can probably imagine. Waiting is always harder than doing, than acting, and when you've been doing it for seven, eight months, since getting sent here from Poland, then that's a whole lot. It's a difficult ordeal that can tire even the best over time. But that's exactly what we cannot become: tired, and so we always have to do something, even if there's not really anything to do or when we're off duty. Because then we always have to work on ourselves to make sure we don't become complacent. So that we can wait until we're called upon and sent where we're needed.

Now, Sybille, you might want to know where I'm at, where we're stationed, my comrades and I. You probably think it would be nice to see the town on a map. And I have to disappoint you again. Because with such a question, the soldier has another important duty besides being able to wait, and that's being able to keep quiet. Chattiness about military matters has done too much damage in times of war and peace already, and therefore it is good when you've learned and know that keeping quiet isn't just a soldier's virtue, but a holy duty. Somewhere in the West is where I'm stationed, one among many, and that has to be good enough. I'm sure it's good enough, because you're Sybille Beise. You're the girl who sent the soldier Ludwig Zelter a nice letter and brought him great joy. For which he is now thanking you again and particularly heartily."

Sybille had first read over the letter hastily, and then she'd read it sentence by sentence, and then, the third time, she had almost spelled it out, word for word. Now she almost knew it by heart. There she sat, on her little chair; it was cool in her room, which faced north and which even in summer rarely received any sun, but she wasn't cold. She was very warm and very content. And even proud. Yes, very proud. Because this letter was the very first letter she had ever gotten in her young life. The notes that she and her friends exchanged underneath the desks at school didn't count. And besides that, she only occasionally received a greeting card from an aunt or another relative, from their summer vacation, from the beach or the Alps, or in particularly fancy cases, maybe from Italy. A letter, particularly such a wonderful letter that you couldn't forget, that you read like a chapter from a very good and sad and serious and nice book, such a letter she'd never gotten before.

"And it's just for myself," Sybille thought, and was happy to own something that was just hers, her personal property. She wouldn't tell anyone about it, and she would keep the letter with her. It would be best, probably, if she made a special kind of pocket for it. She was very good with such small work and sometimes, she even thought to turn this talent into a profession, maybe an artist or something. She didn't quite know what being an artist would entail, but she did know it was something special and was sure that she would like it. And anyway: she'd reply to the letter right away, today or immediately, since it took so long until the letter would reach its destination. This one had taken eight days, so it would take fourteen days until she could be excited to get the next letter, and so on. There would be many, many letters, and it would probably be worth making a special pocket for them.

While Sybille still thought about this, she head the door close - that could only be mother. Sybille jumped up, ran out of the room like a tornado, and her face was glowing so much, her mother asked surprised, "Na - child? Sybille? What's going on?"

"Oh, nothing," Sybille replied and suddenly acted as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred, as if nothing in the world had changed. And only when she noticed that Peter had stuck his head out of the broom cupboard, pulling an angry face - apparently, his experimentation into dying her couldn't bring a proper result and he'd have to put up with laying in another depression in the sand during the next maneuvers, never getting a special duty, never getting promoted - well, only when Sybille noticed her brother was sticking his head out the door and really listening in to find out about the letter, only then she whispered to her mother, "You know, mom, I just got a letter."

"A letter?" Mrs. Beise wondered. That was indeed unusual and had never happened before. "From whom?" she asked, now curious herself.

"From Zelter," Sybille replied triumphantly. "Ludwig Zelter, of course." She looked at her mother expectantly.

Zelter? Zelter? Mrs. Beise thought intently. She couldn't think of anyone by that name, and she looked completely puzzled and even a bit funny how she was trying so hard to figure out who it was. Sybille would've loved to laugh, so funny did her mother's face look at that moment. But her laughter turned to indignation at the fact that her mother, her dear mom who normally knew her so well, couldn't figure it out now that it was so important.

"That's the soldier I wrote to," she said upset. "I told you, back when my class sent the care package, and that I afterward sent another, separate package, just myself."

"Oh, that ... of course!" Mrs. Beise breathed a sigh of relief. Back then, she'd thought it was rather nice of Sybille. And now the awaited answer had arrived - how nice. But the mother was rather surprised that the girl was so excited about this.

"Don't be mad, mom," Sybille said quietly when Mrs. Beise held her hand out for hte letter, which the girl was waiving like a victory flag. "But the letter was meant just for me, and ..."

"Alright, alright - of course," Mrs. Beise lowered her hand. She was a little sad: her Sybille, her daughter ... they always had shared their thoughts, hopes, plans, and opinions. Her daughter's soul had been laying open like a book before the mother, since she was a girl and so different from Peter, who had willful at an early age and who was going his on path. And now, now she started having secrets from the mother. Did that start so early? Mrs. Beise tried to think back to her youth, but she couldn't remember how it had been back then.

She smiled a little - Sybille shouldn't see that she was upset. "You're right, child," she said. "It is your letter, after all." And she turned toward the kitchen to start preparing lunch.

Sybille followed her. She should really help a bit, and even wanted to at first. But then she sat down at on the bench. She took the letter out and read it for the fourth time.

"You know, mom," she said after awhile, a bit reluctant and unsure. "I ... well... would you like to hear some of the letter? There's something in it for you. But only if you'd like to listen."

"Of course, child, I'd love to," Mrs. Beise encouraged her daughter. And the smile that now came to her lips was a different one, expectant and much more optimistic.

Sybille read slowly and with proper pauses the section that talked about comradeship where the soldier Ludwig Zelter had mentioned Sybille's mother.

When she finished, a silence settled, which was finally interrupted by Sybille's question: "So, what do you think about what Ludwig wrote?"

Ludwig she said, of course. The name rolled from her lips without a pause. It was as if she had spoken it every day for many years, it seemed so familiar.

"I think that's quite nice," Mrs. Beise said. "He understands his duty very well and has risen up to meet it. He seems to be a very good person, your ... your soldier."

"I could read another bit," Sybille said and sighed happily. "For example the one where he talks about having to wait. That's kind of nice, too. Only if you have the time and want to listen, though."

Yes, Mrs. Beise hat time, and she wanted to listen, she didn't let there be any questions about that. She was a real mother, and real mothers, no matter how much there is to do and to worry and to work on, they always have time for their children and their small and big worries and needs and joys. Always - even if that means getting their own tasks done late at night.

Sybille read on, the last bit of the letter. And when she reached the end, she thought that the picture her mother was getting of the soldier Ludwig Zelter would be incomplete if she didn't read the beginning of the letter as well.

"So," she finally said with a sigh of relief, "That was all of it. And he has such a ... such distiguished handwriting" - the difficult word gave her problems, but now that she had pronounced it, she was very proud of herself and felt that she needed to repeat it - "very distinguished handwriting, really, you'll see yourself, Mom." And she handed the letter to her mother, the letter she'd gotten and that was just for herself, that nobody else was supposed to read or handle, like she'd sworn to herself. She didn't sit closer, either, when Mrs. Beise took the letter, read it from beginning to end, studied it, and properly praised it. Only when that had happened, when the mother had said a lot of nice and even cordial words about the soldier, only then was Sybille happy.

"Now I'll really help," Sybille said and attacked the vegetables with ardent zeal. Because, if the day had given her something good and unexpected, it was only right if she now did everything to prove worthy of such a present.

(to be continued)