It is late afternoon, March 1945, when a German schoolboy cycling home through the dusk sees a number of women under armed guard at the verge. The boy has grown used to the regular transport of workers to the munitions plant beyond town and instinctively senses that this group is different; out of place and suspicious. But by now the war is in its death throes and abnormality has become a given. Allied forces are pouring in, foreign labour is bleeding out. Everyone on Lüneburg Heath, south of Hamburg, seems depleted and confused, no longer sure who belongs and who doesn’t.
Hitler’s war machine was propped up by millions of workers, predominantly brought in from Poland and Ukraine and forcibly deployed to canneries, factories and farms. Once the Deed Is Done, the fine fifth novel from the German-British author Rachel Seiffert, covers the immediate aftermath of the Third Reich’s collapse, when this vast pool of slave labour became a logistical headache and a humanitarian disaster. Ruth Novak, a 32-year-old Red Cross volunteer from England, arrives at the plant to find the guards fled, paperwork burned and scores of hunched, hungry men left behind the iron railings. Undeniably, there is more than enough relief work for Ruth and her colleagues to tackle. But the mystery of those missing women throbs like a sore tooth. There ought to have been more labourers inside the factory, Ruth thinks. So what has become of the rest of them?
Seiffert is drawn to small figures on a big canvas. Her subjects are the everyday casualties of 20th-century European history and the hazardous, dirty backwash of the second world war. Once the Deed Is Done stirs memories of the centrepiece tale from Seiffert’s Booker-shortlisted debut, The Dark Room, with its depiction of a people cast adrift, struggling to find a route home. But its panoramic sweep owes as much to 2017’s A Boy in Winter, a miniature epic that viewed the Nazi invasion of Ukraine at ground level.
The tale shuttles between a set of parallel narrative strands that turn out to be more braided than they first appear. While principled Ruth provides the novel’s moral compass, she’s an outsider. Seiffert efficiently joins the dots between the shuttered factory and the community that surrounds it, tracing the lines of interdependence and complicity. She shows us the vanquished young soldiers dealing contraband cigarettes in the town square; the stoical parents waiting for official word on their sons; the hard-bitten old timers, furiously protesting their ransacked plum orchards. The townsfolk aren’t wicked, exactly, but none is entirely blameless either. “These people,” marvels shrewd, wary Stanislaw, who works as Ruth’s translator. “They let all of this happen right under their noses?”
Seiffert has cited Joseph Roth – that great chronicler of mittel-European dislocation – as a literary influence. She writes in a similar fashion: plainly, almost bluntly, keeping every character at arm’s length and dispassionately explaining what each is thinking and feeling at any given moment. The pace is steady and the palette strictly limited; the occasional splash of bright colour might have offset its shades of grey. But Seiffert’s direct approach serves the characters well, brings this straitened and provisional world to life and provides a bedrock of basic humanity. The people are exhausted and careworn, reduced to their bare essentials. Their focus, therefore, is largely on manageable, practical tasks.
What is to become of the abandoned workers at the plant? Under Ruth’s supervision, the site is made over as a camp for displaced persons (DP). The Poles take the near quarter, the Ukrainians the far side, while the remaining nationalities spread out through the tents in the field. In town, the Germans drape white pillowcases from their windows to reassure the British soldiers. Out here the inmates are stitching homemade Bohemian, Belgian and Italian flags, carving temporary embassies out of their former prison until they are allowed to depart for whatever remains of their homes. The factory fills up and becomes almost boisterous. It is a fine sight, Ruth decides, “like a continent in miniature”.
The back wall of the DP camp gives out on a lush water meadow. Beyond that, though, lies the Heide, the heath, an open country of juniper, gorse and bogland which appears to extend all the way to the coast. The Heide’s borders are uncertain. People walk in and get lost, or run there to hide out, and the children are warned not to swim in the millpond. The Heide, Seiffert implies, might be another Europe in miniature. If so, it serves as the camp’s dystopian cousin: pitiless and exposed, sometimes treacherous underfoot, and offering scant shelter to the displaced people passing through.
• Once the Deed Is Done by Rachel Seiffert is published by Virago (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
