The Plum Tree

Set in the small Schwäbisch village of Hessental in southern Germany, the novel follows Christine Bölz from the fall of 1938 through the end of World War II, tracing her forbidden love for a Jewish man against the backdrop of Nazi persecution and the concentration camps.

In September 1938, seventeen-year-old Christine, the daughter of a poor mason, shares her first kiss with Isaac Bauerman, the son of the wealthy Jewish lawyer whose family employs Christine's mother, Mutti, as a domestic servant. Christine notices anti-Jewish posters throughout the village explaining Nazi racial classification laws. Mutti informs her that new laws prohibit German women from working for Jewish families and forbid relationships between Germans and Jews, costing the family its income. Christine confides her feelings for Isaac to her supportive younger sister, Maria, and the two young lovers begin communicating through secret notes.

Over the following months, Christine and Isaac meet clandestinely in an unoccupied root cellar, which they furnish with a red-and-white checkered tablecloth. Isaac shares increasingly alarming news: Kristallnacht, the November 1938 anti-Jewish pogrom; the removal of Jewish children from schools; his forced withdrawal from university; and the confiscation of his family's possessions by the SS, the Nazi paramilitary organization. As Hitler annexes Austria, invades Czechoslovakia, and then Poland, Isaac ends their meetings because a curfew for Jews makes them too dangerous. At their last meeting, they nearly consummate their relationship, but Isaac stops, fearing the consequences if Christine were to carry a Jewish child. He writes their initials and the year on the tablecloth with burnt matches, hides it with his lucky fossil stone, and vows they will retrieve it for their wedding.

War transforms daily life in Hessental. Ration cards are introduced, and Christine's best friend Kate begins dating Stefan Eichmann, a young man recently returned from Berlin, whom Christine finds unsettling. Before Christmas 1940, Christine's father, Dietrich Bölz, receives his draft notice. His letters from the Eastern Front arrive sporadically, describing dire conditions with the Sixth Army in the Ukraine. The Wehrmacht, Germany's armed forces, requisitions metal from the village, and the Luftwaffe, Germany's air force, begins using the nearby air base. At a mandatory rally, Christine is selected as an example of Aryan womanhood and forced to shake Hitler's hand. Repulsed, she scrubs her hand and face raw with lye soap until Maria stops her.

Air raids become a regular occurrence. Christine and her younger brother Heinrich are nearly killed by a strafing Allied fighter plane. In September 1943, Christine notices that no one wearing a yellow Star of David appears in the ration lines. She rushes to the Bauerman house and finds the family packed with suitcases, waiting to be transported. Isaac pushes her away, insisting she leave for her own safety. Days later, she witnesses a train of cattle cars carrying prisoners through the valley and runs alongside it, throwing apples through the barbed-wire windows, terrified that Isaac is inside.

A massive bombing raid devastates the village. Christine's grandfather, Opa, is killed when a burning barn wall collapses on him, and her grandmother, Oma, suffers burns. Emaciated Jewish prisoners from the camps are then marched through the village twice daily to rebuild the destroyed air base, beaten and shot by guards. Christine and Mutti leave food on the church steps for the prisoners, risking punishment. During a chaotic incident when prisoners break formation and guards open fire, Christine spots Isaac among the workers and calls to him. He follows her out of the line, and she hides him in a concealed crawl space behind a hidden door in the attic, blocked by a bookcase. Isaac reveals that his father was shot by a guard at Dachau, a Nazi concentration camp, after collapsing from exhaustion, and that his mother and sister were separated from them upon arrival.

The SS searches the house. A Gruppenführer, a senior SS officer, and two soldiers ransack the rooms and enter the attic but fail to notice the hidden door. Dietrich then arrives home unexpectedly, having escaped from a Russian POW train. When the Gruppenführer returns, having noticed scratch marks from the moved bookcase, the soldiers discover Isaac. Christine confesses that she alone hid him, trying to protect her family. She and Isaac are arrested and shoved into an overcrowded cattle car. Isaac instructs her to claim she is not Jewish and to say she is a cook. At Dachau, they are separated. Christine recognizes Stefan among the guards, watching him tear a young boy from his mother's arms at gunpoint.

Christine survives the selection process and is assigned to cook for Lagerkommandant Jörge Grünstein, the camp commander. The Lagerkommandant tells Christine he joined the SS to infiltrate the system and has tried to alert diplomats and church officials to the atrocities, but no one has acted. Christine befriends Hanna, a fellow prisoner, who confirms that Isaac's sister Gabriella was gassed shortly after arrival and his mother Nina died of typhus. Christine steals food from the kitchen to share with starving prisoners. When she spots Isaac on a work detail across the camp fence, she throws scraps over the wire to him for two weeks.

One spring day, hundreds of male prisoners are marched toward the woods carrying shovels. Christine spots Isaac among them and shouts encouragement. Sustained gunfire erupts from the forest, and the guards return without any prisoners. Christine collapses, believing Isaac has been killed. She resolves to stop eating, but two days later, American tanks arrive and liberate Dachau. Christine finds Hanna alive, reunited with her twin brother Heinz. She is placed on a train home and collapses into Mutti's arms.

The family nurses Christine through weeks of fever and malnutrition. Dietrich returns with news of Hitler's suicide and the war's end. Maria confides that she was sent east to dig anti-tank trenches, was raped by Russian soldiers, and is now pregnant. On the family's first Sunday back at church, Christine publicly accuses Stefan of being an SS guard at Dachau, but the congregation refuses to believe her. While the family is at church, Maria falls down the stairs and dies. Christine blames herself for leaving her sister alone.

Stefan assaults Christine in an alley, warning her to keep quiet. He kidnaps Dietrich, dresses him in a stolen SS uniform, and turns him over to the Americans. Christine travels to Dachau to free her father. Brought before Colonel Hensley, the American officer in charge, she discovers that the translator is Isaac. He explains that during the mass execution, a bullet grazed his arm and he fell into the grave, playing dead, then hid in the woods until liberation. With Hensley's cooperation, they compose a forged letter luring Stefan to Dachau under the pretense of an escape plan. Stefan arrives and is captured. During the interrogation, Isaac recognizes Stefan as the guard who murdered his father.

The novel closes with Christine and Isaac married and expecting their first child. Back in Hessental, they use their checkered tablecloth and lucky stone, which Christine rescued from the root cellar during the war, at their wedding celebration. Christine discovers that a plum pit she planted during the war has grown into a young tree bearing blossoms. They agree to name the baby Maria if it is a girl, or Abraham, after Isaac's father, if it is a boy. Dietrich calls them inside for a family meal.