Defiance Part 2: A Woman at Work in the Garden

The Order to Appear

When the German leader—that one—rolled through Zirndorf, Germany with his lacquered cavalcade and pillbox mustache, the village was expected to fold itself into awe. The order had gone out: come to the street, stand witness, act grateful, salute that vulgar salute. And so they did, most of them. My Oma stepped out too, not out of loyalty but because the whole town had been emptied into the road like grain swept from a threshing floor.

Oma said the strangest part was the silence. More police than citizens, more menace than curiosity. And then, when the black sedan drifted near—almost slow enough to seem unsure—the arms began to rise. One after another, muscle before mind.

Anna Wolf, née Reich, did not bow.

I don’t know what she felt in that moment. My family was never sentimental about these things; farm people rarely are. But I can imagine the line she held inside herself—quiet, stubborn, carved from something older than politics. A kind of ancestral refusal. She simply stood there, arms at her sides, her spine a plumb line drawn straight through history.

It took only a few seconds for the officers to reach her.

There’s a part of me that still tries to picture her expression. Not brave—bravery is noisy. Not frightened—fear is quick to ripple. Something else. The look of someone who has already made her peace with the cost of her own integrity. A look that doesn’t ask permission.

They arrested her and took her away for that. For the offense of remaining human in a moment designed to erase humanity.

I don’t know what words were spoken, or which favors were spent. I only know that my grandfather came home one evening without explanation, and she came with him. He had been on the police force in Zirndorf before uniforms curdled into something else, before loyalty became a test instead of a duty. Maybe he still knew which desk to lean on. Maybe he knew which officer still remembered who they’d been before fear became policy. Or maybe the arrest had simply become inconvenient—one woman, no witnesses, no paperwork worth the trouble. The regime was efficient, not thorough. Either way, she was released. Not exonerated. Not apologized to. Just returned. Physically intact. Ethically unchanged.

She did not speak much about it. There was no vow made, no story polished for retelling. What mattered was that the next morning came, and with it the work.

The garden was waiting.

Defending the Garden

There came a time when even tending the garden required nerve.

Oma, my mother, and her two sisters were sheltering in the basement during a bombing. It went on for three days. Not a single strike, but a sustained pressure, the kind that teaches you the difference between fear and endurance. The horizon over Nuremberg pulsed red at night. The sound arrived late and left later, a low concussion that rattled jars and loosened dust from the beams. They stayed belowground, listening. Waiting for nothing in particular. Keeping the children quiet. I asked my mom what they did all day in the basement. "We mostly just sat there," she replied.

Above them, the garden was drying out.

That was what worried Oma.

Not the bombs themselves, not in the way you might expect. She worried about the soil pulling away from the roots, about leaves curling inward, about the long work of the season being lost to neglect. Plants do not understand war strategy. They understand water or the lack of it.

She decided she was going up.

Oma took her own mother with her and left the children in the basement. Not because she didn’t love them, because someone had to keep the world intact. The sky was still unsettled when they stepped outside, the air carrying that metallic tension that comes when something large has not yet finished happening.

They carried water.

They worked the rows the way they always had, moving deliberately, eyes down, letting the motion steady them. The rhythm mattered. Water, step, pour. Water, step, pour. It was the same cadence she had used all her life, the same one that had carried her through shortages and winters and orders she did not recognize.

A neighbor shouted from nearby. What are you doing? The Americans are coming!

They looked toward the river and saw soldiers advancing along it, spaced out, rifles angled low, cautious and young. The war had shifted its shape again. Oma did not answer. She did not stop. The garden was not finished yet.

The soldiers moved closer. On one side, then the other. The women kept working, their backs bent, the water darkening the soil at their feet. If there was fear, it had nowhere to go. The work took all of it.

Then the shots came.

From the bushes nearby. Sharp. Close. A German firing toward the soldiers. Oma and her mother dropped instinctively, the earth catching them the way it always had. The soldiers responded immediately. The exchange was brief. Decisive. When it ended, the air felt newly empty.

They stood up. They returned to the rows.

Only then did the soldiers approach. They were not shouting. Not posturing. Just present. When they learned there were children hiding in the basement, they reached into their packs and handed over chocolate—real chocolate, wrapped and intact. A currency that did not belong to fear or slogans or flags.

Oma took it. Thanked them. Went back belowground long enough to deliver it. Then she came back up and stayed.

The garden was still there. Thirsty, but alive. Waiting.

The Work That Followed

History would later call it my grandfather’s garden, the way it always assigns ownership to the man nearest the gate. But it was as much hers as his. She worked it. Turned soil that had known her hands longer than it had known flags. She planted when others hesitated, thinned when seed was scarce, saved what could be saved. While speeches barked from radios and ration cards tried to dictate who deserved to eat, she grew food anyway. Quietly. Persistently. For neighbors. For widows. For people who did not ask and could not afford to.

Watering, tending--defiance of a different kind.

Not the clean refusal of a raised arm, but the harder one—the daily decision to nourish life inside a system organized around deprivation. Calories as contraband. Potatoes as dissent. A garden that refused to recognize the new rules because the soil hadn’t agreed to them. The motorcade passed. The uniforms multiplied. And still, things grew.

She returned to work. And work, I learned later, was the best thing the garden ever gave us.

Summers Marked by Arrival

I remember her last visit to the United States. I was twelve. She had already said it would be her last, and that knowledge spoiled the trip in a way I didn’t yet have language for. Until then, my summers had been punctuated by her arrivals—weeks at a time. She was fun, a little silly, tireless. She took over without announcing it. Parenting, cooking, fixing things, reorganizing rooms that didn’t ask to be reorganized. She saw what needed doing and did it. Permission never entered the calculation.

She put us to work in our own house. In the garden first. Then the bedrooms. The kitchen. Always something small, always something real. I can’t speak for my sisters, but for me it was pure joy—to work beside her, hands in the same dirt, some thin filament of her existence bleeding quietly into my own. The world made sense when there was something to tend.

I didn’t know then what she had stood up to. I wouldn’t hear those stories until later. I didn’t know about the street, or the arrest, or the garden’s quieter defiance. But I could feel who she was. Work was how she moved through the world. How she steadied herself. How she made sense of the senseless. The same way she had stood that day in the street—hands at her sides, unmoving—while the officers walked toward her, and she did not lift them.

Somehow, even then, I knew I would follow her. I mistook that, for a long time, as becoming her. But what I inherited was not her scale—it was her orientation. She did not think of it as resistance. That kind of thinking belongs to people with time to explain themselves, and language to spare. She had neither. She thought of it as work.

The regime trafficked in abstractions. Blood. Soil. Destiny. All of it shouted, all of it rehearsed. The garden answered with none of that. It required only that you show up, that you know when to plant and when to wait, that you recognize the difference between what can be forced and what must be tended. Flags could be raised overnight. Food could not.

She understood this instinctively. You cannot command a seed to grow. You cannot intimidate the soil into abundance. It either accepts your care or it doesn’t. And once something is growing, once it has taken, it belongs to no one in particular. Not the state. Not the speeches. Not even the people who planted it.

That was the danger.

After the Uniforms

Power tolerates charity. It even tolerates sacrifice. What it cannot tolerate is self-sufficiency it did not authorize. A garden that feeds neighbors without asking is a quiet refusal to participate in scarcity. It exposes the lie that deprivation is necessary, or natural, or deserved. It makes ideology look brittle.

So she kept planting. Kept thinning, harvesting, saving seed. The work never announced itself. It didn’t need to. People came by at dusk. Baskets changed hands without ceremony. Calories moved where they were needed, not where they were permitted.

The motorcade had required silence and raised arms. The garden required bent backs and patience. One demanded performance. The other produced results.

History remembers the first because it was loud. But it was the second that endured. Long after the banners were taken down, long after the uniforms lost their authority, the soil still recognized her. It kept answering the same way it always had—by growing.