Orphans of war: Once the Deed is Done, by Rachel Seiffert, reviewed

In Rachel Seiffert’s searingly beautiful fifth novel, the author returns to Germany, 1945 – ground she previously explored in The Dark Room, her Man Booker-shortlisted debut. Once the Deed is Done opens with a boy, Benno, looking out of his window at night, having been woken by sirens from the munition works. Elsewhere in the town, Hanne and Gustav discover a runaway woman and young child sheltering in their shed. In the morning, the woman has fled, leaving just ‘the winter child’. Hanne decides to care for her, in secret, ‘because she was a child – just a child – left behind in this cold time… What else could she do but hold her?’ They call her Ditte, although ‘the child wasn’t theirs to be naming’. When Hanne’s daughter suggests she relinquish Ditte to the approaching Allies, Hanne inwardly protests: ‘Why should she give the child to Americans? To soldiers? To anyone who didn’t know her?’ So where does the child belong?

This ‘winter child’ is one of many children in the novel, composed of the interleaved stories of around ten characters. Along with Ditte are Sasha and his older sister Yeva, two Ukrainians separated from their mother, who arrive at the former munition works once it has become a British-run camp for displaced people. These three stories stand in for many more. As late as 1948, we are told, the UN recorded 347,057 displaced children in Germany.