“Pick Whatever You Want?” — German Women POWs Discover Choosing Their Own Meal D
She stands with an empty tray, staring at four different dishes, waiting for someone to tell her which one is hers. “Pick whatever you want,” the cook says, already moving on to the next person in line. She doesn’t move. Nobody has ever asked her to decide what goes on her own plate before. Down the line, other women move through it easily, taking a spoonful of this, skipping that, deciding without a second thought.
Her hand hovers over the tray, unsure which dish she’s supposed to want, since wanting was never really part of how meals worked. She pulls her hand back once, unconvinced the offer is really as simple as it looks, before forcing herself to reach again. The woman behind her nudges her forward gently, not impatient, just assuming she’ll figure out what she likes the way everyone else seems to.
She feels the line shifting behind her, patient but present, the ordinary pressure of people waiting for an ordinary decision she still hasn’t made. She points at one dish almost by accident, and the server simply spoons it onto her tray without asking her to justify the choice. The server has already moved to the next person before she’s even fully processed that no explanation was required of her at all.
She looks down at a tray she assembled herself, piece by piece, and doesn’t recognize the feeling of it being entirely her own decision. Four small decisions, one after another, had produced this exact tray, and not one of them had needed anyone else’s sign-off. She sits down carefully, as though the tray might still be corrected by someone walking over to fix her choices.
To understand why choosing her own meal could feel this unfamiliar, you have to understand how long choice had been someone else’s job. She glances at the tray once more, half expecting it to be swapped for something more appropriate before she reaches a table. Nobody swaps it.
The tray stays exactly as she assembled it, all the way to the table. She sits and looks at it a moment longer than necessary, as though it might still rearrange itself back into someone else’s decision. The factory canteen where she’d worked ran on a fixed rotation. Monday soup, Tuesday stew. Nobody chose anything ever. The rotation was posted on the wall for anyone who wanted to check it, though nobody ever really needed to.
It hadn’t changed in years. Frau Bauer ran that canteen with a ticket system so exact that arriving 1 minute late meant eating whatever was left. No exceptions granted. Frau Bauer believed choice was a luxury the war couldn’t afford, and she managed her kitchen accordingly without a hint of apology for it.
Nobody argued with Frau Bauer’s system. Arguing implied there was a decision to be had, and there wasn’t one by design. Every tray left that counter looking exactly like the one before it. Sameness wasn’t an accident. It was the entire point of the system. Outside the canteen, it was no different.
Every gram of anything came with a ticket that decided the matter well before she ever saw the food. When she was assigned to a signal unit, meals arrived on a duty roster, too, timed and portioned by rank, never by preference. The roster left no room for interpretation. Your name meant a specific hour, a specific portion, and nothing resembling a question.
By the time American soldiers found her unit, the idea of choosing a meal felt like a question that simply didn’t apply to her life anymore. She was processed, given a number, and placed in a line, the same as everyone else in her unit that day. The ship crossing took weeks. Meals arrived on a schedule there, too, and she assumed the pattern would simply continue at whatever camp came next.
Her first meal at the camp arrived exactly as she expected, handed to her without a question asked. For the first few days, someone else decided what went on her tray, and she thought nothing more of it. That was simply how meals worked. Then, without any announcement, the line changed. Several dishes appeared side by side instead of one fixed plate handed down the counter.
Nobody explained why. The cook simply arranged the new dishes as though it had always been the plan and went on with the morning. She noticed the change before she understood it, the way you notice a door left open before you understand you’re allowed to walk through it. She asked the woman next to her what had changed.
The woman just shrugged and said you simply picked whatever you wanted now. The shrug itself told her almost as much as the answer did. Whatever this was, it clearly wasn’t worth anyone else’s second thought. The woman who first explained it to her had a name. Margaret said back home, nobody thought twice about choosing their own plate.
Margaret described a diner near her house that changed its whole menu daily and nobody there ever once needed a ticket to prove they’d earned a meal. Margaret said the whole idea of one fixed plate for everyone sounded to her faintly ridiculous, like being told what to think as well as what to eat. It took her the length of that first confusing tray to realize choosing wasn’t a test she could fail.
It was simply how the line worked now. She started a private list, the kind she’d once kept for ration allotments, except this list only needed one entry to be complete. Wanting something is allowed to be the reason you get it. She underlined it twice, unsure yet whether she believed it completely. Which brings her back to this tray, this line, this cook already halfway to the next person waiting for nobody’s permission.
Pick whatever you want, four words that would have meant nothing to Frau Bauer and everything to her right now. She doesn’t answer right away. Wanting something out loud had never once been part of how a meal was supposed to go. She turned the idea over the way she once turned over a ration ticket, checking for a catch that this time genuinely wasn’t printed anywhere on it.
She chooses a second dish more deliberately this time, testing what it feels like to want something and simply be handed it. The server doesn’t blink at the second choice either, and that, more than the first one, is what finally convinces her the rule is real. It tastes the same as it would have if someone else had chosen it for her.
The only thing that’s different is who decided. That realization sat heavier than she expected. The food had never been the hard part. The choosing was the entire hard part every single time. For a moment, she isn’t thinking about the taste at all. She’s thinking about how strange it is that the deciding was the whole difference.
She sets her fork down for a moment, letting the thought finish arriving before picking it back up again. Margaret doesn’t say anything else. She just watches her work through it, the way you watch someone catch up to something you stopped noticing long ago. Around the room, nobody treats the choosing as anything remarkable.
To them, it’s simply how a tray gets filled. She scans the room once, checking for anyone else quietly struggling with it the way she had. Nobody appears to be. That, more than any single dish, is the part she genuinely cannot get used to. Back home, wanting something specific had always been beside the point.
You ate what the ticket said, and the ticket never asked your opinion. Here, the ticket had simply been replaced by a question. Nobody had warned her that a question could feel this disorienting to actually answer. Here, apparently, the ticket had been replaced by a question, asked plainly, expecting an actual answer from her.
She catches herself almost smiling at how much simpler that question turned out to be than she’d expected. It takes her most of the meal to accept that choosing wasn’t a trap disguised as kindness. It was simply how food worked here. By the time her tray is empty, even her suspicion has quieted into something closer to habit than genuine doubt.
For the first time since her capture, she finishes a meal she assembled entirely by her own decisions, start to finish. “You can go back for more, you know, whatever you want.” Margaret says, already standing to do exactly that herself. She goes back, and this time doesn’t hesitate at the line, already knowing roughly what she wants before she reaches the counter.
Something about deciding for herself changes the way the whole meal sits with her, she notices almost against her will. Her hands stay relaxed on the table, no longer braced for someone to walk over and correct a decision she made herself. For the length of one meal, she lets wanting something be reason enough to have it, nothing more complicated than that.
It felt lighter than she expected, letting a want be its own justification without a ticket, a roster, or a ration card standing behind it. They walk off together afterward, and for once she isn’t running through a mental ticket to check whether she took more than her share. It was, she thinks, the first meal in years that asked her a question instead of simply telling her the answer.
She kept replaying the question on the walk back, turning it over the way you turn over something you’re not yet used to being asked. She isn’t sure Frau Bauer would have approved of a line like that. She isn’t sure anymore that approval was ever the right thing to be managing. That night she thought about Frau Bauer’s exact ticket system and wondered whether the woman had ever once wanted to run her kitchen differently.
Maybe the sameness had never been about control at all, she thought. Maybe it had simply been the only system Frau Bauer had the ingredients to run. It was strange extending that kind of understanding to a woman she’d once found so rigid in a bed neither of them could have imagined sharing a war with. Whatever the reason had been, she decided, it didn’t need to follow her into every tray for the rest of her life.
She woke the next morning already thinking about breakfast and what she might actually want from it rather than what she’d simply be given. Years later, she stands behind her own counter, several dishes laid out in front of her in a country where nobody hands her a ticket anymore. A young woman working her first shift hesitates at that same counter, waiting for someone to tell her which dish is hers.
She recognizes the hesitation instantly, the exact stillness she once stood in herself, waiting for permission that wasn’t going to arrive. “Pick whatever you want,” she says, the exact words someone once said to her in a mess hall a lifetime ago. The young woman chooses tentatively at first, the same way she once did, and nobody corrects her for it.
Her shoulders drop slightly after the first choice goes unchallenged, the exact small release she remembers feeling herself years ago in a different country entirely. She thinks sometimes of Frau Bauer’s exact ticket system and wonders whether she ever once wanted to run her kitchen differently.
She decided a long time ago that it didn’t matter whether Frau Bauer had wanted differently. Wanting differently and being able to were never the same thing. She still has one of her old ration card somewhere, kept not for its use, but for what it reminds her she no longer needs. She traces the edge of it sometimes, the way you trace the edge of a scar, checking that it’s healed rather than ex- pecting it to hurt.
She likes to think that card would be almost unrecognizable to her now, a relic from a version of eating she barely remembers living inside. The counter keeps its own rhythm now, unremarkable, ordinary, exactly the way she once assumed a fixed rotation had to be the only option. And she runs her counter this way every day because somewhere along the way being asked what she wanted stopped feeling like a test.
