by Andy Marino
“Dinner! We need to work together to find out what’s going on.”
“I think if they wanted us to know,” Max said carefully, “they would have already told us.” Why must Gerta push everything to the absolute limit! His brain was filled to the brim with worry and anxiety. The last thing he needed was another secret to keep, another task that made him feel too grown-up. He didn’t want to feel grown-up. He hated to admit it, but the stupid blockwart was right—he did want to play soccer with his friends instead of joining the rescue efforts. Even playing on a Hitler Youth team didn’t sound so bad. After all, they had real uniforms …
Gerta scowled. “It’s not like Mutti and Papa to keep secrets from us. I don’t like this one bit.”
Max refrained from pointing out that they had just discovered Papa’s secret floor safe in his study, and there was no telling how many more of their parents’ secrets were undiscovered. Max knew that his sister’s mind worked like a switchboard operator’s. If she wasn’t at the center of all incoming and outgoing Hoffmann-family information, it drove her crazy.
He sighed. “Fine, Gerta.” He thought hard, trying to come up with a way to make Mutti and Papa let them in on whatever was going on. He looked around his room, his gaze sweeping across the stained-glass lamp on his dresser, the poster of the 1936 Summer Olympics, the shelf full of miniature knights and medieval royalty. Then he jumped up and grabbed the king from his place of honor.
“I’ve got an idea,” he said. Gerta eyed the miniature figurine skeptically. But as Max told her his plan, a smile crept across her face.
“My brother, the boy genius,” she said. This time, she meant it.
For Berliners, the wartime food rationing system worked like this: German citizens were divided into categories based on the physical demands of their work. An office clerk was a “normal consumer,” a factory employee a “heavy worker,” and a house builder a “very heavy worker.” Then each citizen was issued color-coded ration cards that could be exchanged for meat, cheese, sugar, flour, rice, bread, tea, oatmeal, and other items, with the amounts determined by the citizen’s category.
The rationing system was supposed to keep everyone from starving.
It did not always work.
Even if you had a blue ration card that allowed for 650 grams of meat per week, it did not mean you could actually get it—stores had shortages all the time, and often there was little to go around. It was such a problem that Mutti sometimes waited in grocery-store lines for several hours, only to come home empty-handed.
Still, as Mutti liked to remind Max and Gerta, the Hoffmanns had it better than most. Because Papa’s work as a surgeon was so valuable to the health and morale of the people of Berlin, he had been classified as a “very heavy worker,” which meant that the family was given the most generous food allotment.
Tonight, there was a loaf of real bread, not the dry, crumbly ersatz stuff made from sawdust. And Mutti had managed to get enough beef to make a hearty stew, complete with potatoes and some carrots and celery from her kitchen garden. Max’s stomach rumbled as he sat down across from Gerta. He took in the savory smells as Papa cut the bread into thick slices.
“This looks wonderful, Ingrid,” Papa said. “You are a true artist.”
“Perhaps we should taste it before declaring me an artist,” Mutti said. “I’m not entirely sure that Bremmer’s didn’t sell me horse meat instead of beef.”
Max’s stomach turned. Mutti saw the look on his face and grinned. “I’m kidding, Maxi. I only ever served you horse meat that one time.”
Max racked his brain. Surely he would remember eating horse, right?
Papa chimed in slyly. “See? You didn’t even know the difference.”
Gerta burst out laughing. Max shook his head and ladled piping-hot stew into his bowl. “Very funny, everybody.”
The stew was so tasty, Max quickly forgot about horse meat. The constant shortages gave everybody ravenous appetites, and it wasn’t uncommon for the Hoffmanns to eat without saying a word to one another. Max was entirely focused on his meal, ripping off hunks of bread and dragging them through the sauce that clung to the bowl. It was only after they all sat back in their chairs with full bellies and Papa lit his pipe that Max caught Gerta’s eye.
She gave him a slight nod. He pulled the figure of the king from his pocket and plunked it down on the table in front of him.
“Who’s this, Maxi?” Mutti said.
“This is Adolf Hitler,” Max said.
Mutti’s mouth dropped open. Papa pulled the pipe stem from his mouth and coughed. Mutti quickly recovered her composure and fixed Max with a steely glare. “And what, pray tell, is he doing at our table?”
“Remember back in the spring,” Max said, “when you told me that Hitler was going completely mad? So mad that he thought of himself as a medieval king?”
“Hmm. I suppose I might have said something like that.”
Max shook his head. “You said it for a reason—Sippenhaft.”
“The blood laws,” Gerta said. “Remember? After they tried to kill Hitler back in March, he made it a law that anybody involved in assassination plots would be killed—along with their entire families. Just like kings used to do.”
“What are you two getting at?” Papa asked. He stared intently through his spectacles, first at Gerta, then at Max.
Max shifted uncomfortably under his father’s gaze. Once you knew a secret, there was no going back. No way to unknow it.
“We were wondering …” He trailed off, gazing into his empty bowl as if he found it suddenly fascinating. “We wanted to know …”
“Are you trying to kill Adolf Hitler?” Gerta said. Her words tumbled out breathlessly. “Is that why the man came here to give you those papers? And what are those papers? And how do you know him? How do—”
Papa put up a hand. “Slow down, Gerta. And please, lower your voice.”
She took a breath. “We deserve to know the truth, because if the Gestapo come to take you away, they’ll take all of us away. Right, Maxi?”
She cocked her head and looked at him, imploring him to back her up. He glanced at Mutti, who was regarding her children with a curious expression.
His heart pounded. No way to unknow a secret …
“Right,” he said at last. “We just want to know what’s going on.”
Papa took a long pull on his pipe and blew smoke into the air above the table.
“Karl,” Mutti said.
“Ingrid,” Papa said thoughtfully.
Max wondered what they were really saying to each other. Sometimes it seemed as if his parents had a private code, but instead of using nonsense that had to be deciphered, they were able to pack entire conversations in one or two words, often just by saying each other’s names.
Suddenly, the mournful howl of Berlin’s air-raid siren split the evening open like a wound. Max moved by instinct, the air-raid procedure drilled deep down into his brain at this point in the war. He jumped up from the table and threw open the kitchen window. Biting-cold air swirled into the house. He ran to open the front door and wedged a triangular piece of wood underneath it to prop it open. He did the same with the back door, and then rushed to open the rest of the windows.
Upstairs in his room, he paused to look out across Dahlem, over the peaked gables of neighboring villas, barely there in the darkness, to the distant Tiergarten, where the hulking monstrosity of the zoo flak tower sent searchlights slicing up through the night. Massive guns bristled at each corner of the cement fortress, and soon enough they would fill the sky with deafening flak bursts.
Gerta would already be down in the shelter, throwing the switches to turn off the electricity, gas, and water. Mutti would be gathering fresh food to supplement the rations they stored in the cellar. And Papa would do the final check to make sure the sandbags were in place and no light could leak out.
Max knew he should be hurrying down into the shelter, but he couldn’t tear himself away from the window. His room had
the best view in the house. If he lingered long enough, he would be able to see the first wave of British bombers break into Berlin’s airspace.
“Max!” Mutti shouted from downstairs.
“Coming!” he shouted back.
And then he saw it: caught in a searchlight’s beam, the green-and-black camouflaged underbelly of an Avro Lancaster. Behind it, dozens more British aircraft crept across the night sky, darkly gleaming birds in a formation so vast they seemed to cover the city’s western suburbs like a canopy.
All at once, the flak guns atop the zoo tower opened up. Each cloudburst sent shock waves that Max felt in his stomach: BOOM BOOM BOOM.
The crackle of machine-gun fire came next, tracer bullets arcing up to ping and spark against the steel wings and bellies of the Avro Lancasters.
Max stood transfixed. It felt as though he were watching a film, and yet at any moment the bombers could burst through the screen and destroy everything in their path.
There was a bright flash in the sky, and shattered pieces of fuselage and wings plummeted to earth in fiery comet-tail arcs. An unlucky bomber had taken a direct hit from an antiaircraft shell. Max strained to see if the crew had managed to parachute out, but it was too dark and chaotic to tell.
Only when the first explosions sent billowing towers of flame across the city center did Max break free of the scene framed in his bedroom window and head downstairs to join the others in the basement shelter.
Before the war, the Hoffmanns’ basement had been used for storing dry goods, wine, and things that weren’t quite junk, but weren’t urgently needed—old bicycles, boxes of newspapers, medical journals, reference books, tools, and model-building kits from when Papa was a boy. Max had always been a little bit frightened of the basement, with its damp chill and musty smell like that of a tomb, and the spiderwebs that clung to his face as he moved about in the dark.
It hadn’t helped that for the entire year of 1938, when Max was seven, Gerta had been sneaking scraps of food into the basement to feed the “cave troll” that she insisted lived down there.
As the last one into the shelter, Max shut the door behind him and pressed the rubber seal into place to fill the gaps between the door and its frame. This was to help protect the Hoffmanns from a poison gas attack, along with the four buglike gas masks hanging on hooks in the far corner of the shelter.
Thankfully, they’d never had to use them. But German official propaganda maintained that the British and their allies would not hesitate to send clouds of mustard gas hissing down to choke the population of Berlin.
Max descended the concrete steps to join Gerta and his parents in the wan flickering of the single kerosene lantern they used to illuminate the shelter.
Mutti was already wrapped in a quilt to ward off the chill, and Gerta handed Max his fluffy down jacket.
During the early months of the war, Papa had transformed the basement according to the luftschutzwart’s rules: the ceiling was strengthened with planed boards; narrow bunk beds and benches were built against two walls, while a third was lined with shelves that held provisions, emergency rations, folded blankets, towels, gloves, candles, matches, and two battery-powered torches. Half a dozen large buckets were filled with water at all times, while another three were filled with sand. In the center of the room was a table upon which sat the lantern and a deck of playing cards. The four rectangular windows set high into each wall were blocked from the outside with piles of sandbags.
As the Hoffmanns settled in, Gerta looked questioningly at Papa.
“You were saying?” she said.
The impact of the first wave of bombs sounded dull and muted underground, and the cellar barely shook—the raid tonight was concentrated far from Dahlem. Still, the flak fire was loud and startling.
“I don’t believe I was saying anything,” Papa said, taking the playing cards from their pack and idly shuffling them with his elegant hands.
“Karl,” Mutti said. Her tone was different than it had been upstairs, and once again Max wondered how they managed to say so much by saying so little.
Papa set the cards down in a neat stack and fiddled with the lamp. The flame inside the glass burned brighter, sending jittery shadows into every corner of the basement.
“You know that we always try to be honest with you both,” Papa said. “It is important for you to know that the Nazis are liars. We are not.” He paused as a rapid-fire series of flak bursts shook the house. Dirt fell from the ceiling beams in a fine mist, speckling the table. Papa glared at the ceiling in distaste. No matter how often they cleaned the cellar, it was always covered in a thin layer of dust.
“All this”—he pointed at the ceiling, meaning the raids, the bombs, perhaps the war itself—“has forced you to grow up fast.” He shook his head. “Much too fast,” he said softly, almost as if he were talking only to himself. He paused for a moment to look at Max and Gerta in turn, and folded his hands in his lap before continuing. “Germany is going to lose this war.”
Max’s chest felt hot, and his body tingled at his father’s words. The Nazis did not hesitate to execute civilians who uttered such treasonous things.
“Germany should lose this war,” Mutti added. “Hitler has dragged us into madness. He doesn’t care if all of Germany ends up like Hamburg.”
Max remembered this past summer, when the Allies firebombed the city of Hamburg into oblivion. With their homes burned to the ground, refugees poured into Berlin, their only possessions the burnt rags they wore on their backs.
“The invasion of the Soviet Union was folly to begin with, and now Stalingrad is all but lost,” Papa said. “And Germany’s biggest ally in Europe—Italy—has surrendered to the Allies. The tide is turning, as many of us always knew it would. But even these recent defeats have not hastened the end like we’d hoped.”
“Every day the Nazis remain in power,” Mutti interjected, “is another day of shame for the German people.”
“Yes,” Papa agreed. “And so it is up to us to find the fastest route to peace, before Germany is wiped off the map and countless more lives are lost in the camps and on the battlefields.”
“For the sake of humanity—” Max said, echoing the words of the man who had died on the kitchen table.
“—the Führer must die,” Gerta said, finishing his sentence.
Max knew Adolf Hitler as a strident voice on the radio, a voice that shouted and blustered from the speakers the Nazis placed on nearly every street corner in Berlin. He pictured Hitler as a figure on a podium at the head of a Nazi rally, whipping thousands of jackbooted soldiers and fanatically loyal civilians into a frenzy. When Hitler was in Berlin, he lived in the heavily guarded Reich Chancellery on Wilhelmstrasse, surrounded by his inner circle, guarded by elite SS troops. It wasn’t like Hitler walked freely among the citizens of Berlin, went to the bakery and the cinema, took the trains to the office. How was somebody like Papa going to kill the most feared and powerful man in Germany—maybe in the entire world?
“They’ll shoot you, Papa,” Gerta said, voicing Max’s thoughts. “The SS will shoot you before you can get anywhere near him.”
“I don’t plan to be anywhere near him,” Papa said.
“Then how will you do it?” Max asked.
“It’s complicated,” Papa said, catching Mutti’s eye.
“Karl,” she said.
“Ingrid,” he replied. “Do you think that’s a good idea?”
Mutti narrowed her eyes slightly.
“Fine, then.” Papa sighed. “Gerta. Max. We are not alone in this.” He nodded once, as if convincing himself. “Tomorrow, you will meet Frau Becker.”
The next morning, ash rained down from the sky.
A naval officer came to the Hoffmanns’ door with a wet towel wrapped around his face, covering his mouth and nose. He lowered the towel briefly and explained that the wind had kicked up firestorms that were still burning in nearby Schmargendorf. School was canceled for the day.
The office
r replaced the wet towel over his face and moved on to deliver the news to the Hoffmanns’ neighbors. Papa shut the door.
“There will be burn victims,” he said. “More than the hospitals can handle.”
He strode purposefully into the small bathroom just off the living room and came out a moment later holding a dripping towel. Mutti fastened it around his face, and he went out into the gray, smoky morning.
Max spent much of the day staring out of his bedroom window at the red haze that had settled over Berlin. The city glowed like embers in a fireplace—as if its molten core had been exposed, its fragile shell ripped away by the British bombs. He thought again of the refugees from Hamburg, skin blackened with soot, eyes staring off into the distance at horrors they would never forget.
Mutti and Papa blamed Hitler and the Nazis for all this suffering. But weren’t the Allies partially to blame, too? After all, it was their incendiary bombs that had turned Hamburg into a fiery hellscape and reduced the whole city to ash. On the radio, the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels called the bombing raids “terror attacks,” and used them as proof that the Allies were monsters. But Max knew that the German air force—the Luftwaffe—had spent much of 1940 and 1941 bombing British cities. The campaign of German air attacks even had a name—the Blitz. And so back and forth it went, back and forth it would go, until … what? The great cities of Berlin and London were nothing but scorched black smudges on the landscape?
For a moment, he sank into deep despair. It was all so overwhelming, the machinery of war. And war seemed to have a mind of its own. It was as if people like Hitler had wound war up, charged its motor, and released it to wreak havoc across the world.
Would killing Hitler really put an end to all this, or would his assassination be one more spark added to the conflagration?
And who on earth was Frau Becker?
Questions swirled in Max’s head as the smoke and ash whipped across the city. These questions would not be answered on this day, or during the night that followed. Papa did not come home. He managed to call to let his family know that he was fine, but he would have to stay the night at the hospital.
