by Andy Marino
“And what, precisely, do you call sewing maps of the Führer’s headquarters inside the boy’s jacket?” Frau Becker asked.
“A one-time, unavoidable event,” Mutti said.
The old woman shook her head. “Every day, more of our Jewish neighbors—Berliners, just like us!—are hunted down like dogs by the Nazis and shipped to the death camps.”
At the sound of death camps, Max’s legs turned to jelly. He so rarely heard them called that. Most other grown-ups, like his teacher and the blockwart, called them relocation centers.
“And yet we hide our heads in the sand,” Frau Becker said.
Aha! Max thought. That’s where Mutti got the expression.
“We are all doing what we can, Frau Becker,” the princess said.
“It’s not enough,” the old woman replied. “It’s never enough.” She placed a hand on the packet of maps. “But I am afraid this operation will take time to plan. We must be very careful not to rush out of our desire to have it done quickly. It must be done right—we may only get one chance.”
Max looked from the princess to Herr Trott to Hans, from General Vogel to his parents. Who among them would be the one to walk up to Adolf Hitler and kill him? Or was the assassin one of the mysterious counterparts of which Frau Becker had spoken?
“In the meantime,” Frau Becker continued, “we shall step up our efforts here in Berlin.”
“What can we do?” Gerta asked eagerly.
“There are Jews hiding right here in the city, under the noses of the Gestapo,” Hans said. “But without ration cards, it is difficult for them to survive. They must rely on the scraps from friendly tables. And for those who wish to escape Germany entirely, it is nearly impossible to move about the streets without the proper papers. So, either way, they need forged identification documents. That is where we come in.”
“I print the pages in the basement of my factory,” Herr Trott said. “There’s so much old equipment and machinery down there, it would take the Gestapo a hundred years to figure out there’s a working printing press shoved into a dark corner.”
“I work in the Foreign Office,” the princess said, “on magazine layouts. I take care of the finishing touches—the photographs and such.”
“We have become rather skilled at creating the forgeries themselves,” Frau Becker explained. “What continues to vex us is the last step—getting the papers into the hands of the people who need them. We are rather … recognizable.” She smiled. “That, my friends, is where you come in.”
“We’ll do it!” Gerta said.
“Frau Becker,” Papa said, “can we speak privately about this?”
“No,” Mutti said. She took a deep breath and let it out. “I promised no more secrets. They can make up their own minds.”
“Er,” Max said, “to do what, exactly?”
Hans reached behind Max’s ear. When he opened his fist, there was a piece of yellow chalk in his palm. “You’ll need this, my friend.”
November slid icily into December. The days turned cold, the nights frigid. One night, during the first week of the month, bombers raiding Berlin were scattered by crosswinds to the southern districts of the city. The next morning, a light snow fell, mingling with ash to coat the streets in a drab gray slush, thin as the gruel that passed for soup in the city’s remaining restaurants.
Along the wide Altensteinstrasse at the eastern edge of Dahlem, near the botanical garden, Max and Gerta walked on opposite sides of the street. Bundled in heavy coats, hats, and scarves, they were indistinguishable from the other pedestrians hurrying home in the dying light of a winter dusk, turning their collars up against the chill.
When Max came to the second bombed-out apartment block along the route laid out by the Becker Circle, stark and sullen against the unfriendly sky, he slowed down to read the ruins.
Ever since the first RAF raids in 1940, Berliners had been scrawling messages in chalk on the ruins of buildings, letting friends and loved ones know they survived the bombing.
Josef, we are unhurt, find us in the university shelter, love T
My darling Gaby, I saved the cat
Papa, I am staying with Loremarie, love Luzie
Max glanced furtively across the street. Gerta ducked beneath the front stoop of an undamaged row house, into the little shelter under the stairs for garbage cans and refuse.
He shot a quick look over his shoulder and waited for a man in a trench coat to pass by, averting his eyes. Gestapo agents weren’t like the SS, with their starched uniforms and thudding footsteps. They often worked undercover, wearing civilian clothes, blending in. Max wouldn’t know if he’d been caught until it was too late.
Directly across from where Gerta had ducked beneath the stairs, Max chose a stack of bricks with metal rebar jutting out at the top, high above his head. It was unlikely to collapse in the next day or so. Quickly, he removed the glove on his right hand and fished the chalk out of his pocket. Careful not to break the chalk with his freezing fingers, he wrote a message on the bricks according to the code for the day.
Dear Jürgen, don’t worry about me, I’ve gone to Potsdam
Satisfied, Max stuck the chalk back in his pocket and moved on down the street. He risked one quick look behind him at the ruins, and when he turned his head back, he bumped into a man hurrying in the opposite direction.
Thrown off balance, Max spun halfway around as the man strode away down the sidewalk without so much as an “excuse me,” trench coat flapping in his wake. Max stared after the man for as long as he dared. Was it the same person he’d seen a moment ago, heading in the other direction, just before he’d chalked the ruins?
Maybe the man suddenly realized he’d forgotten something important at home, and had to turn around and rush back.
Or maybe he’d seen Max acting suspiciously and decided to get a closer look.
That was the strange paradox of Berliners—they hid their heads in the sand when it came to the Gestapo rounding up Jews and political agitators, but they were only too happy to inform on their neighbors about the slightest offenses. Papa called it “selective awareness.” Whatever it was called, it meant that the Gestapo weren’t Max and Gerta’s only worry—they had to keep calm and act normal around everyone.
He watched the man in the trench coat disappear around a bend in the Altensteinstrasse. Then he glanced across the street, just as Gerta emerged from beneath the front stoop of the row house. They walked briskly toward the northwest corner of the botanical garden. He was breathing as if he’d just run a race, exhaling white puffs into the air.
This will get easier, he told himself. He caught the eye of a tall, stylish woman, who peered at him from beneath a smart, tilted hat. As he looked away, he thought, Should I have held eye contact? It was hard to remember what acting normal was supposed to look and feel like. He felt totally exposed, as if he were wearing a sign that said SPY. He began to concentrate on the way he was walking, trying to keep his stride casual, but that only made things worse. It was difficult to walk normally when you were telling yourself: Walk normally.
At the corner of the botanical garden, where the high stone gave way to a wrought-iron gate, he finally crossed paths with Gerta. She gave him a quick nod—it’s done—and walked past him, skirting the edge of the garden to the east, while he moved along the street to the south.
Sometime in the next few hours, one of the Becker Circle’s contacts in the Jewish underground would move quickly down the Altensteinstrasse, discover Max’s coded signal, cross the street to the stoop directly across from his chalk scrawl, and find the forged identification papers that Gerta had hidden behind a garbage can.
Max and Gerta would never see this person or contact him or her directly. This kind of separation was how the resistance operated. That way, if operatives got picked up by the Gestapo and broke under torture, they could only give up limited information about the anti-Nazi resistance, its members, and its activities.
As he walked toward t
he station where he would catch a train home, Max once again removed his glove and slipped his hand into the pocket of his jacket. His fingers brushed against the foil of the last piece of chocolate Hans had given him, which he’d managed to save as a reward for a successful “dead drop”—the name Papa gave to Max and Gerta’s job.
He thought about waiting until he got home. Then he unwrapped the foil and popped the chocolate into his mouth. All around him, the snow fell heavier. Eventually, it triumphed over the ash, and, for a little while at least, Berlin sparkled.
Dahlem’s blockwart, Franz Siewert, glanced out the window of his cramped office. The snow had picked up, and the blast of winter brought with it memories of backbreaking labor. As a child, he had rushed outside with his shovel during snowstorms, pounding on doors, offering to clear out walkways and steps for a few marks.
Herr Siewert had always been ambitious. And now, with the war in full swing, the opportunities for advancement were greater than ever. All of his failures of the 1930s—his doomed landscaping business, the bratwurst stand in the Tiergarten that had been muscled out by the competition—would be wiped away once he joined the Schutzstaffel.
The SS.
What had begun as Hitler’s personal bodyguard had transformed, under the brilliant leadership of Heinrich Himmler, into the army-within-the-army, responsible for enforcing Nazi policy throughout the Reich.
In the SS, there was no limit to how high a crafty, industrious man like Siewert might rise.
He lit the chewed-up remnants of a cigar, took a deep drag, and let the smoke curl lazily about the office. He pictured himself among the perfect ranks of the SS, marching in gorgeous, fearsome symmetry down Unter den Linden. He closed his eyes and imagined the crowd lining the avenue, the awestruck admiration in the faces of all those watching the parade.
There was his polished silver lightning bolt emblem glinting in the light from the great torches …
A knock on his office door shook him from his reverie.
“Come in!”
His secretary entered, set a folder carefully on his desk, and quickly retreated, closing the door behind her. She knew better than to make conversation. Siewert was a busy man and detested interruptions. It was this level of deep focus that would earn him a place at Himmler’s side. And once the war was won … who knew? A cabinet ministry, perhaps, strolling the promenades of the spectacular buildings of Germania—the expanded, supersized Berlin, transformed into the glorious capital of the thousand-year Reich.
He opened the folder to find a memo on the Gestapo’s official letterhead, addressed to Dahlem’s blockwart. It was an intelligence report gathered by a Gestapo spy planted inside one of the anti-Nazi resistance organizations operating right here in Berlin.
At first, Siewert merely scanned the report, idly enjoying the last puffs of his cigar. Then, suddenly, it captured his attention. He stabbed out the cigar in his ashtray and leaned forward, reading the report over again, savoring the words.
This resistance group was forging identity documents for Jews in hiding, so they could apply for ration cards, travel freely throughout Germany, and perhaps even cross the border if they were lucky.
Since 1942, the Nazis had decreed that all Jews living in Berlin had to wear a yellow star on their clothing. This made it possible to deny them service at shops where pure-blooded Aryans bought food and clothes, to force them to commute on special train cars, and to root them out of important jobs in order to keep government and university positions racially pure.
Siewert approved of these measures. Before the yellow stars, it could sometimes be difficult to tell which of his fellow Berliners were Jewish. He had unwittingly associated with them for years, shopping at Jewish-owned stores and even hoisting steins with them in the beer halls after a hard day’s work.
The Nazis had made it much easier for Siewert to tell who it was right and proper for him to be associating with. And it was getting easier all the time—now there were far fewer Jews in the city than there had been at the start of the war. With all the territory the Third Reich was capturing, there was plenty of room to relocate the Jews to cities and camps in the east. Let them have Poland and Hungary, he thought. Leave Berlin to citizens like Franz Siewert—people with good blood.
He shoved the paper back into the folder and slammed it shut, bringing his palm down hard on the desk.
The notion of Jews once again hiding in plain sight, with forged papers that declared them to be part of Siewert’s own race, drove him up and out of his chair. He paced the tiny office with his hands behind his back, like he had practiced many times before, imitating an SS interrogator prowling the interview room, savoring the moment while the prisoner squirmed and begged.
In this daydream, Siewert wore his freshly starched SS uniform with pride. People knew to get out of his way as he marched down the street, riding crop at his side, polished boots crushing anything in his path. After all, he was SS-Oberführer Siewert, the man who had smashed the most secretive and clever resistance group in all of Berlin. He had caught the plotters red-handed, along with the Jewish weasels who refused to wear the yellow star. For this, Heinrich Himmler himself had plucked Franz Siewert from obscurity, promoting him from lowly blockwart to the top ranks of the SS.
Siewert went to the small round mirror on the wall. He fixed his spectacles, smoothed his thinning hair to one side, and removed a small fleck of tobacco stuck to the corner of his lip. He threw his shoulders back, puffed out his chest, and straightened his posture.
The Gestapo report had noted that the couriers working for the forgers were a pair of children who used coded messages in chalk as signals. These people thought they were so clever! Well, they underestimated just how vigilant a man like Herr Siewert could be.
In the mirror, he gave a German salute so crisp that he nearly dislocated his shoulder.
“Heil Hitler!”
By the time Max got home, dusk was creeping across the city, and the snow was up to his ankles. Despite wearing his scarf like a mask, his face was numb. He had grown more and more paranoid as he approached the train station and doubled back several times, walking in crazy loops around Dahlem to make sure the man in the trench coat wasn’t following him home.
Mutti, Papa, and Gerta all jumped up from the living room sofa as soon as he burst through the door.
Mutti rushed to embrace him. “My God, Maxi, you’re a block of ice! We were worried sick about you! Gerta has been back for an hour!”
Papa turned to Gerta. “Run a hot bath.”
Gerta looked puzzled. “It’s Thursday, Papa.” To conserve water, baths were only allowed on weekends.
“Yes, but your brother needs thawing. Quickly now!”
Gerta rushed upstairs.
Mutti unwound the scarf from Max’s face and pulled off his gloves. She cupped her hands around her mouth and breathed hot air on his hands.
How strange, thought Max, to be doing a dead drop on his own—the most grown-up thing he’d ever done—only to come home to his mother fussing over him.
“I’m fine,” he said, gently pushing her hands away. He hung his hat on a peg and wormed his way out of his overcoat.
“I knew this was a bad idea,” Mutti said.
“You were supposed to come straight home afterward,” Papa said. “What kept you?”
Max hesitated. If he told his parents about the man in the trench coat, they might not let him go out on the next drop. Part of him thought that would be okay—his heart was still hammering in his chest, and he had never been so anxious in his life. But another part of him wanted desperately to show Frau Becker and the others—not to mention Gerta—that he was brave enough to resist the Nazis.
He remembered Mutti’s words—no more secrets—and decided to tell the truth.
“I wasn’t sure if somebody was watching me or not. I had to double back a few times to lose the tail. I didn’t want to lead him back here, just in case.”
Max had learned how to lose a
tail from listening to Hornet and Wasp, but he left that part out.
The next thing he knew, Mutti and Papa were sitting him down on the sofa. Papa looked as serious as Max had ever seen. Mutti’s eyes were wide as they looked into Max’s.
“What did this man look like?” Papa said.
“Tall,” Max said. “And he was wearing a long gray trench coat.”
“What made him different than other people on the street?” Mutti said.
Max considered this for a moment. “I thought I saw him twice—once going one way, then again a minute later going the other way.”
“You thought you saw him twice,” Mutti said, “or you did see him?”
Max closed his eyes. He had only briefly glanced at the man, and between the falling snow and the brim of the man’s hat, the face in Max’s memory was nothing more than a pale smudge. He pictured the trench coat flapping in the man’s wake as he hurried down the street, and then again in the opposite direction after Max bumped into him. It was frustrating, but there was nothing at all distinctive about the coat or the hat. It could have been the same person. It could just as easily have been two different people.
“I don’t know,” Max admitted.
Mutti threw up her hands. “This is foolish, Karl. Blood laws or no blood laws, this is too great a risk.”
Papa patted Max’s knee. “You did the right thing, Maxi. Better safe than sorry.” Max looked down at his thick, fuzzy socks. If he did the right thing, why did it suddenly feel like he’d screwed up?
The simple fact was, Gerta was cut out for this kind of work. He wasn’t.
There was a reason she handled the top-secret documents and Max handled the piece of chalk.
Gerta came bounding down the stairs, drying her hands on a flannel. “Bath’s ready, icicle brother.” She stopped in her tracks, reading the mood of the room. “What’s going on? Who died?”
“You mother believes this courier work is too dangerous.” Papa glanced at Max. “And I’m inclined to agree with her. Perhaps we were too hasty in letting Frau Becker involve you so heavily.”
