The German Girl

by Lily Graham

  ‘Anyway – like I said, it’s not going to work if the two of you look as guilty as sin.’

  Asta’s eyes widened. ‘We don’t.’

  He raised a brow. ‘Yes, you do. You startle at every little noise. You follow every car as if someone is going to jump out and stop us,’ he said. He frowned, then hissed, looking in the rear-view mirror, ‘If you value your lives, start smiling right now.’

  To their credit, they did.

  ‘Now laugh,’ said Polgo, who laughed as if someone had said something wildly funny.

  The twins plastered fake smiles on their faces, and pretended to laugh even as their hearts clamoured inside their chests as they left Hamburg behind, while a car with the Nazi flag on either side of its mirrors sped past, its brown-shirted occupants nodding at them in return.

  They pulled over at a gas station inside Elmshorn, a town on the small river Krückau, a tributary of the Elbe. It was an hour’s drive north of Hamburg.

  A brown delivery van with gold lettering that said HERMAN & SÖHNE was waiting.

  ‘Herman will take you the rest of the way; it’ll be a circuitous journey, based on his delivery route,’ said Polgo, getting out of the car, and helping them with their small bundle of belongings towards the truck.

  Herman was a large man, with blotchy skin, yellow straw-like hair, heavy shadows beneath grey eyes and a nicotine-stained beard. ‘Polgo,’ he said, by way of greeting. He didn’t smile or hold out a hand to shake.

  Polgo hadn’t expected it. There hadn’t been a lot of hand-shaking back in prison, where he’d met Herman. Polgo had gone the way of the straight-and-narrow, Herman, not quite so much. Still, he was resourceful, and dependable to a degree.

  ‘Thank you for doing this.’

  Herman shrugged. ‘You know me, Polka, as long as the price is right… I’ll muck shit all day.’

  A muscle flexed in Polgo’s jaw. ‘Charming.’

  Herman sniggered. ‘Ja, that’s me, full of life’s charm. Lay the grease on me.’ Then he held out his palm, and Polgo placed a thick envelope on top.

  Herman opened it, then sniffed. ‘Fine.’

  ‘You’ll let me know – once they’re safe?’

  ‘Ja, ja,’ said Herman impatiently, opening the glove compartment and putting the envelope inside. Then he rolled the car window down, and spat black tobacco, which trailed down the side of the van door, onto Polgo’s boots. Polgo had to stop himself from jumping back. People like Herman loved to prey on any imaginary weakness. His fists clenched at his side.

  Herman smirked, his teeth blackened with the tobacco juice.

  His fun over, not getting the reaction he wanted, Herman sniffed. ‘We’d better get a move on, get your kisses over with.’

  Polgo kept a smile fixed on his face. ‘Just a second,’ he said, then drew the twins a little away from the vehicle. ‘Look, there’s no other way to put it, he’s an asshole, but he should get you across the border in one piece, which is the thing I’m most concerned about.’

  Jürgen clamped a hand on Polgo’s shoulder. ‘It’s fine, that’s all we care about too. Is there any way we can repay you the money at least?’

  Polgo shook his head. ‘Just stay alive.’

  Jürgen nodded. ‘We’ll do our best.’

  Polgo turned to Asta as Herman started to blast the horn. ‘I wish I could take you myself but this is for the best – he delivers across the border into Southern Jutland, so no one will ask too many questions.’

  Asta looked at him, and felt tears smart her eyes. After everything that had happened, Polgo had been the closest thing to a friend they’d had – it was hard to believe only a week had passed since he’d found them hiding on his boat; it felt like a lifetime.

  ‘Thank you for everything.’

  He nodded, then patted both their arms. ‘Thank me when you’re there and you’re safe,’ he said again. ‘Good luck.’

  They nodded. Herman honked again, and the loud horn made the twins jump.

  ‘Get in,’ he told the twins, who hurried over, everything they owned in a small bag in Asta’s arms.

  They watched Polgo reverse, his old cream Volkswagen speeding down the road. ‘Get in the back,’ called Herman, ‘and don’t touch the food – if I catch either of you stealing, I’ll go Chinese on you,’ he said, then made a motion with his palm as if he were slicing off a hand.

  Asta itched to tell him that the Chinese weren’t the only ones who did that but she kept her mouth shut.

  They nodded, and Jürgen turned to open the van door at the rear. Only to gasp.

  There were people already inside.

  Jammed alongside tins of sweetcorn, peas and carrots, bully beef and jars of sauerkraut and paper packages full of cured meat, were four adults. Closest to them was a thin man, in wrinkled clothes and an oversized brown jumper. He stared back at them, dark eyes blinking, and frowning. He had liver-spotted olive skin and thinning grey hair, with long side curls on either side of his face, which he tugged at anxiously. He was wedged in next to a woman with reddish hair, tied up with a silk scarf. She had bulging brown eyes, protruding teeth, and a mouth that had deep lines on either side of it. Despite this, there was a kind of faded elegance to her, like an old rose. Her scowl, however, deepened as she stared up at the twins as they got inside. Behind them was another couple, a plump woman with a dark eyes and black scarf tied around her head, and a man with short curly hair, apart from his own long side curls, and glowering back eyes.

  The tall man closest to them came forward first to close the van door after them, and to welcome them as the truck backed out onto the open road, offering a tight, forced smile. ‘Welcome,’ he said. ‘I am Hershel Blocman.’

  The twins introduced themselves. ‘Asta and Jürgen Schwalbe.’

  ‘Good to meet you,’ said Hershel. ‘The man at the back there is Lars. The sisters are Ruth and my wife, Esther,’ he said, indicating the scowling woman next to him in front. The others nodded their heads in greeting, their smiles not reaching their eyes.

  But the woman named Esther just shook her head, her expression full of scorn, which they soon realised wasn’t necessarily directed at them. Her Polish-Jewish accent was strong, and Asta could see that she was wearing what seemed like several days’ worth of clothing all at once. Instead of greeting them or introducing herself, she glanced from them to Hershel, venom in her mouth as she spat the words, ‘What is this idiot thinking – that for the right price, he’ll try to smuggle all the Jews out of Germany, along with what…’ She picked up something next to her. ‘…jars of sauerkraut, what a fool!’ Then she muttered, ‘It won’t be the jars that shatter – it’ll be us, when this all goes horribly wrong.’

  11

  Snekkersten, Denmark, December 1938

  Trine watched Asta as she slept.

  The girl tossed beneath the covers, her dark blonde hair a matted, sweaty nest, her skin flushed from fever. She was delirious, and mumbling, though it was hard to make out what she said. Some words were uttered over and over again, like Mutti, the German word for mother, and Jürgen.

  Trine took a small, clean sponge, and dribbled water over the girl’s cracked and dry lips. Then felt her forehead, which was hot to the touch.

  She frowned and checked over Asta’s thin frame for anything that might explain her fever. Trine had been a volunteer nurse in the First World War and had been stationed just outside the Somme in France, in a makeshift field hospital, that she still sometimes dreamt of at night – sometimes she was sure she could still smell it. It never really left her.

  The trenches had made her stomach iron-clad, although the experience had broken her ex-husband, Uwe, turning the good-natured man she’d married into a violent drunk. The man she’d married had never come back from those godforsaken trenches. She didn’t necessarily blame him; it had come as a shock when he was conscripted, like so many other residents of Southern Jutland, to fight for Germany. It was one of the reasons they’d moved to Elsinore after the w
ar. What neither of them had realised was that the past comes with you, unless you fight like hell to let it go.

  Her little brother, Fritz, was Asta’s father, and he’d served in the war as a medic. It was he who had told her to leave Uwe, not long after he’d married Frieda. ‘Come back to Hamburg, you can live with us, divorce isn’t the scandal it used to be…’

  Which wasn’t strictly true, people still talked, not that Trine cared, but she’d still had hopes that Uwe would change back, that there would be some day, some moment when he returned to who he used to be. She sighed as she stared at Asta; if she had, would this have been her fate too – escaping one kind of hell, only to find another as they were doomed to try and escape their own country?

  Bjørn sniffed the girl, his golden head nudging her as if he could urge her to wake by sheer will.

  Trine patted his silken head. ‘She’ll be all right, boy, we just need to give her some time, I think. That and some medicine.’ There were no lesions, bites or scratches. ‘Probably some kind of bug or flu,’ she said aloud, as she continued to examine her niece.

  ‘Oh, Asta,’ she breathed, her heart in her mouth, as she watched the feverish girl thrashing in the sheets. She fetched a bowl of clean water and a towel, and bathed her forehead. She moved down to rub the flannel across the girl’s neck, where an ugly red scar made her pause.

  It looked like a knife wound – and like she hadn’t got it that long ago either. The skin was still raw and pink. What had happened to her?

  She swallowed, thinking of her brother, and the rest of their family back in Germany. ‘If you’re here, where are the others?’

  It was a long night. Trine spent most of it in the chair next to her bed watching the girl, while she finished the rest of her editing. Bjørn chose to keep the girl company, stretching himself against her hip. She patted the dog’s head and glanced at the clock on the bedside table. It was just after 5 a.m. The sun would only rise for a brief hour in the afternoon during winter but still, the lights across the harbour gave the illusion of dawn. That and the sounds of life outside beginning to stir in the old fishing town. She liked it here; it was quieter than in the city. Here she felt like she could breathe.

  She checked on Asta, who was sound asleep, and frowned. She put on her boots, and squared her shoulders. It was time to ask for a favour. Bjørn lifted his head up off the bed. Trine put a finger to her lips. ‘Stay here, keep watch.’

  Then she put on her heavy parka and waterproof, fixed her woollen fishermen’s cap over her long grey hair, and, flashlight at the ready, made her way out into the cold December morning.

  Lisbet Sørensen opened the door in her floral pink nightgown, with the sort of scowl that Trine was sure had terrified the children she used to teach. The retired schoolteacher had short, steel-grey hair and sharp blue eyes, which widened when she saw her friend.

  ‘Hej?’ she said, then seeing Trine’s face, frowned. ‘Do I need to fire up the getaway car?’

  ‘Not yet,’ said Trine, a small smile on her face. Despite Lisbet’s stern appearance, she was an ideal friend – not particularly sentimental, on the surface at least, but she was loyal to a fault. Lisbet had made the last five years – since she’d walked out on her marriage and moved here – bearable, and they had a habit of walking along the beach in the mornings together.

  ‘Coffee?’ she offered.

  Trine nodded. ‘Tak.’

  To her credit, Lisbet didn’t ask too many questions as she handed her friend a cup of coffee a few minutes later. She simply listened and nodded as Trine explained what had happened.

  ‘She’s got a fever – I’m not sure how serious it is – and she’s malnourished, which can’t be helping.’

  ‘No,’ agreed Lisbet. ‘Malthe can make her his first round – I’ll go wake him now.’

  Malthe was Lisbet’s husband, and the local doctor, who refused to take up retirement.

  Trine nodded. ‘Thank you. As far as I can tell there’s no sign of sepsis or infection…’

  Lisbet’s eyes widened. ‘That poor child.’ Then she shook her head, staring out at the stretch of sea in the distance, but seeming to see something else. ‘I can’t believe she showed up in the middle of the night like that.’ Her expression hardened, and she sighed, inclining her head toward the small radio that was on the windowsill. ‘I suppose I can, really. She’s been driven out – like the others, most likely.’

  Trine nodded. ‘Yes.’ A single word, but one that didn’t, couldn’t convey the horror and magnitude of what had happened recently in Germany.

  The papers were full of it. Reporters at the paper she worked for had covered it too. It was news that shocked the globe; millions around the world had woken up horrified to learn about Hitler’s latest treatment of the Jews. The November Pogroms – or Kristallnacht as it became known – was the most horrific event reported so far, and the shockwaves were still being felt. As thousands of Jewish-owned stores, homes, buildings and synagogues were invaded by SS forces and attacked with sledgehammers, destroying over seven thousand businesses, assaulting and arresting over twenty thousand Jewish men, who had been sent off to concentration camps. It wasn’t enough that their citizenship had been taken away from them; they were to be broken and punished for ever daring to exist.

  In Trine’s own paper, the headline had read, GERMANY’S DISGRACE.

  Her hands shook as she put the coffee down. She had tried to telephone her brother, Fritz – tried to find out what was going on. Offering, once more, a place for the family to stay. She’d sent several letters to him over the years – ever since Hitler had been made chancellor, suggesting he consider immigration, but his response had always been the same. ‘We will, just not yet.’

  That ‘yet’ had arrived, hadn’t it? But still she never heard anything… till Asta appeared at her door out of the blue.

  Her own parents were long since dead, and when she hadn’t heard back from Fritz – and found that the phone line had been disconnected – she’d tried her sister-in-law’s parents, but there had been no response from them either. The only thing she’d heard about her family was the arrival of her niece, half-starved and delirious, hiding in her barn the night before.

  She stood up, tried to push back the fear. ‘I need to get to the office, else the paper won’t be able to go to print – would you mind looking after her while I’m gone?’ she asked Lisbet.

  ‘Of course, go – she’s in good hands, I’ll fetch Malthe now.’

  Trine fidgeted on the train ride into Elsinore, feeling torn; should she have sent someone with the pages instead – what if Asta woke up without her being there? She knew Lisbet would take care of her, but after everything the girl had been through, it felt horrible to leave her like that. As it was, she hadn’t seen her niece and nephew since they were eight or nine. Where was Jürgen? It seemed so strange to see the one without the other. Fear sat heavily in her chest when she arrived at the printer’s, where the typesetters were already beginning to pull their hair out.

  ‘What kept you?’ grumbled an old man named Karl with arthritic joints, who’d been setting the plates for the Gazette since he was a boy of twelve. He had a rolled-up cigarette lodged on the side of his mouth that he moved from one side to the other, as he sized her up with pale blue eyes as sharp as a tack.

  ‘Overslept,’ she said. It was simpler to lie.

  He raised a brow, but didn’t say anything. She was usually here just before dawn, especially on a print day. He shrugged. Karl wasn’t the type to pry.

  Despite Trine’s worries, the morning moved quickly and she talked him through the changes. He’d already pre-loaded some of the pages, and they went through the copy together, with help from his assistant, a young man with short brown hair and a lazy smile named Oleg.

  After a few hours, Trine was finally able to leave, before putting in her application for a few days’ personal leave.

  Her boss, Henk Garsman, was shocked. ‘A holiday? You?’

&nbs
p; She’d once come to the office with a temperature of forty-one degrees and a nasty cold. Henk had wished she hadn’t – particularly when it laid him low a few days later and he couldn’t move from his bed. It made him wonder just what kind of superwoman powers she had to be able to work when it was a labour for him to simply breathe…

  ‘It’s a personal matter – some things I need to take care of.’

  He frowned, pushing up a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles as he peered at her with his deep brown eyes. ‘Is it Uwe – do you need someone to come—’

  ‘No, it’s nothing like that – it’s a family thing, my niece, she’s not well.’

  He nodded. ‘Take all the time you need. We can manage.’

  She raised a dark blonde brow, and he grinned. ‘This paper has run for sixty years without you, Trine Anderson, and we muddled along somehow – we can get a temp for a while.’

  She narrowed her eyes. ‘Anna Herstman?’ she asked.

  He sighed. ‘Anna Herstman.’ Anna had been their last sub-editor, the one who’d thrown a thesaurus at the features department.

  He seemed to reconsider. ‘Actually, I’ll send her the pages at home.’

  Trine nodded. ‘Probably safest,’ she agreed.

  Back at the house, the smell of soup made her mouth water. The windows were steamed over, and the air was rich with the scent of garlic, caramelised onions and freshly baked bread.

  ‘You didn’t have to do this,’ she said by way of greeting to Lisbet, unwinding her scarf from around her neck, and placing her shoes on the rack by the door. Though she was grateful – Lisbet’s vegetable soup, made with beef shin, tomato and lentils, was the one of the best comforts in the world.

  Lisbet shrugged. ‘I know. There’s fresh bread too. I always like to have something to do, you know me.’

  Trine did. ‘Tak.’ She knew that she’d made it more for Asta than her and that touched her. ‘How is she?’