BRAT and the Kids of Warriors

by Michael Joseph Lyons

  Jack placed his hands in his lap so he could snap the blue rubber band without being noticed. He wasn’t shutting down, but he thought it might just give his brain an extra shot of clarity. “Ingrid, what about the Nazis? Where do they fit in?”

  Ingrid gave him an indulgent look. “You’re always seeing Nazi ghosts. The Nazis were yesterday’s great threat to freedom. Today’s threat aren’t ghosts but very real Communists.”

  Jack struggled to make sense out of this. Our allies are now the enemy. American troops had stayed after the war to help rebuild Germany, but the Nazis weren’t why we never left. We’re here to keep our old allies, the Russians, as well as the other Communists, from attacking West Germany and the rest of the world.

  More things made sense. Grafenwöhr’s up on the East German border. Our dads aren’t going up to Grafenwöhr just to train. If a war starts, it’s gonna start there.

  His throat tightened. Jack remembered the day at the castle when Queenie called their dad a modern-day knight. She was right. The free world depends on him, and the other knights, to protect it. But this is no fairytale, and there could easily be no happily-ever-after.

  Jack heard his sister ask, “What was the war like? What were the Communists like when you were growing up?”

  “I was pretty young during World War II, so I don’t remember much. My family was mostly on my uncle’s farm near Wernigerode. I loved that farm. But near the end of the war, we returned to Dresden. It had been very badly bombed. My most vivid memories are of how the Russian soldiers overran the city, killing people and stealing anything they could get their hands on.

  “They didn’t only steal little things like watches, jewelry, and silver. Once I saw them drive trucks up to a big factory and steal everything inside. The owner just stood there, watching. He told my mom they were taking all his equipment to send back to Russia.”

  “The war suddenly ended, but the Russians didn’t go home. They stayed, and not to help.”

  “Lots of my friends no longer had dads. They’d been killed in the war. And lots of the other dads didn’t come back for months or years, until they were eventually released from prisoner-of-war camps in Russia. Somehow we still had fun. After all, we were kids. We even played games pretending to be Russian soldiers. My favorite game was Gib Mir Deine Uhr, which means Give Me Your Watch. We thought it was funny when a soldier raised up his shirtsleeve and had five or six watches on his arm.”

  Jack was taking in everything about the Russian soldiers. But, as always, he had many other questions about her childhood. “Did you build a lot of forts?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said, smiling at those memories. “We loved to make forts. There certainly was plenty to build with.” She described the massive piles of brick, stone, and wood everywhere—rubble from the war. Mainly from the devastating bombing raids.

  Queenie abruptly held up her hand for silence. “Enough with the war,” she declared. “I have been sitting here listening to you, and, well, until today I thought you only knew a couple words of English. But you could have grown up in America, your English is so great. How is that possible?”

  Ingrid’s eyes grew worried. Quietly, she said, “That I speak your language so well, and how I learned it must be our secret. That means you can’t ever tell. If your parents find out, they too will want to know how I learned, and that I can never tell them. But if you’ll keep my secret, I’ll tell you.”

  Jack had no idea where this was going, but he knew that, more than ever, he believed in Ingrid, and trusted her. “I can keep your secrets.”

  “So can I,” Queenie said.

  Ingrid exhaled. “When I was young I was selected to learn English. Kind of like you, Jack, I’ve always had an easy time learning languages.

  “What about me?” demanded Queenie.

  “You? Well, you’d do a lot better, Laura, if you didn’t always strive for perfection.”

  Naturally, Queenie couldn’t let that pass. “How can striving for perfection ever be bad?”

  “Jack never cares if his German is perfect; he just plows forward, desperate to communicate. By making more mistakes, he gets more practice and helpful corrections. I know it might sound strange, but his willingness to fail helps him learn faster.”

  Queenie just rolled her eyes. “Oh, Jack is definitely willing to fail.”

  Seeing that Queenie was ready to fight this one out, Jack cut in. “Can we just get back to the story?”

  Ingrid continued, “It began when I was little. I loved my teachers, and I knew they loved me. One of my teachers recommended me for a special program to learn English. It was so exclusive, I wasn’t even allowed to tell my friends that I was learning extra English. My teachers, and even my mother and father, were very clear on this point. I was never to tell anyone about my language classes. I told my friends I had extra chores all those afternoons I couldn’t play. They thought I had the strictest parents in the world. But I knew different.

  “The longer I took the classes, the more fun they became. I was taught to read and write in English. To help me learn, the school distributed American books and magazines, which I loved. My teachers told me to read the words but not believe them. They said they were all propaganda. But the more I read, the more I came to believe the things I read and not my teachers. As I read, I fell in love with America.

  “Anyway, I loved my lessons. We even saw movies! No one else could watch Hollywood movies, but we could. To my amazement and delight, they started showing us American movies in the auditorium of our language school. After watching these movies, they’d have us practice speaking with an American accent and lots of American slang. I was so good at it! At language school, I loved to show off the American me. I could be from Boston, or I could be from the South.” Ingrid switched effortlessly between a Boston accent and a Southern drawl.

  “I noticed that I was the youngest person watching those movies, and my teachers told me it was because I was such a promising student. They made me feel important.”

  “But you couldn’t tell your friends?” Queenie sounded incredulous.

  “That was one of the hardest things. How do you not talk about some great movie you’ve just seen?”

  Raising an eyebrow at Jack and Queenie, she said, “I know you two, and you’d have blabbed. But you’ve never lived with constant fear that if you told your friends, and they got caught, you’d cause something bad to happen. In East Germany there is no freedom.

  “But, except for not being able to tell anyone, you had a good life, right?” Queenie said.

  “At first, yes. But as I got older, things began to change.

  I realized my parents and other adults were nervous around people they didn’t know. And they often lied about things. Everyone seemed afraid of one woman in our apartment building. At first I didn’t understand why. I just knew my parents said to stay away from her. Then one time my mom told me to be ready to lie to her. A couple stayed in our apartment for a few days. They were old friends of my parents. My mom made me promise if that woman asked who they were, I should say they were my uncle and aunt, which of course wasn’t true. Sure enough, the next day that woman cornered me in the hallway and asked who was staying with us. But I was prepared and did as my mom had asked. I didn’t like it, but I did it. As time went by, I realized more and more adults were lying about where they’d been or who they’d been with.”

  Queenie seemed to notice her Coke for the first time. She took a sip. “My mom threatens us within an inch of our lives if we tell a lie. Your mom, well, she was making you lie!”

  “Precisely. My life was so different from yours. Especially once I found out about the Stasi. They are the East German secret police. They’re hardcore Communists who spy on everyone. When I was twelve, my dad finally explained that the Stasi were everywhere, listening to everyone’s conversations. He said I needed to be very careful what I said, or I
could be arrested and sent to prison—and my whole family, too. The scariest part was the Stasi don’t need a reason to arrest you. They can send you to jail without a trial. At first I thought my dad was just trying to scare me into behaving. But later I learned the truth. He was trying to protect me. I learned to fear the Stasi.

  “He told me that that snooping woman worked for the Stasi. She told the Stasi everything that went on in our building. Later I heard that the Stasi had a watchdog in every apartment building in East Germany. My dad hadn’t been exaggerating. There really were spies everywhere. Sometimes the Stasi drill tiny holes into the walls of apartments and hotel rooms to film people with special movie cameras. They’re always watching what people do and say. Every school, university, and hospital has Stasi spies and informants in it. They can be bus drivers, trolley conductors, janitors, doctors, nurses, and teachers. The Stasi recruit them because they’re around lots of people and can overhear what’s being said. The Stasi are much worse than the Gestapo, and the Gestapo were terrifying.”

  Jack had seen plenty of Gestapo in movies. They were the ruthless Nazi Secret Police, with their long, black leather coats. How could anyone be worse than they were?

  Ingrid’s eyes darted over to the bartender, and then around the room, as if she were scanning for problems. “Then, when I was fifteen, things suddenly went very bad for me. My language school said I would have the honor of spending that summer holiday at camp. For the first time in my life, I told them to forget it! You know how it is. I wanted to stay home with my girlfriends and enjoy the summer our way.

  “The next day I was called down to the office. A malicious-looking guy glared down at me, saying, ‘You are a very spoiled girl, and we are finished with all that.’ How could he say that about me? I was a model student!

  “The way he looked at me, I knew he was thinking, It would give me great pleasure to torture you. His mocking smirk dared me to challenge him. I was smart enough not to say a thing, but I think he wanted me to react with anger or tears. When it didn’t happen, his impatience seemed to grow, and he got down to business, with, ‘You have two choices, young lady: you go to this camp during the summer and do absolutely everything they tell you without one word of complaint, or there will be no more books, no more magazines, and definitely no more movies. What do you choose?’

  “It was clear. This was not a choice.

  “Unfortunately, I hesitated just a moment too long. Before I could give him the answer he wanted, I found he could look even more evil. He said, ‘Either you go to the camp and perform perfectly, or your brother Klaus will not be attending the University of Dresden, or any other University, for that matter. But, of course, it is your choice.’

  “Needless to say, I went to camp. To my surprise, it had nothing to do with language studies. It was military training. They put us in uniforms and taught us how to march in formation, recognize all the military ranks, act military, and obey orders. They made us do all kinds of exercises and physical-fitness stuff. We had to run up and down hills while carrying a fully loaded backpack and a rifle. I hated that part.

  “And we never got enough sleep. They woke us at five every morning and worked us till late at night. Only then did we drop, exhausted, into bed. By day we learned military tactics and underwent weapons training. We all but lived on the rifle range.”

  “You can shoot?” asked Jack, excitement in his eyes.

  “Absolutely. And you’ll never believe what else. Toward the end of camp, small groups of us got specialized training. First, it involved shooting pistols. We spent hours becoming decent shots.”

  “They’re harder than rifles, right?” Jack said.

  Ingrid nodded. “I was the best shot in my squad.” She said hastily, “Actually it wasn’t all that cool. Mostly just repetitive, boring, and exhausting. But I never complained, not once, that whole summer. I didn’t want to make problems for Klaus. Then one day I realized that no one else complained, either. I asked a guy why. He said, as if it were obvious, ‘The Stasi won’t want us if we question or complain.’ I was stunned. Willingly become Stasi? Certainly not!

  “Oh, don’t get me wrong, some time back I’d guessed that the guy who forced me to attend camp was Stasi. But until that moment, it had never dawned on me we were being trained to become Stasi. In fact, I’d spent most of that summer believing I’d been sent to the wrong camp by accident. I hadn’t said anything in case it looked like a complaint. I was just sticking it out. But that guy’s answer shattered that illusion. I knew that somebody, somewhere, had chosen me to be Stasi. I couldn’t sleep that night.

  “Even without that conversation, I would have started getting suspicious. Soon after, they began teaching us personal fighting skills, espionage techniques, and surveillance methods.”

  Jack’s eyes widened. “Whoa. What was that like? What kinda things did they teach you?”

  For a moment, Ingrid’s purple eyes sparkled back. “Jack, you’d have loved it! We learned things like using invisible ink and secret codes, detecting people tailing us, making dead letter drops.”

  Jack gave her a quizzical look.

  “It’s where you hide a message or a key or something in a public place for someone to pick up later. You might hide it under a rock or behind a loose brick in a wall—that’s called the dead drop. The person you’re leaving it for knows all about the drop and where to look for it.”

  “Nifty,” said Queenie.

  “But,” continued Ingrid, “you also signal that the drop was made, so the person doesn’t arouse suspicion by checking needlessly. We learned to chalk an X or a plus sign as a signal. But you make that chalk mark somewhere far from the dead drop, in a spot they would easily see it.”

  “Great idea,” Jack said.

  “And, Jack, we did micro-photography, too. We used these itty-bitty cameras to photograph documents.”

  “Charlie would love that.” Jack was in spy heaven.

  “There was a whole course on how to observe a suspect without being seen. We learned how to hang out on a street corner reading a newspaper or a bus schedule until the suspect came by, but without being obvious. We’d go out in teams and follow someone, giving each other signals for things like back off or switch places.”

  “What signals?” Jack asked.

  “Simple stuff like removing your sunglasses, or switching your newspaper from one hand to the other, or blowing your nose with your handkerchief. Always something ordinary. But for us, the communication was clear. Disguises were also important. When you’re following someone, or being followed, and you figure you’ve been spotted, you try to fade away by changing your appearance.”

  Queenie said, “How?”

  “We’d carry a briefcase, knapsack, big camera bag—that sort of thing. In it we’d have a change of clothes, a hat, and maybe glasses. There would be a wig with hair of another color, and for men a realistic-looking moustache. Also shoes or boots with thick soles or lifts inside to make you much taller. You’d be surprised how different a person can look after changing height or hair.”

  Jack couldn’t believe his nanny knew all this neat stuff. “Are there other ways to tell if someone is spying on you?”

  “Here’s one—say you have something hidden in your briefcase but you have to leave it alone and you’re worried someone will search through it. How would you know if the briefcase had been tampered with?”

  “Fingerprints?” he asked.

  “Too complicated, and takes too long. Try this sometime.” She reached for her purse and placed it on the table. Then she yanked a single hair from her head, and wet it with her tongue. She stuck it next to the latch of the purse. “If you come back and the hair is still stuck on the latch, then no one has opened it. But if the hair is gone, it means someone has opened it. Watch this.” She snapped open her purse, and then reclosed it. Sure enough, the hair was nowhere to be seen.

&nbs
p; Jack’s glance to Queenie telegraphed, We’ve gotta remember this one.

  “Our instructors also taught us how to conduct investigations and recruit informants. They wanted us to convince wives to spy on their husbands, and children to spy on their parents.”

  Ingrid’s expression was suddenly serious. “It mostly involved the dark art of persuasion: bribery, blackmail, and threats. At first, all this spy stuff was fun and games, kind of like pretend. When I understood they actually expected us to do that kind of thing, I could hardly wait for camp to end. Back at school, with my friends, I tried to put it all behind me.”

  “It was only after I turned sixteen that I realized the Stasi had been involved from the very start. The teacher who saw my talent had been Stasi. The teachers at the English school were, too. They hadn’t been trying to nurture my love for languages. They did it to make me an operative—whether I wanted to or not. And not just as an informant like that creepy woman in my building. I was pretty sure they planned to send me to Western Europe or America as a spy. At that point, I realized all the people in my language classes were, or would be, Stasi agents. We would end up working for Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung, what we call the HVA. It’s the Stasi Main Directorate for Foreign Intelligence. That’s like America’s CIA. I became desperate to get out of East Germany. That’s when I began to plan.” Ingrid went quiet.

  Queenie was staring at Ingrid, almost unable to comprehend what she had been through. But finally she asked, “Your life was so twisted up with the Stasi. How could you possibly get away from them?”

  “It seemed impossible,” said Ingrid grimly. “First, no one in East Germany is allowed to travel without written permission. If we wanted to visit my grandmother who lived a hundred kilometers away, my family couldn’t just do it. We had to go to the police station and tell them exactly why we wanted to visit her and get their official permission.