by Louise Fein
PEOPLE LIKE US
Louise Fein
www.headofzeus.com
First published in the UK in 2020 by Head of Zeus Ltd
Copyright © Louise Fein, 2020
The moral right of Louise Fein to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
With grateful acknowledgment to the following source for song lyric translations: Thesis: Lieder, Totalitarianism, and the Bund Deutscher Mädel: Girls’ Political Coercion Through song. Soutce: Library and Archives Canada/ OCLC 5757010
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN (HB): 9781789545005
ISBN (XTPB): 9781789545012
ISBN (E): 9781789545340
Cover design: Anna Green
Images: Mauritius Images GmbH / Alamy Stock Photo
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Contents
Welcome Page
Copyright
Praise for People Like Us
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue: Leipzig
Summer 1929
Part I
7 August 1933
17 September 1933
8 October 1933
11 October 1933
10 February 1934
11 February 1934
20 April 1934
19 August 1934
10 September 1934
Part II
31 May 1937
25 July 1937
3 August 1937
7 August 1937
8 August 1937
8 September 1937
19 September 1937
20 September 1937
25 September 1937
10 October 1937
12 October 1937
14 October 1937
3 November 1937
19 December 1937
20 December 1937
21 December 1937
29 January 1938
10 February 1938
13 May 1938
7 October 1938
8 October 1938
12 October 1938
23 October 1938
3 November 1938
7 November 1938
8 November 1938
9 November 1938
10 November 1938
17 November 1938
22 November 1938
23 November 1938
Part III
20 December 1938
31 December 1938
7 January 1939
4 February 1939
5 February 1939
1 March 1939
15 March 1939
16 March 1939
11 April 1939
16 April 1939
19 April 1939
10 May 1939
20 May 1939
23 May 1939
31 May 1939
24 July 1939
1 August 1939
18 August 1939
Epilogue
June 1994
Summer 1995
A Note from the Author
Acknowledgements
About the Author
An Invitation from the Publisher
Praise for People Like Us
‘People Like Us is also a reminder that – even in the darkest times – the extraordinary power of love can light the way.’
Fiona Valpy
‘A powerful, unforgettable love story.’
Gill Paul
‘A heartbreaking, beautiful story.’
Jenny Ashcroft
‘This is historical ficton at its absolute best.’
Liz Trenow
‘People Like Us is part romance, part character study, part call to arms.’
Lizzie Page
‘A heartbreaking and thought-provoking story about forbidden love during Nazi Germany.’
Luke Allnott
‘An incredibly moving, utterly captivating, beautiful story of love…’
Rhiannon Navin
‘A beautifully written and emotionally wrenching journey…both sweeping and intimate.’
Karen Harper
To my remarkable parents, who are with me always.
Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
WINSTON CHURCHILL
Prologue
Leipzig
Summer 1929
The lake is silky smooth, lapping gently around the legs of the jetty. The knobbly planks beneath my toes are thick and warmed by the sun. Karl is on the bank, wriggling into his shorts under the towel Mutti is holding around him.
‘Careful, Hetty,’ Karl shouts. ‘The water’s deep out there.’
‘I’m just looking,’ I call back. ‘I want to see the big fish.’
I shuffle right to the very end and curl my toes around the edge. Crouching low, I peer into the water. I can’t see the bottom of the lake. Maybe there isn’t one. Perhaps the dark green water goes all the way down to the middle of the earth where savage monsters lurk, waiting.
Walter swims towards the jetty. He splashes his arms around then floats on his back, pale toes bobbing up out of the water. He pops up again, grinning at me, pushing his wet hair off his face. I wish I could have swimming lessons like Karl, then I too could glide like a fish, instead of splashing about in the shallows, stubbing my toes on jagged stones and slipping on slimy weed.
From my perch, I watch Walter swim further out into the lake. He disappears from sight, hidden by the solid wooden pillar of the jetty. I move to try to see him, but I lean too far and topple forward. My hands fly out, clawing at empty space, and I’m falling, down, down, down.
Belly first, I crash onto the stone-hard surface. I gasp with the iciness, but instead of air, there is only rancid lake water.
‘Help!’ I splutter, splashing hopelessly, blinded by blurry flashes of light and dark.
‘HELP,’ louder now, but the water boils and churns, closing over my head and the monsters suck me down to their deep, green lair.
Gripped by panic, I scrabble and kick, fighting back up to the surface. I manage a breath. There are voices in the distance. I thrash wildly, but it doesn’t keep me up, and I’m swirling, round and round. The voices fade as I’m dragged down again, lungs screaming, but the water – sickening, cloying, heavy – fills them and I’m drowning.
Darkness folds in.
Something scrabbles at my costume and scratches my back. There’s a tugging, and I’m pulled up to the surface. Someone is holding me and I’m retching and coughing in the lightening-white sunlight until I think my insides are going to spill out. With a rasping choke, air surges into my lungs and water pours from my nose. The person holding me is kicking hard, keeping both of us up, panting and grunting with the effort. The hands turn me onto my back and there’s a strong body beneath me, keeping my head above the water.
‘Don’t struggle, you’re safe now.’ A voice in my ear. Walter’s voice. ‘I’m swimming you back to the shore.’ He wraps his hand around my chin and tugs.
I try to lie still, but water laps in my ears and I wobble as he jerkily swims on his back, huffing with the effort of keeping me up until we reach shallow water. D
imly, I hear cries and shouts from nearby. Walter’s body is solid and safe. He begins to wriggle out from under me, but I cling desperately to him, our tangle of legs sinking to the lake floor.
‘It’s all right, you can stand now,’ he says, propping me upright. The mud squishes between my toes as I try to stand but I’m shaking, and my legs collapse beneath me. Walter holds me, and I lean against him. My throat stings from the coughing. Water trickles from my nose.
Mutti runs through the shallows, soaking her skirt, but she doesn’t seem to care. She lifts me up, hugging me tight against her body, and we stagger back to shore. She wraps me in a warm towel.
‘Hetty! Are you okay?’ Karl is here too, patting me on the back, peering at my face. ‘I told you to be careful!’
‘Oh my poor darling.’ Mutti sinks down with me still in her arms. She rocks me back and forth as though I were a baby, not a big seven-year-old. My ear is pressed to her chest and I can hear her breath, ragged and fast, in her throat.
Walter stands close by, watching us, silent and dripping. Mutti turns to him.
‘You saved her life, Walter. Thank heavens you’re such a strong swimmer. If you hadn’t been there so fast…’ She begins to cry.
‘It was no problem,’ Walter says, quickly looking away.
‘I’m going to tell your mother how brave you’ve been.’
‘There’s no need. Honestly.’ He grabs his towel and begins to dry himself.
Mutti wipes her eyes and helps me to dress. The back of my nose and throat are rough-raw, as if I have swallowed concrete.
‘Perhaps Hetty should have swimming lessons,’ Karl says into the silence.
Mutti sniffs and nods.
She bustles around, laying out the blanket and picnic things. I’ve managed to stop shaking and try some raspberry pfannkuchen and milk from her flask.
I finally gather the courage to look directly at Walter. His wavy blond hair is half dry, half wet. He’s saying something to Karl, but then he turns and looks at me and his face breaks into a smile.
His eyes are the warmest, kindest blue.
*
Later that night, Mutti tucks me into my narrow bed, pushed against the wall in the bedroom I share with Karl.
‘Good night, my darling.’ Mutti kisses my forehead. ‘You are all right, aren’t you?’
‘Yes, Mutti.’
‘Good.’ She smiles and strokes my hair.
She turns out the light and closes the door gently behind her.
I keep my eyes open. Through the gloom, I make out the lumpy shape of the wardrobe against the wall and Karl’s empty bed below the windowsill. With him in the room, the menacing shadows can’t harm me. Each time my eyelids droop I’m back in the lake and the water is sucking me into its murky depths, choking and clogging my lungs. My heart thrums and my eyes ping open. Stay awake. Stay awake. Stay awake.
The door creaks sooner than I expect.
‘Karl?’
‘Hetty? You’re still awake.’
‘Can’t sleep.’
‘I wondered. Listen, I have something for you. To make you feel better. I was saving it for your birthday, but I want to give it to you now. I’ll get you something else for your birthday.’ He snaps on the light and I blink at the sudden brightness.
Karl scrabbles under his bed and emerges with a brown, rectangular paper bag.
‘Here,’ he says, placing it on top of my blankets as I push myself up to sit. He perches on the edge of my bed. His cheeks are pinched and his forehead wrinkles beneath his dark fringe.
‘I wish I’d saved you today, Little Mouse,’ he says, ‘but I was too far away.’ I know he means it because, as he looks into my eyes, I can see straight into his soul. The worry has made his pupils huge and black and I can tell he’s crying inside, like me. I nod so he knows I understand.
‘At least Walter was there. And he is your best friend.’
I look at the paper bag, bulky in my hands.
‘Open it then,’ he urges.
The paper crackles as I uncurl the folded bag. I slip my hand inside and my fingers brush the hard cover of a book. It’s a journal, the type a grown-up might have. The front is covered with a rich patchwork of shapes in different shades of browns, oranges and blues. The paper inside is creamy white.
‘It’s beautiful,’ I whisper. ‘Thank you, Karl.’
‘There’s something else in there too.’ Karl smiles.
Resting at the bottom is a silver and blue fountain pen.
‘I thought you could write all your secrets in there. Or stories you make up with that wild imagination of yours,’ Karl says, searching my face.
‘I’ll try and write some really good ones. But maybe not about drowning.’ I smile at him. I want him to know everything is okay.
As I settle my head back on the pillow, I know that it is okay, but some things are changed.
I nearly drowned and Walter rescued me.
That makes everything different.
Part I
7 August 1933
‘Metamorphosis!’ exclaims Dr Kreitz. ‘That’s what the English call this book.’ And he waves its pages in the air with a flourish. ‘Can anyone tell me what that word means?’ He leans on the teacher’s table, shirtsleeves pulled up to his elbows. Not one of us makes a sound from our wooden benches in my new classroom at the Gymnasium.
No more dusty, higgledy-piggledy Volksschule for me. The small, black cinder playground and rough children are a distant memory from before the long summer break. The Gymnasium is all high arches and echoey corridors. In its centre, a great hall with a high, beamed ceiling beneath its grand, red, mansard roof. Here, the teachers are taller, smarter, stricter. I might have got better marks in the entrance test than Karl did three years ago, when he sat for them like me, at eleven, but now I’m here, I don’t feel very clever at all.
‘Does it mean transformation?’ Someone at the back breaks the silence. I twist around and glimpse a small girl with frizzy black hair, a little like my own.
‘Name please,’ Dr Kreitz says, his head popping up, eyes bulging out, reminding me of a frog.
‘Freda Federmann,’ says the girl in a confident voice.
‘Wonderful. Yes, Freda.’ Dr Kreitz enthuses. ‘Transformation. Rebirth. Conversion. From the Greek, Metamorphoun, meaning, “To transform”.’ He begins to pace. ‘Studying the Greeks and Romans,’ he says, ‘will teach us all we need to know about the human condition.’
‘Freda Federmann is a Jewess,’ I hear someone hiss to her neighbour from the row behind me. It’s loud enough for the professor to hear, but he shows no sign of it. He picks a book up from the table as he passes by.
The professor has narrow shoulders and a pot belly. Part of his shirt hangs from his trousers and his tie is askew. This school, famous for its classical education, clearly picked him for his knowledge and superior brain, not for his appearance.
‘Franz Kafka,’ he says, staring intently up at the ceiling, as though he might see the author perched on top of the rafters. ‘What a brilliant – and amusing – man he was. Listen.’ He vigorously flicks through some pages, his hair flopping wildly. He begins to read, treading a slow circuit of the room. He tells us, in a mesmerising voice, the story of Gregor, the travelling salesman who awakens one morning to find himself transformed into an enormous insect-like creature.
Light filters through the long, rectangular windows set high up on the classroom wall. Adolf Hitler stares serenely down at us all from his vast portrait above the blackboard. Dr Kreitz’s voice rises and falls, fades and resounds. As I look at the portrait, Hitler’s face appears to swell and move. He gazes at me, unblinking, but I’m certain his lips have moved, twitched, as if at any moment, he might smile and step down from the picture, saying, Ha ha, what a joke, I have been here all along.
He doesn’t, of course, and I tear my eyes away. Karl says I have too much imagination. My heart jumps and I wonder if he’s right.
Dr Kreitz reads on. I av
oid looking at Hitler’s picture and instead study the profile of the girl sitting next to me. Tall and elegant, she has long auburn hair which hangs either side of her shoulders in two smooth plaits. Her pale face is so perfectly formed, it could have been chiselled from the finest marble. She holds her chin high as she watches Dr Kreitz travel around the room. Feeling my gaze, she turns and fixes me with sloping green eyes.
‘Hello,’ she whispers. ‘My name is Erna Bäcker.’ A smile flickers on her lips.
‘Hetty Heinrich,’ I reply, excruciatingly aware of my frizzy dark hair, big eyes and too-round cheeks.
Erna Bäcker is simply the most bewitching creature I have ever seen in my life.
A knock on the classroom door stops Dr Kreitz’s reading abruptly.
‘Herr Hofmann…’ he addresses the tall, thin man, wearing a waistcoat and bow tie, who enters the room.
‘Heil Hitler,’ Herr Hofmann greets the class.
‘Heil Hitler,’ we echo back.
‘Headmaster,’ Dr Kreitz clears his throat, ‘delighted you can join us.’
Herr Hofmann sweeps to the front of the class.
‘Welcome to our wonderful Gymnasium,’ he says, smiling around the classroom. ‘You’ve all done extremely well to get here. But this is only the beginning. During your time at this school, with hard work and exemplary behaviour, you can become exceptional. This is not only true for the boys, but for you girls too. In the fullness of time, you shall go on to become wonderful members of our great new Reich. I am sure you will make both your parents, and our school, proud. Best of luck to you all.’
I smile back at him. My dream is to become a doctor, preferably a world-famous one. I feel that, being here, at this great school, is one step closer to achieving my ambition. I shall try my very best at all my lessons. Always.
Herr Hofmann turns to Dr Kreitz. ‘What are you studying this morning?’
Dr Kreitz silently shows him the cover of Metamorphosis.
A look of horror passes over Herr Hofmann’s face. ‘Dr Kreitz, have you lost your mind?’
