by Alan Gratz
People didn’t just hand you their secrets. You had to go hunting for them.
I started with the papers on the desk. Internal company memos, official purchase orders from the German government, personal correspondence. All probably very interesting, but not what I wanted. I riffled through the desk drawers. There was a sound in the hall, like floorboards creaking under the weight of a person, and I froze. I reached out to the light, my hand hovering over the chain, but there wasn’t another sound. I left the light on and scanned the desk, trying to think where it would be hidden. Not in plain sight. Not in an official letter.
There was a little toy car sitting on a leather-bound book, and I picked up the car to examine it. I poked at it, peered inside it, pulled at the wheels, but it was just a toy car. I set it aside and picked up the book. It was a copy of Mein Kampf—“My Struggle,” the book Adolf Hitler wrote while he was sitting in a jail cell in Munich for trying to overthrow the government, back before I was born. Now that Hitler ran Germany, Mein Kampf was required reading for anybody in the Nazi Party. Or at least required owning. Despite a playing card tucked into it as a bookmark, it looked like the book had never been opened.
The playing card. I glanced at the page number to be able to put it back where it was, and looked at the card under the light. It was a jack of spades. I turned it over, then ran my fingers down the edge. Was it thicker than usual? I couldn’t tell. I squinted at the edge under the light. Was there a seam there? I ran my fingernail down it, but it didn’t separate. Maybe this wasn’t it. Maybe I was wasting time. How long had I been away from the dinner party? Had they sent one of the servants to look for me?
My fingernail caught. There was a seam! I very carefully worked my fingernail along the edge, trying not to mar the card or tear it, until I got to the corner. I pinched both edges of the seam between my fingers and pulled, and the front and back of the card peeled apart. Inside, printed where no one could see it, was row after row of numbers. I peeled the card the rest of the way apart and read the numbers straight through one time, absorbing them.
The floor outside creaked again. I rolled the two halves of the card back together, stuck the card back into the book, and clicked off the light. The doorknob turned, and the door groaned on its hinges. Someone was coming into the room!
I stepped behind the curtains along the back wall as the door opened. The curtains wavered from my movement, and I pinched a tiny part of them between my fingers to stop them from stirring. The floor creaked. Someone was in the room with me! I held my breath for the click of the light switch.
But it didn’t come. I could hear the swish of clothes, the careful footfalls. But the person didn’t turn on the light. Not the big overhead one. I heard the chick-chick of the desk lamp, and light glowed through the thin curtains in front of me. I could see the silhouette of a person through the curtain. Could they see me? Had I put everything back on the desk the same way I’d found it?
My stomach did somersaults, and suddenly I wished I hadn’t had that extra piece of cake. The person in the room moved again, away from the desk. I heard the clink of glass, the brief, quiet slosh of liquid. What was going on? I had to know. I could see the dim figure of the person through the curtain, could tell he or she was bent over something, not looking in my direction. Slowly, carefully, I peeked out from behind the curtain …
A man in a dark suit stood over a little table on the other side of the room. He was a servant, I realized. The man who’d met us at the door. The butler. The table had glass bottles on it. Drinks. He was pouring a drink for someone. But who? Everyone else was downstairs, weren’t they?
The butler glanced around to make sure no one was watching, and I ducked back behind the curtain. I saw his shadow raise the glass to his own lips and drink down whatever it was in one long gulp. He’d poured the drink for himself! I let out a silent breath of relief. All I had to do was wait for him to leave.
A light flashed behind me suddenly—the bright wash of a searchlight, the ones the Germans used to search the skies for Allied bombers. It startled me, and I turned to look out the window.
Which was a mistake.
The courtyard below was a straight shot down from the window. I closed my eyes, but it was too late. My head swam. My knees buckled. I had to grab for the latch on the window just to keep myself on my feet, and it rattled under my weight.
I was deathly afraid of heights.
“Who’s there?” came the butler’s startled voice.
The silhouette of the butler came closer. All he had to do was pull back the curtains and he would find me. I tried desperately to think of some excuse—I’d gotten lost on the way to the bathroom, I’d seen the race cars on the shelves and come in for a closer look—but none of them explained why I was hiding behind the curtains with the lights off. I was going to be caught, and my family and I would be thrown into a prison camp. There would be an international incident.
The butler’s hand wrapped around the curtain. My heart thudded in my chest. I looked left. Looked right. Backed away as close as I could to the window.
I had nowhere to run.
The Butler’s hand slid away from the curtain, and he crumpled to the ground. Behind him stood another silhouette, shorter and rounder.
“Michael?” the shadow whispered. It was my mother! I stepped out from the curtains, my heart still racing, and almost tripped on the prone form of the butler on the floor. My mother was a small, dimple-cheeked woman with her brown hair cut short and curled, wearing a simple but elegant green dress. I was almost as tall as she was, and we were both definitely smaller than the butler.
“Did you—?” I started to ask, but I could see the butler’s chest rising and falling. He wasn’t dead. Just asleep.
Ma held up her handkerchief. “Chloroform. I always keep a bottle in my handbag for emergencies. Did you get it?”
“I got it. But what about him?” I asked, nodding at the butler.
“What was he doing in here? Did he see you?”
“No. He came in and poured himself a drink.”
Ma smiled. “Likes to have a nip of the good stuff, does he? Can’t blame a soul for that. But I’m afraid he’s going to get in trouble for it this time. Help me drag him to the chair.”
Together we wrestled the butler into the reading chair beside the table, and Ma took a bottle from the table and poured some of it on his shirt before leaving the bottle in his hands.
“They’ll think he had one too many, poor dear. But it’s the only way to cover our tracks. Let’s go.”
Ma and I went back to the table, where everyone had moved on from dessert to cigarettes and coffee. All I wanted was to get out of the house before the butler upstairs was discovered. Before anyone could suspect that we’d had anything to do with it. But if we left right away, we would look even more suspicious. Ma gave Da a slight nod to let him know the business was done, and we settled in to listen to our host boasting about Germany’s success in the war.
“Poland, France, Luxembourg, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, they have all fallen in the great German avalanche that is sweeping Europe, and once the Sixth Army prevails in Stalingrad, Soviet Russia too will fall. And after Russia, we shall finally defeat the English!”
There were smiles all around, except from my family. My father cleared his throat and my mother looked at her plate.
“But not our friends in Ireland, of course, who have remained steadfastly neutral throughout the war,” our host said magnanimously, raising a glass to my father. Da smiled politely and returned the toast.
We all knew that being neutral hadn’t helped Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, or Luxembourg when the Nazis decided they wanted those countries. Germany had overrun them all shortly after invading Poland in 1939, just a year after Kristallnacht, setting off a world war.
Now, four years into the war, the Germans were after Russia and England, who were holding them off only with the help of the Americans. But Ireland had just won
its independence from England before the war, and so we’d decided to sit this one out—which was why we still had an embassy in Berlin when hardly any other country did. But we were under no delusions. If Germany ever wanted Ireland, they would help themselves.
“I think it’s time we were going,” Da said, putting his napkin on the table. “We’ll want to be getting home before the Allies start dropping their bombs on Berlin again.”
That shut them up quick. It was a chilly reminder that not everything was coming up roses for Germany, and I loved my da all the more for saying it.
Everyone else stirred to leave.
“Send for the butler,” the lady of the house told one of the servants.
Ma rose quickly. “We’ll see ourselves out. Thank you for a lovely evening.”
Soon we had made our escape and were in the car on the way back to the embassy.
“I assume you two had something to do with the missing butler?” Da asked as he drove.
“Michael ran into a spot of trouble,” Ma said. “But it’s nothing we couldn’t straighten out.”
Da thumped the steering wheel. “Damnation, Megan. I don’t like using Michael in this business. It’s dangerous! What if he’d been caught?”
“He wasn’t,” Ma said. “And even if they’re suspicious, they won’t find anything missing, will they, Michael?”
I shook my head. Ma gave me a pleased look and pulled a small notepad and pencil from her handbag. “Here. Not that you’re likely to forget it, but write it out so we’ll have it down.”
I took the pencil and paper and copied out the long strings of numbers, exactly as I had seen them. I could remember them as though I was looking at a photograph in my own head. It was a trick I’d been able to do since before I could remember.
I handed the notebook back with the numbers written out. “What is it?” I asked.
“The location of a new engine factory,” Ma said, tucking it away.
Da sighed. “I’ll get them sent out in tomorrow’s diplomatic pouch to Dublin.”
I sat back in my seat, proud that I was doing something at last, something to fight back against the Nazis. Something to make up for that night four years ago when I’d felt so helpless, and for every night in between.
I had found the secret codes and memorized them. Ma had covered my tracks. Tonight she would decode them, and in the morning Da would send the coordinates back to Dublin using a secret code of his own. There, Irish Intelligence (even though they were supposed to be neutral) would secretly pass along the location to the British.
And a week from now, maybe two, Allied bombers would fly over that hidden German engine factory and bomb it back to the Stone Age.
This was the mission. This was the secret my parents had shared with me four years ago on Kristallnacht.
Ireland might have officially been neutral, but unofficially, its ambassador to Germany and his family were spies for the Allies.
A light snow fell on the sidewalks of Berlin as I walked to school the next morning. But at least snow was all that was falling. Half the buildings on the street were roofless, hollowed-out husks, victims of the relentless Allied bombings. Bombing Berlin was easy—it was the capital of Germany. Unlike the secret engine factory I’d discovered the location of, the Allies knew right where Berlin was. The British and the Americans took turns dropping bombs on the city—the British at night, the Americans during the day—sending us scrambling for the air raid shelters every few hours. But even after spending two hours in the middle of the night belowground, showered by grit from the concrete ceilings and feeling the dull thud of the explosions rattle their teeth, the people of Berlin were up and ready to face the day.
They emerged from their houses grim and determined. Or maybe grim and resigned. Some Germans must have gotten up every day and thought, Hitler’s right! We’re the master race! Soon we’ll rule the world! But there had to be more people, lots more, who got up every day and thought, If I just keep my head down and do what I’m supposed to do, maybe I’ll make it through this in one piece. There was nothing to do but go to work for Nazi Germany, for Hitler. To refuse meant arrest, and arrest meant the concentration camps. Everybody knew the concentration camps were awful places where awful things happened, but nobody ever talked about it. That way they could pretend it wasn’t really happening.
People talked about plenty of other stuff they weren’t supposed to, but only after a quick glance over their shoulder to make sure no one else was listening. Everybody did it so much there was even a special word for it: Deutscherblick. The “German Look.” You did the German Look right before you said Germany might be losing the war, or complained about the food rations, or told a joke about Hitler. Because someone was always listening, always waiting to turn you in to the Nazi secret police. Always ready to rat you out to prove how loyal they were, even if they had said the very same thing yesterday.
The Berlin I walked through on the way to school was a quiet, suspicious city. People kept their eyes down, whispered if they had to talk, crossed the street to avoid having to give the Hitler salute to someone they knew in case they didn’t say “Heil Hitler!” loud enough or raise their arm high enough. Nobody wanted to call attention to themselves. Nobody wanted to stand out. Nobody wanted the Nazis to notice them. Just walking to school was like trying to walk past a sleeping bear.
I had a test coming up that day, but I wasn’t too worried about it. Nazi school was a joke. We spent most of the time doing physical education—playing games, running races, exercising. What little time we spent in the classroom was spent listening to the teacher tell us all about the glorious (and short) history of the Nazi Party, or teaching us how to tell German Aryans from “subhumans.”
The history stuff I always aced. I have a good memory for things, like the secret numbers I’d read off the playing card. All I have to do is see or hear something one time, and it sticks in my head like a song you can’t get rid of. It had helped me pick up the German language, and helped me memorize answers for tests, but it had made me a kind of freak too. And when you were an Irish kid at an English boarding school, like I was when my da was stationed in London, being a freak got you beat up. Daily.
Here in Berlin, it might get me killed.
In school, I hung my coat on a peg and took a seat near the back of the room. I didn’t have any friends at school on purpose, so I sat alone. My class was all thirteen-year-old boys. Forty of us. No girls. They had school in an entirely different building.
None of the boys were studying for the math test we had today, because none of them cared. Almost all of them, like me, were in the Hitler Youth. We were all going to move from the Jungvolk—the junior Hitler Youth ranks—to the senior Hitler Youth squads in a year’s time when we turned fourteen. At eighteen, we would graduate from the Hitler Youth into the Reich’s Land Service and work for free on a farm in the country for a year, and after that, we would join the army or the navy or the air force and fight in the war. What did we need to worry about math for?
I tugged on the collar of my Hitler Youth uniform. I hated the thing. I felt like a traitor wearing it. But if you were a boy in Nazi Germany in 1943, you were in the Hitler Youth. It was a requirement. Some of the boys in class were in my Hitler Youth troop, but not all of them. The troops were arranged by neighborhood.
The only boys in the class who weren’t in the Hitler Youth had been kicked out or weren’t allowed in until their parents joined the Nazi Party, and they sat wary and miserable in the front rows, trying desperately to avoid the rest of the boys, who were allowed to bully them without punishment. If those poor boys didn’t find a way to join the Hitler Youth before we graduated, they wouldn’t have any kind of future in Nazi Germany. They would get drafted into the German army at the lowest ranks, and sent to Russia to die in the snow.
A boy stood by the desk next to me. I recognized him. His name was Fritz Brendler. He was new—he’d moved to Berlin only a few weeks ago. He was barely taller sta
nding up than I was sitting down. The Hitler Youth uniform he wore was two sizes too big for him, and his legs and arms stuck out of it like the wooden stick limbs of a marionette. His nose was long and thin, his blond hair cut so close he was almost bald, and his ears, the only parts of him that were regular size, looked so huge on his little head that they stuck out like the wings on a bomber.
I could sense Fritz hoping I would turn and say hello, but I didn’t. I didn’t want a new friend. Definitely not a German one, who might be a rabid Nazi for all I knew. I had a job to do, and a German friend would just get in the way.
“Sit down, sit down, you little wretches,” Herr Professor Doktor Major Melcher said, giving a tardy student a hard smack on the head with his ruler as the boy tried to slip by him into a desk. It was time for Nazi school.
Nobody liked Herr Professor Doktor Major Melcher. For one thing, he had too many titles. The Germans loved their titles. Because he was a man you had to call him Herr, the German word for “mister.” Because he was a teacher, you had to call him Professor. Because he had a doctorate from Heidelberg University, you had to call him Doktor. And because he’d been a major in the German army, you had to call him Major. Herr Professor Doktor Major Melcher. It took so long to ask him if you could go to the bathroom, you could wet yourself. We should have just been glad he didn’t have two doctorates. Then we would have had to call him Herr Professor Doktor Doktor Major Melcher.
Herr Professor Doktor Major Melcher was old and wrinkly, with a bristly white mustache you could have used as a horse brush, and a liver spot the shape of Czechoslovakia on his forehead. He used to be a college professor until all the college-age students were sent off to war, and he was super mad about it and never let us forget it. The only reason anybody put up with him at all was because he’d fought in the First World War, and fighting was about all anybody in Germany respected anymore. I was surprised he wore a brown woolen suit and tie instead of his old uniform and pointy helmet.
