by Alan Gratz
Even though I wasn’t his biggest fan, I had a soft spot for the old codger. I’d gotten the impression he didn’t love the Nazis. It was nothing Melcher had said or done—anything that explicit would have gotten him hauled off to a concentration camp or reenlisted in the army, even though he was too old to fight again. It was just the way he talked so lovingly about the way things used to be. I felt he was a kindred spirit. A fellow faker.
“It’s already enough that I waste my time on you ignoramuses when I should be teaching at university,” Herr Professor Doktor Major Melcher told us. “Sit down and shut up, all of you. Before you take your math tests, I have two items you will no doubt consider to be good news. The first, as you may have heard, is that the Führer has announced that Berlin is now officially Jew-free.”
There were smiles and clapping all around. I gave a fake little smile to mask my disapproval as Fritz, the new boy, turned to nod and grin at me. The Germans had been carting the Jews away to concentration camps all over Germany ever since the Night of Broken Glass, and now, according to Herr Maggot Hitler, they were gone from his capital city.
“The second,” Herr Professor Doktor Major Melcher said, “is that the decision has been made to call up all seventeen-year-old Hitler Youth members directly into the German army.”
The room erupted in excited conversation. Seventeen-year-olds fighting in the army? For the German government to call up senior Hitler Youth members to the army was one thing; to announce that they would be skipping the usual year of service working on farms in the countryside was even more extraordinary. That meant the Nazis were drafting boys just four years older than all of us straight to the front lines.
And I knew why. The rest of the boys in the class only got the news the German government gave them, but my family and I had a radio that could pick up the BBC News Service from London. The truth was, the German Sixth Army had just been forced to surrender to the Russians at Stalingrad after a six-month siege, a loss of more than 285,000 German soldiers. German radio was still listing the names of the tens of thousands of soldiers who’d died before the surrender. The Nazis were scrambling, trying to build their numbers back up after their disaster on the eastern front. The BBC News called it a turning point in the war, a shift in the favor of the English, American, and Russian Allies. For the first time in the war, the Nazis were on the ropes. I let myself smile about it while everyone else thought I was smiling about getting to fight for the Nazis sooner.
“As a result of the senior Hitler Youth members being called into active duty, the age for graduation from the Jungvolk to the Hitler Youth proper is now thirteen, not fourteen,” Herr Professor Doktor Major Melcher told us, “which means all of you little brats are moving up into the regular Hitler Youth a year earlier than you thought. Next week, in fact.”
The classroom exploded in happy conversation.
“Yes!” Fritz said, clenching his fist beside me. “This is great! Into the real Hitler Youth a year early!”
I was excited too. Entry into the senior Hitler Youth would mean even better chances to gather information for the Allies. Now, instead of having to wait to sneak into rooms during dinner parties, I would be given a position of real service in the city, where I could dig up some truly useful Nazi secrets. But then I remembered—to become a senior member of the Hitler Youth, you had to pass a series of physical tests, and there was one I knew I couldn’t pass, and never would. I sank in my chair. Just when my career as a spy was about to take off, it was going to crash and burn.
“All right. Enough,” Herr Professor Doktor Major Melcher said. “If this were a university classroom, we would already be studying calculus. The mathematics of the heavens. As it is, I must debase myself with the mathematics of firebombs and distances marched. Clear your desks for your test.”
I shared Herr Professor Doktor Major Melcher’s distaste for our math exams. Nazi math was always about war stuff. Questions like “A squadron of 346 bombers drops firebombs on an enemy city. Each airplane carries 500 bombs. How many fires will be caused if 30 percent of the bombs are hits and only 20 percent of the hits cause fires?” Or “The Jews are aliens in Germany. In 1933, there were 66,060,000 inhabitants in the German Reich, of whom 499,682 were Jews. What was the percentage of aliens?”
I sighed and attacked the test like the French Resistance attacking the occupying Nazi troops, but hoping for better results. When we finished, it was time for one of our many outdoor Hitler Youth training exercises. Officially, school and the Hitler Youth were separate, but whatever the Hitler Youth wanted—like time away from school to exercise and train—they got. Which in the dead of German winter was even more unbearable.
“If you’re afraid of freezing to death, don’t worry,” Herr Professor Doktor Major Melcher said with barely hidden disgust. “I understand some of you will be keeping warm today by burning books.”
A bonfire already burned in the middle of the street, built out of split timber and broken furniture from a house that had been bombed out by the Allies. It reminded me of the bonfire the men had built in the street during Kristallnacht, the orange flames just beginning to flicker in the broken glass at our feet as my parents and I turned the corner.
The heat coming off the bonfire here and now was inviting in the bitter February cold, but it was hard to enjoy it, knowing that soon we’d be heaping piles of books on top.
The Nazis used to have book burnings like this all the time. Back when Hitler first took over, he ordered that all the “un-German” books be pulled out of schools and libraries and burned. And the “un-German” books were pretty much every book. People were supposed to burn their own books too. The Nazis had huge book-burning ceremonies where they tossed all the offending books on the bonfire while they sang Nazi songs and celebrated being stupid.
By the time I moved to Berlin in 1937, they were pretty much done with book burnings—mostly because they had already burned every book in Germany. But every now and then, they discovered somebody’s hidden stash of “degenerate” books, and they made a big show out of burning them in the street, as a lesson to everyone else.
We stood in a line in the street while our Hitler Youth leader marched up and down in front of us. His name was Horst, and he was fifteen. Horst was a thick-necked, donkey-faced idiot whose idea of a good time was throwing rocks at stray dogs.
“The era of Jewish ‘intellectualism’ is over,” he told us, regurgitating lines the Hitler Youth organization had pounded into his thick skull. “The German man is not a man of books, but of character. Of action! These books,” he said, squeezing one of the offending volumes in his fat hand as if it were a cat he was trying to strangle, “are evil spirits of the past. We consign them to the flames so the world will know there is no place for decadence and moral corruption in Germany!”
No, I thought. No place for decadence or moral corruption. But room for book burnings and concentration camps.
“From the flames of this degenerate filth,” Horst said, flinging the book into the bonfire, “the phoenix of a new German spirit will rise in triumph! Now get inside there and cleanse that house of its corruption!”
This was why we were really here. Not to learn a lesson, but to do the work the SS didn’t want to do. We broke formation and ran up the steps into the thin, gray little row house. Just inside, in a cold, lifeless parlor, stood a small pile of pathetic-looking books, like the last rotting apples left on the ground after a harvest. While the other boys fell on them, grabbing up handfuls to haul outside, I took in the room. There were a few pieces of furniture—worn-looking upholstered chairs, scuffed end tables, a once-red rug whose color had faded to a kind of rust brown. But everything personal was gone. There were no mementos on the fireplace mantel, no knickknacks on the tables. Bright round circles of color stood out on the pale wallpaper where pictures had once hung, and an empty vase in the corner sat on its side, knocked over. It was unbroken, but no one had set it to rights.
The cold settled on me
, chilling me to the bone. This house was dead. And so too, probably, were the Germans who had lived in it. Who had they been? An old couple, living out their last years together? A young couple, making a new start with hand-me-down furniture? A family with children—perhaps a boy my own age?
Whoever they had been, they were as dead as this house. Or soon would be. Carted off to a prison camp to die, all for the sin of hiding forbidden books in their home.
I picked up what was left of the books and followed the other boys outside. They weren’t thinking about who had lived there, or where they had gone. They were merrily tossing the books on the fire, happy for any chance to throw something and watch it burn.
I tossed one book onto the fire at a time, slowly, so Horst wouldn’t see me standing around doing nothing. My skin crawled, as if I was consigning little bits of my soul to the fire with each book I threw in. But like smiling at a Nazi dinner party or memorizing facts about the Nazis for tests in school, it was all about the bigger mission. It was all part of the game. If it meant them letting me stick around to steal their secrets so the Allies could win the war, I’d burn every last book in Berlin.
“Hey! He doesn’t want to burn the books!” one of the boys yelled, and I flinched.
I was busted.
I nearly jumped out of my skin, thinking he was talking about me. That I’d been too slow to burn my books, that I’d let my disgust show on my face. But the boy was pointing at someone on the other side of the fire.
“The Dreikäsehoch,” he said. “He’s not burning his books.”
Dreikäsehoch was one of those crazy German compound words where they mash a bunch of little words together to make one big mouthful of a word, the way Obersturmführer meant “senior assault leader.” Dreikäsehoch meant “three cheeses tall,” like three wheels of cheese stacked one atop the other. It was a silly way of saying somebody was short.
And the short kid, in this case, was Fritz Brendler. The new kid. He was so small he looked like he was ten years old, not thirteen. He had four books in one arm, clutched to his chest, and another in his hand. And he wasn’t throwing any of them on the fire.
Fritz stepped back, his eyes wide with fear, as Horst and the other boys surrounded him.
“What’s this?” Horst demanded. “You don’t want to burn these books?”
“I didn’t—I just—” Fritz stammered.
Come on, kid. Don’t do this, I thought. These boys were animals. Even now they were circling him like wolves.
Horst snatched the book out of his hand and read the cover. “You just thought Sherlock Holmes wasn’t degenerate English filth?” Horst flung the book into the fire and advanced on Fritz.
“No, I just—I’m sorry. I—” Fritz said.
Just throw the books into the fire, I begged Fritz silently. They’re going to kill you if you don’t.
Horst slapped the other books out of Fritz’s arms and kicked them away. Before Fritz could recover, Horst shoved him hard with both hands, sending him flying into the Hitler Youth boys behind him. They grabbed him and punched him, like hungry dogs pouncing on rotten meat. “Jew lover!” they cried. “Degenerate!” My face burned hot in the crisp winter air and my hands clenched into fists as the boys fell on Fritz, hitting him, clawing at him, tearing his clothes.
My parents and I had walked away from the Jewish man in the street that Night of Broken Glass four years ago because we had a bigger mission than one man. But I was right here, right now, and I wasn’t the helpless little boy I’d been then, and these boys weren’t the Gestapo. Then again, I was supposed to stay invisible. I wasn’t supposed to get involved.
Fritz dropped to the ground and curled into a ball, the boys kicking him and punching him where he lay, and suddenly I was back in the school yard at St. Paul’s, in London, and the older boys were kicking me in the legs, the back, the head, their laughter the only thing louder than my crying. I was helpless. Ashamed. Learning the hardest lesson I’d ever learned:
When you fell down, it was over.
Without giving it another moment’s thought, I threw myself into the fight.
I kicked shins. I elbowed stomachs. I punched noses and ears. I stood over little three-cheeses-tall Fritz where he lay on the ground, protecting him like an antiaircraft gun during an air raid. I was the only one who came to his defense. But I was enough. I was a right whirling dervish, a one-man army Hitler would have given his little mustache to bottle up and ship to the Eastern Front. Don’t get me wrong—those Aryans gave me a busted lip and bruises that would send Da into a tizzy that night. But at last we reached an uneasy truce there in the street with the bonfire crackling behind us. Nobody wanted to come close enough for me to scrape my knuckles on their faces, and I wasn’t moving from the spot.
“He was burning books. I saw him,” I said, fists clenched, breathing hard. “He was just taking his time about it. Weren’t you?” I asked Fritz. He still lay on the ground, his arms covering his head. “Weren’t you?” I yelled, urgent. If he didn’t help me out here, we were both done for.
“Y-yes,” he said at last. “Of course.”
Horst stepped in between us and the other boys. “All right. Enough. We can’t hurt our Irish guest too badly, boys. Haven’t you heard? His daddy is an ambassador. If you break his nose, the Irish might declare war on us!” He pretended to be frightened by holding his hands against his chest and quivering, which got a laugh from the rest of the boys. Ireland was as much a threat to Nazi Germany as a summer rain, and all of us knew it. Horst just loved rubbing it in. I hated him all the more for it, but the joke had broken the bloodlust of the boys, and for that I was grateful. I lowered my fists and nodded my thanks to Horst.
Horst thanked me by cracking a fist across my face and sending me to the ground next to Fritz.
“Compassion is a weakness,” Horst said for the benefit of me and anyone else in our squad who might not like bullies picking on little kids. “All life is struggle,” he added, spouting more lines from the leadership guides the Nazi Party sent him each week. “He who wants to live should fight for himself. He who doesn’t want to fight in this world of eternal struggle doesn’t deserve to live.” That part was meant for Fritz. Horst gave him a swift kick to the small of his back to punctuate the lesson, making Fritz writhe. I glared at Horst, wondering what made him such an arse. Maybe Horst really believed all that “might makes right” malarkey. Maybe he didn’t like an Irish boy showing up the German “master race.”
Or maybe he was just a bleeding maggot.
My money was on the latter. I rose up on an elbow, my Irish blood thundering war drums in my ears, ready to knock Horst’s donkey teeth down his throat.
I wanted nothing more than to pound Horst into a German pancake. But while the Nazis would give you a medal for punching and kicking your comrades, they’d sack you for attacking a superior officer. And like it or not, that’s what Horst was to me in the Hitler Youth. And I wanted to stay in the Hitler Youth—needed to stick around, as a spy—so I swallowed my bile.
Horst grinned. It was as though he could see me doing the math of our relationship, could read my powerlessness to fight back. Horst gave Fritz another kick just because he knew I hated it and couldn’t stop him. “Above all else, a boy must learn to be beaten,” Horst said, quoting Nazi scripture again. “There is no place in Germany for peaceful thinkers and physical degenerates.”
I vowed right then and there that one day I was going to teach Horst how to take a beating. But not today. Today I swallowed my rage and helped Fritz to his feet, hoping I hadn’t called too much attention to myself.
“And you,” Horst said. He poked Fritz in the chest. Hard. But his voice was soft. “Someday, when you truly believe in that uniform you’re wearing, you won’t hesitate. You’ll burn books, you’ll turn in your parents, you’ll give your life for Germany. And on that day, you’ll finally understand the freedom, the joy, that comes with giving yourself completely to the Führer.”
A g
overnment truck rattled up on the cobblestone street, and two older Hitler Youth boys jumped out of the passenger door before it had even come to a stop. The two boys wore the special insignia that marked them as the SRD, the Hitler Youth’s “Patrol Force.” The SRD were like junior secret police officers, the Hitler Youth equivalent of the Gestapo. And just as scary. Like the special Hitler Youth army, navy, and marine divisions, the SRD was one of the groups you could apply for after you graduated from the Jungvolk. Most SRD went on to become secret police.
Horst snapped to attention, and so did the rest of us.
“Jungvolk!” one of the SRD boys said. “You are needed at once! A British plane has been shot down just outside Berlin. A parachute was spotted, but no pilot has been recovered. Your help is needed to search the countryside. You are to board the truck immediately!”
A British pilot, on the run in the countryside right outside the city? Fear for his capture made my heart hammer in my chest, but that had to be nothing compared to the real terror he must be feeling right now. If he was caught, he’d be tortured and killed. How long could he hide out from the SS patrols? And if he did elude them, how would he avoid a dozen or more Hitler Youth crawling through the woods and fields to look for him?
The boys in my troop were already clambering for the truck, thrilled to have real work to do for the Fatherland. So much for the rest of the school day—the Hitler Youth had won out over academics yet again. I glanced back down the street, trying to figure out what to do. I had to get word to my parents. They had helped Allied soldiers and spies get out of Berlin before. But the truck was turning around. Boys were filling the benches in back.
