by Alan Gratz
“So, ready to try again?” Simon said at last. “I think the Yanks will give us another hour or so’s privacy.”
I took a deep breath and nodded. “Did you hear the one,” I said, “about the Irishman, the Scotsman, and the Englishman stranded on a desert island?”
The afternoon after the air raid, a dark black cloud hung over the bombed-out city. Gray ash still fluttered in the air like snow. Tumbled bricks and broken furniture filled the streets. Hitler Youth boys and aging air wardens were already hard at work, spraying water on the flames, tossing rubble into wheelbarrows, and stacking up the bodies of the people who hadn’t made it to the air raid shelters in time. More Hitler Youth stood guard over shops and banks. A little boy in gray trousers and a little gray coat sat on a shattered roof timber, clutching a teddy bear and crying softly. He couldn’t have been more than four years old. A girl from the Bund Deutscher Mädel, the girls’ version of the Hitler Youth, came and collected him. There was no sign of his parents. It was a scene that had played out the day before, and the day before that, and the day before that. Except today there was something new.
I stopped in front of a crumbling wall and stared. DOWN WITH HITLER! was painted on the wall in big red letters. Beside it was written THE HIGH COMMAND LIES! DOWN WITH THE NAZI BEAST! And underneath the words was a little painted stencil of an edelweiss flower.
Edelweiss is a mountain flower with white petals in a kind of star shape around a yellow fuzzy center. The stems and leaves are fuzzy too, and they grow pretty close to the ground. The Germans and Swiss and Austrians were mad for them, because edelweiss only grow in high altitudes, where other plants can’t grow. Survival of the fittest, flower-style. Tough but “pure.” That made them holy around here. So holy that they were claimed as a symbol by both the Nazis and what passed for the resistance in Berlin: the Edelweiss Pirates.
That’s what they called themselves. Kids the same age as the Hitler Youth who didn’t agree with Hitler and the Nazis. Like the real edelweiss, they grew up in a hostile place that was always trying to kill them. They were dropouts—from school, from the Hitler Youth, from society. They spent their days avoiding the SRD in cafés and beer halls, smoking cigarettes and playing pool and making up funny lyrics to Hitler Youth songs. They let the air out of car tires, stole bicycles, picked fights with the Hitler Youth when they caught one of them alone. But ever since the defeat at Stalingrad, the Pirates had gotten more serious. Now they were coming out during air raids when hardly anyone else was around and painting anti-Hitler slogans all over the city. If they weren’t careful, they were going to wake the sleeping bear. But I was glad somebody else was doing something to fight back.
The next morning, I made a detour by Fritz’s house on the way to school. Most of the buildings on his street were still standing, and red-and-white flags with big black swastikas hung from every windowsill. Some people may have agreed with the Edelweiss Pirates, but they weren’t brave enough to show it.
Fritz came to the door when I knocked. I hoped he would invite me inside, hoped I might get a chance to snoop for the blueprints of Projekt 1065, but he told me to wait on the front step and came back with his rucksack and his little sister. Her name was Lina. She was ten years old, wore her blond hair in braids like every other girl in Berlin, and was dressed in the uniform of the junior BDM: a blue skirt, a white blouse, and a honey-colored jacket.
Lina froze when she saw me. She stared at me with big saucer-shaped eyes.
“What?” I asked her. But Lina didn’t say anything. She kept staring at me with those big round eyes as she followed us to school.
“Your sister is creepy,” I told Fritz.
“I know. She’s a goofy dame.”
I shot Fritz a sideways look. Goofy dame was more English slang, like gumshoe. I didn’t want to scare him off, so I didn’t say anything about it. But I filed it for later.
“So, do you still want to join the SRD?” I asked Fritz. The Hitler Youth initiation was in three days.
Fritz nodded. “I don’t know if I’m going to make it, though,” he said. “I’m not strong enough. Not fast enough. Not tough enough.”
“Well, maybe we can help each other out,” I told him. “I want to be in the SRD too.” I hated the idea of being in the junior Gestapo, hated the thought of marching around in jackboots and spying on my neighbors. But if it meant staying close enough to Fritz to get to the jet fighter plans, I’d do it. “We can train together. I can help you get stronger. Teach you to fight. And … maybe you can help me get over my fear of heights. For the test of courage.”
“It’s a deal!” he told me, and we shook hands.
To beat Hitler, I was going to have to become a real Nazi.
“You’re in my seat.”
Fritz and I had just sat down at desks in our classroom. Another boy, named Willi, stood over Fritz, demanding he give up his desk. Willi was bigger and stronger than Fritz, but then, every boy in the class was bigger and stronger than Fritz.
Fritz started to get up, but I caught his eye and shook my head. If he was going to learn to be tougher, he was going to start right now.
Fritz froze. I could see the fear, the doubt, pass over him like a cloud. But he really must have wanted to join the SRD bad. He slowly sat back down in his seat, his eyes lowered.
“I said, you’re in my seat,” Willi repeated. He gave Fritz a slap that made his head turn.
“Sock him,” I whispered. It was English slang, but Fritz understood.
Fritz clinched his fist, screwed his eyes shut, and swung. He landed a punch right to Willi’s gut, doubling him over.
“You little runt!” Willi cried. He threw himself at Fritz, and they tumbled into the aisle.
“Hit him!” I told Fritz. “Kick him!” In seconds the whole class was there, cheering them on. None of the rest of them cared about Fritz or Willi. They just wanted to see some blood.
It was hard to watch. Fritz was a terrible fighter. He flailed about, hardly ever landing a punch. I think he may have even hit himself in the head. I wanted to pull Willi off him, to do the fighting for him, but that wasn’t going to teach Fritz anything.
“What is this?” Herr Professor Doktor Major Melcher cried. He pushed his way through the watching boys and grabbed Fritz and Willi by the ears. “Fighting. Always fighting! That’s all you monsters ever do! It’s what you’re bred to do. To fight and die for the Führer!”
I blinked. Herr Professor Doktor Major Melcher wasn’t saying anything we hadn’t heard before. Half the stories we read in our primer were about German boys who fought and died for the Fatherland. The very motto of the Hitler Youth was “We are born to die for Germany.” But there was something in the way Herr Professor Doktor Major Melcher said it. Like he didn’t believe in what he’d been teaching us anymore. Like maybe he never had.
“Sit down! All of you.” He flung the two boys away so hard I thought he was going to rip their ears off. I had never seen Herr Professor Doktor Major Melcher this mad before.
Fritz slid back into his seat, and Willi slunk away. I was worried Fritz would be upset at the beating he took, but when he turned to look at me his eyes were alive and he was grinning wolfishly. He was drunk on confidence. Even though he’d taken a beating, he liked the feeling of fighting back.
“Sit down and shut up, or I’ll beat you until you can’t sit down!” Herr Professor Doktor Major Melcher said. A boy in the first row sneezed, and Melcher gave him a wicked smack with his ruler. I was so startled I sat up straight in my chair. Herr Professor Doktor Major Melcher had always been snappish, but this was different. I could feel the atmosphere in the room grow colder, the eyes of the boys in the class grow narrower. They were monsters, all of them, and monsters didn’t like to be bitten by other monsters.
Herr Professor Doktor Major Melcher began class by handing back essays we’d turned in a few days ago titled “The Educational Value of the Reich Labor Service.” Bor-ing. There was a lot of grumbling as people got their
grades this time, though. Mine was a D. I blinked in amazement. I’d never gotten such a bad grade on an essay before—mostly because I copied all my essays straight from stupid Nazi propaganda, just like I’d done for this one. Giving me a D on words I’d lifted right out of the German newspapers was like Herr Professor Doktor Major Melcher saying he disagreed with the official party line. And he did not want to be admitting that in front of a class full of boys who made it their business to rat people out to the Gestapo.
There were a lot of questioning looks between the boys before Melcher told us to open our biology textbooks to the next chapter. The page had a picture of a healthy Aryan man with good posture standing next to hunchbacked, ugly-looking Untermenschen—“subhumans” like Jews, Poles, Russians, and Africans.
I slid down in my seat, ready for another ridiculous lecture on the superiority of the German “master race.” I had what the Germans would call good Sitzfleisch. It literally translated as “seat meat.” It meant being able to sit through something long and boring, as if you had a big padded butt.
But today’s lecture wasn’t boring. In fact, what Herr Professor Doktor Major Melcher said had all of us sitting up in our seats.
I knew something was up when Herr Professor Doktor Major Melcher told us to put away our textbooks. “We don’t need these things,” he said, dropping his in the wastebasket. That caused more looks between the boys.
“We know the truth, don’t we, students?” Herr Professor Doktor Major Melcher said. “Tell me—what does the ideal Aryan look like? The perfect example of the master race.”
Aryan was Nazi code for Western European white people—of which the Nazis were the perfect example, of course. Boys raised their hands and gave the answers that had been drilled into them. Aryans had blond hair. Blue eyes. Square shoulders. Smooth straight noses. Square jaws. Above-average height. Superior strength, intelligence, and agility, with pure Aryan ancestors as far back as six hundred years.
“Good, yes,” Herr Professor Doktor Major Melcher said. “Like our beloved Führer, yes? The Aryan ideal!” He pointed to the picture of Adolf Hitler on the wall behind him. “Our Führer, who has dark hair and dark eyes. Whose nose is bulbous, who is short and never takes physical exercise. And where is his grandfather from? Czechoslovakia, perhaps? Poland? He has never told us. Hmm. So perhaps not the best example.”
You could almost hear the classroom gasp. Was Herr Professor Doktor Major Melcher joking? It had to be a joke. It was no secret that the Führer didn’t match the Aryan ideal that he’d gone to war to defend, but no one talked about it. To speak of it in public was like saying the emperor wasn’t wearing any clothes. It just wasn’t done. But Melcher wasn’t joking. I could tell, and so could the other boys. I felt as though I could hear the heartbeats of every boy in the room but mine slow to a cool, calculated thrum. They were trained to be on the lookout for dissenters, people who didn’t agree with the Nazi Party, tuned in like the special radios the Nazis sold that only picked up German radio stations.
“But the Führer is exceptional,” Herr Professor Doktor Major Melcher said, and the room relaxed slightly. He could still get out of this if he praised Hitler and went back to teaching the party line. “Surely the other Nazi leaders are true Aryans!” he said. “Herr Himmler, head of the SS! Shortsighted. Dark hair, dark eyes. No chin. Nose like the beak of a bird. No, perhaps not. Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, then! Short of stature, thin, acne-marred face—ah, and that clubfoot. Hardly the Aryan ideal. Can anyone think of a Nazi leader who does match the Aryan ideal our young men are fighting and dying for? No?”
Herr Professor Doktor Major Melcher was met with a wall of silence. The boys sat watching him the way hawks stared unblinkingly at their prey. The only time I’d been more frightened for another person was when I’d seen the Jewish man being beaten on Kristallnacht.
I was sweating and shaking as though it was me up there in front of the class, digging a grave for myself. It was like a nightmare I couldn’t wake up from. I had no idea what had happened to Herr Professor Doktor Major Melcher, what had made him change his mind or finally tell us what he’d always secretly been thinking. But if he wasn’t careful, he was going to end up in a concentration camp.
“Remember what we learned last week?” Herr Professor Doktor Major Melcher went on. “Every race in the world can be sorted into one of three categories: culture founders, culture maintainers, and culture destroyers. Aryans, of course, are the culture founders and maintainers. Every great advancement in the history of mankind has been made by Aryans! Like paper. Ah, no, wait. That was invented by the subhuman Chinese. Gunpowder too. The radio! No—an Italian. The gramophone—no, a German Jew! But I’m sure we can think of something.”
A number of the boys started to call out Aryan advancements, but Herr Professor Doktor Major Melcher waved them away. “No matter who created these things, we must defend them against the culture destroyers, yes? For what do culture destroyers do? They burn books. They ban music. They rip great art from museum walls. They refuse to teach literature, music, and art to their children. They are monsters!”
I held my breath. No one spoke. The Nazis had done all those things in the name of “preserving” the pure Aryan culture, and we all knew it. I gripped the edge of my desk, worried for Herr Professor Doktor Major Melcher. Like the Edelweiss Pirates, he was finally standing up to the Nazis and telling the truth.
And it was going to get him killed.
The bell rang. It was time for the first of our five Hitler Youth–mandated hours of physical education in our eight-hour school day.
The boys in the class stared mutely at Herr Professor Doktor Major Melcher as they filed past. They were giving him the silent treatment. The forty thirteen-year-old boys in our class had never left the room so quietly. It was spooky. Herr Professor Doktor Major Melcher had to notice.
“Just remember,” he called to us, “you are members of the master race! It is your God-given duty to bring order to this wicked world by dying for your Führer!”
After school, Fritz and I trained for the Hitler Youth initiation in an alley near his house. I stood on top of a tallish pile of rubble from a bombed-out wall, trying to practice breathing slowly. Fritz was running sprints up and down the alley, dodging the debris that littered the street.
“Herr Professor Doktor Major Melcher really put his foot in it today,” Fritz said as he ran by.
It was hard to talk and focus on my breathing at the same time, but Melcher was a welcome distraction. “He’s crazy. He’s going to get himself taken into protective custody,” I said.
Protective custody was one of those terms everybody in Germany used with a wink and a nod. When the Gestapo picked you up for doing something wrong, they made you sign a piece of paper officially asking them to take you away—for your own protection, they said. But what you really needed protection from was the Gestapo.
I wondered again why Fritz wanted to be in the SRD, the junior Gestapo. So I asked him.
Fritz ran in silence for a few moments before answering. “For Germany,” he said at last. “For the Führer. Everything I do is for the greater good of the Fatherland.”
It was the party line. Propaganda. Did he really believe that? Even if he did, I felt like there was some other reason he was so determined to make the SRD. He could have been part of the regular Hitler Youth without any effort. What was it that made him want to be in the super-elite Patrol Force?
My Sitzfleisch got another workout that night sitting through another boring state dinner. Part of my father’s job was to go to meetings with important government officials, but another part of his job was to invite Nazis to the embassy for fancy meals.
The embassy where a Jewish RAF spy was hiding in the next room.
It was all I could think about while the Nazis around me talked about factories and battles and the Edelweiss Pirates. Simon, folded up in that tiny little closet. Had he gotten out again since the air raid that morning? Had he had
anything to eat? Had a chance to go to the bathroom?
Suddenly, I realized everyone was looking at me expectantly. Someone must have asked me a question.
“I—I’m sorry. I’m not feeling well,” I said. “May I please be excused?”
My mother gave me a look from the other end of the table. I knew what that look meant: The best way to keep Simon hidden and safe was to pretend that nothing was different, to smile and laugh and be the good little Hitler Youth at the dinner table. But she took pity on me with a sigh.
“Take your plate with you,” she told me. “In case you’re hungry later.”
Take a plate for Simon, she meant! She knew exactly where I was going. I collected my plate and my drink, nodded my apologies to the Nazis at the table, and went for the hall.
“His German is so good!” I heard a woman say as I left. “If I didn’t know you were Irish … ”
I did the German Look, saw no one was watching, and slipped into my father’s study. I put the food on his desk, locked the door, and went to the corner with the secret room.
“Simon,” I whispered. “It’s Michael.”
I found the hidden latch that opened the bookcase and pulled on it. The bookshelf swung open, and Simon pulled himself to his feet, unfolding his lanky arms and legs like a map.
“Boy am I glad to see you,” he said. “I have to see a man about a horse.” He hightailed it to the private bathroom off my father’s study, and I waited while he relieved himself.
“We have to be quiet,” I warned him when he came out. “Ma and Da are hosting a dinner party. The dining room’s crawling with Nazis.”
“Foxes in the henhouse, eh?” he said, falling on the food I’d brought him. “There’s no potatoes!” he said around a bite, joking again about the Irish and their love of potatoes.
