by Alan Gratz
I made a mental note of its location so the Allies could bomb it.
An adult Hitler Youth leader—the first one I’d seen all day—stood on a raised metal walkway. Teenagers like Horst ran the smaller troop meetings, but adults from the Hitler Youth administration showed up for bigger missions and medal ceremonies like this one. We listened while he gave a short, boring speech, and then each of us who had passed the initiation tests was called forward to take the Hitler Youth oath.
With a last name starting with O, I came in the middle. The Hitler Youth leader told me to put my hand on a folded flag. The flag was called the Blood Banner. Legend had it this banner had been dipped in the blood of the Hitler Youth’s greatest martyr, Herbert “Quex” Norkus, who had been killed by a gang of Communist boys back in the days before the Nazis ruled the whole country. I didn’t believe it. That Herbert Norkus had been killed, I believed, but I couldn’t believe his blood was really on this flag. We were just one small unit of Hitler Youth boys in Berlin. There were hundreds more groups in the city, and thousands more in the rest of the country. If every one of the hundreds of Blood Banners used to initiate new Hitler Youth members all over Nazi Germany had been dipped in the blood of Herbert Norkus, they must have wrung the poor guy out like a sponge before they buried him.
When every last one of us had touched the Blood Banner and recited the oath, the Hitler Youth leader smiled down on us.
“In completing this test, you have fulfilled but a small part of your duty to the Fatherland,” he told us. “You do so with pleasure, for millions of your young comrades do the same. You have become a soldier for Adolf Hitler!” He set the needle on a gramophone recording of a trumpet fanfare, and then we sang a couple of Nazi songs. The last one ended with the words “Today Germany listens to us, and tomorrow the whole world,” but the boys changed the lyrics, as they always did, to “Today Germany belongs to us, and tomorrow the whole world!” I got a cold shiver, and it wasn’t just from my dunk in the pool. If Hitler ever conquered the world, this was how he was going to do it—by turning all of Germany’s youth into his willing soldiers.
At last we were all given the thing we had coveted most: the Hitler Youth dagger. We would wear it in a metal sheath on our belt from now on, wherever we went. It was a symbol, a badge of honor that said we had made the cut. The room rang with a collective shing as every one of us pulled our daggers from their sheaths at the same time to marvel at them. The handle was black, decorated with a red-and-white checkerboard diamond with a swastika in the middle. A finger guard curled over one side of the hilt. The blade itself was only six inches long, but it was an inch wide, and engraved on it were the words BLUT UND EHRE!
Blood and Honor.
“Live faithfully, fight bravely, and die laughing, for you are now officially Hitler Youth!”
The boys cheered, and I raised my fist and pretended to be happy. Nobody cared. As soon as the cheer ended, everyone stampeded over to the bulletin board. It was time to learn which Hitler Youth sections we had been assigned to.
Most of the boys ended up in the general Hitler Youth. Others had been assigned the sea corps, or the air corps, or the popular motor corps, where you learned to ride motorcycles. I scanned the lists for my name, and there it was: O’Shaunessey, Michael. Streifendienst. The SRD. The junior Gestapo. I’d made it.
I found Fritz on the outskirts of the crowd. My heart sank. There were tears in his bruise-rimmed eyes.
“No—don’t tell me you didn’t make it!” I said.
Fritz smiled through his tears. “I did. I made it. I can’t believe it.” He was so happy he was crying. “You made it too, didn’t you? I knew you would.”
“Why? Just because I conquered the courage test?”
“No. Because you showed them you could be ruthless.”
My skin grew cold as I thought again about the beatdown I’d given Fritz in the boxing test.
“You’re the reason I got in too,” Fritz told me.
“How do you figure that?”
“Because,” said Fritz, “you helped me show them that I’m not afraid to die for Germany. Come on. Let’s go back to my house and celebrate.”
I shook my head as I followed him home. Fritz wasn’t as crazy as the rest of the boys.
He was crazier.
We got to Fritz’s door. Hidden somewhere behind that door were the secret jet plans that could win the war. Change the world. That door had always been closed to me, but now Fritz was slipping his key in the lock, opening the door, beckoning me inside.
And just like that, I was in. I felt goose bumps as I stepped over the threshold. It was the first step in what was no doubt going to be weeks and weeks of trying to find the hidden plans, but it still gave me a thrill. Now it was time to be a spy.
Fritz lived well. The house had two floors, with rooms on the first floor on each side separated by a long hallway that led back to the kitchen. A staircase ran up one side of the hallway to the second floor. I memorized the layout, began breaking it down into sections to search on different days.
“Come on,” Fritz said, running upstairs. “I want to show you something secret.”
Was it really going to be that easy? Was Fritz going to take me right to the rest of the plans for Projekt 1065? He’d brought one of the pages to school to show me before he ever really knew me. Maybe now he was going to show me the rest.
I kept my eyes on the top of the stairs as I followed him, making sure not to look down. Watching us from the railing up above was Fritz’s little sister, Lina. Watching me, I should say. Her big, wide eyes followed me all the way up the stairs. When I made the turn to follow Fritz back down the hall, I looked over my shoulder. She was still staring at me, expressionless, with those big saucerlike eyes.
“Fritz, your sister really is super creepy.”
Fritz shrugged like he was used to it.
I followed Fritz into his room. It was fairly spartan, with a small gray bed, a wooden desk and chair, and an old brown bureau against the wall. Drawings of airplanes were pinned to the wall. Unfortunately, they weren’t the jet fighter plans, just pictures of propeller planes shooting dotted lines at tanks on the ground.
Fritz went straight to his closet and pulled out a small wooden crate from the back. I frowned. If these were the secret jet fighter plans, this was an awfully strange place to hide them. Fritz hesitated, looking at me one last time as though making sure I could be trusted, and lifted the lid.
Inside were stacks of sheet music, like you’d use to play a piano. I frowned. Then Fritz pulled away the music sheets and revealed what was hidden underneath.
Mystery novels. British and American mystery novels.
My disappointment at not finding the plans right away was quickly replaced by my amazement at seeing the treasure trove of books.
“Detective books!” I said. “So that’s where you were getting all those English words! And that’s why you couldn’t burn those books at the bonfire.”
Fritz relaxed visibly. “You like them too? I thought you might, being English.”
“Irish,” I said. “But yeah. I just read The Maltese Falcon. My friend Si—” I caught myself, horrified that I’d almost said Simon’s name. Almost told Fritz that the British Jewish pilot hiding in my house had introduced me to detective novels. But Fritz had just trusted me with his deep dark secret—a secret that could get him and his family shipped off to a concentration camp. Did that mean I could trust him too?
“A friend back in Ireland got me hooked,” I said instead. I still couldn’t do it. Once you got in the habit of keeping secrets, it was hard to stop.
We spent a happy hour on the floor poring over the novels and talking about our favorite scenes. We promised to swap books from our collections, but of course we had to keep the whole thing hidden from sight.
Fritz’s collection was a big secret, but not the one I’d been hoping to discover in this house. I still had to find the plans for Projekt 1065. Would I find them i
n time to get them to the Allies to counter the Nazi jet fighters before they turned the tide of the war? I would just have to come back to Fritz’s house as often as I could and find some excuse to go snooping around.
Fritz’s mother called him and Lina to dinner, and Fritz walked me to the door. I was pulling on my coat when I saw a messy room through a half-closed doorway off the downstairs hallway. A large desk was covered with stacks of papers and slide rules, and a drafting table stood nearby covered with larger sheets of white paper.
“Oh, that’s my dad’s study,” Fritz said. He stepped inside, and I followed. All over the walls, pinned up around and on top of one another, were a dozen sheets of big blue paper with engineering schematics drawn on them.
“It’s the jet plane he’s working on,” Fritz said. “The one I showed you before.” He put his arms out like airplane wings and zoomed around the room.
I blinked stupidly. I think my mouth hung open. There they were, out there for anyone to see, plain as day. The blueprints for Projekt 1065. I wouldn’t have to go snooping for them after all. There were too many to memorize all in one day, and Fritz’s mother wouldn’t exactly let me sit in here and stare at them while they had dinner.
But I would be back tomorrow after school. And the day after that, and the day after that, and the day after that, for as long as it took.
The plans for Projekt 1065 were mine!
Every day after school, I went home with Fritz, and every day before I left, I popped into his father’s study to memorize another part of the blueprints.
“And his father’s never there, working on the designs?” Simon asked me one day as I sat with him in his little closet, adding words and numbers I’d memorized to the blueprints we were reconstructing. Ma had brought us big sheets of butcher paper from the store to write on. Some of them still smelled of raw meat.
“His mother and father are always gone,” I told Simon. “Everybody’s mother and father are always gone. There’s a joke in Germany about how dad’s in the army, mom’s in the Nazi Women’s League, the son is in the Hitler Youth, and the daughter is in the Bund Deutscher Mädel, and they only get to see each other once a year at the Nazi Party rally.”
“Not very funny,” Simon said.
“But true,” I told him. “In Fritz’s case, just substitute his father working for the air force instead of the German army.”
“I’m still gobsmacked that you got in there and found the plans, Michael. It’s an incredible piece of spycraft.” Simon squinted at my terrible handwriting. “What’s this word here? Schwalbe?”
“It, um—it’s the name of the plane.”
“But what does it mean?” Simon asked.
I held my breath. I hated to tell him. “It means ‘Swallow,’ ” I told him. “Like the bird. The Messerschmitt Me 262 Swallow.” Swallows looked just like swifts.
“Ah,” he said, and I could see he was back on that rooftop when he was a boy, caught up in a tornado of birds.
“Have you figured out how you’re going to escape from Germany?” I asked, trying to distract him.
“Your mother’s been working on it. Apparently, it involves a number of different modes of transportation and many days of travel under cover of darkness. There may even be trench coats and false mustaches. But at the rate you’re going with these blueprints, we’ll be ready before she is. You’ve a fine memory, Michael. Have you ever tried to hone it? Practiced getting better at remembering things?”
I shrugged. “I never needed to.”
“Your memory can always improve,” Simon told me. “Have you gotten to the point in Kim where he meets Lurgan Sahib, the gem trader?”
I hadn’t. With all my Hitler Youth training and all the evenings spent in here with him transcribing the plans for the Swallow, I hadn’t had as much time for reading.
“Slip out to your father’s study and bring me a handful of random little things—an eraser, a paper clip, a coin, things like that. As many as you can find.”
The door to Da’s study was locked, but I still used the little hidden peephole in the shelf to have a look around first. Nothing. I breathed a sigh of relief. The staff weren’t supposed to be able to get in, but if one of them was a spy, they could find a way.
When I returned with my modest loot, Simon took the items from me and arranged a few of them unseen underneath his handkerchief.
“This is called Kim’s Game, for the game he plays with Lurgan Sahib.” Simon pulled the handkerchief away, revealing some of the objects I’d gathered for him. “Study them for as long as you like,” he told me. “Pick them up. Handle them if you want. But when you’re finished, I’m going to put this handkerchief back over them and have you tell me all about them.”
I took a few seconds to memorize what I saw and then I told Simon I was ready. He had me tell him which objects I had seen, and I was able to rattle them off without any problem. “And what did the eraser say on it?” he asked me.
“What?”
“There was a word on the eraser,” Simon told me. “Or part of one, at least. Some of it’s been rubbed off. What was it?”
I stared at the shelves of books behind Simon, trying to remember, but I couldn’t. I’d seen it, but I hadn’t really seen it.
“Do you understand now?” Simon said. “You remembered what the items were without any problem. But you didn’t remember everything about them. But you can. And you will. If you train yourself to remember. Do you want to try again?”
I did.
“Hey, remember that kid in line ahead of us at the initiation test who got sent home because his parents weren’t good Nazis?” Fritz asked me. “There he is.”
We stood at the end of a cobblestone street with other members of the SRD, ready, at last, to take on our first assignment for the Hitler Youth Patrol Force. The boy Fritz was talking about stood a little ways off from us wearing a brand-new SRD uniform just like ours.
I frowned. “Didn’t he get kicked out?” I said. “What’s he doing here, wearing that uniform?”
“His name’s Karl. You didn’t hear? He made it into the Hitler Youth after all by turning in his parents to the Gestapo.”
I shook my head. People were always spying on one another and ratting on each other to the secret police, especially if there was some reason they didn’t like them. Someone cuts in front of you in the food ration line? Tell the Gestapo you overheard them complaining about Hitler. Your boss at work gave you a bad review? Tell the Gestapo he’s been stealing office supplies. Your neighbor’s dog digs holes in your flower bed? Tell the Gestapo your neighbor is hiding a Jew. Turning in your neighbor was the German national pastime.
But to denounce your own parents? I shuddered at the thought. If you were denounced for a real reason, it was as good as a death sentence.
“They took them into protective custody,” Fritz whispered. Code for being arrested and sent to a concentration camp. “And Karl got an automatic promotion to the SRD.”
But of course. If you were a coldhearted weasel who would turn in your parents to get a promotion, you belonged in the SRD. I could see that the other SRD boys were giving him plenty of space, but I didn’t know if it was out of respect or out of fear.
“SRD, to me!” a man in an SS uniform called, and with a start I realized it was SS-Obersturmführer Trumbauer, the Gestapo man who told the story at dinner about the boy who turned in his parents for harboring a Jew. The SS officer who had almost caught me talking with Simon that night at the embassy. Apparently, ratting out your parents to the Gestapo was a great way to get on his good side. “The rest of you, line up!” he called.
This must be something important for an adult to be here with us, I thought. SS-Obersturmführer Trumbauer caught sight of me. He came over and tapped his riding crop against the silver gorget I wore on my blue SRD uniform.
“Michael O’Shaunessey. I see you chose the SRD,” he said, and my skin crawled. “Very impressive.”
Beside me, Fritz straighte
ned as though he’d gotten the compliment.
SS-Obersturmführer Trumbauer turned his attention to the other boys, the ones wearing the plain black-and-brown uniforms of the regular Hitler Youth.
“You regular Hitler Youth are here today because we need extra manpower. Members of the Edelweiss Pirates are known to frequent the pool hall at the end of the street, and today, we are going to raid it.”
An electric current rippled through the collected boys. Fritz and I turned to stare at each other in surprise. Our first action as SRD, and we were going on a raid! Fritz was excited. I was worried. How could I pretend to be enthusiastic but not hurt anyone?
“I need a volunteer to lead the first wave of the attack,” our leader said. He eyed me, but there was no way I was going to be fool enough to be the first person through that door, wearing an SRD uniform, no less! Then, to my surprise, Fritz’s hand shot up.
SS-Obersturmführer Trumbauer raised his eyebrows. “And what is your name, young man?”
“Fritz Brendler, sir!”
“Very good, Fritz Brendler,” SS-Obersturmführer Trumbauer said. The SS-Obersturmführer gave me a disappointed look and began to separate the regular Hitler Youth boys into small groups and assign them to SRD boys.
I shot Fritz a glance like Are you crazy? but he was too excited to notice. I could see that wild look in his eyes again, could see him breathing faster. He barked out an order to his troops, and they ran off down the street toward the pool hall. The rest of us followed on their heels.
“Don’t hurt any of them,” I told my boys. “We do this the easy way. We’re just here to take them into protective custody with as little trouble as possible.” Which was a joke, because protective custody meant they were anything but safe. But I didn’t want any of the Pirates’ blood on my hands, especially when I secretly agreed with them.
We took up positions outside the pool hall. I thought SS-Obersturmführer Trumbauer was going to give us instructions, coordinate things, but Fritz yelled, “This is an SRD raid!” and shot through the front door of the pool hall with all the subtlety of a bazooka. “Surrender or die, Edelweiss pigs!” he screamed.
