by Karin Tanabe
“Forget it,” said Christian, ignoring Jack’s death sentence and thinking only about how Jack had ten months left in the place and no one to go home to.
As Jack had mentioned on Christian’s first day, he wasn’t the only one whose parents had been arrested for un-American activities. There was also Inge Anders, the most nervous little girl to ever sleep on the other side of the orphanage.
When they were all outside a few days later shoveling snow after Christian was allowed to resume physical activities, Jack called out to a thin girl wearing a boy’s winter coat. She was playing with other children in a pile of insect-infested firewood in front of the administration building. The building itself was quite beautiful, as the orphanage had originally been built as a college. The words over the door frame spelled out “administration” in Gothic letters, as inviting as one could hope for an orphanage. Christian’s eyes moved up from the children to the steeply sloped roof and the rows of rectangular windows below them, their thick panes divided into squares. It was a much more attractive building from the outside than in.
“Hey, little kraut! Come over here,” Jack yelled to the girl. “I’ve got another kraut for you to meet. Still a kraut, just a bigger one.”
Inge hesitated for a moment, then dropped the wood she was holding and ran over. She stopped right in front of Christian, her big green eyes fixed on him, her brown hair falling out of the hood of her coat in messy curls.
“This is him,” said Jack. “I told you about him before, when you were crying yet again. Christian. He speaks German like you. And some English, too.”
“Bist du Deutscher?” Inge said, her mouth quivering and her little hands pulling at her hood. She looked as if just a small gust of wind could knock her down and pull the tears out of her.
“Ja, ich bin Deutscher. Amerikaner, aber meine Eltern sind Deutsche,” he explained. I am American, but my parents are German.
“Are your parents going to die, too?” she asked.
“No. They’re not going to die. Do you think your parents are going to die?” Christian looked at Jack, sure that he had fed her that worry.
“I don’t want my mother to die!” she screamed, her tears the exclamation point to her yell.
Christian was going to ask about her father—didn’t she want him to live, too?—but Inge threw her skinny arms around him, lost in her big coat, her head coming just above his waist, and kept crying.
Surprised, Christian left his arms rigidly by his sides until Jack shouted, “Hey, hug the poor little kraut!”
“No one is going to die,” Christian said, finally hugging her back. “They’re questioning lots of people’s parents, not just yours and mine. There’s no reason to worry.”
“Are they questioning Jack’s parents?” she asked.
“Jack doesn’t have parents,” Christian said quickly.
That made her cry even harder.
“But what if my parents did something bad?” she asked, whimpering and holding on to Christian. “Something bad enough so that the men want to kill them?”
“Are your parents in the Bund?” asked Christian, wondering why she was wearing a boy’s overcoat. He imagined that they had dragged her out of her house with very few of her things. She was too small to spend hours alone as he had. Maybe it was the same agents who had done it to him, fat Smith and pompous Jakobsson.
“What is the Bund?” she asked, looking up at him with wet eyes.
“Never mind. If you don’t know what it is, then that’s probably a good sign.” He put his hand on her hood and noticed how little her head was. “How old are you, Inge?”
“Seven and a half,” she said.
“Was there no family for you to go stay with instead of coming here?” he asked, feeling sorry for her even if he didn’t feel comfortable consoling her.
She started to cry again, and Jack punched him in the shoulder.
“No one wanted me,” she said through sobs. “Auntie Aleit and Uncle Heinz are in Germany, and Mama and Papa’s friends said no.”
“Of course people wanted you,” said Christian. He looked up at Jack, who appeared to be debating whether to hit Christian again.
“I didn’t used to be here. I was with Mama,” Inge explained. “They took Papa somewhere, and then they took me and Mama to a home in Milwaukee. It was full of nuns.”
“Sounds like a convent,” said Christian.
“That’s what it was. A convent.”
“And why aren’t you there anymore?”
“They made me leave,” she said. “They said Mama had turned crazy and it was dangerous for me to be there. They said I couldn’t stay with my Mama, and one of the nuns, she took me here in a car that smelled like a dog.”
Christian looked at Jack, who was spinning his finger next to his head to indicate Inge’s mother’s state of mind.
“I don’t want my mother to die!” Inge started screaming. “No! No, no!”
“No one is going to die,” Christian said.
He picked Inge up and, with Jack, brought her back inside the big brick administration building, where the youngest children slept. He stood outside the cramped director’s office with her head against his shoulder, not daring to move until she had calmed down. When her breath was regulated and she had fallen asleep, he dropped her off with the sympathetic warden of the girls’ side of the home.
After that, Inge followed Christian like a shadow.
CHAPTER 4
CHRISTIAN LANGE
FEBRUARY–MARCH 1943
Despite their violent first encounter, Jack Walter and Christian became fast friends, their relationship founded on daily fistfights and insults. Almost everyone Jack had been close to for the last ten years had aged out of the Home, for as soon as a boy turned eighteen, he was gone before the candles on the cake could be blown out. And now Jack had just months left himself until it was his turn to live on his own. Christian Lange and his trials were a welcome distraction from his countdown, but it didn’t last long. After a month and a half at the Milwaukee Children’s Home, Christian finally got news of his parents.
“Sit down, please,” said Mr. Braque, the head of the Home, pushing aside a pile of books and yellowing newspapers to make room for Christian in his office. Everything about Braque was gray—his eyes, his hair, the pallor of his skin—but his gentle demeanor made the children forget about his dusty coating. “What a trial you have gone through these past weeks, knowing nothing of your parents’ whereabouts. Of course, every child here has their own cross to bear, but I have been thinking about you often, Mr. Lange, and I’m happy to say that you now have a destination beyond our old walls.”
“I do? Do you know where my parents are, then? Where have they been?” Christian asked, letting the emotion he had been repressing for seven weeks rise up in his throat, making him croak out his words. He had thought of them without pause, but he’d barely talked about it. Except for Jack, the boys his age didn’t bother to make friends with someone whose time at the Home was limited. And with Jack, he didn’t feel it was right to dwell on his sad story, since Jack’s circumstances had been much harder. So all of Christian’s worry had stayed coiled inside his gut.
“Your parents, I am told, were both questioned, tried, and then sent from Milwaukee to a prison in Stringtown, Oklahoma.” Braque spoke as he continued to clear his desk and chairs, placing his reading materials on the ground, as the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves were already overflowing. The room was barely bigger than a bathroom, and with all the files on the children housed there, too, it could barely accommodate Braque and one visitor. “If you’re bad in pairs they have to yell at you in the cafeteria,” Jack had told Christian when they had indeed been yelled at together for fighting.
“A prison? So they were found guilty? Why would they send them so far away?” Christian asked, following Braque with his eyes as he bobbed around the small room.
“The prison, from what I was told, is no longer a prison but a housing center for
people like your parents. But they are not staying in Oklahoma much longer. They’re going to South Texas, and you’ll be leaving us tomorrow to join them.” He reached in his pocket for a handkerchief and dusted the crucifix on the wall before turning around to gauge Christian’s reaction.
“Texas?” asked Christian, trying to hold himself together. He stood up, his foot slipping on a newspaper that, like all of them, had a headline about the war. “Why would I need to go there?”
“You’re being sent to a place called Crystal City,” Braque said. “They told me it’s an internment camp, but a family internment camp, where children and their parents can be together.”
“We’re being interned?” asked Christian, addressing Braque, who had finally sat down. “Like the Japanese?”
Braque let Christian have a moment and then cleared his throat and continued. “It’s important to note that you will be going to Crystal City as a voluntary internee. Your parents were forced to go there, but technically you are volunteering to go there. Or more precisely, your parents are volunteering you. But you don’t have the option to say no, unfortunately, because you are still a minor. So once you are inside the camp, you can’t leave again until they release you. You’re essentially a prisoner. From what I know, based on other camps, they’re not too much better than a prison. Of course there are nicer accommodations and fresh air, but there are barbed-wire fences, watchtowers, men patrolling with guns.”
“Guns? Like they’re going to shoot me?”
“No, they’re not going to—”
“Why would my parents subject me to that?” Christian interrupted. “Why won’t they let me stay here until I turn eighteen?”
“I’m not sure,” said Braque, looking at Christian’s desperate face. He handed him the handkerchief that he had just dusted the crucifix with. “But I can think of one good reason why.”
“I can’t,” said Christian, thinking that, all of a sudden, getting shoes thrown at him in Milwaukee sounded like a vacation.
“Well, I imagine,” said Braque, “it’s because they love you.”
* * *
The only person who saw Christian off from the Children’s Home was Jack. And he wasn’t seeing just Christian off, but Inge, too. She was also headed to Crystal City, and Christian had been tasked with making sure she got there safely. They hadn’t left the Home yet and her hand was already in his, holding on tighter than a child on a roller coaster.
“This is for you,” said Jack, giving Christian his shoe as they stood outside the boys’ cottage, their faces red from the cold. “You can hit yourself in the face with it at night to remind yourself of the good times.”
“Your shoe?” said Christian. “I can’t.”
“Sure you can. I may be a sad orphan, but I’m due to get another pair. My big toes can’t breathe in those, and Braque owes me at least that for babysitting you.”
Christian took the shoe from Jack, tying a knot at the end of the frayed lace, and put it in his traveling bag. “I’ll take it if you promise me one thing. You’ll like it, I swear.”
“Try me.”
“When you’re out of here, can you go to my house and see if there’s anything left? If there is, maybe change the locks?” He reached into his coat and handed Jack Walter his house key. “Nine thousand River Road.”
“There’s not going to be anything left in your house.”
“Maybe not, but check for me, okay? Sleep there if you want, while you sort out your non–Children’s Home life.”
Jack nodded and took the key. “If you haven’t been looted, then I’m the man for the job. I’ll sleep right in your parents’ bed, pretend I’m the mayor.”
“’Course you will,” said Christian. “And will you write to me in that awful place? Something like, ‘Hey kraut, you’re probably going to die soon.’ ”
Jack laughed his good-natured laugh and agreed. “Yes. But only because I have absolutely nothing else to do but count down the days until my eighteenth birthday and punch anyone new who comes into my room.”
Jack gave Christian a fake, slow punch to the jaw and waved goodbye. It was the kind of stiff wave a boy who was always being left was used to giving: devoid of emotion but jovial enough to show that he wasn’t being tortured at the Children’s Home.
It wasn’t until Christian was at the station with the Home’s assistant headmaster, Mr. Klimek, that he was told anything about his trip. Maybe Braque had not wanted to scare him with details, but Klimek had no such qualms. He was the least liked person at the Home, and all the students made sure he knew it. It wasn’t that he had ever done anything truly menacing; he just didn’t have the right personality for children, especially children desperate for stand-in parents.
“Crystal City, Texas,” said Klimek, leaning against the station wall, his right leg up and slightly bent, the way they always described detectives posing in the radio shows. “Braque told me about it. Little shit town near Mexico with scorpions on every block. How much did he tell you?”
Christian squinted at him and said, “Nothing.”
“Wanted to spare you the truth. I don’t see it that way. I think you should know what you’re getting into. Mexicans everywhere. They hate whites down there. Especially German ones. But don’t worry too much, son, your parents will be there, too, so you won’t suffer alone.”
Christian looked down at Inge to see if she was listening. Her hand was still attached to his, but her mind seemed to be elsewhere and her eyes, usually big as a doll’s, were closed.
“I almost forgot. You have to wear this,” said Klimek, taking an identification tag out of his pocket and giving it to Christian. He gave him Inge’s, as well, and stood back as Christian inspected them and put hers in her hand.
“It’s got to be around your necks on a piece of string,” he corrected him, pointing at Christian’s collar.
Christian stared at him. “You got string?” he asked.
“Why would I have string?”
Christian kept looking at him, to see if he was kidding, his hand starting to hurt from the pressure Inge was putting on it.
“Don’t just stare at me and do nothing. You best figure something out for you and the girl. Quickly,” Klimek warned. “It was an INS agent who gave them to me. He had a gun and everything. Bet the train will be crawling with them and I wouldn’t want to get on their wrong side by not having your tag on a string. Pretty simple request that you can’t seem to follow.”
Instead of arguing, or asking how he should have intuited that he bring string, Christian reached into his bag and took out Jack’s shoe. He took Inge’s tag and tied each end of the lace to a little hole on either side. He leaned down, took the shoelace out of one of his own shoes, and did the same thing. On Inge, the tag fell where it should, but his barely made it around his neck.
Once the tags were straightened, Klimek reached out his hand for Christian’s and gave it a firm shake. “Could be worse, kid,” he said with a forced smile. “And don’t forget all your friends at the Home.”
“Right. I won’t. Thanks,” said Christian, thinking of everyone but Klimek.
“I’ll wait until you are both safely on. But you better go talk to the agents now and figure out the details. You’re almost eighteen. You should start doing these things on your own.”
Christian wanted to remind Klimek that he had only been at the Home for seven weeks, and not for ten years, but he held back. He was aware that he was far more babied by his mother than any of the children at the Home had been by Klimek or even the kindly Braque.
He wasn’t sure if it was the shoe constantly thrown against his cheek, Jack’s fist against his nose, or his concussion, but he knew that the punches he endured in the Home had done him some good. Tucked in between the snoring of orphans, Christian had realized how much his parents coddled him. He knew they doted on him, but he hadn’t fully understood the extent of it, since that was the norm in River Hills. Perhaps now, Christian thought, he was more prepare
d to be a man who fended for himself, who might one day make love under a canopy of monarch butterflies and whose spirit didn’t break from having to share a room with others. Even someone like Jack Walter.
On the train platform were other children, all with mothers, who were going to the camp, too. Christian stopped and asked one of the mothers whom he should speak to before he boarded the train, and she pointed to a young man flirting with one of the teenage daughters about to be shipped off.
“He doesn’t seem to mind her German background, does he?” she said, holding her own little boy by the hand.
Christian shrugged and headed over to the agent, who looked barely older than he did.
“Names,” said the agent, his brown hair glued to his head with so much pomade that it resisted the winter wind like a helmet.
He looked right at their name tags but waited for Christian to say their names.
“How old are you?” he asked Christian after checking his list.
“I’m seventeen. Doesn’t it say so there?”
“Yeah, it does. I was just hoping you’d lie and say eighteen so I wouldn’t have to check on you two the entire train ride down.” He flipped the pages of his list back over. “But I guess you didn’t think about me, did you? Fine. You don’t have seat assignments, but you’ll be in car twelve. It’s full of mother hens, so I won’t bother to check on you very often. Just make sure that she,” he said, pointing at Inge, “gets to San Antonio looking happier than that.” He looked down at Inge’s tear- and mucus-streaked face disapprovingly.
Christian said he’d do his best and moved down the train.
“Will you sit with me? The whole time?” Inge asked. “I don’t want to be alone. Not for one second. Will you stay with me? Do you promise? Say promise.”
