The Enemy Above

by Michael P. Spradlin

  And this time, Anton did not know how he would protect her.

  In the end, it had been easy. The Juden thought they were so clever. Karl was surprised no one had thought of it before. The intelligence report had led him to a small village to the north. He had interrogated the informant who knew which of the town’s residents was trading with the Juden. Maksym Shevchenko. It had not taken much to find out where this man lived, and drive the short distance to his house. No matter that it was the wee hours of the morning. No matter that he had been demoted. He was still a captain of the gestapo, which Shevchenko would do well to respect.

  As soon as the peasant walked out onto the porch, Von Duesen could sense his fear. Shevchenko wore a straw hat, which he removed and worked nervously in his hands. His wife followed him, and though Shevchenko tried to order her back inside, she refused and clutched his arm.

  “Guten Tag, Herr Shevchenko,” Von Duesen called out. Good day. He would not do them the courtesy of speaking Ukrainian. The man and his wife nodded, but did not reply.

  “I am looking for two men. I understand you trade with them.”

  “Nein.” The man shook his head.

  “Are you certain? I have this information on very good authority.”

  “Nein, mein captain,” the man said. “I know of no such men.”

  Von Duesen sighed. It was nearly dawn. Inside the house he could see the warm glow from a lantern. He had probably interrupted their breakfast.

  “Are you certain, Herr Shevchenko?” he asked again.

  “Ja,” the man said.

  Von Duesen pulled the Luger from his belt. He pointed it at Shevchenko’s wife and shot her in the thigh. She fell to the ground, her screams so high-pitched and agonizing that it was actually painful to Von Duesen’s ears. Shevchenko dropped to his knees, his hands pressing on her thigh to try and stop the bleeding. He cursed the captain as the woman continued her keening wail. The noise was giving Von Duesen a headache.

  “Tell her to be quiet or I will shoot her again,” he said calmly.

  The man sobbed as he spoke quietly to his wife, who tried valiantly to silence herself.

  “Now. The men—where do they come from? They want for supplies for more than two people. Where are they hiding?”

  “Mein captain,” the man pleaded. “I do not know. Please. Please!”

  Von Duesen shot the wife in the right elbow. She screamed again, and to Von Duesen’s relief she passed out, her blood pouring out of her and staining the porch. Shevchenko begged Von Duesen for mercy.

  “If you do not tell me what I want to know, the next shot will be between her eyes.”

  Shevchenko was breathing so heavily he could barely speak. “No. No, please. Please, mein captain! I will tell you what I know. I have heard rumors only. The men, they bring scrap metal, which I can sell. They say nothing about where they come from or where they find the scrap. We trade and then they leave.”

  Von Duesen raised the Luger, pointing it at the woman’s face.

  “Say your good-byes. I will kill your wife, but I will leave you alive, to mourn, and to remind you how stupid you are. Your wife will die because you chose to protect a group of Jewish dogs instead of her.”

  “No, mein captain,” Shevchenko pleaded. He put himself between the gun and his wife. “I do not know for certain! As I said, I have heard rumors. There is a place called the Priest’s Grotto. It is not far from here. It is a large cave. I have heard that the Jews hide there. Only the men come out and only at night.”

  Von Duesen lowered the Luger to his side and returned it to his holster. He pulled the map from inside his uniform jacket and spread it open on the hood of his truck.

  “Show me where it is.”

  From there, it had been so simple. Von Duesen had gone to the Priest’s Grotto. And he had found exactly whom he was looking for.

  “Anton,” Dmitri whispered. “We must slow down. We don’t know what is happening. If it is the gestapo, we must be careful.”

  Anton knew Dmitri was right, but he had a horrible feeling their hiding place had been discovered. Images of Rina and David gunned down like animals flew through his mind. He could not calm himself. His uncle finally grabbed him by the shoulder and jerked him to a stop.

  “Anton,” Dmitri said harshly. “Listen to me! We must be quiet. If the gestapo has found the cave, we will need to make sure we are not seen.”

  Anton was finally able to calm himself. He knew his uncle was right. Anton and Dmitri crept out of the forest quietly, but kept themselves hidden in the underbrush. The sun was clearing the eastern horizon. In the morning light they could see all the residents of the cave standing just outside its entrance. And there in front of them, Bubbe trembled on her knees. And a familiar face hovered behind hers—the young gestapo officer who had already taken her prisoner once.

  He held his pistol at her temple. Her eyebrow was cut and bleeding. He must have knocked her to the ground. And now the look on his face said that was only the beginning. Herman and Sergei tried to intervene, but the German forced them back by pointing his gun.

  “Bubbe!” Anton cried. He burst from the underbrush and ran toward his grandmother.

  “No, Anton!” he heard Dmitri and Bubbe shout at the same time. Their voices sounded low and far away against the thumping sound of Anton’s heart beating in his ears.

  Recognition burned in the Nazi’s eyes.

  “You!” he shouted. “At last I have found you, you little Jewish pig! Now you die!” He swung the pistol around and took aim at Anton just as Bubbe leapt from the ground. She threw herself between Anton and her tormentor as he pulled the trigger. The explosion sounded like a thunderclap. The bullet ripped into her torso and she fell forward on the man who had shot her. He struggled to shove the old woman’s body aside, and when he finally succeeded, he took aim at Anton once again.

  There were ten meters between them. Anton ran toward the officer as fast as he could. At the last second, he closed his eyes, certain he was about to die. And in that moment, he began to pray. If this was God’s plan, as his uncle Dmitri had told him, so be it. Without Bubbe, he had nothing. His only chance was to get to the German before he got a shot off. He would kill the man with his bare hands.

  He realized he was too late the instant he heard the boom of a single gunshot. Anton waited for the bullet to rend his flesh. But nothing happened. He felt no pain. Perhaps this is how one died. When he opened his eyes, he could not fathom what he was seeing. The officer’s body lay next to Bubbe on the ground. He had been shot through the head.

  But Anton’s grandmother was still breathing. He ran to her side and dropped to his knees. “Bubbe! Bubbe!” he shouted, taking her by the shoulders. “Someone help her!” he pleaded to his friends and neighbors. They looked at him, then looked away. He felt Uncle Dmitri’s hand on his shoulder. Bubbe had been shot in the stomach. Blood soaked her dress. In spite of this, she opened her eyes and smiled at him. She reached her gnarled hand up and touched his cheek.

  “Anton, my good boy,” she whispered. “Someday, you will understand this love …” Her words were interrupted by a horrible, wracking cough. “It is all I have to give you. My love.” She closed her eyes and was gone.

  Tears flowed down Anton’s cheeks. He could not stop them. He did not want to stop them. And he did not understand what had just happened. Bubbe had saved him. The gestapo officer was dead. But how?

  He looked up to see Uncle Dmitri standing over him, his eyes also filled with tears. All of the families that had come to know Bubbe cried along with them.

  Then an unfamiliar noise caught Anton’s attention. At the edge of the tree line stood a group of armed men. Pavel was among them and held a still-smoking rifle. He had reunited with his militia.

  Anton recognized another face. Daniel. He held a shotgun, but did not quite look at home among the militia members. How good it was to see his old friend’s face!

  Uncle Pavel came toward them, and Anton could see that his ey
es were ringed with redness. “The Germans are on the run,” Pavel told them. “The Russian army is less than five kilometers to the west. We … all … we are safe, now. I only wish we could have gotten here sooner,” he said, before bowing his head in prayer.

  Anton looked at his bubbe, whom he still held in his arms. Then he stared long and hard at the body of a man so full of evil he had made an old woman his nemesis. Now the Nazi was nothing more than an empty shell. His lifeless eyes stared up at the sky like a doll’s.

  “Safety is an illusion,” Anton said. “We will never be safe. Not while men like this walk the earth.”

  Anton gently laid his bubbe on the ground, and then he prayed through his tears.

  Daniel came to live on the family farm with Anton and Dmitri. He had nowhere—and no one—to return to, and Anton was happy to have the company. Uncle Pavel had chosen to rejoin the militia and chase the Nazis out of Ukraine.

  The Germans were sure to lose. Men and women of good conscience would defeat evil. Every day, Anton thought about what the war had stolen from him. His childhood. His bubbe. His father. Uncle Dmitri did his best to keep his nephew’s spirits up. Anton and Daniel helped him work the farm, and even found occasional time to read and explore. But nothing felt the same anymore.

  One morning, Anton woke up with a decision made. He packed his blanket with a map, a canteen, some matches, and some bread and potatoes he’d nabbed from the kitchen the night before. He tried to be quiet, but failed—he and Daniel shared the room and his friend was a light sleeper.

  “Are you going somewhere?” Daniel asked with a yawn.

  “Yes,” Anton answered. “West. To Poland. I’m going to find my father.”

  “Anton, what if your father is …”

  “Then at least I will know.”

  “Have you told Dmitri?”

  “No. He will forbid me to go.”

  “What should I tell him?”

  “You won’t have to. He will know why I must go.”

  “Are you sure this is the right thing to do? There is still a war out there.”

  “There is always a war.”

  Daniel had nothing to say to that.

  “Thank you for letting me stay here, Anton,” Daniel said. “I hope you and your father will come home one day soon. I would like to meet him.”

  Anton shook Daniel’s hand and quietly crept through the house. He left through the kitchen door, and as he stepped outside, he took one last look around the farm in the gathering light.

  Then he pulled up his collar around his neck and headed west into the cool, fine morning.

  I owe a great deal of thanks to so many people for helping me to shape this book. First off, I need to thank my editor, Jenne Abramowitz, for molding the story into shape. Every writer should be so lucky to have such an editor. I also owe a debt of gratitude to Jana Haussmann at Scholastic Book Fairs for encouraging me to pursue this novel. In fact, I’m just going to go all in and say a great big thank-you to everyone at Scholastic for being such a great publisher and helping me grow as a writer.

  My family, as always, is my source of strength and inspiration. In particular, my wife, Kelly, deserves far more praise for her help and encouragement than I could ever confine to the pages of this book. My children, Mick, Jessica, and Rachel, do nothing except provide me with laughter and joy every single day. I love you all.

  Though The Enemy Above is fiction, it is based on real events. The Priest’s Grotto still exists, and while it no longer harbors Jewish refugees, it serves as a stark reminder of the horror that all Jews faced during World War II. Several Jewish families used it as a safe haven during the Nazi occupation of Western Ukraine. This area is filled with limestone and gypsum caves, and many refugees took advantage of the terrain to escape Adolf Hitler’s Judenfrei policy.

  When I began working on this book, I quickly discovered the near impossibility of finding words to describe the enormity of the horror and death during the Holocaust. Millions of Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, and people from other ethnic groups were exterminated by a madman—one it took the combined might of the world’s greatest nations to defeat. The magnitude of the loss of so much human potential makes words seem empty and meaningless.

  But as Bubbe says in The Enemy Above, Jews were persecuted for centuries before Hitler came to power. After the Russian Revolution, attacks on Jewish settlements, called pogroms, killed and destroyed the property of hundreds of thousands of Jews. And in this area of Western Ukraine, Jewish families were under constant assault for hundreds of years. In fact, many Jews throughout Europe were slow to believe that Hitler’s threat was out of the ordinary. Many saw it as just another in a long line of assaults against their very existence. By the time they discovered the magnitude of Hitler’s plans, it was already too late for millions of people.

  Yet somehow in the midst of this suffering, the tenacity of the human spirit took root. When tyranny and oppression are opposed, they can ultimately be defeated. It may take years, decades, even centuries, but in the end the human desire for freedom and self-determination can win out. The fight for survival can be more powerful than any weapon or ideology.

  In researching this novel, I found that the story of those who hid in the Priest’s Grotto was not unique. Many of the people whom Adolf Hitler considered inferior survived by their wits and ingenuity. They hid in caves, deep within forests, or high in mountain ranges. Some, like the Bielski brothers, took up arms and retreated deep into the forests of German-occupied Poland. Their guerilla warfare against the Nazis saved the lives of thousands of Jews. Men like Oskar Schindler risked their lives to smuggle hundreds of Jews to freedom. Undoubtedly, there are many more undiscovered stories of those who found the ability to survive amid a horrible tragedy.

  I hope someday their stories are told.

  Berkhoff, Karel C. Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine Under Nazi Rule. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2008.

  Macgosci, Paul Robert. A History of Ukraine. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995.

  NationalGeographic.com

  Nicola, Christos and Peter Lane Taylor. The Secret of Priest’s Grotto: A Holocaust Survival Story. Minneapolis: Kar-Ben Publishing, 2007.

  Michael P. Spradlin is a New York Times bestselling author. His books include Into the Killing Seas, the Youngest Templar trilogy, the Wrangler Award winner Off Like the Wind!: The First Ride of the Pony Express, the Killer Species series, and several other novels and picture books. He holds a black belt in television remote control and is fluent in British, Canadian, Australian, and several other English-based languages. He lives in Lapeer, Michigan.

  Visit him online at www.michaelspradlin.com.

  Copyright © 2016 by Michael P. Spradlin

  All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Press, an imprint of Scholastic Inc., Publishers since 1920. SCHOLASTIC, SCHOLASTIC PRESS, and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  While inspired by real events and historical characters, this is a work of fiction and does not claim to be historically accurate or portray factual events or relationships. Please keep in mind that references to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales may not be factually accurate, but rather fictionalized by the author.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Spradlin, Michael P., author.

  The enemy above / by Michael P. Spradlin.

  pages cm

  Summary: In 1942 twelve-year-old Anton, his family, and their small community of Ukrainian Jews are hiding from the advancing Nazis troops, and from the gestapo, in a web of underground caves, and one officer in particular, Major Karl Von Duesen, is determined to catch or kill every Jew he can find—but as the tide of war turns, a final confrontation between Anton and his enemy is looming.

 
ISBN 978-0-545-85782-6

  1. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—Juvenile fiction. 2. Jews—Ukraine—History—20th century—Juvenile fiction. 3. Germany. Geheime Staatspolizei—Officers—Juvenile fiction. 4. World War, 1939–1945—Ukraine—Juvenile fiction. 5. Enemies—Juvenile fiction. 6. Fear—Juvenile fiction. 7. War stories. 8. Ukraine—History—20th century—Juvenile fiction. [1. Holocaust, Jewish, (1939–1945)—Ukraine—Fiction. 2. Jews—Ukraine—Fiction. 3. Nazis—Fiction. 4. World War, 1939–1945—Ukraine—Fiction. 5. Ukraine—History—German occupation, 1941–1944—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.S7645En 2016

  813.54—dc23

  [Fic]

  2015031408

  First edition, July 2016

  Cover art © 2016 by Mike Heath

  Cover design by Christopher Stengel

  e-ISBN 978-0-545-86148-9

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