When We Were Brave

by Karla M Jay

  During the two-hour ride, he struggled with overwhelming anxiety about Jutta and Frieda on one side, his wounded son on the other. Once, a small tremor moved through Alfred’s body and his eyes fluttered, a sign he hoped meant his son was coming around. But he remained unconscious. If Alfred didn’t get good medical attention soon, he might never open his eyes again. Waves of hopelessness and futility raced through him. He had taken so much for granted. His parents, their sacrifice to get him and Karl to America, and then build a good life. The gristmill and the daily labor that fulfilled him at the close of each day. His children growing, learning, their unique personalities. Frieda kind and giving. Alfred always on the defense but deep down, kindhearted. For the first time, Alfred had not struck out in rash anger. He’d been clubbed for being reasonable, for protecting the women.

  The truck slowed and then ground gears as it wound up the hill. Traveling over an aqueduct, a red-roof village unfurled in the valley below. Finally, the truck slowed at a fortified gate and then proceeded through before stopping in front of an ancient-looking square-shaped château. It felt surreal to be driven past the high walls, the wired fences. To lose his freedom once again.

  A guard with a hardened face ordered them out of the truck.

  “What about my son?” Herbert motioned to Alfred’s limp body.

  Medics were called, and they carried Alfred inside the damp, stone fortress on an army stretcher as he followed.

  They took them to a small cell containing two metal beds covered with thin mattresses, a wash basin, and wooden chair. Alfred moaned when the medics moved him to the bed, but he didn’t awaken.

  When the Germans turned to leave, he raised his hand to halt them. “Wait! He needs help.”

  The men stopped outside the cell and pulled the bars closed. “Yes. Today . . . or tomorrow.” The metal clang reverberated in the stone hallway.

  In the cells across the hall, he saw men tightly packed on bunk beds, who seemed slumped in their personal sorrows.

  “Is there a hospital here?” Herbert called across the way. He was led to believe Alfred would get medical attention.

  “There are medics here.” In a cell diagonally across, a man with a full beard stood at the bars. He gripped the iron rods and leaned his face between them. “Welcome to ILAG Seven, the camp for everyone they scraped off the countryside and don’t know what to do with.”

  “That sounds about right.” He paced the floor next to Alfred’s bed. The boy let out a tiny moan. Herbert dropped to the concrete floor, leaning close to him. “Son. Can you hear me?”

  Alfred’s eyes opened, mere slits with a dark pebble behind each. Then he was out again.

  He sighed.

  “What happened to your boy?”

  “He was hit in the head. How do I get the medics to look at him right now?” Heat filled his head. They’d been sent into Germany under such dangerous conditions. When he left Ellis Island, his main concern, and he thought it to be crazy at best, was whether they might become laborers, or detained in a prison camp. The image of dodging bombs never entered his mind since he’d been guaranteed they would have safe passage. He drew in a long breath to calm his anger. Alfred needed a level-headed father once he awakened.

  “There is a clinic here, but it’s understaffed and overrun with wounded soldiers. You should be on the civilian side of the prison. Rumor has it the Red Cross is good about providing food and medical attention there.”

  “And what about here?”

  “I’m not sure the Red Cross knows we exist.”

  Hours later, Alfred stirred. His head rested on Herbert’s lap as he sat on the bed with his back to the wall.

  “Where are we?” Alfred’s voice was barely a croak.

  “Praise God, son.” Relief washed through him. “You’re awake.”

  “Everything’s blurry.” Alfred’s eyes opened wider and moved over Herbert’s face and then to the mottled stone walls.

  “I’m sorry. It should clear up when your head heals.” He hoped he was right. “You have no idea how good it is to hear your voice.”

  Alfred tried to touch his head, but his hand wobbled, and it took several attempts before he found the injured area. “I don’t remember anything.”

  “You tried to protect those women at the train station. Very brave, son.” Herbert told him what happened after the Gestapo hit him. “We’re in a German camp of sorts. Actually, a castle.”

  “Mother and Frieda?”

  “They should have arrived in Wiesbaden by now, but we have no way to know.” He swallowed a lump in his throat and sent a dozen prayers skyward that Jutta and Frieda were safe. Unmolested. Unharmed in any way. Raised to believe every sacrifice has a reward and every failure has a second chance if God were in the equation. He sent prayers out of habit. But with all that happened, his belief in divine intervention wavered.

  He stroked Alfred’s matted hair and studied the wild cast in his eyes.

  “I need you to drink some water, son.” He lifted a tin cup and raised Alfred’s head. Most of the water ran down his chin and shirt, but some made it down his throat. He pictured Alfred as a baby, spitting out pureed carrots as Jutta tried to keep the orange paste from flying everywhere.

  Alfred moaned. “My head sure hurts.” He seemed shrunken, a broken fifteen-year-old.

  “I’ve asked for a doctor.” A vein pounded in his neck. He could do nothing for Alfred. “We just have to wait a little longer.” Alfred drifted back to sleep as he prayed he’d spoken the truth—“a little longer.”

  Wilhelm Falk

  Auschwitz, Poland - January 1945

  The SS officer who met Falk’s Red Cross caravan in Auschwitz had the look of a cobra. Guards had rotated in the year since Falk was there, which meant it was unlikely anyone would remember him. A guard stopped them outside the gate, reminding the volunteers the other prisoners must not learn about the purchase. An uprising was the last thing they wanted.

  He didn’t count on the barracks being so far from where they were instructed to park. If the freed prisoners were to walk to the buses, he had no legitimate way to get to the barracks, no possibility of putting his plan into action. Kill Mengele. Help load the prisoners on the bus. Do what the U.S. government asked until the end of the war. Return to his wife and boys.

  The only complication was the first part. Lieutenant Nilsson denied his request for twenty minutes inside the camp unchaperoned.

  Another guard, with bulging eyes, took the release papers and studied them. “Two hundred Jews. That’s it. Only Danish and Dutch. We have them ready to go in twenty minutes.” He made an impatient gesture before heading back along the tracks.

  Falk needed an excuse to get into camp, so he walked to the lead bus and found Bauer.

  “I don’t trust these guards. How do we know they will give us the correct people?” Falk asked.

  “Why do these guards seem different than in the other camps?”

  “I’ve heard that this camp has the cruelest and most deceitful SS.” He couldn’t explain he’d visited here before and what he witnessed. “Is it okay if I supervise?”

  Bauer studied Falk. “If Lieutenant Nilsson gives us the green light.” The young man set off in search of the commander.

  He needed to move fast because there was no approval from Nilsson coming his way. He moved into the tree line that paralleled the train tracks. Working his way toward the camp, he reached the far side of the train platform. When he glanced into the fenced-in areas, he was jarred by what he saw. The number of prisoners had multiplied since he was last here. No wonder the guards didn’t let the Red Cross any closer. Skeletal bodies in filthy clothing filled the compound, nearly to overflowing. Many stood just behind the fence, watching him. Were they hopeful the man in a Red Cross uniform meant something positive? That their struggle to hang on one more day meant they’d won? He averted
his eyes and hurried on, the sight heartbreaking and beyond the reach of what he could do. By killing Mengele, he’d save hundreds from extreme medical experiments ultimately ending in death, and make amends for Hiam’s death.

  He approached the main gate and showed his fake Red Cross papers, grateful for the official patches and insignia on his clothes. Assuming the guards had heard of the transfer, he patted his coat pocket and said, “I am here for children,” in what he hoped sounded like broken German. A man’s attempt to speak their language. He dropped his hand and pantomimed patting the heads of children. “For Himmler.”

  He held his breath as they conferred. These guards looked young, like Eduard and the now-dead Christoph, the young soldiers from the Algonquin.

  They handed him the papers and stepped back. He walked through the gate and into the camp proper. The crematorium’s chimneys billowed ferociously, and a sickening stench settled over the entire camp.

  He kept his head down and headed straight for Mengele’s research building. Ever since he’d been asked to assist the Red Cross, he fantasized about killing the doctor, and his heart hammered—now only steps away.

  The door to the main facility was locked. Falk circled to the side and entered through the attached dormitory. At his back, he felt the eyes of a hundred ragged prisoners in striped clothing follow his movements. Once through the door, his vision quickly adjusted in the dim light. He counted twelve children, some on their beds, others at tables, reading or drawing. The room held nice furniture, and curtains hung on the window.

  He pushed his finger to his lips. “Shhh.”

  Wide-eyed, the children watched him, but none so much as blinked as he walked past their beds. He took a big breath, and then with muscles strung tight and ready to spring, turned the knob and rushed through the next door into Mengele’s private quarters. Within seconds, he took in the scene. No one was there. He searched the other adjoining rooms. The doctor wasn’t in the building. He clenched his fists as disappointment settled like spikes in his chest. Where the hell was Mengele? He had limited time to hunt for him, or he’d be left behind when the buses pulled away.

  Then he returned to the dormitory. Several children were lined up and watching him. “Where is the man who lives there?” he asked the children in German.

  A dwarf child answered. “He left this morning. Are you here to take us for our meal?”

  The innocents! These children lived in the lion’s lair but had not yet seen the teeth of the beast. He had no choice but to scrap the first part of his plan and follow through with the second. He was here to get prisoners out of camp and onto the buses, so he might as well start by saving these twelve from the doctor’s horror show.

  “Yes. I am also a doctor.” He pointed to the red cross on his sleeve. “We will go to some buses outside the camp where there is something for everyone to eat.”

  A small boy stepped forward and held out a drawing of a house. It was excellent. He said in Dutch, “It’s for Uncle Josef. I have to stay.”

  How could he convince the boy without making a scene? He bent to study the picture and smiled. His ability to speak Dutch was rusty, but passable. He now thanked Ilse for all the times they spoke in her native tongue when the children were younger, impressing upon them the need to speak both parents’ languages.

  “Is this your home?” he asked.

  The boy nodded. Falk looked at the home. It did look like the houses in the Netherlands, especially Amsterdam. He and Ilse stopped there many times after visiting her sister in Eindhoven. The details of the boy’s drawing were so distinct. Then, suddenly, one small detail caught his eye—a praying hands door knocker.

  The child was studying his face when Falk looked more closely at him. He had billeted at a house with a door knocker exactly like the one in the drawing, just after he first visited Auschwitz. Was it even possible this boy and his mother were the same people forced to take him in? He recalled he paced their upstairs floor all night, half out of his mind because of what he’d witnessed in the extermination camps.

  He bent down. “Do you know me?” he whispered to the boy.

  The boy slowly bobbed his head and started to back away. “You were a German soldier, and you gave me sweets.”

  “That’s right. But we can forget that because I am now with the Red Cross.”

  “Uncle Josef is also doctor who still wears his good grey uniform as you once did.”

  “Yes, he does.” He took the boy’s drawing and then tucked it in his coat. Then he stood, disliking the feeling of being compared to Mengele. He reached for the boy’s hand and thankfully the child accepted it. He said to the children in Dutch, “We have to leave now, take another person’s hand and follow me, do not stop until we reach the buses where we have the food.”

  And then in German, “We have to go now. Take the hand of another and follow me. Do not stop until we reach the buses where we have the food.”

  Outside, the arctic air hit Falk and cleared his head. Mengele could be anywhere in the camp and watching them leave. He needed to get the children to the coaches as soon as possible before the madman discovered they were missing. He had no doubt Mengele would have them all shot to make a point.

  Herbert Müller

  Laufen (Civilian Internment Camp), Germany - January 1945

  Eleven days, and Herbert had no word as to when he and Alfred would be allowed to leave the Laufen internment camp and travel to Wiesbaden. The camp housed hundreds of men deported from the Channel Islands of Jersey and Guernsey, and some American civilians caught in Europe when Germany declared war. Those were the unlucky ones not exchanged for repatriated Americans like he and his family. The prisoners all seemed to live in a stew of anxiety on the civilian side of the prison. The International Red Cross was as involved as they could be. But with all the chaos in Europe, their directive to protect all internees held by a warring nation was lackluster at best as the numbers ran into the millions.

  Because of Article 79 of the Geneva Convention, the Red Cross was allowed to pass on information or enquiries about POWs. These letters were restricted to twenty-five words and had to be family news only.

  Although Herbert couldn’t tell Jutta where they were, he wrote to let her know they were safe and that Alfred was healing. That they missed them, loved them, and dreamed of their reunion. His letter was sent to the International Red Cross headquarters in Geneva where it would be forwarded to Elke’s address. Jutta should have it by now. And he’d almost wept two days earlier when the Red Cross confirmed Jutta and Frieda made it to Elke’s. With tens of thousands of letters being exchanged each month, they told him to be patient with receiving a reply from Wiesbaden. He could wait. His family was divided but fine. The Red Cross worked on their request to be reunited, but for now he and Alfred were coping.

  To his knowledge, Pastor Graf was not in the castle prison. He asked the Red Cross to try to track down his friend. Although they said they would, they added there were hundreds of camps throughout Germany and Austria holding Americans and others deemed enemy aliens.

  This morning, he woke up early, like always, picturing home. The bright kitchen where they spent most of their time in the evenings. Jutta at the piano. The children showing off their Charleston moves when they tired of performing Waltz and Foxtrot steps. Frieda practicing the saxophone. What he wouldn’t give to hear that plaintive sound with its little bit of brassiness and occasional off-key squeaks. Otto snoring in a living room chair, the German paper open on his lap. The radio announcing a Philly’s baseball game. He wanted it all back more than ever but without the emotional suffering. Now, held captive thousands of miles away in a dim and dank prison cell, his former life seemed like an illusion.

  Herbert pulled himself back to reality and crossed to the small sink where he shaved, using an old razor and sliver of soap, the water a few degrees above freezing.

  He glanced at Alfr
ed’s reflection in the mirror—breathing steady, deeply asleep. Alfred continued to improve but remained dizzy. He couldn’t stand or navigate far without Herbert’s support. The medics checked on him frequently, stating nothing but time would heal his injured head.

  He dressed. His clothes were freshly laundered and slipped between the bars of their cell during the night. Laundry service was once a week, barbering offered twice a month, and emergency dental appointments were available.

  Men in the other cells began to stir. The squeaky wheel on the breakfast cart announced its arrival. He learned that when men had time on their hands, time took on extreme importance. Their breakfast trays would arrive in exactly five minutes and forty seconds, but only if an inmate didn’t disrupt the flow.

  He crossed to Alfred’s bed and rubbed his son’s back. “Good morning.”

  Alfred mumbled something Herbert didn’t catch but made Herbert smile. How many mornings had his son muttered, “Just five more minutes?” while cocooned under thick quilts, unwilling to crawl out on a cold winter morning even for buttermilk pancakes?

  Herbert gently shook Alfred’s shoulder again. “Breakfast time, son. Wake up.”

  The boy didn’t move. It was then he recognized the smell of urine. He pulled back the blanket. His son’s pants were soaked. His pulse quickened. Alfred’s face was covered with a sheen of moisture. How could he be sweating in their cold cell? He touched his son’s forehead and discovered he was burning up.

  Herbert rushed to the cell bars. “Medic! Quickly! My son needs help!”

  Immediately, he heard the sounds of booted guards rushing toward their cell. They slid to a halt. “What happened?”

  “My son has a fever, and I can’t wake him.” Bile rose in his throat. His breath came in bursts. “Please. Get the doctor.”

  They peeked into the cell as if to verify what he said before jogging away. He knelt next to Alfred’s bed and scooped him up, and gently rocked him. “Hang on, son. You’re going to get better.” He felt the heat of Alfred’s body through his own clothes. “Remember, Mother and Frieda are waiting for us. We all love you.”