by Dean Hughes
“You can approach one of the checkpoints our boys will have set up. By then, lots of Germans should be surrendering. I don’t think it will be a problem.” He hesitated. “Hey, you know what I mean. I’m not trying to tell you this is a cakewalk. I’m just saying things are worked out. We expect you to get out when it’s over. You shouldn’t be in there longer than about ten days. We aren’t sending you out to sacrifice your lives.”
Alex wondered. He knew that operatives were expendable—part of the numbers game of war. If two men could save thousands of lives, their lives were worth gambling. Alex didn’t disagree with that idea; he just didn’t feel a lot of comfort about being the expendable commodity.
“One more thing. We’re moving this whole operation. We’re going to be flying out of Dijon, a little north of here, from now on. So we’re sending you two up there by jeep this afternoon. Thomas, you’ll be trained by Lang and some other OSS boys. We usually give a man eight weeks of training for a job like this, and you’re going to have to learn what you can in two. So work hard. Anything they teach you might save your life. I’m not going to wave the flag at you, but I gotta say, you men are heroes. You could shorten this war by months if you do your job right.”
With that, he stood. Alex and Otto stood too, and Alex saluted. Then he and Lang left the room. Once outside, Lang said, in German, “I think we just got a load of manure dumped on our heads.”
“What do you mean?”
“Let’s just say that the likelihood of living through something like this is not very good.”
Alex turned toward Lang and took hold of his arm. “Listen to me, Lang. You go ahead and die if you want to, but I’m coming back. My wife is going to have a baby in three months, and I must get back to her.”
“That’s fine with me,” Lang said. “All in all, I would rather live than die.” He laughed in his strange way again, drawing in lots of air. “And call me Otto,” he added.
But Alex didn’t like any of that. This was no game. Alex needed someone at his side who was just as intent on living as he was.
***
Peter Stoltz stood at the farmhouse door and waited. He was taking a great chance, but he knew nothing else to do. He had to get something to eat. When the door opened, a woman was standing before him—a little woman, maybe forty, maybe younger. Her hair was covered with a brown scarf, and she was wearing a faded brown house dress, the shape of it gone. She stayed back, held the door, seemed ill at ease.
“I am Polnisch,” he said—the German word for “Polish.” “I work. You give food.”
The woman smiled just a little, but she shook her head. “Nein,” she told him. And then she spoke in Polish. Peter understood a few words. He had been traveling among Polish refugees for the past few weeks. They had shared their food with him, however meager their own supplies had been, and they had let him sleep by their fires.
This German woman was turning him down. He caught enough words to understand that, and he also understood her problem. There were so many refugees and so little food. A woman like this had to look out for her own children.
He turned to go, but she spoke in Polish again, and he didn’t comprehend her meaning. She might have been offering food, but he wasn’t sure. At least she had sounded apologetic. “Danke,” he said, and he hesitated, waiting to see what she might do.
She repeated some of the same words, but he couldn’t put the ideas together. She must have seen his confusion. “You’re not Polish,” she said, in German.
“Danke,” he mumbled again. He decided he’d better move on. If she guessed who he really was, he could be in trouble.
“You’re a German boy. You’ve run from the army.”
He stepped off the porch and set out walking, meaning to get as far away as he could before she tipped off some local party official or policeman.
“Wait.”
He kept walking.
“I can use the help here. And I’ll feed you. I don’t blame you for what you’ve done. Soon everyone will have to run.”
He stopped and considered. Maybe she was baiting him, tempting him to stay so she could report him. But he needed to eat. So he walked back.
“I only wish my husband had run. He was killed last fall.”
“Where?” Peter asked.
“I don’t know. No one ever told me. Somewhere on the eastern front.”
“We were all dying there.”
He hadn’t meant it quite the way it came out, but the idea was right. Peter had died there, he was quite certain, and now he was alive again. Or maybe he was someone else. It was hard to think that he was the Peter Stoltz who had gone to battle.
“Spring is coming. I need to plant. I’ve never done it by myself. If you will stay here and help me, I’ll tell people . . . something. I’ll think up a story. Do you have papers?”
“No. Only military papers.”
“You could be wounded. You could be my nephew. We’ll think of something.”
“I’ve never farmed. I know nothing of planting.”
“I know a little. I need help—and some strength.”
He smiled. “You’re stronger than I am, I think.” He didn’t say it, but he felt as though he might pass out.
“Your face is like ashes. You haven’t eaten, have you?”
“No.”
“Come in and sit down. I have bread and Wurst. You eat that, and then I’ll cook something more.”
Peter walked into the little farmhouse. The front room was dark, but in the kitchen the afternoon sun was filtering through sheer white curtains, and the place seemed something like his home, the apartment he had grown up in—or at least the kitchen did.
“Sit down. Tell me your name.”
“Peter.” He didn’t know what last name he would use, but he chose, for now, not to offer one. He slid a chair back and sat down. He knew that he was filthy, and he ought to wash, but he needed to eat a little, to feel some strength before he did anything else.
The woman brought bread to the table on a bread board, cut slices of it, the dark slabs folding over. It was all he could do not to grab for it. But he waited until she brought the Wurst and a little block of cheese. She sliced these, too, and still he waited. When she set a board in front of him, a knife and a fork, he finally took a slice of bread, set it on the board, and then some cheese and some slices of the Wurst. He ate as he had long ago, in his home, cutting with his knife and fork, combining the bread and cheese and meat, but eating small portions. When the woman brought milk, he didn’t gulp it but took long drinks, feeling the smooth coolness of it.
“How old are you, Peter?”
He hadn’t thought of this for a long time. He stopped to consider. “Eighteen,” he finally said.
“Where are you from?”
“It’s better not to tell you these things. If I have to run again, it’s better that you not know.”
“That’s true. But if you tell me things, I won’t reveal them.”
He nodded, kept eating. The bread was soft and fragrant, the Wurst pungent with flavor. “Thank you,” he mumbled. “This is the best meal I’ve eaten for . . . I don’t know. Maybe ever.”
She laughed. “Have you been through a lot, Peter?”
Peter was suddenly struck by the affection in her voice, the way she pronounced his name. It was like hearing his mother. But it hurt, too, and unexpectedly, he felt tears on his face. “Yes,” he said. “No one should have to do what we did.”
“This war was wrong from the beginning, Peter. Hitler was wrong. My husband said it ten years ago, and he was right.”
“My parents said it too. More of us should have said it louder. We should have stopped him before he led us into this.”
“Yes,” she said. “That’s what we should have done. But no one dared.”
“Hitler has done terrible things. I heard stories in Poland. He killed people by the thousands. Maybe millions.”
“Jews?”
“Yes. Many Jews. But
Poles and Russians too—anyone he feared.”
“I hear these things now. But we didn’t know this, did we?”
“We knew enough.”
“We didn’t, Peter. I didn’t.”
“Where did you think the Jews were going when the Gestapo took them away?”
“To camps. I didn’t know the Nazis would kill them.”
Peter didn’t want to talk about this. In the past few weeks he had seen so much. He had passed through a town called Treblinka, and there he had heard the stories. Jews were being gassed and then burned in ovens—thousands, every day.
He was still eating when a girl came into the house through the kitchen door. She was skinny, a teenager, and she seemed surprised to find a stranger in her kitchen. She looked like the woman—who was obviously her mother—with round, black eyes that bulged. They were pretty eyes, actually, but strange.
“This is Peter,” the woman said. And she told the girl the little she knew about him. Then she said, “Peter, I haven’t told you my name. I’m Frau Schaller, and my daughter’s name is Katrina. I have two sons, both younger. You will meet them soon. We have a room in the attic of our house. There’s no bed there, but I can give you plenty of blankets. You will be warm and maybe not so uncomfortable.”
“It sounds fine,” Peter said. But in fact, it sounded much better than that. He was sitting in a kitchen, eating good food, and he was in a family, almost part of it, it seemed. He had never thought something like this could happen to him again.
Chapter 9
Heinrich Stoltz was sitting in a small train station in the little town of Landau, not far from Karlsruhe. It was a dismal morning, with a heavy mist in the air, and the smell of burning coal from the trains was so strong and sour in the air that he felt a little ill. Or maybe it was just that he was nervous.
A few early morning travelers sat on the benches in the waiting area, all of them bundled up in heavy coats because the train stations were not heated these days. Brother Stoltz waited until he saw a man approach—a man with a newspaper in his left hand. “Do you mind if I sit here?” the man asked. “My feet are aching.”
“Not at all,” Brother Stoltz said. “Give your feet some rest.”
The man was bigger than Brother Stoltz had imagined he might be, almost brutish. He was wearing worker’s clothes—a mechanic’s coveralls and a worn-out cap—and his massive jowls hadn’t been shaved for a few days. But he had carried the paper in his left hand, had given the proper code words—the statement about his aching feet. Perhaps his appearance was something of a disguise.
“They tell me that you want to help? What are you, a professor?” The man kept his voice down, but it was deep—as though spoken from a cave.
“I was a teacher at one time in my life.”
“This may not be the right work for you, Mein Herr. We’re not professors, our people.”
“It doesn’t matter. I want to do my part. What should I call you?”
“My code name is Wolf.” He turned and looked directly at Brother Stoltz. “Can you crawl about, by night, and blow up train tracks? That sort of thing?”
“I have no expertise in such things, but yes, I will work with others if they can show me what to do.”
“I guess we’ll take what help we can get, but you’re not what I would go looking for.”
“I want to bring Hitler down, to end this war as soon as possible. Isn’t that qualification enough?”
The man looked about. A train was approaching on one of the tracks outside, the sound building as the rhythm of the engine slowed. “Keep your voice down,” he said. And then he asked, “Are you a socialist?”
“No.”
“Most of us are, you know. Very few people will fight this man. They’re all too frightened. But those of us who want a better world, we are willing to fight for it.”
“You want to team up with this butcher, Stalin, and make a better world that way?”
“Listen, if you can’t work with us, tell me now.”
“It doesn’t matter. I want to do something, so I’ll know all my life that I didn’t just sit by and let Hitler have his way.”
“You’ve waited a long time. We needed more resisters long before now.”
“Yes. Yes, I know.”
Brother Stoltz glanced around the train station. The few people—mostly men in military uniforms—looked half asleep, worn down by everything they had been through. He wondered what such men thought of Hitler now. He heard less enthusiasm these days, less reverent talk of “the Führer,” but he also never heard anything he could call criticism. There was so much stoicism now, even fatalism, recognition of the dark time ahead, but people didn’t speak openly of that either. They simply kept surviving, staying alive each day. If they cursed anyone, it was the pilots who bombed their cities, but even that kind of talk had diminished. Everyone in the western cities knew that those same Allied forces who bombed their homes would soon be crossing the Rhine, occupying the area. And the fear of Russia was much greater than fear of the Allies.
“The crossing will begin soon,” Wolf said. “The Allies will make a major move before long. Everyone knows that, of course, but we know the points where the crossings will take place. We are in contact with Allied operatives working here in the country. We are to bomb railroad tracks and power stations, knock out guns, make things easier for the invading troops.”
Wolf surely knew Brother Stoltz’s connection to the OSS. Georg had put the two in touch with each other, and he certainly would have told him that much. It didn’t seem wise, however, to say anything more than necessary. The fact was, Brother Stoltz knew nothing of the invasion, and Wolf did. “If I engage myself in such sabotage, will I have to kill innocent civilians?” Brother Stoltz asked.
“Possibly. I can’t guarantee that will never happen. But we take precautions. We don’t blow up tracks when trains are approaching. For the most part, all we do is delay the train. The railroad people have learned to repair tracks quickly. They are used to it. But a delay of a few hours, in certain circumstances, can make a significant difference. If we can keep troops or ammunition from arriving fast, the invasion could go much better.”
“I want you to understand—I know that lives must be taken in a war. And I have taken my stand. I stood up to the Gestapo. My son and I fought an agent, injured him badly. I am no coward. But what I want is to save lives, not kill.”
Wolf nodded, and he seemed impressed. “You surprise me,” he said. “You fought a Gestapo agent? That is more than I have done.” He laughed. “You have some shoulders on you, and good arms, but you look too gentle.”
“One of my shoulders was broken by a Gestapo agent. And my knee. I’m no fighter, and I never was. But I will do what I have to do. I know you need younger men, ones who can carry heavy loads and run fast. I can’t do those things, so if you don’t want me, just say so. But I want to help if you will let me.”
“It’s good. I can use you. How shall I call you?”
Brother Stoltz laughed. “If you are a wolf, perhaps it’s best to call me Hase.”
Wolf laughed. “A hare? You said you couldn’t run.”
“That may depend on how scared I am.”
He nodded. “There’s good reason to be frightened, my friend. There is a certain amount of danger to others, as I said, but most of the danger is to us. I hope you understand that. The tracks are guarded these days, and the Abwehr is always trying to track us down. Once you join us, you are on the road to death. Perhaps, now, the Allies are close enough that we can hope to survive, but for years I have expected every day to be picked up and shot. Many of my friends have met that fate.”
“I understand. I thought about all of that before I made my contact.”
“All right, then. We know how to reach you. We have someone in Karlsruhe. He will contact you on the street, probably as you leave the bakery where you work. I will tell our man to mention a hare in some way, and that will be your way of knowing him. It wo
n’t be long now.”
“Good. I’ll be waiting for your contact.”
Wolf got up and walked away. Brother Stoltz would catch the next train back to Karlsruhe. He was glad that he had finally made this contact, but he was ill at ease. For such a long time he had wanted to do something more, strike a blow of some kind. At the same time, he knew how dangerous this was. Perhaps he owed his wife and family better than that. But then, that was what most Germans were thinking, and that’s why so few had taken a stand.
So Brother Stoltz waited, and he returned to Karlsruhe, and each day, as he left the bakery, he wondered whether someone would approach him. He was always a little relieved when it didn’t happen, since he was apprehensive about taking a step into deeper danger, but he also knew that the sooner the action came, the sooner the Allies would cross the Rhine and penetrate the Reich. And then, Hitler would fall.
***
LaRue had study hall in the library every day right after lunch. As often as not, she spent the time talking to her friend Verla Sumsion. LaRue actually wasn’t doing badly in school—at least for someone who rarely studied. She had raised her grades since fall, when her father had gotten upset with her about all the time she spent at the USO. LaRue had been more careful since then about handing in all the little busywork assignments she hated. What she didn’t bother to do was read her textbooks. She got through by listening to what was said in class and by bluffing on tests. Algebra couldn’t be bluffed, but it was easy for her, so she managed to get by with little effort there, too.
Today she was sitting across the table from Verla, and the two had been gabbing about this and that—mostly the basketball team, or more specifically, the boys on the basketball team. But then Verla surprised LaRue by asking, “Did I see you walking down my street with Cecil Broadbent the other night?”
“You might have,” LaRue said. “I did go for a walk with him.” What she didn’t admit was that she had gone for a walk with him not just once but three times.
