“Shh,” I said, trying to soothe her. “Such a stubborn girl. Look at me.” She would not. “Look at me,” I demanded. She did this time. To drive home my next point, I produced for her my identity book, complete with photograph and eagle and swastika emblem. “My country is at war. And I am Captain Harmon Becker. Acting group commander of Three Group, Jagdgeschwader Thirty-Two of my country’s Luftwaffe. That’s all I can be at this point.”
“You can be so much more than that.”
My head swam as I returned the booklet to my pocket. “I’m sorry,” I said with an air of finality. “What possessed you to do this?”
“They came to me for help,” was her simple reply. Then she added what could have been her epitaph: “Sometimes the right choices are the hardest choices.”
I pulled her up against me and held her tight. “Woman,” I whispered with a mixture of admiration for what she’d done and resentment over the position she’d put me in. “What am I to do with you?”
Then there was a knock on the door.
29
The rapping on the door continued with insistence. My first instinct was to reach for my pistol. She saw the motion of my hand and looked at me quizzically. I followed her to the threshold.
“Who is it?” she said.
“Um, it’s me, Stefan, Fräulein Amelia. From Koppel’s store?” She looked at me before opening the door. I holstered my sidearm and nodded.
The door creaked open and there stood a teenaged boy in rumpled pants and a brown frock coat, carrying a parcel wrapped in brown paper and secured by frayed twine.
“Oh hello, Stefan,” Amelia said with a relieved smile. “I’d forgotten about you. Come in while I get your money.”
“Thank you,” the boy said, and he stepped inside, removing his hat.
Then he almost leapt back out onto the street when he saw me standing there. He didn’t expect to come face-to-face with a Luftwaffe officer, and the look of awe was readily apparent. Boys who came of age after Hitler’s rise to power had been drilled to worship authority and my uniform.
He tucked the parcel under one arm and drew himself stiffly to attention. “Heil Hitler!” he blurted with a squeak. I returned the salute casually. Were there not a family of four with death sentences two stories above my head, I should have laughed at the sight. Instead I stared coolly at him. An awkward silence followed while Amelia rummaged in the next room for her purse. The lad was eyeing me curiously, as if cataloguing me, when Amelia returned with some Reichsmarks jingling in her palm.
“Stefan Rosner,” she said in as natural a voice as she could summon, “this is my friend, Captain Becker. He grew up here in Stauffenberg. The captain is on leave from the front.”
“Hello, sir,” he offered politely. Still he seemed to be taking mental notes about me, which made me uneasy in my heightened stage of paranoia. The younger children had been programmed by Nazi indoctrination to be on the constant lookout for enemies of the Reich—even among their own families.
Nevertheless, I tried to be nonchalant as I took the parcel, which contained canned goods, eggs, and powdered milk, from his hand. Amelia replaced it with the coins. “Tell Herr Koppel thank you and I hope he feels better.”
“I will, Fräulein.” He counted out the money with his finger. He nodded respectfully to my chest. “Herr Captain.” Then he clicked his heels and once more threw up an enthusiastic Nazi salute. “Heil Hitler!” I returned it in the same manner, and he retreated back onto the cobblestone street.
After Amelia shut the door, she stepped over and peered through the curtains, following Stefan’s retreat.
“Nazis,” she snorted. “And he could be such a nice boy. He reminds me of you when you were a young sprout.”
“I can’t remember ever being so young,” I said.
“It wasn’t that long ago.” Amelia smiled. “Koppel lets him work there. His father was killed in North Africa. He was a captain, like yourself.”
“No wonder he was gawking at me.” I sighed with relief. “He was making me nervous.”
“He was enamored with your uniform,” she said.
Carrying the groceries, I followed her into the kitchen.
“He seems more enamored with Hitler,” I observed.
“He’s not alone,” she said. “Even now as our cities burn and our young men die by the thousands, he still holds a wicked spell over us.” I handed her the items one by one, and she placed them in the cupboard. Then she wrapped me in her arms once more. “And now our pilots risk their lives every day to protect us.”
Although I held her close, as she closed her watery eyes and buried her face into my chest, my own eyes, dry and clear, uneasily drifted to the ceiling as if pulled skyward by a sinister magnet. This pilot is risking much more than that, I thought. And I shuddered at my future.
30
Supper at my home, my first in years, should have been filled with gaiety and celebration of my survival. But this was war, and even though I was far from the immediate dangers of the front, the shadow of the reaper by my side, waiting for his moment, was an unspoken presence in the house.
Outside my door, a clamoring parade of Hitler Youth, their unlined faces illuminated by bobbing torchlights, marched proudly through the streets of Stauffenberg like a brown-and-red striped serpent, singing and chanting. “Ein Volk! Ein Reich! Ein Führer!” Paul was among their standard-bearers, so it was just three of us, as Amelia thought my parents might want some time alone with their boy. While my mother circled the kitchen table ladling out portions of stew into our bowls, Father and I sat in the little parlor at the front of the house, our chiseled faces outlined by the familiar glow of a comforting fire. We sipped schnapps as I brought him up to date on what I’d been doing for the past two years.
Papa smiled in the direction of the kitchen. “You’ve made Mama happy tonight.” From the wireless on the counter by the stove drifted the Berlin Festival Orchestra’s performance of The Marriage of Figaro. Frau Becker knew every word in Italian, and her accompanying voice was pleasant to the ear. I could see where my own musicality originated. But the man responsible for my understanding the logic and mathematics of it all sat across from me as we soaked up the warmth from the fire—and the bottle. Two Becker men in uniform. He was a constable, and I, a fighter pilot. One soldier from the first Great War, one from the second. Through this common bond we’d paradoxically grown closer by my absence.
He was, of course, relieved that I’d survived thus far, but he was clearly unnerved by my tales from the front—unfettered by the omnipresent threat of censors and Nazi informants. I first hesitated to relate to him too much so as not to worry him, but he knew better. And as the alcohol unshackled us both, he grew more interested in the war and I more willing to tell him my tales. I recounted for him my part in the Russian campaign and how the first winter had almost wiped out the Ostheer, the Eastern Army. How only fanatical devotion to Hitler had saved it from annihilation. He reveled in my colorful escapades with the Greenhearts and was intrigued by the science of air combat. Finally I told him of my curious transfer to the West and my subordination to a paranoid major.
“And now a political lapdog is your commanding officer,” he said, sighing and peering into his glass. “How typical. New Order indeed. Like the barons of old. Only now it’s who drops his pants for those criminals in Berlin.”
“Papa,” I begged in a hushed voice. “It’s dangerous to say such things.”
“Bah! Who will report me?” he said dismissively. “Greta? You?” I noticed he didn’t say Paul. He knew better than to speak his mind in my kid brother’s presence these days. His eyes gleamed in the fire as he spoke. “Son, I do hope you’re being careful. On the ground as well as in the air. I heard you had a little row with our local SS worm Keitel.” I raised my eyebrows. “I know the owner of the Brauhaus where you two, shall we say, conversed with some animati
on. That boy is developing a reputation that will see him answering to Saint Peter for many things in the next life. Please tread lightly.”
“I know,” I said. “I acted stupidly.” Desperate to change the subject from the SS, considering what I now knew about Amelia’s undocumented guests, I smiled while reminding him of my pending meeting with the Führer and my medal. “Well, at least when I fly I don’t tread too lightly, eh Papa? But,” I added somberly, “I don’t know how much longer I can continue against such odds. The Allies grow stronger while we grow weaker.” I lowered my voice so Frau Becker couldn’t hear me from the kitchen. “You and Mama have to be prepared for my black note one day.”
He turned his reticent gaze towards my mother. “I wish you wouldn’t say such things, Harmon. I’ve lost one son already.” I saw a resignation that all would be lost reflected in his kind eyes.
“You mean Pauli?” I asked. “Oh, he’s just a boy. He’ll come to his senses in time.”
The old constable traced his finger in a circle on the rim of his glass, as he often did when deep in thought. “He thinks we’re winning, the little imbecile.” Father looked at me in helpless frustration. “He’s joining the Luftwaffe. Does he have a death wish?”
I put my hand on Father’s knee. “I tried to tell him, Papa. He won’t listen to me.”
“The only way he’d listen is if it came out of Goebbels’ sewer of a mouth.”
A deep silence but for the crackling of the flames enveloped us. Then my father said with a pleading gaze: “Try to protect him, Harmon. He’s not like you. He has too much of his mother in him. She is an unbearable optimist. But you are my son. You know as I do that, win or lose, only those with fighting skill and common sense will be left standing when this is all over. That or dumb luck. I fear Paul has neither.”
I shook my head. “I’ll try to get him assigned to my unit. Other than that, there’s not much I can do.”
He leaned back in his leather chair and exhaled deeply. “I suppose there’s nothing any of us can do for him.”
My mother broke the mood by calling us to supper. Father and I made our tipsy way into the kitchen. The sweet aroma from simmering beef stew, my mother humming along to the wireless, and the familiar sights from the happy days of my youth brought to me a sense of security within the plaster walls of my little home. For the rest of the evening we ate in peace and, for a brief time, the war was out there, in some other dimension apart from this toasty-warm cocoon deep in the Bavarian winter.
But then my thoughts would travel to the Krupinskis. Their gaunt faces staring at me with bewildered and frightened eyes reminded me that my life could not remain as such. And I could sense that even after two years of air combat, and one hundred kills on my rudder, my real war was just beginning.
Although it was well past midnight, I laid on my back in my old bed with my hands behind my head, staring through the darkness at the ceiling. My uniform hung neatly in the armoire; my visor cap rested on the end table next to a copy of Mein Kampf that I found on Paul’s dresser. I actually thumbed through it by the soft glow of a lamp. A heavy quilt, suspended by nails driven into the pane, was draped over the window to keep the light contained in the room. With air raids on German towns growing more common despite our fliers’ efforts, every little village of any consequence observed blackout conditions. As today’s raid on Adelstatz showed, being nestled in a remote river valley of the Oberfranken did not guarantee safety from Allied bombs.
Reading while in my bed was a simple pleasure I’d forgotten once in the Wehrmacht. Too few idle moments of relaxation presented themselves during wartime. But now I was home, in my familiar bed in the old room I shared with my brother, actually wearing warm flannel pajamas instead of my uniform, in which I often slept. Unfortunately there was nothing to read but Hitler’s memoir from prison. We had all been required to read it in gymnasium, our high-level secondary school, yet I never paid much attention to it then. But that was when I lived in another world. Now, with my country in its fourth year of war, with millions buried in countless holes dug into the continent or at the bottom of the sea, the words took on new significance to me:
“The personification of the devil as the symbol of all evil assumes the living shape of the Jew.”
When I read such passages, I understood now the reality of those words. I saw the Krupinski family huddled in Amelia’s attic while sadists like Keitel patrolled the streets. Mein Kampf had ceased to be Hitler’s “struggle” a long time ago. It was now a blueprint for the New Order.
“Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator. By defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.”
And I was doing my part to construct his vision of a New Europe, devoid of all but pure Aryan blood. Most of my countrymen, even if they had not become criminals, had easily donned the robes of accomplices. And I was among them. Krup was right.
All this was running through my mind when I heard the door to my room creak open. A line of light appeared in the door jam and widened until a lithe figure in a Hitler Youth uniform and cap revealed itself to me.
“Harmon,” he whispered. “Are you in here, Brother?”
I sat up, squinting until my eyes adjusted to the hallway light shining behind Paul like an aura.
“I am.”
“I hope I didn’t wake you,” he said, entering the room and tossing his hat on his bed.
“I can’t sleep,” I said, leaning on my elbow. “It’s too quiet for me.”
Paul sat on his bed facing me. He slid off his high boots. “I’m surprised you’re not staying with Amelia.” He had a lecherous grin on his young face.
“We’re not yet married.” I smiled back. He crinkled his brow with doubt. “Fine,” I said, laughing. “Hanna would have me castrated if she thought I was having her daughter under her roof.” That was a lie. Amelia and I knew it would not bode well for my family if the Jews were discovered while I was staying at her house. The SS penchant for making the parents pay for the sins of the children, and vice versa, was legion by this time.
“She’s too frail to care,” Paul declared, removing his shirt. He looked so pale and thin to me. So much a boy still.
“Hardly,” I replied. “She’s quite aware of the world around her.” Then it hit me. Hanna must have known what was going on two stories above her head. Amelia never would have continued to house them without her mother’s approval. The apple, as they say, does not fall far from the tree. I was coming to appreciate what exceptional women the Engel ladies were.
“How was your rally?” I asked Paul, clicking on the lamp on the end table.
“Splendid!” replied my kid brother as he removed the rest of his brown uniform and donned his sleeping thermals. The transformation from fierce Nazi to innocent boy was startling.
Paul went on to tell me about the rally. How his troop was organizing a trip to Berlin to help clear rubble from British raids, but he was soon to report for duty in flight training. (I cringed but held my tongue, as it was pointless.) He went on about how well the war was going. How it was only a matter of time before the Russians had had enough. That the Allies were taking a pounding in Italy. And those making any attempt to cross the English Channel to breach Hitler’s “Atlantic Wall” would suffer the same fate as the slaughtered Canadians in Dieppe the year before. But most of all he waxed poetic on how proud he was to be German and how he could not wait to finally join the fight. “Now don’t try to change my mind again, Harmon,” he cautioned me.
“I’m through with that discussion,” I assured him wearily.
“Glad to hear it. In fact you’re lucky I didn’t report you for what you said to me.”
I shot him a frown. “Report me? For what? For trying to save my brother’s life?”
Paul shrugged and crawled into bed. “For trying to stop me from doing my
duty to the Fatherland,” he replied. “Others have been arrested for less,” he added indifferently.
I shifted to sit up on the edge of the bed and glared at him while he seemed to pay me no mind at all. “I should give you a good thrashing.”
Paul smiled wryly. “I hardly think that would stop the SS from coming for you, don’t you think, Brother?” He understood better than I the ways of the New World, it seemed. Without a cockpit or an airbase, I was out of my element. “Good night, Harmon. I’m tired.”
“And I’m sick,” I said as I laid back down on the bed. “What’s happened to you?”
Paul hoisted himself up on his side. I can still see the boyish face with hazel eyes grinning in the orange glow of the lamplight. “I saw the truth. That’s what has happened to me. You and Papa are from other worlds. Papa’s an old fart and will never change. But I still don’t understand why you don’t fully embrace the New Germany.”
“Perhaps because I have blood on my hands, Little Brother. As does Papa. Can you say as much?”
“I hope to soon,” was the last thing he said before curling up and falling asleep, as if he didn’t have a care in the world. I just stared at him as his breathing grew deeper and dreams of the glories of a Reich that would last a thousand years filled his unconscious mind.
The weather turned increasingly foul during the night. December returned and brought damp snows and frozen clouds to Stauffenberg. The next day I spent the time before my train for Berchtesgaden was to depart in the company of Amelia in her home. We stayed inside this time. That was fine with me, as out there in those once friendly streets strutted Keitel and his SS minions like gamecocks. Despite the risks of the SS kicking down the door at any minute and whisking us all away, I wanted to be with her. I’d never realized the steel girders that held up her soft facade. This was a woman who would give a man nothing but grief until the end of his days should he marry her. And that was exactly what I intended to do. But not until the war was over and I’d made it through. I had no intention of inflicting the status of war widow on anyone.
Of Another Time and Place Page 14
