Prisoner of Night and Fog

by Anne Blankman

“Herr Hitler,” the chauffeur said quietly, “the audience should be leaving any moment.”

  Hitler grunted. “Always, they want to hunt me down after a speech and haggle over every point. He waggled a finger. “Don’t give anyone a chance to challenge your ideas!”

  “Please, Uncle Dolf, I just need a moment.” Desperation tightened her voice into something she barely recognized. “Mama says we can’t afford it. She says I need to find a job, but there is so little work, and I want so much to be a doctor, and I’m certain there’s something you can do—”

  “Hanfstaengl,” Uncle Dolf interrupted, “weren’t you complaining the other day that your office isn’t adequately staffed?”

  For the first time, Gretchen noticed the tall man lounging against the lamppost a few feet away. Ernst Hanfstaengl was the NSDAP foreign press chief, a bear of a man with an immense lantern jaw and wiry dark hair. “I’ve done more than complain about it, Herr Hitler; I’ve practically shouted it from the rooftops. And I’ve been shut up in a tiny office where nobody can ever find me—”

  “Yes, yes, we really must improve your situation, Hanfstaengl,” Hitler said hastily. “Fräulein Müller shall be your new assistant. She can help your secretary, whenever you get around to hiring one. She’ll start the day after tomorrow, which should afford you enough time to find her a desk.”

  Gretchen wanted to object. Hadn’t he understood when she said she didn’t want a job but to continue her schooling? Still, she said nothing. No one refused a favor from Hitler.

  Hanfstaengl shot a resigned glance at Gretchen. “I don’t suppose you have any secretarial experience, do you?”

  “Well, I help my mother at the boardinghouse—”

  “In other words, no.” He rolled his eyes.

  “Hanfstaengl,” Hitler snapped, “surely hiring the daughter of one of our fallen comrades isn’t too much to ask?”

  Hanfstaengl swallowed a sigh, his massive shoulders practically shaking from the effort. “Of course not.”

  “Her father made the ultimate sacrifice for the good of the Party.” Hitler’s voice grew louder. Behind them, Gretchen heard the clatter of footsteps; the crowds were leaving the Circus Krone. “If it had not been for Klaus Müller and his daring act, I would not be here. But Providence had other plans for me.”

  “Herr Hitler,” the chauffeur said, “we really must be going!”

  “Yes, yes.” Uncle Dolf kissed Gretchen’s hands. “Don’t look so downhearted, my child; it is all arranged.”

  But hovered on her lips though she didn’t dare say it.

  Hitler and Hanfstaengl got into the Mercedes. As the car drove away, she watched its taillights turn into ruby-red pinpricks.

  He hadn’t understood. That was all. Once she had a chance to explain the problem to him properly, he would talk to Mama. He would find a way for her to continue her schooling. Hadn’t he arranged for Geli to begin medical studies at the university, and when she tired of them, found a music instructor so she could begin a singing career? Surely he could do the same for her.

  The tramp of footsteps cut into her thoughts. Marching toward her was a group of young men, dressed identically in black shirts and red bow ties. Her legs locked her in place. Communists. Of the dozens of warring political parties that had sprung up in Munich after the Great War, this group was the only one she feared. Uncle Dolf called Communism a plague sweeping down from the Russian steppes and infecting so many European countries, an ideology formed solely to promote Jewish interests and destroy all non-Jewish nations.

  And they were carrying truncheons.

  “We heard an ugly rumor that there was a Nazi gathering tonight,” one of them called. He looked her up and down. “I see the ugly part was wrong.”

  Frantically, she scanned the narrow street. Nobody else up ahead. Behind, audience members slowly meandered out of the Circus Krone, chattering with one another. They were a few yards away. Not close enough if the Communists decided she was worth attacking. She’d heard of girls involved in street fights between National Socialists and Communists; one girl had even died in Berlin last year. There was nowhere to run.

  “You’re mistaken.” She willed her voice not to shake. “I’m walking home, that’s all.”

  “A likely story.” One of the men nudged another. “Look at her necklace.”

  The Hakenkreuz! Her fingers closed over the charm. She’d forgotten she was wearing it. She might as well string a placard around her neck, proclaiming she was one of Hitler’s favorites.

  “You don’t want to hurt a girl,” she said.

  “No,” the same man said. “But I’m happy to take you as a hostage.”

  And he leapt at her.

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  7

  FOR A HORRIBLE INSTANT, THE MAN WAS suspended in midair. Gretchen watched him coming toward her, his body lowering, lowering—

  Then a dark blur knocked the man sideways. The two grappled on the pavement, swearing at each other. She heard the sickening sound of fists meeting flesh. The dark blur scrambled to his feet, glancing at her. It was Kurt. A cut under his eye dripped blood.

  “Get out of here!” he shouted, and she turned and ran.

  Behind her, she heard the Communists’ feet thundering on the sidewalk. Ahead, she saw Reinhard and a group of SA fellows, standing in a bunch, laughing and talking, then turning, their faces slackening in surprise when they saw her.

  “Communists!” she screamed. “Help!”

  They rushed past her. She kept running, but someone grabbed her arm, and she nearly snatched it back before she saw who it was.

  SA chief Röhm. He had lost his cap, so she could see how his hair had been shaved so close to the scalp that his pale skin showed, a fresh-scrubbed pink like a pig’s hide. His small eyes focused on hers. Pockmarks disfigured his broad, florid face. From shrapnel, she’d heard, but she didn’t know if the injuries had occurred during the Great War or while he had lived as a mercenary soldier in Bolivia during the twenties. The deep gouges had always unsettled her, ever since she’d seen him again in April, after Hitler summoned him back to Munich to take over the SA.

  “Fräulein Müller, this is no place for you.” His voice sounded as rough as pieces of sandpaper rubbing together. “Come.”

  His grip was tight on her wrist as he pulled her along. Stumbling, she broke into a light jog to match his pace. Ahead, the avenue stretched out like a gray ribbon before it fell into darkness, and behind, the men’s cries and grunts started to fade.

  “Don’t look so frightened, Fräulein.” Röhm stopped, his heavy chest rising and falling with labored breaths. He grinned, startling her. “Street fights are to be celebrated, not feared. That’s one of the many things the Führer and I argue about. The trouble with you is the same trouble with most Germans: Our countrymen have forgotten how to hate.” He ran a broad hand over his brown tunic, smoothing out the wrinkles. “Your brother understands.”

  She recalled Reinhard’s blank eyes meeting hers across the kitchen table as he casually told their mother how much Gretchen must like Yids. She shuddered. Yes, he understood hatred. Sometimes she even wondered if he hated her. Or if he thought his tricks were a bizarre form of brotherly teasing—

  The shrill blast of police whistles pierced the air. Röhm cursed. “I must get the men to scatter. I’ll send Kurt to ferry you home.”

  “No! That’s not necessary!” But she was speaking to his back; he was already jogging back to the melee. More men ran from the direction of the Circus Krone to join the fight. Thirty or forty men now spilled across the street, punching and shouting.

  A few yards away, Reinhard smashed his fist into a man’s face, watching emotionlessly as the man crumpled to the ground. Another man flung himself onto Reinhard’s back, but the added weight barely moved her brother. With one quick motion, he reached back, seizing hi
s attacker’s arms before flipping him overhead and throwing him down to the pavement.

  Gretchen couldn’t look away. He made it look so easy, crushing men with a few well-aimed punches. As he stepped into the golden light of a streetlamp, she saw how calm and impassive his face looked; his eyes flicked back and forth, searching for a possible threat, and his jaw clenched, but no anger tightened his expression, no fear contorted his features. And yet . . . Gretchen scanned the other men. All of them looked furious or scared, sometimes both. Reinhard was the only one who appeared untouched.

  More police whistles sounded. The men broke apart, racing into the shadows. As quickly as it had begun, the fight seemed over. Gretchen released the breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. Shaking, she turned away.

  “Gretchen!” Kurt called behind her.

  So Röhm hadn’t forgotten his promise to find her a chauffeur. The thought of getting back into Kurt’s car was more than she could bear. She remembered the Daimler-Benz skidding across the cobblestones, its headlamps illuminating the Jew’s face, frozen with shock, for one terrifying second before the car spun in the other direction. But there was no reason she could refuse a ride. She would have to go with him.

  “A rough bunch tonight,” Kurt said as he caught up to her. “A few more minutes and we would have had the best of them. We’d better get out of here before the police arrive.”

  They ran onto a side street. At this late hour, it was deserted, the lights in the office buildings extinguished. Halfway down the block, Kurt’s auto sat at the curb. As Kurt began to drive, Gretchen stared through the smeary windshield, listening to the tires rumble over the cobbles, wondering what she could possibly say to fill the silence. The old man! Cautiously, she watched Kurt from the corner of her eye. He leaned over the steering wheel, frowning, peering hard at the street.

  “I knew I should have washed the windshield,” he muttered.

  Ahead, a few men weaved drunkenly along the sidewalk. Somewhere, a door opened and closed, letting out a quick blare of music.

  “Kurt,” Gretchen said, “who was that old man? The one you fellows removed from the Circus Krone tonight?”

  “Hmm? Oh, just a half-dead Party crank.” Kurt’s frown deepened. The drunks had spotted them, and one of them had started to unbutton his trousers, leering at Gretchen. “Fools!” Kurt stuck his head out the open car window. “Nobody wants to see your pitiful excuse for manhood!” Must he fight with everyone? Gretchen bit back a sigh.

  After a quick glance for traffic, Kurt jammed the accelerator, speeding the car through an intersection. “Boss’s orders,” he added. “Röhm said the man’s to be dragged out of every meeting he attends.”

  The response seemed strange. Gretchen suppressed a shiver. What interest could Röhm have in an elderly, infirm Party comrade?

  “What happened to him?” she asked.

  “Hmm? Oh, I don’t know.” Kurt patted his pocket, probably searching for cigarettes. “We taught the fellow a lesson and then he staggered off with some boy. Weeping like a child.” He grinned and held up a pack. “Hurrah, cigarettes!”

  “Why does SA-Stabschef Röhm care about the old man?”

  Kurt slammed on the brake, so hard that she had to fling out her hands so she didn’t fly into the gearbox. “Idiot drivers.” He gestured at the Opel crawling front of them. “The fellow’s been hanging around Party headquarters and attending the Führer’s speeches. Asking all sorts of questions about the putsch.”

  The putsch. Her heart beat faster. The event that had ended in the street shoot-out that had killed her father.

  “Questions?” She hoped she sounded casual. “What did he want to know?”

  Fumbling in his pocket for a lighter, Kurt steered one-handed along a quiet street. When the lighter flared into life, its tiny orange flame illuminated his face for an instant, revealing his fair eyebrows and jade-green eyes. “All manner of nonsense. The position of the men in the front line. Powder burns. Stupid old man’s probably going senile.”

  She froze. A dull roaring filled her ears. Your father did not die a martyr to the Nazi cause, and your family’s precarious position within Hitler’s party is predicated on a lie. An old Party comrade, who had known her father during the early years of struggle, who might have marched alongside her father during the final minutes of his life . . . “Yes, nonsense,” she managed to say. “He must be losing his mind.”

  When Gretchen finally got back to the boardinghouse, closing the door in Kurt’s face as he leaned in for a kiss, which struck her as ludicrous, she hurried up the stairs, skipping the creaking steps. As she did every night, she locked the door, slid the chair under the knob, and untied the heavy curtains. Alone, at last.

  She found Striped Peterl in her armoire, curled on the toes of her winter galoshes. She carried him over to the bed and stretched across the chenille coverlet, letting the cat lie on her chest, rumbling, as she petted him and thought.

  The old man had asked about the men’s positions in the front line. He must have meant the march on the Residenzstrasse. Eight years ago, after failing to take over the city in the putsch, the National Socialists had paraded through Munich, right into a waiting cadre of police officers. Her father had walked with Uncle Dolf in the front. When the shooting started, Papa had jumped in front of Hitler, his body jolting as bullets bit into his chest. Taking the shots intended for his leader.

  The familiar band tightened around her chest, cutting off her breathing. Calm, calm. She closed her eyes and focused on the flow of oxygen in and out of her lungs. Three deep breaths, the old trick Hitler had taught her. Feeling the air flow into her nostrils, her chest filling.

  The method worked, as it always did. She opened her eyes. The men in the front line—a famous Great War general, a former flying ace, an army colonel, a prominent National Socialist from Russia, the Munich SA leader, Hitler’s personal bodyguard, Hitler himself, and her father, Hitler’s old friend from the war.

  Papa shot . . . Memories swamped her—the tickle of his mustache on her cheek when he kissed her, and the warm roughness of his hands as they patted her face.

  They had been sitting on the kitchen floor, which was the only room they could afford to heat during the miserably cold November of 1923. Her father wore his Great War uniform and an armband decorated with a swastika, and they huddled beside the stove as he placed a kitten in her hands.

  “It’s for you,” Papa said. “I’ve already named it Striped Peterl.”

  “Papa, I love it!” She stroked its soft fur. “But what if it runs away, too? Like Little Franzl?”

  A strange expression twisted her father’s face; for an instant, he looked afraid. But that was ridiculous; her big, strong father was afraid of nothing, and certainly not of the family cat that had disappeared a month earlier.

  “You must be very careful with it,” he finally said. “Don’t let anyone else play with it. The cat is just for you, do you understand?”

  “Yes, Papa. Thank you.” When she kissed him, she felt a sudden wetness on her cheeks and knew it came from his tears, and she cried, too, because Papa had promised by tomorrow night the National Socialist flags would fly from City Hall. But what he had to do first would be very dangerous.

  And now, eight years later, in another house, in another part of the city, in another stage of her life, she felt like that nine-year-old child again, alone and mourning the father who would never return.

  She kept his uniform on the armoire’s top shelf. When Mama had come home from the city morgue with Papa’s things, she had wanted to burn it, and toss out the battered shoes, the bloodstained woolen long johns. But Gretchen had begged to keep the shirt, the ruined cloth she had embraced over and over, sobbing because it hadn’t protected Papa at all, needing it because it had been the last garment to touch his skin.

  The shirt had been tucked into a small square, and she shook it out, running her fingers over the bullet holes. So many holes, she couldn’t count them all, al
though she had tried. Gunpowder and dried blood, faint gray and rusty red, everywhere. Tears burned her eyes, and she started to fold it, freezing when she saw the tear in its back.

  Her breath caught. A hole, on the back of the shirt, where her father’s shoulder blades would have been. A bullet hole. Gray powder had been ground into the cloth around the hole’s edges. Confused, she ran her fingers over the ragged circle, stiff with dried blood, discolored from a gun blast. Powder burns, the old man had said.

  She knew the shape bullets made when they tore into something, and the grayish powder they sprayed if you fired at a close target. Uncle Dolf had taught her long ago, when she was a small child. He was one of the best marksmen in the city and believed everyone ought to know how to handle a weapon.

  On Sunday afternoons, after he stopped by for tea, he and Papa would take her and Reinhard to the Englischer Garten, to a copse of beeches far from the paths, so no one would see them practice shooting at the trees. At first, the recoil shoved her back a few steps, into Uncle Dolf’s legs. He laughed and showed her how to dig her heels into the dirt, so she could brace herself.

  She stared at Papa’s shirt. If the hole had been formed by a bullet’s exit, there wouldn’t have been powder burns. Only blood. But she could see it, a messy circle of grayish dust and dried blood.

  Someone had shot her father in the back. State police troopers had stood in front of him. Only other National Socialists had been behind him.

  The Jew had been right.

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  8

  THE NEXT NIGHT, GRETCHEN WALKED INTO THE Golden Phoenix dance hall and stopped short to stare. Blue-and-gold designs papered the walls, turning the enormous space into a glittering Easter egg. A glorious sound, pulsing with sinuous energy, cascaded from the orchestra stand. Small tables had been arranged along the room’s edges, where couples in evening dress lounged over drinks.