by Alan Gratz
Title Page
Nazis in the Night
Cabbage Heads
Pee Break
On Stage
Independence
Dead Or Alive
Rupert
Be Brave
Crash Landing
Wolves
The Battle of the Bridge
Obeying Orders
Exhausted
Pakow
An Empty Nest
They Always Come Back
Left Behind
The Wasp’s Sting
Samira’s Army
Rupert Two
The End of a Rescue
Froufrou
Sneak Peek at Allies
About the Author
Also by Alan Gratz
Copyright
The door to the tavern down the street swung open, and Samira Zidane gasped in horror. Five Nazi officers staggered out into the lane, laughing and barking loudly at each other in German. Beside her, the little white dog that had become Samira’s friend and companion in the last few hours, a scrappy terrier she’d named Cyrano, growled at the soldiers. He seemed to hate Nazis even more than Samira did.
The soldiers were too wrapped up in whatever they were laughing about to have spotted her yet, and Samira snatched Cyrano up in her arms and looked for a place to hide. It was long after curfew, the time the Nazis set for everyone in this part of occupied France to be inside their homes. People who were caught out after hours were often shot on sight as spies.
And Samira really was a spy. She had been helping her mother run messages to and from the French Resistance for months, and in the past few hours she’d actually helped the French Resistance sabotage German trains.
Samira’s simple green dress and brown sweater might help her blend in as a villager if she was caught, but her light brown skin and black hair would definitely make her stand out. Samira was French-Algerian, and the Nazis would see she was one of the people they considered inferior and regularly shipped off to work camps.
Samira spotted a shop doorway that was set back from the street and hurried toward it, one hand around Cyrano and the other clutching the bottom of the blue kerchief she wore around her head. The one her mother had worn, before the Nazis had stolen her away. Quick and quiet as a fox, Samira jumped the two steps up to the doorway and darted into the small sliver of shadow where the Nazis wouldn’t see her—and ran right into the other person who was already hiding there.
Samira tried to back away, but the person she’d run into quickly put a hand on her arm to keep her still. As her eyes adjusted to the shadows, Samira saw who shared her hiding place. He was a boy with a pale, lean, hungry face and unkempt brown hair. Samira was twelve years old, and this boy couldn’t have been more than three or four years older. He wore a torn brown jacket that was a size too big for him, a dirty white shirt, and gray pants that were held around his waist with a bit of rope.
The surprise of finding him here in the shadows had sent Samira’s heart into her throat, but Cyrano had already decided he liked the boy and was licking his arm with enthusiasm.
The boy put a finger to his lips to tell Samira to be quiet, and she nodded. Whoever he was, he was as afraid of the Nazis as she was, and he didn’t want to get caught either.
The German soldiers lingered in the street, still laughing and braying at each other. They had been out enjoying themselves at the local tavern, and now it was time for them to return to their beds in whatever garrison they were stationed in.
“Lousy cabbage heads,” the boy whispered beside her. “Walking around like they own the place.”
It was hard to argue they didn’t own the place, Samira thought. Nazi Germany had invaded France in 1940, and in no time at all they had rolled into Paris, the capital, and claimed the whole country for the German empire. The northern part of France, like here in Normandy, where Samira and her mother now lived, was under direct control of Germany, while the southern part of France was ruled by a French government that answered to the Nazis. For the last four years, Germany had moved soldiers and guns into barracks and fortresses all over France, solidifying their control. Now it was going to take a full-on Allied invasion—of soldiers from England and the United States—to drive them out again.
An invasion that was supposed to happen just a few hours from now!
Samira felt the boy tense beside her, and she looked back down the street. The Nazi soldiers were on the move again—and they were headed right for where Samira and the boy were hiding.
The Nazi soldiers swaggered down the street, conquerors enjoying their victory. They were getting closer. Closer. Samira and the boy were hidden in the shadows, but the doorway wasn’t very deep. All it would take was for one of the soldiers to turn his head and see them, and it was all over. They would be captured and taken prisoner.
Will I be taken to where my mother is being held? Samira wondered. Her mother had been captured earlier that night, trying to help another French family escape a Nazi roundup. Samira thought her mother was being held with the others in a prison in the city of Bayeux. That’s where Samira had been heading, hoping that the Germans would be too concerned with the Allied invasion to execute their prisoners at dawn, as they often did.
But what if the Allied invasion didn’t work? What if the Germans shot down all the paratroopers and threw all the American and English soldiers and tanks coming up from the beaches back into the sea? Then her mother and all the other French prisoners would die. And if Samira was caught here and now, she’d be shot with them.
The German soldiers sang at the top of their lungs as they came closer, daring anyone to tell them to be quiet. No one would, of course. Every door in the little French village was shut and locked and every window shade pulled down tight while people quaked under their bed covers. The Nazis were real-life boogeymen. Sober, they were fearsome masters. Drunk, like these men were, they could become monsters.
Samira’s breath caught as one of the soldiers broke away from the rest of the group and staggered toward the doorway where she and the boy were hiding. The soldier fumbled with his belt, and with dread, Samira realized he was coming this way to relieve himself.
Samira turned and tried the door handle to the shop, but it was closed. There was nowhere for her and the boy to go. They were trapped, and the Nazi was almost on top of them.
Beside her, the boy pulled a pistol from the waist of his pants. Samira’s eyes went wide. She hadn’t noticed the gun before. The boy looked at her with wild eyes, as if telling her he would kill the Nazi soldier rather than be caught. Samira panicked. Being captured by the Nazis was one thing—shooting one, that would turn the drunk soldiers into monsters for sure. Each of the Germans carried a pistol of his own at his side, and if they heard a single shot and saw their comrade fall they would fire every last bullet they had into the shadows of this doorway. The boy couldn’t shoot them all. Samira and Cyrano and the boy would probably be dead before he could fire a second shot.
Samira’s mind raced. What to do—what to do? The German soldier was going to see them any second now. The boy raised his pistol. Cyrano growled.
A calm came over Samira. The same kind of calm she felt before she walked out onto the stage during a play at school. When all the rehearsing, all the memorization of lines, all the butterflies suddenly went away, and she stepped out of herself and into another character. Became someone else. She felt that same liberation of spirit now, and in that moment, she knew what she had to do.
Samira put Cyrano on the ground, pretended to pull the door closed behind her, and stepped out into the street.
“No,” the boy whispered, reaching out for her at the last second. But he was too late. Samira stepped out into the light of the full moon, drawing her kerchief close and hugging an
arm to her chest against the cold.
“Go potty now, Cyrano. Hurry,” she said. Then she looked up and saw the German soldier right in front of her. She sucked in her breath and stopped, acting surprised, as if this was the first time she’d seen him.
Samira appearing out of the shadows so suddenly in the middle of the night startled the German soldier, and he staggered back. Cyrano ran circles around the Nazi, yipping at him, and now Samira had the attention of all the drunk soldiers in the street.
One of the soldiers asked her in German what she was doing outside so late after curfew.
“I’m sorry,” Samira replied in French. “I don’t speak German.” Which wasn’t true. She spoke a little, the same way everybody else in German-occupied France had picked up a little German. But she wasn’t going to tell them that.
The German soldier groaned and repeated himself in French. “Why are you out after curfew?”
“My dog was scratching at the door like he had to pee,” Samira told them.
“So I see,” said one of the other soldiers. He pointed at Cyrano, who was, at that moment, peeing on the leg of the German soldier who’d been headed off into the doorway to do the same thing.
“Hey! Cut that out!” the soldier said, hopping backward.
His friends fell all over themselves laughing.
“I’m sorry! I’m so sorry,” Samira said, running after Cyrano. The dog led her on a merry chase among the Nazis, nipping at them as he went.
“Your dog doesn’t seem to like Germans,” another soldier said.
“No, no,” Samira said. “He loves you.”
Cyrano put the lie to her words by biting at the heels of the soldier who had to pee. Samira scooped up Cyrano in her arms and hid a smile.
High up in the sky behind the soldiers, Samira saw the black silhouettes of half a dozen parachutes against the bright full moon. The invasion. Soon these German soldiers would have lots more to worry about, but for now, Samira had to save herself and the boy in the doorway.
“All right. Your dog’s done his business,” said a soldier holding a wine bottle. He seemed to be the one in charge. “Now go on back to bed. We’ll forgive you being out after curfew this one time, but next time he pees on the rug instead. Understand?”
“Yes, yes. Thank you,” Samira said. She looked back and forth between the doorway and the soldiers. A few more steps and they would see the boy.
“Are you headed back to the garrison?” Samira asked.
The soldier with the bottle narrowed his eyes warily.
“Why?” he asked.
“Because the garrison isn’t that way, it’s that way,” Samira said, pointing in the other direction down the street. Samira had no idea where their fort was in this part of France. Her adventures before now had taken her far from home tonight. But she hoped the German soldiers were too drunk to know one direction from another.
The soldiers looked back and forth and frowned, and their leader cursed.
“These French villages all look alike,” he said in German. He shook his head and started off down the road in the other direction, and the soldiers followed him.
“Au revoir!” Samira called to the soldiers as she went back into the shadows to join the boy. She worried that was laying it on a bit thick, but the soldiers walked on without looking back.
“That was amazing,” the boy whispered when the soldiers were out of sight. “I can’t believe you did that.”
“I can’t believe you were going to shoot him!” Samira said.
The boy blushed and put the pistol away.
“My name is Lucien,” he told her as they stepped out from the shadows.
“I’m Atalanta,” Samira told him. “And this is Cyrano,” she said, holding up the dog. “Those are our code names. We work for the French Resistance.”
“I’m with the Resistance too!” Lucien told her. “My code name is Lycastus.”
“Then come help me find my mother!” Samira said. “She’s being held in Bayeux.”
“Come with you to Bayeux? But that’s hours from here! I can’t,” Lucien said. “Besides, I have a mission.” He pulled a pair of wire cutters from his pocket. “I have to cut all the telephone lines from here to Saint-Georges so the cabbage heads can’t call for reinforcements.” He leaned in conspiratorially. “The invasion is happening tonight!”
“I know,” Samira said. “My mother was captured delivering the message to the fighters in the woods. If the English and the Americans make it up off the beach in time, the Germans might not shoot her at dawn with the other prisoners. But if the invasion isn’t successful—”
“It will be!” Lucien told her. “It has to be!” He turned to leave. “You better get out of here before those soldiers realize you sent them off in the wrong direction. And stay off the roads if you can!”
“Wait!” Samira called, but the boy was already running away into the darkness.
“Looks like it’s just you and me again, Cyrano,” Samira told the little dog. She let him down, and he shook himself and fell into a trot alongside her.
Cyrano’s family had been taken as prisoners at the same time Samira’s mother had, and it seemed like he and Samira were the only ones interested in saving their lives. But Bayeux was the biggest city in this part of Normandy, and a great many Nazi soldiers were stationed there. There was no way she and Cyrano could free the other prisoners on their own. Samira was determined to get to Bayeux by morning nonetheless, to be there when the Allies arrived. And if they didn’t …
Samira felt a pang in her chest at the thought. But everything in its own time, as her mother would say. No sense crying before you were hurt.
Samira left the road, as Lucien had advised, stepping carefully through cow pastures. But always north, toward Bayeux. Tall hedgerows hid her from view. Overhead, airplanes droned by constantly, accompanied by the boom-boom-boom of German anti-aircraft guns. Gray clouds came and went, but in the light from the moon and the tracer fire she could still see the tiny black dots that filled the skies like the speckles on Normandy’s cows. Allied paratroopers, dropping behind enemy lines to fight the Germans. Her heart swelled at the idea.
We will finally be free from the Nazis, she thought. After four long years of living in fear, it was almost too much to hope for. What would she and her mother do then? she wondered. A little voice inside her said, “Your mother’s not free yet. Might never be free. Might be—”
No. She quashed the thought and let herself dream. She had to live with hope, not fear, or she would curl up into a ball and cry right here in the meadow with the cows.
When the war was over, she and her mother would return to Paris. Yes. Her mother would go back to the university and study law, like before, and then they would travel to Algeria, in North Africa. The French colony that Samira called her own but had never been to. Never seen. The French would grant Algeria their independence for helping free France from German rule, and Samira and her mother would no longer be second-class citizens. They and all the other Algerians would rise from the ashes of this world war and build a new, free nation.
The sound of gunshots filled the air, and Samira ducked instinctively. Fighting? Here? Now? But she was hours from the coast! The sounds of war were getting closer, but everywhere she looked, she saw only sleepy cows and open fields. There—in the sky—a paratrooper was coming down just a few hundred kilometers away! All the other parachutes had looked like little mushrooms in the clouds, but this one was as big as a tree, and the dark silhouette of a man dangled from the bottom. The Germans must be shooting at him, Samira thought. She didn’t see any German soldiers, but the field was filled with the sound of gunfire.
The man on the parachute swung down, down, down, until he crashed into a stand of trees at the far end of the field. Samira could still hear gunshots and explosions, but she had to find the man. He might need her help.
And maybe, just maybe, he could help Samira free her mother.
Cyrano yipped mer
rily, his little paws a blur as he ran alongside Samira. The sound of the gunfire and explosions grew louder, and Samira ducked again, worried she might be shot. But she didn’t see any soldiers, didn’t see any explosions. She and Cyrano made it to the small cluster of trees, and she slowed. This was where she had seen the parachute come down, and she fought to calm her pounding heart as she searched the ground for the soldier.
Nothing. Nothing. The sound of battle filled the small wood all around her, but she and Cyrano were totally alone. The trees—the paratrooper must have gotten caught in the trees!
Samira looked up, and immediately she saw him. The soldier’s parachute had gotten caught in the branches of an oak tree, and he was hanging loose in the wind. He was no more than a silhouette, and his arms and legs dangled limply from his body.
“Hello?” Samira called out. She looked around, worried that any German soldiers in the area might have heard her, then tried again. “Hello?”
She was speaking French, and she assumed the paratrooper spoke English—he was likely from the United States or the United Kingdom, after all—but he didn’t say anything back in any language. Had his landing knocked him unconscious? Had the Nazis shot him on the way down, and he was dead? Samira had to know. Had to help, if she could.
“Wait here,” she told Cyrano, and she began to climb.
It was hard to get started. The oak’s lowest branch was almost out of her reach, and when she grabbed it, it was almost too thin and weak to support her. But Samira was small and deft, and she scrabbled up until she found a thicker branch to hold her. Up and up she climbed. It seemed to take forever, and all the while anti-aircraft guns boomed overhead and the gunshots and mortar explosions continued. Below her, Cyrano got smaller and smaller, but the paratrooper was looking bigger. And, unfortunately, less alive. He hung lifelessly, like a dummy stuffed with straw. Samira’s breaths came short and quick, and she felt tears well up in her eyes. What would she do if he really was dead?