The Children's War

by Stroyar, J. N.

  “Yes, I should have resorted to it,” he murmured. Courage?

  “And Kasia told her to come by with the child at any time. She likes Pawel, so you can bet she’ll be here. Magdalena will be well cared for.”

  He smiled his thanks, but still his eyes strayed unbidden to the path his daughter had taken.

  The following evening he watched the path even more hopelessly as Liesel and Pawel approached the house. He gave his daughter one last kiss, and Madzia gave him a hug and wiped at the tears that ran down his face. She giggled at thewet warmth and sucked her fingers to determine its taste. Making a face at the salty water, she squirmed in his arms and he set her down. She toddled over to Zosia, who went into the hall to deliver her into Liesel’s care. As was now her habit, she howled at the disruption in her playtime and clung to Zosia’s neck. Zosia carefully extracted her and, ignoring Liesel’s presence, kissed the child. Liesel gasped in horror and looked meaningfully to Pawel to upbraid his uppity, servant, but he just shrugged. As Liesel said her good-bye to Pawel, Zosia withdrew into the sitting room to see how her husband was coping. Peter watched from a window as Liesel retreated back down the path with her charge. He brushed the tears from his face with an impatience that betrayed his embarrassment.

  “I’ll miss her,” Zosia ventured. “She has a lot of personality.”

  Peter nodded. “I’m glad you talked with Teresa. I feel a lot better about her care.”

  “Don’t worry, love, something will work out.”

  He shook his head slowly. What could they possibly do? There was nothing short of stealing the child, and unlike their adversaries, they did not indulge in kidnapping. There were far too many pressing problems to waste resources and political advantage on sorting out the details of one person’s life; Tadek’s wife was certain proof of that. No, he would never get permission to abduct his own child, and without permission and therefore without a place for her to live, he could offer her no life at all.

  They returned to Szaflary and spent the remaining time before their departure preparing for their trip to America. In order to arm himself with both the relevant facts and the emotional fire to convince the American public of the justice of their struggle, Peter went to the library and delved into the archives that Katerina had pointed out to him. He was not unfamiliar with the history therein; nevertheless, the documented brutality and mass murder still horrified him. His head swam with images of humans packed into quicklime-laden freight cars and agonizingly burned to death, of gas spraying from shower heads asphyxiating helpless, naked, shaved people, of mass graves with broken and distorted bodies, of starved children with staring eyes, of walkways paved with the ashes of the dead, of shattered bones and bombed cities, of massacred villages and hanged hostages and millions upon millions of murdered innocents. The words appalled him, they haunted him, and they also raised a question in his mind: What was the point in telling his story? How was his paltry, miserable tale possibly going to impress a people who had remained unmoved by all that had gone before?

  Alex listened to Peter’s question patiently and explained that history was insignificant to most people: “Hell, on a world scale, most of this stuff pales into insignificance! What we need is someone these people can see and hear and touch. Your story alone will be sufficient. Your hurt will become their hurt, your anger will become their anger. Don’t look at any history—we’ve had too much ofthat and to no good effect. Work on presenting yourself, just yourself. Do whatever it takes to make yourself acceptable and sympathetic to the Americans. That’s an order!”

  So, Peter read magazines and newspapers and watched a series of videos that Zosia scrounged up for him. Using the reviews and political fallout from each documentary or press conference or personal interview, and discussing details with Alex and Anna, they homed in on what they believed would be an acceptable television persona for him to present to the world.

  First and foremost, they decided that absolute honesty was out. Genuineness would have to be sacrificed to avoid aggravating vocal segments of the American population. They decided Alex was right: though love was something that he could talk about freely, and sex he could mention indirectly, it was essential that Allison be his wife rather than another man’s wife. The pain of their separation, the depth of his feeling, the grief at her death, would not be believed otherwise. He would be labeled an adulterer, and all else that followed in his story might be interpreted as divine retribution, as unlikely as God was to use the National Socialist regime to carry out heavenly justice.

  His affair with Elspeth was clearly off-limits, not only because it would offend a segment of right-thinking Americans, but also because it could endanger Elspeth and by extension Magdalena. And they would have to avoid the fact that he had technically committed a criminal offense by draft-dodging. In a society as fanatical about crime and punishment as America seemed to be, the label

  criminal was all too likely to provoke a response that he only got what he deserved.

  They decided he would have to work on his accent. Too strong an accent would be viewed as too foreign and therefore not only incomprehensible, but also not worthy of attention or sympathy. Also, it was clear from the entertainment media that his accent was appropriate to the lower classes and would be ascribed to a criminal milieu, and again, it would then be likely that the rest of his story would be considered irrelevant. Gangsters and street thugs could expect to live a life of random violence and arrest, what did they have to do with social justice on a worldwide scale?

  It wasn’t difficult for him to change his accent; for although he spoke as everyone around him in London had spoken, he had earlier in his life learned a more old-fashioned accent from his parents. Only when they had given up speaking English to him and had switched to German had he adopted the rough tones and vocabulary of his boyhood friends and later his Underground comrades. With a bit of effort he recovered his parents’ accent; that, combined with his usual speech patterns and some deliberate Americanisms added for clarity, left him with an understandable and reasonably pleasing voice. “Mid-Atlantic” Zosia called it, though to himself, he sounded like a foreigner in his own tongue.

  Upon Alex’s insistence they decided he would have to give up smoking and drinking for the duration of the visit. He could indulge in a social drink on rare occasions in public, but he should not, even once, light up a cigarette. “You cando it in private,” Alex confided. “Everyone does, just don’t do it in public—not unless you want to get dragged into a debate on alcohol and tobacco.”

  “Maybe a debate would be amusing,” Peter suggested.

  “No!” Alex almost screamed. “You have no idea! For God’s sake don’t comment on any American issue. All you’ll do is divert attention from our cause, make enemies, and get screamed at by fanatics. No discussions of cigarettes, alcohol, drugs, crime, racism—except as it applied to you—abortion, religion . . . Well, you get the point. It will become obvious which topics to avoid when you’re here. Oh, yeah, make sure you leave the Kommandant out of your story. If you aren’t condemned for being a queer, you’ll be accused of being homophobic. And some women’s group would no doubt claim you are degrading women.”

  “How so?”

  “Oh, let’s say, you’d be trivializing the trauma of rape by implying it can happen to a man . . .”

  Peter listened somewhat aghast as Alex constructed possible scenarios for which Peter could be denounced by various interest groups. Would it really be like that? Like stepping into a snake pit? Each word placing him near to some poisonous jaws waiting to inject their venom? He had no conception of the pitfalls of free debate in a free society and had naively thought that his story would be accepted for what it was: his story.

  “. . . In fact, no sex at all, if you can avoid it. They’re squeamish about that,” Alex concluded.

  “Sex? What about violence and murder?”

  “No problem there. Their kids have it served up on TV with their breakfast cereal. And that
reminds me: learn what a typical diet is and don’t admit to preferring anything else. They think it’s odd if you don’t have cereal and milk for breakfast. And watch your sense of humor—they might think you’re weird, and you’re going to have to be careful about your childhood—their assumptions are going to be completely different from yours. No gangs, make sure your parents are warm and caring, and your school—try to make it sound like a positive experience—”

  “Nobody had a childhood like that,” Peter protested. “I’ll sound like a freak!”

  “No, you’ll sound like a kid with an ideal American childhood rather than a Nazi-English one. Look, we want them to give money to help us overthrow the government, not support the various social programs they might think we need there. And that reminds me, make sure everything now is just perfect with your life, okay?”

  “Why?”

  “They like happy endings. Your escaping is like Cinderella putting on that glass slipper. That’s it, no adjustment difficulties, no reality afterwards, just smiles and warm, understanding revolutionaries welcoming you into their arms and praising you for your noble sacrifices. Your experiences are going to be an analogy for our entire land, and we want to make sure when they give us money, they can walk away smiling, knowing that everything’s going to be all right now.”

  “How about if I just keep quiet about the afterwards part?” Peter asked. Zosia sputtered quietly.

  “Yeah, that will work, too. They’ll assume the best. Just be careful that we don’t turn their sympathies away from our struggle and towards some softhearted victims’ groups. In any case, try to be a bit more buoyant. They often misinterpret the Brits here, think they’re too cold and unfeeling. If you’re not a bit more bouncy—”

  “Bouncy?” Peter asked in amazement.

  “Yes, bouncy. Otherwise, they’ll think you’re miserable even when you aren’t. And don’t forget, for heaven’s sakes, clean up your vocabulary . . .”

  Alex continued with his advice, and Peter nodded his head, forgetting for the moment that Alex could not see him. As Zosia noted her father’s suggestions, Peter wondered why they didn’t just hire an actor. By the end of their refinements, he would be unrecognizable. “What’s the point of my going?” he finally asked.

  Alex seemed to understand his frustration. “You’ll do fine. Don’t worry. And despite these limits, the essential truth of your story will be very moving. When you tell everyone what’s happening there, they’ll believe you, because they can see the reflection of our people’s pain in your face. An actor would never be able to convey the poignancy of our suffering the way you will.”

  Zosia raised her eyebrows at her father’s almost poetic efforts. Maybe studying-public relations tactics had influenced him. He dispelled that idea by concluding, “And besides, actors are expensive and you’re free! Beyond that, truth is stronger than fiction.”

  “Stranger,” Peter corrected.

  “Huh?”

  “Stranger. Truth is stranger than fiction.”

  “Stronger, too. Your story will never be disproved because it’s true, and that is a very strong point in our favor. The point is, we want to make Americans feel that they would be as vulnerable as you were. So we must avoid anything that the average American is sure he or she is not and that includes adulterer, alcoholic, drug addict, criminal, homosexual, dirty, smelly, or low class. And, oh, yeah, atheist.”

  Zosia smiled at her father’s idea of tact.

  “You forgot polluted by medical experiments,” Peter added wryly.

  “Oh, that’s not your fault,” Alex assured him. “Anyway, they’re used to being poked at by obnoxious physicians here.”

  “Thank God for small mercies. Anyway, that’s one I’ve decided to leave out.”

  “What? Leave out? What do you mean?”

  “There’s enough there without me talking about the medical experiments. Besides, from my point of view, it was nothing more than a needle jabbed into my arm. I don’t think it’s very impressive. We can let the data I translated speak for itself. Has it been released over there yet?”

  “Released?” Alex repeated nervously. “Er, yes. Making quite a splash. Still, I think you should talk about your experience with that. It is important to have the personal touch.”

  “No. Not on that. I don’t want to. Make sure it stays out of any previsit publicity. I really want to avoid discussions of my sex life. It could get complicated. It’s important, Alex, I mean this. No discussion of that sterility program!”

  “You’re free to talk about whatever you want. If you want to leave that out, fine. Leave it out.”

  “And, Alex?” Peter asked somewhat hesitantly. “Katerina said I can’t do any engagements for anyone else—you know, like one of the international prisonerrights organizations. Do you think you could talk to her about that?”

  “No. She and I are agreed on that. You speak for us alone. We don’t want to dilute our message.”

  “But maybe I could help by—”

  “The answer is no. You are speaking for us, for the Reich-wide resistance movements. Nothing else.”

  “But, Alex—”

  “You owe us loyalty, Peter!”

  “I know that. I know I owe you my life, and I am grateful to you all. And you have my loyalty. I just thought that maybe I could do some good—”

  “No. We need to keep this thing under our control. The answer is no.”

  53

  “ITHOUGHT WE HAD this damn thing under control!” the Führer fumed, so furious that his nails dug into the fine leather of his armchair. “You told me your source said everything had been taken care of! What is this, Günter? A betrayal? Are you trying to make me look bad?”

  Schindler shook his head, genuinely perplexed. “No, no! I don’t know what’s going on—”

  “Why not!”

  “I haven’t been able to make contact recently. It’s very complicated, everything has to be run through various levels of government. Maybe my source got it wrong—”

  “Wrong? Wrong? You’re the one who promised me your stupid sterility program would be carried out in the greatest confidence! You . . .” The Führer paused, at a loss for how to express his anger. His face had turned a dangerous purple.

  “Mein Führer,” Schindler pleaded, “whatever leaks we have had with regards to the Hamburg lab, it does not help to bring even more people in on it.” Henodded toward the third person in the room, standing quietly off to the side, smoking pensively. “Why is he here?”

  “Herr Traugutt was good enough to personally warn me of your lax security,” the Führer answered with suppressed rage. “He has gained my trust from his astute observations.”

  Schindler glared at Richard remembering the inebriated dinner conversation that had led him to reveal state secrets.

  “With only the most minimal digging, he managed to come up with details about your arrangements that no one should have been able to find out!” the Führer continued. “He worried, quite rightly, that if he could learn our secrets so easily, then so could the Americans! He warned me even before that incident in January.”

  “You mean the attachó being kidnapped? That was nothing! He had no real information!”

  “Well, as we both know, there was a breach somewhere. Now I’m being humiliated in America. It’s common knowledge there! Information has been officially released by their government about our secret sterility program—and you promised me that your people would keep a lid on it! If only I had listened to Traugutt back then, rather than you!”

  Schindler’s look turned from one of fury to one of confusion. “How did you find out so much?” he accused Richard. “Is that why you wanted to snoop around there? I knew you were up to no good!”

  “No, the request to visit was legitimate,” Richard explained. “Don’t you remember, it was you who told me that the laboratory was special to you.”

  “You son of a—”

  “Not only that, Günter,” the Führer c
ontinued darkly, “but my dear friend Richard also warned me that your source in America was misinformed. He warned me that the project would be made public despite your agents’ efforts, and it’s only thanks to him that I was able to take abortive action!”

  “Abortive?” Schindler asked worriedly. He glanced involuntarily over his shoulder, looking instinctively for an arresting officer.

  “Don’t worry, I don’t have to sacrifice you,” the Führer sneered. “Not this time, anyway. It seems neither you nor I knew anything about this secret laboratory. It was that underling of yours, Rattenhuber, who cooked the whole damn thing up. You can thank Traugutt for that. With his timely warnings, I was able to have my own people discover the sterility program and close it down before the Americans publicized their information. Rattenhuber is being appropriately handled, and you, ignorant as you were of the whole thing, are being let off with a warning to keep your people on a tighter leash! Understood?”

  “A tighter leash, yes, of course,” Schindler muttered contritely. “What about my son?”

  “Amazingly,” the Führer explained, “he knew nothing about it at all.”

  “Excuse me, mein Führer,” Richard interrupted, “but I believe he was the onewho tipped off your people in the first place. It was a clever move on Herr Schindler’s part to put his son into that laboratory.”

  Schindler nodded his gratitude. “Yes, yes. My son, quite the hero. Saved the day . . .”

  “That’s right. This time. All I can say is, there had better not be a next time!” the Führer warned.

  “A next time?” Schindler asked. “You’re not really going to kill the project, are you?”

  The Führer sighed. “I have no choice. This was too close a call. They have an entire overview of the program: experimental data, human subjects, supply sources. Where the hell they got such information . . . As it is, my ability to deny any high-level involvement has been severely strained, and the idea that one underling was responsible for the entire conspiracy hardly holds water. Only the fact that I closed it down before they released the information has saved me. Or rather, you.”