White Rose Black Forest

by Dempsey, Eoin

  He twisted his body around toward the doorway and let himself drop to the floor. He brought his hand down. Pain burned through him, but he gritted his teeth, taking as much weight as he could on the palm of his hand. He used his arms to pull himself along, dragging his legs behind him as he made it around to the door. He reached up to the handle. It was locked, but then, he’d known that already. It took him two endless minutes to drag his broken body to where she’d tossed his Luftwaffe blazer. He smiled as he reached into the breast pocket for the paper clips he’d put there after his final briefing.

  The keyhole was set in a tarnished plate on the wooden door. He tried to peer through but could only make out the glow of the fire burning. Picking locks hadn’t been a specific part of his training. It was more of an extracurricular lesson his instructor had taught him. And he had excelled at it. He propped himself up, one hand on the knob, the other pushing the bent pin into the keyhole to turn over the tumbler. He missed it the first time. Seconds later he heard the click as the tumbler came off. With a turn of the knob, the door fell open.

  The fire blazed. A stack of wood stood beside it, and above sat a mantelpiece with porcelain trinkets and a radio. A spot of wallpaper was less faded than the rest, signifying a missing picture. As he looked around the room, he realized that several pictures had been taken down. An empty rocking chair lay still beside the fire, with an old threadbare couch alongside it. The entrance to the kitchen was on his left, and the flickering light told of another fire she’d set in there. His backpack was sitting in the corner next to a bookshelf, and he wondered why she hadn’t tried to hide it. Maybe there was no reason to hide it if the Gestapo men were probably on their way here right now. The cabin was silent, no sounds at all apart from the popping wood in the fireplace.

  He dragged himself over to his backpack on his forearms, reached into it, and pulled out a change of clothes, maps, and a flashlight. Both his pistols were gone, but he didn’t waste time wondering where she’d stashed them. Instead, he sat up against the wall and reached back inside. His papers were intact; his Luftwaffe paybook, his leave papers, and his travel orders were all properly rubber-stamped, signed, and countersigned. And in front of him, not thirty feet away, was the front door.

  It took Franka thirty glorious minutes to reach the bottom of the valley and the main road into town. It had been cleared enough to let cars through, with the snow piled up at the side of the road on either side.

  “National Socialist efficiency,” she mumbled to herself.

  Five minutes passed before a truck stopped to pick her up. A Wehrmacht soldier waved her to hop on board as he ground to a snowy halt. Franka stiffened but had little choice now. It might look even more suspicious if she didn’t take the ride. She tucked her skis under her arm and tramped up toward the door the soldier had left open for her.

  “Good day, Fräulein,” the soldier said with a smile. “Climb on board. I’m going all the way to Freiburg.”

  “That would be wonderful, thank you.”

  She climbed into the passenger seat, doing her best to return the soldier’s smile as she closed the door behind her. He was young, no older than twenty-two, even younger than she was.

  “What brings you into town on a day like this?”

  “A shopping trip. I didn’t expect this weather. We’re snowed in and running a little low on supplies.”

  He glanced across at her longer than was comfortable, and the truck veered toward the curb before he righted it.

  She decided not to comment on the young soldier’s driving skills. “I haven’t used these skis in years. I’m glad you picked me up.”

  “My pleasure, Fräulein.”

  She did her best to humor him as he talked and talked, all the way into town. She told him nothing about herself, deflecting every question. It was a skill she’d honed over the years. She had it down to a fine art.

  The snow-covered hills around the city came into view first, followed by the roofs and spires, coated with white. From a distance Freiburg looked like any medieval town in Europe. However, like everywhere else in Germany, Freiburg had changed under National Socialism. The Allied bombers hadn’t rained destruction upon Freiburg like they had upon Hamburg, Kassel, or Dresden. Indeed, there had been only a few minor bombing raids on the city, but somehow that made the loss of her father even more severe. What had been the point of that raid in October? She wondered if the pilot or the bombardier ever thought about who they were killing when they dropped the bomb on her father’s apartment block as he slept. Were they even aware that they’d killed civilians? Would they even care? Somehow she doubted it. She felt her body tensing. They would never know the kind, gentle man they’d taken from her.

  The news of her father’s death came via letter, and the warden had refused her appeal to go to the funeral on the grounds that “traitors to the Reich should not be shown undue compassion.” It was only after she was released from prison that she was able to visit his grave, to utter faint, final goodbyes.

  The sight of the soldiers manning the checkpoint on the road into town brought everything back into sharp focus. The escape she’d enjoyed in the cabin was not to be found here. The chokehold that the National Socialists had on the citizenry of Germany was plain to see. Free movement or unsanctioned travel were relics of the past. Franka handed over the packet of papers she was required to produce on demand, sometimes several times a day. The sentry examined them as she sat in silence.

  “Ahnenpass?” he asked.

  Franka nodded and reached into her pocket for her Ahnenpass, a certificate of her Aryan ancestry. The sentry took a glance at it and handed it back with a nod. She hid her shame with a smile. The old joke Hans used to tell about the Aryan lies came back to her.

  “What is an Aryan?” he would ask the group.

  “Blond like Hitler!”—who had dark hair.

  “Tall like Goebbels!” someone else would say—Goebbels was five feet five.

  “A perfect athletic specimen like Goering!”—who was a disgusting, fat slug. Jokes had landed many people in jail. The Nazis displayed little good humor. Everything derogatory was censured and carried the threat of jail or worse, no matter how funny the joke was.

  The sentry motioned the truck onward. Franka deflected the soldier’s offer of a drink that night, with the excuse of having a boyfriend on the Russian front. She jumped out in the center of town. Nazi flags rippled in the breeze. Hitler had explained the reasoning behind the various parts of the flag in the book he’d written during his time in jail, which Franka, and all the other kids, had been required to study in school like a religious catechism—a set of rules for life. The red background represented the social idea of the movement, the white circle in the middle spoke of the purity of its nationalistic goals, and the black swastika denoted the racial superiority of the Aryan race. The Aryans were a made-up race of blond supermen, which the Nazis had convinced the German people they belonged to. She was the perfect Aryan specimen herself—tall, athletic, blond, and with piercing blue eyes she had come to be almost ashamed of. The compliments she’d received on her perfect Aryan looks were flattering when she was a teenager. Now she resented them.

  A few hundred yards away the Christmas market was bustling in the shade of the Freiburg Minster, the medieval Gothic cathedral that dominated the center of town. The cathedral was one of the few places of Catholic worship left, but only as a symbol of the religious freedoms that Hitler had promised when he first came to power. There was no Mass—the local priest had been sent to a concentration camp years ago. The Protestant churches were still open, but years earlier they had been merged to form the National Reich Church to ensure that worship was controlled, and that the head of the Protestant church in Germany was both a member of the Nazi Party and an Aryan. Church members called themselves German Christians, with “the swastika on their chests and the cross in their hearts.” The National Socialists still allowed Christmas, but its future existence was far from assured. An
ything that swayed belief from the Nazi cause was a threat.

  Franka kept her eyes on the pavement as she shuffled along, her skis under her arm, her rucksack on her back. Several soldiers in uniform brushed past her, laughing and joking. One of them whistled at her, but her eyes didn’t waver from the gray-white slush on the cobbled pavement. She wondered if she would meet anyone she knew, and if she did, would they have heard about her? Would they shun her as a traitor? She hoped not to find out.

  A bell rang over the pharmacy door as she pushed her way inside. She kept her eyes to the floor as she made her way to the opiates. The tiny bottles of heroin were the first that caught her eye, but she moved on to the morphine. She bought enough for a few days, along with the syringes she would need to administer it. She took aspirin, plaster of paris, gauze, and nylon socks to fit over the man’s legs and brought them to the counter. The pharmacist, a middle-aged man with a thick gray mustache, peered at her over his glasses with suspicious eyes. Franka noted the Nazi pin on his white coat.

  “My brother,” she smiled. “He broke his legs tobogganing last night, and we’re snowed in.”

  “Quite the predicament,” the pharmacist said. “Are you going to make up the cast yourself?”

  “I’m a nurse. I’m well able to do it.”

  “He’s a lucky boy.”

  “I don’t know if you could call someone with two broken legs ‘a lucky boy,’ but I suppose you might be right.”

  The pharmacist smiled and handed her the brown paper bag. Franka bade him goodbye and edged out of the store, trying to look as casual as possible. Inside, she felt like she was about to vomit.

  The air was fresh against her clammy skin, and a light snow was beginning. She only had to get the food before leaving. She missed the solitude of the cabin. These streets in this beautiful town had been perverted, twisted by the all-encompassing Nazi ideology that made it impossible to live a rewarding life, particularly for a woman. No woman was allowed to be a doctor, lawyer, civil servant, or judge. Juries were to be made up only of men. Women could not be trusted to make decisions—they were thought too susceptible to being controlled by their emotions. Women weren’t allowed to vote either, but what good was a vote anyway? All parties other than the National Socialists had been made illegal. German women were forbidden to wear makeup or to color or perm their hair. Instead, the three Ks were drummed into girls from an early age: Kinder (children), Kirche (church), and Küche (kitchen). She could still remember her League of German Girls troop leaders urging them to forget about the ridiculous notion of a self-satisfying career. It was more important to stay home and bear strong sons that could one day serve the Reich. That was the role a woman had to play in modern Germany, and many of the girls she had known in her youth had adapted to it. Some had received the Mother’s Cross—a medal the Nazis gave out to mothers who had more than five healthy Aryan children. Hilda Speigel, a girl she had been in the League of German Girls with, had already received the ultimate honor: the gold Mother’s Cross, for the eight children she had by the age of twenty-seven.

  Remembrances of Franka’s old life swarmed like locusts around her head. Every building she walked by conjured a new memory. The site of the apartment her father had lived in for the last five years of his life was only blocks away, and she felt her footsteps slowing as she neared it. She thought of the man in the cabin. He was one of them—one of the Allies who’d perpetrated that crime. She longed for the luxury of oblivion.

  She arrived at the general store. The German people were feeling the ravages of the war. The early days of the war had seen almost as much plenty in the stores as before the battles had started, but rationing began in earnest in the spring of 1942, and many commonly used items were now considered a luxury. The smell of fresh bread made her empty stomach rumble. She found a loaf, as well as some cheese, and dried meats. It was uphill most of the way home, so she tried to avoid heavier goods like the canned soups that had kept for so long in the cabin. When she had gotten as much food as her rationing card allowed, she made for the counter to use some of her father’s inheritance money to pay. She remembered the lawyer as he’d read her the will. He knew that she’d spent time in jail, and although he didn’t say it out loud, she suspected he knew why. The judgment was in his eyes.

  Franka made her way out onto the street. It was almost two o’clock now. There was no use trying to make it back to the cabin on an empty stomach. She had kept aside enough of her ration tickets to afford lunch, and she knew a place down the street. The café was bustling with loud chatter as she arrived. Smoke hung in the air. Several soldiers sat in the corner, laughing and drinking beer. Sitting as far away from them as she could, she ordered schnitzel and potatoes and a cup of café au lait. Five minutes later her food arrived. It was heavenly, and she barely stopped to breathe as she wolfed it down. The man at the table next to her got up from his seat, leaving his newspaper—something she could hide behind. She picked it up and held it to her face. It was full of stories glorifying the führer and the brave soldiers fighting for Germany’s future in Russia. She stopped reading after a few seconds and just let her eyes rest there. She was thinking about the trip back to the cabin, thinking about the man, when she heard a voice in front of her.

  “Franka Gerber?”

  She felt her chest contract as she lowered the newspaper. She saw the black uniform of the Gestapo before her eyes made their way up to the face of a man she had hoped she would never have to see again—Daniel Berkel.

  The man placed the maps, compass, spare clothes, and his identity papers back into the backpack, just as he’d found them. He was sitting up, by the bookcase. The front door was about thirty feet away, but the back door was even closer. He could make out the white glow of sun on snow seeping underneath the door. He wasn’t dressed to go outside, and escape would be impossible with his broken legs. The truth that his stubbornness had tried to fight became all too clear: without his weapons, he was at Franka Gerber’s mercy, whoever she happened to be. He was still wearing the pajamas she’d put him in, but what harm would looking out do? Perhaps she was telling the truth and they were in the middle of the mountains. Perhaps not. He dragged himself along the floor. The hallway was gritty, and he could feel the particles of dirt under his palms as he crawled along. With his right hand he reached up for the door handle, pushing up on his left elbow. He moved his body out of the way as he wrenched the door open. An ocean of white burned his eyes. The cold draft cut at his exposed chest, and he felt the pain in his legs like knives into his flesh. The door opened out onto an area for firewood. Snow-covered trees began just a few feet beyond. Nothing to see. Damn. He closed the door.

  He took a few seconds to regain his breath before crawling back into the living room. The fire was warm, and he lost a minute or two lying in front of it. What the hell was he going to do, even if they were close to the city? How was he going to get there with two broken legs? If he did make it there alive, which seemed so ridiculous as to be almost impossible, anyone who picked him up would bring him to the local hospital immediately. That would be the end, for him and the mission. More likely he would die in the snow, as he undoubtedly would have if the woman hadn’t brought him back here. Perhaps she was who she said she was. Perhaps she was a friend. What were the chances of being found by someone friendly in this country of fanatics? He had seen the newsreels of enormous crowds cheering Hitler’s every word, waving flags, beating on drums. The entire nation had seemingly been brainwashed into following the Nazi cause like a new religion. Why else would they do the things they did in the occupied territories? How else could they justify an organization as savage as the Gestapo? He remembered his instructor’s words: “Trust no one.” He’d said that the only good German was a dead one. The recruits had laughed, but there was no doubting the veracity of his words. They all believed it, just as he himself did.

  The view behind the back door had told him nothing. He had to be sure. He began crawling toward the front. The
cuckoo clock in the hallway by the front door struck ten o’clock. He kept on, one arm and then another, ignoring the pain in his legs. He reached the door and turned the handle, opening it an inch before moving his body out of the way to open it fully. The glare of white came again, and he saw a Volkswagen covered in snow. He pitched himself up on his palms, as high as he could. There was nothing but snow and trees as far as the eye could see. Not even a road. There was no sound. No other sign of life. It was true: they were alone up here.

  He closed the front door and started making his way back to the living area. He wanted to be in bed when she got back, didn’t want her to suspect that he’d been up and snooping around the house. He stopped at a hall table beneath the cuckoo clock. More out of a whim than anything else, he reached up to open the small table drawer. It opened, and he recognized the sound of sliding metal immediately. He reached in and pulled out a pistol. He would be ready, and if they did come, he was taking some of them with him.

  “It’s wonderful to see you. You look better than ever. How long has it been, Franka?” Berkel said.

  Franka was staring at the death’s-head skull on his hat. He took the cap off and put it under his arm.

  “Thank you. It’s been years, Herr Berkel. Four years?”

  “I haven’t seen you since you moved to Munich. Do you mind if I sit down for just a moment?” He pulled out the chair opposite her.

  “Of course not.” She had no choice in the matter.

  “Please, call me Daniel. We shouldn’t need to be so formal just because of my position. We’re old friends, catching up, and that’s all I want to do—catch up. Do you mind if I smoke?” He offered her a cigarette. She hadn’t smoked for several years but took one anyway. He lit her cigarette first, then his own. Puffs of white smoke filled the air between them. She sat back, hoping it might calm her nerves. “What brings you back to Freiburg?” he continued.