There had been no allowance for nuance in his training. The Nazis were to be wiped out. His mission was paramount, and anything or anyone who stood in his way was to be eliminated. Nothing was more important. Not him, and certainly not Franka Gerber. He thought of her face and the earnest beauty of her eyes. He couldn’t let her charms sway him. He had to remain strong. He heard the footsteps coming to the door.
“Good morning,” Franka said. “How are you feeling?”
“Better, thank you.”
She seemed embarrassed for having revealed too much the night before.
“Would you like some breakfast?”
“Yes, please.”
Franka walked out, and he listened as she rustled around in the kitchen for a few minutes before returning with some meat and cheese, as well as a hot cup of coffee. She left him there eating it, returning to collect the plate from him only once he’d finished. A part of him longed for her to sit with him again, for her to tell him the rest of her story. Where was Fredi now? Was he a real person? It was getting harder to believe that this was just an elaborate ruse to gain his confidence. She left the room without a word.
A few seconds went by before he heard footsteps tramping across the wooden floor once more, and she came back into the bedroom, toolbox in hand. She passed by the bed without looking at him and sat down beside the hole in the floor. He watched as she took a hammer and began prying up the floorboard adjacent to the opening.
“What are you doing, Fräulein?”
“What does it look like? I’m opening up the floor.”
She didn’t look at him, just kept on. He waited until she’d pulled up the floorboard to speak again. It felt wrong to watch her doing all of this work while he lay there useless in the bed.
“Why are you doing that?”
She stood up and pushed out a breath as she stretched out her lower back. She got back down on her knees and peered into the hole she’d made. She seemed to be measuring out the width. It was about three feet wide and six feet long. Franka stood up and left the room, again without making eye contact. A couple of minutes later she returned with several blankets under her arm. She knelt beside the hole and laid out the blankets, lining the space under the floorboards. She stood up again. It seemed she was going to say something, but instead she made for the tiny corner between the bed and the wall where his rucksack and uniform still lay. She folded the uniform and placed it inside the hole.
“Fräulein, I really must ask what exactly you’re doing here. That’s my uniform.”
“Is it?” She threw the rucksack down on top of it. She picked up one of the floorboards she’d left against the wall and slipped it back into place.
“Fräulein Gerber?”
She laid the other two floorboards back into place. She got on her knees once more and pushed the floorboards down as hard as she could. She ran her hand over the surface of the boards, making sure that they weren’t protruding, and then stood back to examine her work, her fingers on her chin. The scuff marks at the end of the floorboards told an unwanted story. She walked out, and he heard her going through the cupboards for a few seconds before she returned, a pot of wood varnish in her hand. The floors in the old cabin had been well tended. The varnish on the floor was smooth and even, probably not five years old. Franka got on her knees and began to dab fresh varnish on the ends of the floorboards to mask the flecks that had flown off. Within two minutes or so it was impossible to tell that the floorboards had been disturbed at all.
“That’s for when the Gestapo come. If they find you here, we’re both dead, and I’m not going to live in denial, even if you are. They’re not going to come while the snow is as thick on the ground as it is, but once it melts they’ll start searching for you. Someone saw your parachute or heard the plane you jumped out of. The longer you keep up this ridiculous charade, the longer you’re jeopardizing both our lives. If you don’t start trusting me, we’re both going to die.”
She walked out of the room.
He lay alone through a dreary afternoon. The window let in little light, and the door remained closed. He heard sounds every so often but didn’t see her. There were no answers—only more questions. There was nothing he could do trapped here in this bed. The pain in his legs was bearable now, but he wouldn’t be able to walk out of here for weeks. Could he trust this woman? Had she disavowed the mindless obedience that the Nazis had instilled in so many Germans? Or were there more like her than he thought? What would she be willing to do if he did trust her? The pressure was building inside him. Every day alone and useless in this bed was a day closer to failure, and that was something he couldn’t accept. He cursed his legs, cursed the Nazis, tried to somehow sleep to escape the agonizing possibility that he might fail this mission. He bit down on his fist so hard he almost drew blood. Sleep would not come. There was no escape.
The cuckoo clock sang seven times, and a few seconds later the door opened. She came in and placed the tray on his lap as he sat up. He didn’t touch the food, even though he felt as if he were starving to death.
“Fräulein? Franka?”
The wind howled outside the window.
“Do you have pictures of your family? Do you have a picture of Fredi?”
“Yes, some.”
“Can I see them? I didn’t see any pictures when I was outside.”
“There were pictures once. I took them down just a few days before I found you.”
“Do you still have them?”
“I do.”
She disappeared through the door and came back a minute later, two dog-eared photos in her hands. She held them as if they were an injured bird she’d found. He took them between two fingers. The first photo was of the four of them posing together on the steps of what he assumed was their house. Franka was younger, perhaps sixteen at the time. She had short blond curls and was wearing a white dress. She had her arm around her father, a stout, handsome man with a brown beard and smiling eyes. Her mother’s long blond hair was carefree about her shoulders, her smile radiant and her eyes sparkling even in the colorless old photo. She had her arms draped around Fredi, who was nestling into her. He looked about eight. His weak, lank arms and legs protruded through his T-shirt and shorts. He was looking up at her lovingly. He turned over the photo to reveal the date—June 1933. Franka handed him the next picture, taken outside the cabin on a warm summer day in 1935, just the three of them. Fredi still smiled as he sat on his father’s lap, but it seemed for the benefit of the camera. Thomas was gazing at his son, the adoration clear. Franka sat beside them, staring with a seriousness uncommon in a girl that age. He handed the photos back to her.
“Thank you for showing me.”
She nodded and left, taking the pictures with her. He’d almost finished the meat and vegetables she’d served him when she came back into the room. She had a chair with her and sat down beside the bed, waiting for him to finish eating.
“I wanted to thank you for sharing your story with me last night,” he said as he finished. He took a drink of water as he waited for her to answer.
“I haven’t spoken about my family for some time. It opened up some wounds that had barely begun to heal.”
Restrain yourself. Let her be. She’ll tell you in her own time. He put the empty glass down on the tray she’d brought, nodding his head. She took it from him and left without speaking.
Hours later, he sat listening to the wind as it rattled the windowpanes. It was dark outside now, and she came back to light the oil lamp beside his bed. She sat down beside him. He didn’t speak, waiting for her to begin.
“I want to tell you the rest of my story. I’ve been debating back and forth, wondering what I should say, what I should censor, and if you really are who I think you are. But then it came to me. I realized I don’t have anything left to lose. If you’re not who I think you are, and telling you my story costs me my miserable life, then so be it, but I’m not holding back. Not anymore. I don’t care. You can kill me. Your
side killed my father. The others killed almost everyone else I love.”
It was all too easy to forget the reason he was here. Best to stay quiet, let her reveal her true self if that’s what she was so determined to do. He had enough food to last a week or more. If she were to leave, he could survive on his own. It wasn’t his job to save this German woman from the demons of her past. There simply wasn’t time for attachment or sentimentality.
He lay back as she began to speak. The wind died outside, and darkness fell. The room filled with golden light from the oil lamp burning on the table. She stared out into nothing as if the past were all around her and she had only to reach out to touch it.
Berlin was the capital, and where Hitler resided, but it was a city he never liked. Munich was Hitler’s heartland. He often spoke of his boundless love for the place where he’d arrived as a penniless artist, sketching picture postcards to sell on the street. This was where the National Socialist revolution had begun with the unsuccessful Beer Hall Putsch in 1923—where the bodies of the men who died that day were encased in massive stone sarcophagi, guarded by granite-faced SS men in black uniforms. Munich was where Hitler had found his first supporters—disenfranchised soldiers, rejects, and castoffs of a society scarred by war. In those early days, they marched in step, dressed in coats and windbreakers, not able to afford uniforms. His followers multiplied until he was known as the “King of Munich” just a few short years after his arrival. It was something Hitler never forgot. Munich was his.
The Nazi takeover had tempered the luminosity and charm of Munich by 1941. There was even less escape from the ubiquitous Nazi flags than in Freiburg. The Nazi bullyboys controlled the city, as they did everywhere in Germany now, and the lack of freedom felt like a vise. But the Nazis could not snuff out all life and beauty from this vibrant place. Franka found refuge in the arts and attended concerts regularly. She found the ultimate escape in music, and that in itself was a protest. Music gave life to the part of her that the Nazis could never touch. She found peace in this subtle form of protest, for to declare an interest in the arts was to be anti-Nazi without declaring it. Hitler scorned the intellectual and the pursuit of the aesthetic. Showing love for such things was a sign of weakness, not the iron-willed toughness that the National Socialists demanded. The concert hall offered a sanctuary, and Franka felt at one with the others in the seats as the ambrosia of sound swept over her.
The hospital where she worked was filled with joy and dread, horror and beauty. The soldiers from the front filled the beds, their wounds a glimpse into a hell she could never have envisioned before the war. Young boys lay broken all around her, their futures stubbed out by bullets and bombs, their eyes or legs missing, their faces burned to cinder, their lifeblood leaking onto the marble floors. So much waste. She sat with boys whose only wish was that she hold their hands and smile. They showed her pictures of wives and girlfriends, who’d come to visit with flowers in their hands and wet eyes. Going from bed to bed, being there for them, imbued her with a happiness she’d thought impossible. Those soldiers lit a candle in the darkness inside her. Sometimes they spoke of the Reich, and their hopes for the future once the final, great victory was won. Through broken teeth and torn lips they spoke of magnificent glory on the battlefield. Their loyalty to the regime that had destroyed them was unwavering. So few of them realized they had been chewed up and spat out in the service of a lie. Few seemed to recognize the vilification that lay in wait for them once the history was written. They remained convinced that they were doing right, even at the end. She didn’t have the heart to tell them any different. Nothing could have been crueler.
Hans Scholl wore the gray uniform of the Wehrmacht, but with a lively charisma that was all too rare in those days. He was a year younger than she, with dark blond hair and a face that could have graced the movies he loved. The other nurses nudged each other to look up as he strutted past. He was a student medic taking classes at the university. He didn’t use the Nazi salute, instead proffering a handshake. He asked her out thirty seconds after meeting her. She was powerless in the face of his charm and gave an almost-immediate yes. They went to a concert together the next night. He held her hand as Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony boomed, and she knew he was different. She knew he was like her. The moon shone bright over the city that night, and they sat in the park after the concert, sipping red wine in the warm summer air. It was almost enough to forget. Hans made her laugh, made her feel beautiful. His eyes sparkled in the silver light. Tyranny and terror were forgotten. The barbs of the past melted away. And she knew something had begun.
He was from Ulm, a small town she remembered visiting as a child, one hundred miles from Munich. He spoke about his family often. His father was a local politician and business owner, as well as an ardent critic of the Nazi Party, and had been arrested by the Gestapo for seditious thinking. He often mentioned his siblings, especially his little sister Sophie, who was to follow him on to the university the year after. He was a former member of the Hitler Youth. He should have been one of the bright lights in the movement—yet he wore no Nazi pin and spoke about the government evasively, always eager to change the subject. Instead, he told stories he’d heard from his fellow soldiers who’d served in Poland. He talked about civil liberties and freedom with a passion and vehemence that left her in no doubt as to where his allegiances lay. There was a liberty in being with him. He was someone she could discuss art and politics with and who agreed with her that the machinations of the National Socialist regime would ultimately lead to the destruction of the German nation. Some of the other nurses stopped talking to her when it became public knowledge that they were together.
At the end of the summer of 1941, Hans invited her to a gathering of a group of his friends. Ostensibly, he said, they were meeting to discuss philosophy. In reality they met to vent their political frustrations. The gathering took place not at a bar but in the study of a private home. Cups of coffee and glasses of beer lay on the table along with stacks of papers and books. Hans introduced Franka to his friends Willi and Christoph, and she sat around the table with a handful of others. All were students and younger than she, except for the owner of the house, Dr. Schmorell, whose son, Alex, sat beside him. After brief introductions, Hans began to talk.
“We’ve all heard stories from the front. Franka and I see the German victims of this useless war every day in the hospital.” The men glanced over at Franka before fixing back on Hans. “I heard just yesterday from a trusted friend who saw with his own eyes the sight of Poles and Russians being herded into concentration camps on the eastern front, to be executed or worked to death providing slave labor.”
The feeling of escape was overwhelming, almost giddying. Franka hadn’t heard anyone speak like that other than her father. Not even Hans had been this frank with her before. A fire had been set within her.
“Girls are rounded up,” Willi said, “and sent to whorehouses to service their new SS masters against their will. It’s more than the mere subjugation of a people. It’s rape and murder on an industrial scale. It’s horror that mankind has hardly known before, and it’s being perpetrated in all our names.”
Christoph stood up. “The treatment of the people in the occupied territories is an abomination, even more so than the regime’s treatment of its own citizens. The question is, do we act? Can we sit back and watch this happen? It’s all well and good sitting around this table, voicing ideas that, if known outside, would land us all in jail.” He turned to Franka, who felt the spotlight glare on her. “Franka, Hans has told us what the Nazis did to your brother. You’ve suffered terribly at their hands.”
All waited for her to speak, but the words caught in her throat. She’d only told Hans of what had happened to Fredi in stuttering sentences, hadn’t revealed the depth of the pain behind it, and she wasn’t ready to share with these strangers, like-minded though they were.
“I’m not ready to speak about that here and now, but suffice to say that the Nazis
have destroyed, or attempted to destroy, all that was once virtuous and true in this wonderful country of ours, and you ask should we do something? My unequivocal answer is yes. It is our moral duty.”
“But what can we do?” Willi said. “If it’s our moral obligation to do something as loyal Germans, then what? The scope of the military is certainly beyond us. We’re not assassins or rabble-rousers. We’re not military strongmen or bullies like the Nazis themselves.”
“We use our strengths,” Hans said. “We channel our ideas onto paper, and we spread the truth as we see it. The Nazis are quick to proclaim their might and the fact that the empire they’re building will last a thousand years, but they’re so afraid of their own people that they suppress with terminal effect any denunciation. They’re terrified of one thing: the truth. If we can spread the truth among the people—about the horrors the Nazis perpetrate in their name—we will win. The Jews left in our cities are marked with a golden star, but where are the others? We know now. We know, but most people don’t or pretend not to. If we can force the German people to face up to the truth, we have a chance of real and sustained change. We must be the conscience of Germany. We must speak for the Jews, the homosexuals, the clergy, and the other enemies of the state who have disappeared. We need to let our people and the rest of the world know that there are Germans who are appalled at the actions of the Nazis and demand that they desist.” The political discourse lasted a few more hours, until, exhausted, Franka went home. The words she’d heard at the meeting buzzed around inside her head for days, drowning out the Nazi propaganda that would have otherwise dominated her daily life.
The steps to turning these words into actions took time. In the Nazi state, the necessities of their mission, such as typewriters, paper, and a duplicating machine, were hard to come by without drawing suspicion. Hans procured a location to house the tools they acquired, and they began to work out an outline for their leaflets. They came up with basic arguments, which were smoothed out and sharpened at their regular meetings.
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