The Escape

by Andy Marino

  The dangers ahead. The fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters left behind.

  When Papa’s face appeared, Max closed his eyes. The face remained, imprinted behind his eyelids. He thought he might never sleep. As if she could read his mind, Mutti began to hum Brahms’s Lullaby, and eventually the faint and gentle melody carried him off.

  Light splashed across a dark dream. Max opened his eyes. It took him a moment to remember where he was as he catalogued the unfamiliar sights—a table, a lamp, a wall with a big square piece missing, which shone brightly around the edges of a silhouetted figure.

  Right. He was in the hidden room with its trick bookshelf. It was open now, and as the figure stepped forward, he sat up in bed.

  “Good morning,” Elke whispered. Max glanced to the side and saw that Kat, Gerta, and his mother were still asleep. “I’ve got breakfast waiting for you. Would you prefer tea, coffee, or cocoa?”

  “Um,” Max said, wiping away the crust in the corners of his eyes. “You have real cocoa here?”

  “We do indeed. Come.” She turned and left the room, leaving the bookshelf open.

  Max couldn’t remember the last time he’d tasted real cocoa. How did these old women get such wonderful black-market goods?

  He hopped out of bed, pulled on his trousers, and went out into the living room. Daylight filtered in through sheer curtains that hung over a pair of large windows, throwing bright shapes across the polished hardwood floor. Max looked at one of the many clocks on the shelves. It was almost noon. He had slept through the morning, which made sense—they had gone to bed very late. The cinnamon smell lingered. He followed Elke through an open door into a dining room where a crystal chandelier glittered above a long wooden table lacquered to a deep cherry red. Dangling from the chandelier was a menagerie of intricate paper birds.

  “Sit,” Elke said, setting down a tray on the table. “Eat.”

  Max sat down and she placed a steaming mug in front of him. He leaned into the steam and took a sniff. The cocoa smelled rich and genuine. Elke sat across from him and plucked a fluffy roll from the tray. Max’s stomach growled. While his cocoa cooled, he made short work of a roll. Elke raised an eyebrow as he devoured it in three bites.

  “Alas,” she said, “we are short on real butter at the moment, and the ersatz stuff isn’t worth feeding to a stray cat.”

  “It’s okay,” Max said with a mouth full of bread. “This is great.”

  He washed down a second roll with a sip of cocoa, warm and sweet.

  “So,” Elke said, folding her hands, “what should I call you, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  Max paused. Last night was a blur—Albert shuffling them inside the house, Elke and Petra ushering them off to bed in the secret room. They had never even introduced themselves.

  “I’m Max,” he said. “Then there’s my sister, Gerta, and my mother, and …” He trailed off. “Our cousin, Kat Vogel.”

  “Well, Max,” she said, “you’re very brave to be making this journey.”

  He frowned. Stauffenberg was brave. Frau Becker was brave. He was just a boy who’d gotten himself captured, and because of that they’d been forced to flee and leave Papa behind in Berlin. The war swept him along according to its fiery, chaotic whims—the same as everyone else. There was nothing brave about it.

  “I didn’t really have a choice,” he said.

  “There is always a choice,” Elke said. “And most of our fellow Germans made the choice to stand with the Nazis. Oh, sure, plenty of them are strong leaders, brilliant thinkers, excellent soldiers—courageous on the battlefield, perfectly willing to die for their country and all that. But they have made the easy choice. None of them are brave in the same way that you and your family are brave. Never forget that.”

  Max thought back to the person he’d been last year, when he’d envied the boys who got to play on the Hitler Youth soccer teams. It struck him that the only reason he had done anything to fight the Nazis—the dead drops for the Becker Circle, the vandalism of the Red Dragons—was because of the man who had died on their kitchen table in the middle of the bombing raid. After that, Mutti and Papa had made the choice to involve Max and Gerta in the resistance. But what if things had been different? What if Mutti and Papa had chosen to stand with the Nazis, like so many of their neighbors?

  Then, Max thought, he would be strutting around in a crisp Hitler Youth uniform like Heinrich, and happily playing on a soccer team after school while the Nazis sent Jews, Roma, homosexuals, and other “undesirables” to the death camps by the millions.

  He had never really considered this before, and it disturbed him greatly. The sweet taste of cocoa turned bitter on his tongue. He set down his mug.

  “Is your drink okay?” Elke asked, studying his face.

  “Yes, thank you,” Max said.

  “What’s on your mind?”

  He glanced over his shoulder. There was no sign of his mother or the girls. That was good—he hoped they would sleep for another hour. He didn’t know why, but he felt more comfortable sharing his current thoughts with this old woman—a total stranger—than with anyone in his family.

  “Maybe there was a choice,” he said, “but my parents are the ones who made it. If they’d told me that the Nazis were right … I would have just become a Nazi.”

  “Perhaps,” Elke said. “And perhaps if the Führer had devoted just a little bit more time to his painting, he would have been accepted to the Academy of Fine Arts and lived a quiet life in Vienna, and there would be an everlasting peace in Europe.” She shrugged. “Or perhaps, whatever happened, he still would have found a way to fulfill his mad destiny. We can’t look back on life’s twists and turns and fret over some other path that never came to be.”

  Max thought for a moment. “So even if my parents were Nazis … maybe I still would have been me?”

  “My point, Max, is that it’s no use to admonish ourselves for the person we might have been, just as it’s no use to pine for a world where things turned out differently. God grants us one life to live, and the good among us try to live it as best they can.” She took a sip of her coffee. Then she sighed. “My son joined the Nazi Party in nineteen thirty-four, back when they were just a bunch of thugs and rabble-rousers in brown shirts. Nobody took them seriously. His father and I …” She shook her head. “We took him to the opera and the symphony, filled our home with books. We taught him to be a young man of the world. Growing up, it didn’t matter to him that some of his friends were Jewish, or that his aunt Petra didn’t hear very well or speak a word. But now, when he visits me, he sits in the living room and rambles on about a pure Germany cleansed of the Jewish influence, and he can barely bring himself to look at my sister. She’s mentally deficient, you see. Useless to the glorious Thousand-Year Reich. Oh, yes, he brings me real cocoa, too. Which I save for the Jews who hide in my back room.”

  Max looked down at his mug. It was easy for Elke to tell him not to fret over a path that never came to be, but it wasn’t like he could just flick a switch and turn off his thoughts. In fact, paths that never came to be were practically all he could think about right now. What if Stauffenberg’s bomb had killed Hitler?

  What if he hadn’t gone out for one last mission with the Red Dragons and gotten himself captured?

  What if Hans Meier had never joined the Becker Circle?

  “I can see the sparrows nesting in your head,” Elke said. “That’s enough talk for one noonday breakfast, I think. Come and help me get some more rolls from the kitchen, and we’ll see if we can wake the sleepyheads.”

  Max followed Elke into a small but very neat kitchen. Petra was standing next to the stove wearing a white apron over her dress, stirring a steaming pot with a wooden spoon. When Max walked in, Petra rested the spoon on the rim of the pot, wiped her hands on her apron, and reached up to open a cupboard. Inside was a single candle nestled in a small glass base. She lifted it out and set it down carefully on the counter next to the stove. Then she stru
ck a match and held it to the wick. When she pulled the match away, the flame burned with icy blue radiance.

  Astonished, Max went to examine the candle. It appeared normal, but inside the depths of its blue flame were brilliant flashes of crimson and gold.

  Petra watched him expectantly.

  “It’s beautiful,” he said. Petra smiled and went back to stirring whatever was in the pot on the stove.

  “Where did you get it?” he asked Elke, hoping it wasn’t some special Nazi trick candle her son had given her.

  “Prague,” she said, placing hot rolls on a silver tray. “It’s very old and very special. My sister must like you very much. It’s been a long time since she’s shared it with anyone.”

  “Thank you,” Max said. Petra leaned over and blew out the candle. A ribbon of smoke curled up to the ceiling and vanished.

  Later, when Max tried to describe the candle to Gerta and Kat, he found that words completely escaped him.

  Albert arrived at Elke and Petra’s house the following evening. He was still wearing his Gestapo disguise: long leather coat, black gloves, vicious scar that sliced across his face. He carried a large suitcase into the living room, set it down on the sofa, and opened it up.

  “Time to try on your new skins,” he said.

  “You brought us skins?” Kat said.

  “No. I brought you clothes. But when you’re wearing a disguise, the clothes are only half of it. You can’t just be a kid playing dress-up. You’ve got to make yourself believe it so fully that your skin believes it, too.” He paused. “I can give you the clothes. The skins are up to you.”

  He handed Mutti a neatly folded checked skirt and a demure blouse with a button-up collar. Gerta and Kat received identical outfits: long black skirts, short-sleeved collared tops, and skinny black neckties.

  The uniform of the League of German Girls.

  Max knew what was coming before Albert took the next set of clothes out of the suitcase. A moment later, he found himself holding short pants that stopped just above his knee, a short-sleeved collared shirt, and a black necktie.

  The uniform that Heinrich and the rest of the Hitler Youth wore.

  “I would rather die than dress like one of those girls,” Kat said. She tossed her new clothes on the sofa, folded her arms, and set her mouth in a defiant line.

  “I’m not going to look like Magda Schmitz,” Gerta said.

  “Who’s Magda Schmitz?” Max asked.

  “The worst girl in my school. The absolute worst.”

  Mutti sighed. She looked at Albert and shrugged. Max was worried about his mother. Yesterday she had slept late into the afternoon, and seemed only half awake for the rest of the day. I dreamed I passed your father in a car, going the opposite direction, she’d told Max in a daze.

  Albert seemed to sense that the moment was slipping beyond Ingrid Hoffmann’s grasp.

  “Listen to me,” he said. “I am a high-ranking Gestapo agent named Klaus Bauer. My papers prove this, and they are impeccable. Your mother is my loyal wife, Renate, and you three are my picture-perfect children. Your papers also prove this. I am stationed in Paris, but I took my children to a youth rally in Berlin, and now we are returning. We visited relatives in Dortmund along the way.”

  He handed identification cards to Max, Gerta, and Kat.

  Max’s card said his name was “Ernst Bauer.”

  “Why can’t I be ‘Max Bauer’?” he asked. It seemed easier to keep his first name. If some SS guard at a checkpoint called him Ernst, he would probably stare blankly before remembering who he was supposed to be.

  “The Hoffmann family is on a list,” Albert explained. “An ‘Ingrid’ traveling with a ‘Max’ and a ‘Gerta’ could raise alarm bells in an alert guard. Let us hope we only encounter the lazy kind.”

  “ ‘Ursula Bauer’?” Gerta said, studying her card.

  “Could be worse,” Kat said. “I’m ‘Ingeborg.’ ”

  “Put on your clothes and get used to your names,” Albert said. “Practice calling each other by them. Get used to calling me ‘Papa.’ Remember what I said about your skins—until we get to the safe house in Paris, for the entire time we are on the road, you are loyal Nazis. Think of your classmates who were in the Hitler Youth. Act like them.”

  Max thought of Heinrich, and his father’s knife flashed before his eyes.

  “Now,” Albert said, “try to get some rest. We’re leaving at dawn.” He turned to Kat. “I have some news for you.”

  Her eyes widened.

  “Your mother has been moved from a camp in Poland.”

  “She’s alive!” Kat exclaimed.

  “Yes,” Albert said. “And she’s now being held at Ravensbrück. It’s a camp for women about ninety kilometers north of Berlin. The Nazis are transporting their prisoners west as the Red Army advances.”

  Kat rushed forward and threw her arms around Albert. A stunned look passed across his face, then he patted her on the back.

  She let him go. “Can you get a letter to her?”

  “I can try,” he said. “But you must write as if it will most certainly be intercepted and read. Don’t say anything about your whereabouts—just that you are alive and well.”

  “I will!” Kat said. “I mean, I won’t!” She put her hands on her head, started to walk to the back room, then stopped and turned to Elke and Petra, who had been watching the proceedings from the sofa. “Do you have paper? And a pen?”

  “Yes, dear,” Elke said. Petra reached into a brightly colored beaded bag at her side and produced a square piece of paper and a black pen with a smart silver cap.

  Kat took the pen and paper and rushed away, calling out a hurried “Thanks!” over her shoulder.

  “I guess I’ll go practice my Sieg Heil-ing,” Gerta said. She followed Kat into the room behind the bookshelf.

  “This isn’t so bad,” Mutti said, holding up her blouse.

  “Only the best for Renate Bauer,” Albert said, closing the suitcase. “My wife won’t be outdone by those stylish Parisian women.” He smiled at Mutti, but his smile abruptly faded. “I’m sorry, Ingrid. I didn’t mean … they’re just disguises, you understand. I would never presume …”

  “It’s okay, Albert,” Mutti said. “Really.” She blinked. “I mean, Klaus.” She joined Gerta and Kat behind the bookshelf.

  Max watched the awkward exchange with a strange tightness in his stomach. He was happy for Kat—it had been so long since she’d heard anything about her mother. The not-knowing was the worst feeling of all. Even the knowledge that she was in a place like Ravensbrück was better than wondering if she was alive or dead.

  “Have you heard anything about my father?” he asked tentatively.

  Albert stood very straight, suitcase in hand, long jacket draped over his forearm, looking every inch the Gestapo commander.

  “No,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  Max swallowed. “It’s okay.”

  Albert nodded and turned to go.

  “Albert?” Max said. He didn’t stop. “Um, Papa, I mean?”

  Albert paused. “Yes, Ernst?”

  “I don’t know how to tie a tie. I never had to wear one to school.”

  “Oh,” Albert said. “Do you want me to show you?”

  Max hesitated. Papa had always promised to show him one day. He handed Albert the long black fabric. “Could you just do it for me?”

  Albert set down his suitcase and jacket and took the tie. He draped it over the back of his neck and made a few deft flips and turns of the fabric. Then he loosened the loop and handed it back to Max.

  “Thanks,” Max said. He couldn’t bring himself to add Papa.

  Max opened his eyes in darkness, shaken awake by Mutti’s hand on his shoulder.

  “Get dressed, Ernst. It’s time to go.”

  Max rubbed his eyes. Ernst. What was his mother talking about? Was he still dreaming?

  Lamplight washed over him, and he sat up. There were Gerta and Kat, dressed like upstandi
ng members of the League of German Girls. Max had seen League girls arrayed in formation on the soccer fields near his school, and Gerta and Kat would fit right in. They looked like they were about to practice calisthenics. And there was Mutti in a fancy—but not glamorous—outfit, her hair tied back in a bun.

  Now he was sure he was dreaming. He groaned, lay back down, pulled the covers over his head, and closed his eyes.

  Mutti yanked the covers away. “Come on! Your father’s waiting.”

  Papa! Max swung his legs over the side of the bed and stood up. Then his eyes swept across the Hitler Youth uniform he’d piled on top of his knapsack on the floor. The short-sleeved brown shirt, the half-length trousers, and the necktie with its premade loop. Reality crashed in. Papa was back in Berlin, whereabouts unknown. Albert was here in Potsdam, and Max was supposed to pretend to be his “son.”

  He waited until Mutti, Gerta, and Kat went out into the living room. Then he picked up the stiff trousers, the brown shirt, and the tie and tossed them onto his bed. He thought of what Albert had said about skins. It wasn’t enough just to wear the clothes; he had to make himself believe that he was the loyal son of a fervent Nazi, a proud Hitler Youth boy. And yet he couldn’t even bring himself to put on the trousers.

  There was a knock on the side of the half-open bookshelf. Max turned to find Albert peeking in.

  “Do you need help?”

  “No,” Max said.

  “It’s best if we leave before the sun comes up,” Albert said.

  “I’ll be right there.”

  Albert went back into the living room.

  Max took a deep breath and stared at the uniform. He told himself it was just stitches and fabric. It didn’t mean anything. He could take it off and throw it away as soon as they got to Paris.

  Put it on, Max. They’re all waiting for you.

  He tried to blank out his mind, but it was no use. As he stepped into the trousers and pulled them up, he thought of Heinrich, Gerhard, and the other boys of the Hitler Youth—thousands of them, all over the Third Reich—getting ready for their day in exactly the same manner. He thought of what he’d discussed with Elke—the queasy knowledge that, if things had gone slightly differently, he could have been one of those boys. How easy it would have been for Max to be the proud owner of one of these uniforms—not as a disguise, but as a badge of honor, worn to fit in with the ranks of his fellow Nazi youth. After all, these were the boys he’d grown up with, the friends and schoolmates whose parents preferred that they not draw attention to themselves or stand out, lest they be lumped in with the “relocated” Jews and other undesirables not fit to live in an Aryan society.