by Andy Marino
He buttoned his shirt and turned the collar up so he could tighten the loop of the necktie. In the mirror, he fussed with the knot until it sat snugly in the triangular space where the collar parted. He paused a moment to study his new persona. Then he vowed not to look in another mirror until he’d taken the uniform off. He shoved his things into his knapsack, trying to unsee the image of himself as a Hitler Youth boy—an image that would probably be etched in his mind for the rest of his life.
He did one final check in his bag for the wooden knight and the paper star, then stepped out into the living room. Gerta’s eyes widened when she saw him. Kat seemed about to say something, but silenced herself and turned away. Mutti regarded him with placid understanding.
Only Albert—Papa, Max reminded himself—spoke.
“Fix your hair, Ernst,” he said sternly. Max’s hand went to the top of his head. He hadn’t spent long enough in the mirror to notice his hair. It was mussed from sleeping. Mutti beckoned him closer.
“Let me,” she said, smoothing his hair.
Max thought of all the boys in the Hitler Youth whose mothers fixed their hair before they went out marching and vandalizing Jewish businesses and whatever else they did.
Petra came from the kitchen bearing a tray of food. She went around to each of them in turn and solemnly handed over a roll and a small piece of cheese. She met Max’s eyes and held his gaze, smiled, and then retreated back into the kitchen. As if they had planned their shifts, Elke appeared in the room as soon as her sister vanished. She folded her arms, studied each of her guests, then nodded her approval to Albert.
“Very good,” she said.
“I’m parked just around the corner,” Albert said. “I’m going to make sure that the street is safe, and then you can follow me to the car.” He moved quickly down the hall and out the front door. Max stuffed the roll into his mouth.
“I’m very pleased I got to meet you all,” Elke said.
“I’m afraid we don’t have the means to thank you properly for your hospitality at the moment,” Mutti said. “But after all this is over, perhaps …”
“Nonsense,” Elke said. “You don’t owe me anything.” She embraced Mutti. “Safe travels,” she said. Then she turned to Gerta and Kat. “Keep him in line, ladies,” she added, pointing to Max. Then she joined her sister in the kitchen.
As he chewed his roll, Max was struck by the feeling that he would never see Elke or Petra again. How strange that so many people passed through the sisters’ home, never to return. How many of them moved on down the line to safety? How many were caught and sent to the camps?
He took one last look at the living room, with its shelves full of clocks, its menagerie of paper creatures, and its false bookshelf. He wondered if Elke’s son, the Nazi, would visit after they had left. The man would sit on the sofa and drink his genuine hot cocoa, never suspecting that a family of fugitives wanted by the Gestapo had just taken refuge in his mother’s house.
“This stupid shirt itches,” Kat said, scratching underneath her collar.
“I look like Magda Schmitz,” Gerta said glumly.
“Max looks like he found his older brother’s uniform and tried it on,” Kat said.
“I don’t care what I look like,” Max said. “I’m taking this off as soon as we get to Paris.” He turned to Mutti. “How long does it take to get to Paris?”
“A day and a night,” Mutti said, “if we don’t run into any problems. But we will.”
She explained that the Reichsautobahn—the system of highways the Nazis were building across Central Europe to connect the farthest corners of the Reich—was limited to official traffic. They would be driving alongside Wehrmacht transports carrying troops, howitzers, airplane parts, and other material destined for the front lines. Albert would have to show a special pass at every checkpoint. And when they got to Paris, the Nazis’ grip on the roads would become even tighter.
“Everywhere we go,” she said, “we keep quiet, hand over our papers when asked, and let Albert”—she shook her head—“Papa do the talking.”
Max heard the front door open and close. Albert appeared at the edge of the living room.
“Follow me,” he said. “It’s still dark, and the city is blacked out, so keep close.”
Outside, Max took one last look at the sisters’ neat row house. He thought he saw the curtains part in an upper room, but it was too dark to see if anyone was there, watching them go.
Klaus Bauer’s car was a gleaming black Škoda with a silver grille and two spare tires that slotted into sleek teardrop-shaped curves in the chassis above the front wheels. Max had seen cars just like it all over Berlin. The Czech-made Škodas were favorites of the Gestapo.
“Where did you get this?” Max asked after they had piled into the spacious car—Albert in the driver’s seat, Mutti next to him, Max sandwiched between Gerta and Kat in the back.
“A friend owed me a favor,” Albert said in a tone that implied the topic was closed for discussion. He held down the starter button, and the engine came to life. Then he reached down by his leg, palmed the long silver gearshift lever that jutted up from the floor, and pushed it forward. After a light jolt, the car eased smoothly out into the empty street. Albert flicked a switch on a dashboard panel full of gauges, and the headlights lit up the predawn street. A man on a bicycle, clearly expecting to have the early morning hours to himself, swerved out of the way. Albert cursed under his breath.
Max supposed that running down a cyclist a block away from Elke and Petra’s house would have been a disastrous beginning to the journey.
“We’re off,” Albert said. The dark streets blurred past. As if the atmosphere of the sleeping city had entered the car, no one spoke. Max tried to pick out familiar landmarks from his trip to Potsdam years ago, but there was nothing to see except a few early-bird shop owners tidying up their stores behind blue-lit windows.
Gradually a pale dawn crept across the sky, and a city took shape outside the car. Pedestrians began to hurry along the sidewalks, and a few other vehicles appeared on the roads. Max saw another black Škoda, several army trucks, and a staff car. Soon the buildings of Potsdam were behind them. They crossed an empty bridge, drove onto a heavily forested island, and joined a narrow road that sliced through the trees. Out the window, Max caught glimpses of a placid lake. It seemed like they were the only people on the island, and he was just getting used to this welcome sense of peace and solitude when Albert spoke.
“Have your papers ready.”
Up ahead, the trees had been cleared. On either side of the road, parked among the barren stumps, were canvas-covered military trucks. Two uniformed SS men held German shepherds on short leashes. The dogs panted in the summer heat. Closer to the road was a small booth emblazoned with a red sign that said ACHTUNG—ATTENTION. A red-and-white-striped pole on a pedestal jutted out horizontally to block the road.
Albert shifted down and slowed the car to a crawl, making a complete stop a few meters in front of the blockade. A helmeted SS man jogged out from the booth and approached the driver’s-side window. His eyes made a quick, darting appraisal of the car and its passengers, then he gave Albert a stiff-armed German greeting.
Albert rolled down the window. “Heil Hitler,” he said in response. Then he handed over his identification papers and Reichsautobahn pass before the SS man had a chance to ask for them.
The SS man took the papers, glanced at the ID, looked at Albert, and then handed them back. “We don’t get a lot of traffic through here at this time of day,” he said. It sounded to Max like casual conversation. But Max knew that words could be used to set traps. And he remembered the last time Albert, in his Gestapo disguise, had squared off against the SS.
“I’ve been called back to Paris early,” Albert said.
“Trouble?” the SS man said.
“The usual,” Albert said. “We round up some Jews, the next day a Wehrmacht officer gets shot in a Métro station. Our spies in the resistance p
oint fingers, and we put a bunch of French teenagers up against the wall for the crime. A month goes by, and we repeat the same charade.”
The SS man looked wistful. “I was in Paris before the war. Degenerate, of course. But beautiful.”
“We have corrected some of the degeneracy and sacrificed none of the beauty,” Albert said.
A knock on the passenger-side window sent Max’s heart into his throat. A second SS man he hadn’t seen approach the car was motioning to Mutti to roll down her window. She complied.
The man leaned forward, sticking his head nearly inside the car. He had a long, horsey face and piercing blue eyes. “Papers, please,” he said.
Mutti already had her papers in her hand, and she presented them to the man without a word.
Max had been distracted by Albert’s exchange with the guard. While Gerta and Kat passed their papers up to Mutti in the front, he dug through his knapsack. Balled-up clothes, a few books, Petra’s paper star, Uncle Friedrich’s wooden knight—but no identification card. His heart beat wildly. He racked his brain—Albert had given it to him last night, and he was sure he’d packed it away. He retraced his steps in his mind. He’d put it in the pocket of his trousers, he was certain. Quickly, he pulled his wrinkled pants out of his knapsack.
“Ernst,” Albert said sternly, turning toward the back seat, “I told you to have your papers ready. These men don’t have all day.”
“Yes, Papa. I’m sorry.”
Max pulled his crumpled identification card from the pocket, smoothed it as best he could, and handed it to Mutti, who smoothed it some more and passed it to the guard.
Max noticed that his hand was trembling. He also noticed that the SS man at Albert’s window was regarding him with interest.
“What happened to your face?” he asked through the window.
Startled, Max’s mind went blank. My face? Then he realized the guard must be referring to the bruise that remained from Heinrich’s pistol cracking his skull.
“I play goalie on my soccer team,” he said, hoping that would be explanation enough.
The SS man smiled. “Using your head, I see.”
Max tried to look bold. “Whatever gets the save.”
The guard gestured to a third man inside the booth, who stepped out and lifted the barricade so that the pole pointed at the sky.
The second SS man handed the identification cards back to Mutti. After another exchange of Heil Hitlers, Albert rolled up his window, put the car into drive, and drove through the open gate.
“Ernst,” he said as they sped away down the forest trail, “the next time I tell you to have your papers ready, please have your papers ready.”
“Yes, Papa,” Max said.
“Papa,” Kat said, “what would you do if they made us step out of the car?”
Max reminded himself that Kat hadn’t seen Albert dispatch those Gestapo agents in the ruins of the opera house.
“Shoot them,” Albert said matter-of-factly. “Eventually we’d have to leave the car behind—it’s too easy to tail—and then we’d cross Germany on foot, traveling at night, sleeping in barns, eating whatever we find.”
“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,” Mutti said.
“I don’t have the proper shoes,” Kat said.
“Ernst,” Gerta said, “for God’s sake, have your papers ready next time.”
The German countryside swept past the windows in a hundred shades of green. The Reichsautobahn cut through rolling hills, twin highways divided by a grassy strip that sprouted tentative foliage here and there like a poorly shaved head. Max dozed fitfully in the back seat and woke to flashes of scenery that he would later be unable to differentiate from dreams—a fairy-tale castle on a distant hill, its gables stretching to challenge the low clouds. Hidden Luftwaffe fighter planes tucked into trees alongside the highway, their snub noses poking from the greenery. Bridges arched like Roman aqueducts hung with silver eagles gripping swastikas in their talons.
They passed few fellow travelers, and there were long stretches where it felt like the Škoda was the only vehicle on the road in all of Germany. Staring out at the endless forests dotted with the alabaster stones of ancient villages, chimney smoke curling up into the sky, it was easy to forget that they were fleeing the epicenter of a five-year war that had pulled in most of the world. But all it took to snap him back to reality was for Max to spy Albert’s leather-gloved hands on the steering wheel.
One thought in particular troubled him the most: Every kilometer carried them farther away from Papa.
He dozed for a while. Sometime later he woke with Gerta’s head on his shoulder, squirmed a little in his seat, and went back to sleep.
He woke again during the late afternoon when the sun was on its downward plunge. The car had slowed. There was traffic here—canvas-covered Wehrmacht trucks, convertible cars driven by uniformed soldiers in goggles, even a procession of Panzer tanks crawling along like armored beetles.
Out the right-hand window—north, Max guessed—a city like a low gray ash heap came into view. Distant ruins hazed into an unbroken carpet of dull slag, punctuated by a cathedral’s Gothic spires that presided over the wrecked landscape.
“Frankfurt,” Mutti announced. Max had never been to Frankfurt, but he could imagine that before the war it must have been as grand as Berlin. A river curled like the Spree, a sparkling blue line snaking through the ruins. He had heard about the bombing of cities all across Germany, of course, and he had seen the hollow-eyed refugees from Hamburg who had poured into Berlin by the thousands.
If only Stauffenberg had succeeded! Hitler, it seemed, would never give up. The Führer would rather see all of Germany reduced to dust than surrender. Max wondered if there would even be a Berlin to go back to after the war ended.
The checkpoints on the roads just south of Frankfurt were much different than the small hut manned by a handful of guards in the woods outside of Potsdam. A concrete blockhouse squatted on the side of the road, emblazoned with the SS insignia. There were at least a dozen men milling about, and Max counted five well-fed German shepherds, much healthier than the mangy strays that roamed Berlin. The SS guards carried rifles slung over their shoulders, and the long barrel of a machine gun jutted from its nest atop the blockhouse.
This time, Max had his papers ready, and the car was waved through after what felt like a cursory glance. As they drove away, Albert explained.
“We’ve practically joined this Wehrmacht convoy headed for the Siegfried line,” he said, indicating the parade of military vehicles that stretched along the highway in front of and behind the Škoda. “The guards probably assume that nobody’s stupid enough to be fleeing Germany this way.”
“Good thing we’re that stupid,” Kat said.
“What’s the Siegfried line?” Gerta asked.
“Hitler’s reinforcing German positions along the French border, and the Siegfried line is full of old bunkers and gun emplacements and tank traps from the First World War. Even the Führer has to admit that the Allies will be there before long.”
“Are we going to get caught in the fighting?” Max asked.
“They’re not there yet,” Mutti said.
“The funny thing about the border,” Albert said, “is that it doesn’t really exist anymore, ever since Hitler annexed Alsace-Lorraine. All that French territory is part of the Reich now. So we’re not really ‘crossing over’ into France—the Reich just keeps going and going. The people in this part of it just happen to speak French. At least that’s how the Nazis think of it.”
“Max can translate for us,” Gerta said. “As long as it’s a conversation about French theater.”
“Oui,” Max said. Albert’s words echoed inside his head. The Reich just keeps going and going. At the beginning of the war, all these European borders became elastic, stretched out by the advancing Wehrmacht from the English Channel to Russia’s vast, frigid interior. But now the borders were snapping back into place as the Allies advanced
in the west and the Red Army in the east. And yet the borders weren’t snapping back fast enough to save Kat’s mother, or Papa, or anyone else stuck in Germany. Hitler was desperate to hold on to what he’d gained, even if he had to claw at scraps of territory until they were shredded bits of what they had been.
The promise of night seemed to hover about the car, and then darkness fell so quickly that Max wondered if he’d dozed off again. The Reichsautobahn was reduced to the gray pavement caught in the Škoda’s headlights, and they drove steadily onward, a lighted bubble in a dark land. Occasionally they passed sluggish flatbed trucks crawling along, laden with a hundred tons of machinery.
Eventually, traffic funneled dutifully into the queue of another checkpoint lit by rows of bright bulbs on steel racks that resembled the framework of the Red Army’s Katyusha rocket launcher.
Papers, please.
Until they reached this checkpoint, the SS guards had been young and strong. But this man was much older, and he walked with a slight limp. His bespectacled face was doughy and soft. It was as if he’d just been yanked from his armchair, where he’d been smoking a pipe and reading a book, thrust into an SS uniform, and sent off to the French border territory of Alsace-Lorraine.
He studied their identification cards for a very long time. Then he asked Albert politely if he wouldn’t mind stepping out of the car.