by Andy Marino
Max couldn’t say how, exactly, but he was overcome with the certainty that they would see Papa again one day. He almost said this out loud to Mutti and Gerta, but at the last second he decided to hold his tongue. The feeling would be his alone. It was truer that way, somehow.
As they made their way toward the farmhouse, Max began to smell bacon and eggs.
In the years to come, Max would have plenty of time to live with the story of how he and his family had fought the Nazis and survived the war. For now, it was morning in Spain, and it was time for breakfast.
In the end, Adolf Hitler’s assassin turned out to be none other than Adolf Hitler himself. On the afternoon of April 30, 1945, with the Red Army closing in on the Führerbunker, Hitler retired to his personal study and shot himself in the head with his own pistol. His wife, Eva Braun, killed herself with a cyanide capsule. They had been married for less than forty hours.
Germany signed the unconditional surrender on May 8, 1945.
The Hoffmanns, along with millions of other displaced refugees, made their way across war-ravaged Europe and returned to homes they scarcely recognized—if they were still there at all.
The Dahlem villa had been picked clean of everything but the furniture. Even the blankets and candles in the bomb shelter were gone. There was no way of knowing if the culprits were fleeing German soldiers or looters from the Red Army. It didn’t matter—the result was the same.
“I can’t believe this,” Max said, running a finger through the thick dust that had collected on the sitting room end table.
The Hoffmanns had waited out the final year of the war in the Spanish city of San Sebastián. Mutti had found work in the office of a German-speaking dentist, and they lived simply and comfortably. As the months passed, it became easier and easier to put the war out of their minds. In neutral Spain, there were no blackouts, no food rationing, no bombing raids.
No hiding from the Gestapo.
If not for Papa’s absence, it would have been possible for Max to let himself be swept pleasantly along by life’s new routines. But it had proved impossible to discover anything about Karl Hoffmann’s fate in Spain. So, after the war ended, Mutti took Max and Gerta back to Berlin, a city of rubble and ruin, to start life anew in the one place that Karl Hoffmann would return to if he was still alive.
“At least our home is still standing,” Mutti said, straightening a picture frame on the wall. The oil painting of Unter den Linden that had once filled the frame was gone.
“And nobody else is living in it,” Gerta said, sitting down on the sofa with a heavy sigh. A cloud of dust erupted into the air around her.
Max went to the doorway of the kitchen. The empty house was eerie in the afternoon light, every corner hiding ghosts, every hallway full of echoes of his father.
There was the wooden table where the man had delivered the maps to Papa before succumbing to his wounds.
Max walked down the hall and peeked into the study. There was the corner of the carpet that hid Papa’s safe, the nook in the desk where he kept his doctor’s bag, the shelves full of leather-bound medical books and literary tomes.
He could hear Papa’s voice, faint and distant: Max, get me my bag, please.
He went back into the living room. Mutti was bustling about, straightening up. Gerta sat on the sofa with her arms folded, staring at a torn piece of wallpaper.
This is our house, Max thought to himself. It didn’t seem real. He hadn’t slept a single night in this place for over a year. He paused for a moment, leaning against the arm of the sofa, thinking about the boy he used to be. That boy, too, seemed unreal.
So who was he, now that the war was over and he was home?
He looked at his sister. She had thrived in Spain, learning the language and making friends easily. Max had mostly kept to himself, despite Mutti’s urgings to get out and meet some local kids to play with. He had started keeping a journal, writing down his wartime experiences and memories.
Writing helped chase away the bad dreams. It also helped him stay connected to Kat. Through the few letters that the princess’s network managed to smuggle over the border, Max learned that Ravensbrück had been liberated by the Red Army on the same day that Hitler shot himself—and Kat’s mother was one of the survivors. They were to be reunited in Berlin.
“Hey, look at this!” he said, noticing a small item on the windowsill. He went over and picked it up. It was a wooden figurine of a knight on horseback—the exact same miniature he’d left at Albert’s side as he lay on the floor of the abandoned shoe factory outside Paris.
Mutti and Gerta came over to look.
“Looks like Albert’s back, too,” Max said.
Gerta made a show of studying an armchair with suspicion. “Albert, is that you?”
Mutti examined the knight and shook her head. “What a strange man.”
Food rationing under the Soviets was scarcely better than it had been under the Nazis, but Mutti could still work magic with the black market. By the end of the week, they had enough food for potato pancakes, schnitzel, and a hearty vegetable stew. They were just sitting down to eat when a knock came at the front door.
Max put down his fork and went to get it. He was expecting one of their neighbors from Dahlem. All week people had been stopping by to say hello and see how they were getting on. Max regarded them all with contempt. Most of them were former Nazis. The end of the war didn’t erase their complicity.
He opened the door.
There, with his hat in his hand and spectacles perched on the bridge of his nose, stood a gaunt, hollow-cheeked man in a threadbare coat, standing with the aid of a cane.
Max blinked. The world went askew. For a moment, it seemed that all of Dahlem was fracturing, breaking apart around the figure on the doorstep. Then everything came rushing back together, and a single word escaped him.
“Papa.”
Karl Hoffmann fixed a crooked smile to his face. “Max,” he said. And then Max found himself half embracing, half dragging his father inside the house while Papa chuckled.
“Careful, there’s not as much of me as there used to be.”
Mutti and Gerta came rushing over, and in a moment they were all holding one another, afraid to let go. Mutti began to cry as she kissed his forehead, his cheeks, his lips.
Finally, Papa managed to free himself and walk slowly but steadily over to the sofa, the tip of his cane clacking against the floorboards. He leaned the cane against a cushion and sat down. Then he took off his hat. His hair was thin, wispy, and whitish gray. Behind the spectacles, his eyes seemed to stare off into some unfathomable distance. Max knew without having to ask that his father had been in a camp.
“I’ve missed you so much,” Papa said. He took off his spectacles and wiped his eyes. “I didn’t know what I’d find when I got here. If the house would be empty. Berlin, it feels like …” He shook his head. “It’s no longer a city. I don’t know what it is. I was afraid our house would be the same way. A tomb. A graveyard of memories.” He looked around at his family, and there was great wonder in his expression. “But you’re here. You’re all really here.” Suddenly, his skinny arm darted out and his hand clasped Max’s elbow. “Tell me you’re really here,” he said. His bottom lip trembled and his shoulders shook.
“I’m really here, Papa,” Max said. “We’re all here. We made it.”
Karl Hoffmann wept. “There were times when you were so far away that I thought I dreamed you.”
He looked so weak, but his grip on Max’s elbow was fierce. At that moment, Max realized that for the Hoffmanns, the war would never really be over. But that was okay, he thought. They were all back home. They had survived. And they would meet whatever came next as a family: Max, Gerta, Mutti, and Papa.
Together.
Resistance to the Nazis during World War II was a sprawling, international affair that often hinged on the split-second decisions of ordinary men and women willing to make incredible sacrifices. Once I began research
ing, the rabbit holes proved to be endless, filled with unbelievable characters, wild events, and acts of courage that made me question how I would behave in similar circumstances. (One of my favorite stories, whose events in no way intersect with this series, is the tale of the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, “the Butcher of Prague,” by agents of the Czech resistance who parachuted into the occupied city.)
The treacherous path through Occupied France and across the Pyrenees into the relative “freedom” of Spain really existed. The Comet Line, led by a Belgian woman code-named Dédée, helped hundreds of downed Allied pilots escape the clutches of the Gestapo and live to fight another day. The Hoffmanns’ route in this book roughly traces the route of the Comet Line. The final leg, at the French-Spanish border, really was operated by Basque guides whose families had lived in that mountainous region for centuries. Peter Eisner’s book The Freedom Line was incredibly helpful as I wrote the scenes set in those areas, and I took from it a variety of details, including the all-important alpargatas.
The Nazi occupation of Paris created a weird alternate universe in the middle of war-torn Europe. It was supposed to be a symbol of the Nazis’ benevolent power, so rather than bomb it into submission, Hitler settled thousands of German citizens there in an attempt to “colonize” it, while the SS and the Gestapo kept the French population in line. This made for a tense and awkward coexistence between an occupying force trying to refrain from brutality (except against the Jewish population, of course) and a citizenry trying to preserve some semblance of its national character and pride. But not everyone simply went about their business. Resistance groups operated all over the city. In the final days of the occupation, as the Allies drew ever closer, the resistance rose up. (I believe that Kat and the princess fought alongside them, but that’s a story for another time … ) The excellent book When Paris Went Dark by Ronald C. Rosbottom helped me bring the characters to occupied Paris.
I would also like to cite Alan Furst’s novel A Hero of France for inspiring the Hoffmanns’ train journey out of Paris and into southern France.
So much has been written on resistance activities during World War II, and yet countless stories of defiance and sacrifice will no doubt remain forever untold. This series is dedicated to everyone whose acts of resistance went unwitnessed and unrecorded.
Andy Marino was born and raised in upstate New York and currently lives in New York City with his wife and two cats. You can visit him at andy-marino.com.
Copyright © 2020 by Andy Marino
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First edition, June 2020
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e-ISBN 978-1-338-35907-7
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