by Alan Gratz
The explosion had triggered an avalanche.
Fritz and I watched, transfixed, as snow roared down the side of the mountain toward the forest of fir trees below.
Toward us.
At first I couldn’t believe it would possibly reach us, but as the snow rolled down the mountain, giant clouds of it blossomed and roiled, growing bigger and taller.
The avalanche was going to hit the cable car.
I rolled for the arm at the center of the roof, wrapping my whole body around it just as the first snow burst hit us. The snow stung like sleet, and then the bigger clouds caught us. Snow and rock slammed into me like gravel fired from a cannon. I heard Fritz cry out, but couldn’t see him in the storm.
I clung to the arm of the cable car and held on as the tram was knocked sideways, sweeping up and away from the avalanche like a flag in the wind. The snow pummeled me, beat me like waves, trying to strip me free, but I held on.
And then it was past. The tidal wave of snow rumbled on down the mountain, the aerial tram swung sickeningly back down to how it was supposed to hang, and I sucked in a desperate lungful of air, snow and ice still covering every inch of my body.
I had hung on, but Fritz hadn’t. I was alone on the roof of the cable car.
When you fell down, it was over.
The train compartment rocked like the cable car swinging in the sky, but this one was mercifully connected to the ground. I slumped heavily against the window, still stunned that I had been able to save Professor Goldsmit, who sat on the seat across from me. Still stunned that I had fought Fritz on top of a cable car. That I had watched him there, clinging to the roof of the gondola one moment, gone the next.
Goldsmit and I had caught a train from Mürren to Bern, the capital of Switzerland, where there was an Irish Embassy just like the one in Berlin. Only this one, presumably, still had an ambassador. Once I handed over Goldsmit, he wasn’t my responsibility anymore.
Our train rumbled along the sweeping curve of a stone bridge, a lazy, crystal-blue river below us. Enormous evergreen trees stood like sentinels along hillsides covered in a soft white blanket of snow. A little village with peaked roofs, a church steeple, and smoking chimneys glowed yellow-orange in the fading twilight.
This was a Europe untouched by war. This was a Europe where no bombs had fallen, no Jews had been rounded up and sent to concentration camps, no tanks had torn the streets up with their treads. Where homes and churches and schools still stood, where food was plentiful, where people still greeted one another warmly on the sidewalk, without suspicion. This was Switzerland, protected from the horrors on their doorstep by the thin shield of neutrality, the paper wall of diplomacy and politics.
Just like Ireland.
But the war that was being fought just outside the borders of Switzerland and just across the Celtic Sea from Ireland wasn’t just a war between the Axis and the Allies. It was a world war, and the fate of every nation on Earth, neutral or not, lay in the balance. When the war was over, the world would be ruled one way, or the other—by freedom or fascism, by hope or by fear. I had seen the depths, the lengths, the Nazis would go to win that war, sacrificing their own children to the cause, and I also knew firsthand the sacrifices the Allies had made to stop them.
I wonder, Michael, did you ever hear the one about the Englishman, the Irishman, and the Scotsman who were all lined up in front of a firing squad?
Whether they wanted them to or not, Simon and the Allies were fighting to save the world for Switzerland too. And Ireland. What right did the Swiss, the Irish, the Spanish—anyone—have to sit out the fight for the fate of the world when they too would live or die by the result?
“A good man died to save you,” I said to Goldsmit, startling him. They were the first words either of us had spoken since we boarded the train, weary from our adventure. My voice sounded harder than I’d meant it to, like an accusation.
“I didn’t ask him to,” Goldsmit said defensively.
“Well, he did, whether you wanted him to or not.”
“I—I’m sorry,” Goldsmit said.
“Don’t be sorry,” I told him. “Just … make that bomb. Save the world. Do something that makes your life worth saving.”
Goldsmit took off his glasses, cleaned them with his handkerchief, and put them back on. “I’ll do my best,” he said.
I stared out the window again, at the white mountains in the distance. I thought of Simon, and of my parents. Where were they right now? In a barn in Germany? Hiding beneath a bridge in Nazi-occupied France? Or had they gone north into Denmark, looking for a ferry to take them across the North Sea to England? Surely they hadn’t gone east, toward the Russian front.
Wherever they were, I prayed they were safe, and that I would see them again soon.
Our train pulled in to Bern less than an hour later. The station agent gave us directions, and the professor and I made our way to the Irish Embassy. I spent more than a minute explaining to the lady at the front desk who Goldsmit and I were and why we were there, before I realized I was still speaking German and had to start all over again in English.
“Yes, yes, Michael!” the woman said. “You’ve been expected!”
“I have?” I asked. “We have? By whom?”
But the lady was already on the phone, excitedly reporting our arrival. I heard a familiar voice give a happy cry somewhere down the hall. And then my mother and father and I were running to meet each other, wrapping one another in one great Irish hug.
“That should be the last of them, then,” Chief Technician Ross of the Royal Air Force said in his Scottish brogue. He shuffled the papers into a single stack and put his pencil and eraser on top of them. The pencil was blue, and had VENUS ~ BLUE BAND ~ SUPERTHIN ~ 3561 ~ NO2 printed on it in white. The eraser said WH SMIT. I assumed it once said WH SMITH, but the second H had worn off.
“You’ve an absolutely incredible memory for detail,” said Agent Faulkner. He was in the SOE—Special Operations Executive, Britain’s secret war intelligence organization—and a ramrod English aristocrat to the core. He was probably Lord something-or-other outside the war, and had gone to university at Oxford or Cambridge. Or both. “I doubt even I could have reconstructed those plans from memory after all this time,” he said.
After our happy reunion, my parents and I had flown under cover of night from Bern to London, where we were now. While my parents had spent the last three days being debriefed by the SOE and receiving their new orders from Dublin, I had worked with Chief Technician Ross to rebuild the plans for Projekt 1065 from memory, exactly the same way Simon and I had in the little secret room at the Irish Embassy. It hadn’t been easy, but I’d already done it once in Berlin. Why couldn’t I do it again here? Now if the Nazis did build their jet-powered Flugzeug—“fly thing,” the German word for “airplane”—the Allies would have one to match them.
“Have you ever heard the one about the Englishman, the Irishman, and the Scotsman who sold their brains as transplants?” I asked Agent Faulkner.
The British Intelligence officer looked a little taken aback. He glanced at the Scottish engineer, who just shook his head and smiled.
“I’m afraid I haven’t,” said Agent Faulkner.
“Well, it turns out the Irishman’s and the Scotsman’s brains only sold for a hundred pounds, but the Englishman’s sold for five thousand pounds. ‘It just goes to prove,’ said the Englishman, ‘that Englishmen are much cleverer than Irishmen or Scotsmen.’ ‘No, it doesn’t,’ said the Irishman. ‘It just means the Englishman’s brain had never been used.’ ”
“Right,” Agent Faulkner said, not quite sure what to do with that. Chief Technician Ross tried to hide a smile.
Agent Faulkner stood. “I think we’re about finished here. Chief Technician?”
The Scotsman gave me an easy salute and collected the papers. “Cheers, lad.”
I joked, but the whole reason I’d been able to remember the plans was down to Simon, my English friend. He was
the one who’d helped me hone my memory, the one who’d played Kim’s Game with me night after night. He was the reason too that I’d been able to save Professor Goldsmit from Fritz.
Fritz. I thought of him again, standing over me, that bloody Hitler Youth dagger in his hands, ready to die for Germany. He had, in the end. Like the Hitler Youth’s motto, he’d lived faithfully and fought bravely. But he hadn’t died laughing.
“I understand you and your family are off to Washington, D.C., now,” Agent Faulkner said when Ross was gone.
I nodded. We were going to America! “It’s a new posting for my father,” I said. “He reckons it’ll be safer there than in Berlin, and Ma is going to help the Yanks with their new intelligence service.” I paused, then asked, “What about Professor Goldsmit? Is he back in the States working on the atomic bomb?”
Agent Faulkner cleared his throat. “I really couldn’t say.”
Of course not. Loose lips sink ships and all that.
“So when do I get to meet Mr. Churchill?” I asked.
Agent Faulkner looked bewildered. “Meet Mr. Churchill?”
“You know, to get my medal. Get my picture in all the papers.”
Faulkner looked uncomfortable. “You and your family may yet get a commendation from His Majesty’s government,” Agent Faulkner said. “That’s not for me to say. But Michael, you do understand that you can’t say a word about any of this. Ever. To anyone.”
I frowned. “What? What do you mean I can’t tell anyone?”
Agent Faulkner sat back down across from me. “Michael, it’s imperative that you tell no one about what you and your parents have done. Not one bit of it. If you go telling your story, it will be obvious that we’ve had Irish agents working under Hitler’s nose the whole war. That we still do have Irish agents in the field.”
“What’s wrong with that?” I asked. “People should know.”
“Michael, it’s vital that we maintain the illusion of Ireland’s neutrality. It may yet be valuable to us. I’m afraid everything you’ve seen and heard, everything you and your parents have done for the war effort, falls under the Official Secrets Act. You’re forbidden from telling anyone what happened, under penalty of imprisonment.”
I couldn’t believe it. My mother and father had been sending valuable intelligence to the Allies for years. I had just risked my life—and theirs, and sacrificed Simon’s life—to get the plans for Projekt 1065. To save Professor Goldsmit. And now we couldn’t tell anybody about it?
“It’s not fair,” I told Faulkner.
“Welcome to the world of international espionage,” Agent Faulkner said, and he got up to leave. He stopped and gave me a sympathetic look. “I’m afraid you’ll just have to sleep well in the knowledge that you and your family have done your part to win the war.”
I huffed. It wasn’t enough. I wanted the world to know what I’d done. What Ma and Da had done.
But then I remembered riding on the train through Switzerland with Goldsmit, feeling bitter about Ireland’s neutrality in the war. The truth was, Ireland wasn’t sitting on the sidelines. We had done something. We were just fighting in a different way.
Even though nobody would ever know what I’d done, what my ma and da had done, what Ireland had done, we’d stood up to Hitler and the Nazis with the rest of the Allies.
We’d fought for freedom too.
In modern history, young people were perhaps never used so much to fight a war as they were in Nazi Germany during World War II. At the beginning of the war, when things were going well for the Nazis, German children worked on the home front. Like their Allied counterparts in England and America and Russia, they were farmers, messengers, and air raid wardens. They collected raw materials in scrap drives. They put out fires and cleared debris after bombings. They worked in factories and hospitals and welfare agencies.
But after the disastrous Battle of Stalingrad in early 1943, in which the Nazis lost more than 285,000 men, Germany became desperate for new soldiers. By that summer, Nazi Germany was officially drafting boys as young as sixteen for active military duty. They were given guns, grenades, and rocket launchers, and sent to the front lines with little or no training. Tens of thousands of young German boys died fighting on the Russian front alone. In one extraordinary case, the Nazis created a special, fully equipped tank division manned entirely by Hitler Youth between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, and tasked them with stopping the Allied advance in France after D-Day. Of the more than 20,000 boys in the unit, almost half died in the war.
In late 1944, when Germany’s defeat was all but certain, Adolf Hitler ordered that every male between the ages of fifteen and sixty who was not already fighting must join in the defense of Germany. But in reality, boys—and girls—as young as eleven years old were recruited to fight. The boys were given rocket launchers and grenades and sent to attack Allied tanks; the girls were taught to operate antiaircraft guns and told to shoot down enemy planes. During the battle for the city of Aachen, American soldiers reported capturing German soldiers as young as eight years old. Though unskilled, the German children fought with a ferociousness that frightened Allied troops. The Nazis had told their young soldiers that the Allies were monsters who would torture and kill them if they were captured, so many of them fought to the death or committed suicide rather than surrender. Of the five thousand Hitler Youths who fought in the Battle of Berlin at the end of the war, only five hundred survived.
In Adolf Hitler’s last public appearance in April of 1945, he emerged from his bunker underneath what was left of the Reich Chancellery building to award the Iron Cross, Nazi Germany’s highest honor, to members of the Hitler Youth who had showed bravery on the battlefield. The youngest of them was twelve years old. Hitler committed suicide just ten days later, and within a week Nazi Germany surrendered. But not before it had sacrificed an entire generation of young people to a mad dream of world domination.
After the war, when the Allies had to decide which Nazis to try for war crimes, the Hitler Youth who survived were forgiven because they were children. They had been misguided by their leaders, the Allies decided, who were really to blame. As a part of the “denazification” of Germany, the Allies showed films of the Nazi death camps to German children who had been members of the Hitler Youth and the Bund Deutscher Mädel. Many of them didn’t believe the images they saw. They had been so brainwashed by their Nazi leaders that it took years for them to understand that they, and not the Allies, were the monsters. In the years to come, the boys and girls who had been members of the Hitler Youth came to despise Nazi Germany for turning them into soldiers, making them complicit in the Holocaust, and robbing them of their youth.
Projekt 1065 is a work of fiction set against the very real backdrop of Nazi Germany in World War II. Kristallnacht, the Gestapo, the SRD, the concentration camps, the Hitler Youth, the Edelweiss Pirates, the “Aryan” education in German schools—all of that is real. Everything Adolf Hitler says to Michael and the other boys in this book is an actual quote from Hitler; I gathered them together from various speeches and interviews so that I wasn’t putting words in Hitler’s mouth. Adolf Hitler said enough crazy, awful things that I didn’t need to make up anything new for him.
By 1943, the Americans and British were taking turns bombing Berlin, dropping more than 68,000 tons of bombs on the city, and many Allied bomber and fighter pilots had to parachute into enemy territory when their planes were shot out from under them. Some survived and were ferreted to safety by the resistance movement; far more were captured and taken to concentration camps or killed. Nazi children were encouraged to spy on their parents and turn them in for violations, which they often did. The Nazis were great burners of “degenerate” books too, but by 1943, when my story takes place, there weren’t many large-scale book burnings anymore—mostly because the Nazis had already rounded up and destroyed all the books they disagreed with.
Ireland was officially neutral during World War II, much to the disappointmen
t and disdain of England and the rest of the Allies. The Irish did have an embassy in Berlin during World War II, but Michael and his family are fictional characters. The spying that the O’Shaunessey family does, however, is based in reality. In the 1980s, declassified documents revealed that the Irish diplomatic corps in Europe had been actively collecting intelligence and sending it back to the Allies—at great risk to themselves—throughout World War II. Though her army never fought in the war, Ireland, it turns out, wasn’t quite as neutral as everyone had been led to believe.
Real too is Projekt 1065, the actual code name for the secret Nazi project to develop a jet-powered aircraft. In 1944, the Germans succeeded, and the Messerschmitt Me 262 Schwalbe became the world’s first operational jet fighter, flying almost a hundred miles an hour faster than any Allied plane in the skies. By then, it was too little too late, but their invention of the jet engine did change the world. At the end of the war, the Allies snatched up the technology and developed jet planes of their own, and by the 1950s, jet planes began replacing propeller-powered planes in air forces and civilian air travel.
Operation Paperclip, the code name for the real Allied plan to recruit or kidnap Nazi scientists to work for the United States, came a little later than I have used it here, but both the Americans and Russians played a chess game with scientists throughout the war, trying to capture the best brains in Europe for themselves. Both sides were particularly interested in rocket scientists for the coming space race, and in nuclear physicists who could develop an atomic bomb. The Manhattan Project, the code name for the US project that created the world’s first nuclear weapon, was a much bigger secret than I have made it here—most people didn’t know anything about the development of the atomic bomb until the United States became the first and only nation to use one, dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945.