Refugee

by Alan Gratz

  WHAT YOU CAN DO

  Beverly Crawford, a professor emerita at the University of California, Berkeley, has written that refugees live three lives. The first is spent escaping the horrors of whatever has driven them from their homes—like the persecution and murder of Jews in Josef’s Nazi Germany, the starvation and civil rights abuses of Isabel’s Cuba, or the devastating civil war of Mahmoud’s Syria. Those who are lucky enough to escape their homes begin a second, equally dangerous life in their search for refuge, trying to survive ocean crossings and border patrols and criminals looking to profit off them. Most migrants don’t end up in refugee camps, and their days are spent seeking shelter, food, water, and warmth. But even in the camps, refugees are exposed to illness and disease, and often have to exist on less than fifty cents a day.

  If refugees manage to escape their home and then survive the journey to freedom, they begin a third life, starting over in a new country, one where they often do not speak the language or practice the same religion as their hosts. Professional degrees granted in one country are often not honored in another, so refugees who were doctors or lawyers or teachers where they came from become store clerks and taxi drivers and janitors. Families that once had comfortable homes and cars and money set aside for college and retirement have to start all over, living with other refugees in government housing or with host families in foreign cities as they rebuild their lives.

  You can help refugee families by donating money to one of the many groups who help refugees through every phase of their three lives. Some nonprofit organizations have very specific missions, like rescuing people fleeing the Middle East by boat or battling disease in refugee camps. Two of my favorite organizations work specifically with refugee children around the world. The first is UNICEF, the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund, which is working to keep Syrian children from becoming a “lost generation” by providing life-saving medical services, food, water, sanitation, and education both within Syria and wherever Syrian refugees have fled. The second is Save the Children, which works with a number of corporate partners and individual donors here in the United States to offer emergency relief to children whenever and wherever it’s needed around the world, including a special campaign for Syrian children.

  Both UNICEF and Save the Children spend 90 percent of every dollar they raise on services and resources that directly help children. Donations to either of these terrific organizations can be earmarked for specific regions and conflicts, or be used to help refugee children worldwide. Learn more at www.unicefusa.org and www.savethechildren.org.

  I will be donating a portion of my proceeds from the sale of this book to UNICEF, to support their relief efforts with refugee children around the world.

  Alan Gratz

  North Carolina, USA

  2017

  Many thanks to my terrific editor, Aimee Friedman, for all her hard work and devotion to this book, and to editorial director David Levithan for his faith and support. I’m also indebted to the experts who read drafts of Refugee and helped me better understand the people, places, and cultures I was writing about, including Sarabrynn Hudgins, José Moya, Hossein Kamaly, Christina Diaz Gonzalez, and Gabriel Rumbaut. Any mistakes that remain are my own. Thank you to copy editor Bonnie Cutler and proofreader Erica Ferguson for making me look good. Thank you to designer Nina Goffi for the stunning cover and interior layout, and to map artist Jim McMahon. And once again I owe a huge debt of gratitude to everyone who works behind the scenes at Scholastic to help make my books a success: president Ellie Berger; Jennifer Abbots and Tracy van Straaten in Publicity; Lori Benton, Michelle Campbell, Hillary Doyle, Rachel Feld, Paul Gagne, Leslie Garych, Antonio Gonzalez, Jana Haussmann, Emily Heddleson, Jazan Higgins, Robin Hoffman, Meghann Lucy, Joanne Mojica, Kerianne Okie, Stephanie Peitz, John Pels, Christine Reedy, Lizette Serrano, Mindy Stockfield, Michael Strouse, Olivia Valcarce, Ann Marie Wong, and so many others. And to Alan Smagler and the entire Sales team, and all the sales reps and Fairs and Clubs reps across the country who work so hard to tell the world about my books. Special thanks to my friends and fellow writers at Bat Cave for their critiques, and to my great friend Bob who is always so encouraging and supportive. Thank you to my literary agent, Holly Root at Waxman Leavell, and to my publicists and right-hand women Lauren Harr and Caroline Christopoulos at Gold Leaf Literary—I couldn’t have done it without you. (Seriously.) Thanks again to all the teachers, librarians, and booksellers out there who continue to share my books with young readers—you’re rock stars! And last but not least, much love and thanks to my wife, Wendi, and my daughter, Jo. You are my refuge in the storm.

  Alan Gratz is the acclaimed author of several books for young readers, including Projekt 1065, which received starred reviews from Kirkus and School Library Journal; Prisoner B-3087, which was named to YALSA’s 2014 Best Fiction for Young Adults list; and Code of Honor, a YALSA 2016 Quick Pick. Alan lives in North Carolina with his wife and daughter. Look for him online at www.alangratz.com.

  Turn the page for a sneak peek at Alan Gratz’s novel

  Projekt 1065!

  It’s hard to smile when you’re having dinner with Nazis.

  There were Nazis all up and down the long table, talking and laughing and eating. There were Nazi soldiers in their gray German army uniforms. There were SS officers, members of Adolf Hitler’s private Protection Squadron, in their black uniforms and red armbands. There were regular civilian Nazis who didn’t fight in the military, who ran banks and factories and newspapers and wore suits and ties and Nazi pins.

  And then there was me, Michael O’Shaunessey, wearing my brown long-sleeved shirt, black shorts, white knee socks, and black hiking boots polished to a shine. And just like the SS, the most fearsome killers in all the land, I wore a red armband with a big black swastika in the center of it, the hooked-cross symbol the Nazis plastered all over everything. I wore the uniform of the Hitler Youth, Germany’s version of the Boy Scouts. Because I was a Nazi too.

  Or at least I was pretending to be.

  “More cake?” the Nazi next to me asked, offering me another slice. Light from the chandelier glinted on the silver skull pin on his collar.

  “Um, sure. Thanks,” I said. “That’s very kind of you.” I remembered to smile, even though it took effort. I hated pretending to like these people, hated pretending to agree with their awful hatred of the Jews, hated pretending I wanted them to win the war and conquer the world. But I smiled because I had to. If they ever discovered I wasn’t really one of them, my family and I would disappear into a concentration camp, never to be seen or heard from again.

  “Your German is so good!” the woman on my other side told me. She was the wife of a captain in the German army. “If I didn’t know your father was the Irish ambassador, I would think you grew up here in Berlin!”

  I sagged in my chair. I heard this every time my family attended one of these dinners. I wasn’t exactly the blue-eyed, blond-haired “Aryan ideal,” but with my flawless German accent and my brown hair that fell like a mop into my brown eyes, I could pass for an average German boy any day. I wasn’t proud of it, but it was definitely useful.

  “Michael’s always had a good head for languages,” my father said in German. He sat across from me at the table, my mother two seats down from him. “We’ve only been here for six years, but he already speaks better German than I do!”

  1937. That was the year my father was named Irish ambassador to Germany and we moved from London, where he’d been stationed, to Berlin. It was 1943 now, and I was thirteen years old. Things had changed so much in those six years. Berlin had been a wonderland when I first arrived, all towering columns with eagle statues on top and red flags fluttering from every building and parades ten thousand people strong. Hitler was already the chancellor of Germany, and the Nazis, his political party, were well in control. Germany wasn’t at war yet, and not everybody was a Nazi back then, but it was hard to argue with their success. Everywhere I’d
looked I’d seen faces full of smiles and laughter. But then, overnight, the party had ended. Not the Nazi Party. They had only gotten stronger. The other party—the feeling of unbounded German cheerfulness—was gone. I had finally seen the horror behind the smiles, and so had the rest of the world.

  What happened that one night still haunted me.

  “Michael’s always had an exceptional memory, haven’t you, son?” Ma said, breaking into my thoughts.

  “It’s true,” my father said. “Michael reads in German, tells jokes in German. I think he even dreams in German!”

  The adults around us at the table gave him a polite chuckle. Da the diplomat, doing what he did best. His mustache widened as he beamed at me, but the eyes that peered at me over his glasses weren’t smiling. They were reminding me to smile. To be friendly. To play my part.

  I picked up my glass of grape juice and took a drink to hide my frown.

  “You are a better German than some Germans,” the Nazi who had offered me cake said. His name was Trumbauer, and his rank within the SS was Obersturmführer, which meant senior assault leader. He was a tall, thin man with slicked-back, jet-black hair, and a nose like a parrot’s beak. “Just today, we raided the home of a German couple who were hiding a Jew in their attic. Right here in Berlin!” He shook his head as if he couldn’t believe the stupidity of some people.

  “How did you know they were hiding a Jew?” the woman next to me asked.

  SS-Obersturmführer Trumbauer cut out a bite of cake with his fork and lifted it. “Their son reported them.”

  I shuddered. Their own son, ratting them out to the secret police. I couldn’t imagine ever doing something like that to my own parents.

  “What happened to them?” I asked.

  “Hmm?” SS-Obersturmführer Trumbauer said, swallowing his cake. “Oh. The Germans were taken into protective custody at Dachau, of course. The Jew was shot while trying to escape.”

  The SS-Obersturmführer’s words rattled me, and I knocked over my glass trying to set it back down. It struck the rim of my plate and shattered, sending glass and grape juice everywhere. I caught my reflection in every one of the tiny shards, half a dozen little Michael O’Shaunesseys looking up at me in horror. Suddenly, I was back again on that Berlin street, that night four years ago, when everything had changed.

  When I’d finally learned what monsters the Nazis really were.

  Also by Alan Gratz

  Projekt 1065

  Prisoner B-3087

  Code of Honor

  The Brooklyn Nine

  Samurai Shortstop

  Copyright © 2017 by Alan Gratz

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  While inspired by real events and historical characters, this is a work of fiction and does not claim to be historically accurate or portray factual events or relationships. Please keep in mind that references to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales may not be factually accurate, but rather fictionalized by the author.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

  ISBN 978-0-545-88083-1

  First edition, August 2017

  Map art by Jim McMahon

  Jacket art © 2017 by Hitandrun

  Jacket design by Nina Goffi

  e-ISBN 978-0-545-88087-9

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