by Karin Tanabe
Pohl shoved Agatha aside so he was in front of Leo and she fell to the ground.
“Don’t touch her!” Leo screamed, lunging for Agatha, but Pohl stopped him and pushed him so hard that Leo stumbled backward, but managed not to fall. The fact that he’d been drinking most of the night was not helping his judgment, but he knew he was still more sober than Pohl.
“Is this a joke?” the German asked, dropping his coat and smiling as he reached over and knocked Leo to the ground easily. “Some German dishwasher in China is trying to protect your honor?” he asked Agatha, who had righted herself. “Oh, my little beauty,” he said when Agatha reached for the side of her dress, which had torn with her fall.
It was the perfect time for Leo to run. Pohl was concerned with Agatha and wasn’t looking at him. But Leo’s feet felt like lead. He couldn’t leave her, and he couldn’t let Pohl win. In Vienna, he could never have stood that close to an SS officer without being outnumbered. If a Jew stepped out of line, it meant death. In Shanghai, where Pohl was the first Nazi Leo had seen, he felt protected. And even if the chaos of the city couldn’t keep him safe, he was willing to take whatever punishment was bestowed upon him. So instead of running away, he walked over to them and with all his strength, punched Pohl in the side of his jaw. Leo heard the bone crack before Pohl fell to the ground, the most satisfying sound he had ever heard.
Agatha screamed for Leo to run, but it was too late. Pohl was up, despite his broken jaw and bleeding nose, and before Leo could turn around, he had landed a punch clear across his face.
Leo didn’t fall to the ground, his lead feet helping to keep him stable. Instead he looked at Pohl and said, “God will punish you for your crimes, you German Nazi filth.” Pohl’s next punch caused Leo to tilt backward, falling headfirst onto the pavement. He moved his arms up to block his face, but Pohl was too fast, sitting on Leo’s chest and landing one punch after the other.
“Stop!” he heard Agatha scream, as his face and body went numb. “Leave him! You’re going to kill him!”
No longer able to move, Leo still felt Pohl steal his shoes before going through his pockets and taking his wallet.
“Of course. He’s a Jew,” Pohl said, looking at Leo’s pass for the restricted area. “It’s much harder to spot a Jew in China. They can hide easier out of their natural habitat.”
Leo’s eyes couldn’t open, but he heard Pohl start laughing. “And an Austrian Jew! How is he still alive? I can take care of that oversight.” Pohl’s fists started to attack Leo with rage, hitting his face, his skull, his stomach. Every inch of him that could be beaten was beaten.
Pohl’s words were the last Leo heard. He didn’t feel Agatha put her head on his heart and start screaming. He didn’t feel the hands of the rickshaw driver who put him in the back of his cart and suggested he dump Leo on the side of the road with the other dead. Agatha refused. She insisted on the hospital. Leo Hartmann would not die on the side of a road.
PART THREE
CHAPTER 25
CHRISTIAN LANGE
NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 1943
Christian felt that the circumstances of war had forced him to become an adult as quickly as a sunrise. His days and weeks in an orphanage, the family’s incarceration in Crystal City; the courtship, physical relationship, and abrupt departure of Emi Kato; the baby’s death—all of it had stripped away a distinct layer of his youthful exuberance. Now he felt compelled to abandon one country to serve another. He spent days strangled by guilt, agonizing over how he would tell his parents that he had decided to enlist in the U.S. Army. As expected, his parents were devastated, terrified that they would lose yet another child, their only child. But Christian’s conviction was as firm as Lange steel.
Before leaving Crystal City, Christian wrote Jack Walter a letter and addressed it to the Children’s Home. Sitting by the swimming pool, anguishing in the void that Emi left, he wrote:
Jack,
You’re about to turn 18, and you’re going to get the hell out of there. Congratulations, shoe thrower. I wish I were there to throw a steel-toe boot at your head just to show you how much I care. Once you’re out, please remember to go to my house in River Hills and steal everything. We’ve got some good stuff, if my dad’s VP hasn’t pocketed it all already. Odds are he did, but there might be a few crumbs left for a sad orphan like you.
I know you said you would never enlist, but if you’ve changed your mind, then you should enlist with me. I’ve gotten out of going to Germany. My parents are sailing on the repatriation ship sometime in the next year or two, but I’m not going to rot in Crystal City until then. I’m on my way to Camp Fannin in Tyler, Texas, just north of my current hellhole, for seven weeks of infantry basic. Obviously, I had no choice in where I did basic or I wouldn’t have chosen to keep frying my ass off in Texas. But from Fannin, I’m heading to Hawaii, joining the 7th Infantry Division currently training at Schofield Barracks on Oahu. It’s obviously not the easiest assignment to land—the head of the internment camp in Texas had to make a lot of calls for me to end up there, as Hawaii sure beats the shit out of Texas—but I think society owes you a favor too after orphaning you and giving you that violent streak.
If I’m going to fight, I want to fight in the Pacific, for reasons I’m sure you can guess from my letters. So if you want to watch me make a fool out of myself as I try to become a good soldier, and see a part of the world that’s not Wisconsin, you should find a way to get yourself to Hawaii.
If I never see you again—if, as you said, I end up a dead kraut like I deserve—then thanks for helping to save me from myself at the Home. I’m indebted. If I do see you again, I hope it’s in Hawaii. Think about it. At the very least, you’ll have one new old shoe as a good luck charm when we go fight in the Pacific. I’m bringing it with me.
Kraut
During Christian’s first day of basic, his head was shaved—his thick blond hair swept into the garbage by a skinny teenage draftee—his clothes taken, his body put through a prying physical inspection, his name replaced with a number, and his few possessions sent back to Crystal City. At first, he endured it all with easygoing curiosity, thrilled to be out of the internment camp and away from the tight quarters he was forced into with his parents, but he wondered how long it would last. He knew that preparing for war was very different than walking into gunfire. Little by little, as the days went by, he realized that on base, just as in the camp, his world was no longer his. He still belonged to the government—this time to the Army instead of the FBI.
He woke up at 4:45 A.M., marched ten miles a day, ran another ten in the afternoon, learned to dig foxholes with tools that would have been more useful stirring soup, grunted through long hours lying on his stomach at the rifle range, became competent in throwing grenades and engaging in hand-to-hand combat, and, most important, learned along with his fellow enlistees how to care if a comrade died, yet rejoice if the enemy did.
During Christian’s second week in the camp, when he was just getting used to his closest bunkmate, Tom Gibb, snoring solidly from midnight till the drill sergeant routed them all before five, the propaganda machine was cranked up. The men were shown a series of training films seemingly designed to inculcate hate rather than combat skills.
As the projector whirred behind them, a group of stylish, young Japanese women appeared on the screen, peacefully crossing a street in their Western clothes. They fell back as Japanese military vehicles flew through the road, flags waving, the word Japanazis appearing on-screen in big flashing letters. Tom leaned over to Christian and said, “I don’t think I could shoot those people. Some of those Jap girls are real pretty.”
“This sure as shit is some propaganda film,” Dave Simon, another of their bunkmates, whispered. He, like Tom, was one of the room’s gorilla-like snorers. “They pounded them with endless propaganda during training in the Great War, too. My old man told me all about it. No Japs, but the Germans were described as baby eaters back then. Just munching up their youn
g like ears of corn.”
“You’re not supposed to shoot the Jap women, you jackass. Just their husbands and fathers,” said Frank Tremmel, a black-haired boy from South Texas who drawled so much he sounded as if his tongue were reaching to his Adam’s apple.
“The Germans are baby killers,” said Ray Hagen, another Texan with a ruddy complexion and constantly darting eyes. “Don’t you read?”
“Not if I don’t have to,” said Frank. “Plus, be sensitive. Lange and his parents are baby-killing Germans themselves. He just snuck out of prison down in Crystal City. You don’t want to upset him.”
Christian regretted ever mentioning the internment camp to Frank.
“Oh yeah!” said Tom. “Of course! We have our own Nazi right here. How did they let you through the gates?” he asked, kicking Christian’s chair and doing the Nazi salute.
“At least you’re not a Jap,” said another soldier named Harvey Chandler, whom Christian had barely spoken to. “That would be a shitty life. To go through it all looking like a Jap.”
Christian didn’t answer, turning his attention back to the movie as the narrator explained how the Japanese were trying to take over all of Asia, killing women and children in their desperate fight for expansion.
“All this is true,” said Harvey. “If we don’t stop them, they’ll slaughter everyone in Asia—China, the Philippines, everywhere. We better get over there quick and behead them.” He made a motion with his hand, as if he were wielding a samurai sword, causing everyone around him to laugh, except for Christian and Dave Simon.
The sergeant in charge came over and screamed at them, and after the movie they spent the evening running ten miles in mud as slippery as cake batter.
When their seven weeks of training was over, Christian was told he’d be transferring to Oahu just before Thanksgiving. The only one from his barracks who would be going over with him was Dave, who Christian learned was a pacifist, as he was raised a Quaker by devout parents in Boston. He’d already been nicknamed the Dove by the other men.
“Sad you’re stuck with me on the train, the boat, and God knows what else they shove us on to get there?” Dave said to Christian as they polished their boots next to each other. Dave’s big brown eyes, which already had a terrified look about them, turned to Christian and stared at him hopefully.
“Nope,” said Christian. “I always wanted to fight alongside a pacifist.”
“Good,” said Dave, who had been drafted right before Christian enlisted. “Maybe you can keep me alive when I forget what the captains here taught us. I think I selectively weeded out everything that involves killing my fellow man.”
“But the Japanese soldiers are not your fellow man,” said Christian, the words feeling strange on his tongue. “I’m not saying we should slaughter civilians—of course not—but the soldiers are going to try to kill us if we don’t kill them first.”
“That doesn’t mean they’re not our fellow man,” said Dave. “You’ll see. You might not think it now because we’ve been watching those videos that make the Japanese military seem like bloodthirsty pigs, but when you are looking one in the eye, you’ll see yourself in him, uniform or not.”
“I hope not,” said Christian. “Or I’ll die pretty fast.”
Christian and Dave made it to Hawaii the week before Thanksgiving, and all Dave talked about on their boat over was the wickedness of war and how ready he was for Hawaiian girls after being stuck with Texan boys for the past two months.
“I thought you were so religious,” said Christian, laughing at Dave’s dreams of girls in grass skirts.
“Just because I don’t want to kill people doesn’t mean I don’t want to sleep with women,” said Dave, closing his eyes and smiling. “One is love, the other is death.”
“Love?” said Christian laughing. “I don’t think we’ll be there long enough for you to fall in love.” But then he thought of Emi, and how fast he had fallen for her, and patted Dave’s shoulder. “Maybe you’ll prove me wrong,” he said before going on a walk around the boat.
Christian was ready for Hawaii because it was half a world closer to Emi. Missing her was so all-consuming, such a tug on his heart, that it had convinced him to leave his parents, to abandon Germany. He and his father had talked until the sun rose on Christian’s last night in Crystal City and had agreed that the war might end before the Langes were sent to Germany.
“It is possible,” his father had said harshly, still very angry at his son for leaving his fragile mother.
“You have to understand. It’s not my country,” said Christian after Franz kept hammering out his disappointment. “I have no ties there. You and Mom are going home, but it’s not home to me. I don’t want to go there and support a military I don’t believe in.”
“We aren’t going to support the military,” Franz had said, his handsome face creased and tired. “We are just going to live there and then return to Wisconsin when they’ll have us back.”
“I don’t have faith that they’ll take us back,” said Christian. “And I don’t want to be gone from here forever. As mad as I am at the American government, for this, for what happened to Mom and the baby, this is still my home.”
He had never mentioned Emi to his parents, never explained the source of his real pull to the Pacific. His mother needed him, she told him constantly, but he assured her that he would be there for her again. After he had found Emi. After the war.
The only other person Christian said goodbye to before he left Crystal City was Inge, who leapt into his arms, put her hands behind his neck and whispered that she would be escaping with him.
“Your parents have invited us to Pforzheim with them,” said her mother. “Now that you have enlisted, they say there will be more than enough space and everyone claims it’s safer than Berlin, where we intended to go. Your mother has really taken a liking to little Inge. I think she’s helping cheer her up.”
“Impossible not to be cheered up by Inge,” said Christian, shaking her mother’s hand.
“I know your parents are angry with you, but I think what you’re doing is very brave,” she said before Christian went to his parents one last time. “If I could find a way to leave Inge in America, I might. I think it’s safer here.”
“I will see you again,” said Christian, waving to her. He patted Inge on the head, as she cried inconsolably into his shoulder. He gave her a final hug and handed her to her mother before going to his own mother, so she could cry all over him, too.
If Texas had been an abrupt change from River Hills, Hawaii was a slice of an entirely different world. And here he didn’t have Franz Lange to help him navigate or his mother to comfort him when he failed. He had a pacifist who was terrified to die and seemed to want to spend the last weeks of his life surrounded by near-naked girls on the beach.
“Black on red. Seven straight and another seven upside down,” Christian said to Dave before they arrived in Oahu. He had drawn a picture of the Seventh Infantry’s famous insignia and given it to Dave just before their boat docked.
“I thought it was an hourglass,” said Dave, holding up the piece of paper.
“It is an hourglass. One made from two sevens,” said Christian, tracing the sevens on the paper.
“I don’t like it,” said Dave. “Like we are just waiting for the sand to run out and then poof, we die. I’ll probably die walking off this damn boat. I hate boats.”
But he did not die. They both survived the first couple of days on base and soon it was Thanksgiving Day and they were ready to celebrate. They took off to Honolulu in military jeeps, down badly paved roads flanked by palm trees. Christian and the others tried to shake off the fear that it could be their last Thanksgiving, while Christian also kept flashing back to one year before, when he and his parents had joyfully celebrated the holiday together, just weeks before the FBI was at their door. It was their last Thanksgiving as the Langes of River Hills. The family they always thought they’d be.
On Tha
nksgiving Day 1943, Christian had the kind of hangover reserved for inexperienced drinkers. He woke up with a head that felt bruised, squinting in the bright sunlight. His throat was raw and parched and he was desperate for the cool winter air of Wisconsin, which always set his head right. When Christian finally found the strength to leave his barracks, all he got was tropical humidity and the pulsating rays from the sun. He turned on the water in the outdoor sink, letting it run over his face and short hair, and stayed there, bent in half, until he heard someone holler his name.
Christian pulled his head up out of the cold water, half-opened his eyes, and saw Corporal Menkins beside him holding three letters.
“Lange! Mail!” he said, dropping them on the wet sink, his face tan and relaxed. “Came in yesterday. Your mother. Two of them,” he added before turning to go off and find the next man.
“What’s she say?” Christian yelled to him. Menkins made it a habit to read everyone’s mail and he seemed convinced that Christian’s was the most interesting since the letter he’d received on arrival contained a picture of Helene Lange. “I’m gonna chop out your pop and pin your mama over my bed,” he’d said to Christian when he’d handed him that one. Christian had had to twist his arm back painfully to get the photo from him.
Menkins walked back to Christian, took the letter, pretending he hadn’t opened it, and smiled when they both saw that the envelope flap was unsealed.
“She says Happy Thanksgiving, of course.”
“Not the happiest I’ve ever had, but thanks for this anyway,” he said, lifting up the letter.
Menkins grinned and said, “Your pretty mama also begs you to come back to her and says that if you die fighting the Japs that she’s throwing herself into the San Antonio River. Oh, she also ends with something about having more proof that Martin did it.” He handed the letter back to Christian and said, “Did what?”