by Susan Finlay
“Did your parents speak German at home after you moved here?”
“No. Well, not after the first year. From the start they insisted we learn English, and once we did they insisted we speak it always. That’s why neither of us remembers much German. Not after all these years. We know we have relatives still living in Germany, but we can’t communicate with them.”
“Really? Do you have names and contact information?”
“Probably somewhere,” Anna said. It would take us time to find it.”
“Sister, Seth has it. Remember, we gave it to him when he visited us.”
“Oh, that’s right.”
Lucas looked at the clock. “It’s getting late. I should get back home. I have a wife and daughter waiting for me. They would love to meet you both sometime, if that’s okay.” The moment the words left his mouth, he wanted to pull them back in. What was he thinking? His aunts might be just as prejudiced as his father and brother.
“Of course it is,” the aunts said in unison.
“Maybe we should get to know each better before we add them to our conversations,” he said. “I have lots of questions about the family’s history, stuff that would probably bore them.”
“We’d be happy to talk with your more,” Anna said. “But it might have to wait until after Elsa’s surgery.”
Lucas nodded. Not what he wanted to hear. Recovery from hip replacement surgery wasn’t going to be a picnic, and could make them shun any visitors.
As they walked him to the door, he turned and said, “I have one quick question. What were your parents’ names?”
CHAPTER SIX
Christa Nagel, April 20, 1944, Altstadt, Sudetenland—
THE WOODS LOOKED a bit spooky in this area, with the dense pine trees huddled together for warmth, barely leaving room for Christa, Ernst, Fritz, and Julia to walk through. But the dark woods also made for the best play. The foursome came here whenever they got the chance. With schools shut down by the Wehrmacht, there was more time for exploring, which Christa knew worried Mutti, but also gave Mutti some quiet time. Soon after the school closures had been announced, poor Mutti had almost pulled out her hair, stuck with a house full of kids, day in and day out. Christa worried about Mutti. Christa didn’t know how Mutti coped with running the house, taking care of six kids, shopping, and making repairs on their clothing and the house. Christa hoped she would never have to be responsible for all of that. Of course the older kids helped with chores, but that still left an awful lot for Mutti. She sometimes sent them out here to collect small pieces of wood for their stove and fireplace. That was today’s assignment, but she also told them they could play for a while, too, so that the baby and Giselle could nap. Maybe Mutti needed to nap, too.
“Hey, look over here,” Fritz yelled. “I found something.”
Christa was closest to him and got to him first, with Ernst fast on her heels. Julia was running toward them, carrying a large log, and Christa half expected her to trip over something and go flying. Somehow, Julia didn’t trip, and Christa turned her attention to the item Fritz had found.
On the ground was a wadded up cloth. A big cloth, like a bed sheet. But why would someone bring a sheet out into the woods? She glanced around, looking for gypsies who might be camping here. No one here except her brothers and sister.
“What do you think it is?” Fritz asked.
Ernst bent down and prodded it with a stick, lifting an edge up and showing more of the material. Strings hung from it.
“Oh Gott,” Christa said. “Is that a . . . a parachute?”
“That is what it looks like to me,” Ernst said, bent at the waist, his upper body turned to look up at his siblings. “Do you know what this means?”
“A soldier landed very close to this spot,” Christa said, glancing around for a possible landing place. “Over there, in the clearing.” The clearing was maybe fifty feet from where she stood. “Question is, German or allied? And where is he? Is he wounded?”
Ernst dropped his stick and picked up the parachute with his bare hands, examining it closely. “Definitely allied. Must mean the Americans or Brits are moving in. What I do not know is if the German soldiers captured him.”
“They might have seen the plane and they could be searching for him,” Christa said. She had seen German soldiers around town for days, stopping people, forcing them to show their identity cards. Could this be why?
Julia said, “Should we look for him? Maybe he needs help.”
“Why would he need help from kids?” Ernst said. “He must have jumped from a plane before it crashed. He is probably long gone from here.”
“Would he not have taken his parachute with him?” Christa asked. She couldn’t imagine him leaving that behind. That could give him away, when most likely he was trying to hide the fact that he’d landed here.
“Not necessarily,” Ernst said. “Maybe he got spooked. He might have heard German soldiers in the woods and had to get away quickly.”
Christa felt goose bumps on her arms, and not just from the cold air. That poor man may have been killed right here in this spot. She glanced down to see if she could see blood on any of the pine needles. She didn’t see any here, but it could be anywhere, really. Finding his blood out here in the woods and the clearing would be like finding a needle in a haystack.
Fritz said, “You are probably right. If that is what happened, he might have dropped something, like a gun or food or something we could use.”
Ernst gave him a lopsided grin. “Food? Really? You have food on the brain.”
“It is possible,” Fritz said in his defense. “He would have been carrying food rations in his rucksack, would he not?”
Christa and Ernst exchanged looks.
As the oldest, at eleven years old, Christa was in charge. What should she say? She took a deep breath and let it out. “All right. Let us finish gathering wood and if we happen to find anything else while we are at it, we will decide what to do with it. Then we go straight home.”
“What about the parachute?” Fritz asked.
“Fold it up as small as you can and hide it under a bush or under a bunch of pine needles. When we are ready to leave—and that has to be soon—we will come back for it.”
All four children rushed around, looking for wood to take home, carefully checking to make sure any wood they put into their rucksacks was free of bugs and worms, and searching for any signs of an airman or his supplies. Christa found a knife and flashlight near the place where they’d found the parachute. She stuck them in her rucksack along with wood she’d collected, and continued her search.
Hanna Nagel, April 20, 1944, Altstadt, Sudetenland—
WHAT WAS TAKING the kids so long? Hanna opened the front door for the tenth time, and stuck her head outside, looking in the direction the kids would be coming from. The sun was setting and it would soon be too dark for the kids to be tromping through the woods. What if they didn’t come home? What was she supposed to do?
She went back to the kitchen and stirred the pot of soup. Giselle had been whining for an hour, wanting her dinner. Hanna had already fed the baby his milk. The table was set and the soup was ready. The kids must be freezing, she worried, looking out the window again. With the sun going down and the temperature rapidly dropping. She tried to remember if they’d worn their hats and gloves. She hadn’t paid attention. What kind of mother was she? She wrung her hands and paced across the kitchen to the front door.
One more look.
She opened the door again and leaned out, holding her breath.
“Mutti! We are home,” Julia yelled, running up the steps and hugging her, then pushing past her into the house.
Hanna started to go after her, then stopped and hugged each of the other kids as they entered the house. “I thought you got lost,” she said, once everyone was safely in the house. “What kept you so long? Did something happen?”
“I am hungry,” Fritz said, ignoring her question. “Are we going to eat
dinner?”
Hanna opened her mouth to repeat her question, but all the kids were hurrying into the kitchen, away from her. She lifted her hands in a gesture of defeat, and shook her head. Part of her thought she should be angry and reprimand her children for scaring her so, but no real harm done, they were home now and safe. Well, as safe as they could be during a war. She followed them into the kitchen and scooped soup into their bowls.
After dinner, she and Christa washed and dried the dishes, while the boys unloaded the wood they had all collected in the woods and stacked it next to the stove.
When they sat down in the living room for their evening of reading and storytelling, Fritz said, “I found something exciting in the woods today.”
Hanna looked at him, curious. “What did you find, my boy?”
“He found a parachute,” Julia said.
“Hey, I wanted to tell her. That is not fair.”
Julia said, “We all found it. It belongs to all of us. And so does the knife and flashlight Christa found.”
Hanna gasped.
“What is wrong, Mutti?” Christa asked.
Hanna’s heart was pounding and she felt dizzy. Oh mein Gott!
“Mutti, you look pale. Are you sick?”
With her hand clutching her chest, she said, “You did not bring those things into this house, did you? Please tell me you left them in the woods.”
Fritz jumped up, his eyes moist and shiny, and his face red. “You are scaring me, Mutti. We . . . we brought them in our rucksacks. We were not stealing, or nuthin’. The soldier who dropped from the airplane lost them and we found them. Finders keepers, right?”
Hanna couldn’t speak. She closed her eyes, remembering the news she’d heard on the BBC radio months ago, after the kids had gone to bed. Alone in the dark living room, she’d practically gone into convulsions listening to the horrific story. How could she tell her children what had happened to the people in Lidice?
It had happened less than two years ago, northwest of Altstadt. Not terribly far away. Hitler had ordered that all men over fifteen years of age in Lidice be executed. All of the women and children were taken away, supposedly deported. The village was set on fire and the remnant of every building was destroyed. Even the animals were slaughtered. Hanna shuddered, picturing the scene in her mind.
She’d tried to keep it from her children. They didn’t need to know the depths to which their government had sunken, but they needed to know now.
She took a deep breath and said, “I must tell you something. Sit down and listen. What I’m about to tell you is horrible. Almost two years ago, the SS General of Police, Reinhard Heydrich, the Acting Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia, was assassinated by men who had parachuted into the country from Great Britain. The SS suspected the residents of the small village of Lidice had harboured local resistance and partisans and had aided the paratroopers.”
Ernst and Christa, both wide-eyed, looked at each other. Mutti wondered what they were thinking, but continued. “According to the news on the radio, the SS killed all of the men there and took the women and children away. Then they destroyed the village. They erased all evidence that it had ever existed.” She left out details that would scare them more, and which she couldn’t bare to say out loud. According to the BBC news, the women and children weren’t simply deported, as the Volksempfänger news claimed. They were imprisoned in concentration camps. Most adults in the Sudetenland had heard rumors about concentration camps where the SS was holding Jews, but until the Lidice massacre, many hadn’t believed it.
Julia and Giselle cried, and Christa hugged them both.
Fritz yelled out and pulled at his own hair. “We didn’t help any soldiers. I swear we didn’t. We looked for the parachute man, but he was gone. Are the SS soldiers going to come for us? Are they going to wipe out our village, too?”
“Did anyone see you?” Mutti asked. “Think carefully.”
Ernst said, “I do not think so.”
“Where are the parachute and other things you found? Go and get them and bring them to me.” She stood up and added wood to the fireplace to grow the fire.
When Fritz and Christa came back with the items, Mutti grabbed the folded parachute and tossed it into the flames. As it burned, she looked at the knife and flashlight lying on the floor. “I will bury these after you all go to bed. You must promise me never to go into those woods again.”
Christa said, “But Mutti, even if we do not find things again . . . other things left by parachute soldiers, the SS might still blame someone in our village for helping the allies. We could still be . . . .”
She didn’t finish her sentence, but Hanna understood and she didn’t have a good answer. After several moments, she said, “We have no control over what others in our village do or what the SS thinks or does, but we must not be the ones to bring destruction. We must do everything we can to keep ourselves and our village safe. Do you understand?”
All of the children nodded.
“Good. Let us try to concentrate on a good book for now, and put this incident out of our minds.”
Ilse Seidel, April 20, 1944, Memmingen, Germany—
JOHANN GRINNED EAR-TO-EAR as he stood in the front parlor wearing his new uniform, and Ilse wanted to smack him upside the head. He was starting in the training class for becoming a Wehrmacht soldier. He wasn’t old enough to officially join the Hitler Youth, but the war had been going on for too long and the army was running low on soldiers. They needed every man or boy they could get. Ilse couldn’t believe that her brother was actually eager to join the army. He bragged about how he was going to be trained the right way and then he could not only be a soldier but also move up in the ranks. He would make something of himself, he said. More likely, Ilse decided, he’d get himself killed. Johann was strong and smart, but he didn’t know anything about war. For all his big talk, he was still an innocent boy. He was gullible and had allowed the Nazis to brainwash him.
Mutter went over to Johann and straightened his hat. “You look handsome in your uniform, Johann. But you must know I do not want you to join the army. Please, will you change your mind about going to the training class?”
“You know I cannot refuse to go. Even if I wanted to, which I do not. No one turns down an offer to join the Hitler Youth.”
Oma began crying, and Opa put his arm around her shoulders.
Christa stood, wringing her hands together, in the middle of the parlor, halfway between her mother and Johann and her grandparents. Her younger brother, Robert, and her sister, Ursula, stood at the bottom of the stairs, watching, wide eyed.
Robert said, “I will not go. No one can force me to join any of the groups.”
“You are too young,” Johann said. “You are only eight. You have no idea what you are talking about. When you are old enough, you will change your mind.”
Mutter said, “Let us pray the war does not last that long. I do not want to lose both of my sons.”
Johann glared at her. “Thanks for the vote of confidence in my abilities. I am not stupid. I will not get myself killed.”
“War does not only kill stupid people.” With that said, Mutter turned on her heels and walked toward the stairs. Robert and Ursula moved out of her way, and she strode up the stairs without looking back.
Two weeks later, Johann came home, packed a bag, and announced that he was being sent to the front. The army needed new recruits, and his whole class had been called up. They were all required to report to Biberach for medical examinations and then from there they would head out.
Mutter fell apart when he broke the news, and she barely got herself back together enough to hug him and say goodbye. Ilse thought Mutter was already grieving for him, as if he’d died.
The family continued on after he left. In some ways, life was easier with one less mouth to feed, but it was harder, too, without a pair of strong hands for doing repairs around the house. Bombings were common and even though their house hadn’t taken a direc
t hit, they always had indirect damage. And when one of the adjoining houses had incurred extensive damage, it was in the family’s best interest to help with their repairs, too, because they counted on the heat and protection the adjoining walls afforded.
Two weeks after Johann departed, the family celebrated Ursula’s twelfth birthday with the smallest of cakes—but at least it was a cake, Ilse had told her. She didn’t tell her that she’d been saving small portions of flour for it for a month and that Oma had traded a piece of her jewelry for it. Ilse didn’t know why someone wanted the jewelry, but figured it must be someone who had a contact who could help her trade it for something she needed. That’s how it usually worked in Memmingen during the war.
Thomas Landry, April 20, 1944, San Francisco, California—
MUSIC PLAYED ON the radio in the living room of the Landry family’s Victorian house. The DJ was playing the top ten songs, and Thomas was swaying to Bosame Mucho (Kiss Me Much) by Jimmy Dorsey while he swept the floor. With his mother, Rachel, working in a weapons factory while his father and older brother were fighting overseas, Thomas and Teresa had to help with the chores after school. He didn’t mind, as long as he could crank up the radio while he worked. In truth, not minding was an understatement. He was at home, while most of his buddies had to work after school. All he had to do was babysit his younger sister—and she didn’t require much effort, seeing as how she was shut up in her bedroom working on homework for at least an hour and then had to help him fix their dinner. Yeah, he had it pretty easy. Dusting, sweeping, laundry, grocery shopping, house repairs. All pretty basic stuff. What worried him was that he was almost finished with his junior year of high school, and then one more year to go. At graduation, he’d be eighteen and would be drafted into the army, unless he opted to voluntarily enlist like his brother and father did.