At last, he nods. “Ja, Christl. Take your time, and when you’re satisfied, give me a draft to look over.”
“Danke.” Christl’s gaze, though still weary, is alight with new determination.
“Don’t thank us,” Sophie says. “We would be honored to print your words.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Kirk
February 3, 1943
Munich
ANNALISE—HALF DRESSED, MUSSED, getting ready for classes—hums in the kitchen. I inhale the crisp, brown scent of toasting bread and blow on my steaming ersatz, then get up from the table and cross to our Volksempfänger radio, one of Annalise’s contributions to our married home. With an extra antenna and a lot of tinkering, we’ve been able to pick up the evening BBC broadcast. “Take that, Herr Goebbels,” Annalise had said with a laugh, looking over my shoulder as I rigged up the antenna over the Christmas holiday. I smile, remembering those golden honeymoon days.
“Breakfast is ready.” Annalise carries in two plates of toast—the barest hint of butter, no jam. Like all couples, we’ve settled on a division of labor. I get up before her and make kaffee, while she does the toast. Routine, one of the stabilizing normalcies in a married life that’s anything but.
I fiddle with the dial on the radio, fighting a yawn. A clatter as Annalise sets the plates on the table. Static crackles from the radio, turned to an “approved” station. Then low notes of mournful music.
“That’s the second movement of Beethoven’s Fifth.” Annalise’s cup clinks on its saucer.
The music dies away. A male voice begins to speak.
“The battle for Stalingrad is over. True, with their last breath, to their oath to their flag, the Sixth Army, under the inspirational leadership of General Field Marshal von Paulus, has been defeated …”
My breath seizes.
Over 330,000 German soldiers fought at Stalingrad.
I turn to Annalise. Her hand is pressed to her lips, and her face is ashen. Is her vater among those saved? Or those lost? What of Sophie’s Fritz? My schoolmates from boyhood? How many?
So many.
I go to Annalise, sit beside her, and take her hand in mine. She leans against my shoulder. Neither of us speak. The announcer’s voice echoes in the air, his final words filling the apartment.
“They died so that Germany may live.”
After the defeat at Stalingrad, the time is ripe for action. A move bolder than any we’ve made yet.
When Alex first mentioned his plan, the idea got pushed aside in favor of printing more leaflets. Still he persisted.
“Our leaflets can only go so far. Anyone can ball them up after a second’s scrutiny. We need something impossible to ignore. Imagine! Truth written in the sky for everyone to see. Only we can’t write it in the sky. So we’ll write it on buildings … with tar paint.”
Alex has paint and a few handmade stencils, crafted out of lightweight tin. Hans, a loaded pistol.
This is too risky to tell the others about. Especially Sophie or Annalise. We gave the excuse of working a late shift at the women’s clinic due to a complicated childbirth case. Instead, we wait at Eickemeyer’s studio until eleven. Hans paces. The aromatic scent of Alex’s pipe whelms the basement room. Chin in hand, Willi looks lost in thought. I don’t blame him. Since the announcement, I’ve been unable to stop thinking about Stalingrad. The men who died. The ones still trapped there.
All day, frantic men and women packed the streets, clamoring to buy papers, desperate for news. It was piteous to see their expressions. Grief. Shock. There wasn’t one who didn’t look crushed, trodden upon. For many, the defeat at Stalingrad is the first time they have questioned the Führer at the helm of our country, considered victory something we might not actually achieve. Tomorrow morning, they’ll have something else to question.
If we succeed.
After eleven, we leave the studio, our supplies in canvas bags slung over our shoulders. Due to the three days of national mourning imposed by Goebbels, everything has been shut down for hours: cinemas, restaurants, concert halls. The street is black and silent. Moonless. A light rain mists from the sky, slicking the cobblestones.
I shiver and pull my collar up around my chin. Hans and Alex are flushed with pent-up energy. Their stride is quick, like they can’t contain themselves another second. Willi and I follow behind, constantly on guard.
Have I been entrenched in danger so long it makes me feel nothing? Three months ago, my heart would have raced, my stomach knotted with sick suspense. Now I’m careful, but no longer afraid.
The night, after all, is the friend of the free.
Alex is definite about his choice of buildings, those with prestige that will attract notice. We approach the National Theatre, a towering edifice of gray stone.
Willi stands as lookout, Hans’s loaded pistol at the ready.
Breathing hard, Alex unfurls the stencil. I wrench open the can of black paint. Chemicals and tar burn my nostrils. Its surface shimmers like a mill-pond in the night. Hans and I each grab a side of the stencil and hold it flat against the cool, damp stone of the building. Alex dips his brush into the paint and slaps it across the stencil, filling in the outline.
“Hurry.” Hans glances toward where Willi stands a few meters away, the hand holding the pistol concealed in the folds of his coat as he scans the street.
We pull away the stencil. Some of the paint drips off, coating our hands.
DOWN WITH HITLER
In glistening black letters for all to see.
“One more thing.” Alex grins a wicked smile. In quick strokes, he draws a swastika beside the words.
“Hold this.” He pries open a can of red, hands it to me. Dips his brush. He slashes the red in a bold x over the swastika.
Then we move on. Willi and I trade places, and I serve as lookout while they work, scanning the streets, pistol clenched in my grip. At any moment, air-raid sirens could sound. Or we could be caught by a policeman or an innocent passerby.
With the evidence streaked across our hands, it would all be over.
Street by street, building by building, we deface over twenty structures with HITLER THE MASS MURDERER! and DOWN WITH HITLER.
Hans and Alex are drunk on exhilaration, drawing swastikas with a flourish and covering them with ugly gashes of red before racing onward. Paint dribbles down pale stone. My hands are sticky with it, the stench heavy in the misty air.
“The university!” Alex’s eyes dance. “We mustn’t leave them out.”
Up ahead are the familiar gates with high stone walls on either side. Seized with inspiration, infected by the giddiness of my friends, I grab Alex’s paintbrush and dip it in glistening black. In broad strokes, I paint a single word. One that has ceased to have meaning in Germany today.
FREEDOM
Over and over, we daub the word onto the entrance to the university. Alex slaps paint across the DOWN WITH HITLER stencil. Hans yanks it away, revealing the words. They gleam in the darkness. Paint trails onto the cobblestones.
My shirt is drenched with sweat, my coat with drizzling rain. In the distance, the university buildings we’ve come to know so well stretch out in sleeping silence.
FREEDOM
Willi jogs over. “We’ve got to get out of here.” His face and hair are eerily pale in the faint light.
Alex rolls up the stencil. I grab the can of half-empty paint.
We leave the university behind, walking quickly on the rain-slick cobblestones. Hans says something about a bottle of wine in his apartment, but I only want to get home to Annalise. To wash the paint from my hands and hold her close and cherish the moments of calm.
Though even in those moments, wrapped in her embrace, the tightness in my chest never dissipates. Not really. I lie awake, staring at the ceiling, exhausted but sleepless.
The tension of the day magnified by the silence of the night.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Sophie
February 4, 1943<
br />
FRITZ IS ALIVE. FOR two days, I’ve carried the unbelievable truth with me. I thought him dead. Lost, along with thousands of other men and boys stolen by Stalingrad. By some miracle, he made it out on one of the last planes evacuated. From the military hospital in Lemberg, he got word to his parents, and they phoned me in Munich.
War leaves none of us as we once were. Fritz lost two of his fingers to frostbite. Never again will he play his beloved piano or fasten his own tie.
But he is alive. He will come back to me.
Should that make me long to live too? In light of our work with the leaflets, taking his silence to mean the worst, I’d begun to think of my own life as something expendable. Now I have more than myself to lose, to regret. With Fritz’s return, a spark has caught tinder inside me, warming the frozen places.
I want to preserve myself for the fiancé who needs me more than ever, to give what we once had another chance. To be Fritz and Sophie again, changed perhaps, but with the hope of a future together still before us. To let the possibility of loss bind the cracks in our fractured love.
But I can’t stop. We’re in too deep. And if I stopped, I’d never be able to meet my own eyes in the mirror again.
I walk with my sister Lisl in the direction of the university beneath a gray morning sky. She’s taken a break from her teaching duties to visit Hans and me. Of course, she knows nothing about our leaflets, which has curtailed my own activities somewhat. I sense a barrier between my sister and me, built by the work that encompasses so much of my time and thoughts, yet about which I cannot say a word. Still, it’s been a pleasant visit. Hans and Alex returned from the hospital well after one in the morning, flushed and exultant. They opened a bottle of wine and sat at the table with us talking for hours about everything and nothing. Strangely, they said not a word about their urgent childbirth case.
“Tell me about Mutter.” I turn to my sister. “Is she really as ill as Inge says?”
“It’s true, she’s poorly.” A little fur cap frames Lisl’s face, her dark hair hanging in loose curls around her shoulders. “Her energy is low, and she spends most of the day resting.”
A newsboy hawks papers on the corner, stamping booted feet in the cold. The newspaper is bordered in black. As we pass, I catch a glimpse of the headline.
Tragic, Heroic Defeat!
I don’t need to buy a paper to get my fill of defeat. We’ve been defeated for years. Many are just now waking up to it.
“I should go home. For a week or so, anyway. I can help around the house and see to Mutter myself.” I’ve neglected my family more than I care to admit these past months. They need me. And truthfully, I need them.
Lisl nods, cheeks red with cold. “It would do Mutter a world of good to see you.”
We turn down Ludwigstraße. “We’d better hurry. Professor Huber is lecturing, and I’m sure no one will object if you sit in.”
A smile brightens Lisl’s face. I mull over travel plans as we walk until her voice breaks into my thoughts.
“What’s that crowd doing there?”
A group is gathered in front of the university entrance. A few whisper and gesture. Most stare silently, before ducking their heads and walking on. We stop on the fringes, and I crane my neck to peer around the man in front of me.
Two women wearing kerchiefs and ragged dresses plunge sponges into buckets of soapy water, vigorously rubbing the stone exterior.
My heart gives a little kick.
FREEDOM. DOWN WITH HITLER. The words are nearly a meter high, rendered in thick, black strokes.
A guard barks at the women. “Schnell! This should have been finished by now.”
One of the women stops scrubbing. Her hands are red and chapped, and she wipes a strand of hair out of tired eyes. “It will not come off,” she says in broken German. “The paint … it sticks.”
“Well, it better come off,” the guard mutters. “The university rector is furious.”
I take in the words hungrily. Written resistance. What a glorious sight. Whoever did this believes as we do, enough to court the dangers of detection.
Then I remember. Hans and Alex waking me last night. A strange odor hung about their clothing. I figured it was something they used at the hospital.
They couldn’t have … couldn’t be behind this graffiti?
Of course. What other reason would they have to be out so late? They were at the university and likely elsewhere in the city, plastering buildings with words that no one dares utter. Alex is behind this. It was his idea. I’d wager it.
How reckless. How … effective.
Next time, I’ll ask them to take me along.
Lisl stares at the scrubbing women, the painted words scarcely diminished by their attempts to remove them. Her brown eyes are wide. They’d be all the wider if she knew her own brother was behind it.
“Come.” I tug her arm, and we walk on. I glance over my shoulder, flinging one last look at the women’s vain efforts to erase the handiwork as the crowd continues to gather.
I hope it never comes off.
Annalise
February 8, 1943
Let the shadows stay outside, just for a little while. Let there be peace, if only for a moment.
The refrain is prayer and plea both as Kirk and I lie together in the darkness. My head rests against his warm chest, his arm encircling me, an anchor of protection. His eyes are closed, but I sense he’s awake. His even intakes of breath brush my ear, and I listen to their steady cadence.
How deeply I’ve grown to love him. I, who for years never trusted, never let anyone in, have given myself fully to this man. Daily, I marvel at his gentle kindness, steadfast strength, and determination to see darkness made light. The beauty of our love steals my breath. Could I truly have gained such a husband—I, Annalise Brandt, whose fate was to wed a high-ranking officer to breed babies for the Fatherland? It seems a porcelain reality.
One I fear will shatter at the slightest jolt.
How long can we go on living as students by day, cranking out leaflets by night, the weight of exhaustion an endless pressure on our eyelids, constantly looking over our shoulders, fraught with tension, uncertainty, dread? How long before our resistance is discovered and we must pay the penalty meted out to traitors of the Reich?
I want nothing more than to cling to Kirk and safety. But I cannot. We cannot stop what has been put in motion, only move forward and pray for guidance.
Kirk stirs. His fingers trail my shoulder, their warmth penetrating through the fabric of my nightgown.
“I have to go out.”
I look up. “Now? Why?”
He sighs, his face shadowed in the dimness of our room. A lock of hair curls over his forehead, brushing the place I kissed not half an hour ago, my lips against salty sweat and smooth skin. He doesn’t answer.
“You’re going to do it again, aren’t you?” I sit up in bed, swiping my tangled curls back from my face. “More graffiti?”
He nods.
“They’ll be on alert, you know. Munich was in an uproar last time.”
He nods again. Rises, swinging his long legs over the edge of the bed. In the darkness, he begins to dress, pulling his shirt over his broad shoulders. I watch him, the covers pulled around me, my heartbeat a raw taste in my throat.
Dressed in a woolen coat, a low-brimmed cap, he turns to me, leaning over the bed.
“Annalise.” My name is a husky whisper on his lips.
“Ja?”
“Promise me …” He swallows. “Promise me if the worst comes, you’ll do all in your power to save yourself. If something happens to me, I can endure it. But I couldn’t endure, knowing you …” Something broken and anguished lives in his face as he looks down at me in the darkness. “I need you to promise to fight for yourself, whatever it takes. I’ve got to know one of us, at least, will survive.”
I shake my head, throat hot and tight. “Don’t talk like that.”
“I have to.” His voice is fi
rm. “Please, Annalise. Promise me.”
In the moment, those who ask for such promises cannot know what it will require to keep them. And those who make vows cannot foresee what honoring them will demand. But in all our raw, human frailty, we seek and give words that, in truth, are as weightless as a summer wind.
Still, I nod, sensing Kirk needs this from me. “I promise.”
He takes my face in his hands, framing my cheeks. He presses a kiss to the top of my head, then brushes his lips against mine. My eyes burn with tears.
Don’t go.
“I’ll be back in a few hours.” He gazes down at me, expression torn. Then turns and leaves the room, his footsteps reverberating through the apartment. The door shuts.
Bring them safely home.
Sometimes I wonder how long God will keep answering that prayer.
I sit in the darkness, taking slow breaths through my nose, until the knot in my throat lessens and tears no longer threaten.
I should have gone with him. But Hans and Kirk would never allow it. Sophie told me she offered to take part, and Hans refused, telling her it’s too dangerous. She’s in Ulm now, helping her family. I’m glad she wasn’t here to witness this afternoon.
Falk Harnack, our liaison with the resistance in Berlin, met with us at the Scholls’ apartment. He praised our last leaflet and arranged the promised meeting for Hans, Alex, and Kirk in Berlin on February 25. “I’ll introduce you to my contacts,” he had said. “Then we can proceed as a united force.”
Only this afternoon I sat in the same room with a man embroiled in the wider resistance movement. Following the arrangements for the meeting, Harnack went on at great length about the government after the war and how everyone must work together, regardless of prior political views, for the cause of obliterating Nazism.
After Harnack left, Professor Huber spoke up. “I won’t remain in the same organization as someone who suggests we work with Communists. You should cancel the meeting.” Hans and Alex refused. Then Hans took exception to a line Professor Huber had written in the leaflet he’d drafted, about the students supporting our glorious Wehrmacht. Alex said he wouldn’t print it—“the Wehrmacht is little better than the Nazis.” Huber left furious.
The White Rose Resists Page 25