The White Rose Resists

by Amanda Barratt

  It’s time for me to be strong again. Unlike the others, I don’t fear death by the next bomb. I’d welcome it actually. To be with the Lord and with Kirk sounds like bliss. An end to these days of ceaseless misery.

  Until then, if then indeed comes, I’m determined not to give up. When I prayed that prayer on my cot, drowning in sorrow after Kirk’s death, I didn’t really expect God to answer. When He did, it wasn’t to take away the core-deep emptiness or erase all fear. He simply provided the strength to keep going another minute, another hour. It’s humbling, this daily, childlike reliance, but faith has given me courage outside of myself. Peace, like Mutter Hoffmann says, is a choice, not a feeling.

  Putting Hella gently from me, I stand and walk through the crowd. Ignoring the bickering, I turn to some of the onlookers who watch the disagreement with bland interest.

  I take a deep breath. “Come ladies, gather ’round.”

  “What for?” Martha, the lanky woman I sit across from in the munitions workroom, hugs her arms against herself.

  “We’re going to pray. I think now would be a good time, don’t you?”

  Martha shrugs.

  “Tell your friends. Let’s get in a circle.” I beckon Hella toward me.

  Another blast jitters the shelter walls, reverberates through my body. The light sputters. Surprisingly, Martha walks away and speaks to some of her friends. After a few words, several follow her.

  We form a circle of about thirty in the middle of the shelter. The others stand on the fringes, arms crossed, determined to have none of it. I expect the guard to protest, but he remains at his post near the shelter door, puffing on a cigarette.

  “All right, everyone. Join hands.” I grab Hella and Martha’s hands. I’ve never prayed in a group before. I haven’t even attended a church service since I was a little girl. What am I thinking, leading something like this?

  But in this desperate place and time, while the world around us turns to rubble and not a one of us knows if we will survive this night, none of that matters. High-flung words won’t impress a single woman here.

  Faith, though, now that’s something else altogether.

  I look into the faces in our circle, flickering light illuminating them in a glow of shadows. Each gaze bears the marks of a different kind of suffering. The war has stolen more than we bargained for from all of us.

  In and of myself, I can offer them nothing.

  He can.

  I hear Kirk’s voice, see his soft smile urging me on.

  “God is with us.” My voice is strong. “He is always with us.”

  “Even in prison?” the ginger-haired girl asks with a jut of her chin. She stands on the outskirts, hands in her pockets.

  “Ja, even here.” My hand in Hella’s is damp. “Especially here. In the worst places of this world, He is in those places. He sees every injustice—”

  “Then why doesn’t He stop them?” Nods and murmurs of agreement echo the ginger-haired girl’s question.

  I sigh. “I’ve wondered that too. I don’t think we’re supposed to have all the answers. Only to know that no matter how dark it becomes around us, there’s always a flicker of light. His light.” I swallow. “I’ve made the choice to trust Him. Not because I’m hoping for miracles, but because His love is the miracle.” I pause. “Shall we pray together?”

  Head bent, the ginger-haired girl slips into the circle. I smile at her. Some women cross themselves. Some bow their heads. Others stand stiffly, unsure.

  The words come, faltering at first, but growing in strength. Hella squeezes my hand. Martha wipes away a tear.

  And as the shelter convulses and sirens whine and we wait for dawn, our hearts rise toward heaven.

  Kirk

  May 7, 1945

  Switzerland

  “It’s over.” Rudolf Ganz bursts into the classroom. The students look up from their lessons with eager eyes at the sight of the white-haired man standing in the doorway of the sunlit schoolroom.

  “What’s over?” From my place at the blackboard, I give Rudolf a stern glance. It’s a warm day, and the May air has been a lure all morning. I’ve had enough trouble keeping everyone on task without his interruption.

  “The war. It’s over! Germany has officially surrendered. I just heard it on the BBC.”

  I brace my hand against the blackboard to steady myself, drawing in deep breaths of chalk-laden air. We’ve known it was coming for weeks. Now it has come. The surrender. The end of six long years of untold heartache.

  It’s over.

  I turn to face my classroom of students—German-Jewish orphans all. They stare at me utterly still, hands folded on their desks, eyes wide and far older than their years. For many of these children, their first memories are of the war. They don’t remember a time before constant fear and rationed food and the deaths of their families. In Switzerland, they’ve lived in comparative safety, but they still bear the burden of memories. Child or adult, some experiences stay with one for a lifetime.

  Making a solemn speech won’t bring their families back or blot out the past. What these children need is simply to be children.

  “What would you all say to leaving mathematics until tomorrow and playing outside instead?”

  The children clap and cheer, their faces lighting up. War, for the moment, is forgotten.

  “All right.” I laugh. “Outside we go.”

  They make a mad dash for the door, jostling and laughing. Rudolf and I follow as they spill down the hall and into the sunshine. The grassy grounds are soon filled with games of tag and fußball, shouts and giggles carried on the breeze. We watch them, the brick manor house that has become a refuge for these children, and indeed for me, in the background.

  “It’s really over.” I turn and look into Rudolf’s weathered face.

  “Hard to believe, I know.” From the very first day I arrived at his door, still weak and tense from the strain of the journey, Rudolf Ganz welcomed me as if I were an orphan myself. The first night, I told him who I really was. He promised to keep my secret and gave me a job in the orphanage school. The years here have been good. During the day, there was always something to do, always the worry about having enough food and clothes to keep us in operation, always a child in need of love and care.

  Only at night did thoughts of my family and Annalise press through the barrier and reduce me to a man frantic with fear, broken by agony. Germany has suffered much since I left it. More lives have been extinguished than I expect we realize.

  I may return to find my loved ones vanished without a trace. I may never know what happened.

  Both are very real possibilities.

  I push my spectacles higher onto the bridge of my nose. Though I haven’t continued to dye my hair, I still wear the spectacles to match the photo in my identity papers. Everyone knows me as Franz Beck. I’ve grown used to it; if someone called me Kirk Hoffmann, it would take me a moment to connect myself with the name.

  “You’re thinking about going back.”

  I nod, gaze fixed absently on the children. Hair streaming in the wind, lips parted in laughter, they look so innocent. These children, all children, are our future.

  “When will you leave?”

  I meet Rudolf’s clear blue gaze. “As soon as I can.”

  “Travel won’t be easy. Everyone will be trying to go somewhere, find someone.”

  “I know. But I’ve got to. To see …” I can’t finish the sentence.

  “Who is left,” Rudolf says it for me. He knows as little as I about the fate of my family. I’ve forbidden him from writing to my parents. I wanted nothing to connect us, to put those I love in danger.

  Through every day, Annalise’s face is a shadow in the back of my mind. Our final moments together when she kissed me in the police van, whispering her love with tear-stained lips. At night, when the desperation became too much to bear, I let myself imagine seeing her again. My mind never allowed itself to conjure details besides looking into her eyes a
nd taking her face in my hands. Pressing our foreheads together and holding each other with a strength that will never again part us.

  My imaginings always left me where I started. Empty and alone and praying worn-out prayers for a miracle that may not come.

  I left her. I left my friends. I heard on the BBC that Alex, Willi, and Professor Huber lost their lives at Stadelheim during the summer and autumn of 1943. I’ll never again see the faces of my comrades. How young and fearless we were, typing our leaflets in the dark of night, breathing the air of revolution. We’d been so full of plans and dreams. So golden with promise.

  None of it came to pass. We wrote six leaflets, defaced a few buildings, dreamed of contacting the Berlin resistance. Was it in vain? The sacrifice of these good, brave people?

  I draw in a long breath.

  I have to believe it wasn’t. That their lives will count for something. That God has a plan in spite of the madness of man and the desecration of war.

  I have to believe.

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  Annalise

  May 30, 1945

  Berlin

  STANDING ON A SIDEWALK littered with rubble, I stare up at the brick edifice of the place I once called home. How is it even possible, when I’ve passed street after street leveled to ruins, that it remains untouched?

  Berlin is a wasteland of gray. Buildings once proud are charred shells. Ragged children wander aimlessly. Everywhere, families stumble through the streets, hauling bundles of whatever remains of their worldly goods. Where they are going is a mystery, even to them it seems. Soviet troops stand on street corners, smoking German cigarettes, uniforms stark against the colorless landscape. Defeat shows on every dirty, ravaged face.

  The Annalise of before would be shaking after the nightmare trip from Munich to Berlin. It took days to find a truck to take me, and I spent the trip with my arms wrapped around my knees, staring out a grimy window, pressed against the bodies of other desperate men and women trying to get to the city. Not knowing if, once I made it in, I’d be able to find a way out.

  But I had to come back. To see what, if anything, remains of my family.

  I climb the steps, sidestepping piles of broken glass and debris. I raise my fist and knock.

  I’ve spent the weeks since being released from prison in Munich with the Hoffmanns. We waited out the bombings with our arms around each other, prayers on our lips. At the end of April, American troops marched into the city. Our liberators. How young they are beneath their stern helmets. They treat us with mistrust and occasionally derision. I can’t say I blame them. I’ve talked with a few, and when asked, told them of my imprisonment. A particularly young soldier with wheat-blond hair and a farm-boy grin gave me a pack of Lucky Strikes and a tin of some strange meat-like substance called Spam. With food shortages rife and meat nonexistent, the Hoffmanns and I enjoyed it immensely.

  Minutes pass. Silence greets my knocks. I’m about to turn away when I glimpse a curtain lift in a downstairs window. It falls again, and I wait uncertainly a few moments more, hands clasped at my waist.

  The door opens a cautious crack.

  “Annalise?” My vater’s voice is a papery-thin whisper. He opens the door wider.

  “Vater.” I swallow hard at the sight of him. He’s scarecrow thin, a threadbare suit coat hanging sack-like on his shoulders. His eyes are lifeless hollows in a gaunt face.

  He steps aside to let me pass. Our once grand foyer is stripped bare. Glass litters the marble floor and dust hangs in the air.

  We regard each other silently. I’m sure he’s thinking the same about me. Prison turned me into a wisp with eyes too large for my thin face. I now wear my hair pinned in a loose knot at my nape, and I’m dressed in a navy skirt and cream blouse of Mutter Hoffmann’s that she made over to fit me. The apartment Kirk and I shared was razed by bombs. Nothing of my own is left anymore. My clothes, my paintings, Kirk’s books, our marriage license. All destroyed.

  “How are you?” Thank God I no longer look at him with fear or even anger. The only emotion I can summon is a detached kind of pity. His beloved Reich is in ruins. It is said power makes small men great. I would add that the lack of it makes great men weak.

  “Well.” He draws himself up, as if trying to gather the fragments of who he once was. “And you?” His voice is toneless, the way one would answer a stranger.

  “I’m fine.” Once, I might’ve added, No thanks to you, but not anymore. What’s the point? I cannot change the past. “Where’s Mutter?” I made the trip to Berlin mostly to see her.

  “She’s dead. She died this past February. The letter the hospital sent said it was pneumonia.”

  After so much loss, it would seem I’d be immune to the pain of it.

  “Was anyone with her?” Tears burn my eyes as I remember my mutter’s face, gray in the light of dawn, when I bid her goodbye. She didn’t want me to return to Munich. I left her, wanting to be with my friends and with Kirk.

  I left her.

  “I was at the front. I don’t know.” Vater draws in a long breath.

  She died alone. The woman who spent her years in the shadow of her husband ended her life as she lived it. Desolate. I wasn’t even there to hold her hand. My throat aches.

  “And Heinz and Albert?” I look toward the stairs, expecting to see my brothers coming down to greet me.

  Vater looks away. “Heinz was killed in an air raid in January. Albert died defending the city against the Russians. A hero of the Fatherland.”

  “He was sixteen. A child.” My voice is choked. A million little memories rush over me at once. Heinz’s laughter as he spun me in a dance in front of the Christmas tree. Holding Albert’s soft warm body in my arms an hour after he was born, vowing to always be the best big sister. Sitting next to him on the parlor sofa while he sounded out words, my arm around his shoulders, inhaling his little boy scent. He’d look up at me with a sparkle in his eyes and a gap-toothed smile. “I did good, Annalise. Didn’t I?”

  Both of them. Gone.

  “He was a hero.” Vater’s tone is firm. As if he’s clinging to the only thing he has left to believe in. “All my children were. Except you.”

  I wish I could say I’d hardened enough for his words to have no effect on me. Oh, how I wish that could be true. I force myself to meet his eyes. “You are free to feel whatever you want toward me. I can’t alter your hatred of me, any more than I can bring back the family we once had. But you don’t define me. I pity you because I see the worthless foundation you built your life upon—”

  “I don’t want your pity.” Something broken enters his gaze for an instant, swiftly replaced by ice. “Get out. This is no longer your home.”

  The finality of his words hits me like a slap.

  I’m worthless to him. As I have always been.

  My body shakes, going hot and cold by turns. I look at him once more, a tired old man standing in the shambles of an era that will never be again. “Auf Wiedersehen, Vater,” I say softly.

  He stands motionless.

  I turn away, letting myself out of the house. The door clicks shut behind me. I stand poised on the steps of a place I once lived, in a city once glorious, now destroyed. Jagged breaths fall from my lips, and I brace my hand against the side of the building, fingers pressing into the brick to steady myself.

  Dear God, You have always been my vater. And You have given me the Hoffmanns. Bring me safely back to them, to my true home and family.

  Shoulders straight, I walk on, heels clicking with each step I take. A truth settles inside me, making me turn at the corner for one last look at my girlhood home.

  I will never see it, or him, again.

  Kirk

  June 3, 1945

  I dare not hope. Dare not allow myself even the slightest flicker of expectancy my journey will have a happy ending. War is not a storybook. Its cruelties don’t end with treaties signed or dictatorships crushed. They reach beyond into the lives of those left in its wake.

/>   Munich, the companion of my youth, is a city of ghosts. Architectural splendor has turned to heaps of ashes. Everywhere there is fresh evidence of poverty, destruction, and devastating loss. Her pride, her Führer, reduced her to this.

  I walk slowly down the sidewalk, rucksack over my shoulder. How well I remember every house on our street—Frau Adler with her blue shutters and begonias, the Bergmann’s next door, whose daughter my six-year-old self delighted in teasing because of her pigtails.

  Next to that …

  My heart falters.

  Home.

  Hope flares suddenly, stubbornly within my chest. It still stands. The yard is weed-ridden and the gate sags on its hinges, its latch broken. In disrepair, but undestroyed. It’s more than I let myself hope for.

  The gate creaks as I open it. My shoes crunch on the graveled path, late-afternoon sun warm on my face.

  After two years, I’m home. Only … what does home mean after all this? Any imaginings that everything will be as before hold no weight. We’re all scarred. Changed. To them, I’m a dead man.

  I pause in the middle of the path, breath coming fast, almost angry at myself. Haven’t I dreamed of this, envisioned it in my mind like a reel of film I can’t stop watching? Now it’s before me, and I can’t make myself move. I should be running inside, into the arms of my family, if they are there.

  The realization pulls the breath from my lungs.

  I’m scared. Out here, I can imagine them as they have been in my dreams, alive and well. Taking those remaining steps and knocking on the front door will put an end to the illusion. I want that. I need that.

  And I fear it.

  Almighty God, give me strength.

  The front door opens with a groan. A woman with a kerchief around her hair and a covered basket in her hand closes the door behind her. She makes her way down the steps, gaze on the ground.

  Her slim frame, the set of her shoulders …

  For so long, she’s been lost to me, an ethereal dream, not flesh-and-blood reality. My beloved wife, heart of my heart, part of me body and soul. She starts down the path.