by Louise Fein
Dedication
To my remarkable parents, who are with me always.
Epigraph
Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
—WINSTON CHURCHILL
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Part I
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Part II
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Eight
Thirty-Nine
Forty
Part III
Forty-One
Forty-Two
Forty-Three
Forty-Four
Forty-Five
Forty-Six
Forty-Seven
Forty-Eight
Forty-Nine
Fifty
Fifty-One
Fifty-Two
Fifty-Three
Fifty-Four
Fifty-Five
Fifty-Six
Fifty-Seven
Fifty-Eight
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*
About the Author
About the Book
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue
Leipzig
Summer 1929
The lake is silky smooth, lapping gently around the legs of the jetty. The knobbly planks beneath my toes are thick and warmed by the sun. Karl is on the bank, wriggling into his shorts under the towel Mutti is holding around him.
“Careful, Hetty,” Karl shouts. “The water’s deep out there.”
“I’m just looking,” I call back. “I want to see the big fish.”
I shuffle right to the very end and curl my toes around the edge. Crouching low, I peer into the water. I can’t see the bottom of the lake. Maybe there isn’t one. Perhaps the dark green water goes all the way down to the middle of the earth where savage monsters lurk, waiting.
Walter swims toward the jetty. He splashes his arms around then floats on his back, pale toes bobbing up out of the water. He pops up again, grinning at me, pushing his wet hair off his face. I wish I could have swimming lessons like Karl, then I, too, could glide like a fish, instead of splashing about in the shallows, stubbing my toes on jagged stones and slipping on slimy weed.
From my perch, I watch Walter swim farther out into the lake. He disappears from sight, hidden by the solid wooden pillar of the jetty. I move to try to see him, but I lean too far and topple forward. My hands fly out, clawing at empty space, and I’m falling, down, down, down.
Belly first, I crash onto the stone-hard surface. I gasp with the iciness, but instead of air, there is only rancid lake water.
“Help!” I splutter, splashing hopelessly, blinded by blurry flashes of light and dark.
“HELP,” louder now, but the water boils and churns, closing over my head, and the monsters suck me down to their deep, green lair.
Gripped by panic, I scrabble and kick, fighting back up to the surface. I manage a breath. There are voices in the distance. I thrash wildly, but it doesn’t keep me up, and I’m swirling, round and round. The voices fade as I’m dragged down again, lungs screaming, but the water—sickening, cloying, heavy—fills them and I’m drowning.
Darkness folds in.
Something scrabbles at my swimsuit and scratches my back. There’s a tugging, and I’m pulled up to the surface. Someone is holding me and I’m retching and coughing in the lightning-white sunlight until I think my insides are going to spill out. With a rasping choke, air surges into my lungs, and water pours from my nose. The person holding me is kicking hard, keeping both of us up, panting and grunting with the effort. The hands turn me onto my back and there’s a strong body beneath me, keeping my head above the water.
“Don’t struggle, you’re safe now.” A voice in my ear. Walter’s voice. “I’m swimming you back to the shore.” He wraps his hand around my chin and tugs.
I try to lie still, but water laps in my ears and I wobble as he jerkily swims on his back, huffing with the effort of keeping me up until we reach shallow water. Dimly, I hear cries and shouts from nearby. Walter’s body is solid and safe. He begins to wriggle out from under me, but I cling desperately to him, our tangle of legs sinking to the lake floor.
“It’s all right, you can stand now,” he says, propping me upright. The mud squishes between my toes as I try to stand but I’m shaking, and my legs collapse beneath me. Walter holds me, and I lean against him. My throat stings from the coughing. Water trickles from my nose.
Mutti runs through the shallows, soaking her skirt, but she doesn’t seem to care. She lifts me up, hugging me tight against her body, and we stagger back to shore. She wraps me in a warm towel.
“Hetty! Are you okay?” Karl is here, too, patting me on the back, peering at my face. “I told you to be careful!”
“Oh my poor darling.” Mutti sinks down with me still in her arms. She rocks me back and forth as though I were a baby, not a big seven-year-old. My ear is pressed to her chest and I can hear her breath, ragged and fast, in her throat.
Walter stands close by, watching us, silent and dripping. Mutti turns to him.
“You saved her life, Walter. Thank heavens you’re such a strong swimmer. If you hadn’t been there so fast . . .” She begins to cry.
“It was no problem,” Walter says, quickly looking away.
“I’m going to tell your mother how brave you’ve been.”
“There’s no need. Honestly.” He grabs his towel and begins to dry himself.
Mutti wipes her eyes and helps me to dress. The back of my nose and throat are rough-raw, as if I have swallowed concrete.
“Perhaps Hetty should have swimming lessons,” Karl says into the silence.
Mutti sniffs and nods.
She bustles around, laying out the blanket and picnic things. I’ve managed to stop shaking and try some raspberry pfannkuchen and milk from her flask.
I finally gather the courage to look directly at Walter. His wavy blond hair is half dry, half wet. He’s saying something to Karl, but then he turns and looks at me and his face breaks into a smile.
His eyes are the warmest, kindest blue.
LATER THAT NIGHT, Mutti tucks me into my narrow bed, pushed against the wall in the bedroom I share with Karl.
“Good night, my darling.” Mutti kisses my forehead. “You are all right, aren’t you?”
“Yes, Mutti.”
“Good.” She smiles and strokes my hair.
She turns out the light and closes the door gently behind her.
I keep my eyes open. Through the gloom, I make out the lumpy shape of the wardrobe against the wall and Karl’s empty bed below the windowsill. With him in the room, the menacing shadows can’t harm me. Each time my eyelids droop I’m bac
k in the lake and the water is sucking me into its murky depths, choking and clogging my lungs. My heart thrums and my eyes ping open. Stay awake. Stay awake. Stay awake.
The door creaks sooner than I expect.
“Karl?”
“Hetty? You’re still awake.”
“Can’t sleep.”
“I wondered. Listen, I have something for you. To make you feel better. I was saving it for your birthday, but I want to give it to you now. I’ll get you something else for your birthday.” He snaps on the light and I blink at the sudden brightness.
Karl scrabbles under his bed and emerges with a brown, rectangular paper bag.
“Here,” he says, placing it on top of my blankets as I push myself up to sit. He perches on the edge of my bed. His cheeks are pinched and his forehead wrinkles beneath his dark fringe.
“I wish I’d saved you today, Little Mouse,” he says, “but I was too far away.” I know he means it because as he looks into my eyes, I can see straight into his soul. The worry has made his pupils huge and black and I can tell he’s crying inside, like me. I nod so he knows I understand.
“At least Walter was there. And he is your best friend.”
I look at the paper bag, bulky in my hands.
“Open it then,” he urges.
The paper crackles as I uncurl the folded bag. I slip my hand inside and my fingers brush the hard cover of a book. It’s a journal, the type a grown-up might have. The front is covered with a rich patchwork of shapes in different shades of browns, oranges, and blues. The paper inside is creamy white.
“It’s beautiful,” I whisper. “Thank you, Karl.”
“There’s something else in there too.” Karl smiles.
Resting at the bottom is a silver-and-blue fountain pen.
“I thought you could write all your secrets in there. Or stories you make up with that wild imagination of yours,” Karl says, searching my face.
“I’ll try and write some really good ones. But maybe not about drowning.” I smile at him. I want him to know everything is okay.
As I settle my head back on the pillow, I know that it is okay, but some things are changed.
I nearly drowned and Walter rescued me.
That makes everything different.
Part I
One
August 7, 1933
Metamorphosis!” exclaims Dr. Kreitz. “That’s what the English call this book,” and he waves its pages in the air with a flourish. “Can anyone tell me what that word means?” He leans on the teacher’s table, shirtsleeves pulled up to his elbows. Not one of us makes a sound from our wooden benches in my new classroom at the gymnasium.
No more dusty, higgledy-piggledy volksschule for me. The small, black cinder playground and rough children are a distant memory from before the long summer break. The gymnasium is all high arches and echoey corridors. In its center, a great hall with a high beamed ceiling beneath its grand, red mansard roof. Here, the teachers are taller, smarter, stricter. I might have gotten better marks in the entrance test than Karl did three years ago, when he sat for them like me, at eleven; but now I’m here, I don’t feel very clever at all.
“Does it mean transformation?” Someone at the back breaks the silence. I twist around and glimpse a small girl with frizzy black hair, a little like my own.
“Name, please,” Dr. Kreitz says, his head popping up, eyes bulging out, reminding me of a frog.
“Freda Federmann,” says the girl in a confident voice.
“Wonderful. Yes, Freda,” Dr. Kreitz enthuses. “Transformation. Rebirth. Conversion. From the Greek metamorphoun, meaning ‘to transform.’” He begins to pace. “Studying the Greeks and Romans,” he says, “will teach us all we need to know about the human condition.”
“Freda Federmann is a Jewess,” I hear someone hiss to her neighbor from the row behind me. It’s loud enough for the professor to hear, but he shows no sign of it. He picks up a book from the table as he passes by.
The professor has narrow shoulders and a potbelly. Part of his shirt hangs from his trousers and his tie is askew. This school, famous for its classical education, clearly picked him for his knowledge and superior brain, not for his appearance.
“Franz Kafka,” he says, staring intently up at the ceiling, as though he might see the author perched on top of the rafters. “What a brilliant, and amusing, man he was. Listen.” He vigorously flicks through some pages, his hair flopping wildly. He begins to read, treading a slow circuit of the room. He tells us, in a mesmerizing voice, the story of Gregor, the traveling salesman who awakens one morning to find himself transformed into an enormous insectlike creature.
Light filters through the long, rectangular windows set high up on the classroom wall. Adolf Hitler stares serenely down at us all from his vast portrait above the blackboard. Dr. Kreitz’s voice rises and falls, fades and resounds. As I look at the portrait, Hitler’s face appears to swell and move. He gazes at me, unblinking, but I’m certain his lips have moved, twitched, as if at any moment he might smile and step down from the picture, saying ha ha, what a joke, I have been here all along.
He doesn’t, of course, and I tear my eyes away. Karl says I have too much imagination. My heart jumps and I wonder if he’s right.
Dr. Kreitz reads on. I avoid looking at Hitler’s picture and instead study the profile of the girl sitting next to me. Tall and elegant, she has long auburn hair that hangs either side of her shoulders in two smooth plaits. Her pale face is so perfectly formed, it could have been chiseled from the finest marble. She holds her chin high as she watches Dr. Kreitz travel around the room. Feeling my gaze, she turns and fixes me with sloping green eyes.
“Hello,” she whispers. “My name is Erna Bäcker.” A smile flickers on her lips.
“Hetty Heinrich,” I reply, excruciatingly aware of my frizzy dark hair, big eyes, and too-round cheeks.
Erna Bäcker is simply the most bewitching creature I have ever seen in my life.
A knock on the classroom door stops Dr. Kreitz’s reading abruptly.
“Herr Hofmann . . .” He addresses the tall, thin man, wearing a waistcoat and bow tie, who enters the room.
“Heil Hitler,” Herr Hofmann greets the class.
“Heil Hitler,” we echo back.
“Headmaster”—Dr. Kreitz clears his throat—“delighted you can join us.”
Herr Hofmann sweeps to the front of the class.
“Welcome to our wonderful gymnasium,” he says, smiling around the classroom. “You’ve all done extremely well to get here. But this is only the beginning. During your time at this school, with hard work and exemplary behavior, you can become exceptional. This is true not only for the boys, but for you girls, too. In the fullness of time, you shall go on to become wonderful members of our great new Reich. I am sure you will make both your parents and our school proud. Best of luck to you all.”
I smile back at him. My dream is to become a doctor, preferably a world-famous one. I feel that, being here, at this great school, is one step closer to achieving my ambition. I shall try my very best at all my lessons. Always.
Herr Hofmann turns to Dr. Kreitz. “What are you studying this morning?”
Dr. Kreitz silently shows him the cover of Metamorphosis.
A look of horror passes over Herr Hofmann’s face. “Dr. Kreitz, have you lost your mind?”
He shrugs. “It’s a wonderful text, Herr Hofmann. Perfect for introducing the themes we are studying this year: symbolism, the metaphor, the absurdity of life—”
“We will discuss this later,” Herr Hofmann says brusquely. “In the meantime, as well you know, this is not an appropriate text to be studying. Ensure you choose a suitable German author next time. Good day, children,” and he sweeps from the room, banging the door shut behind him.
Dr. Kreitz shrinks.
His hand trembles as he returns to his desk and slides Metamorphosis into his bag. He licks his lips and stares at us, as if not sure what to do next. Chatter breaks
out among the class and he makes no attempt to stop it.
Again, he reminds me of a frog, but this time, one that has been squashed and flattened on a busy road.
TOMAS IS WAITING for me when I come out of school. Long-legged and skinny, he leans nonchalantly against the trunk of a large tree on Nordplatz. Before I can make a run for it, he spots me and rushes over, bumping into me with a crooked smile.
“What’s it like then?” he asks, looking over his shoulder at the school. We fall in behind a noisy group of older pupils streaming across the grassy square toward Gohlis.
“It’s still school. Just . . . smarter and stricter, that’s all.”
Tomas looks a little wistful. He’d go there in a shot, if only his parents could afford the fees. He’s clever enough to pass the test.
“It’s odd, you not living in our block anymore,” Tomas says. “Emptier,” he adds after a pause.
“I’m not far away.”
“I guess.” He’s breathing heavily as we walk, pausing to cross Kirchplatz. “What’s your new place like then?”
“Just wait till you see it.” I laugh. “After the flat, you won’t believe . . . Come on,” and I break into a run, a bubble of excitement rising inside.
Our vast new house on Fritzschestrasse has a pointy roof and two chimneys sticking up like thick fingers toward heaven. There are four layers of windows. We could have a whole floor each.
“It’s the biggest house in the street,” Tomas says as he stares up in awe at the handsome building, all sandy brick and trimmed with black. His tawny hair is disheveled and his eyes insect-big through the grubby lenses of his tortoiseshell glasses. He screws up his nose as he surveys its vastness.
I stand taller.
“Does it have a garden out back?”
“Of course it does! That’s my room.” I point up at the window with the balcony overlooking the road on the second floor. There’s a beautiful old cherry tree growing beneath it. Its branches extend over the iron railings and the pavement on one side and under the balcony on the other. From my special seat in the window, I can see the junction with Berggartenstrasse and nearly the whole of Fritzschestrasse until it bends around to the right, near Walter’s flat. I watch him come and go.