Of Another Time and Place

by Brad Schaeffer

  I smiled. “I don’t think you quite know the man.”

  “I know that he’s first and foremost a soldier. He’ll want his best pilot back.”

  I turned and faced the rising sun. A glowing peach hovering low in the humid morning air over my town along the river below us. “I’m not going back, Josef,” I said quietly.

  Mueller gritted his teeth. “Are you crazy? If I go to the SS, what chance have you then? If you come back with me now, then perhaps—”

  “My war is over,” I declared with growing conviction. I looked over to my sobbing parents standing arm in arm under the trees. What would this decision mean for them? And Amelia? Did I have a right to condemn others to the wrath of the Nazis? Still it didn’t matter. It was as if something had broken inside me and I’d become paralyzed. My sense of honor forbade me from going back up in the sky to defend the men and the ideal that had put Paul Becker in his grave at eighteen. Mueller pulled at me until I turned around to face him again. In all our years together I’d never seen him look so dour. And in his uniform I realized that he was a soldier. And he reminded me of this: “Harmon. I can’t bear to see the SS take you away. But I have my orders. You know that I’ll carry them out. You know it!”

  “Then do as you must,” I said, resigned to my fate. “I’ve had enough.”

  His face grew red. “It’s your duty as a German officer to return to your station and defend the Fatherland. Hitler or no Hitler, this is your country we’re talking about! Your home. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

  “My country killed my brother,” I reminded him.

  “You mean the Americans.”

  “No!” I seethed. “The Amis just carried out the sentence.”

  “Paul is not the last,” Mueller pleaded. He could see I was serious, and this unnerved him to the core. “Many more Germans will die before this game is played out.”

  Gazing past him, I saw an eagle soaring high above the mountains, riding the gentle currents of humid air. Circling, it seemed to be calling to me to rise above this world. Above those men of mayhem and mischief. Those men who did such harm to the world. Who took it upon themselves to decide who lives and who dies. Who were these wretched people? And why was I doing their bidding? Why should I have to climb into a flying machine and kill boys by the scores so they could have their congratulatory parties of wine and cheese high in cloud cuckooland at the Berghof? They didn’t even know who Paul Becker was. He was just a number to them. An entry on the ledger that read “KIA.” No more, no less. Hitler’s own arch-enemy, Stalin, offered that one death is a tragedy, one million a statistic. The Nazis were no different. But people are not numbers. Gerhard Borner, Big Werner Gaetjens, and Paul Becker were not ledger entries. They’d been given the gift of life by God. And only God could take that away. But the Lord can make His will known through our hearts. And though I’m not a wholly religious man—I’ve seen too much death to view life through anything but a jaded lens—I do know that someone spoke to me at that moment. That eagle swooping over the hills was there to remind me that I could do a decent thing in the middle of a great indecency.

  “Well,” I finally said, “I know four Germans who are not going to die…not if I can help it.”

  “What are you talking about, Harmon?”

  I turned to my old wingman. “Josef, you’ve been a good friend to me over the years. A better friend than I’ve been to you. It’s just not in my nature to give so much of myself. But you know that every time you saved my skin, the place in my heart for you grew more solid, like bedrock that will never break. But now I must do something that you’d better stay clear of. I can’t have a wingman on this mission. Take care of yourself, my friend. Perhaps we’ll meet in Dresden when this is all over and it’s safe for me again. Then you can show me one of those barrels you make. If you’re half as good a cooper as you are a pilot—or a friend—I’m sure they’re a sight to see.”

  And on that note I tried to leave him on the hilltop. I started towards my parents to collect them and load them into the Kübelwagen for the silent drive back to town. But Mueller would have none of it.

  “Captain Becker!” he called to me. My parents and Amelia turned. “Don’t make me do this. If you return, look for the new base in the woods, a half mile west of the château grounds.”

  I glanced one last time at Mueller, his fine soldierly form in his uniform outlined against the glowing promise of a new day. “You speak of duty, Josef?”

  He stood straight and swallowed with his arms behind his back. “I do.”

  “Then allow me to do my duty. As a man.” And I said nothing more to him. Instead my father and I each took my mother by the hands and led her back to the wagon. Amelia slid over and I hopped in the familiar driver’s seat. Then I threw the auto into gear and the four of us headed over the hill, down the lane into the town.

  I didn’t hear him mutter the words, but I know what he must have said.

  “And I must do my duty. As a soldier.”

  48

  After I left Mueller to make his solitary vow on the hilltop, we drove the Kübelwagen cautiously back into town. It was midmorning, and the streets were now awake and filling with people. But Amelia knew every approach and guided me through tree-covered back lanes that led into the village through routes that avoided the more conspicuous Himmelplatz approach. I was surprised by how much I’d already forgotten about my village as the data of war crowded out more peaceful memories. We made it into the narrow cobblestone backstreets of our block with little scrutiny other than the occasional horse-drawn wagon hauling a load to the market. Only the echo of the car’s engine reverberating off the gingerbread facades of the cottages that lined the lane announced our presence. Fortunately, this was the day when the townspeople congregated in the square to ply their wares, and so most of the people were away from our neighborhood. There wasn’t an SS man in sight. Our luck continued to hold.

  When we pulled up to my little home, I took my father aside and revealed to him that Mueller had orders to report me to Keitel. His face turned pale.

  “What more do you have to tell me?” he insisted. His patience was wearing thin, as he knew there was more to this. “Son, tell me, as this involves us all. What else have you been up to?”

  It was then, at the step of his door, that I revealed to him Amelia’s secret about the Krupinskis and that I planned to get them out. “They’re still alive?” he gasped. He seemed impressed actually. “Everyone just assumed they were dead. And all this time right here under the very nose of the SS? Keitel is such an imbecile. But he’s a ruthless imbecile, nonetheless.” As Amelia escorted my mother past us into the house, he pulled me aside and whispered: “If you’re taken by the SS, this will all come out. I don’t have to tell you they are adept at getting information. And then we’re all dead. Your mother and I need to leave this place.”

  The look of resignation on his face gave me pause. “Papa, no. This is your home. And there’s a war on. Where will you go? Germany is surrounded by enemies.”

  He gave me a grave look. “The same place you must go.”

  I shook my head. “No. It’s far too dangerous. We need to get you to Switzerland. Over the mountains.”

  My father scolded me as if I were on the football field. “Your mother would never survive the trek! Think for a moment. You cannot lose your head now!”

  “Papa, now that the SS are involved I can’t go back to my base and return to flying even if I wanted to.”

  “I figured that,” he said. “So then it’s to the Allied lines.”

  “If we try to cross the battlefield on foot we’d be dead in a day,” I said. “Flying out is the only way. Over the channel. And that runs risks I don’t even want to think about.”

  He closed his eyes and cringed as if hit with a stick. “England? Is it even possible?”

  So great was the tension that I
actually broke into a chuckle. “Sure. Assuming we can get you, Mama, a cripple and her daughter, an ailing man and woman, and their two malnourished children, out of town without the SS—who sees everything—spotting us. Assuming we can cover the two hundred miles to my base without being stopped by our own patrols or blasted by Jabos. Assuming I can get us onto my base unnoticed. Assuming I can commandeer an aircraft large enough to fit us all. Assuming we can evade the Luftwaffe if we get in the air. Assuming that we can fly to the invasion beachhead in a German aircraft without Allied patrols blowing us out of the sky. Oh yes, it’s quite possible.”

  He too recognized how far-fetched it sounded. And he too managed a grin. He put his hand on my shoulder. “Well then, let’s get moving, shall we?”

  A few minutes later, my father was relaying the bad news of our imminent flight to my astonished mother.

  “I don’t see why we should have to leave,” protested my hopelessly bewildered mother as she and Father hastily tossed some clothing into his old steel-gray bag from the Great War. “Karl, this is our home!”

  He continued jamming his shirts into the opening of the bag as if violently stuffing a goose. “There’s no time to explain. But we must hurry.”

  “But our life?” she pleaded.

  He stood up and slung the bag over his shoulder in a motion he hadn’t performed since his discharge in 1919. “Our old life is over,” he said.

  SS Sturmbahnführer Keitel sat deep in thought with his gleaming calf-hugging boots propped up on his desk, twirling his Luger pistol on his finger. On his wall hung a photograph of the Führer’s triumphant entry into Paris. Other artifacts and memorabilia from Russia were scattered about his office. A captured Soviet banner. A Red Army helmet, which he now used as a candleholder. The emblem of the Totenkopf in fine crafted gold served as his paperweight. A real human skull on the shelf. He’d been campaigning a long time, and done his Führer’s bidding unquestionably. In Russia he had carried out the Commissar Order and shot every Communist and Jew he encountered with unflinching expediency. And now he felt honored with the assignment to clear this part of Germany and the surrounding countryside of spies, traitors, and all enemies of the state. How could we win the war in the field while enemies still lurked in the shadows at home? He was just the man to find them.

  Today his patriotic work would continue. But how best to approach this? Amelia was up to something. He could feel it. After all, he knew her well enough to have once been engaged to her, even if it was her father who said yes and not her. That he never got to share a bed with her filled him with unsatisfied longing. But not after today. She would learn that when it came to finding treachery against the Fatherland, more than a few unfortunate Bolsheviks, partisans, and special prisoners of war found that he had Fingerspitzengefühl…intuition at the fingertips. And his intuition was screaming at him today to just break into the blonde tart’s house and find out what was going on inside.

  Normally that would be simple. As SS commander, he was the absolute authority and could do whatever he wanted. He found this notion intoxicating. And nothing was more thrilling to him than the total power he had in the basement of the offices here, which were once those of a prominent Jewish doctor. The doctor was gone now, of course, sent away with all the others, but he had obligingly left behind his medical devices, forceps, scalpels, clamps, and needles, which Keitel had put to good use. And the damp and candlelit basement, carved from stone like a mine, and which once housed the doctor’s exceptional wine collection, kept the shrieks and pleas for mercy hidden from pedestrians above as if in a vacuum. Oh, the rush of excitement he found when inflicting pain upon another! The total and absolute power he possessed. He could make them say or do anything to end his interrogations, which if done right could last for hours before the criminal either passed out or expired. That, he mused, was what a god can do.

  He thought about Amelia and felt the familiar stirring of flesh hunger. What fun it would be to get her down into his little laboratory. Naked, vulnerable, strung up by the wrists as he sliced, probed, and prodded. Her heaving breasts, nipples hard from fear and the cold. Offering him anything if he would just make the pain stop. Finally she would be his. It was a delicious thought.

  But he’d decided to wait. Something told him that if he played his cards right, bigger game could be snared in his net. Who exactly, he didn’t know for sure. Her demeanor yesterday, combined with his own observations and those from the Hitler Youth informant, told him there were other players in whatever game she was playing. How to do this? And then came a knock on the door.

  “Come,” he barked, straightening up to sit stiffly at the desk. He put the Luger down and began shuffling through papers as if caught in the middle of something very important.

  The Luftwaffe first lieutenant stepped into the office and tucked his visor cap under his arm. Unsure how to approach an officer in Hitler’s personal bodyguard, he courteously snapped his arm in the air. “Heil Hitler.”

  Keitel looked at the fighter pilot with queer fascination. He stood up and raised his arm to acknowledge the greeting. “Heil Hitler.” The pilot glanced down at Keitel’s sidearm on the desk and then stood in silence. The SS officer held out his palms. “Well? What can I do for the Luftwaffe today, First Lieutenant?”

  Josef Mueller forced himself to speak. With each word he felt as if he was carving away at his soul.

  49

  Things were taking too long. It seemed that my parents couldn’t get out of their house. Whether through Father Anton or Gregor, word had gotten around town that young Paul Becker was the latest to give his life for the Fatherland. Soon after we returned to the house, neighbors and friends began to come by in driblets to offer their sympathies and inquire as to what they could do to ease the pain. More than a few were perplexed at the sudden morning burial, but they just chalked it up to the understandably irrational behavior of grieving parents who’d just lost their youngest boy.

  Amelia had bolted back to her house to get the Krupinskis ready, but I had to stay out of sight, as I knew by now that Mueller would’ve carried out his orders and flown back to base. So I stayed hidden upstairs while the interminable visits from the townspeople dragged on. Each brought over something to eat if they had any extra. For the women of Stauffenberg, many of whom had lost their own sons to the fighting, this had become a familiar ritual. Some of my mother’s closer acquaintances stayed for tea. They sat around in the parlor and comforted the distraught Greta as her increasingly edgy husband checked his watch with growing frequency.

  At one point my father excused himself and came upstairs to find me.

  “We have to go now,” I whispered insistently.

  He put his finger to his lips and made a calming gesture. “Easy, Son. We must appear natural.”

  “But—”

  “Harmon. There’s always the chance that we may have to come back to this place,” he reminded me. “I’ll not put your mother in needless danger. This has to play out naturally.”

  He was right, of course. If we couldn’t get out of town, or if, for whatever reason, they had to return here, their conduct now, if it were in any way peculiar, would become suspect. Among their visitors could also be informants. I had to a keep cool head, even as my heart raced. My father’s wisdom and maturity over me was showing.

  By the time the final visitor departed, I looked out my bedroom window and was surprised to see that the sun had gone down. Still no SS. Josef must have stalled before seeing Keitel, either to give me a head start or to steel himself for so unsavory a mission. But how much longer did we have?

  I raced down the stairs, imploring my parents to hurry. “We’ve little time,” I said. “Take only what you can carry.”

  Along with his packed duffel bag, my father hastily retrieved his old haversack, also from the Great War, and rummaged through the pantry, jamming the sack with anything he could get his hands on. Roll
s of bread, jelly, canned fruit, a pocketknife, and so on. He also grabbed his winter coat. I stopped what I was doing to question him about the need for a heavy jacket in the middle of June. “We may yet need to try and go over the mountains. Either way I hear it gets cold up in those airplanes of yours.”

  I marveled at his ability to think so clearly at a time like this. “I’ll get one for Mama,” I said with a nod.

  He looked over to her, still seated on the couch with a cup of tea and a saucer in her hands. She was staring blankly at the far wall. I tried to imagine what this must be like for her. When she had gone to bed last night, although she fretted over the war like everyone, she still had both of her sons, her home, and her country. By the end of today, all of that, save for me and Father, would be ripped away from her.

  “Papa,” I asked quietly. “Is she up for this?”

  “She has no choice,” he said grimly. He looked down at his bags and patted them reassuringly. “Well, that’s everything.”

  I stepped over to my mother and knelt down to look at her. I set her teacup on the table and squeezed her shaking hand. “I’m sorry it came to this, Mama,” I said. “Please forgive me.”

  She looked up and put her hand on my cheek and gave me a motherly smile to warm the iciest of souls. “There’s nothing to forgive. You are a good boy.”

  “Come on,” I said, and gently lifted my mother to her feet.

  We left through the back of the house. My father was the last to leave. He stood in the doorway and paused before closing it behind him. He was taking in his home for the last time. He knew, deep down, that he would never be back here again.