by Andie Newton
After a brief stay in a makeshift hospital set up for those wounded during the liberation, I was moved in the middle of the night by a convoy of sisters to the nave of Saint Michael’s Church in Luxembourg City. I assumed the hospital had become too crowded and they took me in, like the true orphan I was. One of them shushed me, told me not to talk until I was strong. I nodded, fell asleep and took her advice literally, feeling safer with the silence.
I lay there for weeks on a metal-framed bed with a thin mattress and an even thinner, almost see-through white curtain strung between my bed and one other that was empty. The sisters put me in a ruffled blue sleeping gown and bowed fresh bandages around my knees and elbows like ribbons. Sometimes I heard onlookers, who occasionally stood on the other side of the veil, wondering who I was, what village in Luxembourg I had come from.
I spent my days staring at the stained-glass windows set high in the church’s stone walls. When the sun crept in, I gazed at beams of coloured light that danced under the ceiling’s shallow coffered arches. Often, the shadows of allied bomber planes streaked across the stones. The rumbling from their engines shook my bed and my bones they were so close.
Three times a day the sisters walked in single file from the narthex into the nave with a low-burning white candle cupped between their hands. The hem of their black habits swooshed against their feet as they walked and the candles spread a peaceful, yet ghostlike glow onto their faces, which were flush against the black veils that covered their heads and cascaded down their shoulders like hair.
They stood at the foot of my bed and prayed silently. After a few minutes, they bent to their knees, rubbed scentless oil into the palms of my hands, kissed my wrists, and then walked out the same way they came in.
One morning I woke to find a girl lying in the next bed to me. Her face was sickly white, with grey lips and droopy blue eyes that stared right into mine. A long, frizzy braid of blonde hair lay against her neck and disappeared into the white sheets.
She rested on her side with her left hand draped over her waist and the other flattened near her face. Sometimes her arms tightened and her chest constricted. I pulled our beds closer using her rail. A tired smile hung on her lips, and I thought she was glad I had done it. Then she went to sleep.
That night I had a dream, and it was the first dream I could remember since I’d been arrested.
I walked barefoot in a garden of root vegetables that had ripened to the point of spoiling. In the distance a range of purple mountains with white peaks pointed to a halo of orange sunlight. A sister from the church, the one who most often prayed beside my bedside, walked with me, her hands clasped loosely behind her back. Instead of her habit, she wore black trousers and a fitted men’s shirt that buttoned up the front. Dark hair flowed like a chocolatey river down her back, and grey, almost crystalline eyes watched me as we walked.
I pointed to the brown and mushy spots on the vegetables. ‘There’s so much food going to waste.’
Her mouth never opened when she talked. ‘Look beyond the vegetables to the far side of the garden, where the field had been harvested weeks prior and think about the crops that had made it into the mouths of the hungry.’
‘But why were these crops neglected?’
‘What makes you think they were?’ she said. ‘Do they not supply nourishment to the creatures of the soil or fatten the earth for the next harvest?’
Before I could answer, she asked me what I thought of the mountains, said sometimes the only way to reach new heights was to start at the bottom. I stopped walking and stared at the mountain’s white snow-caps. Then images of my aunt, smiling, baking desserts in the kitchen of our half-timbered house in Nuremberg reeled in my mind like a movie projector. Her hair had more grey than blonde in it and her lips were paler than they ought to be. I knew she missed me, yet I also had the overwhelming feeling that she knew I was alive, and that I was safe.
The sister smiled. ‘I know what you saw.’
‘What about Claudia? And Max?’ I asked.
‘Both of them have their own paths. Their own destinies.’ Suddenly there was a blue rose in her hand, which she handed to me.
‘I’ve seen this before.’
‘In a painting,’ she said, smiling. ‘You must become the blue rose again, Ella. If you want to survive…’
I woke up some time in the middle of the night thinking about the mountain peaks, and how they looked like whipped cream against the clear blue sky.
White pillar candles had been placed at a distance near the high altar and dulled the air with light shadow. I stretched in my bed. The dream had revived me in a way I couldn’t explain. A slight groan seeped from the corner of my mouth. I pulled the bandages from my arms and legs. My joints didn’t hurt like they had before and the wounds around my knees and elbows had completely healed. Even the grey rings the Nazi Clock had left around my wrists had faded.
The new girl watched me with sagging, nearly closed eyes. ‘You’re getting better,’ she said in French, but her accent was unexpectedly flat. Her hand flopped against the metal frame of my bed and opened like a flower. ‘Did they put oil in your palm?’
‘Oui,’ I said.
She closed her eyes as if it was a nod.
‘Why do they do that?’ I said, continuing our conversation in French.
Her throat sputtered with a moaned laugh, and the darkened hollows under her cheek bones sank into her face. ‘Vous ne savez pas?’
‘Non,’ I said. ‘Should I know?’
Her arms tightened and her hands curled into fists. Usually she let the spasms pass without so much as a whimper, but this time her face winced with pain.
‘What’s happening to you?’ I said.
‘The Nazis poisoned me,’ she said. ‘The sisters think they can save me, but I feel dead already.’
‘Do you have family?’
She lifted her head just a hair and closed her eyes. ‘What’s that accent I hear?’
I bit my lip and said nothing. She was nice, and I felt sorry for her, but I didn’t feel comfortable enough to tell her my true identity: that I was not Luxembourgian, but one of the enemies of this war. I was German.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘You can hide your German accent just like I hid my American one from the Nazis that took over my village.’
She knows. I scooted up. ‘I’m just trying to survive,’ I said, defensively.
‘I know,’ she said. ‘I can tell you’re different. You wouldn’t be here if you weren’t.’
I was relieved she didn’t judge me cruelly, and I thought it best not to press the subject. But I did wonder how an American had ended up living in Luxembourg. ‘American? What is an American girl doing in Luxembourg?’
‘I was born there, but I’ve lived in Luxembourg since I was a child.’ She patted her chest and moved something hidden under her dress. ‘I’ve got the documents to prove it.’ Her eyes drooped to a close and her voice trailed into a whisper. ‘Hold my hand.’ She offered me her palm.
She fell asleep again, and I watched her for many hours with her eyes closed. Then sometime just after dawn, her hand went limp and her pulse turned into a calm chill. An odd smile gaped in her mouth.
She’s dead.
A small brown booklet slipped into the vee of her collar, and I sat up with a jolt. Become the blue rose. My eyes shifted to the narthex, then back to her limp, war-thin body. The war has dragged on for years, and it could drag on for even more. What if the Reich takes Luxembourg again? If they don’t kill me on the spot, they’ll send me back to prison—which is just as good as dying.
I pulled the booklet slowly from her dress and tucked it into mine. Then I slipped off the side of my bed, my feet searching the unfamiliar ground for support. My legs wobbled like noodles under the weight of my body. A wooden door set into the stone wall on the other side of the nave called out to me as if I was in a dream, and I took a step, and then another, until I made it to the other side of the church, and snuck out
of the door with the dead girl’s documents poking out of my brassiere.
*
The sun had risen and streaks of yellow light filtered through the buildings and onto the street like warm rays of gold. I walked slowly to the end of a cobblestoned courtyard near the city’s edge and sat on a low stone wall that overlooked a field that swayed with tall green grasses. On the other side, the Americans had set up a base camp that bustled like a small city; smoking barrels lined the perimeter, armoured vehicles rumbled in and out. Some soldiers relaxed in netted beds strung between vehicles while others sunned themselves on the tops of tanks, smoking and joking. If it hadn’t been for the distant boom of mortar fire in the north, one would have thought they were camping, perhaps even on a retreat.
I arched my neck to catch the sun on my face, dangled my feet on the other side of the wall, and let the warm sunlight absorb into my skin. A small market with tattered tents of various colours assembled behind me. Little old ladies with their grey hair twisted into buns pinned tight behind their heads, sold meagre items, mostly wax, nuts and things the Nazis left behind. I pulled the girl’s brown booklet from my brassiere and brushed my thumb over the faded black lettering on the front: United States Passport. Inside was a visa from Luxembourg dated 1920. An old photo of a girl about five years old or so stuck to the right corner; she had poufy blonde hair and an innocent smile that tethered chunky cheeks. The paper called her Anna.
I tucked it back into the top of my gown and gazed at the soldiers on the other side of the field behind the barbed wire fence. One sat on the front wing of a dusty green jeep with a white star painted on its door. A guitar rested on his knee. His calf-length boot, coated in European dirt, used the jeep’s metal bumper as a foot stand. He watched his own fingers as he strummed the strings on his guitar and played a song I could barely hear.
A withered old lady with worn pointed heels, and a dirty white kerchief tied under her chin, stepped out from behind a merchant’s tent, shaking her bony index finger at my hands. ‘Les marques de Jésus-Christ,’ she said in a voice too agitated for me to figure out if she was scared or excited.
‘What?’ I said, and then noticed the splotches of blood my hands had made on the stone wall, which alarmed me at first as much as they did her. She ducked back behind the tent, anchored her eye in a thumb-sized tear in its canvas fabric and watched me inspect the wounds centred in my palms.
Is this why I was taken to the church?
I wanted to say they were escape wounds, long since healed over, but the words never came. I looked back at her, and her one big eye peeping through the canvas. Suddenly every note coming from the soldier’s guitar turned crystal clear, and I thought, whatever the reasons were for the wounds, if they were an anomaly or if they were in fact divinely bestowed, one thing was for sure: if I hadn’t been brought to that church I wouldn’t have ended up with Anna’s documents in my brassiere.
Just then, the barbed wire that bordered the far end of the field was rolled back, and opened like a gate that led right to the soldier on the jeep.
I stepped down off the stone wall.
My legs felt strong, sturdier then they had before, and I walked, slowly at first, through the field toward the gap in the fence, the grasses getting taller, greener and more lustrous the closer I got to the soldier. He lifted his head; deep-set hazel eyes watched me from under thick lashes. ‘Hey, I remember you.’ He smiled, reached into a small pocket hidden in his faded green uniform and pulled out a very tattered yellow scarf.
I stopped, disbelieving, and studied his face. He was all cleaned up now, and suddenly completely recognizable: the soldier that rescued me all those weeks ago. His voice was as reassuring as the day he pulled me out of the mud.
He waved the scarf at me, smiling. ‘I was hoping I’d see you again,’ he said in English.
I gently pushed his hand back. I didn’t want the scarf anymore. I wasn’t a jumpbox; I wasn’t a resister or a spy. I reached into the top of my gown, pulled the passport from my brassiere and remembered Anna’s flat American accent.
There was a shift—the memory of my aunt, Claudia, and Max silenced like characters in a closed book as I felt Anna’s gaunt face and body veil my own.
A good shop girl can make a person believe anything.
The dull roar of an American transport plane rumbled in the distance. I thought about what it would be like to be on it and move far away from here—as far away as I could get—as I answered him back in my best French-somewhat-American-accent.
‘Me too.’ I handed him the passport.
Acknowledgments
There are so many people to thank. Firstly, this book would not be in print today if it wasn’t for the passion and drive of my fabulous editor, Hannah Smith. Her ideas and suggestions turned my manuscript into a book and I’m eternally grateful. She also made my dream come true, and that’s an amazing thing! I also want to thank the entire team at Aria Fiction for all of the behind-the-scenes work they did to bring this novel to life. Thank you to my agent, Kate Nash, for her expert advice and for answering every single question I had (and I had a lot). Kate, her clients, and her team have been especially supportive of me, and at times I’ve had to pinch myself.
Thank you to my husband, Matt, and my two kids, Zane and Drew, for their encouragement, unrelenting support, and for listening to me talk about ‘my book’ for ten long years. Thank you to my sister, Lori Burns, and my parents. They never once stopped believing in my book, even while I was swimming in a sea of rejection.
This book started with an idea, but as I worked my way through the first draft, I quickly became overwhelmed and I thought I should just give up. If it wasn’t for the early reads from Katie Flanagan and Rebecca Wedberg I just might have. Along the way I met Paula Butterfield, an incredible writer who was literally the only person I could talk shop with. She helped me with plot ideas, gave me advice, and read every single word I pushed at her, even when she was knee-deep in her own edits.
Lastly, thank you to the Pacific Northwest Writers Association for the writing award I received many years ago. It was the boost I needed at just the right time.
Author’s Note
This book is a work of fiction, however, the backdrop and setting are based and inspired by real events, people, and places. I would love to go through every page and tell you what inspired me and what I fictionalized to craft this story, but since I can’t, I’d like to tell you a few interesting facts.
First and foremost, the Nuremberg Kunstbunker was indeed a real thing, although the date of construction happened a little earlier than it does in this story. Many years ago, I caught a documentary on the History Channel about the art bunker (and the little antiques shop next door.) With my background in history, I was aware there were youth in the German Resistance, but it wasn’t until after I saw the documentary that I started researching who exactly these youths were and what they did. This is when the pieces for The Girl I Left Behind came together.
The Falcons were inspired by many resistance groups. The Swing Kids was a group (and a movement) who openly resisted the confines of Nazi behavior. They listened to banned music and essentially behaved like American teens, which was absolutely scandalous and an arrestable offense. The Edelweiss Pirates and Leipzig Meuten were much different, most remembered for their violent street thug behavior and clashes with the Hitler Youth. Other groups were more organized; they printed phony identification papers and provided safe houses for Jews. Then there were the special sects: renegades—some of them female—who sabotaged patrols, schemed to assassinate Hitler, and infiltrated the Reich to spy for the British. It was upon learning this that the idea to have The Girl I Left Behind play out as a female-driven spy novel became too good to resist.
Many emails were exchanged with various places in Munich and Nuremberg to confirm or shed light on information I had researched. Some got back to me; some did not. The Korn und Berg bookstore was one that wrote back. It was through this exchange I learn
ed about the windows, and how Hitler himself had ordered the shopkeeper to change the shape.
Hinzert prison was a political prison that also kept Night and Fog prisoners. The flowerbeds and gardens were real; only a true monster could create this place. The Königsplatz was a unique area because it was where all sorts of different departments within the Reich came together. When I learned this, I had to place Ella there to give her maximum opportunity. Toyoka is a work of fiction, but Hiroshi Ōshima, the Japanese Ambassador, was real. I read that he was extremely careless with his communications and the Allies gleaned a lot of information from him. I thought it was an interesting twist to rewrite history and give him a beautiful Japanese girlfriend who was actually a British spy. Yes, he was careless and ignorant, but it seemed much more interesting to me if the intelligence the Allies received was actually a calculated effort by a woman.
Sophie Scholl and the White Rose were indeed real; I couldn’t write a book about the German Resistance and not include the White Rose in it. They were notoriously passive, yet provocative with their anti-Nazi leaflets, and incredibly brave.
Writing The Girl I Left Behind was my way of exploring this time in history. What was it like to be a young woman in the resistance, and how far would she go in the name of freedom? Most importantly, what would make her break? Sure, history can tell us these things, but through fiction we can feel them.
I hope you enjoyed my book. Thanks for reading!
About the Author
Andie Newton is an American writer living in Washington State with her husband and two boys. She writes female-driven historical fiction set in WWII. The Girl I Left Behind is her first novel. She would love to say she spends her free time gardening and cooking, but she’s killed everything she’s ever planted and set off more fire alarms than she cares to admit. Andie does, however, love spending time with her family, ultra trail running, and drinking copious amounts of coffee.