The Boy Who Dared

  At a small, dark pub along the Ausschläger Allee, they make a significant discovery. In the smoky room filled with customers who wear the cloth caps of working men, a barmaid whispers a name. Franz Seemann. She had seen him talking to the streetwalker just a few nights before the murder.

  Helmuth senses Rudi’s excitement, and he elbows a gentle warning to remain composed. Helmuth nods and thanks the barmaid, then nudges Rudi outside.

  “I know that man,” says Rudi excitedly. “He’s an unemployed dockworker. He’s always looking for handouts and a free drink. Do you think we have a suspect?”

  “I don’t know. We only have a name. But at least we have information for Inspector Becker, something for him to go on.”

  The boys hurry to the Hammer Deich station and report their findings. “Unemployed, you say?” says Inspector Becker, looking pleased. “At a time when Hitler has jobs for everyone. Sounds like a suspicious character, possibly an anarchist. There are those people who want to undermine this great country. All mentally unstable, if you ask me. In need of rehabilitation.”

  Helmuth’s insides tighten at hearing this. He realizes something that frightens him: Inspector Becker seems to have already found Franz Seemann guilty. But Inspector Becker shakes their hands and assures them they did the right thing. He will send two agents to pick up Franz Seemann and bring him in for questioning.

  Two days later, Helmuth and Rudi stop by the police station, and Inspector Becker tells them that Seemann is in prison where he belongs. Becker pumps their hands again, congratulates them for helping to solve the case, promises to keep them in mind if he has other cases for them to solve.

  Helmuth pushes down the unease he feels. Surely he hasn’t accused an innocent man. Surely Inspector Becker would not allow that to happen. But still the unease is there, that nagging feeling.

  * * *

  The next time Helmuth sees Rudi, Rudi’s left arm is bandaged from wrist to elbow. “What happened?” Helmuth asks.

  “An accident,” says Rudi, and he tells Helmuth how he had been playing chase with other boys from his street, and how he fell through a window, shattering the glass, and severing an artery in his wrist. Rudi was rushed to the hospital for emergency surgery.

  Helmuth whistles in stunned sympathy.

  “That wasn’t the worst part,” says Rudi. “I had two visitors from the Gestapo.”

  “The Gestapo! What did they want?”

  “To investigate me. The nurses went through my wallet and found the Lord Lister card. They reported me as a potential enemy agent!”

  Helmuth snorts. “You? An enemy agent?”

  Rudi snaps at Helmuth. “It’s not funny. They wanted to know who Lord Lister was. Wanted to know why I worked for a British detective agency.”

  “Did you tell them it was a game? A made-up game?”

  “Of course. But the one agent slapped me, hard. He said it was no game to them. He warned me that they take subversive activity very seriously. The second agent wanted to know if it was a cover-up for a secret underground movement.”

  Helmuth’s insides twist. He does not want to be in trouble with the Gestapo.

  Rudi looks ready to cry. “They fired question after question at me. They took my words, twisted them, and used them against me. They wanted to know what adults were involved.”

  “This is unfair!” says Helmuth. “A Gestapo badge is not a license to abuse innocent people.”

  Rudi quiets him. “I told them to ask Inspector Becker, that he would know who I am. The men wrote his name down and then said they’d check out my story, and for my sake, I’d better not be lying. I’ll never forget the look in their eyes — like they enjoyed scaring me — and then they said, ‘We’ll find out the truth. We always do.’ They took my wallet and my Lord Lister card with them.”

  “This is insane,” says Helmuth. “We wanted to help the police and now they’ve turned on us.”

  Rudi nods. “They were trying to trip me up. Trying to get me to say something that wasn’t true, trying to get me to give information about somebody else, anything at all. They wrote it all down.”

  “Let them take notes,” says Helmuth. “All the notes they want. What do we care? We don’t know anything that can hurt anyone.”

  “I don’t ever want to go through anything like that again.”

  “You won’t,” says Helmuth. “Inspector Becker will straighten them out. That’s the last you’ll see of the Gestapo.”

  “I hope so!” says Rudi. “I felt so scared, so guilty, even though I’d done nothing wrong.”

  Helmuth wishes there were something more he could say, something he could do to help Rudi, but at this moment he feels helpless.

  Exercise time ends. The guard barks another command. Helmuth retrieves his slop bucket, trudges back to his cell. Sets the slop bucket in the corner.

  It’s time to clean. Helmuth takes his time, stretches out each task to pass the morning. He dusts the table, the chair, the floor, the corners, especially the corners. Dust is verboten. Helmuth winces, doesn’t want to think about the punishment that dust brings.

  As he cleans, he wonders about Franz Seemann, wonders if he was truly guilty, wonders how he held up under the Gestapo interrogation he certainly received. Helmuth knows all about Gestapo interrogations now. He knows that prisoners will say anything, admit to anything to make the torture stop. He wishes he could tell Franz Seemann how sorry he is.

  Helmuth digs vigorously at the dust in the corner.

  The summer of 1938 turns to crisp fall. The Germans are upset at stories that Czechs and Poles are abusing ethnic Germans living in Czechoslovakia and Poland. Hitler orders troops to the border of Czechoslovakia, sending a strong warning to those who dare to mistreat Germans. He demands the Sudetenland, where many Germans live, and gets his way.

  Helmuth and Rudi never hear from Inspector Becker again. The police are too busy arresting Polish Jews living in Germany, cramming them into trains, shipping them back to Poland.

  “Have you seen the long lines of Jews at the train station?” says Hugo one night in late October. “A good thing. We’ve got too many Jews as it is. No need to keep the Polish ones, too.”

  “Too many Jews?” says Gerhard. “Germany has sixty million people, and out of that sixty million, only one-half million are Jews.”

  “And look at the trouble those half million have caused,” says Hugo matter-of-factly.

  “How many Jews do you know?” asks Helmuth quietly.

  Hugo thinks over his answer. “None, and now, thanks to our Führer, I will soon know even fewer.” He chuckles at his own joke. “No one wants the Jews. Not even America. Americans have no right to criticize us. They rounded up their Indians, you know. Put them on reservations.”

  Helmuth pities the Polish Jews who are herded onto trains, shipped back to Poland, but feels sorrier still when Poland doesn’t want them back. At the border, Polish authorities deny the Jews entry and detain them in open fields, without shelter, food, or water while the Polish and German governments argue. After several tense days, the Polish government agrees to a compromise. Poland takes some of the Jews, and the rest are shipped back to Germany.

  “A great victory,” says Hugo. “We have shown Poland that they cannot dictate policy to us. Germany is for Germans. True Germans.”

  * * *

  The November weather turns colder, the sky always dark and gray. Hamburg is beautiful nonetheless, with its rivers and canals, craggy spires and turrets. And for a city that had been so poor before Hitler’s rise to power, the sound of work, of hammers ringing along the docks, building ships and U-boats, is beautiful, too. There’s excitement in Germany. Prosperity. Pride in everything German.

  But there’s tension, too, and on November 7, the radio crackles with news reports about a young Jew named Herschel Grynszpan, who has shot a Nazi official, Ernst vom Rath, in Paris. A fever grips the German people as they learn that the official lies near death in a Paris hospital.


  “It’s a plot!” rages Hugo. “A cowardly plot! Another Jewish plot to bring Germany to its knees, to cripple the Fatherland.”

  “How can you call it a plot?” asks Helmuth. “It’s one seventeen-year-old boy who shot one Nazi.”

  But Hugo won’t listen. “Mark my words. It’s a plot!”

  The next day, to prove his point, Hugo waves the Nazi Party newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, with its thick black headlines that cry, Outrage! World Jewry Attacks!

  “See?” he says. “I was right. And the Jews will pay for their cowardly act.”

  * * *

  Two nights later, Mutti is clinking dinner dishes in the kitchen sink as Hugo dresses. The radio is on, has been on for two days, so Hugo can listen and sputter and shout about the news.

  Hugo shrugs into his thick black coat, picks up his SS hat. He nuzzles Mutti’s neck. “Be careful. Don’t go out tonight,” he says. “And don’t wait up.” There’s a dangerous glint in Hugo’s eyes.

  Hugo leaves. Helmuth stands at the window, watches as Hugo crosses to the corner. It’s drizzling. The black pavement gleams wet. The street is quiet. Oddly quiet. No police. No pedestrians. Just the distant rumble of a streetcar.

  Under the gas lamp, Hugo greets several men. All are wearing uniforms. They stand proudly as if their uniforms make them something. Two are so drunk they lean against each other.

  The night seems ordinary enough. Just a bit darker than usual. A bit quieter.

  Mutti calls Helmuth from the window. She has changed the radio station, and a Wagner opera now fills the flat. “Come dry,” she says to Helmuth, pressing a dish towel into his hand.

  As Helmuth dries the last dish, the Wagner opera is interrupted. A newscaster breaks in with a special report. The Nazi official, Ernst vom Rath, has died.

  After that, the night explodes. Helmuth hears distant shouts. Crashing. Splintering. The roar of engines. Trucks come and go all night.

  The next morning, just as Gerhard and Helmuth finish breakfast, Hugo stumbles in the door. The smell of smoke hangs on his coat. There’s a strange look of feverish excitement in his bloodshot eyes, making them a sharper and brighter blue.

  Mutti brings him two soft-boiled eggs in blue eggcups and a thick slice of rye toast. Hugo grabs a knife, hatchets off the tops of his eggs. He dunks the bread in the runny yolks and gobbles it down.

  Hugo turns on the radio. In full cry, the newscaster erupts with the details of spontaneous riots against the Jews that have taken place all over Germany. It’s all in retribution for the Jew who killed the Nazi official in Paris. Synagogues are burned down or nearly demolished. Jewish shops, stores, businesses, and private homes ransacked and destroyed. Jews arrested and trucked away.

  “It’s terrible,” says Mutti. She touches Hugo’s neck, folds down the collar on his shirt.

  “I agree. It’s not pretty,” says Hugo. “People do terrible things when they’re angry. But Jews must learn that they can’t get away with murder.”

  Hugo finishes the second egg and his toast. He sucks the egg from his mustache, pushes away from the table, and heads to the bedroom. He collapses with a groan on the bed. Mutti follows him, and from the kitchen, Helmuth watches as she tugs off his boots, draws the blanket over him.

  Helmuth wrestles a sudden wave of nausea as he realizes what Hugo did last night. But it’s Gerhard who says something when Mutti returns. “How can you?” he whispers to Mutti. “You heard the news. How can you not say anything?”

  Mutti bites her lip, doesn’t answer for a long while, and when she does, she speaks without looking at her sons. “Silence is how people get on sometimes. I don’t expect you to understand.”

  Helmuth’s disgust turns to pain for his mother and disgust for himself. He recognizes silence. He’s silent every night around Hugo. Every day at school when Herr Vinke says terrible things about Jews. Every meeting with the Jungvolk when they play games like “Capture the Jew.”

  Gerhard stalks out. Helmuth leaves, too. He heads toward school, and then changes his mind and turns toward the Grindel district. Nothing prepares him for what he sees — the work of Hugo and his Nazi friends — the ruined shops and businesses, the burned-out buildings, the smoldering synagogue, its colorful glass windows shattered; the looters, their arms heaped with clothing, shoes, everything they can carry; the splintered furniture; the weeping women pushing broken glass with their brooms. All around is misery and destruction.

  Outside a pub, several drunken storm troopers sit in soot-covered uniforms, singing about the greatness of Germany. Helmuth catches the sour smell of beer, and it sickens him. He turns, catches his reflection in the window, loathes the silent German who stares back at him.

  Dust motes swirl in the late-morning sunlight. Helmuth follows the swirling stream to the cell window, stands on tiptoe, reaches to wipe the sill. It is verboten to look out the window. But later he will. Later he will listen for footsteps in the corridor, the jangle of keys, and when it’s clear, he will stand on the table. He will gaze beyond the high brick wall, the red-tile rooftops, the spike of church steeples, the linden and chestnut trees.

  A sparrow flits by. Nearly tempts him to the window, but he stops himself. Wants to save the best part of the afternoon for later. Doesn’t want to sit, either. And so he paces. Eight steps the length of the cell. He pushes off the back wall, turns, takes eight steps back, pushes off the front wall. Back and forth, back and forth. He blocks out the jangle of keys, the clang of cell doors opening, closing, the words, “Come with us. It is time.”

  Another Christmas. Another new year. 1939. An uneasy peace falls across Europe. That spring, Germany annexes Czechoslovakia and then demands Danzig and the Polish corridor — the land separating Germany from East Prussia. Britain and France send a stern warning to Hitler, promising to support Poland if Germany threatens to invade.

  An uneasy peace settles over the Sachsenstrasse flat, too. Unable to tolerate Hugo any longer, Gerhard moves out, taking over the small bedroom in Oma and Opa’s flat. Helmuth misses Gerhard and he falls into a routine designed to avoid Hugo. Morning at school. Noon meal with Oma and Opa. Evening study in his bedroom. There Helmuth also eats supper as he does his homework. At school, he takes typing and stenography classes. He prefers to practice in quiet where Hugo won’t make fun. If Mutti minds that Helmuth eats alone, she doesn’t say. More and more these days, silence is how they get on.

  Now fourteen, Helmuth graduates into the Hitler Youth proper, though he skips the meetings as often as he dares. The Hitler Youth isn’t as fun as the Jungvolk. The older boys take everything much more seriously — the drilling, the weapons training, the endless military parades. He despises their politics, too, the way they power over one another, the way might equals right. Their games are brutal, as if they enjoy shedding blood on the field, pummeling the weaker ones. And if you don’t follow along, the Hitler Youth leaders threaten you with extra drills and fines and weekend detention.

  * * *

  Gerhard turns eighteen, and one night he and Helmuth walk down Süderstrasse, past what used to be Herr Seligmann’s butcher shop and Herr Kaltenbach’s bake shop. The shops now bear Aryan names and swastika banners.

  “I got my letter to appear before the military induction board,” Gerhard tells Helmuth.

  The news stuns Helmuth. “You’re being drafted? But you have school —”

  Gerhard shakes his head. “They granted me a deferment until I graduate. But I must still serve six months in the Reich Labor Service.”

  “What about Hans?” asks Helmuth.

  “He won’t be drafted,” says Gerhard. “He already serves the Fatherland by building submarines.”

  The two brothers walk on in silence. All sorts of bitter feelings rise in Helmuth until finally he says, “Hitler promises peace, but every day he moves us closer to war.”

  “I feel it, too,” says Gerhard. “There doesn’t seem to be anything we can do to stop the arrogance and hate and spite that lead to war.
”

  Helmuth looks at the swastika banners fluttering over the shops. The flags seem to gloat, seem to goose-step triumphantly down the street.

  * * *

  By summer’s end, the newspaper headlines scream about atrocities that Poles are committing against ethnic Germans. Hitler sends troops to the Polish border. War clouds gather and erupt.

  On September 1, Helmuth bursts into his grandparents’ flat and snaps on the radio. “Gerhard, did you hear? The Poles have attacked us! They fired shots at our soldiers, and now we’re firing back. We’re at war!”

  They listen in stunned silence. Hitler has declared war on Poland, and even now, as the RRG broadcasts the news, the Luftwaffe is bombing Poland by air, supported by tanks and infantry.

  The Reich has also passed a new law, the Extraordinary Radio Law, intended to protect the Fatherland from lies and other enemy propaganda.

  Gerhard turns up the volume. “Listening to foreign radio stations is forbidden,” continues the newscaster. “Violations will be punished by imprisonment or by death!”

  Helmuth is infuriated by this latest restriction. “How can the Nazis do this?” he asks. “How can we trust that they will tell us the truth? I love Germany, but this makes me hate it!”

  “Helmuth!” says Gerhard. “Don’t say such a thing! It’s still our country, no matter who leads us. We must obey the law. I hate the thought of war, too, but we must defend the Fatherland, no matter what.”

  Helmuth snaps off the radio. The world has turned upside down — and yet it feels as though Hitler has been preparing for this moment for a very long time.

  Three days later, the world spins wildly again when the British and the French honor their promise to Poland and declare war on Germany. British planes fly over Germany, littering cities with leaflets. Helmuth picks one up. It’s a warning to the German people. “Your rulers have condemned you to the massacres, miseries, and privations of a war they can never hope to win,” the leaflet says.