Prisoner of Night and Fog (19 page)

“You may be right—” she started to say, but Daniel was gone, banging out the door and leaving her alone, locked in, with nowhere to go and only her tortured thoughts for companionship.

Sleep had dragged her like a stone to the bottom of a lake. A hand shaking her shoulder pulled her to the surface, and she opened her eyes to find Daniel’s face inches from hers, his expression serious.

“Get up,” he said. “We haven’t much time, and you should eat something to keep up your strength.”

“But what’s happening . . . ?” Hastily, she wiped away a line of drool from her mouth, hoping Daniel hadn’t noticed, but he was already striding back into the kitchen. The windows were deep blue, darkening to black; it was nearly night. She must have slept for most of the afternoon.

“What’s happening?” she asked again, sitting up. Aaron and Ruth were setting plates on the table. Exhaustion must have plugged her ears so completely she hadn’t heard them come in or make supper. The aroma of onions, cabbage, turnips, and potatoes carried across the room, and her stomach contracted with hunger.

“I’ve arranged for us to meet with someone important.” Daniel carried glasses to the table. He didn’t look at her, and every curve of his body seemed tight and controlled, but whether it was from anger or nerves, she couldn’t tell. “You’d better hurry and eat, for if we’re late I doubt he will wait for us.”

She sat down and tried to smile a greeting at Ruth and Aaron, but her lips were still too swollen. The cousins ignored her anyway. “Who is it?”

Finally Daniel looked at her. “The man Hitler hates more than anyone else in Munich.”

Mist rolled off the river. Gretchen and Daniel stood by the banks of the Isar, waiting. The water looked swollen and black in the night—a gigantic snake whose skin glistened from rain. It streamed past in a thundering rush, so loudly that Gretchen had to put her lips against Daniel’s ear when she spoke.

“I don’t think he’s coming.”

“He’s coming.” Daniel’s face remained calm; only the fingers drumming on his leg betrayed his nerves. “He said he was coming, so he’ll be here.”

Gretchen wrapped her arms around herself and shivered. Although the night was warm, the air was heavy with damp. She glanced at Daniel’s wristwatch. The glass face was cracked—broken when he’d been dragged out of one of Hitler’s speeches for heckling, he had said with a rueful grin at luncheon—but she could read the numbers clearly enough by the lighted windows in the apartment building behind them. Nine o’clock. Only twenty-four hours ago she had been bicycling through the night to Uncle Dolf’s apartment, and now she stood in the Isarvorstadt district, surrounded by the people she had always thought were her country’s greatest enemy.

“Tell me again what you know about this Fritz Gerlich,” she said.

“He isn’t a liberal, dishonest scandalmonger, as you’ve probably been told,” Daniel said. “First of all, Gerlich is a highly respected journalist and historian. Today he works at the Bavarian National Archives, but for several years in the twenties he was the editor in chief of the
Münchner Neueste Nachrichten
. And he’s a conservative.”

Gretchen shook her head. Everybody knew the liberals and the Communists despised Hitler, but many of the conservatives adored him. “That’s . . .” And then she remembered sitting beside Uncle Dolf in Café Heck, sipping coffee, bored, while he thundered:
Only by eliminating the Jewish menace shall we regain our health
.

In her mind, she heard Daniel saying she ought to see a doctor, and she saw Ruth thrusting a towel and soap into her hand. She turned and looked at the shabby rows of apartment buildings behind them, full of ordinary people eating, drinking, sleeping, finishing schoolwork, sewing, holding babies. Not subhumans. Not carriers of a virus insidiously infecting the Fatherland.

Perhaps Uncle Dolf was wrong about his opponents, too.
Or lying
, her brain whispered, but she tried to ignore it.

“All I know about Herr Gerlich,” Gretchen said, “is he’s one of the NSDAP’s fiercest enemies.”

“Yes. And he was present during the putsch. If he saw something, he won’t be afraid to say it.”

The sound of footsteps on cobblestones silenced them. As one, they turned to watch the man walking along the embankment toward them. He was a perfectly ordinary-looking fellow: mid-forties, dark hair slicked back from an oval face, quiet eyes behind round metal spectacles. Gretchen could have passed him a thousand times on the street and never noticed him, and she felt vaguely disappointed at his common appearance. Surely one of the men whom Uncle Dolf despised most in all of Munich should seem more menacing.

When he reached them, he glanced around, the quick, jerking movement of his head reminding Gretchen of a bird. “So this is the Fräulein Müller I have heard so much of for the past several years.” His voice was soft and deliberate, as though he weighed each word carefully on an invisible scale. “Fräulein, I was distressed to hear from Herr Cohen that you had been injured, but it gives me great pleasure to meet you in such surroundings, for this tells me you have parted ways with—what do you call him?—your Uncle Dolf, I believe.”

She didn’t dare confirm anything to a stranger, so she said nothing.

“I wish I could say ‘good for you,’ but I see by your expression you won’t believe that sentiment yet. No mind. You will.” He turned to Daniel. “And Herr Cohen. I read your newspaper with great interest. Yours is one of the last lights in the growing darkness, I’m afraid.

Now, on the telephone, you said you wished to ask me about the putsch. Ask away, but I request that we walk, for it is damp by the river.”

They fell into step together. The street was nearly deserted; only a few men hurried past, their shoulders hunched, their heads down. Lights shone from the apartment buildings. Shapes moved behind the glass: a woman holding a baby, another sitting down to sew, two boys bending over books, a man packing tobacco into a pipe. The busy indoor activity should have looked normal, and yet it didn’t, for there was barely anyone on the street, even at this early nighttime hour.

“It’s so quiet,” Gretchen said.

“Of course it is.” Daniel shook his head. “These are
Jews
, Gretchen.”

Her face turned to flame.
I’m sorry
, she wanted to say, because her people were the reason few Jews ventured out at night anymore. She stared down at the dirty cobblestones, grateful when Daniel said to Gerlich, “Please, anything you can tell us about that night would be helpful. We’re anxious to learn all we can about Gretchen’s father’s death.”

“Are you now? I should have thought it was a matter long forgotten, but I suppose it never will be by the man’s children. What would you like to know?”

“Anything you can remember about my father from that night,” Gretchen said. “Did you see him?”

“Yes, briefly.” Gerlich hunched his shoulders against the night air. “I had only been in the Bürgerbräukeller for a few minutes when your father came over to the bar where I stood with the other reporters.”

“What time was this?”

“About eight, half past, I suppose.”

Gretchen thought. Her father would have just arrived at the beer hall. The SA troops hadn’t yet stormed the Bürgerbräukeller; Uncle Dolf hadn’t pushed his way to the stage and shot into the ceiling, shouting that the national revolution had begun. Everyone was still seated, listening to the politician’s speech.

“How did he seem?” she asked Gerlich.

“Miserable. I remember his attitude surprised me so much that I made a joke, something to the effect of, was this what a revolution felt like. He said it felt like a funeral. The statement was so peculiar, I’ve never forgotten it.”

Daniel glanced at Gerlich. “And a peculiar thing to say to a reporter.”

“It was different in those days.” Lamplight from a nearby window crossed Gerlich’s face. In the sudden wash of gold, Gretchen saw how tired he looked. “We all knew one another; the National Socialist Party was young. Munich teetered on the edge of anarchy. We were all desperate for a strong leader to pull us out of the despair and economic ruin we had felt since the Great War ended. Why, I myself had hoped Hitler might be the man we needed. But when I saw him try to take over the city that night, I knew he couldn’t be trusted.”

Trusted
. Gretchen touched her split lips.

“A reporter wouldn’t have let my father get away with making such a cryptic remark,” she said.

Gerlich laughed. “I see you’ve spent enough time around Herr Cohen to understand how we operate! No, naturally I questioned the poor fellow until finally he muttered something about upsetting his friend but he’d find a way to make it right. He said he ought to concentrate tonight on his party’s goal, not his old wartime memories. And that,” he added as Gretchen started to speak, “is all I know, for just then the SA troops burst through the back doors. There was such a commotion, pushing and shouting, chairs falling over and women fainting, that I quite forgot about your father until I heard the next morning that he had been shot.”

They walked for a moment in silence. What had her father meant? Why would his wartime recollections bother him at such a crucial time, when he and his comrades were planning to overthrow the government? Determining which memory had troubled him would be difficult, if not impossible; he had spoken little of his war experiences, and those had centered on Uncle Dolf. They had fought in the same regiment, sitting in the trenches, marching across scorched French fields, surviving the same gas attack in the war’s final days.

They had reached the end of the street, and Gerlich stopped walking. “Your father may have been mistaken in his beliefs, but he was a good man.” He glanced at Daniel. “Herr Cohen, may I speak privately to Fräulein Müller?”

“Of course.” Daniel stepped back as they continued on without him.

The street curved and turned into another, this one as narrow and shabby and silent as the previous one. Only the lighted windows broke the gloom. Mist moved in patches across the avenue, and the air was so damp that moisture pushed right through Gretchen’s clothes into her skin. She tried not to shiver.

“Fräulein Müller,” Gerlich said, “I have heard a little of you through the gossip circles over the years. I’ll assume the rumors were true and so shall speak plainly. You are said to be a clever girl. I hope eventually you will understand what Hitler’s party truly stands for. National Socialism means tyranny internally and war externally.”

His words took her breath away. They contradicted everything she had been taught. And without those familiar ropes to cling to, she felt herself falling through empty air.

Automatically, she started defending the Party. “Herr Hitler says he would only advocate war if other countries insisted on it.” Each word came out more slowly as she listened to what she was saying. How could she protect Uncle Dolf’s reputation when she already knew he was untrustworthy? Defending him had become a habit she couldn’t break.

“I see Hitler’s poison is still in your system.” When Gerlich smiled at her, Gretchen felt tears burn her eyes because she couldn’t remember the last time anyone had looked at her so gently. A few drops fell from her good one, others squeezing more slowly from beneath her closed, blackened eyelid before sliding down her cheek. “For your sake,” Gerlich went on, “I hope you rid yourself of it quickly.” Then he tipped his hat and strode off into the night, the mist swirling around him, tinting him gray until he was gone.

22

THE OTHERS HAD ALREADY LEFT WHEN GRETCHEN
woke the next morning. The thoughts moving about in her brain had somehow taken shape while she slept, and she knew what she must do. She fetched Daniel’s cheap copy of
Mein Kampf
from the little bookcase next to the sofa and, over a bowl of watery porridge, started reading.

She had always heard
Mein Kampf
referred to as Hitler’s autobiography, which he had written in prison while serving his sentence for high treason after the putsch, so she had expected a long retelling of his life, but most of the book consisted of his political theories, the personal section a mere handful of pages. She had hoped for a glimpse into his early years, but all the doors remained firmly closed.

And yet they weren’t. At first, as she trudged through the pages, she felt as though she were reading a longer and less eloquent version of Machiavelli’s
The Prince
, one dull political diatribe after the next, but slowly she realized what Hitler was saying. Stripped of his voice’s magnetic power, the words assumed a darker shade than they would in one of his speeches.

War
. She set the book down and stared out the window at the street below. He was advocating war. The man who insisted Germany would go to war only if she was thrust into it; the man who proclaimed that other nations’ traitorous and cowardly actions after the Great War would push them into battle—he
wanted
war. And Uncle Dolf had created an enemy to fight. He had seized upon the oldest and most convenient scapegoats of all. The Jews.

She remembered the speeches she had heard, the dinnertime conversations, the torrents of words flowing as fast and musically as a stream. All of Germany’s perceived enemies—the Communists, the liberals, the money-hungry bankers, the countries that had tried to cripple Germans with the overly harsh Versailles Treaty after the Great War—all had been rolled into one ominous shape, the black-caftaned, hook-nosed, earlocked Jew whom Hitler described with such hatred as the first Jew he had ever seen on the streets of Vienna.

She felt sick. Everything she had ever been taught, everything she had believed, was wrong. The Jews weren’t evil..

She thought of Daniel’s stories about his parents and sisters, doing schoolwork in the kitchen, listening to the wireless, reading books, picking apples from the tree in their backyard. Erika Goldberg from school, smiling at her across the classroom because they both liked the
Aeneid
. The Jew in the alley, his voice like melting snow. All of them ordinary. Human.