Prisoner of Night and Fog (39 page)

She sprang as hard as she could. For an instant, she was suspended in the air, the wind pushed by the oncoming train dragging at her clothes, and then Daniel’s arms closed around her.

Her feet knocked hard against the well’s lip, and she and Daniel fell onto the platform, Daniel landing on his back, she on top of him. The air slammed out of her lungs.

“Come on,” Daniel panted.

They scrambled to their feet. Behind them, the brownshirts’ frustrated shouts mingled with the train’s screeching brakes, a wave of sound washing over them. The other train’s doors started to close.

“Go!”

They raced across the platform, throwing themselves onto the train. The doors shut with a hiss. The train lurched forward, and Daniel nearly fell. Gretchen swung her arm around his waist, supporting him as they limped to the nearest compartment. She eased Daniel onto a seat, hearing his low moan of pain as he touched his injured arm. Suddenly, her legs turned to water, and she sank down beside him, shaking all over.

The train gathered speed. They hurtled around a curve, emerging into the city. Through the window, Gretchen saw the street, now swarming with brownshirts. Superimposed on them were her and Daniel’s own reflections, their faces pale as milk, their eyes ringed with exhaustion. The images lasted for a second before the train pulled away, dragging them deeper into the dark night.

She turned to Daniel. He sat back in the seat, breathing hard. Sweat slicked his hair back from his face.

“Are you all right?” she asked, even though she knew he wasn’t, and he managed a weak grin.

“Not bad when I think how furious Röhm must be that we got away from him.” He grimaced. “The worst of it’s my arm. I can move it, so I don’t think it’s broken, but it feels like it’s on fire.”

He glanced at Gretchen. “We need to figure out where this train is going. I’m sure Röhm and your brother are already racing to intercept us at the next stop.”

Pain arrowed through her chest, so swift and sharp she had to close her eyes for an instant. “Then you didn’t see what happened, back in the square.” She plowed on before he could reply. “Röhm shot Reinhard. He’s dead.”

There was a beat of silence. With his good hand, Daniel took hers, turning it over so he could lace their dirty, blood-stained fingers together. “I’m sorry.”

Her dry eyes ached. She was still too numb to know how she felt. There was only this blank emptiness in her heart for the brother she had feared and had wanted so badly to love.

They had entered a third-class compartment, so the seats were crowded closely together, but it didn’t matter because they were alone and there was no one to hear them. It was so dark outside that she couldn’t tell what direction they were headed in, and she had no idea what their destination might be.

A conductor stepped into their car and peered at them disapprovingly. “Tickets?” he asked dubiously, as if two filthy and battered-looking teenagers couldn’t possibly have tickets.

Which, of course, they didn’t. Daniel paid for them with the last of his pocket change. At some point, Gretchen had lost her pocketbook, so they had no possessions at all. As the conductor turned to leave, Gretchen asked him where their train was going.

“Dachau,” he sniffed, and retreated to another car.

She almost laughed. It was their second piece of luck tonight. Dachau was a scant thirty minutes’ train ride from Munich—not very much time for Daniel to recover his strength or to form a plan, but the short trip could work in their favor as it didn’t give the brownshirts much time to catch up to them.

“We have about fifteen more minutes until we reach Dachau,” Gretchen said. “I doubt Röhm and his men could have beaten us there, but . . .”

“We mustn’t take the chance,” Daniel finished. He touched Gretchen’s face. “I’ll be all right,” he said, and she realized he must have guessed her idea. “I can make the jump. Sitting here has given me a decent rest. But Dachau is a small village—we can’t possibly hope to conceal ourselves among the locals.”

“We won’t need to. My grandparents live there. Mama will be with them, since Röhm persuaded her to leave Munich. They’ll help us. By the time the SA guess where we’ve gone, we’ll have left long ago.”

“But will your family assist a Jew—” He cut himself off. “There’s no time to argue. The train’s starting to slow down.”

Together, they made their way along the narrow corridor. Through the windows, the trees and countryside whipped past, little more than blurred shadows.

She wrenched the door open. For an instant, she stood in the doorway, the wind tearing at her clothes and flinging her hair like a curtain over her eyes. The train was still moving so fast she had to hold on to the door frame so she didn’t lose her balance.

She shook her hair out of her eyes. There, farther along the rail line, she saw a faint glimmer in the darkness—the station’s lighted windows, and beyond them, the steeply pitched roofs of the little village.

Now
, she thought, and flung herself into the darkness.

44

SHE LANDED HARD, WITH A SICKENING CRUNCH
of bone. The instant her feet touched the ground, she tucked herself into a ball and rolled, again and again, down the hill. She tasted grass and dirt and wildflowers.

Somewhere nearby she heard Daniel rolling through the tall grasses, the hard sound of a body slamming against dirt over and over. When she stopped, the world tilted drunkenly on its axis for an instant, the stars spinning overhead, and she staggered to her feet, throwing out her arms for balance. A few feet away, Daniel sat up, bracing his good hand on his knee. He spat out a clump of earth and cursed.

“Are you all right?” she asked. The stars stopped wheeling in the sky, but her stomach still pitched.

“Fine. You?”

“Fine.”

He got up. “How far is your grandparents’ home from here?”

They stood in the midst of a field, its tall grasses rippling in the wind. Here, the stars hung low in the sky and looked like nail heads that had been hammered through black velvet, so immense and so bright that they stained the field silver. She hadn’t taken the train to Dachau in two years, so she couldn’t immediately picture their location on a map.

Through the tall pine trees, she saw the cluster of red-roofed buildings that made up the town square. In the darkness, their stone facades looked ghostly white. The dozens of buildings looked like children’s toys. To the right, the river Wurm gleamed like a silver ribbon.

On the eastern side of Dachau, she knew, stood a massive concrete wall encircling an abandoned munitions factory.

Gretchen pointed. “West of the old powder factory. My grandparents have a farmhouse near the church.”

“They’re not in the village proper, then.” Daniel exhaled sharply. “That’s a small point for us.”

“There’s another one,” she told him as they began walking, the long grasses slapping against their legs. “My grandfather keeps a car.”

They had walked for several minutes when Gretchen noticed a change coming over Daniel. Gradually, his steps had grown faster, his footing surer, his breathing deeper. He held his injured arm in his good one and the sweat had dried on his face. He didn’t look as exhausted.

The whispery sound of grasses bending and then rubbing against something interrupted her thoughts. She stopped. They had drawn closer to the old factory, and it was difficult to see anything now because the immense wall seemed to blot out the stars, extinguishing what little light there was.

The sound came again, and then Gretchen saw the outline of shoulders, a slim torso, long legs, a flowered housedress.
Mama
.

How had she known how to find them?

“Gretchen?” her mother said. She moved forward, into a patch of moonlight, and saw Gretchen and Daniel standing motionless. She ran to Gretchen, opening her arms for an embrace, then seemed to think better of it and stopped, her arms sliding to her sides. “Are you all right?”

Gretchen ignored the question. “Why have you come out here, Mama? Hoping to deliver us to Röhm yourself and weasel your way back into Uncle Dolf’s good favor?”

Her mother winced. Although her gaze flickered over Daniel, she said nothing to him. “Two SA men drove up to my parents’ door a few moments ago. Your grandfather snuck me out the back, and I came straight here, hoping to intercept you on the way. You mustn’t go there, Gretchen, because they’re waiting for you.”

Gretchen hesitated. She didn’t know what to do now.

She looked at her mother. The pain in Mama’s eyes was unmistakable. She wished she could despise her mother, or feel indifferent—anything but this endless back-and-forth between pity and anger. “Mama, Reinhard’s dead.”

Her mother let out a soft cry, like a newborn kitten. “I knew this day would come.” She spoke almost to herself. “How did it happen?”

Gretchen couldn’t tell her the truth. Misery was etched in every inch of her mother’s body, from the dejected slope of her shoulders to her hands knitted tightly together. She wanted to give her mother something, at least some tiny piece of solace to hang on to as the years went past. “He died protecting me,” she said, and it was almost the truth, for his death had prevented hers, giving her precious seconds to hide herself among the crowd. At her side, Daniel squeezed her hand. She saw the pride on his face, and relaxed a little. He understood what she had done.

Mama sighed. “Thank God. Thank God for that.” She reached into her pocket and withdrew a leather wallet. “This is for you. It’s all the money I possess in the world. I want you to have it.”

It must be the extra money from the household accounts, and whatever savings Mama had managed to squirrel away. Gretchen looked at the wallet, but didn’t move to take it. “How will you live?”

“It doesn’t matter.” Her mother pressed the wallet into Gretchen’s hand. “All I care about is that
you
do.” At last, her mother looked at Daniel. Something seemed to change in her face, a barely perceptible loosening of muscles as though she had unclamped her jaw.

“You love my daughter,” her mother said.

Daniel nodded. “Yes. With all of my soul.”

“I can’t pretend to understand it.” Her mother studied Daniel. “It isn’t natural. Just promise,” she said to Daniel, reaching out as if to touch him then shrinking back as if she’d suddenly remembered herself, “just promise you’ll treat my daughter well.”

Daniel looked solemn. “I will, Frau Müller.”

To Gretchen’s shock, her mother pulled her close in a hard embrace. “I love you, my little girl,” she murmured, then released her suddenly and strode away into the darkness. For an instant, she was a silver-edged figure in the shadows, then she was nothing more than the whispers of tall grasses and wind. Gretchen swallowed against the welling emotion in her throat.

“We must go,” Gretchen said, and they headed north, keeping close to the river as they skirted Dachau’s outer edges.

The nearest village with a decent-sized train station was nearly forty miles away, a few days’ hike, since they stopped frequently to forage for berries or drink from streams.

At Ingolstadt, they caught a train that carried them southwest. A few bills from her mother’s wallet convinced the conductor not to ask for their passports. Their good luck couldn’t hold out for long, and they would have to find a forger to make them false papers so that they could continue to England.

Dawn had lightened the sky to a pale pink when they reached Switzerland. The train curved around a hill and a small village lay beneath them, gray stone buildings tucked among the towering evergreens. It looked like Germany.

But it wasn’t, and Gretchen knew she might never again see the country of her childhood, the land that reminded her of fairy tales for its dark beauty and cunning cruelties, its crystalline lakes she had swum with Hitler, its pine forests she had walked with her father, its city of stone and stained glass where she had met Daniel.

“We may never go back,” Gretchen said.

Daniel looked at her. He had slept on and off throughout the night’s train ride, and though his face was still tight with pain and his arm still lay crumpled over his chest, he looked far better. His skin felt soft and warm to the touch; the danger had passed. Every time she looked at him, her heart seemed to burst out of her chest with gladness and gratitude.

“No,” Daniel agreed. He leaned closer, brushing her lips with his. “We may not. But I think we will, Gretchen. Somehow, someday, Hitler will fail. And we’ll have been part of the force that brought him to his knees.”

She hoped he was right. Her mother’s money would get them to England, and there they would tell everyone they could the truth about Hitler; they would shout about the danger in Munich to everyone who could hear. And somehow they would survive together—she would live the life she had chosen for herself. For now, that was what mattered. And it had to be enough.

She looked at Daniel—so solid and dependable and real, not like the figures of smoke and shadow she had known her whole life. “I’m ready,” she said. The train hesitated at the top of the hill, then slowly started sliding down, picking up speed until they were hurtling toward the village and whatever lay beyond.

Author’s Note

ALTHOUGH
PRISONER OF NIGHT AND FOG
     IS A WORK of fiction, much of it is rooted in fact. Please note that this section contains major plot spoilers, so read no further if you haven’t finished the book!

Gretchen, her family, Daniel, the boardinghouse residents, Kurt Jaeger, Gretchen’s classmate Erika, Lars and Stefan Dearstyne, and Cell G’s victim Dieter Adler are fictitious characters. Everyone else was a real person.

I wove a fictitious murder around two of the most devastating real events in Hitler’s life: Germany’s surrender while he was being treated for “hysterical blindness” and the “Beer Hall Putsch.”

During the final weeks of World War One, Hitler’s regiment suffered a poison gas attack. While other temporarily blinded soldiers recovered their eyesight fairly soon, Hitler didn’t and was labeled a “hysteric.” According to a Berlin War Ministry decree, all “hysterical soldiers” had to be quarantined because their nervous condition was thought to be contagious. Accordingly, Hitler was separated from his regiment and sent to a military hospital in Pasewalk, Pomerania. There he proved to be such a difficult patient that doctors called in a consulting specialist named Edmund Forster, who diagnosed Hitler as a “classic psychopath.”