Refugee by Alan Gratz
CRACK! BANG!
Josef Landau shot straight up in bed, his heart racing. That sound—it was like someone had kicked the front door in. Or had he dreamed it?
Josef listened, straining his ears in the dark. He wasn’t used to the sounds of this new flat, the smaller one he and his family had been forced to move into. They couldn’t afford their old place, not since the Nazis told Josef’s father he wasn’t allowed to practice law anymore because he was Jewish.
Across the room, Josef’s little sister, Ruth, was still asleep. Josef tried to relax. Maybe he’d just been having a nightmare.
Something in the darkness outside his room moved with a grunt and a scuffle.
Someone was in the house!
Josef scrambled backward on his bed, his eyes wide. There was a shattering sound in the next room—crisssh! Ruth woke up and screamed. Screamed in sheer blind terror. She was only six years old.
“Mama!” Josef cried. “Papa!”
Towering shadows burst into the room. The air seemed to crackle around them like static from a radio. Josef tried to hide in the corner of his bed, but shadowy hands snatched at him. Grabbed for him. He screamed even louder than his little sister, drowning her out. He kicked and flailed in a panic, but one of the shadows caught his ankle and dragged him face-first across his bed. Josef clawed at his sheets, but the hands were too strong. Josef was so scared he wet himself, the warm liquid spreading through his nightclothes.
“No!” Josef screamed. “No!”
The shadows threw him to the floor. Another shadow picked up Ruth by the hair and slapped her.
“Be quiet!” the shadow yelled, and it tossed Ruth down on the floor beside Josef. The shock shut Ruth up, but only for a moment. Then she wailed even harder and louder.
“Hush, Ruthie. Hush,” Josef begged her. He took her in his arms and wrapped her in a protective hug. “Hush now.”
They cowered together on the floor as the shadows picked up Ruth’s bed and threw it against the wall. Crash! The bed broke into pieces. The shadows tore down pictures, pulled drawers from their bureaus, and flung clothing everywhere. They broke lamps and lightbulbs. Josef and Ruth clung to each other, terrified and wet-faced with tears.
The shadows grabbed them again and dragged them into the living room. They threw Josef and Ruth on the floor once more and flicked on the overhead light. As Josef’s eyes adjusted, he saw the seven strangers who had invaded his home. Some of them wore regular clothes: white shirts with the sleeves rolled up, gray slacks, brown wool caps, leather work boots. More of them wore the brown shirts and red swastika armbands of the Sturmabteilung, Adolf Hitler’s “storm troopers.”
Josef’s mother and father were there too, lying on the floor at the feet of the Brownshirts.
“Josef! Ruth!” Mama cried when she saw them. She lunged for her children, but one of the Nazis grabbed her nightgown and pulled her back.
“Aaron Landau,” one of the Brownshirts said to Josef’s father, “you have continued to practice law despite the fact that Jews are forbidden to do so under the Civil Service Restoration Act of 1933. For this crime against the German people, you will be taken into protective custody.”
Josef looked at his father, panicked.
“This is all a misunderstanding,” Papa said. “If you’d just give me a chance to explain—”
The Brownshirt ignored Papa and nodded at the other men. Two of the Nazis yanked Josef’s father to his feet and dragged him toward the door.
“No!” Josef cried. He had to do something. He leaped to his feet, grabbed the arm of one of the men carrying his father, and tried to pull him off. Two more of the men jerked Josef away and held him as he fought against them.
The Brownshirt in charge laughed. “Look at this one!” he said, pointing to the wet spot on Josef’s nightclothes. “The boy’s pissed himself!”
The Nazis laughed, and Josef’s face burned hot with shame. He struggled in the men’s arms, trying to break free. “I’ll be a man soon enough,” Josef told them. “I’ll be a man in six months and eleven days.”
The Nazis laughed again. “Six months and eleven days!” the Brownshirt said. “Not that he’s counting.” The Brownshirt suddenly turned serious. “Perhaps you’re close enough that we should take you to a concentration camp too, like your father.”
“No!” Mama cried. “No, my son is just twelve. He’s just a boy. Please—don’t.”
Ruth wrapped herself around Josef’s leg and wailed. “Don’t take him! Don’t take him!”
The Brownshirt scowled at the noise and gave the men carrying Aaron Landau a dismissive wave. Josef watched as they dragged Papa away to the sounds of Mama’s sobs and Ruth’s wails.
“Don’t be so quick to grow up, boy,” the Brownshirt told Josef. “We’ll come for you soon enough.”
The Nazis trashed the rest of Josef’s house, breaking furniture and smashing plates and tearing curtains. They left as suddenly as they had come, and Josef and his sister and mother huddled together on their knees in the middle of the room. At last, when they had cried all the tears they could cry, Rachel Landau led her children to her room, put her bed back together, and hugged Josef and Ruth close until morning.
In the days to come, Josef learned that his family wasn’t the only one the Nazis had attacked that night. Other Jewish homes and businesses and synagogues were destroyed all over Germany, and tens of thousands of Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps. They called it Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass.
The Nazis hadn’t said it with words, but the message was clear: Josef and his family weren’t wanted in Germany anymore. But Josef and his mother and sister weren’t going anywhere. Not yet. Not without Josef’s father.
Mama spent weeks going from one government office to another, trying to find out where her husband was and how to get him back. Nobody would tell her anything, and Josef began to despair that he would never see his father again.
And then, six months after he’d been taken away, they got a telegram. A telegram from Papa! He’d been released from a concentration camp called Dachau, but only on condition that he leave the country within fourteen days.
Josef didn’t want to leave. Germany was his home. Where would they go? How would they live? But the Nazis had told them to get out of Germany twice now, and the Landau family wasn’t going to wait around to see what the Nazis would do next.
It took only two tries to get the scrawny calico kitten to come out from under the pink cinder-block house and eat from Isabel Fernandez’s hand. The cat was hungry, just like everyone else in Cuba, and its belly quickly won out over its fear.