As Jack had mentioned on Christian’s first day, he wasn’t the only one whose parents had been arrested for un-American activities. There was also Inge Anders, the most nervous little girl to ever sleep on the other side of the orphanage.
When they were all outside a few days later shoveling snow after Christian was allowed to resume physical activities, Jack called out to a thin girl wearing a boy’s winter coat. She was playing with other children in a pile of insect-infested firewood in front of the administration building. The building itself was quite beautiful, as the orphanage had originally been built as a college. The words over the door frame spelled out “administration” in Gothic letters, as inviting as one could hope for an orphanage. Christian’s eyes moved up from the children to the steeply sloped roof and the rows of rectangular windows below them, their thick panes divided into squares. It was a much more attractive building from the outside than in.
“Hey, little kraut! Come over here,” Jack yelled to the girl. “I’ve got another kraut for you to meet. Still a kraut, just a bigger one.”
Inge hesitated for a moment, then dropped the wood she was holding and ran over. She stopped right in front of Christian, her big green eyes fixed on him, her brown hair falling out of the hood of her coat in messy curls.
“This is him,” said Jack. “I told you about him before, when you were crying yet again. Christian. He speaks German like you. And some English, too.”
“Bist du Deutscher?” Inge said, her mouth quivering and her little hands pulling at her hood. She looked as if just a small gust of wind could knock her down and pull the tears out of her.
“Ja, ich bin Deutscher. Amerikaner, aber meine Eltern sind Deutsche,” he explained. I am American, but my parents are German.
“Are your parents going to die, too?” she asked.
“No. They’re not going to die. Do you think your parents are going to die?” Christian looked at Jack, sure that he had fed her that worry.
“I don’t want my mother to die!” she screamed, her tears the exclamation point to her yell.
Christian was going to ask about her father—didn’t she want him to live, too?—but Inge threw her skinny arms around him, lost in her big coat, her head coming just above his waist, and kept crying.
Surprised, Christian left his arms rigidly by his sides until Jack shouted, “Hey, hug the poor little kraut!”
“No one is going to die,” Christian said, finally hugging her back. “They’re questioning lots of people’s parents, not just yours and mine. There’s no reason to worry.”
“Are they questioning Jack’s parents?” she asked.
“Jack doesn’t have parents,” Christian said quickly.
That made her cry even harder.
“But what if my parents did something bad?” she asked, whimpering and holding on to Christian. “Something bad enough so that the men want to kill them?”
“Are your parents in the Bund?” asked Christian, wondering why she was wearing a boy’s overcoat. He imagined that they had dragged her out of her house with very few of her things. She was too small to spend hours alone as he had. Maybe it was the same agents who had done it to him, fat Smith and pompous Jakobsson.
“What is the Bund?” she asked, looking up at him with wet eyes.
“Never mind. If you don’t know what it is, then that’s probably a good sign.” He put his hand on her hood and noticed how little her head was. “How old are you, Inge?”
“Seven and a half,” she said.
“Was there no family for you to go stay with instead of coming here?” he asked, feeling sorry for her even if he didn’t feel comfortable consoling her.
She started to cry again, and Jack punched him in the shoulder.
“No one wanted me,” she said through sobs. “Auntie Aleit and Uncle Heinz are in Germany, and Mama and Papa’s friends said no.”
“Of course people wanted you,” said Christian. He looked up at Jack, who appeared to be debating whether to hit Christian again.
“I didn’t used to be here. I was with Mama,” Inge explained. “They took Papa somewhere, and then they took me and Mama to a home in Milwaukee. It was full of nuns.”
“Sounds like a convent,” said Christian.
“That’s what it was. A convent.”
“And why aren’t you there anymore?”
“They made me leave,” she said. “They said Mama had turned crazy and it was dangerous for me to be there. They said I couldn’t stay with my Mama, and one of the nuns, she took me here in a car that smelled like a dog.”
Christian looked at Jack, who was spinning his finger next to his head to indicate Inge’s mother’s state of mind.
“I don’t want my mother to die!” Inge started screaming. “No! No, no!”
“No one is going to die,” Christian said.
He picked Inge up and, with Jack, brought her back inside the big brick administration building, where the youngest children slept. He stood outside the cramped director’s office with her head against his shoulder, not daring to move until she had calmed down. When her breath was regulated and she had fallen asleep, he dropped her off with the sympathetic warden of the girls’ side of the home.
After that, Inge followed Christian like a shadow.
CHAPTER 4
CHRISTIAN LANGE
FEBRUARY–MARCH 1943
Despite their violent first encounter, Jack Walter and Christian became fast friends, their relationship founded on daily fistfights and insults. Almost everyone Jack had been close to for the last ten years had aged out of the Home, for as soon as a boy turned eighteen, he was gone before the candles on the cake could be blown out. And now Jack had just months left himself until it was his turn to live on his own. Christian Lange and his trials were a welcome distraction from his countdown, but it didn’t last long. After a month and a half at the Milwaukee Children’s Home, Christian finally got news of his parents.
“Sit down, please,” said Mr. Braque, the head of the Home, pushing aside a pile of books and yellowing newspapers to make room for Christian in his office. Everything about Braque was gray—his eyes, his hair, the pallor of his skin—but his gentle demeanor made the children forget about his dusty coating. “What a trial you have gone through these past weeks, knowing nothing of your parents’ whereabouts. Of course, every child here has their own cross to bear, but I have been thinking about you often, Mr. Lange, and I’m happy to say that you now have a destination beyond our old walls.”