But the way he was driven out of town by FBI agents—it had changed everything. He knew that people in River Hills now believed that his parents had been arrested as foreign enemies, which meant he was implicated as well.
He was only a semester away from graduating from high school and had plans to attend the University of Wisconsin and maybe walk on to their football team. He was going to apply in the spring, knowing that he’d be accepted handily. His father had been donating money to the football team for years, and Christian’s grades were strong enough even without his father’s money. But now, college seemed out of reach. Would he even be allowed in after the country had declared him an enemy?
He tried to let his confidence in his parents’ innocence rock him back to sleep, but halfway through Missouri he heard the word, and he knew sleep would evade him for hours.
Hitler. It was said once, and then five minutes later he heard it again. Then again. The conversation was in German, but he could understand it perfectly.
“There will be many who support the Führer there.”
“I know,” said a woman diagonally across the aisle from him while her very young children climbed all over the seats. “My husband is one of them. He was able to write to me and said that when Fritz Kuhn is released from prison, if there is still war, he will be transferred to Crystal City, too.”
Christian had known who Fritz Kuhn was before the FBI agents had accused his father of writing to him. He was the head of the German American Bund. Christian first heard him on the radio when he spoke at Madison Square Garden in 1939. He had dubbed President Roosevelt’s New Deal “the Jew Deal.” Franz, listening with him, had described Kuhn as one of the biggest idiots that Germany had ever produced. “And we have produced plenty,” he remembered his father saying. Since his speech at the Garden, Kuhn had been arrested and imprisoned for embezzlement and tax evasion and the Bund had lost the following it had in the late 1930s. But that was not the case for everyone, it seemed.
Christian tried to ignore the conversation as he looked out on the America he had never seen. The train’s speed transformed it into brilliant streaks before his eyes.
At night when the children were quiet and Christian could hear only the mothers’ rhythmic breathing and the train’s thundering wheels, he let the fear of what lay ahead of him set in. He squeezed Inge’s little hand, this time letting her comfort him. If a child of seven and a half can endure all this, then I better be able to, he thought to himself. But then the sun came up and the babies started to cry for food, and he suddenly felt not very different from them.
After thirty-one hours of travel, the train was seventy miles outside San Antonio and the landscape was bone-dry. This was winter in a part of the planet where the soil felt like sand between your fingers and the air lay hot and dense in your lungs.
“I don’t like it here,” said Inge, when she finally woke up. She pressed her snub nose flat against the glass. “It’s all the same color. It looks like a place that will make me sneeze.”
“I don’t like it, either,” said Christian, as the world they knew went out of focus for good.
“Give the little one this candy,” said the woman who had been talking about Hitler, offering a slightly melted butterscotch in a foil wrapper. “She is your sister?”
“Yes,” said Inge, before Christian could say no. She reached out and grabbed the candy, shoving it in her mouth. Christian nudged her, and she got up to give the woman a hug of thanks.
For the last thirty minutes, Christian wrestled with his own anxiety while he tried to persuade Inge there was nothing to worry about.
And then it was over. They were in Texas, and the doors opened with a loud, tired groan onto the San Antonio train station. Christian looked out the window, with Inge peeking out from behind him. Together, they saw that the platform was packed with American men in uniform.
“Are they all here for us?” she asked, climbing over his knees.
“They can’t be,” said Christian, trying not to stare at the men, who all seemed to be around his age. Instead of the exhaustion and dread that were caked onto Christian’s face, they appeared buoyed by the glamour of the uniform, the heroics of war, perhaps even the probable death that was looming for them.
“Follow me,” an agent said, nudging Christian’s foot with his own. He ushered them off the train and told them to walk as fast as they could, giving Inge a firm push forward when she paused to look at the stained-glass windows of the station.
“I want to see my mother,” she said, startled.
“You will. She’s going to be waiting for you,” said the agent.
They passed the soldiers, who eyed them suspiciously, and were hustled to a parking lot.
“If these soldiers find out all these broads are Germans, they’ll harass them all the way out the gate,” he heard one INS agent say to another. In the distance Christian could see an Army bus and people standing in front of it.
“Wait here. Your parents are coming,” the guard told them, but Inge was already off and running.
Christian could see his mother, one of two women in the group of fathers. She’d grown visibly pregnant instead of just soft around the middle. She beckoned for him to run to her, and without thinking, he did.
“You’re finally here! My baby. My always baby. They promised me you were in good hands at that orphanage in Milwaukee, but I cried myself to sleep over it every night,” she said, her arms tight around him. “Were you okay? Do you promise me you were all right? No one tried to hurt you?” Christian thought about his concussion and the shoe thrown at his head with a pitcher’s gusto every day and said that he was fine.
“But I wish they had let me go with you instead,” he said, relaxing into his mother’s hug. “Was it awful where you were? Were you with Dad?”
“All that is for another day,” she said. “You’re safe, and you’re here with me. That’s all it takes for me to feel happy again.” She let her son go and explained that she and Inge’s mother had shared their worry night after night. “But I knew you would take care of the little girl on the train. That’s the kind of heart you have. I told Elke Anders that you would.”
“That’s him, there,” Christian heard Inge saying behind him in German. “Big kraut. He held my hand for two days on the train and only let go when I asked him to because someone gave me a candy.”
“Don’t say kraut!” her mother replied, shocked.
“Jack Walter said I am little kraut and Christian is big kraut and now that we are gone from the Home there is no kraut left, so who will he call kraut?”
Her mother smacked her hand and told her never to say that word again. Then she walked over to Christian and threw her arms around him the way his own mother had just done. With her thick brown hair and thin frame, she looked like a movie star in shabby clothing.