“This place will age me five years in five months,” she said, sighing.
“I doubt we will be here for five months more, Mrs. Tomato Soup,” his father said, trying to cheer up his wife. He crossed the room and opened his arms for Christian to throw him the ball, which he did, even though the room wasn’t more than ten feet long.
“It’s not a very big space,” he said to Christian, trying futilely to mask his misery. “And we have to share it with another family. But we are surviving.”
“It’s awful is what it is, Franz,” said Helene, taking the ball out of his hands. “And for what?” she snapped, losing the composure she had been radiating since she picked up Christian at the station. “For eight thousand dollars sent in all innocence to Jutta? For lies told about you? I am sure it was Martin who made that convenient call to the FBI,” she said, her lip curling as she mentioned Franz’s deputy at Lange Steel. “It had to be. He saw the perfect opportunity to take your company. Report you as a Nazi and then Lange Steel is his. Your hard work. Your years of sacrifice. Now that you’re here, he’s free to take it all from you.”
“For the hundredth time, it wasn’t Martin,” said Franz. “He’s my oldest friend in America. He would never do such a thing. I’m sure we’ll have a letter from him any day now.”
“You keep believing that, Franz. Please, do. But it’s always the one just a notch below you who pulls you down.”
“It could have been someone in the neighborhood,” said Christian, remembering the cars moving slowly down their street when he left their house.
“Yes! Exactly,” said Franz. “It could have been.”
He put his hand around his son’s broad shoulder and said, “Come, I’ll show you around.” They turned the corner and he said, “Unfortunately, we all have to sleep in the same room. And your poor mother with the baby.” He shook his head at the two beds in front of him, both twin size, and said: “We only have two. Maybe they can bring us another one, or you and I can take turns sleeping on the floor. At least it’s warm here. It’s not like having to sleep on the floor in Wisconsin.”
They both looked down at the dusty floor, and neither said anything about the two lizards scampering under the first of the twin beds.
“Just tell me this is all their mistake,” said Christian, sitting down on the closest bed.
“Of course it is,” said his mother, who had followed them. “Do you believe we did this? That we are spying? Nazis? Sweetheart, you don’t really think that,” she said, growing visibly upset.
Christian and the rest of America had been hearing about the Nazis, and Nazi barbarity, for more than a decade. In the early thirties, since much of the campaign for what Hitler announced as a new world order was centered in Germany, Christian, though very young, had paid attention to it when it was in the news. He knew that Germany meant his family, him. He listened to the radio reports fearfully, but as he grew up, he went from being a little boy who was scared of something beyond his grasp, to a young man starting to understand the horrors. In the summer of 1942, Christian read an article—from the New York Times but reprinted in the Milwaukee Sentinel—that reported on a killing center in Poland, targeting Jews. He’d spoken about it with his father, who’d said that it was hard to know what to believe. The media, the American government, didn’t even seem to know. But at the end of 1942, when the Allies joined together to denounce the killing of the Jews in Europe by Nazi hands, Christian started to believe every word he read about Nazi atrocities. By 1943, he understood that even normal Germans were involved in the cruelty, but it still felt very far away.
Stuck in Crystal City, he was forced to confront what it meant to be a German. Maybe the FBI agents were right. Perhaps Jutta and her husband were Nazis. And what about on his father’s side? It was certainly possible. The young men would at least have to fight for Germany. And what did that mean? Killing the Allies, or worse.
“I don’t think you’re guilty,” Christian replied to his mother, honestly. “I just haven’t seen you since that night with the agents. You’ve never had a chance to explain. And now we’re here in this place.”
“There is nothing to explain,” said Helene. “Except a grave American mistake.”
Christian raised his eyebrows and reached for his mother’s hand. He believed her, but that did not change their circumstances. “What are we going to do, stuck in here?” he asked, looking around the cramped room.
“We are going to live our lives as well as we can. Nothing is forever. Certainly not this,” said Franz.
CHAPTER 7
CHRISTIAN LANGE
MARCH–APRIL 1943
A week later, Helene started to feel the baby kick. Christian was walking back from his second day at the German school when he saw his mother approaching. She had a smile on her face that belied her dismal surroundings. Christian had planned to tell her how his German abilities did not extend to writing essays in the language, but when he saw her happiness, he decided to delay the bad news. Within just a few days of his arrival, he’d learned why he couldn’t attend the American school. The elected spokesman for their side of the camp was intensely pro-German and anyone who sent their children to the American-style Federal School was deemed a traitor. There were whispers that one family’s food had been withheld for several days because their daughter, who spoke no German, enrolled there.
“Put your hand here,” Helene said when she’d reached Christian. She placed his right hand on the top of her stomach. She was wearing the dress that was given to women when they arrived, and Christian thought it made her look plain and homespun, definitely more Mrs. Tomato Soup than Mrs. Country Club.
They waited a few minutes, but nothing happened. Christian started to fidget, and his mother laughed at him. “Do you have somewhere to be? Wait to feel the baby.”
So they waited. Mothers walked by them and smiled, teenagers coming out of school slowed down and whispered, and finally, when Christian was about to pull his hand away, embarrassed, the baby kicked.
“I felt it!” he said, pressing his hand harder against his mother’s belly.
“I told you it would be worth the wait,” said Helene, her voice full of delight.