“Of course. He’s a Jew,” Pohl said, looking at Leo’s pass for the restricted area. “It’s much harder to spot a Jew in China. They can hide easier out of their natural habitat.”
Leo’s eyes couldn’t open, but he heard Pohl start laughing. “And an Austrian Jew! How is he still alive? I can take care of that oversight.” Pohl’s fists started to attack Leo with rage, hitting his face, his skull, his stomach. Every inch of him that could be beaten was beaten.
Pohl’s words were the last Leo heard. He didn’t feel Agatha put her head on his heart and start screaming. He didn’t feel the hands of the rickshaw driver who put him in the back of his cart and suggested he dump Leo on the side of the road with the other dead. Agatha refused. She insisted on the hospital. Leo Hartmann would not die on the side of a road.
PART THREE
CHAPTER 25
CHRISTIAN LANGE
NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 1943
Christian felt that the circumstances of war had forced him to become an adult as quickly as a sunrise. His days and weeks in an orphanage, the family’s incarceration in Crystal City; the courtship, physical relationship, and abrupt departure of Emi Kato; the baby’s death—all of it had stripped away a distinct layer of his youthful exuberance. Now he felt compelled to abandon one country to serve another. He spent days strangled by guilt, agonizing over how he would tell his parents that he had decided to enlist in the U.S. Army. As expected, his parents were devastated, terrified that they would lose yet another child, their only child. But Christian’s conviction was as firm as Lange steel.
Before leaving Crystal City, Christian wrote Jack Walter a letter and addressed it to the Children’s Home. Sitting by the swimming pool, anguishing in the void that Emi left, he wrote:
Jack,
You’re about to turn 18, and you’re going to get the hell out of there. Congratulations, shoe thrower. I wish I were there to throw a steel-toe boot at your head just to show you how much I care. Once you’re out, please remember to go to my house in River Hills and steal everything. We’ve got some good stuff, if my dad’s VP hasn’t pocketed it all already. Odds are he did, but there might be a few crumbs left for a sad orphan like you.
I know you said you would never enlist, but if you’ve changed your mind, then you should enlist with me. I’ve gotten out of going to Germany. My parents are sailing on the repatriation ship sometime in the next year or two, but I’m not going to rot in Crystal City until then. I’m on my way to Camp Fannin in Tyler, Texas, just north of my current hellhole, for seven weeks of infantry basic. Obviously, I had no choice in where I did basic or I wouldn’t have chosen to keep frying my ass off in Texas. But from Fannin, I’m heading to Hawaii, joining the 7th Infantry Division currently training at Schofield Barracks on Oahu. It’s obviously not the easiest assignment to land—the head of the internment camp in Texas had to make a lot of calls for me to end up there, as Hawaii sure beats the shit out of Texas—but I think society owes you a favor too after orphaning you and giving you that violent streak.
If I’m going to fight, I want to fight in the Pacific, for reasons I’m sure you can guess from my letters. So if you want to watch me make a fool out of myself as I try to become a good soldier, and see a part of the world that’s not Wisconsin, you should find a way to get yourself to Hawaii.
If I never see you again—if, as you said, I end up a dead kraut like I deserve—then thanks for helping to save me from myself at the Home. I’m indebted. If I do see you again, I hope it’s in Hawaii. Think about it. At the very least, you’ll have one new old shoe as a good luck charm when we go fight in the Pacific. I’m bringing it with me.
Kraut
During Christian’s first day of basic, his head was shaved—his thick blond hair swept into the garbage by a skinny teenage draftee—his clothes taken, his body put through a prying physical inspection, his name replaced with a number, and his few possessions sent back to Crystal City. At first, he endured it all with easygoing curiosity, thrilled to be out of the internment camp and away from the tight quarters he was forced into with his parents, but he wondered how long it would last. He knew that preparing for war was very different than walking into gunfire. Little by little, as the days went by, he realized that on base, just as in the camp, his world was no longer his. He still belonged to the government—this time to the Army instead of the FBI.
He woke up at 4:45 A.M., marched ten miles a day, ran another ten in the afternoon, learned to dig foxholes with tools that would have been more useful stirring soup, grunted through long hours lying on his stomach at the rifle range, became competent in throwing grenades and engaging in hand-to-hand combat, and, most important, learned along with his fellow enlistees how to care if a comrade died, yet rejoice if the enemy did.
During Christian’s second week in the camp, when he was just getting used to his closest bunkmate, Tom Gibb, snoring solidly from midnight till the drill sergeant routed them all before five, the propaganda machine was cranked up. The men were shown a series of training films seemingly designed to inculcate hate rather than combat skills.
As the projector whirred behind them, a group of stylish, young Japanese women appeared on the screen, peacefully crossing a street in their Western clothes. They fell back as Japanese military vehicles flew through the road, flags waving, the word Japanazis appearing on-screen in big flashing letters. Tom leaned over to Christian and said, “I don’t think I could shoot those people. Some of those Jap girls are real pretty.”
“This sure as shit is some propaganda film,” Dave Simon, another of their bunkmates, whispered. He, like Tom, was one of the room’s gorilla-like snorers. “They pounded them with endless propaganda during training in the Great War, too. My old man told me all about it. No Japs, but the Germans were described as baby eaters back then. Just munching up their young like ears of corn.”
“You’re not supposed to shoot the Jap women, you jackass. Just their husbands and fathers,” said Frank Tremmel, a black-haired boy from South Texas who drawled so much he sounded as if his tongue were reaching to his Adam’s apple.
“The Germans are baby killers,” said Ray Hagen, another Texan with a ruddy complexion and constantly darting eyes. “Don’t you read?”
“Not if I don’t have to,” said Frank. “Plus, be sensitive. Lange and his parents are baby-killing Germans themselves. He just snuck out of prison down in Crystal City. You don’t want to upset him.”
Christian regretted ever mentioning the internment camp to Frank.
“Oh yeah!” said Tom. “Of course! We have our own Nazi right here. How did they let you through the gates?” he asked, kicking Christian’s chair and doing the Nazi salute.