The man seemed shocked. “I would never do anything to hurt you. Not now that I know—”
“Do you have any idea why I was prying up the floorboards when you woke?” The man didn’t answer, just looked on. “I was prying up the floorboards so I could hide you. So when the Gestapo come, which they inevitably will, you won’t be lying in this bed.”
“Fr?ulein—”
“The Gestapo will come,” she repeated. “I ran into an old boyfriend of mine, who’s a captain in the Gestapo. I didn’t tell him that you were here, but he will come, particularly if they’re already looking for you.” She leaned over the bed, both hands on the blanket. “I’ll tell you who I am, and at the end of my story, if you still insist that you’re a Luftwaffe airman, I’ll look after you here for the next few days, and you can limp away when the weather clears. Or else you can trust me, and I can help you.”
The man didn’t answer. His face was pale. He reached for the glass of water she’d left for him by the bed and then looked at the hole in the floorboards. Silence filled the air.
“I’m listening,” he said.
Chapter 6
The arrival of another new chancellor in 1933 didn’t seem momentous or noteworthy. There had been many, and little seemed to improve. Life was still hard. The worldwide depression was getting worse, and Germany appeared to have been stricken the hardest. The newspapers said that more than fifteen million people, 20 percent of the population at the time, were living at subsistence level. This new man, this Hitler, was regarded as an upstart, a bad joke. His National Socialist party had never achieved more than 37 percent of the vote, but the president had named him chancellor. Either way, the “little Austrian corporal,” as his political opponents had referred to him, could never last long. He and his brown-shirted rabble would be run out of power once the republic had solved the infighting that had split the political powers apart. And besides, Hitler could not have really meant what he said in his speeches about his intention to tear the republic apart and start again, or about his determination to avenge Germany’s defeat in the world war, or about the Jews. A statement released to the papers by one of his spokesmen was largely ignored: “You must realize that what has happened in Germany is no ordinary change. Parliamentary and democratic times are passed. A new era has begun.”
That same week Franka learned new words like “lymphoma” and “metastasized” and saw her father cry for the first time. Fredi didn’t understand, and his mother hugged him tight to her breast as he smiled that beautiful smile at her. She urged them to be brave. They had been through so much already. The future held only wonderful things. She would beat this cancer, and they would go on together. This was only the beginning of their lives. She wasn’t even forty. It didn’t matter what the doctors said. Faith would bring her through this, just as it had before, just as it had when Fredi was born, and all of the times with him after.
The cancer spread.
Within weeks, Hitler had consolidated his power. The rights of free speech, press, and public assembly were abolished, and thus the German experiment with freedom and democracy ended. The German citizenry ceded absolute power to Hitler and his Nazis without so much as a whimper. The people didn’t seem to feel oppressed by the new regime. They had no great faith in a dysfunctional and poorly designed democratic system. Kids began to wear Nazi armbands to school, and the new greeting of extending one’s arm while saying “Heil Hitler” became a way of signaling loyalty to the party.
The enthusiasm for a leadership that promised to place Germany back on its pedestal as one of the great nations of the world was contagious. Franka felt it. Almost every young person she knew felt it. It seemed like the German people were on the brink of something momentous and incredible. The support for the new National Socialist system came from all sides. Franka even noticed in the paper that an organization called the Association of German National Jews had voiced their support for the new Nazi regime.
Franka saw the change almost immediately. A new ruling class was rising in cities and towns throughout Germany, and they were determined to make their presence known. Fortified by the party emblems in their buttonholes, the party-membership cards in their pockets, and the swastikas on their sleeves, the previously obscure and unnoticed group began to assert themselves. Josef Donitz, a local grocer, began wearing a storm trooper’s uniform to work. Within weeks he took over the local government without the formality or troubles of an election. The local fire chief, a lifetime friend of Franka’s father, was elbowed out of his job by a junior fireman who was a known alcoholic and just happened to be a member of the party. Employees with party credentials spoke sharply to management, who began to listen respectfully. On every level of social and political life, the National Socialist revolution manifested itself as a kind of seepage upward—the scum rising to the top.