The Girl from Berlin

by Kate Hewitt

Genres: General Fiction; Coming of Age; Family Life; Historical Fiction; Jewish Fiction; Literary Fiction; War & Military

Synopsis

‘Absolutely brilliant, emotional, and heartbreaking… My TOP read of 2021… Everyone should be reading this book… Quite frankly it is worth 1 million shining stars.’ Sinfully Wicked Book Reviews ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

1936, Nazi-ruled Berlin. A heartbreaking and stunningly powerful novel of friendship, courage and betrayal, about two girls whose lives collide in war-torn Berlin, and whose friendship is the only thing that might get them out alive. They sat together on the roof, watching Berlin burn, as traces of smoke and cloud floated through the air. “I just want to be free,” Rosa said quietly, “Even if only for a few minutes. It might be the last chance I have.” From her beautiful new home in Berlin, a young woman named Liesel Scholz barely notices the changes to the city around her. Her life is one of privilege and safety thanks to her father’s job working for the new government. But a chance encounter with Rosa, the daughter of their Jewish housekeeper, confirms Liesel’s fears that something isn’t right. That the Nazi government’s brutal rules are cruel and dangerous, and that others aren’t as safe as she is. When Rosa begs Liesel to help—pressing her grandfather’s gold pocket watch into Liesel’s hand—Liesel recklessly agrees. She will help hide Rosa and her loved ones—in the dusty, unused rooms at the top of their house—even if it means putting everyone she loves in danger. Even if it means risking her own life. Frankfurt, 1946 : An idealistic American captain, Sam Houghton, arrives in Germany to interrogate prominent Nazis on trial and to help rebuild a battered country. When he hires an enigmatic, damaged interpreter named Anna, he doesn’t expect sparks to fly between them. Perhaps there is a chance of love for both of them. But then the question of what happened to Anna in the war raises its head. Because Anna has secrets—ones that link her to Berlin, the Nazi party, and the story of one gold pocket watch and two young women who became friends, even when they were told it was impossible… A compelling and haunting story about courage, love and betrayal set in war-torn Berlin. Fans of The Alice Network, All the Light We Cannot See and The Nightingale will be not be able to put this down. Readers are loving The Girl from Berlin : “I was utterly engrossed from the start… so haunting and raw, it hits you deep into your very core… A heartbreaking and yet powerful novel… utterly amazing… I devoured it and felt so upset when I finished it… I cannot praise it enough… [A] raw and heart wrenching novel that pulls at your heart strings.” Goodreads Reviewer ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

“ Beautiful, strong and absorbing… I confess to shedding tears… A powerhouse of emotions, activity and full of heart… A real page turner. It gripped me from the very beginning.” Reviewing Recommended Reads, ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

“Hauntingly wonderful!... Broke my heart over and over again… Gut-wrenching, mind-blowing.” Healthy Body, Mind and Soul ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

“I couldn’t put it down. I found myself in tears… My heart really ached… truly astounding… I’m going to be giving this book one of my rare five stars! A must read!” Goodreads Reviewer ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

“Heartbreaking… I absolutely loved every moment… I was caught in a catch 22 where I was willing the novel to last forever whilst at the same time longing to know how it would all end… the very definition of a satisfying read.” On the Shelf Books ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

“ WOW, this amazing, captivating and emotionally gripping story is one that you are sure to remember for a long time. It captures your attention from the very first page… Will have you reaching for the box of Kleenex… Emotional and phenomenal.” Page-turners ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Release date: February 25, 2021

Publisher: Bookouture

Print pages: 350

Sample

“Open the door, Fraulein.”

There are three of them, crowding the narrow hall that smells of drains and decay and death. The older one who spoke is looking at her with a weary sort of indifference, which is somehow worse than if he’d been either angrily threatening or deadly quiet. He knows she is cornered, helpless. The other two seem just as bored; one scratches his stubbly cheek, his battered rifle pointing at her at a forty-five-degree angle. If he shoots her, it will be in the kneecap, except she doesn’t think he is going to shoot her.

She swallows. Stays silent. And she doesn’t move. She is not deceiving herself that she can keep these three soldiers here forever, or even for five minutes. But if she can stall them for just a few seconds… if she can give the others enough time to get away, to find some sort of escape, at least from this.

“Open the door, Fraulein. Jetzt.” Now. She hears a bit of temper in his voice, but not much. Not enough. She stays where she is.

The soldier who spoke sighs, as if he is a schoolteacher and she is a recalcitrant pupil in need of no more than a slapped hand. She is a fly he cannot be bothered to swat. He says something to the other, she can’t hear what, a guttural command that feels inevitable. Her heart begins to thud. She can guess what happens next, and she is ready for it.

It feels as if every dark and uncertain moment up until now has been preparing her for this—from that first faint twinge of doubt she’d felt when staring up at the stadium in all of its Olympic glory to the terrible, leaden knowledge lodged inside her nearly nine years later, when she’d surveyed the sweep of broken bodies strewn over that once-hallowed ground. All of it, every single labored breath and agonizing choice, had been preparing her for the penance she can finally make, for she knows she has so much to atone for.

Have they got away?

The second soldier, the one who received the command, hefts his rifle to his shoulder, so it is aiming at her heart. She hears a click and she closes her eyes, her body pressed against the door, as she waits for whatever comes next, knowing she will accept it. She will embrace it, because perhaps then she can be forgiven.

That is the last thing she lets herself remember.

It was meant to be perfect, and yet it rained. Liesel Scholz craned her neck to look out her bedroom window at the dank sky that bore down on the city like an unwholesome blanket, turning everything to gray, the Grunewald forest on the edge of Berlin shrouded in tendrils of damp fog. A few fat raindrops spattered onto the pavement of Koenigsallee below, a rather dismal harbinger for the magnificent proceedings that were to unfurl today, in the Reich’s most triumphant occasion to date. It was the opening of the Olympics, meant to be the finest display of Aryan superiority and strength the waiting world had ever seen.

“The weather dares to disobey the Führer,” her father remarked lightly as he poked his head through the doorway of her bedroom. “But, more importantly, what do you think of my new suit?”

Liesel turned from the window, planting her hands on her hips as she made a show of inspecting her father’s single-breasted suit, cut, as always, in the latest style. “It’s quite… bright,” she remarked a bit dubiously, for the pattern was of bright green check, far from the usual sober browns, blacks, and grays that most men wore these days. “But you look very handsome as always.” With his tall, lean physique, sandy hair and hazel eyes so often full of humor, her father cut a debonaire and slightly louche figure, especially compared to the stern, stodgy types Liesel saw so often now—the Hitler Youth boys with their razor-straight partings and bright, steely eyes, or their corpulent fathers, with their glossily bald heads and ruddy, sweating faces.

Otto Scholz was nothing like either of those unlovely specimens, and for that, as much as the attention he showered on her so easily and so happily, she loved him.

He chuckled now as he gazed down at his outfit with a wry look of acknowledgment. “Ah, yes, so it is, but I want to be noticed today. There will be many important people around us, Lieseling,” he explained, using the pet name he’d made up for her when she was small, a play on liebling—or darling—and one Liesel pretended to think was babyish but secretly still loved.

“Why am I not allowed to be noticed, then?” she returned with a half-mock pout.

A faint frown creased her father’s forehead as she dared to touch on that one forbidden subject—her mother. Ilse Scholz had, despite her own penchant for high fashion and French perfume, insisted Liesel wear a plain dark skirt and white blouse with a pair of obnoxiously sturdy shoes. In such a staid outfit she looked even younger than her fourteen years.

“You do not need to make an impression,” Ilse had told her with a pointed look at her husband. Otto had simply smiled, ignoring the jibe, if it had indeed been one.

Liesel couldn’t tell if it had been or not; she so rarely could, when it came to her parents and their complex relationship. She believed her father adored her mother with an unreserved wholeheartedness, something that annoyed her on occasion as she loved being the center of his gentle and teasing affection, and too often she wasn’t.

As for her mother… Ilse Scholz, a cool, dark-haired beauty who could have once graced Berlin’s finest concert halls as a pianist if she’d chosen to do so, seemed too remote and withdrawn for that sort of intensity of emotion; her distant gaze often skimmed over everyone, including her husband, never resting or settling, but always drifting on, to an unknown place it seemed as if she’d rather be.

At least Liesel would not have to deal with her mother’s cool disapproval today. Ilse had refused to come to the Opening Ceremony even though Otto had procured tickets to one of the VIP loges in the stadium, thanks to his position at IG Farben, one of Germany’s largest chemical manufacturers.

“I have no need to see such ostentatious displays,” Ilse had stated coolly, “and the excitement and crowds would be far too much for Friedrich.”

Liesel’s younger brother, at six years old, had a poor constitution and a weak chest, in addition to a slightly twisted left foot thanks to a difficult birth. “He needed an extra tug,” Otto liked to say—and as a result he was hopelessly coddled, and, Liesel thought, rather spoiled by her parents, and sometimes even by her. She couldn’t help but feel sorry for poor little Friedy, with his thick spectacles and his owlish stare, his dreamy ways and his hesitant, limping walk.

Perhaps because of his infirmities, or maybe because of the many miscarriages that had preceded his birth, and the children who had never come after, Liesel sometimes felt as if there was a river of loss running through the empty center of their home, although her parents never spoke of such things, or even acknowledged they existed.

Still, she saw it in the way her mother often went to bed in the middle of the afternoon, and how her father acted as if this were a perfectly normal thing to do. She felt it in the distance that had always yawned between her and her mother, especially as she’d grown older. Was it because her mother was afraid to love her? Or was she simply too weary from all the losses that she couldn’t summon the energy for affection? Whatever the reason, it had bred in Liesel a deep, simmering resentment, as well as a silent disdain. Her father did not have such troubles. Why did her mother have to be so weak?

In any case, her mother did not seem to have those same troubles with Friedrich. Certainly, she refused him nothing, except perhaps to attend the Ceremony today, which he’d wanted to desperately, as he was an enthusiastic devotee of the Führer, listening to his speeches on the wireless with a grave intensity that belied his few years.

Ilse had promised him an ice cream at Café Kranzler on the Kurfurstendamm instead, which Liesel thought quite a poor second choice. Still, she was glad Friedrich wasn’t going. It would just be her and her father, the way she liked it.

“Don’t fuss about your clothes,” Otto told her now with another one of his easy smiles. “I can’t bear your frowns, and in any case, there’s far too much to be excited about today. Are you almost ready?”

“Yes, I am.” Liesel glanced at her reflection briefly, grimacing at the schoolgirl clothes her mother had insisted upon. She almost looked as if she were wearing the uniform of the Bund Deutscher Mädel, the girls’ branch of the Hitler Youth and an organization she had no desire to join, although nearly every girl in her year had since turning fourteen, spending two afternoons a week, as well as most Saturdays, in such appropriate activities as learning childcare and homecraft, distributing leaflets or running races.

Liesel thought the girls were all ridiculous, going into faints over the Führer and being so pompous about their parades and their stupid gymnastics. She’d refused to join the Jungmädel for younger girls when she’d been ten, mainly because she thought this little show of spirit pleased her father, and he hadn’t even bothered to ask her about the BDM when she’d turned fourteen in February, thank goodness.

“Not every Nazi has to goosestep,” she’d heard him say lightly to her mother on more than one occasion, a remark to which her mother never replied, but which Liesel had always remembered.

Now, as they headed out to the car waiting on Koenigsallee, Liesel felt excitement bubble up inside her, irrepressible and infectious. The whole city would be out today. All of Berlin had been scrubbed to a ferocious shine for its many important and international visitors, every bit of it gleaming with a hard, unyielding brightness, despite the rain.

Her family had only moved to Berlin from Frankfurt back in February, for her father had been promoted to running a factory and laboratory in Schkopau, which he traveled to at least once a week, spending the rest of his time at the laboratory in Berlin. Liesel didn’t understand much of it; she did know that despite being from Berlin originally, her mother had not wanted to leave Frankfurt.

“There is nothing good to come of being in Berlin,” she’d declared to Otto in a grim, final-sounding tone, when he’d announced the move at dinner one evening.

“Ah, but, Ilse,” Otto had exclaimed as lightly as ever, “what about the cafés and the cabarets?”

“You know as well as I do the cabarets play nothing but German marching music these days.”

“The cafés then,” Otto had insisted with a smile. “The coffee will be better, at least.”

“These days it’s difficult to find anything but ersatz.”

Otto had thrown up his hands in a parody of defeat. “Very well,” he’d intoned gloomily. “There is nothing whatsoever that is good about Berlin. Not even the house on Koenigsallee that is twice as big as this one, or the chauffeured car we shall be able to use, or the beauty of the Tiergarten or Grunewald…”

A flicker of a smile had touched her mother’s mouth and then died, but she had not made any reply.

Now, as they drove toward the Olympic Stadium in the newly constructed Reichssportfeld built for this year’s Games, Liesel felt as if she were about to ascend onto a stage, as if the whole city were putting on a performance, a collective breath held before the show was to begin, and for a few moments she could imagine she was its star.

It was as if there was a crackling excitement in the air, an electric hum that traveled along her veins and ignited her heart as she gazed at the crowds heading to the stadium on foot: families with picnic baskets, children skipping ahead, smiling soldiers of the Schutzstaffel enjoying the spectacle and yet still smart in their black uniforms—a streaming surge of humanity intent on celebration. Today was important; today she was somebody important.

“Look how clean the city is,” Otto remarked as the car headed up Douglasstrasse toward the Reichssportfeld. “Not a begging gypsy in sight.”

“Who cares about gypsies?” Liesel returned, and Otto chucked her under the chin.

“Not you, apparently.”

“Of course I don’t.” She never even thought about them, dirty begging creatures on street corners. She turned back to the window, her nose nearly pressed to the glass. The car continued to crawl forward in the traffic and people on bicycles weaved in and out, everyone heading toward the stadium.

“I doubt you’ll see anyone important walking or cycling,” Otto remarked dryly. “Anyone who is anyone will be coming in a chauffeured car as we are.”

“I just want to see,” Liesel answered. She didn’t actually care about the so-called important people—Goebbels or Göring, Himmler or Hess, or even Hitler himself—the members of the Nazi elite who so many adulated, as celebrities bored Liesel; they looked too severe, and when they could have spoken, they often shouted instead. Who cared for their fury? She was not interested in them.

Besides, her father didn’t seem to actually like any of the Nazi officials, although he never said as much, and he’d been a Party member for three years. Liesel had long ago noticed how a wry, slightly mocking edge entered his voice whenever he spoke about Hitler or the men who surrounded him. That was good enough for her. If her father didn’t like the Nazis, if he found them ridiculous, with their strutting and their shouting, then she would feel the same.

She did, however, like being a part of things, especially on a day like today, when the whole world felt electric and alive, and she was right in the middle of it.

Their car pulled up to the magnificent Olympic Stadium, a huge, oval amphitheater—modeled on the Colosseum of ancient Rome—that could seat over one hundred thousand people. Today it would be crammed full of both spectators and competitors, as athletes from many countries processed through the stadium, dipping their flags to Hitler’s straight-armed salute while the crowd roared their unabashed approval and the world watched, for the Games were to be televised for the first time in history.

Liesel followed her father into the stadium, doing her best to adopt his worldly, insouciant air as he flashed his papers and slipped through a cordoned-off area guarded by a stern-looking SS officer, to a wide tunnel that led to the VIP loges.

They really were important, she thought with a thrill as they traversed the grand concourse bedecked with scarlet and black swastika flags, her father smiling and waving to anyone he recognized, while Liesel kept her chin up, her head held high, as if she were a grand lady rather than a girl in school clothes. At least she could pretend.

The sheer size of the stadium, already filling up with people, took her breath away, although she tried to look unimpressed by its magnitude. It seemed as if all of Berlin would be there to see the momentous events, crammed into its towering rows of seats, eagerly awaiting the spectacle.

Their seats, however, were something of a disappointment; although they were indeed in one of the VIP loges, it was far from those reserved for the top Nazi officials by Hitler’s viewing platform, and instead was a third of the way down the length of the stadium, on the side. Still, they would have a good view of the athletes as they processed, and that would surely be more interesting than watching a bunch of Nazis complete an endless round of fervent Sieg Heils.

“I’d rather see Jesse Owens than Joseph Goebbels,” she told her father with a pert look, and he smiled faintly before pressing a finger to his lips.

“A sensible approach, I’m sure, although not one I’d discuss with our present company.” He nodded toward a couple that were making their way to their loge—an overweight man with pomaded hair and a Party pin on his lapel, and his unsmiling wife in a gray skirt and matching belted jacket, both cut in a severe style. “Herr Wolff, Frau Wolff,” Otto said as he sent his arm out in the straight salute that had become essential to the most basic pleasantry. “Heil Hitler.”

“Heil Hitler,” Herr Wolff replied, and Liesel had to dodge out of the way as his arm shot out like an iron. She looked at him and his sour-faced wife with undisguised resentment; if she had been hoping for interesting or amenable companions for the afternoon, she knew now she was to be disappointed.

Still, the sheer spectacle of the event was enough to keep her entertained; the ceremony began with a flyover of the massive Hindenburg, the Olympic flag with its five colorful circles streaming behind it, and then Hitler entered the stadium through the Marathon steps, sober-faced, high-ranking Nazi officials flanking him. He paused to accept flowers from a little girl before ascending the platform, as the orchestra burst into a rousing rendition of Wagner’s March of Homage.

As the officials filed onto the viewing platform, Liesel felt a reluctant flicker of fascination she hadn’t expected, simply because they were clearly so important. What must it feel like, to have half the world staring at you in such awe? To have that much attention and power, and to know it full well, to consider it your right and your due?

As the orchestra struck up Deutschland über Alles, Liesel glanced at her father; she saw he was merely mouthing the words as he studied the men on the platform, his hands in his trouser pockets, a slight frown creasing his features as his gaze moved slowly over each one.

A few minutes earlier, when Hitler had ascended the platform, the crowds had gone wild, as they always did; Liesel had had to suppress the urge to clap her hands over her ears as the Sieg Heils roared over the stadium in a wave of nearly demented exultation. Next to her, Herr Wolff’s face had adopted a frenzied look, his eyes bulging as spittle flew from his mouth.

“I have never understood the need to deify such a petty little man,” Liesel had once heard her father say, late one evening, when he’d thought she’d been in bed but she’d crept down the stairs to listen to her parents talk in low voices over glasses of cognac. “And I’ve heard he has bad breath and terrible gas.”

“Otto, really.” Her mother had laughed, a rich, throaty sound Liesel normally never heard. “The adoring crowds won’t know such things.”

“And if they did? I wonder…” Her father’s voice had been a mixture of amusement and sobriety. “Could the Third Reich be felled by the power of halitosis?”

Now, in the huge stadium, Liesel was as close to Hitler as she’d ever been, close enough to see the shock of glossy dark hair that flopped over his forehead, the ruthlessly trimmed moustache that seemed to her so small and so silly; the stern look in his eyes that somehow, despite her own determination to somehow feel superior to the leader of her country, made her straighten her spine.

His eyes, she saw, really were as blue and penetrating as the colored portrait that adorned so many sitting rooms, including their own.

The cheering and the frenzied Sieg Heils continued as the parade of nations began, each country processing in front of Hitler while his arm remained as unbending as an iron rod, his expression unflinching and severe.

Liesel was fascinated by the seemingly never-ending parade of smartly dressed athletes preceded by their country’s flag, all of them walking in time and most unsmiling as they saluted the men on the viewing platform.

“It is convenient,” Otto remarked sotto voce, “that the Olympic salute so closely resembles that of the Nazi party.”

Liesel glanced at him uncertainly. “There is an Olympic salute?”

“Indeed.” He nodded toward the team from Canada now marching past the viewing platform, arms straight out. “They are not, in fact, heiling Hitler, whatever he and his cronies may prefer to believe,” he told her in a murmur only she could hear.

The large team from the United States, Liesel noticed, did not offer Hitler any salute, but rather removed their straw boaters and placed their hands over their hearts. As they passed by the platform, their flag did not dip.

“Ah, the symbolic gesture,” her father murmured, his lids half-lowered. “So powerful. So pointless.”

Finally the team from Germany, as the host country, came out last, and although Liesel had not thought it possible, the crowd’s roaring grew louder, fiercer, their fists raised or their arms shot out, so it seemed to her as if there was something almost angry about their joy.

“The German people have waited a long time to be feted in such a way,” her father explained to her quietly, answering her silent question as he so often seemed able to do.

When the athletes had all assembled, the last runner of the torch relay, a concept that had been introduced only this year, emerged from the tunnel and did a graceful circuit of the stadium before lighting a cauldron at the top of the stadium that would burn for the entire Games. There was something both noble and inspiring about the single figure with his torch held aloft, so Liesel felt a stirring inside her, a sense of purpose as well as being part of something greater. She glanced around at the exultant crowd, feeling united with them in a way she hadn’t expected.

Then the president of the German Olympic Committee made a speech that Liesel did not bother listening to, instead studying the athletes assembled in the stadium like soldiers of the world, many in colorful ensembles from their home countries, and then Hitler himself stepped forward, causing the wild crowd to fall silent in an expectant, reverent hush.

“I proclaim open the Olympic Games of Berlin, celebrating the Eleventh Olympiad of the modern era,” he stated, and the cheers and Sieg Heils began again in earnest as twenty-five thousand pigeons were released into the air and a cannon went off with a boom that made Liesel jump.

“I fear the pigeons have been startled,” her father remarked with a nod to the flock of birds that had risen up over the stadium; it took Liesel a moment to realize the frightened birds’ droppings were splattering all over the stadium, much to the rueful dismay of all the athletes assembled below. “How unfortunate,” he continued in a low, laughing voice, “that our Führer did not consider the matter more closely.” He turned to the loge’s other occupants with a ready smile. “Herr Wolff, how did you enjoy the day’s festivities? Quite a remarkable show, don’t you think? I can hardly wait until the competitions begin.”

“Germany will excel, of course,” Herr Wolff said, bristling, and Otto smiled faintly in return.

“Of course.”

Later, as they walked out of the stadium amidst the stream of humanity, Liesel, still caught up in the exultant emotion of the day, asked her father rather suddenly, “Vati, why don’t you like Hitler?”

Her father’s expression remained relaxed even as his gaze darted quickly around at the people walking near them. “Who says I don’t like him? Why, I don’t know him. But if he came to tea, I daresay I would be very pleased. I’d certainly serve him some cake. I hear he has as much a fondness for it as he does a dislike of meat.”

Liesel smiled at that as she persisted with her point. “Yes, yes, but you know what I mean.”

“I wonder if you know what you mean,” Otto returned. “Or are you merely parroting things you’ve heard while crouching behind doorways or on stairs?” His smiling yet shrewd gaze pinned her in place for a moment before he caught sight of someone walking ahead of them. “Herr Ambros. Were the ceremonies not magnificent? Have you met my daughter, Liesel?”

Liesel waited silently while her father exchanged pleasantries with his work colleague; she heard them talking about Schkopau, although she could not follow the conversation.

“Your father has friends in high places,” Ambros told her with a smile that did not reach his eyes, and Liesel glanced at her father uncertainly, not sure how to reply. She did not know much about her father’s work, only that he was a chemist and he liked to call himself an inventor. He’d done something with pesticides when she was small, but she didn’t know what.

Finally they were walking again and once more she had his attention.

“Why did Herr Ambros say you had friends in high places?”

“Because I am ambitious, which is no bad thing.”

“You still haven’t answered my question about Hitler.”

“I believe I did, and you surely won’t get another answer from me,” Otto returned lightly before a slight frown came over his features as he gave her a more serious look. “Liesel, at your age you must know the impropriety of such questions, especially in a place like this.” He nodded to the crowded space all around them—the concourse bedecked by dozens of large swastika banners, the children waving flags, a couple of SS officers laughing and tossing a ball between them on a stretch of grass nearby.

“But you don’t care about such things,” Liesel answered in surprise. “You never have.” Which was why she didn’t either. The preening girls with their absurd adoration of Hitler, the teachers who lectured about race science as if it was something obvious and elemental, the fussy men who had been standing on the platform and even the brownshirts she saw marching on the streets… all of it was to be disdained, if quietly. Privately. “You’ve always acted as if you don’t care about any of them,” she insisted.

“I believe your opinion of me is far too elevated,” her father replied a bit shortly. “I care as much as the next man. The Führer is the leader of my country. Naturally, I must respect and obey him, especially if I am to get on in this world.”

They walked in silence for a few moments; Liesel felt strangely disappointed by her father’s strait-laced answer. It had almost felt as if he were scolding her, and for what? Parroting his own opinions? Was he allowed to tease, and she wasn’t?

She’d liked it, she realized, when she and her father had been complicit in their disdain for the Nazis, even if she knew better than to say as much to anyone else. She liked the feeling of being different together, a little bit superior and smug to the crowd that followed so blindly the leaders that were so earnest and so very dull. She did not want to be like everyone else, and she certainly didn’t want her father to be.

“I can tell I have not lived up to your lofty expectations,” Otto remarked wryly as they reached the street. “And for that I am, of course, sorry. But I am not a rebel, Liesel, and neither, I think, are you. It’s easy to make smart comments, less so to actually do something.” He let out a quiet sigh as he gave a small shake of his head. “As Goethe says, ‘To think is easy. To act is hard.’”

“And what would you do, if you could do something?” Liesel asked. She wasn’t entirely sure what her father meant, although she knew he loved to quote his beloved Goethe. He’d read her both parts of Goethe’s Faust as bedtime stories, and she’d memorized passages herself, just to please and impress him.

“Obey my Führer, like I said,” he answered after a moment, his voice sounding strangely heavy. “And protect and care for my family, as any good father would do. That is all I can hope for in this world, all I aspire to.”

Yet he’d said he was ambitious. Liesel opened her mouth to make some protesting reply, but her father silenced her, touching her arm as he nodded toward a fleet of buses lined up at the side of the stadium, waiting to take the athletes back to the Olympic Village some twenty miles away. “Do you see the brackets on the top of those buses?” he asked her, and Liesel gazed at the buses blankly.

“Yes…”

“That’s where the machine guns will go,” he said softly. He sounded both sorrowful and impressed. “Ingenious, is it not? Right there in plain view of the whole world, as we celebrate a strong and peaceful nation. And the gliders that are so gracefully arcing over the stadium on this happy day?” He tilted his head upwards, a faint smile on his face as he regarded the display above them, the gliders as slender and lovely as birds. “Attach a motor to one and it becomes a fighter plane.”

Liesel lowered her head to stare at him in confusion. Why was he talking about guns and planes, on today of all days? “What are you saying, Vati?”

“We are a peace-loving nation determined to rearm ourselves, my Lieseling,” he replied with a small smile. They started walking again, toward the waiting car. “And like it or not, that is how I will make our fortune.”

It lay on her bed, indicting her with its ugliness: a white middy blouse with the wretched emblem on its sleeve, a navy skirt, a black tie, sturdy marching shoes. Liesel hated it all.

“What is this?” she demanded of her mother as she stormed downstairs, holding the blouse aloft as if it were a dirty rag.

Ilse was sitting in the dining room with its dark, heavy furniture, the velvet curtains drawn against the summer sunshine. She was still in her silk dressing gown, even though it was after four o’clock in the afternoon, and there was a half-drunk glass of schnapps on the table, as well as a pack of French cigarettes Liesel knew could only have been procured on the black market. Whenever her father brought them home, he made a game of her mother having to find them, checking all his pockets in smiling exasp