The Lost Book of Bonn

by Brianna Labuskes

Genres: World War II; War & Military; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

For fans of The Rose Code and The Librarian Spy comes another literary themed historical novel from the author of The Librarian of Burned Books.

Germany, 1946: Emmy Clarke is a librarian not a soldier. But that doesn’t stop the Library of Congress from sending her overseas to Germany to help the Monuments Men retrieve and catalog precious literature that was plundered by the Nazis. The Offenbach Archival Depot and its work may get less attention than returning art to its rightful owners, but for Emmy, who sees the personalized messages on the inside of the books and the notes in margins of pages, it feels just as important.

On Emmy’s first day at work, she finds a poetry collection by Rainer Maria Rilke, and on the title page is a handwritten dedication: “To Annelise, my brave Edelweiss Pirate.” Emmy is instantly intrigued by the story behind the dedication and becomes determined to figure out what happened.

The hunt for the rightful owner of the book leads Emmy to two sisters, a horrific betrayal, and an extraordinary protest against the Nazis that was held in Berlin at the height of the war. Nearly a decade earlier, hundreds of brave women gathered in the streets after their Jewish husbands were detained by the Gestapo. Through freezing rain and RAF bombings, the women faced down certain death and did what so few others dared to do under the Third Reich. They said no.

Emmy grapples with her own ghosts as she begins to wonder if she’s just chasing two more. What she finds instead is a powerful story of love, forgiveness, and courage that brings light to even the darkest of postwar days. 

Release date: March 19, 2024

Publisher: HarperCollins

Print pages: 384

Sample

Chapter 1
Emmy

April 1946

Frankfurt, Germany

Emmy Clarke was a librarian not a soldier.

She met her eyes in the cracked mirror hanging in the Frankfurt train station WC and told herself that again. She was a librarian.

The United States Army uniform Emmy wore mocked that assertion.

It was a costume, though. A powerful one that offered Emmy protection as she traveled through postwar Germany, but a costume nonetheless.

Mr. Luther Harris Evans, the director of the Library of Congress, had told her that all the trappings—including an army title she certainly hadn’t earned—were a precaution. She wouldn’t be in a single moment of danger if she accepted the two-month assignment abroad.

Had Director Evans known her well, he would have realized she didn’t care about the potential danger.

She just didn’t want to see herself in the uniform that her husband had died in.

Emmy touched the tie at her neck, and remembered how she’d tightened Joseph’s four-in-hand knot the morning he’d shipped out, like she had a thousand times since they’d been married.

The pain of the loss had dulled, as everyone had said it would, but being in Germany was bringing it all back. And this was only the first day of her new assignment.

“A faint heart never filled a spade flush,” Emmy whispered to herself, a saying her mother had picked up in the Montana logging towns they traveled through, poker a religion more than a pastime out there. The phrase was a bit of card sharp nonsense, but it always reminded her of what she had already been through in her life and survived.

She could do this, too.

Emmy gave her reflection a firm nod, and then bent to retrieve her bag.

Stragglers were still disembarking from the train when she stepped back out onto the platform, but the crowd was thinning. She was thankful for that. There were too many people in U.S. Army uniforms and she needed to find a specific one.

Major Wesley Arnold.

The major was a member of the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives unit, the group that had been irreverently dubbed Monuments Men. Emmy had always loved the idea of them—scuttling about Europe, protecting artistic and architectural masterpieces from bombs, Allies and Axis alike. Safeguarding humanity’s cultural inheritance.

No one on the platform looked like an academic who also punched Nazis in the name of defending art, so she kept walking, hoping he would find her first.

When she got to the lobby, Emmy was immediately surrounded by a group of young children, their thin little bodies pressing into her legs, their hands reaching up, palms and fingernails crusted with dirt. She wasn’t fluent in German but knew enough to realize they were begging for food.

After several days of traveling by train through the country, she had been prepared for this onslaught. Starving children gathered at spots along the railroad all the way from the port to Frankfurt, calling out to passengers for cigarettes and candy and sandwiches. Never for money, that wouldn’t do them any good.

“Bitte, bitte, bitte,” they cried in unison.

Please. Please. Please.

Emmy resented them. She hated them, even.

Because they made her care, and Emmy didn’t want to feel any kind of complex emotion for Germans—children or not. Her chest went tight as she pictured that moment of fixing Joseph’s tie once more. His smile, the dark curl that fell over his forehead.

Don’t you forget me, he’d said. A tease, a joke. But there had been a serious thread that ran through those words. They both knew his likely fate.

“Bitte, bitte, bitte.”

A sharp whistle cut through the pleas, and Emmy looked up into the eyes of a man holding a placard with her name scrawled across it.

The begging children didn’t scatter, just shifted their attention, and the man held out a package to the youngest one in the bunch with a single command: “Share.”

They seemed to collectively decide they had gotten all that they would and scampered off after the rest of the passengers. The man watched them go and Emmy watched the man.

He was of medium height and medium build with a medium-brown hair color that matched medium-brown eyes. Silver threaded through the strands at his temples, suggesting he was at least in his midthirties. A constellation of freckles sat at the corner of his mouth, which was the only objectively interesting thing about his face.

But there was a magnetism about him that was hard to look away from.

Maybe it was her travel-induced delirium, but she had to admit that he did, in fact, look exactly like an academic who also punched Nazis in the name of defending art. That impression might have to do with the spiderweb of freshly scarred skin that peeked out from his collar. Or the way he leaned much of his weight on his cane. He had seen action.

When Emmy met his eyes, they were hard, but there was a slant to his lips as if he found her scrutiny amusing.

She flushed and looked down, caught out. What assumptions was he now making about her? Emmy had never given much thought to her looks. She was unremarkable but not unattractive, with a face that most people forgot a few minutes after meeting her. Throughout her life, she’d received the advice to skip dessert plenty of times. The one feature that garnered any attention—her thick, glossy black hair—was currently dull from travel, tucked back in a low 

chignon.

For a silly moment, she wished she’d applied lipstick in the WC.

“I’m Mrs. Clarke,” she said after realizing they had been standing in a strange, weighted silence for too long.

His half smile became a full one that still didn’t meet his eyes. Her own flicked down to his scars again, and she wondered if the flint in his personality was innate or forged through war.

“Major Wesley Arnold,” he said, his voice a lovely rumble, his accent American but hard to place beyond that. “At your service.”

He reached out a hand for her bag and she fought the urge to refuse his help because of his cane. If he’d offered, he could handle it.

“I hope your trip was uneventful,” he said, stilted in that way of people who weren’t natural conversationalists. She followed him into the street where an open-air jeep was waiting under guard by a young private.

“Quite.” Emmy eyed the step up into the vehicle. There was no way she was going to climb in there in a graceful manner with this impractical skirt tight around her knees. How the army thought this was a suitable uniform, she would never know. Women working for the war efforts should have been supplied with trousers.

Before she could even make an attempt, Major Wesley Arnold’s hands cupped her waist. He boosted her into the passenger seat with an ease that suggested a hidden strength not obvious to the casual eye.

Emmy blinked, thrown once again. He’d handled the whole affair with an efficiency she found intensely refreshing. She had needed to get into the jeep, and so he had made it happen.

Major Arnold slid behind the wheel and stowed his cane, all with well-practiced movements. Maybe the injury wasn’t quite as new as she’d thought.

“Thank you,” she murmured. He paused with the key in the ignition as if her response surprised him. Perhaps he’d been expecting a reprimand for how his thumbs had pressed into the soft flesh of her hips.

They drove for a while in silence, and maybe in some other circumstance it would have been uncomfortable. But mostly, she was too exhausted to feel anything but gratitude that someone had taken over the logistics of getting her to where she needed to go.

Emmy wasn’t sure she could have made idle chitchat, anyway. They were driving through destruction that was so complete and devastating she couldn’t look away from it—the buildings that were no longer buildings; the skinny dogs that, judging from the state of the few people she saw out, would likely become food themselves; the air that was thick with dust and the stench of human suffering. Sour rot, copper blood, disease.

Why was she here again?

She hated that she was here.

Joseph hadn’t died in this country, but he had died because of this country.

Emmy had been more than happy toiling away in the acquisitions department of the Library of Congress. It was a prestigious position for someone as young as she, and it let her get lost in books. Grief, she’d found, had a way of receding when she was reading. Her work in acquisitions often had

more to do with examining the book itself than consuming the story, but she’d never been good at ignoring the words that beckoned her into another world, into another time period, into a place where her husband hadn’t died along with millions of other young men.

Then Director Evans had called her into his office. The Library of Congress needed a volunteer to head to Offenbach am Main where the government had set up an archival depot that held the millions of books the Nazis had plundered from occupied nations. They were to sort through all that loot for anything that could be deemed “enemy literature” in an effort to learn more about why and how all this had happened.

One of the original members of the mission had become ill and had to bow out, and Emmy would serve as a placeholder until they could get someone in longer term.

Everything in her had balked at the request. How could she go to Germany and be anything but the cruelest version of herself?

But she’d never been able to say no to books.

So instead of walking to work on a crisp spring morning back in Washington, she was being driven through a bombed-out Frankfurt by a man with scars and darkness in his expression in the very country she’d sworn never to step foot in for her entire life.

More children ran behind their jeep, their bones pressing too tight against their skin, their lips dry and cracked, their feet bare. Emmy wanted Major Arnold to drive faster, but even when they left the children behind there was little relief to be found. On the sidewalk, a pair of shoes stuck out from a dirty blanket, the lump underneath too still to be anything but a corpse.

“Should we stop?” Emmy dared ask, even though she wanted nothing more than to pretend she hadn’t seen it.

But Major Arnold shook his head. “I’ll send someone out. It’s . . . not uncommon.”

Three weeks ago, before Director Evans had given her this assignment, Emmy would have said she would be perfectly happy to consign each and every single German to hell. Yet here they were in hell, and Emmy couldn’t find any satisfaction in the suffering that she saw.

As they crossed the bridge toward Offenbach am Main, a town that sat over the river from Frankfurt, she felt Major Arnold’s eyes on her. When she looked, though, he was back to watching the road. The potholes that came not only from bombs but from neglect and budgetary prioritization required careful navigation.

“Your first time in Germany?” he asked, his voice neutral.

“First time out of America,” she admitted. And then, her defenses lowered, “I don’t know what I expected.”

“Some people think

the Germans deserve all this,” Major Arnold said.

She thought about all she’d seen since arriving in Germany. Her train had passed through whole towns that had been leveled to the ground. That rubble represented more than stone and mortar.

She thought about Joseph’s last letter, which she carried around in the breast pocket of her army-issued jacket. The paper was yellow at the edges, tearstained now. He’d written the message the night before the Normandy invasion, the night before he’d died alone on a beach, if he’d even made it that far.

“I’m not an expert,” Emmy said slowly. “But I don’t think this is what justice looks like.”

That earned her an approving glance from the major. They fell silent once more and Emmy was glad for it. She had no desire to bare her soul to this stranger. Instead, she twisted the wedding ring she still wore and tried not to think about anything at all.

Major Arnold finally pulled to a stop in front of an ugly, giant warehouse. During the war it had been used to make chemicals and pharmaceuticals for purposes she had been afraid to ask about.

Now it was the army’s Offenbach Archival Depot. Emmy had been half hoping that the major would drop her off at her cottage for today, but now that they were at the collection point she couldn’t ignore the thrill of excitement that coursed through her.

She trailed behind Major Arnold, studiously not looking at the fit of his uniform. When he opened the door to the depot, the intoxicating, earthy scent of books crashed into her, not a ripple but a tidal wave. Glue and paper, bindings and ink. Time.

Inside, there were millions of books that had been stolen by the Nazis. They came from all over Europe—from research libraries and private collections and universities and government agencies. There would be ones that were encrusted with jewels whose pages were adorned with gold; there would be slim, cheap throwaway paperbacks that came from someone’s bedside table; there would be priceless documents that held information on civilizations that would be forgotten had the volumes not been salvaged.

They had been found by men like Major Arnold in castles and wine cellars, in homes and apartment buildings, in schools and hidden behind wallpaper. They had been found in that horrific institute across the river that had been set up by the high-ranking Nazi Alfred Rosenberg, with the sole purpose of studying the Jewish culture.

Since she had been tasked with this assignment, Emmy had been focused on how hard it would be to go to Germany. How much it would be a constant reminder of everything she’d lost.

She should have known better, though.

What better way to soothe the broken parts of her than to be part of the effort that was helping all of these books find their way home? 

 

Chapter 2
Annelise

Summer 1937

Bonn, Germany

Annelise Fischer pulled her modest dress over her head the minute she passed the tree line. She dropped it on the ground and spread her arms to the sky above, clad only in her underthings.

Despite the woods’ thick canopy, the sun cut patterns through the leaves, kissing her cheeks, her chest, her arms. She lived for this moment, for this freedom.

The air was cooler in here, the sounds of nature waking back up as they always did once the creatures of the forest became accustomed to her presence. She wanted to take her leather sandals off as well and press the souls of her feet into the soil, to feel the earth beneath her.

A low whistle brought her back to herself.

“Better be careful,” Marta Schmidt said, tapping Annelise on the rump in greeting. “There be wolves in these woods.”

Annelise flashed a smile that she knew bent toward predatory. “Wolves should be scared of me.”

“You are positively terrifying,” Marta teased, as Annelise rummaged through her rucksack. She shimmied into a pleated skirt that hit just below her knees, and then pulled on the bright turquoise blouse she’d bought at the market the past weekend.

Annelise tied a daffodil-colored scarf around her neck and then yanked her socks up to her knees. Marta watched it all with the patient eye of someone who’d just finished her own adjustments.

Some of the Edelweiss Pirates wore their flashier outfits out around town. But, so far, Annelise’s parents hadn’t made a fuss about where she was spending her time after school and on weekends. She wanted to keep it that way, so she played the part of a good German girl when there was a chance her neighbors would see and report back on her outfits.

As her final touch, Annelise secured the edelweiss pin to the corner of her scarf. The flower was the symbol that bound them all together. Once upon a time, it had represented groups of young people who had devoted themselves to outdoor pursuits—to hiking, to camping, to skiing, to frolicking in the woods. Those had been simpler days.

Now the symbol had weight. They were the Edelweiss Pirates, the youth who wouldn’t conform, who wouldn’t join the Hitlerjugend, who would wear what they wanted, say what they wanted, act how they wanted. And in doing so, the Pirates had become more than a flower—they had become a thorn in the side of the Nazis at a time when it seemed most of their fellow countrymen were begging to lick the boots of the Führer.

“Are you finally sleeping in Stefan’s tent tonight?” Annelise asked Marta, as they started deeper into the woods. The hiking trails that wound up the Seven Mountains outside Bonn were plentiful and well-marked, though they were used with less frequency than they had been in Annelise’s parents’ generation. Now the adults were too busy working in the factories and the young people were too busy with the Hitlerjugend.

That did mean more often than not the Pirates had the woods to themselves. Most of the boys in the group had dropped out of school a few years back, so they came here ahead of the girls who still went to classes and set up camp at the top of Lohrberg Mountain. They always brought extra tents. Annelise and Marta often shared one, but Stefan had been chasing after her friend for a few weeks now, and Annelise 

had a feeling Marta was ready to be caught.

“That depends on what present he brought me today,” Marta said, nose in the air as if they didn’t both know it was a foregone conclusion.

“He’ll have written you a song.”

Stefan was one of the more proficient guitar players in their little group, though a lack of skill rarely stopped any of their boys from strumming along or showing off.

“Then maybe I’ll leave you in the tent by yourself.” She shot Annelise a sly smile. “But only if the song is good.”

An acrid jealousy crept in behind Annelise’s amusement. It wasn’t that she wanted either Stefan or Marta, nor did she worry she would lose Marta’s friendship and attention.

No, Annelise was jealous because she desperately wanted that feeling. She wanted to want someone.

Marta made the flirtations look fun. She’d shared her tent with a few of the boys, broken a few other hearts, and laughed her way through it all with such charm that no one resented her after all the dust settled.

Annelise wished she could love so easily.

The boys in their group had never appealed to her beyond friendship. She adored them, but they were silly and sweet and she’d seen their pale rear ends on the days they swam in the cool mountain lakes. She hadn’t been impressed.

Beyond the Pirates, though, there were only the boys who had gleefully donned the Hitlerjugend uniform, and she didn’t think she’d ever be able to flirt with, let alone kiss, someone who supported that lunatic.

While she didn’t naturally draw attention like Marta, who was all plush curves and big grins and luscious red curls, Annelise could admit to her own subtle kind of beauty. Her wheaten hair was thick and long, her legs trim from weekly hikes, her face pretty enough. Had a boy struck her fancy, she didn’t think she’d have trouble getting him to share her tent.

That hadn’t happened yet. Maybe it never would.

Marta’s fingers wrapped around Annelise’s wrist, drawing her to a stop. They were only about halfway to the summit and Annelise tensed when she noticed Marta’s expression.

“You have a little shadow,” Marta whispered, her lips brushing Annelise’s ear.

As casually as she could, Annelise glanced over her shoulder and caught the flutter of the Bund Deutscher Mädel uniform. Everything in her relaxed and she rolled her eyes.

“Christina, out,” Annelise demanded. “Now.”

For a moment nothing happened, then her sister slunk from behind a tree, her shoulders rounded, her mouth set in a petulant pout.

“You’re not supposed to be out here,” Christina said, ever the prim and proper BDM girl. At fifteen, Christina was a little more than a year younger than Annelise, but sometimes Annelise wondered if one of them was a changeling. They were so different. Not in looks—they could be twins and had been told so many

 times—but in temperament.

Her little rule-follower of a sister knew nothing of freedom, of wanting. Christina liked being told what to do, liked wearing that ridiculous uniform and spending all her free time learning how to be a good German wife and mother for the Fatherland. She’d been a tattler and an apple-polisher as a child and it seemed she’d never grown out of the impulse.

“Yet here you are,” Annelise countered, irritated. Christina was always following her, trying to catch her in some kind of trouble.

“Trying to save you,” Christina said, cheeks flushed in what Annelise knew was righteous indignation. “From ruining our family.”

Annelise considered arguing, but they’d had this discussion so many times over the past year, she could practically run the lines playing both of their parts. It would end with bitterness from Christina—who did genuinely believe she was doing what was best for Annelise—and exasperated annoyance from Annelise. None of it was worth the wasted breath.

“Come on,” Annelise said, and then started up the trail once more.

“You’re sure this is wise?” Marta asked beneath her breath. Christina hadn’t fallen in behind them yet, but Annelise knew it wouldn’t be long before her little shadow caught up.

“No,” Annelise said, with a grin. “But when does anything we do count as wise?”

They both ignored Christina as she finally joined them, and continued to gossip their way to the top of the mountain.

For all that Christina liked to prattle on about how important sports and athletics were to the BDM, she was huffing far more than either Annelise or Marta by the end.

Annelise handed over her flask of water. Just because she was frustrated with Christina didn’t mean she wanted her to suffer.

Christina took it without thanks. But that was her sister—so used to Annelise’s care that she would only notice it if it was gone.

Marta and Annelise soaked in the view as Christina tried to subtly catch her breath. The thick Rhine wound its way through the farmlands that surrounded Bonn, the hills in the distance matching their own high point, the bluebird sky dotted with puffy clouds. They could have been standing in a painting for how perfect the day was.

Being up here, so far away from the struggle of her daily life, made Annelise almost

forget everything that was going on down below. The politics, the hardship, her parents’ dead-eyed stares.

The way that all of the Pirates faced backlash for refusing to fall in line with Hitler.

Annelise had to watch as her friends were denied good positions at warehouses, had to put up with being shunned by all their neighbors and given poor marks by teachers. But worse, in the past few months, the bullies in the Hitlerjugend—or the HJ as everyone called them—had begun violently targeting the Pirates. There had been several all-out brawls in the street that had resulted in more than a few broken bones and black eyes for the Pirates. And it was only going to continue to escalate.

But if resistance had been easy, it wouldn’t have been resistance.

Annelise had always believed that the traits that had caused the Pirates to seek belonging in outdoors groups were the same that led them to identify the brutality in the Nazis’ worldview while everyone else bought into the propaganda. The Edelweiss Pirates, by nature, sought peace, sought equanimity, sought love and freedom and self-expression. They had never been the type to conform to what was expected—rather they ran through the trees, they climbed impossible mountains, they breathed in air that hadn’t been tainted by warehouse smoke or by hatred.

They were pirates, which meant they could never be serfs.

Marta whooped and Annelise turned to see the smoke rising just off the summit.

Annelise looped an arm around Christina’s neck as they followed a skipping Marta at a slightly slower pace.

“Aren’t you missing your precious BDM practice right now?” Annelise asked, hating the part of herself that made her poke and prod. “Or is this a spy-in-training assignment?”

Christina wasn’t cruel like some of the Hitlerjugend, but she loved handbooks and guidelines and being told what to do. If one of the women who ran the BDM asked her to find out what the Pirates got up to in these mountains, Annelise wasn’t sure Christina wouldn’t give a detailed list of how to identify everyone involved. She was a teacher’s pet in a new world where they reigned supreme.

“I said I have the same illness as you’ve mysteriously had for the past six months.”

Annelise had been putting off the quite persistent local BDM office with the excuse that she didn’t want to infect the rest of the girls.

“You lied?” Annelise asked, eyes comically wide in shock that was only half exaggerated. Christina was typically so earnest, Annelise had a hard time picturing her sister delivering even the smallest fib.

Christina took a fortifying breath. “It was for the greater good.”

Of course, that’s

all Christina cared about. She had bought into all that Nazi propaganda that made all the girls like Christina think themselves more important than they would ever be. “I am terrified to ask what you believe is the ‘greater good’ here.”

“Making sure our family is in good standing with the NSDAP,” Christina said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

Perhaps it was petty of Annelise, but she couldn’t help but add, “You mean the Nazis.”

That earned her a glare and a hard pinch to the soft side of her arm. “You think you’re so clever, but it’s comments such as that that will doom us.”

Hitler wasn’t particularly fond of Nazi, which had roots in a name synonymous with backward peasants. It was a sore point for the party that it had taken off so.

Annelise smirked and pinched her sister back.

Up ahead, the Edelweiss Pirates’ camp came into view. Marta launched herself into the arms of the tall boy with bronzed curls and a guitar strung around his back. Christina made some offended sound—boys and girls were kept strictly separate in the HJ and the BDM.

“You won’t tell anyone about this?” Annelise checked one more time, dropping the pretense of teasing. She had no desire to endanger her friends simply because she’d naively trusted her sister. As much as Christina toed the line, Annelise didn’t think she would do anything that would actually endanger Annelise.

Christina sniffed as if she found the question preposterous. “I don’t want myself associated with these hooligans.”

“Well, when you put it that way, I’m convinced,” Annelise said, dry but honest. If she could count on anything it was that Christina wouldn’t want to get in trouble herself.

The fire was already going, logs set up around it to create a gathering space. The tents had also been constructed, a mishmash of painted canvas and sticks.

Annelise always took the one with the three pines on the flap. She threw her rucksack inside without even checking to see if it was taken, and then found Walter Schubert in the small crowd. She kissed his cheek in thanks because he’d set up the tent without any expectation of sharing it with her.

That’s how the Pirates were. They looked after each other.

“Who brought the Nazi?” one of the boys called, clearly having come back from relieving himself.

“Shove off, Hans,” Annelise snapped, wrapping a protective arm around Christina’s waist. Only she could be mean to Christina, that’s how sibling relations worked. “She’s my sister.”

Muffled grumbling followed the introduction, but no one really put up a fight. Annelise was far from the leader of the group, but she was well-liked and had been around long enough to have earned some goodwill. If she vouched for someone, most of the Pirates would go along with it.

Meanwhile, Christina looked like she wanted to take a running leap off the

nearby cliffs to escape the scrutiny, so Annelise squeezed her hip in a comforting gesture while wishing she’d brought an extra set of clothes for her to change into.

There was nothing to be done about Christina, though. Annelise’s school clothes were sweat-damp and unpleasant, and even if she had brought something that would help her sister fit in with the group, Christina would have refused. She wore her BDM skirt and jacket with pride. Annelise directed Christina onto one of the logs beside Walter, who would treat her the gentlest, and then grabbed a package of warmed nuts that had been resting against the fire. She poured most of them out into Christina’s waiting palm.

Marta sat herself in Stefan’s lap, which prompted Hans to grab for the guitar. The strap was completely decorated in pins, but at the top was the edelweiss flower. Annelise fiddled with her own as Hans strummed the opening bars of one of their favorite songs.

The three hitchhikers met, who’d traveled around the world.

Let’s all hitchhike together.

An ache filled the hollow spaces in her body—that wanting of something she couldn’t quite name. To be somewhere else, to be someone else, she didn’t really know. But life had to be more than working in factories and producing infants for the Fatherland and passing simple day after simple day in this tiny town.

The Pirates sang, handed the guitars around, doled out the liquor one of the boys had smuggled from his house in a flask. Some kissed, some danced, they all laughed and talked and felt at home for once.

The closest they came to discussing the HJ or the Nazis was when they were performing skits for each other.

In one of them Stefan and Marta pretended to be two members of the HJ. The Pirates around the campfire booed and hollered when they announced who they were and then dissolved into a fit of giggles when the two buffooned their way into setting up a one-man tent. They argued who would take it and settled on Marta inside, with Stefan sleeping outside. A “family of bears” wandered by and began “attacking” Stefan. They ran away when Marta stuck her head out of the tent. Stefan begged to switch places, but Marta refused. When they went back to sleep, the bears returned and batted Stefan around again.

A couple Pirates called encouragement to the bears as they once again ran off when Marta “woke up.” Stefan pleaded to be given the tent, and Marta reluctantly agreed.

When the bears came back the third time, the head one said, “We’ve given this Nazi a hard enough time, let’s go for the one in the tent.”

Even Christina couldn’t hide her laughter at the punch line, despite the angry flush Annelise had spotted riding along her cheekbones.

Apart from the silly skit, though, the Pirates stayed away from controversial topics. It was rare they delved into politics anyway. Some of them really had simply joined because it was an outdoors group, some because they didn’t like being told what

to wear and how to act. Many of them simply didn’t like the HJ. Despite the fact the very existence of the group had become an annoyance to the Nazis in town, the boys didn’t often get philosophical about the NSDAP’s policies. Regardless, with Christina there, that kind of discussion was off-limits.

When Annelise and Christina crawled into their tent long after the sun had set, smelling of smoke and gin and laughter, Annelise gathered her sister in her arms and placed a sloppy kiss on her forehead.

She and her sister used to be so close as children. Their brother, Anders, was older and commanded all their parents’ limited attention, so it had been up to the girls to entertain themselves. Ever since Christina joined the BDM two years ago, though, most of their conversations had devolved into petty fights.

Annelise could admit more often than not she dismissed Christina as silly, not worthy of a debate. But how could she spend the night with the Pirates and not see what Annelise loved about them? They didn’t judge anyone—more than a few harmless chirps—nor did they hate or belittle those with less power or social status. They were creating a community so much stronger than the BDM because they actually cared for each other and loved the things the group valued.

“You could be a Pirate, Christina,” Annelise whispered, almost nervous.

“Never. They’re nothing but riffraff who will get you killed one day,” Christina said.

A door shut in her face. Annelise wasn’t quite sure why she kept trying, except that hope was a stubborn weed, hard to kill.

Christina could be extraordinarily kind and clever and caring. ...