Projekt 1065: List 1

If I weren’t Irish and already born to hate them, I had plenty of other good reasons for loathing the English.

The crash was followed by a woman’s scream, and the acrid smell of smoke bit at my nose as a black cloud rose over the rooftops the next street over.

“Go. Move,” Ma said, snapping us all out of our stupor.

I very carefully worked my fingernail along the edge, trying not to mar the card or tear it, until I got to the corner.

I stepped out from the curtains, my heart still racing, and almost tripped on the prone form of the butler on the floor.

“But not our friends in Ireland, of course, who have remained steadfastly neutral throughout the war,” our host said magnanimously, raising a glass to my father.

“But not our friends in Ireland, of course, who have remained steadfastly neutral throughout the war,” our host said magnanimously, raising a glass to my father.

The Hitler Youth uniform he wore was two sizes too big for him, and his legs and arms stuck out of it like the wooden stick limbs of a marionette.

I didn’t want a new friend. Definitely not a German one, who might be a rabid Nazi for all I knew.

“Sit down, sit down, you little wretches,” Herr Professor Doktor Major Melcher said, giving a tardy student a hard smack on the head with his ruler as the boy tried to slip by him into a desk.

Even though I wasn’t his biggest fan, I had a soft spot for the old codger.

It was nothing Melcher had said or done—anything that explicit would have gotten him hauled off to a concentration camp or reenlisted in the army, even though he was too old to fight again.

I felt he was a kindred spirit.

“It’s already enough that I waste my time on you ignoramuses when I should be teaching at university,” Herr Professor Doktor Major Melcher told us.

“All right. Enough,” Herr Professor Doktor Major Melcher said. “If this were a university classroom, we would already be studying calculus. The mathematics of the heavens. As it is, I must debase myself with the mathematics of firebombs and distances marched. Clear your desks for your test.”

By the time I moved to Berlin in 1937, they were pretty much done with book burnings—mostly because they had already burned every book in Germany. But every now and then, they discovered somebody’s hidden stash of “degenerate” books, and they made a big show out of burning them in the street, as a lesson to everyone else.

“The German man is not a man of books, but of character. Of action! These books,” he said, squeezing one of the offending volumes in his fat hand as if it were a cat he was trying to strangle, “are evil spirits of the past. We consign them to the flames so the world will know there is no place for decadence and moral corruption in Germany!”

“The German man is not a man of books, but of character. Of action! These books,” he said, squeezing one of the offending volumes in his fat hand as if it were a cat he was trying to strangle, “are evil spirits of the past. We consign them to the flames so the world will know there is no place for decadence and moral corruption in Germany!”

“From the flames of this degenerate filth,” Horst said, flinging the book into the bonfire, “the phoenix of a new German spirit will rise in triumph! Now get inside there and cleanse that house of its corruption!”

I was a right whirling dervish, a one-man army Hitler would have given his little mustache to bottle up and ship to the Eastern Front.

“He who wants to live should fight for himself. He who doesn’t want to fight in this world of eternal struggle doesn’t deserve to live.” That part was meant for Fritz. Horst gave him a swift kick to the small of his back to punctuate the lesson, making Fritz writhe.

Maybe Horst really believed all that “might makes right” malarkey.

The two boys wore the special insignia that marked them as the SRD, the Hitler Youth’s “Patrol Force.”

And if he did elude them, how would he avoid a dozen or more Hitler Youth crawling through the woods and fields to look for him?

The boys in my troop were already clambering for the truck, thrilled to have real work to do for the Fatherland.

“So, you’re English?” Fritz asked.
I bristled at the insult. “No. Not English. Irish. I hate the English,” I told him.

For centuries the English had done all they could to take our land, quash our language, and put us in chains, and it took a bloody war for independence to set us free of them.

Gorgets are metal plates that hang down on your chest from a heavy chain around your neck, like a huge, gaudy necklace.

“The airman is still at large,” one of the SS told us, and my heart fluttered with hope.

A rickety old ladder led up to a loft where more hay was stored—an even better hiding place than the haystacks Fritz was poking.

I backed warily toward the ladder. I didn’t want to look down until I had to, if at all.

Acrophobia
Fritz grabbed my shirt. I swung out over the edge, about to drop, but I couldn’t move. I was paralyzed. Frozen with fear.

The familiar sick and dizzy feeling of vertigo slowly left me as we lay on our backs, panting and exhausted.

An SS officer joined the vanguard of Hitler Youth beating at the bushes.

Was that just the excitement of the chase, or did he really believe all that Nazi claptrap about the master race?