Under the Same Stars by Libba Bray(54)
Herr Ohlsen gently defended his position. “But all we know is what we read in the papers. What they allow us to read. I have heard—”
“You have heard? From whom? Surely you are not listening to foreign radio and its lies, Herr Ohlsen?”
Sophie was very nervous. She liked Herr Ohlsen, who would talk to her about how he was building a radio from parts he scavenged near the old dump. “So many useful scraps are there! A gold mine!” he’d said, excited as a boy on Christmas morning. She knew, though, that Herr Ohlsen did not like the Nazis and that he had once asked her father if he might be able to find him a copy of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice for his friend with whom he shared an apartment, even though Thomas Mann’s works had been labeled “unacceptable” and burned in a bonfire by Goebbels in 1933. She remembered a quote from the Jewish German poet Heinrich Heine: “Where you burn books, you ultimately burn people.” She worried about the look on Herr Binder’s face now, like a match had been struck and held up to better see Herr Ohlsen.
“Herr Binder! If it’s history you like, I have just the book for you. Right this way…,” she said with forced brightness and a gentle hand on his back and a pleading glance over her shoulder to the piano teacher.
Sophie knew that her parents had also been listening to the forbidden BBC radio out of London and she worried that someone might find out. Just two weeks earlier, three students living at Frau Krupp’s boardinghouse had been arrested for listening to “foreign radio.” Frau Krupp’s son, a Luftwaffe airman, had gone missing and was presumed dead. The students had been listening to BBC when they heard the son’s name among a list of Germans who had been captured by the British. The students gave Frau Krupp the good news that her beloved son was still alive. But rather than feeling grateful, Frau Krupp promptly reported them to the authorities for their crime. She was praised by officials for “being a loyal, heroic German.” The students had been sent to prison.
Later that month, the Führer’s birthday was celebrated. Many in Kleinwald flew the Reich flag from their windows for the occasion. Sophie’s parents did not. Frau Wiedenhammer, decked out in jewels from her Berlin cabaret days, peered up at their empty windows. “Where is your flag? Aren’t you patriots?”
“Oh, Frau Wiedenhammer, it is too dirty to show. We are down to just a sliver of soap. We would be ashamed to fly it,” Sophie lied.
She had become adept at lying or, at least, not telling the full truth. She wondered if that was the same as acting.
Hitler took to the official radio, sounding angry and hateful, petty and aggrieved about one thing or another. Sophie had never heard him any other way, never seen his dead eyes light up with joy. He frightened her. Those bombastic tirades, the newspaper photos of his face splotchy with rage, a finger jabbing at the air as if it, too, were an offense, as if he had gone mad. But the very traits that upset Sophie seemed to bring other people a sense of comfort and security. “He’s a strong leader,” Fr?ulein Volker would say. “A real man who is unafraid of his authority. The fatherland demands a strict father to make it great again.”
Sophie was glad that her own father was not like this.
“I’m outnumbered in my own house,” he would say with a twinkle.
The first week of May, Sophie’s little brother came mewling into the uncertain world. Her parents named the boy Fritz. He was fat and pink and healthy. Sophie wrote to Hanna to tell her the news. The next week, Germany invaded Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands. All German-occupied territories now. A second letter arrived from Hanna, shorter than the first.
Dear Sophie,
I am so glad that little Fritz is here and that your mother is well. A baby is a hopeful, happy thing. Not for me, of course. I have made my feelings about the little brats quite clear.
Sophie grinned. There were some things that never changed.
The trees are blooming here in Lodz, but I don’t think spring will ever really come to Poland again. It will take more magic than any seidr branch holds to weave color back into this deeply sad world. Thank you for visiting Karl and for the resplendent flowers you left him.
Your friend,
Hanna
Sophie didn’t know quite what to make of this letter. This Hanna sounded melancholy, to use one of their words. Perhaps she was homesick. After all, she’d been away from Kleinwald for the first time and for two whole months, and Sophie secretly hoped that this would cure Hanna of ever wanting to leave again.
Between the shop and the new baby, Sophie was very busy, and so it wasn’t until the close of May, when summer showed up like a flirt, that Sophie was seized by a sudden yearning to go to the forest. That afternoon, she dusted off her bicycle and traveled the familiar road made somewhat unfamiliar now by the sight of rakes and wheelbarrows positioned to look like antiaircraft guns when viewed from above. There had been bombings in Germany and a town fifty kilometers to the west had burned. But none of that mattered to the forest, which bloomed anew. Sophie saw two freckled fawns wobbling behind their mother with a curious determination. She felt as if she had come home again after a long journey. The Bridegroom’s Oak wore a brilliant crown of new leaves. Sophie climbed the ladder, mostly out of nostalgia; she was fifteen now and had tasted the beginnings of war and loss. She was not as taken with magic as she had been once upon a time. And so she was quite surprised to find in the day’s stack a letter, crackly with age, addressed to her.