White Rose Black Forest(14)

The news of her father’s death came via letter, and the warden had refused her appeal to go to the funeral on the grounds that “traitors to the Reich should not be shown undue compassion.” It was only after she was released from prison that she was able to visit his grave, to utter faint, final goodbyes.

The sight of the soldiers manning the checkpoint on the road into town brought everything back into sharp focus. The escape she’d enjoyed in the cabin was not to be found here. The chokehold that the National Socialists had on the citizenry of Germany was plain to see. Free movement or unsanctioned travel were relics of the past. Franka handed over the packet of papers she was required to produce on demand, sometimes several times a day. The sentry examined them as she sat in silence.

“Ahnenpass?” he asked.

Franka nodded and reached into her pocket for her Ahnenpass, a certificate of her Aryan ancestry. The sentry took a glance at it and handed it back with a nod. She hid her shame with a smile. The old joke Hans used to tell about the Aryan lies came back to her.

“What is an Aryan?” he would ask the group.

“Blond like Hitler!”—who had dark hair.

“Tall like Goebbels!” someone else would say—Goebbels was five feet five.

“A perfect athletic specimen like Goering!”—who was a disgusting, fat slug. Jokes had landed many people in jail. The Nazis displayed little good humor. Everything derogatory was censured and carried the threat of jail or worse, no matter how funny the joke was.

The sentry motioned the truck onward. Franka deflected the soldier’s offer of a drink that night, with the excuse of having a boyfriend on the Russian front. She jumped out in the center of town. Nazi flags rippled in the breeze. Hitler had explained the reasoning behind the various parts of the flag in the book he’d written during his time in jail, which Franka, and all the other kids, had been required to study in school like a religious catechism—a set of rules for life. The red background represented the social idea of the movement, the white circle in the middle spoke of the purity of its nationalistic goals, and the black swastika denoted the racial superiority of the Aryan race. The Aryans were a made-up race of blond supermen, which the Nazis had convinced the German people they belonged to. She was the perfect Aryan specimen herself—tall, athletic, blond, and with piercing blue eyes she had come to be almost ashamed of. The compliments she’d received on her perfect Aryan looks were flattering when she was a teenager. Now she resented them.

A few hundred yards away the Christmas market was bustling in the shade of the Freiburg Minster, the medieval Gothic cathedral that dominated the center of town. The cathedral was one of the few places of Catholic worship left, but only as a symbol of the religious freedoms that Hitler had promised when he first came to power. There was no Mass—the local priest had been sent to a concentration camp years ago. The Protestant churches were still open, but years earlier they had been merged to form the National Reich Church to ensure that worship was controlled, and that the head of the Protestant church in Germany was both a member of the Nazi Party and an Aryan. Church members called themselves German Christians, with “the swastika on their chests and the cross in their hearts.” The National Socialists still allowed Christmas, but its future existence was far from assured. Anything that swayed belief from the Nazi cause was a threat.

Franka kept her eyes on the pavement as she shuffled along, her skis under her arm, her rucksack on her back. Several soldiers in uniform brushed past her, laughing and joking. One of them whistled at her, but her eyes didn’t waver from the gray-white slush on the cobbled pavement. She wondered if she would meet anyone she knew, and if she did, would they have heard about her? Would they shun her as a traitor? She hoped not to find out.

A bell rang over the pharmacy door as she pushed her way inside. She kept her eyes to the floor as she made her way to the opiates. The tiny bottles of heroin were the first that caught her eye, but she moved on to the morphine. She bought enough for a few days, along with the syringes she would need to administer it. She took aspirin, plaster of paris, gauze, and nylon socks to fit over the man’s legs and brought them to the counter. The pharmacist, a middle-aged man with a thick gray mustache, peered at her over his glasses with suspicious eyes. Franka noted the Nazi pin on his white coat.

“My brother,” she smiled. “He broke his legs tobogganing last night, and we’re snowed in.”

“Quite the predicament,” the pharmacist said. “Are you going to make up the cast yourself?”

“I’m a nurse. I’m well able to do it.”

“He’s a lucky boy.”

“I don’t know if you could call someone with two broken legs ‘a lucky boy,’ but I suppose you might be right.”

The pharmacist smiled and handed her the brown paper bag. Franka bade him goodbye and edged out of the store, trying to look as casual as possible. Inside, she felt like she was about to vomit.

The air was fresh against her clammy skin, and a light snow was beginning. She only had to get the food before leaving. She missed the solitude of the cabin. These streets in this beautiful town had been perverted, twisted by the all-encompassing Nazi ideology that made it impossible to live a rewarding life, particularly for a woman. No woman was allowed to be a doctor, lawyer, civil servant, or judge. Juries were to be made up only of men. Women could not be trusted to make decisions—they were thought too susceptible to being controlled by their emotions. Women weren’t allowed to vote either, but what good was a vote anyway? All parties other than the National Socialists had been made illegal. German women were forbidden to wear makeup or to color or perm their hair. Instead, the three Ks were drummed into girls from an early age: Kinder (children), Kirche (church), and Küche (kitchen). She could still remember her League of German Girls troop leaders urging them to forget about the ridiculous notion of a self-satisfying career. It was more important to stay home and bear strong sons that could one day serve the Reich. That was the role a woman had to play in modern Germany, and many of the girls she had known in her youth had adapted to it. Some had received the Mother’s Cross—a medal the Nazis gave out to mothers who had more than five healthy Aryan children. Hilda Speigel, a girl she had been in the League of German Girls with, had already received the ultimate honor: the gold Mother’s Cross, for the eight children she had by the age of twenty-seven.