White Rose Black Forest(29)

“What are you talking about?”

They stopped walking. She was aware of strangers’ eyes on them as they passed but knew that she had to press on. She steeled herself for the next part, ready now to say the words that had been dormant inside her for months. “I think we need some time apart. I’m not sure I want to—”

“You’re breaking up with me? What? You can’t do that.”

“I think you’re a determined, courageous young man, with so much to offer . . .”

“Don’t be ridiculous. We’re not breaking up. We’re going to be married in a few years, and we’ll settle here and raise a family. We decided that together.”

“That’s not what I want anymore.”

“All right,” he snarled. “Have it your way. Don’t think I’ll be waiting when you come crawling back in a few days, you bitch!” He stormed off.

A few weeks later Daniel received a letter from the Reich Labor Service and was called away for six months to toil, unpaid, on behalf of the Reich on a farm in Bavaria. The letters from him began after a few weeks. Franka’s father, who had been subtle in his satisfaction at her breaking up with Daniel, held the letters at first but then relented. She was an adult and could make her own decisions now. Franka took the letters her father had hidden from her and went to her room. She tore the envelopes open and let them drop to the floor as she took the letters in hand. Daniel declared that he was sorry, that he had been upset. She didn’t reply, but still the letters came. Daniel was laboring on a massive farm, lodging with dozens of others. He spoke of the wonderful feeling of serving the Reich, and of the comradeship that had engendered between him and his fellow workers, all aged around nineteen. A sense of curiosity drove her to read each of the letters once before burning them in the fire. She knew from his tone that he wasn’t finished with her, even if she was with him.

Her father’s reading habits hadn’t changed since the inception of the National Socialist state. Many of the dusty and worn books that clogged the bookshelves in his study were now banned and would result in questioning from the local Gestapo, and even a few nights in jail. He shrugged when she reminded him of the prohibition on subversive literature, and he promised to take them down. Weeks passed. The books remained. Franka took the matter into her own hands and was halfway through clearing off his shelves when her father arrived home from work.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“I’m doing something you should have done long ago,” Franka explained. “We can’t afford for you to go to jail or lose your job, and just for a few books?”

“These aren’t just any books.” He plucked the book she was holding out of her hand. “You see this? Heinrich Heine?”

“I know Heine. Anyone who knows German literature knows Heine.”

“Yet he’s been banned by our National Socialist overlords. His incomparable lyrics have been officially declared both forbidden and nonexistent. I remember reading through his Book of Songs with you as you sat on my knee as a girl.”

Franka nodded. She remembered the lines glittering on the page, dancing from her father’s lips to her ear.

He rifled through the pages. “Were you planning on having a bonfire, like the Nazis do?” He found the page he was looking for and pointed at a line as he stared at her.

“No, Father. I was going to put them under your bed.”

“Does it not seem absurd that suddenly a great poet is no longer a great poet, because he belonged to the wrong race, because he was a Jew? The man’s been dead for almost eighty years.”

“Of course it’s absurd, but it’s also his political views they’re concerned with. I was just trying to protect you, Father.”

“Read out the line I’m pointing to. Read it.”

Her eyes found the words. “‘Where they burn books, they will also, in the end, burn people.’”

“Perhaps they’ve already begun,” her father said. He handed her the book and left without another word.

Later that night, after Fredi had gone to sleep, she was sitting on her bed when her father brought the rest to her.

“These books are precious now. You are privileged to read these words so many are barred from. And why are they barred? Because the Nazis know that their real enemy is the independent thinker, the true German patriot who questions their ways and speaks up against their injustices. I’m not suggesting you go around preaching the writings of Heine, but keep the ideas he speaks of in your heart, and use them. Analyze what’s going on, and remember that he never knew of Hitler or the National Socialists. He understood human nature and the nature of the German people, and that’s why his writings still matter. That’s what the Nazis are afraid of.”

Two weeks later Hitler marched his troops into the Rhineland, an area of Germany on the French border that had been demilitarized by the Treaty of Versailles, in a flagrant snub of international law. That night, Franka sat on her bed, reading the words Heine had written almost a hundred years before. The poet said that once the moral rule of law was broken in Germany, the savagery of the ancient berserker warriors that the Nordic bards sang of would blaze up once more. And this new fury, this thunderclap of German rage, would be like none that the world had witnessed before.

Franka lay back on the bed, knowing that it had already begun.