Papa and Mommi had saved half of the money needed for the four of us to make the long-awaited trip to Germany when Opa died suddenly in August of 1939. I remember when the telegram came for Papa. We’d never gotten a telegram before. I was ten years old and I had never seen my papa cry until that day. He explained he was sad that his father died without ever having met Max and me. I remember a friend from Papa’s work turning into our driveway the next day in a shining blue car to take Papa to the train station. Papa had to get to New York Harbor first, and then board a ship bound for Hamburg, and then take another train to southern Germany.
Papa was gone for four weeks, with half of that time devoted to travel. He came home from the funeral with Opa’s military medals in a velvet case and spicy-sweet lebkuchen wrapped in shiny foil wrappers. I remember my mother asking him, in English, if it had been hard to come back. He had said Germany would always have a special place in his heart, but his home was here now, in Iowa, with her and with Max and me.
Two days after Papa got back, Adolf Hitler invaded Poland, the first of many countries his armies would roll into in his quest to bring about a new kind of world.
Being only ten, I didn’t appreciate what the invasion of Poland meant. France and Britain declared war on Germany just days after that. I remember my father announcing this to my mother while I was eating a slice of the gingery German lebkuchen, still moist from having just been unwrapped.
My parents began to speak quietly to each other about the affairs going on in their homeland after that. Papa would go to a German American club in nearby Bettendorf to play cards and he would come home whispering secrets to Mommi about what was happening that I was not meant to hear. I didn’t care. None of the talk of politics and war interested me. I do remember my father saying to Mommi at one point, “We should get our declarations in.” He meant declarations of intent to become American citizens.
Before anything came of my parents’ declarations, however, something else happened. Just half a year after Germany occupied Poland—and by this time Denmark and Norway had been invaded, too—Congress passed the Alien Registration Act. I was unaffected, being an American citizen by birth, and only eleven, so its passage went unnoticed by me. My parents, however, as legal residents but not citizens, were compelled to go to the post office to register and be fingerprinted. They were asked questions about their family and educational history in Germany, organizations they belonged to, and occupations they had been and were currently engaged in. They were given alien registration numbers. A file was begun on my father on the day he was fingerprinted, a file that he had not been concerned about because he believed he had nothing to hide. He’d been in America for fifteen years. He was not a Nazi Party member. He had declared his intent to become naturalized. He loved his new country.
As the war in Europe intensified, my parents—like many German Americans—watched quietly from the sidelines, willing the conflict to end before it got any worse or hoping at least that the United States would remain neutral. Any hope of that evaporated, of course, when four days after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Germany declared war against the United States.
None of us knew that after Pearl Harbor, my father was being routinely watched for signs of subversive activity. For me, the war was happening far away from where we were and had nothing to do with us. My family and I practiced the air raid drills, we put up blackout curtains, and we conserved where we could and were careful with our war ration books and red stamps and blue stamps. We lived like all the other Americans in our neighborhood did.
But my parents were not like all the other Americans.
Still, Papa wasn’t concerned for himself. Why should he have been worried? He was working hard and living a life of integrity, which was all that the American Dream required of you.
My father’s trip to Germany just before Hitler invaded Poland was to bury his father, but the reason he went was not as important as that he went. One day, unknown to Papa, FBI agents came to his place of employment and asked his supervisor and coworkers what they knew about Otto Sontag’s visit to Germany a year and a half earlier, and where they believed Otto Sontag’s loyalties lay. Then, some months later, Stevie Winters told his father what Mr. Sontag had said about making a bomb. Mr. Winters promptly reported this to the FBI.
Next thing you know, Papa, Mommi, and I were sitting in our kitchen while FBI agents tore apart our house looking for corroborating evidence that Alien #451068, also known as Otto Sontag, was a threat to national security. They found the book Hitler wrote, the war medals, Opa’s many letters, and all the photographs of my father having lived a German life prior to coming to America.
Papa had told me ages ago, years before the war, that terrible things can happen when you mix two substances that don’t belong together. He was worried I might one day na?vely mix laundry bleach with ammonia and he wanted to make sure I understood some things cannot be stirred together into the same pot because they will react in ways that can hurt someone.
It is that way with fear and ignorance, I think. Those FBI agents were ignorant of my father’s true loyalties because they didn’t truly know him. They saw what little they saw and feared he was a danger. A threat. An enemy.
I would learn this is what happened to Mariko’s parents, too, and to many of the other families at Crystal City. Mariko’s father and mother, who’d been in the States even longer than my parents, had countless family and friends back in Japan, many of whom were serving in the Imperial Japanese Navy. But Mr. Inoue wasn’t a dangerous man. He was just a grocer from Little Tokyo.
Lucy Hobart was found and returned to her anxious parents on a snowy evening five days after she ran away. The next time I saw my father it was a blistering-hot afternoon in mid-July, and we were more than a thousand miles from the only place I had ever called home.
5
At my junior high school back in Davenport there was a boy in my class named Artie Gibbs who, sadly, had nothing going for him. He was pudgy and bucktoothed, his eyeglasses were as thick as pop-bottle bottoms, he lisped, he talked to himself, and he frequently came to school with unwashed hair and clothes that smelled of the farrowing barns his father owned. He struggled with just about every subject and routinely sat alone at lunch. He was often the brunt of jokes and the target of bullies. The ultimate insult to a girl in my school was to have it said that she was Artie Gibbs’s girlfriend.
Artie didn’t seem to care that everyone but the bullies steered clear of him. I used to watch him out of the corner of my eye, wondering what it was like to be him, wondering if he was only pretending not to notice that everyone treated him like a pariah. I remember wondering one day in particular, when Artie had been tripped in the hallway to gales of laughter, if pretending that it didn’t matter what people thought of you was easier than living with the ache that it did.
A week after Papa’s arrest, the gossip that had circulated around school was that my father was, among other things, a Nazi, a Jew hater, a Kraut lover, a bomb maker, and a traitor. No one actually said these things to my face, but the words swirled about me wherever I went. It was like knives thrust into my soul that people could so quickly believe the worst about Papa. The stares, the whispers, the wide-eyed glares—these were the worst. If a classmate had actually confronted me and asked if it was true that my father was a Nazi and a spy, I could’ve answered that he most certainly was neither. But they accused with their eyes and comments to one another.
My closest friends, Collette especially, came to my defense at first. But with each passing day that my father did not return home, cleared of any wrongdoing, the less my friends felt safe standing up for me. One by one, they began to distance themselves, first by averting their eyes when I passed them in the hall, then by avoiding me in the schoolyard, then by spreading out their lunches so that there was no room for me at our usual table.
Collette, who had been my best friend since fourth grade, had a brother in the army and a cousin flying for the RAF in England, both risking life and limb to save the world from the evils of the Third Reich. When the second week of Papa’s being gone stretched into the third, she pulled me to a quiet corner of the school library, where our history class had been sent to research ancient civilizations.
“We can’t . . . You and I can’t be friends right now, Elise,” she said. Her eyes were rimmed with tears, and suddenly so were mine. “Not like we were. My parents won’t allow it. They . . .” She broke off, unable to finish.
“But my father is innocent,” I whispered back. “You know he is!”
Collette just blinked at me. Two tears trailed down her face. “But . . . ,” she finally said. “But things were found at your house.”
“Just a book and a few letters and some pictures of his family,” I said. “They don’t mean anything. They’re going to release Papa. They have to. He’s done nothing wrong.”
Collette swiped at her tears and looked away from me. “My parents won’t let me be friends with you right now. I have to go.”