“Yes,” Nina agreed, smiling at the two blond heads below, the black head, and the dark with its salting of gray. Maybe they weren’t Night Witches, they weren’t a regiment, but—“Is our team.”
She tore into the peanuts, wandering back down. Men on the field were running around again, people were on their feet shouting, who knew why. “Hit him with the bat!” Nina shouted, just to join in. Slid into her seat beside Ian, who had dropped his hat and pulled a paperback out from Nina’s bag: The Grand Sophy, by Georgette Heyer. “You stole my book again, Vanya,” Nina complained.
“Sophia Stanton-Lacy is being vexed by the spiteful Miss Wraxton, but I am confident she will prevail.” Ian removed a bookmark. “And since when am I Vanya? We’ve moved on from little ray of sunshine?”
“Ian—in Russian, would be Ivan. Proper nickname for Ivan is Vanya.”
“Nicknames are to shorten. You don’t shorten a three-letter name to a four-letter name to a five-letter name.”
“You do in Russian,” she said serenely.
He raised an eyebrow, studying her. “What are you thinking, comrade?”
“I think maybe we put off divorce for a year.” She’d been turning those words over for a while, not sure about them. She followed them up with a glare. “Only a year. Then maybe . . .”
“Then maybe,” he agreed, nonchalant. Englishmen, they couldn’t do nonchalant. Or maybe just her Englishman. He was fighting the grin that tugged at his lips, the grin she’d liked from the start even when she couldn’t understand a thing he was saying. It wasn’t much like the grin that had scrunched Yelena’s nose so sweetly, but there must have been something about it that was the same, because it had a similar effect on Nina’s stomach.
“A year,” he said again, as if he liked the sound of it. Nina liked it too. Not too confining, a year. It didn’t make her want to bristle and retreat. It wouldn’t stop her looking at a waning quarter moon and wanting Yelena back, missing her more than life—Nina didn’t think that would ever leave her. But she could bear it.
Nina took Ian’s panama and clapped it over her own head, tilting her face up to the sun, warmed through. “Tvoyu mat,” she said, blinking at the blue sky above. “Good flying weather.”
NAZI MURDERESS SENTENCED
BY IAN GRAHAM
OCTOBER 9, 1959
THE TRIAL OF Nazi war criminal Lorelei Vogt has played to its last act, as the woman known as die J?gerin stood yesterday in an Austrian courtroom to receive her sentence. Although she was first arrested in 1950, her trial would not commence until 1953 and proceeded to drag out for a further six years. Crowds gathered outside the courthouse to see the arrival of the defendant, made notorious by the award-winning photographic essay “Portraits in Evil” (J. Bryde) run in the October issue of LIFE magazine in 1956. Lorelei Vogt showed no emotion as her sentence was read: life imprisonment. So the wheel of justice turns.
Those hoping to read answers in her face were surely disappointed. The face of evil remains unknowable, and the questions remain: Who is she? What is she? How could she? Her victims are memorialized at the Rodomovsky Documentation Center in Boston, Massachusetts (director Anton Rodomovsky, human rights attorney), where the words over the center’s doors read “The Living Forget. The Dead Remember.”
The dead lie beyond any struggle, so we living must struggle for them. We must remember, because there are other wheels that turn besides the wheel of justice. Time is a wheel, vast and indifferent, and when time rolls on and men forget, we face the risk of circling back. We slouch yawning to a new horizon and find ourselves gazing at old hatreds seeded and watered by forgetfulness and flowering into new wars. New massacres. New monsters like die J?gerin.
Let this wheel stop.
Let us not forget this time.
Let us remember.
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About the Author
Meet Kate Quinn
KATE QUINN is a New York Times bestselling author of historical fiction. A lifelong history buff, she has written seven historical novels, including the bestselling The Alice Network, the Empress of Rome Saga, and the Borgia Chronicles. All have been translated into multiple languages. Kate and her husband now live in San Diego with two black dogs named Caesar and Calpurnia.
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About the Book
Author’s Note
“Does INS know of any Nazi war criminals living in the United States at this time?”
“Yes. Fifty-three.”
That question was posed in 1973 by Democratic Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman in a routine subcommittee hearing, and the answer surprised her as much as it did me during my research for this novel. Had there really been known war criminals living in America since the end of the Second World War?
Yes. There just wasn’t any funding or organization to investigate them. Holtzman later pushed for the creation of the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations, but before the OSI, any Nazi war criminal who made it to the United States had a good chance of living in peace . . . including one woman upon whom I partly based die J?gerin.
Hermine Braunsteiner was a brutal female camp guard at Ravensbrück and Majdanek, who served a brief postwar prison sentence in Europe, then married an American and became a US citizen living in Queens, New York. Her neighbors were dumbfounded when she was tracked down in 1964 and accused of war crimes, and her astonished husband protested, “My wife wouldn’t hurt a fly!” Anneliese Weber/Lorelei Vogt is a fictional composite of Hermine Braunsteiner and another woman, Erna Petri, an SS officer’s wife who during the war found six escaped Jewish children near her home in Ukraine, brought them home to feed them a meal, then shot them. Petri was tried in 1962 and given a life sentence, and Braunsteiner became the first Nazi war criminal to be extradited from the United States.
What moved these women to do such terrible things? The question is unanswerable. Petri was defensive, saying that she had been conditioned to Nazi racial laws and hardened by living among SS men who carried out frequent executions—she admitted wanting to show she could conduct herself like a man. Braunsteiner was self-pitying, weeping, “I was punished enough.” Both women faced justice, but only after a long slog of legalities and paperwork: it took seventeen years for Braunsteiner to be extradited, tried, and sentenced to life in prison. I wanted The Huntress to have a swifter climax than a decades-long legal battle, and I certainly had no wish for my fictional characters take credit from the very real journalists and investigators who brought Petri and Braunsteiner to justice, so I made the decision to create a fictional female war criminal from both women’s records.
Mention the term “Nazi hunter” out loud, and most real Nazi hunters will wince. The term conjures a Hollywood vision of pulse-pounding adventure, and the reality is very different. The first war crimes investigation teams were hard at work before the V-E Day champagne corks had even started popping; they took testimony from camp survivors and liberators, tracked the guilty down in POW camps and escape bolt-holes, and sought out the civilian murderers of downed Allied airmen and escaped prisoners as well as perpetrators of the Final Solution. Men like William Denson, US Army chief prosecutor at the Dachau trials, and Benjamin Ferencz, chief prosecutor in the trial of the Einsatzgruppen killers, were overworked heroes responsible for prosecuting hundreds. But after the Nuremberg Trials there was an overwhelming public sense of “Well, now that’s done” as far as Nazi war criminals were concerned. Even though only a tiny percentage of the guilty had been prosecuted, there wasn’t much interest in further war crimes trials—the Soviet Union had become the enemy to fear, not the defunct Third Reich. By the seventies and eighties, as the Cold War waned and people realized time was running out as World War II veterans and witnesses aged, there was a surge of renewed interest in bringing Nazis to justice, but post-Nuremberg investigation teams had a real fight on their hands.