It took Franka thirty glorious minutes to reach the bottom of the valley and the main road into town. It had been cleared enough to let cars through, with the snow piled up at the side of the road on either side.
“National Socialist efficiency,” she mumbled to herself.
Five minutes passed before a truck stopped to pick her up. A Wehrmacht soldier waved her to hop on board as he ground to a snowy halt. Franka stiffened but had little choice now. It might look even more suspicious if she didn’t take the ride. She tucked her skis under her arm and tramped up toward the door the soldier had left open for her.
“Good day, Fr?ulein,” the soldier said with a smile. “Climb on board. I’m going all the way to Freiburg.”
“That would be wonderful, thank you.”
She climbed into the passenger seat, doing her best to return the soldier’s smile as she closed the door behind her. He was young, no older than twenty-two, even younger than she was.
“What brings you into town on a day like this?”
“A shopping trip. I didn’t expect this weather. We’re snowed in and running a little low on supplies.”
He glanced across at her longer than was comfortable, and the truck veered toward the curb before he righted it.
She decided not to comment on the young soldier’s driving skills. “I haven’t used these skis in years. I’m glad you picked me up.”
“My pleasure, Fr?ulein.”
She did her best to humor him as he talked and talked, all the way into town. She told him nothing about herself, deflecting every question. It was a skill she’d honed over the years. She had it down to a fine art.
The snow-covered hills around the city came into view first, followed by the roofs and spires, coated with white. From a distance Freiburg looked like any medieval town in Europe. However, like everywhere else in Germany, Freiburg had changed under National Socialism. The Allied bombers hadn’t rained destruction upon Freiburg like they had upon Hamburg, Kassel, or Dresden. Indeed, there had been only a few minor bombing raids on the city, but somehow that made the loss of her father even more severe. What had been the point of that raid in October? She wondered if the pilot or the bombardier ever thought about who they were killing when they dropped the bomb on her father’s apartment block as he slept. Were they even aware that they’d killed civilians? Would they even care? Somehow she doubted it. She felt her body tensing. They would never know the kind, gentle man they’d taken from her.
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.”