Allies Read online

  Uncle Otto’s disappearance was the final straw for Dee’s parents. They’d already been horrified by the Nazis’ growing power in their country. Stunned by how many people voted for the Nazis and showed up at their rallies. Nazi flags had appeared on every office building and shop and home, until it became dangerous not to have one. Until dissent became unpatriotic. Until it became criminal to not stand and salute the führer.

  And the worst part was that Germany hadn’t suddenly “become” racist and evil. That rot had been there, under the surface, the whole time. Hitler’s hate-filled speeches had allowed the seeds of German bigotry to grow like weeds until they choked out anything else that might have flowered there. Dee and his family had just been living in their own little bubble and hadn’t noticed it.

  But they saw it clearly when Uncle Otto disappeared into the Night and Fog. They left Germany while they still could, before the war started. They came to America as refugees, and Dee’s new life in Philadelphia began at age five.

  The Higgins boat was slapped by a giant wave, and the cold water made Dee gasp. Seawater was pouring in over the side of the boat. Too much water. Sergeant Taylor barked orders for everyone to bail. Dee looked around for a bucket, but there weren’t any nearby. Beside him, Sid pulled off his helmet, gave Dee a grin and a shrug, and scooped his helmet into the vomit-filled water at their feet. Dee did the same, tossing a helmetful of sick-stew over the side.

  Would Sid care that Dee’s parents had disagreed with Hitler? Would Sid care that they had run away to America so Dee wouldn’t be scooped up by the Hitler Youth and brainwashed to hate everyone who wasn’t a “pure” German? That Dee had been in America for almost his whole life, so long that he had lost any trace of his German accent?

  Or would Sid blame Dee and his parents for what had happened in Germany? It was true that Dee’s family hadn’t been the ones persecuting Jews and other minorities. But Dee and his parents hadn’t done anything to try to stop the Nazis either. They hadn’t spoken up when they could, and when it was too late to speak up, they had run away.

  Somewhere beyond the fog, the sun broke the horizon. Dee felt the rumble of the boat’s motor in the pit of his stomach, and he realized they were heading toward the shore.

  They were going in to land on Omaha Beach at last.

  Fa-FOOM.

  Dee flinched and ducked. One of the big American destroyers behind his Higgins boat fired all its guns at once, shelling the German defenses on shore. The huge shells felt like a freight train roaring past. Battleships up and down the line fired again and again, their muzzles flashing bright orange in the darkness.

  The Higgins boat plowed ahead through the waves, and even though it was summer, Dee was cold. The sea spray and the water at the bottom of the boat froze him to the bone. He hugged himself and crouched low, staring at the green metal helmets of the soldiers in front of him.

  Nobody spoke. You couldn’t. You’d have to yell to be heard over the motor, and the ocean, and the battleships, and the planes droning by overhead. Most everybody was lost in their own thoughts anyway.

  Dee thought of his parents. His mother, a thin woman with long blond hair who worked as an illustrator for a pattern-design company. His father, a short, balding man who managed a food warehouse. His parents had left behind everything they knew and everyone they loved to get Dee out of Nazi Germany. They’d learned a new language and started new lives and made a new home for their son. Would he ever see them again?

  Dee felt a tear run down his cheek. He pretended to wipe away the sea spray as he dragged his sleeve across his face.

  “Hey,” Sid said to Dee, yelling right in his ear to be heard. “It’s D-Day. Get it? Dee-Day. This is your day, Dee. That means you gotta make it through okay.”

  Despite the sick feeling in his stomach, Dee smiled. Every time the US Army started a mission, the first day was called D-Day. That’s what the D stood for: It meant “Day-Day,” or “Starting Day.” There had been plenty of other D-Days before. But this was the big one, and all the soldiers knew it. THE D-Day.

  And Dee liked the idea of this one being “Dee-Day.” His day. It kind of was, after all. It was Dee’s day for atonement. The day he came back to Europe to undo what his family had allowed to happen eleven years ago. Today was the culmination of events that had been set in motion that night Uncle Otto had disappeared.

  Dee heard a scream like the squeal of a radio overhead, and he looked up. A cloud of rockets shot past, fire and smoke drawing orange and gray streaks across the sky. The rockets went on and on and on. Hundreds of them. Thousands. Dee and his platoonmates looked around at each other in wonder—this was something new.

  Boom. Boom-boom-boom-boom. Dee heard the rockets explode up ahead, beyond the seven-foot-tall ramp at the front of their boat. Sid smiled at Dee, as if to say, “What could be left for us to fight after that?” But the grim expressions on the faces of the veterans around them dulled Dee’s optimism.

  At the front of the boat, Sergeant Taylor turned to yell at them.

  “All right, you louts. This is it!” he shouted. “This isn’t just an invasion of France. It’s a toehold in Europe. The first step in pushing the Jerries all the way back to Berlin. We’re the foot in the door. The wrench in the works. The kick in Hitler’s nuts.”

  Dee sat up straighter, listening closely.

  “I don’t have to tell you how big this is!” the sergeant continued. “You’ve seen it. All the years of planning by the muckety-mucks in Washington and London. All the ships, planes, and tanks. All the pilots and spies and paratroopers and artillerymen and sailors and medics who did their part so we could be where we are, right here, right now, standing in a puddle of our own sick with Normandy and all of Europe right behind this ramp. Everything’s come together for this one moment, and now it’s all down to us. So don’t screw it up.”

  Great pep talk, Sergeant, Dee thought as the Higgins boat shuddered and bumped. The engine slowed.

  Sid put his helmet to Dee’s helmet and bellowed in his big, deep voice, “Don’t worry, buddy—we’re going to get through this together!”

  Then the boat hit the beach, and the ramp fell down on history.

  A door slammed in the sleepy French village, making eleven-year-old Samira Zidane jump. She gripped her mother’s hand tighter as they hurried along the road out of town. Her mother squeezed back. I’m scared too, the squeeze told her, but we’ll get through this together.

  Samira’s mother, Kenza Zidane, wore a tan raincoat and a blue kerchief, doing her best to hide her beauty—and her black hair and light brown skin. Samira and her mother were French Algerian, and the Nazis weren’t tolerant of anyone who didn’t match their white-skinned, blond-haired Aryan ideal. Samira wished she’d brought a kerchief to hide her hair and face too. But she’d gotten dressed too quickly and wore just a simple green dress and brown sweater.

  Samira searched for the full moon in the sky, but clouds covered it, making the road beyond the village dark and full of shadows. It wasn’t quiet though. Night was never quiet in this part of northern France. Not since the German occupation began. Night after night, American and English planes droned overhead, dropping bombs on Normandy’s bigger cities. Samira had heard that Caen, Vire, and Lisieux were more rubble than buildings now. The Germans, refusing to take the beating without a fight, rattled anti-aircraft guns at the bombers, drawing brilliant white lines across the sky like fireworks.

  Samira and her mother needed the noise and the darkness. It was well after curfew, when no one was allowed to be on the streets but soldiers. If you were caught out after curfew, you were automatically arrested and thrown into jail. If you were lucky. Samira had seen Germans shoot people as spies just for being out late.

  And that’s what Samira’s mother was. A spy for the French Resistance.

  Samira herself wasn’t a spy, but she was a convenient prop. If caught, they had a practiced story that Samira was sick and Kenza was taking her to a doctor. That was why
they were out so late at night and couldn’t wait until morning. The Nazis were unlikely to be sympathetic, but at least it was a realistic excuse for why they were out when they shouldn’t be. And a woman with an eleven-year-old girl in tow was far less likely to be accused of being a spy.

  Samira’s mother pulled her along by the hand, her eyes scanning every inch of the road and the fields. They had been out after curfew before, and it was always dangerous. But if ever there was a night to take the risk, this was it.

  That evening, during the nightly BBC radio broadcast from England, Samira and her mother had heard the words all of France had been waiting to hear: “Les dés sont sur le tapis. Il fait chaud à Suez.” “The dice are on the carpet. It’s hot in Suez.” They were code words. They were meaningless to the Germans, but they meant everything to the French Resistance, the scattered groups of citizens who had taken up arms and were hiding out in the forests and mountains and villages, fighting a guerrilla war against the Nazi occupation. The code words meant that the Allied forces were invading France at last.

  And it was the job of Samira and her mother to take that message to the Resistance fighters south of their little town of Villers-Bocage.

  As they hurried toward the woods, where their contacts in the Resistance were hiding, Samira remembered another desperate night journey with her mother: their escape from Paris four years ago. Millions of Parisians had left the city in the days before the Nazis rolled in, but Samira’s family had stayed. Her parents were students from Algeria at the University of Paris, and they had nowhere else to go. Samira had watched in horror as the Nazi soldiers goose-stepped their way down the Champs-Élysées, Paris’s famous avenue of shops, theaters, and cafés. The Nazis had hung their swastika flag from the Arc de Triomphe and filled the Parisian cafés like they were on holiday.

  Samira’s parents were in favor of Algerian independence from France, but with the Nazis in control, they knew that dream would never come true. So in 1940, Samira’s father had taken part in a student protest against the German occupation. But the Nazis did not take kindly to protests. In the massacre that followed, German soldiers killed Samira’s father. Samira had been just seven years old. Fearing for their lives, Samira’s mother had fled with her from Paris into the countryside, aided by a fledgling Resistance group made up of former students turned rebels. Here, among the farms and hedgerows of Normandy, using false papers to hide their identities, Samira and her mother had survived.

  They had worked as messengers for the Resistance ever since.

  Samira and her mother were almost in the woods when they heard shouting and crying from up the road. Samira’s heartbeat quickened. Trouble? Here in the countryside? This late at night?

  Samira and her mother ducked into the cover of blueberry bushes beside the road. They crept along until they saw a group of farmhouses where French families were being dragged from their homes and loaded into trucks at gunpoint by soldiers.

  Nazi soldiers.

  Samira watched the raid from the shadows, her pulse pounding in her ears.

  “When will you learn?” a Nazi officer said to the French farmers in heavily accented French. “For every one of us you kill, a hundred of you will die!”

  “This must be retaliation for the killing of Major Vogel,” Samira’s mother whispered. The Nazi officer had been murdered by the French Resistance less than a day ago. “I’ve told them not to do that. They’ll only send another Nazi bigwig, and we always pay heavily for it.”

  “But we did nothing!” cried one of the old men being dragged from his home. “None of us was responsible!”

  Samira knew it didn’t matter. This was standard operating procedure for the Nazis. If one of their men was assassinated, they took their revenge by rounding up a hundred of the local French citizens and executing them publicly. Her heart went out to the French farmers. None of this was their fault, but they were the ones being punished.

  A flash of movement behind one of the farmhouses caught Samira’s attention.

  “Look,” she whispered to her mother, pointing. A woman was lifting her young children out of a ground-floor window to escape from the Nazis.

  “We have to help her,” Samira’s mother said. She was already standing to go to the woman’s aid.

  “But what about the radio message?” Samira asked. “What if we’re caught?”

  “We’re in the Resistance, Samira,” her mother told her. “We resist.”

  As Samira and her mother ran to help the woman and her children, a little white dog on a rope in the backyard started to bark excitedly.

  “Samira,” her mother whispered, “see what you can do to get that dog quiet.”

  Samira ran for the dog. It leaped up on her happily, tail wagging, and licked her face.

  “Yes! Yes. Hello, dog,” Samira said. “We need to be quiet now so the Nazis don’t catch us.”

  It was too late. German soldiers came around the side of the house with rifles in hand, and they caught the French woman and Samira’s mother as they were taking the last of four children out of the window.

  Samira’s breath caught in her throat, and her heart stopped. Maman! she thought. No!

  The soldiers yelled orders in German while the French mother begged for her children’s lives. Kenza Zidane gave her daughter a look laced with fear, and Samira clapped her hand around the little dog’s snout and backed into its doghouse, where she was swallowed in shadow. Samira watched, tears streaming down her face, as one of the soldiers yanked off her mother’s beautiful blue kerchief and tossed it on the ground before dragging her away along with the French family.

  “Don’t come after me, Samira!” her mother called out in Arabic, knowing the German guards wouldn’t understand. “Get somewhere safe and stay there! I will see you again in heaven, love of my heart!”

  Samira hiccuped a sob and put a hand over her own mouth so she wouldn’t cry out. Tears streamed down her face. Maman!

  The little dog in Samira’s arms started growling, and there was nothing she could do to quiet him. One of the soldiers turned at the sound and started walking toward the doghouse. Samira shook with fright. If the Nazi caught her, she would be reunited with her mother. Yes, she longed for that—but they would be reunited only until both of them were shot later that morning. Free, Samira could find help. Try to save her mother in time.

  The soldier came closer. The little dog fought to break free of Samira’s arms. The Nazi was almost on top of her now. He was bending down.

  Inside, Samira screamed, What do I do?

  Samira let go of the dog and out he bounded, barking his little head off and charging the soldier like a bull. The soldier was so surprised he cried out and stumbled back, falling down on his bottom in the dirt.

  A few paces away, another Nazi soldier laughed. The little dog barked and snarled, and as he jumped around the fallen soldier, the German got tangled up in the dog’s rope. That only made the other soldier laugh harder, which the fallen soldier didn’t seem to appreciate. Samira held deathly still as the fallen Nazi kicked at the little dog and stood. He said something harsh to the other soldier as he untangled himself. Then he backed away, out of the range of the little dog’s rope, and aimed his rifle at the dog.

  No!

  Samira almost said it out loud, and she had to catch herself before leaping out to protect the dog. She didn’t want to get caught, but she didn’t want the dog to die either.

  The other soldier said something serious through his trailing laughter. Maybe he was trying to tell the humiliated solider not to shoot the dog? But the little dog kept barking, and the soldier kept his gun aimed right in its face.

  Samira couldn’t take it. She couldn’t let the soldier shoot the dog, even if it meant being captured herself. She crawled forward on her hands and knees. Her head had just emerged from the doghouse when—

  Honk-honk!

  The German truck honking in the road made both the soldiers turn and look. The truck must have been leavin
g, because both soldiers suddenly ran, not wanting to miss their ride back to Bayeux. Samira ducked inside the doghouse and waited until the sound of the truck was long gone before she came out again.

  The little dog met her at the entrance and licked her face.

  Samira wiped her eyes dry. “You almost got us both into a lot of trouble,” she told the little dog. His tail wagged again, the threat of the soldiers in his yard already a distant memory. “Here. No sense leaving you tied up, now that your family is gone,” Samira said. She untied the rope around the dog’s collar, but he hardly seemed to notice. He was happy to sniff around her feet.

  Samira went to where her mother’s kerchief lay on the ground and picked it up. It was the only thing she had left of her now. Samira wrapped the kerchief around her head, tying it at the bottom, and wiped tears from her eyes again.

  Enough crying. Her mother had told her to get somewhere safe and stay there. There were a dozen places Samira knew she could go and find refuge for at least the night.

  But she wasn’t going to do what her mother told her. She was going to do the exact opposite. Samira had already lost her father to the Nazis, and she wasn’t going to lose her mother too.

  Samira was going to free her mother. And the only way to do that was to find the Maquis.

  The Maquis would help Samira free her mother. They had to.

  The “Maquis” was what everyone called the Resistance fighters. That’s who Samira and her mother had been going to warn about the coming invasion in the first place. The word maquis meant a “bush” or “thicket” in French. Since that was where the fighters often operated from, it had come to be their name too. Taking on the German army head-to-head was suicide, so the Maquis used guerrilla tactics: attacking tanks just long enough to blow up their treads and then running away, sabotaging phone lines, blowing up weapons depots.