Projekt 1065 Read online

  The airman grunted. “The three-legged race never was my favorite event at the village fair.”

  “Do you always joke around when your life is in danger?” I asked him as we limped into the barn.

  “No better time,” he said. He stopped. “This is your idea? Hide me in the barn? I didn’t hide in here in the first place because it’s the most obvious place to look.”

  I didn’t tell him it was the first place I’d looked for him. But I did tell him it was the last.

  “That’s why it’s the perfect place now,” I said. “What better place to hide than someplace that’s already been searched and cleared?”

  A slow grin spread across the pilot’s face. “Very clever. Are you sure you’re Irish?”

  “You seem like a nice enough fellow,” I threw back at him. “Are you sure you’re English?”

  He laughed and picked up a pitchfork. Together we dug as far back into the hay piles as we could, and I made a little nest for the pilot while he cut a piece of his shirt away to bandage up his arm. There was a lot of blood. Too much. I worried he might bleed to death before we could come back and get him.

  “Stay here. My parents will pick you up tonight.”

  “And just who are your parents? What are you doing here in Berlin?”

  “My da is the Irish ambassador to Germany,” I told him. “They’ve helped other Allied pilots get out of Germany. They’ll help you too. But they don’t even know you were shot down. I had to act fast.”

  “I’m glad you did,” he said, and he shook my hand. This barn was quickly turning into the place where I made new friends. I didn’t know a long German word for that, so I made one up: die Freundschaftserweisungsscheune. “The befriending barn.”

  I picked up a pitchforkful of hay and got ready to bury him.

  “Wait. I need you to do one more thing,” he said. “I took a camera with me from the plane. A big camera. I was taking reconnaissance photos. Very important reconnaissance photos. I need you to find the camera. Get the film. It’s vital that the film make it out of Germany, even if I don’t. I hid it in one of the haystacks in the field where I came down.”

  “Which haystack?” I asked.

  The British pilot smiled apologetically.

  “Um … the brown one?”

  I searched the haystacks for half an hour before the search party came back over the hill. I was as empty-handed as they were. It was late in the day. Time to head back to Berlin. Reinforcements from the city had arrived. The search for the airman would continue without us, and my search for the camera would have to wait until I came back with my parents tonight.

  “Where were you?” Fritz asked me when we met up back at the truck. “I didn’t see you on the search in the hills.”

  “I thought maybe he’d doubled back a second time, to really throw us off the scent,” I lied. “So I searched the haystacks across the road.”

  Fritz laughed. “You’re quite the gumshoe!”

  I was surprised he used the word gumshoe. It was one of those English words there’s no German translation for. If you want to use it, you have to say it in English, and using English words—or words from any other language besides German—was the kind of thing that drew the attention of the SRD and the Gestapo. And how did Fritz know it, anyway? The only place I’d heard it was in American movies, and they didn’t show those here anymore.

  I didn’t have time to ask him about it. The SRD lined us up, and the SS agents spoke to us again. They frowned at us, angry, as if it was our fault the British pilot had gotten away.

  In my case, at least, they were right.

  “A disappointing day,” one of the SS said. “The British spy will be captured. Every man, woman, and child in this country is his enemy. He will find no help from anyone.”

  Well, not every man, woman, and child, I thought. Inwardly, I smiled.

  “In the meantime, we have at least found what he came to do.”

  A cold grin split the SS man’s face as he held aloft a large black camera. I sagged. They must have found it when they were searching the field, long before I ever went looking for it.

  The SS officer flipped open the back of the camera and yanked out the long plastic filmstrip inside, exposing it to the light and ruining it forever.

  It was dark when my parents and I came back that night. The moon was down and the stars were out. Da drove the last mile or so without the headlights on.

  “I don’t like this,” he said.

  “Well, I don’t much like it either,” Ma said. “But we can’t just leave the lad there to be captured by the Nazis.”

  “No,” Da said. “I mean I don’t like Michael hiding English airmen in barns in broad daylight. He should never have done it.”

  “And what was I supposed to do?” I said, leaning over the back of the front seat. “Just let him get caught?”

  “Yes,” Da said.

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I couldn’t find the words. I looked to my ma in the seat beside him. She had to agree with me. She was the real spy in the family.

  “He’s right, Michael,” Ma said. “Sneaking into studies is one thing. Hiding Royal Air Force pilots is another entirely.”

  “But—but—”

  “But nothing,” Da said. “What if you’d been caught?”

  Ma turned to look at me. “Michael, it’s terrible to say so, but sometimes you have to weigh the cost of one man’s life against the value of an entire operation.”

  Suddenly, I was back in the street again during Kristallnacht, hurrying past a man being beaten to death by the Gestapo. Doing nothing. My face burned hot and my heart beat faster.

  “It’s taken me years to set up my informant network in Berlin,” Ma went on. “If you’d been caught, your father would have been expelled and we would have lost everything.”

  “That’s what this is about?” I said.

  “No, that is not what this is about,” Da said, scowling at Ma. “It’s about Michael getting shot. Or worse.”

  Only in Nazi Germany was there something worse than being shot. The concentration camps.

  “Michael, you’ve a terrific mind for details, and the information you’ve helped send back has been dead useful,” Da said as he drove on. “But you’re thirteen years old. You’ve no business putting your life on the line for anything.”

  I thought Ma might say something in my defense. After all, she was the one who’d trained with Irish Intelligence since she was sixteen years old. She was the one who had taught me how to come up with an excuse to leave a party, how to slip away unnoticed, how to lie. It was an argument she and Da had all the time. But if she thought different this time, she bit her tongue.

  I folded my arms across my chest and stared out the window. No business putting my life on the line for anything. That was exactly what was wrong with Nazi Germany. Some of the Germans must have disagreed with Hitler and the Nazis, but they were afraid that if they said something, did something, they might get shot. Or worse. So instead of anybody doing anything to help anybody else, they kept their eyes on their feet and pretended the sky wasn’t falling down on their heads.

  How could none of them do anything? How could I not?

  Da had only allowed me to come along tonight because I knew where the pilot was hidden. He parked the car far down the lane from the farm, and we snuck quietly up to the barn. The farmhands ought to be sound asleep, and any search for the airman called off till morning, but we still had to be careful.

  The barn door creaked so loud I thought for sure they could hear it all the way back in Berlin, but no lights came on in the farmhouse. There was another surprise too: The barn was full of sleeping cows. Da and Ma and I tiptoed between them, careful not to wake them and set them to mooing, which for sure would wake the farmhands. At last we came to the pile of hay where I’d buried the pilot—hopefully not for good.

  We dug in the hay with our hands instead of the pitchfork, so as not to spear the airman. But the
deeper and deeper we dug, we still couldn’t find him. Ma shot me a silent question with her eyes: Are you sure this is where you left him? I nodded an emphatic yes. This was where I’d left him, but what if the SS had searched the outbuildings again, not trusting us to do the job? What if they had already captured the British pilot? Was he sitting in some cell in Berlin somewhere right this minute, SS agents interrogating him? Torturing him?

  A hand popped up out of the hay beside me, making me jump. He was still there! And he was still alive! My father took the airman’s hand and pulled him out while my mother and I brushed the hay from him. He looked worse than before, but Ma would get him fixed up as soon as we got him back to the embassy.

  “Did you find my camera?” he whispered to me.

  I shook my head. “SS found it first.”

  He sighed and nodded.

  “We can at least get you out of here,” Ma said. “You’ll have to stay with us a while in Berlin first, until you heal up.”

  “What’s your name, son?” Da asked.

  “Lieutenant Simon Cohen, sir,” he said, giving us a British salute.

  My mother and father froze.

  “You’re a Jew?” Da asked.

  “Afraid so,” Simon said, flashing that apologetic smile again. “Is that going to be a problem?”

  Taking a Jew into Berlin, the heart of Nazi Germany, where Jews were Public Enemy Number One, was indeed a problem. A big one. Berlin wasn’t really “Jew-free,” the way the Nazis claimed. It couldn’t be. Anybody with half a brain knew there had to be Jews still in the city, hidden away in secret rooms by sympathetic Germans. The German people even had a nickname for the hidden Jews—they called them U-boats. Like the German submarines. I guess because like U-boats, the Jews were lurking there beneath the surface. The SS were thugs, but they weren’t stupid. They knew there were still Jews in Berlin. They just hadn’t found them yet. But they were searching for them. Hard. And if the SS discovered you were hiding Jews in your home, you were sunk. Your whole family would be sent off to the concentration camps with them. Taking Simon back to Berlin with us and hiding him in our embassy was super dangerous to all of us. Not to mention it might lead to a major international incident if the Irish ambassador was discovered hiding a Jewish British spy.

  We slipped into our home at the embassy around three o’clock in the morning, while all the staff were asleep. Our staff were all German, and though we knew them all by name and they had worked for the embassy for years, Da and Ma still assumed that one or more of them were reporting on us to the Gestapo. Right when we moved here, my parents told me to watch what I said and did around the staff, but that was good advice anywhere in Berlin.

  Da and Ma carried Simon to the secret little room in the back of Da’s study. It was a tiny space no bigger than a closet, where we hid all the books the Nazis wanted us to burn. Like the missing family in that empty gray house, whoever they were, we had a stash of forbidden books too. I waited there with Simon while Da went for the medicine bag and Ma went to the kitchen for food.

  “Well, at least I’ll have something to do while I’m holed up,” Simon said, looking around at all our forbidden books. “Murder on the Orient Express. The Dragon Murder Case. The Maltese Falcon,” he said, reading some of the titles. “You’ve got quite a collection of mystery novels. Which one’s your favorite?” Simon asked me.

  I shrugged. “I haven’t read any of them.”

  Simon stared at me, flabbergasted. “You’ve never read any of them? You’re in a country that is burning piles of books. Books just like these. You’re risking your life to stop the Nazis from doing it. You’re fighting to give people everywhere the right to do what they want, to read what they want, to think for themselves. This, all this,” he said, gesturing at the books on the shelves, “this is what you’re fighting for, and you haven’t even bothered to read them? The Nazis may as well throw them on the fire if you’re not going to read them.”

  I burned red with shame, and I put up my hands in surrender. “Okay, okay!” I said. “Sorry.”

  “This isn’t a game, kiddo,” Simon said. “It’s a war. And it’s not enough to say, ‘The Nazis are the bad guys.’ It’s not who you’re fighting against that matters. It’s what you’re fighting for.”

  Simon pulled a book off the shelf. The Golden Spiders by Rex Stout. He put it in my hands.

  “We’ll start with this one,” he said. “Read a few chapters, and then come back every day and we’ll talk about it.”

  I gaped at him. “I already go to school!”

  “Where you’re taught not one single thing of educational value,” Da said, coming back with the medicine bag. “I think it’s a brilliant idea.”

  “Just make sure you don’t let the staff see you reading it,” Ma said. She’d come back with a sandwich and a glass of milk for Simon.

  I groaned and flipped through the pages. It looked boring.

  Ma went to work cleaning and bandaging Simon’s arm while Da retraced our steps, making sure there were no drops of blood for the staff to find the next day.

  Simon hissed with pain as my mother dabbed at his arm with alcohol.

  “Did you hear the one about the Englishman, the Scotsman, and the Irishman who were being chased by the Gestapo?” he asked me in a strained voice. There he went, joking again. I figured he was trying to focus on something else besides the pain, so I played along while Ma continued to work.

  “I can’t say that I have,” I told him.

  “They hide out in this old warehouse where there are three empty sacks on the floor, and each of them jumps into a sack. The Gestapo officer comes in and sees three full sacks on the floor. He kicks the first one, and the Englishman shouts, ‘Woof woof!’ The Gestapo man thinks it’s just an old dog in the sack, so he kicks the second bag. The Scotsman cries, ‘Meow! Meow!’ and the officer leaves it alone, thinking it must be a cat. He kicks the third sack, and the Irishman yells, ‘Potatoes! Potatoes!’ ”

  “Potato jokes? Really?” I said.

  Lieutenant Cohen gave me his big straight-toothed smile. Ma had finished with his arm and was tending to his ankle when Da came back.

  “I’ll start working on a plan right away to get you out of Germany,” Ma told Simon.

  “Not you?” he asked Da.

  “I’m the legit side of the business,” he told Simon. “She’s the clandestine part.”

  Once my parents told me what they were up to, that Night of Broken Glass, I’d begun to see the strange things my mother did in a new light. Like the time when I was seven, just after we’d moved to Berlin, when Ma had taken me for a walk all around the city, shooting my picture in front of the Tempelhof Airport, the German Ministry of Aviation, and the Reich Chancellery, the building from which Adolf Hitler ruled. She hadn’t been taking pictures of me. Not really. She’d been taking pictures of strategic targets. Even then I’d been part of the family business; I just hadn’t known it yet.

  “Women and children make terrific spies,” Ma told me later. “Because people always underestimate us.”

  “It will take some time to arrange for the transportation,” Ma told Simon now. “But you’re not going anywhere until this ankle heals anyhow. You’ve lost a lot of blood too. A few days’ rest and recuperation wouldn’t go amiss, I’m thinking.”

  “What in the name of all that’s holy were you doing flying solo over Berlin in broad daylight?” Da asked. American bombers attacked during the day, but there were dozens, hundreds of them at a time. Not solo planes that were easy to shoot at.

  “Taking pictures,” Simon said. He sucked in air and the color drained from his face as Ma tested his ankle. “Photos ruined, though … All for nothing … Nazis are developing some new kind of airplane … Works without propellers … Super fast … Caught it on the runway during testing … They call it … Projekt 1065 … ”

  Morning dawned bright and early. Too bright and too early when you’d been up half the night rescuing a downed British airma
n from the countryside and hiding him in your house. I came out of my room and looked down the hall at where my father’s study was, thinking about Simon hidden away in that little room. The plan was that Da would lock the door to his study and check in on Simon every few hours, giving him a chance to go to the bathroom, have a little something to eat. But anything more and the staff would know something fishy was happening, and one of them would get word back to the Gestapo.

  I watched as the staff came and went, doing their morning chores. Which of them were sympathetic to the Allies? Which of them were loyal to Hitler? Had found “the freedom, the joy, that comes with giving yourself completely to the Führer,” as Horst called it?

  Which of them would spy on us for the Gestapo to save their families from the concentration camps?

  There was no way to know. The only thing we could do was to keep our U-boat submerged as much as possible, only letting him up every now and then for air.

  I dragged myself to school, half-asleep and fading fast. I planned to close my eyes and sleep through Herr Professor Doktor Major Melcher’s lecture on Nazi history. I’d memorized it all already anyway, and could answer anything he asked if he called on me.

  I had my head down on my desk at the back of the room before class started, drool trickling from my gaping mouth, when I felt someone poking me in the shoulder.

  “Hey! Hey, Michael! Wake up!” It was Fritz. And he wouldn’t stop poking me. Yesterday, I had fought to save his life. This morning, all I wanted to do was kill him.

  “Leave me alone,” I mumbled from behind my arms.

  “Michael, wake up! I want to show you something.”

  I dragged my head up. Whatever this was had better be good.

  “I was going to show this to everybody,” Fritz whispered, “but I’m just going to show it to you instead.” Fritz did the German Look over his shoulder to make sure no one else was listening, and I woke up a little. Whatever Fritz wanted to tell me, he didn’t want anybody else to hear it. Which meant it was something worth hearing.