A Ritchie Boy Page 11

  He saw that the others were intently listening, so he decided to tell them about the fight. “We lived in a mixed neighborhood. Some rough older kids were always after me. One day I decided I was ready to take them on. I told the largest kid to fight me one-on-one. As he moved forward, I kicked him as hard as I could in the groin, grabbed him by the hair, and punched him hard in the stomach. He landed on his back. The others fled fast. I learned then that if you have the right tools, you can get back at the enemy. Right, fellas?”

  “We all were persecuted in one way or another,” Max said. “Now it’s time to get even with Hitler.”

  They arrived in Washington in time for dinner. Bobby hadn’t bothered to tell them his mother was a well-known radio host on WWDC—all the more impressive for her as a rare female in broadcasting—or that his father had socked away a bunch of money and they lived much as they had in Hamburg. And that she was a great cook.

  Between bites of chicken française and rice pilaf, Lena asked what each boy had studied before getting drafted. Henry realized he’d only known about Max’s expertise in architecture because it came up during document analysis class, as did his aptitude in structural engineering. Eli shared that he was a business major at Ohio State and hoped someday to attend law school.

  “Mom just wants to rub in that she’d wanted me to follow my dad’s footsteps into medicine. I majored in theater at George Washington—it’s in Foggy Bottom. I’ll take you through there tomorrow.” Bobby passed the basket of rolls to Henry. “Being pre-med would have deferred me from the draft. A sore point with Mom.”

  “Well, then you wouldn’t have met these lovely young men, Bobby. Nor would I.” Lena’s smile made her entire face light up.

  The idea that Bobby had wanted to be an actor both surprised and made perfect sense to Henry. It explained why Bobby was exceptional during the role-playing sessions in their interrogation classes, and that he was the most sensitive of the group, prone to playing his harmonica quietly on the cabin porch. And why he seemed to dislike the intelligence field activities.

  “When all this is over, I want to move to New York and perform on Broadway,” Bobby confessed.

  “Hey, maybe we could be roommates again.” As a kid, Henry had always dreamed of building skyscrapers. That was behind his decision to major in engineering. And now he could picture it: finally getting out of Queens to live in Manhattan, working his way up at a major real estate company.

  It was the first glimpse into his future that he’d let himself imagine since they met at Camp Ritchie.

  THE NEXT DAY, AFTER Bobby showed them around his hometown, they stopped at Lena’s radio station on Connecticut Avenue. WWDC broadcast almost around the clock, beginning at eight in the morning, with newscasts five minutes before every hour. Lena hosted a daily talk show that ended at noon. She had just gotten off the air when they made their appearance.

  “Well, I’m impressed. You look quite official in your Army attire.” Lena led them down the station’s narrow hallway, intent on giving them a tour.

  Henry peeked into the first open door. “Wow! Look at all that equipment!”

  A man who seemed to be in his thirties looked up at Henry, laying aside his stack of papers. A microphone speaker hung above his desk in front of a metal console filled with knobs and keys. Black padded earphones casually wrapped around his neck and rested against his crisp white collar. “Who do we have here? Well, hello, Lena.”

  “Wes, let me introduce you to these Army intelligence trainees—Henry White, Eli Stoff, Max Schultz. And my son, Bobby. Boys, this is Weston Karr, WWDC’s top news announcer.”

  “Nice to meet you all.” Karr pushed himself away from his desk and motioned the group to come inside his boxy studio. “I have some time before my next broadcast. Happy to answer any of your questions. But only if you share some of your military secrets with me.” He flashed them his winsome smile.

  Henry was most interested in the design and use of the broadcast panel. Max wondered if WWDC broadcast music as well. He shared his father’s prominent role with the Detroit Symphony and that the orchestra’s national radio broadcasts used to be heard on the Ford Symphony Hour. Eli and Bobby remained uncharacteristically quiet until Karr asked them questions about their Camp Ritchie training. While they avoided specifics, each spoke of the general training that would allow them to bring useful enemy information back to the Army.

  A red light illuminated the glass “On Air” marquee above the door, signaling the upcoming broadcast. The trainees quickly thanked Weston for his time and filed back into the hallway. Lena corralled them into the next studio, almost identical in size and filled with similar equipment but unmanned.

  “Let’s listen to Weston’s broadcast in here.” Lena’s words were cut off by her colleague’s voice crackling into the studio over the intercom.

  Allies land in France and wipe out big air bases! Stay tuned for more news after these words from our sponsors.

  Patriotic messages filled a full minute of airtime. Advertisements for Marlboro, Nestlé, and Coca-Cola dragged on, intensifying the charged anticipation in the cramped room. Henry remained standing as he held his breath and looked at his friends, their expressions taut. This was real time. Real news. And it was coming from the studio right next to them.

  After a promotion for GM’s Oldsmobile division that declared “Fire power is our business,” Max groused, “Geez,” under his breath. Finally, Weston’s voice burst back over the airwaves.

  This report just in, folks. Under the command of General Eisenhower, Allied naval troops supported by strong air forces began landing Allied armies this morning on the northern coast of France. An Associated Press correspondent flying over the French coast in a B-26 Marauder reported seeing the fields inland strewn with hundreds of parachutes and dotted with gliders, while great naval forces fired into the coast fortifications. The landing fleet included several battleships, which the Germans said set the whole Seine Bay area ablaze with their fire.

  No one spoke at first. But one thing was instantly, indisputably clear: their intense practice these months at Camp Ritchie was over. Henry saw resignation and acceptance as the four friends locked eyes with one another. They were ready to become intelligence experts and interrogators in a real war. To carry out their orders. But there would be the noble cause of their work and the brutal reality of that work. Didn’t their instructors tell them that, in the end, war is about rage and cruelty and killing and death?

  As soldiers they were about to face something immense, something they couldn’t possibly grasp. It occurred to Henry how temporary their experience at Camp Ritchie had been, how fragile and fleeting their sense of belonging. He thought back to the evening on their cabin porch not six months earlier: the quiet beauty of the night and the pulsating rhythm of music that morphed into a moment of camaraderie and connection.

  Who knew what uncertain fates lay ahead of them?

  THE INTERROGATION

  January 1945

  BEYOND THE PRISONER FACING him, Eli Stoff saw daylight dimming through the room’s single window. Across the table, the young soldier remained silent, staring at his hands, which he clasped tightly on the cold aluminum. A lighter, a broken cigarette, and a black-and-red enameled Deutsche Jungvolk membership badge lay to the side. Eli had had the boy empty his pockets before he began his interrogation. Now, several hours in, the January chill seeped through the plaster walls. It was time to get inside Malcolm Schlick’s head.

  Eli lowered his voice and leaned forward. “So, you had no choice but to sign on with Hitler’s army. You did what you were told. I understand.”

  Eli was trained to “understand.” He’d arrived in Paris in late December, part of a six-man military intelligence team. His orders were simple: arrest all Nazis impersonating Allied officers, put them through rudimentary questioning, write up a report. But something about Malcolm Schlick made this case more complex. Eli couldn’t put his finger on it.

  Schlick still
wore the olive-drab uniform he’d used to blend into the Paris streets, like so many of the beaten-down Germans trying to evade capture. Last night, Eli had overheard traces of German in Schlick’s otherwise fluid French as he bought a paper at the local newsstand. He noticed Schlick’s uniform was scruffy, patched with dried mud—probably taken from a dead soldier. Curfew approached, so Eli had quickly motioned his MI partner, Henry White, to act as backup before he approached the likely imposter.

  Now the boy—because he was just a boy at seventeen—sat in a sterile room in an abandoned villa in Le Vésinet, red blotches flaring up on his neck. Eli couldn’t help feeling sorry for Schlick, who he now knew hailed from a village near Salzburg, plucked from his family at fifteen to face front-line combat. Whether he joined the German troops of his own volition or under duress was yet to be determined.

  Eli felt a slight tapping of the boy’s foot against the wood floor. “Can I get you a cup of tea or coffee?” he asked him.

  Malcolm looked up, a sudden shiver twitching through his upper body. “Ja, Kaffee. Bitte.”

  That familiar Austrian-accented German. It matched up with Schlick’s Salzburg narrative.

  Eli regarded the boy more closely. Malcolm was unskilled in mastering his facial expressions, lacking that mask donned by the men Eli had faced over the past weeks—a mask he would get them, eventually, to drop. Malcolm seemed unpracticed, too, in arranging his body to hide distress. Fear, not anger, shone through the young Austrian’s eyes, pressing on his brows, circling his mouth. Vulnerability spoke in the slack of his shoulders.

  Eli had been trained to notice these signs as he interrogated suspects and prisoners. He worked to make them feel safe so he could learn more about Nazi plans or troop movements—anything to better inform Allied forces as they edged toward victory in an insufferable war. That’s how he found himself stationed in a town west of Paris, face-to-face with a member of the Hitler-Jugend just four years his junior.

  Eli set down the container of coffee, its steam rising like a genie from an oil lamp. He paused while Malcolm drew the cup to his lips, then pressed on. “When did you learn French?”

  “My parents sent me to private school. South of Salzburg, in Anif.” Malcolm kept his head down, his sandy-colored waves falling into his face. “I learned French and English. And we had relatives in France. Visited them during summers when I was growing up.”

  Eli’s memory of Salzburg was when he’d gone skiing in Tyrol on a class trip with his best friend, Toby Wermer, in March of ’38. When he saw soldiers with Nazi banners and swastikas at the Salzburg stop on the way back to Vienna, he’d grasped his uncertain future.

  “Did you ski in the winters?”

  “I did. With my father. He started me when I was three.” Malcolm’s mouth relaxed for a moment. “But things changed … while I was still a young boy.”

  “Tell me more about how you became a soldier.”

  Eli went along with the boy’s story that he hadn’t joined the German Army of his own free will, and he purposefully didn’t label Malcolm a Nazi. He knew to avoid words that might trigger the young soldier to shut down. It was part of a general avoidance of confrontation he’d learned long before his interrogation training—from all the times he’d been spat at, insulted, and bullied in his own neighborhood.

  “They came to my school in ’39. I was twelve. After the Anschluss, Hitler-Jugend membership became compulsory for us. Nazi Party reps were always coming to speak.” Malcolm’s eyes seemed unfocused and distant as he continued. “They talked about how Hitler’s youth organization developed future officers. Made it seem an honor, a stepping-stone. There were gatherings, events. Special uniforms. Boys as young as ten were recruited. Many of my friends were excited to join.”

  “You weren’t?” Eli remembered the pressures in Austria bubbling up and penetrating the broad consciousness of his non-Jewish neighbors, the friends of his family or the workers at his father’s factory. Propaganda about the superiority of the Aryan race and against the Jews was ubiquitous. He could still see his classmates’ eyes widen, taking in those uniforms in the train station on the way back from Tyrol. He understood the pull on an impressionable boy wanting to belong to something. Did Malcolm feel he had no choice? Or did he find the Nazis’ message appealing?

  “Let’s say I had little interest in the military. I like music. I read a lot.”

  Of course the boy would be partial to music; after all, Salzburg was Mozart’s birthplace. Music was native to Austria’s air. But Malcolm’s affect—the direct way he answered Eli’s questions—reminded Eli of Toby. Not in appearance—Malcolm was as tall as Eli and had a sturdy build, whereas Toby was short and thin, with dark hair he wore long and unkempt. But Toby was a voracious reader of novels and any periodical he could get his hands on, and a lover of all kinds of music. He was always asking questions no one would think to articulate or making observations that would get to some truth.

  “How did that go over with your friends, your teachers?”

  Malcolm glanced curiously at Eli. “Not all Austrians and Germans were Nazis, you know.” His eyes glared at nothing in particular. “But they made it quite clear what was the acceptable behavior and point of view. Unfortunately, most of my peers became indoctrinated. Lost their ability to see the world differently.” He swallowed hard. “Boys like me knew to keep quiet or bad things would happen.”

  Eli remembered how Toby learned to moderate his opinions over time. Like during the Olympics in ’36. Toby hated that Hitler had muddied the games, as he’d put it, with his views of Aryan supremacy. Toby voiced his thoughts within earshot of several teachers at their school. After the unannounced search of his home by local authorities that evening, Toby could only silently cheer the four gold medals won by the Negro Jesse Owens.

  Toby and Eli met when they were six and became inseparable. The difference in their religious backgrounds never came up until Toby had to defend Eli.

  While Eli knew there were non-Jewish Austrians like Toby who disagreed with Hitler’s ideology—some who refused to join the Party—he nonetheless identified every soldier in the German Army as a Nazi. All his Army buddies did. In fact, Eli lumped all German soldiers together as the same anti-Semites who had persecuted him and his family. But Toby didn’t fit this mold. And now, Malcolm Schlick didn’t either. Still, Eli held onto his doubts.

  “So, when Austria came under the German Reich, you joined Hitler-Jugend.”

  “I told you, I had to join. After ’38, Austrians fell under the same Nazi laws.” Malcolm pushed away from the table, the chair legs scraping the floor. “My parents signed me up the next year—they had no choice. From then on, most of Germany’s and Austria’s teenagers belonged to the HJ.”

  Eli had escaped Vienna just after the Anschluss, when anti-Jewish discrimination was officially sanctioned. Everything happened so fast. The affidavits came through, and his mother set straight to packing. He wrote Toby when he arrived in New York. Toby’s letter back was cryptic: rapid changes in Vienna, the omnipresence of Nazi soldiers, pressure on his parents to join the party. Then he reverted to lighthearted Toby talk—books he was reading, new jazz he’d discovered. Toby no sooner fit into the Hitler Youth movement than Eli. But that was the last time Eli had heard from him.

  Eli was well aware of Nazi indoctrination but hadn’t appreciated until now how systemic, pervasive, and resolute its recruitment, and how very young its members. It was something he’d emphasize in his report. But he began thinking again about Toby, just fifteen when Eli left Austria. What if he were forced, like Malcolm, to join?

  “Why would you keep your membership badge, if you were coerced as you say? Pocketed as if it were a memento.” The black-and-red object sat between them. Eli picked it up and turned it over, its smooth enamel surface as cold as the dank interrogation room.

  “The Germans in disguise in Paris had only one enemy. I had two—the Nazis I wished to escape and the Americans who, like you, see me as a spy.”
Malcolm grimaced as he eyed Eli. “I needed some proof of membership if I encountered my German comrades.”

  Eli silently smiled at the boy’s agile response and decided to veer in a new direction, beyond his standard script. “What do you remember about the Anschluss?”

  “Germans marching into the city. Arrests. My parents said opponents of the regime and minorities were targeted—their way of urging me to keep my views to myself. A synagogue near my father’s office was destroyed.” Malcolm’s square jaw gave him an appearance of someone older just then. He fixed his gaze on Eli. “Your German is perfect. Perfect Austrian German. When did you leave … and why?”

  Eli should have expected this question, since nothing about this encounter followed procedure. He’d kept digging for more from Malcolm, despite the fact that he already had what he needed. He knew Schlick was a deserter from the Ardennes Counteroffensive. He had a deeper understanding of the Hitler Youth movement and new insight about the current composition of the German Army.

  But it wasn’t that simple now. Malcolm’s enlistment had been a suffocating sentence. It was the law that he and his parents had no choice but to obey. Malcolm could have been Toby. And, if Eli hadn’t been Jewish, he could have been Malcolm. A jumble of feelings roiled inside Eli. His past and present blurred in his mind, and, for a moment, he felt slightly dislocated.

  Eli needed time to think. It was already late, so he chose to avoid Malcolm’s question by offering to get them some food. Frosty air from the central courtyard of the villa rushed into the six-by-six space when he opened the interrogation room door. As he stepped outside, he didn’t worry about Schlick escaping. The arrest seemed liberating to the boy. Like most prisoners from Germany and Austria, Schlick had to be relieved to be apprehended by the U.S. instead of the Soviets. And American treatment would easily be an improvement over the life he was trying to escape as a soldier on the front lines of a depleted army.