Hedwig was sitting in the cramped front room of the apartment with all five of her brothers, quizzing Reiner on air raids. It was his homework, but all the boys were listening—all of them except one-year-old Kurt, who was drifting to sleep on her lap. Kurt was too young to understand about bombs or fire or death, and when he had been given a picture book about air raids, he had torn it up and cheerfully stuffed the pieces into his mouth. Hedwig wished she could do the same with Reiner’s quiz.
As she ran through the list of questions, she was trying to keep order while all three of the other boys attempted to compete. Wolfgang, who at eleven was younger than Reiner but brighter, kept butting in. The oldest, Peter, bent over his schoolwork, contributing answers in a tone of bored superiority that infuriated his younger brother. Even little Ludi, who at five was too small for the Pimpf, but who had regular air-raid lessons at kindergarten, kept jumping up and trying to interrupt.
“Stop it, Ludi. It’s my homework!” shouted Reiner, with a mounting flush on his cheeks. “I need to get it right because there’s a big test coming up!”
Reiner always found himself left behind by his cleverer brothers. He was hopeless at school. Perhaps that was why the HJ meant so much to him. It played to his strengths, which were running, fighting, and swimming. Placing a soothing hand on Ludi’s head, Hedwig continued.
“What do you do if you see a fire, Reiner? Who would be the right person to tell? What do you do if someone’s injured? How would you deal with poison gas?”
War was by far her brothers’ favorite subject. It occupied all their thoughts. Even when they weren’t studying it, the boys were playing it in a variety of military board games, Tanks Forward, Without a Propeller, We Sail Against England—a new one involving U-boats—and Bombs over England, a game where Heinkel bombers attacked London Bridge. That was Wolfgang’s favorite, and when Hedwig told him she had seen the real London Bridge and hoped it wouldn’t be bombed, he’d stared at her in disbelief.
But who needed board games now that the whole of the city had turned into one big practice site? Mock air raids and black-outs went on all the time in Berlin. In a recent drill, soldiers trussed up in decontamination suits had hosed down the streets as if clearing poison gas. The Luftwaffe had been co-opted to drop smoke bombs for a more realistic effect, and fire engines raised their ladders up the sides of buildings to stage rescues. The Hitler Youth dedicated a couple of evenings every week to air-raid drills, and Reiner’s battalion had a large-scale exercise coming up. When war came, it would be the HJ that the city would rely on to coordinate the air-raid precautions, check blackouts and sound sirens, and cope with casualties. That was why Reiner’s homework mattered so much, and why Hedwig needed to drum the answers into his head.
She was devoted to her brood of brothers. Sometimes she felt she was never happier than when settled in this drab, untidy, cramped apartment, parrying their backchat and adjudicating over their squabbles. There was Peter, at seventeen serious and ambitious; Reiner and Wolfgang always fighting; Ludi, a burly miniature of their father; and tiny, boisterous Kurt, who called for Hedwig before he called for his mother and whose care Mutti seemed quite happy to delegate. In the evenings when she was not taking Faith and Beauty classes, Hedwig cooked and washed the plates, and after her father departed for the nearest kneipe bar, divided her time between homework, storytelling, and keeping order. Not to mention patching Kurt’s clothes, which had been shed by four brothers before him like the skins of a snake. This humdrum existence could not be less like the gracious, elegant life that the Faith and Beauty Society was preparing her for. Here in Moabit there was no art, or dancing, or conversation to speak of, unless you counted their father bellowing at the children or Mutti moaning about the amount of washing she had to do. There was no music, apart from the light dance music on the radio, which Mutti used to drown out the squabbling of the boys. And yet it could not suit Hedwig better.
Plowing through the pages of questions on Reiner’s list, she felt a pang of sympathy for him. It had been the same for her in the BDM—endless lists of questions that she could still reel off like some leaden poetry imprinted forever in her mind. What is the date and place of birth of the Führer? What are the clauses of the Treaty of Versailles? What is the date of the Beer Hall Putsch? What is the significance of November 10—the answer to that was Martin Luther’s birthday, rather than Kristallnacht, which had raged through the city last year.
At times it seemed citizens of the Reich spent their entire lives answering questionnaires. At the Faith and Beauty Society they marveled at the form issued by the office responsible for maintaining the racial purity of the SS to women hoping to marry. It was seven pages long and spelled out cumbersome requirements of the hopeful girl, including the precise date that she learned to walk, and photographs of herself in a bathing suit taken from three angles. Worse, some of the queries seemed as daunting as a university examination.
“Is the woman positively addicted to housework?” was one. How did you answer that?
“Does she hold fast to the values of German womanhood?”
And the one that had particularly floored Hedwig. “Does she cherish the high ideals of German philosophy?”
God knew how she would ever answer them, yet with any luck there would be no need. The only question she was interested in just then was the one that Jochen had mentioned the other evening in the restaurant. And if it was what she guessed, then it would be both thrilling and terrifying in equal measure.