Prisoner of Night and Fog Read Online Free PDF Page A

the narrow Tengstrasse thronged with students spilling out of school: classmates from the Gymnasium , laughing and chattering to one another as they milled about on the pavement, and small boys from the primary school, roughhousing and teasing as they streamed down the avenue.
    Gretchen joined her circle of friends. The girls were groaning about Frau Huber’s announcement—a Latin exam this week, simply cruel after the weekend’s assignment on the Aeneid , with all those horrible declensions—and Gretchen’s gaze moved to the next group of girls, meeting the eyes of Erika Goldberg.
    Erika smiled and Gretchen started to smile back, then shame pushed heat into her cheeks and she looked away. She was supposed to despise Erika Goldberg. Erika with the wild corkscrew curls and even wilder laugh. Erika who told funny jokes and could recite the first five stanzas of the Aeneid from memory. She was the enemy, Gretchen had to remind herself when they passed each other in the hallway.
    But she couldn’t. She laughed at Erika’s jokes, even though she shouldn’t. She admired Erika’s grasp of Latin, even though she should sneer. And sometimes, when her classmates gathered at the front steps after school, she wished she could stand with Erika, talking about Frau Huber’s ridiculous clothes, or the impossible English exam, or the handsome boys from the Gymnasium the next street over, but she didn’t. Whenever she turned in Erika’s direction, an invisible string jerked her back.
    She looked away from Erika’s tentative smile, muttering an excuse about getting back to the boardinghouse to help her mother.
    As she walked on alone, hot, dirty air pressed against her face. Up ahead, a low-slung black automobile belched exhaust, and a street vendor scooped scorched-smelling roasted chestnuts into paper bags for schoolboys. Mothers pushed babies in prams, and a woman with a mop tossed a bucket of water onto a flight of front steps. A trio of young men, wearing the SA’s plain brown uniform with the swastika brassard on the arm, ambled along, laughing and smoking. The street looked the same as it did every afternoon when she walked home from school. Everything seemed endlessly the same.
    The future unrolled before her like a ribbon: sleeping with a chair hooked under the doorknob every night, beating carpets on the back steps, cooking the boarders’ breakfast, scrubbing the toilets, changing the linens, pouring fresh water in the basins, haggling with vendors at the Viktualienmarkt, fighting the nightmares about Papa, imagining his bloody body in the street and herself unable to help as his chest stilled and his eyes grew blank.
    Tears locked her throat. She hadn’t been able to save her father, but she could save other people, someday. She walked faster. Nobody understood her ambitions except Uncle Dolf. He battled his life, as she did, searching for something bigger, something meaningful.
    A small boy darted in front of her. “Wait,” he said. “I’ve got something for you.”
    The child couldn’t have been older than seven or eight. She recognized his cheerful, dirty face; he had been one of the schoolboys clustered around the chestnut cart.
    “What is it?”
    “I don’t know, do I?” He sounded indignant. “I don’t go reading other folks’ love letters. Here.” He pulled a white envelope from his leather bag.
    “Love letter.” She had to laugh. “You must have the wrong girl.”
    “Nope.” He thrust the envelope into her hand. “The gentleman said a pretty girl with a blond braid and a white blouse and a Hakenkreuz necklace. You’re the only one, so it must be you.”
    “Wait a minute.” She grabbed his spindly arm. “What gentleman?”
    “I don’t know.” He tied to pull his arm back. “Some tall fellow in a dark suit. Must have been rich, though, because he gave me two marks.”
    Marks, when the boy would have completed the errand for groschen. Not rich, perhaps, but determined.
    Unease whispered