"It would be better to be free and live in the shadow of danger than to be trapped in the certainty of it."
Germany, 1930s.
The Nazis rise to power, and young Klaus Volk witnesses unspeakable tragedies happen to those he loves. Determined to stand against tyranny, he and his teenage friends vow to take a stand against evil.
All it may cost them is everything they have.
Germany, 1930s.
The Nazis rise to power, and young Klaus Volk witnesses unspeakable tragedies happen to those he loves. Determined to stand against tyranny, he and his teenage friends vow to take a stand against evil.
All it may cost them is everything they have.
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Chapter 1
For many of us, our lives began- and ended- with the rise of the Third Reich.
We were born into the years after the Great War- or as many of my fellow Germans sardonically called it, the Great Mistake. Our childhoods were marked by poverty, strife, and sickness. But it mattered not to the elites, to the powerful. The inability of a child to store long-term memories became a blessing for us, as our parents would frequently inform us.
On November 8th of 1923, two major events occurred. The one most are familiar with is an event called the Beer Hall Putsch. A young revolutionary led a group of like-minded men to march in Munich against the government of the time- the Weimar Republic. The young man surrounded himself with war heroes of the Great Mistake such as Erich Ludendorff to add some sort of…credence…to his mission. At least, that’s what my parents said. The young man was a sort of war hero himself, but on a minor scale. He had won a couple Iron Crosses for bravery in that war, but upon the conclusion of hostilities, he had found himself a bit rudderless in a changed world.
The German Army found a place for this young man- that of being a spy in the German Workers’ Party. Unfortunately for the Army, and Germany as a whole, I think, the spy turned. The young man grew enamored with the Party and began to rise in leadership within it rapidly. He ultimately took control of the whole party and so led them on that Putsch of November 1923.
The Putsch failed spectacularly, with some accounts holding that the young man led a charge against the police only to realize that no one followed him. That must have been embarrassing. The young leader was able to escape Munich and arrest, but was apprehended a couple days later.
And so, Adolf Hitler was sent to jail for treason.
For eight months.
During which time he wrote a book and revolutionized the revolution he was leading.
Now, I mentioned that there were two major events on November 8th of 1923. The other was my birth. My name is Klaus Volk.
I was German. I should say, I am German, but the events that transpired in my teenage years made me question my allegiance to a culture that could allow such horror to visit its people not once, but twice in less than fifty years. No, the people to which I refer transcended such nation-state qualifications.
My people were pirates.
Rebels.
Revolutionaries that resisted the revolutionaries.
By the early-1930’s we were concluding our first decade of life when a political movement emerged to take power over our beloved homeland. We were blissfully unaware of such things, still playing imaginatively in the streets and alleys that, in some cases, still bore the scars of tribulation and artillery. Scars that told the origin story of my people before any of us were walking the earth.
Sure, our parents spoke in hushed voices after my brothers and I had gone to bed (supposedly) of something called the “Nazis,” but to us they were merely boogeymen like those in our German folktales and the books we consumed voraciously. My older brother Heinrich was four years my senior and was taken to smacking us upside the head when we kept him awake at night. Kyler was my younger brother, two years my junior. It was in Kyler that I found my kindred spirit. We were the dreamers of the brothers Volk, and Heinrich was the ardent rule follower. He longed for the day when he was old enough to join the military and serve the Fatherland. He had heard of a group called the League of German Worker Youth that accepted pledges at the ripe age of fourteen. He had begged our parents to join, but even at my innocent age, I could tell there was something holding them back. I suspected it had something to do with the other name for the League: Hitler Youth.
My parents had learned at some point in their lives two facts about Germany in the 1930s. First, Adolf Hitler and the Nazis were not going away anytime soon and were fast becoming not just the dominant culture in Germany, but the required culture. And second, they knew that speaking out against the Nazis was a bad, bad thing. When these two facts combined, it made them hesitate to allow Heinrich to so clearly declare his- and arbitrarily, their- allegiance to such a cause.
My father, Dieter, had been a medic in the Great Mistake, and parlayed that career into a medical practice when the war ended. My mother Emeline was a teacher at our school. Both had encouraged a hunger for knowledge and wisdom in their boys, but had also cautioned us to beware that merely possessing knowledge was dangerous. One needed to know what to do with it.
And so, on that fateful night of May 7th, 1933, I acquired knowledge that would shape the rest of my young life.
“I cannot believe that they would do this,” my mother was saying as I leaned my ear as close to the wall as I could and still be in my bed. “To destroy literature is to destroy hope, to destroy wisdom. To destroy rationality!”
“Emmy, I agree with you, but what are you to do?” my father replied with his usual calm and measured tone. “Should you try to intervene and prevent this act, you will be arrested. It may be foolishness, but it is government sanctioned foolishness.”
This particular conversation was one I needed to see first-hand, so I slid as silently as I could from my bed and touched my feet upon the cold, wooden floor of our room.
“What are you doing, täuschen?” Heinrich whispered.
“I want to hear what mother and father are talking about,” replied, my whisper even more subdued than Heinrich’s.
“Let him go, brother,” Kyler defended. “At least he cares to know what has mother so upset.” For a seven-year-old, Kyler was rather astute.
Heinrich grumbled and turned onto his side, placing his back to me. Then he mumbled something about “get what is coming to you” but I ignored it. Kyler, however, joined me in our clandestine mission.
By the time we got out of the room and silently tiptoed down the hall to a spot where we were just outside of our parents’ view, Father was kneeling next to Mother in her chair, holding her hand. “Emmy,” he pleaded, “The Reich Literary Chamber leaves no room for debate on this matter. The books will be taken, and they will be burned! To stand in their way is to run afoul of the kind of people who will take you from us- and what will our boys do then? Without their mother?”
My mother shook her head resolutely, her dark curls bouncing and shifting around her pale face and green eyes. “What good is a mother who will not show her sons what is worth standing for? To destroy the works of Remarque and Becht for simply casting a light on things which those (she paused before she whispered the next word) Nazis would rather not acknowledge is bad enough. But Hemingway? Dieter, there is no cause for burning a Hemingway. He is not even German!”
My mother was fully enamored with the writing of Ernest Hemingway, and while she deemed his work ‘still a bit too adult’ for my brothers and I, she would occasionally read us excerpts from the books she brought home from the small local library where we lived in the outskirts of Munich.
“Ah, but he represents an ideal which that man fears,” Father replied, moving his tone from pleading to persuasive. “Freedom. Something which will be lost to you if you try to stop them. My love, there are battles to be fought, surely. And I believe that many more opportunities to fight lie before us as the German people. Perhaps this is not a fight we should risk. For our sake. For our children’s sake.”
Mother rubbed her hands over her face, then leaned on arm on the table and rested her head in that hand. “I know that you are right, but they will be taking the books from the library tomorrow and storing them in the city hall for the burning on the tenth. That they will take the books is bad enough, but to hold on to them so that they may make a spectacle of the destruction of art? One of the books they are taking is Heinrich Heine’s. Our own son is named for him. And you know what he wrote, do you not, Dieter? ‘Where they burn books, they will, in the end, burn human beings too.’ How long, Dieter? If we stand by and allow our literature to be destroyed by some…fascist book haters…then how long before they destroy humanity with the same callous disregard?”
I looked over my shoulder at Kyler and I could see he was beginning to tear up. He always got scared when Mother raised her voice and grew passionate- not because he feared her, because he feared for her. Even at seven, he could see that things in Germany were growing dangerous. We had seen a Jewish family assaulted by some men in brown shirts just a few weeks before, and a later conversation with my friend Engel Cohen confirmed those sort of attacks were growing more common. We were Lutheran, not Jewish, but Kyler didn’t make that distinction. And I was starting to fear that those men in brown shirts didn’t either.
I shuffled Kyler back to bed as quietly as I could, and our little act of eavesdropping had been successful in avoiding detection. But a seed had been planted in my own mind. Even as I heard the muffled tones of my parents agreeing that Mother would not interfere with the book confiscation, I decided to do something for my mother. Something that would make her proud.
I was going to rescue some books for her.
For many of us, our lives began- and ended- with the rise of the Third Reich.
We were born into the years after the Great War- or as many of my fellow Germans sardonically called it, the Great Mistake. Our childhoods were marked by poverty, strife, and sickness. But it mattered not to the elites, to the powerful. The inability of a child to store long-term memories became a blessing for us, as our parents would frequently inform us.
On November 8th of 1923, two major events occurred. The one most are familiar with is an event called the Beer Hall Putsch. A young revolutionary led a group of like-minded men to march in Munich against the government of the time- the Weimar Republic. The young man surrounded himself with war heroes of the Great Mistake such as Erich Ludendorff to add some sort of…credence…to his mission. At least, that’s what my parents said. The young man was a sort of war hero himself, but on a minor scale. He had won a couple Iron Crosses for bravery in that war, but upon the conclusion of hostilities, he had found himself a bit rudderless in a changed world.
The German Army found a place for this young man- that of being a spy in the German Workers’ Party. Unfortunately for the Army, and Germany as a whole, I think, the spy turned. The young man grew enamored with the Party and began to rise in leadership within it rapidly. He ultimately took control of the whole party and so led them on that Putsch of November 1923.
The Putsch failed spectacularly, with some accounts holding that the young man led a charge against the police only to realize that no one followed him. That must have been embarrassing. The young leader was able to escape Munich and arrest, but was apprehended a couple days later.
And so, Adolf Hitler was sent to jail for treason.
For eight months.
During which time he wrote a book and revolutionized the revolution he was leading.
Now, I mentioned that there were two major events on November 8th of 1923. The other was my birth. My name is Klaus Volk.
I was German. I should say, I am German, but the events that transpired in my teenage years made me question my allegiance to a culture that could allow such horror to visit its people not once, but twice in less than fifty years. No, the people to which I refer transcended such nation-state qualifications.
My people were pirates.
Rebels.
Revolutionaries that resisted the revolutionaries.
By the early-1930’s we were concluding our first decade of life when a political movement emerged to take power over our beloved homeland. We were blissfully unaware of such things, still playing imaginatively in the streets and alleys that, in some cases, still bore the scars of tribulation and artillery. Scars that told the origin story of my people before any of us were walking the earth.
Sure, our parents spoke in hushed voices after my brothers and I had gone to bed (supposedly) of something called the “Nazis,” but to us they were merely boogeymen like those in our German folktales and the books we consumed voraciously. My older brother Heinrich was four years my senior and was taken to smacking us upside the head when we kept him awake at night. Kyler was my younger brother, two years my junior. It was in Kyler that I found my kindred spirit. We were the dreamers of the brothers Volk, and Heinrich was the ardent rule follower. He longed for the day when he was old enough to join the military and serve the Fatherland. He had heard of a group called the League of German Worker Youth that accepted pledges at the ripe age of fourteen. He had begged our parents to join, but even at my innocent age, I could tell there was something holding them back. I suspected it had something to do with the other name for the League: Hitler Youth.
My parents had learned at some point in their lives two facts about Germany in the 1930s. First, Adolf Hitler and the Nazis were not going away anytime soon and were fast becoming not just the dominant culture in Germany, but the required culture. And second, they knew that speaking out against the Nazis was a bad, bad thing. When these two facts combined, it made them hesitate to allow Heinrich to so clearly declare his- and arbitrarily, their- allegiance to such a cause.
My father, Dieter, had been a medic in the Great Mistake, and parlayed that career into a medical practice when the war ended. My mother Emeline was a teacher at our school. Both had encouraged a hunger for knowledge and wisdom in their boys, but had also cautioned us to beware that merely possessing knowledge was dangerous. One needed to know what to do with it.
And so, on that fateful night of May 7th, 1933, I acquired knowledge that would shape the rest of my young life.
“I cannot believe that they would do this,” my mother was saying as I leaned my ear as close to the wall as I could and still be in my bed. “To destroy literature is to destroy hope, to destroy wisdom. To destroy rationality!”
“Emmy, I agree with you, but what are you to do?” my father replied with his usual calm and measured tone. “Should you try to intervene and prevent this act, you will be arrested. It may be foolishness, but it is government sanctioned foolishness.”
This particular conversation was one I needed to see first-hand, so I slid as silently as I could from my bed and touched my feet upon the cold, wooden floor of our room.
“What are you doing, täuschen?” Heinrich whispered.
“I want to hear what mother and father are talking about,” replied, my whisper even more subdued than Heinrich’s.
“Let him go, brother,” Kyler defended. “At least he cares to know what has mother so upset.” For a seven-year-old, Kyler was rather astute.
Heinrich grumbled and turned onto his side, placing his back to me. Then he mumbled something about “get what is coming to you” but I ignored it. Kyler, however, joined me in our clandestine mission.
By the time we got out of the room and silently tiptoed down the hall to a spot where we were just outside of our parents’ view, Father was kneeling next to Mother in her chair, holding her hand. “Emmy,” he pleaded, “The Reich Literary Chamber leaves no room for debate on this matter. The books will be taken, and they will be burned! To stand in their way is to run afoul of the kind of people who will take you from us- and what will our boys do then? Without their mother?”
My mother shook her head resolutely, her dark curls bouncing and shifting around her pale face and green eyes. “What good is a mother who will not show her sons what is worth standing for? To destroy the works of Remarque and Becht for simply casting a light on things which those (she paused before she whispered the next word) Nazis would rather not acknowledge is bad enough. But Hemingway? Dieter, there is no cause for burning a Hemingway. He is not even German!”
My mother was fully enamored with the writing of Ernest Hemingway, and while she deemed his work ‘still a bit too adult’ for my brothers and I, she would occasionally read us excerpts from the books she brought home from the small local library where we lived in the outskirts of Munich.
“Ah, but he represents an ideal which that man fears,” Father replied, moving his tone from pleading to persuasive. “Freedom. Something which will be lost to you if you try to stop them. My love, there are battles to be fought, surely. And I believe that many more opportunities to fight lie before us as the German people. Perhaps this is not a fight we should risk. For our sake. For our children’s sake.”
Mother rubbed her hands over her face, then leaned on arm on the table and rested her head in that hand. “I know that you are right, but they will be taking the books from the library tomorrow and storing them in the city hall for the burning on the tenth. That they will take the books is bad enough, but to hold on to them so that they may make a spectacle of the destruction of art? One of the books they are taking is Heinrich Heine’s. Our own son is named for him. And you know what he wrote, do you not, Dieter? ‘Where they burn books, they will, in the end, burn human beings too.’ How long, Dieter? If we stand by and allow our literature to be destroyed by some…fascist book haters…then how long before they destroy humanity with the same callous disregard?”
I looked over my shoulder at Kyler and I could see he was beginning to tear up. He always got scared when Mother raised her voice and grew passionate- not because he feared her, because he feared for her. Even at seven, he could see that things in Germany were growing dangerous. We had seen a Jewish family assaulted by some men in brown shirts just a few weeks before, and a later conversation with my friend Engel Cohen confirmed those sort of attacks were growing more common. We were Lutheran, not Jewish, but Kyler didn’t make that distinction. And I was starting to fear that those men in brown shirts didn’t either.
I shuffled Kyler back to bed as quietly as I could, and our little act of eavesdropping had been successful in avoiding detection. But a seed had been planted in my own mind. Even as I heard the muffled tones of my parents agreeing that Mother would not interfere with the book confiscation, I decided to do something for my mother. Something that would make her proud.
I was going to rescue some books for her.