Page 2 of Only The Brave

Despite her concerns about the war, Sophia managed to finish her nursing studies by Christmas. With extra classes, and credit for work at her father’s hospital, she managed to finish early, with high marks. She was officially hired as a surgical nurse in her father’s hospital on a day shift, and worked two or three nights a week with the nuns, visiting poor neighborhoods and tending to the sick and indigent, doing whatever was needed. Her father had no idea that she did that, and never inquired about how she spent her evenings. She had always been studious and retiring, and she was almost twenty-one years old. Her father had no concerns about her, and there were no men in her life. She wasn’t Theresa, who would have worried him if she weren’t married. Sophia being an adult now, with a respectable job, allowed him to work night and day himself. He had no interest in a home life, once his wife died. Sophia thought he looked tired and worn, and ever since her mother’s death there was an intensity about him that worried her. He was only fifty-six years old, but he looked considerably older. Widowhood and hard work had aged him.

Theresa had invited her father and sister to spend Christmas Eve with them, but Thomas was quick to say that he would be working through the holidays. He had nothing to celebrate since Monika’s death, and he encouraged Sophia to accept her sister’s invitation and spend the holiday with her. Sophia had lunch with Theresa and told her their father was declining her invitation, and Sophia was startled by Theresa’s good spirits despite the fact that the country was at war. Theresa was going to parties every night with Heinrich. They had friends among the Nazi High Command and a flood of invitations from old friends and new ones.

“How can you bear to be with them?” Sophia said somberly. Theresa was wearing a striking red dress and a large pair of ruby earrings her parents-in-law had given her early for Christmas, and she had a beautiful fur coat over her shoulders when she walked into the fashionable restaurant. Sophia was wearing an old black dress of her mother’s and looked like a schoolteacher going to a funeral. Theresa looked at her with disapproval.

“Can’t you find something happier to wear in Mama’s closets?” Theresa said, as they sat down.

“I think you took them all,” Sophia dished back to her. “Besides, how can you be happy and going to parties, with everything that’s happening?”

“Nothing is happening,” Theresa said blithely.

“Are you serious?” Sophia was shocked. “They’re sending Jews away to labor camps, taking away their property, stealing everything they have, their homes, their jobs, their money. They’re killing people.”

“They’re trying to get the undesirables off the streets, to keep us safe,” Theresa said firmly.

“Doctors and lawyers and dentists? They’re doing it to people we went to school with. Real people, Theresa, not just ‘criminals and gypsies,’ as they claim. And you’re dancing with the people who give the orders to kill them.”

“That’s all propaganda circulated by the Jews to make us feel sorry for them.” Sophia couldn’t tell her that she had seen many of them on her rounds with the Sisters of Mercy at night. She didn’t want Theresa or her father to know she did that. It wasn’t dangerous so far, but it was heartbreaking. “You need to meet a man, Sophia, before you turn into a sour old woman. Heinrich has lots of friends we can introduce you to,” Theresa said with a bright smile. Her lipstick was the same color as her new earrings.

“And they’re all in uniform?” Sophia said with a chilly tone.

“Yes, most of them. It makes them look more handsome. Heinrich isn’t in uniform.” He had been given a deferral for his “important work” at the bank, according to Theresa, and the fact that his family made substantial monetary contributions to the Reich and the war effort. So, for now, he was remaining a civilian. His father had orchestrated it for him. He didn’t want his son being sent to the front or cleaning out the Warsaw ghetto of the rabble that lived there. The city of Warsaw had surrendered to the Germans in September, three weeks after war was declared. “You have to stop listening to all that gossip about the Jews,” Theresa said after they ordered lunch. “None of it is true.”

“It’s all true,” Sophia insisted. “I’ve seen it. And so would you, if you weren’t at parties or the hairdresser or shopping all the time. I’ve seen people dragged from their homes with their children screaming in terror.” Heinrich had given Theresa a car and driver, and she led a thoroughly protected life, far from the realities that Sophia was more familiar with.

“They were probably criminals who had stolen something or killed someone.” There was no getting through to Theresa, and no way to convince her that the Reich was committing atrocities. Sophia had seen evidence of it in the homes she visited with the Sisters of Mercy. In a few instances, they had been called on to help tend to someone that the people who had called them were hiding. In two recent incidents, a neighbor had pressed a child, and once a baby, on them just before the police came and took the parents away. The infant was only two months old, clean and swaddled and wrapped in an expensive blanket, and might be an orphan by now. The nuns had taken them to an orphanage, where they were picked up by “relatives” hours later.

Sophia found lunch with her sister awkward. Theresa greeted countless women who came past them in the restaurant, all expensively dressed and wearing fur coats. She was part of the cream of Berlin society now. The Alexanders were a respected family, and most of Thomas’s patients were wealthy and important, but even though the Alexanders had entertained elegantly before Monika fell ill, they had never been part of the really showy, snobbish group that Theresa was part of now and thoroughly enjoying. She was rapidly becoming someone Sophia hardly recognized and didn’t want to, though she loved her. All her friends were rabid supporters of the Nazi party and their leader. Theresa spoke of him like their savior who was going to correct all the ills in Germany. Sophia already knew better, and that they were trying to eradicate an entire race of people they treated like animals. Her love for her sister surpassed politics but it upset Sophia to see how blind and superficial Theresa was. She refused to hear the truth.

Right before she graduated from nursing school, Sophia had met several student nurses, and a young medical student who had invited her to a friendly gathering at a bar in a student neighborhood. After they each drank a beer, the medical student led them down a dark staircase to the basement, where Sophia saw a large group of young people milling around in a candlelit subcellar with no windows. The crowd was large and noisy, and some of them were quite rough-looking. A young woman called them to order, and a number of people spoke—mostly men, but not all—and talked of the horrors they had seen in their ordinary lives, and took a strong stand against the Nazis, the police, the SS, and even Hitler, warning the listeners that there was worse to come, and that Germany was rapidly becoming a police state, led by fanatics. The theme of the evening was to not follow along like sheep and to stand up for decency and humanity and the principles the country once stood for in better times.

“It’s up to us to defend the honor of Germany,” one of them said fervently, “with courage, no matter what it costs us. The country has been taken over by wolves, and no one will defend her but people like us.” They were encouraged to start small groups like this one, to form a strong dissident population that would rise and take over one day and restore Germany to sanity. “The country is insane now. We have to stop the madness. If we and people like us don’t, no one will.” Sophia wasn’t clear on how they intended to do it, but they encouraged each other to seize every opportunity for opposition, even if you had to kill someone to do it. When she left the meeting that night with the other student nurses, she had the feeling that she had done something very dangerous. What if someone reported them to the police? Sophia agreed with everything they said, but she had no idea how to put it into action efficiently. And she wasn’t prepared to kill someone. What they were suggesting was anarchy. She didn’t want to become a murderer or a revolutionary, she just wanted to heal people and live in a country where people were treated fairly and equally and could live safely.

Sophia could only imagine what Theresa would say if she knew about the meeting she’d gone to, or their father, who was a law-abiding man who didn’t like Hitler’s policies, but whose mission was to save people, not kill them.

Sophia had attended half a dozen of those meetings, and met people there she liked, but she could never figure out how she could be useful to them without getting into serious trouble.

When she and Theresa left the restaurant after lunch, Sophia felt as though she was the little sister and Theresa was the sophisticated older one. She was so sure of herself now, so proud of who she was married to. She loved showing off their house and her elegant clothes and jewelry, and she fully believed that the Nazis were the master race, the messengers from the gods. The sisters kissed on the sidewalk, Theresa got back into her chauffeured car, and Sophia took the bus back to the hospital. Theresa had offered to drop her off, but Sophia was embarrassed to be seen in a fancy car driven by a chauffeur and preferred the bus. She had a lot to think about after she saw her sister, and her mind kept going back to the most recent dissidents’ meetings she’d been to.

The population of Berlin was following the rules the Reich had set down for them. Most citizens were too afraid to intervene on behalf of the Jews, no matter how unfair they thought their treatment was. But people had families to protect, jobs they needed to pay the rent and buy food for themselves and their children. They weren’t willing to risk everything they had built and were clinging to, in order to save or shelter an entire race of people who had been designated as scapegoats and victims. Sophia felt increasingly helpless the more she thought about the situation. The nuns were sympathetic to the plight of the Jews too, but the Mother Superior had warned them all not to get involved, that it was not their place to take a position against the government. But at times, Sophia found it very tempting to do so.

She said nothing to the nuns or anyone else about it and continued to attend meetings. At least she could listen, which she did, avidly, learning more and more about the shocking treatment of the Jews in a country she had once been proud of and no longer could be. She relayed some of it to the younger nuns when they went out into the neighborhoods together, and they were as upset as she was. But none of them saw a way that they could make a difference. Sophia would have liked to discuss it with her father, but she couldn’t. He didn’t want to hear about it and didn’t want to get involved, and suggested she do the same.

In contrast, Sophia saw high-ranking officers of the SS come to see her father as patients every day and had to maintain a neutral demeanor when he introduced her to them. All Thomas allowed himself to see were the parts of their body which needed surgical attention. He didn’t see their heart or their soul or their conscience. He didn’t know which of them had committed some unthinkable crime in the name of the Reich. They were just bodies he was going to work on, and he explained their surgeries to them as he would have to anyone else, and operated on them as carefully as he did all his other patients. Sophia was always fascinated by how he managed to cut himself off emotionally from them. And after war was declared, the attacks on the Jews seemed to be even more frequent and more vicious. The Nazis had a free hand now, and too much of public opinion was with them, in a frenzy like no other, whipped up by the Führer and his generals. Some people actually believed that the Jews were a national danger that had to be eliminated. Sophia was astounded that they believed that.

As he had said he would, Thomas worked straight through the holidays, on an emergency appendectomy of the daughter of one of his patients, broken hips, and a delicate heart surgery. Sophia went to Theresa’s home alone on Christmas Eve. Several of Heinrich’s relatives were there, and Theresa whispered to her sister after dinner that she was pregnant and was elated. Heinrich looked at her as though she was a rare gem of some kind, or the first woman to be carrying a baby. The baby was due in July, two months after their first anniversary.

“Fast work,” Sophia commented with a smile and hugged her.

“Heinrich says he wants five more.” Theresa grinned shyly. “All boys. He wants to name this one after the Führer.” Sophia’s stomach turned over when she said it, and she frowned. “I want to name him after Papa.”

“It might be a girl,” Sophia reminded her. “You could name her after Mama,” she said tenderly, and Theresa nodded. She had thought of it too, and Heinrich had agreed, but he hoped it wouldn’t be a girl. He wanted sons and was counting on Theresa to produce them.

The guests all talked after dinner, sitting around the enormous Christmas tree in the living room, with the candles lit, as was their tradition. Everyone kept an eye on the candles to make sure that none of the branches caught fire.

They played cards and games after dinner. The women were all in evening gowns and the men in black tie. It was an elegant evening with a warm cozy feeling to it. They put records on at the end of the evening, and Heinrich danced with his wife. Sophia was relieved that for once there were no uniforms present, no armbands with swastikas on them. One could almost close one’s eyes and pretend that there wasn’t a war on. It felt like old times except that Monika wasn’t with them, nor their father.

Sophia drove herself home in her father’s car when she left with the last of the guests. She drove past the convent, and noticed that the lights were on in the chapel. Through the open car window she could hear voices raised, singing Christmas carols. She parked in front of the church and went in. It was after midnight, and the church was full of nuns, and some of the neighbors, for a midnight mass. Sophia slipped into a pew toward the back, and after a few minutes joined in the familiar carols. It was a perfect end to the evening, and she went to wish a merry Christmas to the Mother Superior and some of the nuns before she left.

“You’re alone tonight, Sophia?” Mother Regina asked her, and she nodded.

“My father’s working and I just left my sister. She’s expecting,” she said in a whisper, and the Mother Superior smiled.

“That’s happy news. We need it these days.” They had made their rounds among the families they served earlier that night, and left them little baskets with fruit and nuts, and some sweets for the children. But Sophia had been at her sister’s and couldn’t join them when they had asked. She stayed for a few more minutes and went home to the empty house. The housekeeper and the young girl they employed as her helper had gone to bed hours before, and Sophia walked slowly up the stairs, and was surprised to see her father outside his bedroom, still fully dressed.

“I thought you’d sleep at the hospital tonight,” she said. He had a small functional bedroom next to his office there, to use when he needed to stay close by to be available for a patient in distress.

“It’s been quiet for the last two hours, so I thought I’d come home and sleep here.” He smiled at his daughter and gave her a warm hug. “How was it? Was half the Reich there tonight?” he inquired, curious, and she shook her head.

“No, just Heinrich’s family. Theresa is having a baby, in seven months.” He looked surprised and pleased at the news.

“I’m not sure I’m ready to be a grandfather but I’m happy for them. Are they excited?” He couldn’t imagine his youngest daughter as a mother at nineteen, but thought it would be good for her.

“Heinrich is over the moon. He’s sure it’s a boy and wants to name him Adolf.” Her father winced.

“It had better be a girl,” and the obvious choice of name to all of them would be that of his late wife. “Merry Christmas, Sophia,” he said, looking at her proudly, and she hugged him again. She was looking forward to working with him in the operating theater and learning more from him. He was known to be an extraordinary, deft surgeon, with highly skilled, precise fingers, and incredible instincts, and she still had much to learn.

They both went to their rooms then, and she was just falling asleep an hour later, when she heard the phone ring, and five minutes later, heard her father’s bedroom door open and close. She got up and hurried to stick her head out of her bedroom.

“Do you want help?” He hesitated for a fraction of a second.

“You don’t need to come. Get some sleep. It’s Christmas.”

“I have nothing to do tomorrow.” She knew the hospital was often short-staffed on holiday nights, so most of the medical staff could be with their families. But she was still wide awake.

“If you want,” he said hesitantly. “It’s not a surgical emergency, it’s medical. A child,” he said with an odd glance at her, and she didn’t question him further.

“I’ll dress and meet you there in five minutes,” she said, and darted back to her room, as he rushed down the stairs and she heard the front door slam minutes later. She brushed her hair and wound it in a tight bun, washed her face and hands, brushed her teeth, and put on her uniform, not sure what to expect. She put her nurse’s cape on after pinning her starched hat in place, her black nurse’s shoes completing her uniform, which was the all-white dress of a surgical nurse with a white apron, which she was so proud of. The other nurses wore a blue dress with white collar, cap, and apron. She flew down the stairs and out the front door, closing it more quietly than her father had. She ran down the path that led from their home to the hospital and was there in the five minutes she had promised.

She found two young nurses in an exam room who were picking up an armload of wet towels, and one of them pointed upstairs to a floor of rooms where nonsurgical patients spent the night, sometimes with a bad stomachache, being monitored for appendicitis or some other medical condition. Sophia left her cape and hurried up the stairs, and heard voices coming from behind a closed door of one of the rooms. She knocked and opened it gently, and saw a small boy on the exam table, wrapped in blankets. She could barely see his face, but she could see that he was trembling violently and that his lips were a deep blue, his face so pale it was almost colorless. He was very thin, and he looked terrified, as Thomas spoke to a young woman who Sophia assumed was the boy’s mother. She was saying something to Thomas about the house having been searched, and the child had been outside in a shallow pool for an hour. It was freezing outside, and he was suffering from hypothermia. The woman, who was well dressed, was rubbing the child’s body and arms through the blanket and Thomas had placed a small heater next to him and turned it up high.

“Hot-water bottles,” Thomas said to Sophia softly, and she came back with four of them minutes later and tucked them around the child under the blanket. She spoke soothingly to him and he smiled at her, as the woman explained that she was his aunt, and told a disjointed story about the boy falling into the pool. Thomas understood the situation immediately.

“My sister and her husband were... are away... and Bertie is staying with me until they get back.” What Thomas had understood instantly was that his parents had probably been deported, or fled before they were, and couldn’t take the child with them, and she was hiding him. The house had been searched that night. The boy, six years old, had hidden in a pond outside her home that wasn’t deep and was partially frozen. He hadn’t drowned, but he had nearly frozen to death. It took two hours to warm him, and he was still shaking slightly while they continued to wrap him in warm blankets and surround him with hot-water bottles, but his lips were no longer blue. He was very pale, probably because he hadn’t seen daylight since his parents left. There were more and more children like him, and he wasn’t the first one Thomas had seen. Eventually many of them got caught, often reported by zealous neighbors who discovered them, and then they were sent away to meet the same fate as their parents.

Thomas handed Bertie a lollipop once his teeth stopped chattering and he was starting to talk.

“You can’t go swimming on Christmas, you know,” Thomas said, and the boy smiled, enjoying the lollipop, as his aunt sat down on a chair, looking shaken and pale herself.

“I don’t know why they came,” she said, looking panicked. “He hasn’t left the house in five months.” She whispered that he was living in the attic and was a very good boy. Clearly one of his parents was non-Aryan, and if the authorities found him, he was doomed. He was out of physical danger now, but she’d have to keep him warm. Thomas could see from the address she’d given that she lived just down the street. And she had come to Thomas’s hospital because it was private. No one knew anymore what secrets were hidden in their neighbors’ homes, and it was best not to know.

“You should go home soon, before daylight,” Thomas told Bertie’s aunt, and she nodded.

“I’ll take him away tomorrow, to be hidden somewhere else.” Sophia wondered if she knew where to go for help or if she had some plan. She didn’t look very old herself, in her mid- or late twenties, and she had explained that Bertie was her older sister’s child.

Thomas nodded. “You should go. Keep him warm tonight, he’ll be fine. And no more swimming,” he said to Bertie with a smile. Sophia went to get warm pajamas for him and wrapped him up in another blanket, and Thomas carried him out to the car. The two young nurses on duty in the emergency room were having a tea break with an orderly from the surgical floor and paid no attention to them when they left.

Bertie’s aunt had tried to pay Thomas and he refused. “Good luck,” he said to her, and waved at Bertie. They didn’t have far to go, and Thomas and Sophia walked back to the hospital, upstairs to his office, and closed the door. She sat on the other side of her father’s desk. He looked tired and sad, but they had saved the boy. “I wonder how many children there are like him in Germany now, and Austria and Poland, and Czechoslovakia. I wonder how many of them will survive the war.”

“His aunt seems like a sweet woman,” Sophia added, as affected by it as he was.

“It’s an enormous responsibility for her, and if they’re found, they’ll both be killed, she for hiding a non-Aryan child. These are the criminals the Reich wants to punish. A six-year-old child, and his aunt who’s barely more than a child herself. She’s not much older than you are.”

“You were brave to do it, Papa,” Sophia said softly. “If they found out, they would punish you too,” and maybe kill him.

“We’re here to save lives, Sophia. I should have sent you home, I put you at risk too. Thank you for helping me.” He smiled at her, and her face broke into a slow smile, as the sun began to rise.

“Merry Christmas, Papa,” she said, and they held hands across his desk. They had just had the best Christmas gift of all. They had saved a life, and they both silently wished Bertie well. Sophia had realized that night that there was more to her father than she had ever known. She was proud to be his daughter.