Germ

Several trips along the rubble-strewn streets of Berlin filled the car with three other children—two boys, one of whom wept incessantly, and a cheery little girl who informed them that she was five. Travel was slow as they moved against a pounding tide of refugees heading into Berlin.

Two hours later, they lost their car to three German army officers determined to escape the wrath of both the Allied war machine and an increasingly unstable fuhrer. What followed was a blur of trudging through fields and swamps and dense forests.

The thought of missing the U-boat made his father nearly insane with panic. They caught an hour's sleep here, a couple more there. They rummaged through heaps of trash and the clothes of decaying corpses, looking for scraps of food. Josef feared all pedestrians, and vehicles even more so. He instructed the others to hit the ground and stay flat at his signal.

Once, Josef told the children to wait, and he loped off toward a farmhouse. Karl thought he looked like a wounded beast, bounding toward shelter under the glare of a hateful moon. He returned thirty minutes later with two loaves of bread and a small bag of carrots and potatoes. The bread was splattered with a dark, coppery-smelling liquid, impossible to identify in the night. The group ate it without question.

Sometime after that a fat man in tatters sprang out from behind a stone wall. He grabbed at the children, demanding food. Josef rushed to him and knocked him into the mud. In an instant, he was sitting on the man's fat belly. A huge knife appeared. Josef pressed the blade against the man's bulging neck. Karl saw muscles strain in his father's jaw and forearms and caught a flash of gritted teeth: the wounded beast cornered.

"Don't try me," his father said. "You won't survive to tell the tale."

They did not move for a long moment, then his father pushed off the man and started walking again. Always walking.

The downed man gasped for breath. Blood flowed from what looked to Karl like a small, smiling mouth etched into his neck. But the man pulled himself up, held a dirty handkerchief to his wound, and stumbled off in the other direction.

They staggered into Rostock on the Baltic Sea late the next afternoon. After three years of Royal Air Force bombings, the town was a crumbling mess. Tiny billows of dust danced like ghosts in the empty streets. Shutters clung to darkened windows. If the Brits had failed to completely destroy the place, they had succeeded in beating the spirit out of its people.

They rounded a ravaged brick building and faced the harbor—but no U-boat. The opaque water was smooth and undisturbed. The scorched pilings of shattered docks jutted from the water like rotten teeth. Only the nearest dock had barely survived, the huge sliding doors of its warehouse intact and drawn tight.

Karl turned to his father, who did not look devastated as Karl had expected, only worried. Josef held his hand up to Karl—Don't panic, it said—and walked on, his hand still raised, forgotten.

As they drew closer, one of the warehouse doors screeched open and SS soldiers stepped out. The SS commander explained that the U-boat was waiting thirty miles offshore. Josef's mood lifted; he laughed. "Call it in," he said.

Karl lumbered into the gutted warehouse. A ragtag bunch of children—most of them nowhere near puberty—sprawled in boredom and fatigue over mountains of crates. He discovered later that they numbered thirty-five, including himself. Among them were a half dozen men, unshaven, unbathed, and looking utterly miserable. The scientists and chaperones his father had told him about. Water from an early-afternoon rain shower dripped off exposed rafters, producing a light melody on the crates and concrete floor.

He located a boy about his size, sitting on a short stack of pallets, and hobbled over to him. Karl had lost a shoe in a treacherous ravine several days before and now wore only a bulky rag on that foot.

"What's your name?" Karl demanded.

"Gregor." His voice was weak, as though he had no energy for the task. His face was scratched and dirty. Karl knew his was the same.

"Your shoes—give them to me."

Gregor looked him up and down. "No."

Karl moved in quickly. One hand clenched Gregor's neck, the other caught the arm that had come up in defense. He touched his lips to the boy's ear. "Don't try me," he whispered harshly. "You won't survive to tell the tale."

He took a step back and smiled wickedly at Gregor's stunned expression. Then Gregor lowered his head and untied the shoes.

Six hours later, he watched as the SS officer with the submachine gun hidden behind him used subtle hand signals to organize his soldiers into a crescent around the dockworkers. The military men eyed the officer for a signal, as an orchestra would watch its conductor. Just as one of the workers tossed a cigarette aside and turned his head in suspicion, the officer nodded. He swung the gun around and started firing.