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k, revealing nothing yet saying everything, because they were from him to her, and he wanted to write—even if it was simply about what he ate in the canteen, or the color of the sky on a May morning.
“Lily, look.” Sophie gestured to the night sky, now streaked with light.
Lily hurried to the window, her mouth opening soundlessly as she stared at the dozens of planes moving purposefully across the midnight canvas of the night sky, like arrows pointing east. So many…
“What…” she began, but of course she knew. The invasion was happening at last.
“It’s beginning,” Sophie said, and she sounded triumphant. “It’s finally beginning.”
Part II
Chapter Fifteen
June 6, 1944
Matthew sat hunched over, his elbows braced on his knees, on one of the metal seats set in facing rows along the length of the C-47 plane as it moved steadily towards the Channel.
He was wearing seventy pounds of equipment—a parachute on his back, and another strapped to his chest; a gas mask tied to one leg, and a small hoe for digging foxholes attached to the other. From his belt hung a first-aid kit, a bayonet, a trench knife, and two fragmentation hand grenades, along with extra ammunition. He had another grenade in his musette bag, along with all of his personal gear, as well as his most important possession: a bundle of letters from Lily. His shoulders ached and his stomach felt as if he’d swallowed a stone whole.
Next to him, another paratrooper of the 508th was cracking his knuckles and chewing gum with grim determination. Across from him, a whey-faced boy of no more than nineteen had been sick down his front. Whether that was from nerves or the motion of the plane which had been flying in circles waiting for other planes to join up, Matthew didn’t know. Further down his row, Tom Reese sat, his face set in grim lines. Matthew didn’t meet his eye.
The last twenty-four hours had felt utterly surreal, as if none of it was actually happening, or, if it was, he was merely an observer to someone’s else drama. He’d felt this way before, back in Fraustadt in 1938, when stormtroopers had broken into his father’s office, smashing glass and hurling papers and books to the floor with looks of naked, savage glee on their faces.
Matthew had stood, transfixed, on the stairs from their flat above, while his father, clad in a dressing gown and slippers, had strode through the mess, demanding that the soldiers stop their needless destruction and leave the premises. For such unthinkable folly, he’d been kicked in the stomach by a stormtrooper’s jackboot, and when he’d fallen to the floor, they had continued their savagery, kicking and beating him, while Matthew had watched, his mind and body both frozen with terror, unable to comprehend that this was actually happening, that it already had.
After a few terrifying minutes, or perhaps just seconds, his mother had urged him back up the stairs, her face gaunt, her eyes filled with mute horror. “They will come for you next,” she’d hissed as they’d crept towards the kitchen. “You’re seventeen, practically a man.”
And so, man that he hadn’t been, he’d spent the night hidden in a cupboard, his knees up to his chin, his body aching, his mind both numb and blank, before learning the next morning that his father was dead.
Just after dawn, his mother had handed him a parcel of food and another of clothes, with the best of her jewelry sewn into the hem of a pair of trousers. She’d hugged him tightly, and his sister Gertie had clung to him, while his little brothers Franz and Arno had stared silently. Then a man he’d never seen before had come to the door, urging him to leave all he’d known and follow him he didn’t even know where.
He’d spent the next nine months moving from house to house, a parade of nights spent in attics or sheds or understair cupboards, until he’d made it to his uncle’s in Munich and then to Spain and then to America, the whole process an endless, exhausting fight for freedom, a blur in his mind now, of kindly faces and anxious eyes, what food could be spared bolted quickly, days and nights passing as if the same.
Yesterday, while they’d all been kicking their heels outside an air hangar in Leicestershire, knowing the invasion was imminent, he’d felt the same sort of separation of self; they’d been told, after bad weather the night before had kept them grounded, that they would fly that evening, and then be dropped ten miles inland on the Cotentin Peninsula of Normandy. If the sea assault failed, there would be no rescue for the men stuck deep behind enemy lines.
But Matthew was used to that sort of hopelessness.
He’d become used to it after Kristallnacht, when the reality of what was happening in his home country finally penetrated his arrogant, teenaged naivety. He was the son of an accountant, a German before he was a Jew, proud, like the rest of his family, of his Prussian heritage, his father having served in the First World War. He’d thought those things had mattered. He’d believed, so ridiculously, so wrongly, that stormtroopers didn’t come for the likes of him and his family, good Germans with proper pedigree and education, who had fought in wars and spoke several languages, patriots rather than religious zealots.
He thought they came for the Jews who spoke Polish and wore yarmulkes and muttered in their pidgin languages of German and Hebrew. Not that those were deserving of such treatment—of course they weren’t, but still, he’d thought back then, they were different. Perhaps a bit too different. And so Matthew had somehow convinced himself he and his family were safe.
He’d had plenty of opportunity to learn that he wasn’t in the years since then. Plenty of time to look back on his arrogant folly, when the Nuremberg Laws had passed in 1935, and somehow he still hadn’t thought it mattered. Yes, he’d had to go to a different school, one only for Jews, but he had friends there, and, for the most part, people were still kind; his old math teachers had apologized to him, tearfully, when he’d seen him in the street. And yes, he was no longer allowed to marry a non-Jew, not that he’d even been thinking about girls at that point. His father could have only Jewish customers, but somehow he accepted even that; money turned tight, but they had enough and it would all surely pass. Hitler had to go out of favor, because no thinking German could support such craven idiocy for long. Or so his father had said.
The C-47 stopped circling and began to straighten out. In the eerie red light that was meant to accustom them to night vision, Matthew looked out and saw that a flotilla of planes had joined them as they made for France, gliding like steel ghosts through a night sky. There would be no turning back.
As they’d been loaded onto the plane less than an hour before, the mood of joking camaraderie that had prevailed during the forty-eight hours—and really, months and even years—of waiting had become suddenly somber. Hours ago, they’d been using British money for their poker games, throwing dice, cracking jokes, but now everyone fell silent as they took their seats and a recorded message from General Eisenhower, meant for all Allied forces, was played.
“You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, towards which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world. Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well equipped, and battle-hardened. We will accept nothing less than full victory. Good luck! And let us all beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.”
The import of his words, of what they were doing, was impossible to comprehend, as if someone was playing a massive joke and they were the punchline. These pale-faced men hunched over in their seats, burdened by their own equipment, were, quite literally, tasked to save the world. It was absurd. It was impossible.
It was happening.
Matthew glanced around at the grim faces of his comrades, bluish in the weird light, the rattling of the plane and the drone of its engine making speech impossible, not that anyone was inclined to talk. What were they thinking? How many of them would survive? Matthew knew the odds weren’t good. There was every likelihood that they wouldn’t even make it to France—their plane would be hit by antiaircraft fire before the drop and they would plummet to their fiery deaths, their war over before it had really begun.
He prayed—and it had been a long time since he had prayed—that that wouldn’t happen. He wanted—needed a chance to go back to Germany. To find his family, and to seek justice for his father’s death. And then return to Lily…
“Up!”
