The Girl I Left Behind: An emotional, gripping and heartwrenching historical debut

The Girl I Left Behind

Andie Newton

AN IMPRINT OF HEAD OF ZEUS

www.ariafiction.com

First published in the United Kingdom in 2019 by Aria, an imprint of Head of Zeus Ltd

Copyright © Andie Newton, 2019

The moral right of Andie Newton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781789546682

Cover design © Charlotte Abrams-Simpson

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Contents

Welcome Page

Copyright

Dedication

Historical Note

Prologue: 1943

1941

Chapter 1: October

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

1942

Chapter 8: April

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11: June

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14: July

Chapter 15: August

Chapter 16: October

Chapter 17: December

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

1943

Chapter 20: February

Chapter 21: August

Chapter 22: October

Chapter 23

Chapter 24: December

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

1944

Chapter 27: January

Chapter 28: September

Chapter 29

Acknowledgments

Author’s Note

About the Author

Become an Aria Addict

For Matt, Zane, and Drew

Historical Note

Hidden inside Nazi Germany, deep within the fabric of society, groups of rebels risked their lives defying the laws of the Third Reich. Many were young people, children who grew up in Hitler’s Germany where Nazi indoctrination started in kindergarten. As these children reached adulthood, they realized that what they had been taught to admire wasn’t worth admiring after all, and they resented the way the Nazi Party tried to control all facets of their life. These non-conformists were the resisters of Nazism, the youth of the German Resistance.

Prologue

1943

Germany

The man was a spy. This much he would have admitted, but only if the ropes had tightened just a hair more around his wrists, or if the water they threw on him had got any colder. There was, after all, only so much torture a man could take in Nazi Germany before his defences would break and his British accent would betray him.

The Gestapo had perfected their torture techniques, and contrary to belief, they liked to use the dullest knives, not the sharpest. The dull ones caused more pain and had been proven to yield much more information. Luckily enough for the man, informants hadn’t learned this technique, and while they decided on the best approach for extraction, the man had wiggled out from the ropes that bound him, reached for the dagger he always carried in a sheath above his right ankle, and killed his way out of the Munich storage room where they’d held him captive.

He dared not go home to his flat for fear they’d already discovered where he lived. Instead, he broke for the side exit, shuffling down the long corridor the best he could with an injured leg that caused him to limp.

A trample roared just above him one floor up and he listened with his eyes to the ceiling, counting the thumps, deciding how many informants were on the verge of discovering he’d got away. He limped on at a galloping rate, knowing his own hobbling could be heard, and burst out the side doors into the dark alley, tripping into some rubbish bins that hadn’t been emptied.

A cat screeched from somewhere, and he stumbled forward, rushing toward his contact who’d been waiting for him outside for more than an hour: a girl—a shop girl, she had told him not long ago—who gleamed like a new coin in the night. She waved the bouquet she’d bought earlier, concealing the intelligence tucked inside. ‘Where have you been?’ she said, and he snatched the flowers from her hands.

His throat was dry, and try as he might, he didn’t have the strength to tell her he’d been caught, but he did have the sense to tell her to run, and she took off in the other direction.

The man rounded the corner onto the street, and for a moment breathed a sigh of relief, thinking he’d outsmarted the informants and that his spy was safe. He took a deep breath, but then slumped forward from a surprise, life-ending stab to his abdomen.

The informant yanked the bouquet from the man’s hands, laughing as he pulled his knife back, letting the man walk his last humiliating steps into a crowded square where he would die.

And when the man fell onto the cobblestones, people stopped and stared. To his horror, just when he was about to take his last gurgling breath, the girl he’d told to run leaned over his body and looked into his eyes. He saw the shock on her face, and then heard it from the others when English words spilled from his lips.

As she covered her mouth watching him die, his last thought was not one of shame for having been caught, but of guilt, because he’d remembered that hidden under his mattress with his notes, he had scrawled her name on a piece of paper.

1941

1

October

Nuremberg

I hurried through the crowded streets of Nuremberg, checking my watch every few seconds as the hands moved closer and closer to seven o’clock. The League of German Girls didn’t wait for late arrivals, and if I missed Frau Dankwart’s opening remarks, I’d hear about it from Aunt Bridget, who’d die from embarrassment if I showed up tardy again.

I had one job to do this evening, and that was to close up my aunt’s antiques shop in time to make my League meeting. I didn’t account for an unexpected customer who couldn’t make up her mind, and then having the terrible misfortune of using my aunt’s cramped office to change into my League uniform.

I rounded a corner, getting ready to cross the street, but then bumped right into a child, knocking the poor boy to the ground. He lay paralyzed with fear, eyes wide and unblinking, with his little hands clinging to his sides. I went to help him up, and that’s when the yellow star sewn on his left breast shone up like a beam of light in the gloaming just before his curfew.

His mother screamed silently, hands to her mouth for the attention he caused, probably wondering if I was going to alert the policeman directing traffic nearby in the square. ‘It wasn’t his fault,’ I said to his mother. I looked back at the policeman who hadn’t seen a thing. ‘Go!’ And they walked into a sea of foot traffic, disappearing between the bodies.

I ran across the street, only that same policeman who’d been directing traffic had blown his whistle. Someone else took his post, and he walked up to me, hand gripping his billy club close to his side. I closed my eyes briefly, mad at myself, knowing I shouldn’t have been running.

I smoothed my tie flat.

‘Who are you running from?’ He reached for my elbow, but I’d unbuttoned my coat just enough to show him my League uniform—thick blue tie and white shirt—which had actually started to dull, much to Auntie’s dismay.

‘I’m late for my League meeting. I’m sorry.’

Bystanders shot me strange looks, some probably hoping I’d be dragged away, give them a sight to see. He looked at his watch, tapping the crystal. ‘At this hour?’ He squinted.

I gulped, knowing his questions could go on indefinitely if he wanted. I tried not to sound impatient. ‘I work at my aunt’s shop. This is the first time I had to close and make a League meeting right after.’ I hung my head down. ‘I should have planned better.’

‘What shop?’ he tipped his helmet up, looking down the street and past the Nazi flags hanging above shop windows.

I pointed. ‘The antiques shop just there. Next to the old beer cellar with the red door—’

‘I know of it.’ He sounded bored, and then quickly spotted someone else to go after, an old man with a cane on the other side of the street who moved much too fast for his age. ‘Be off now,’ he said, pulling out his stick and heading across the street.

I turned away, not wanting to see what was about to come next.

I took a deep breath once I’d made it to Frau Dankwart’s house. All was quiet. The rest of the girls were already inside. I straightened my jacket and smoothed my hair back, if only to look less hurried. I went to knock on her tall black door and was suddenly thrown back to the first day I’d met her.

My parents had only just died when my aunt told me she’d enrolled me in the League of German Girls—the female branch of the Hitler Youth. She said my mother had broken the law since membership was compulsory. When I told her I wasn’t a National Socialist she shushed me. That was five years ago. Now, it was only a matter of weeks before I turned eighteen, and I’d graduate out of the League.

I rapped once and the door flew open. Frau Dankwart’s rail-thin body stood like a pole in the doorway, her dark eyes sinking into her face. ‘Ella Strauss,’ she said. ‘Glad you finally arrived.’ Her voice was stern, and I fully expected her to scold me, but then she threw a wrinkly old finger into the air, pointing at her parlour. ‘Get inside. We’re reading Mein Kampf,’ she said, as if I thought we’d be reading something else. ‘You almost missed my opening remarks.’

‘Yes, ma’am. Sorry. Pardon me…’ I said, and I slipped past her through the door.

Frau Dankwart’s sitting parlour had been rearranged to look more like a classroom during League meetings. The most devout League girls sat at the desks. The ones she hadn’t made up her mind about sat at the tables off to the side, and the ones she had little hope for sat on the floor way in the back in the draftiest part of the room. I made my way to the back.

I tripped on a ripple in the rug and bumped into a girl’s desk. She looked up from her book, sniffling and snivelling, wiping tears from her eyes. ‘I’m in love with the Führer,’ she gushed.

I patted her arm and continued to the back of the room where my friend, Claudia, sat crisscross on the floor waiting for me, her auburn hair twisted over one shoulder. I sat down in a hurry, grabbing my copy of Mein Kampf from my rucksack.

‘You’re late,’ she whispered.

The girl in front of us turned around sharply. ‘Shh!’

Claudia held her book up to her face, shoving her nose into it. ‘What took you so long?’ she whispered. ‘I’m about to go out of my mind. Frau Dankwart’s in one of her moods.’

I scooted closer to her, looking up over the pages of my book at Frau Dankwart, who was too busy looking at her reflection in a handheld mirror. She smoothed her grey hair back, which had already been pulled into a bun at the base of her neck.

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘My aunt has me closing the shop now by myself. Still not used to the hours, or how long it takes to walk here.’

Frau Dankwart cleared her throat from the front of the room, eyes scanning, and we pretended to be absorbed in our reading, ducking down just a bit, mouthing the text to ourselves.

Claudia leaned into my ear. ‘What are you reading?’ She took a quick look at some of the pages, and then we switched books. The book jacket was Hitler’s memoir, but we’d changed the books inside months ago.

Frau Dankwart clapped her hands once, and we stood bolt upright. There was a moment of quietness as we looked up at Hitler’s portrait on her wall. ‘Ready, girls?’ She clasped her hands together. ‘Begin.’

And all thirteen of us drummed out our pledge. ‘I promise always to do my duty in the Hitler Youth, in love and loyalty to the Führer…’

Claudia leaned into my ear. ‘Can you help me again tonight?’ she whispered, and I looked at her. ‘Please?’

I glanced at Frau Dankwart to see if she was looking, but her back was to us.

I nodded once, and Claudia smiled.

*

I had just blown out the candle on my nightstand and settled deep into the down of my feathered bed, when I heard the tick of a fingernail tapping against my window. I kicked off the sheets and then peered into the dark reflection of the glass. It could have only been one person.

‘Claudia.’

She climbed through the window, plopping the burlap bag she had strung over her shoulder onto my bed. I tipped the bag upside down and gave it a stiff shake: a brown mop-topped wig, a sack of hair pins, barbed metal hooks, and a tin of lard to help mould it in place—the makings for a disguise.

Claudia sat on my bed and batted her emerald-green eyes. A row of pin-pricked freckles ran across her crinkled nose as she held the wig close to her face. ‘Can you pin this?’

My jaw cracked when I yawned, nodding.

‘Thank you for doing this, Ella. I know it’s late.’ She kissed my cheek before wrapping her arms around my neck.

I cleared a spot on the floor with my foot and then relit the smouldering pillar candle on the nightstand next to my bed. This wasn’t the first time she’d asked me to thread her hair. I’d plaited a synthetic wig into it last week. But never had she come to my window so close to midnight.

Claudia situated herself on the floor, talking about how she wanted to use every strand of hair she had brought. ‘None of it should be wasted.’

I brushed her hair out before dividing it into sections. Plaiting was meticulous, eye-straining work, but it was the best way to secure pieces of a wig into place. Her scalp still looked tender and raw from the last time. ‘Your scalp hasn’t healed.’

‘Don’t worry about that,’ she said, flicking her fingers at me. ‘Pull it as tight as you can. Even if it hurts.’ And I did, pulling and stretching her hair tightly into place, especially behind her ears, using a dab of lard to smooth fly-a-ways before snipping a small lock of hair from the wig.

‘I’m getting good at your disguises.’ I rubbed a few of the strands in between my fingers; it was silky, not dry and bristly like the last one. ‘Is this—’

‘Real? You can tell?’

I held it to my nose. There was a delicate scent to it, almost as if she had rinsed the hair in rose water.

Claudia’s stomach rumbled. My aunt’s room was opposite mine, down a long corridor in the corner of an old, half-timbered house in the Altstadt, Old Town, and even though there was a good distance between our rooms, she had sharp ears. Auntie also had the bladder of a little girl, often getting up in the middle of the night to relieve herself. The sound of splintering floorboards always gave her away. Tonight, those noises would serve as a warning.

Claudia’s stomach rumbled again, but this time it sounded like a wrecking ball slamming against her ribs. ‘Shh! You’ll wake my aunt.’

She winced. ‘I didn’t have time to eat dinner. I’d stop it if I could—I swear it.’

‘I’d get you something from the kitchen, but with my aunt…’

‘I know,’ she said. She turned around unexpectedly, and her soft hair slid down the flank of my hand, unravelling the twisty curl I’d pulled from the wig. ‘You’re an incredible friend, Ella, always helping me, never asking any questions.’ She reached for my face, her fingers feeling unusually icy as they grabbed my lower jaw and aligned my eyes to her own. ‘I need another favour. You can say no.’

‘What is it?’

‘I need you to deliver a key to a man you don’t know.’

I scooted up. She’d never asked me to do something so mysterious before, and my heart beat faster. ‘Where? And who is he?’

‘At the Hauptmarkt near the fountain, before the merchants set up their tents in the morning. His name is Wilhelm.’

The Hauptmarkt was one of the oldest squares in the city, right in the middle of the Altstadt, where merchants sold everything from linens to fruit and vegetables.

‘He’ll speak French to you. You still know some, right? It’s a good idea to speak in another language. In case anyone overhears.’

‘Remember?’ I said. ‘Both my mother and father were fluent. We talked in French all the time before they…’ My back got a little straighter. ‘Passed away.’

She patted my knee. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘The anniversary of their car accident is coming up, isn’t it?’ She got very quiet and reached for my hand. ‘Such a shame we had to mourn the deaths of our loved ones together.’

During the same week many years ago, Claudia’s older sister, a teacher, had been hung outside her apartment for not aligning her curriculum with Party ideology. Her sister’s eight-year-old student had turned her in.

Claudia took a deep breath, then dug into her pocket and fished out a key. ‘There’s a message too,’ she said. ‘The key is useless without it.’ She pulled a piece of paper out from under her sleeve and unravelled it. ‘Here,’ she said, showing it to me.

A puff of air escaped from my lips. It was an address—a house she once lived in, now used as one of her father’s rentals. I glanced up at her.

‘They’re sending all the Jews east, Ella. Against their will.’ She stared at me while I thought about what she’d been doing. I wasn’t that naïve; I knew that, with all of her disguises, she was doing something that could get her arrested. From the beginning, she only told me things I needed to know. It was safer that way. I just didn’t realize she was actively hiding them.

‘Will you be all right?’ she said, and I nodded. ‘If it’s too much—’

I thought of that little boy I ran into earlier. He looked about ten years old or so. Brown hair and eyes, chubby cheeks, innocent. Scared.

‘I’ll do it,’ I said. ‘Deliver a key and an address. I’ll go before I head to the shop. But where will you be?’ I knew not to ask, but it slipped out. At the very least, I thought she could tell me how she kept her activities from her parents. ‘What do you tell your parents?’

‘My father’s regularly in Frankfurt on business and my mother has her liquor. I’m not missed.’

Claudia let go of my arm and fitted her elbows back into the crook of her knees, leaving a swirl of gritty dust on the floor where she had spun back around.

‘And you’ll need a scarf,’ she said, ‘something with a lot of yellow in it. Otherwise you’ll blend in with everyone else. He’ll be looking for it.’

‘In that drawer,’ I said, pointing with my head.

She sifted through a mound of scarves and ribbons until she found the solid yellow one my uncle gave me before the Party transferred him to Berlin to develop ciphers.

She bit the tag off with her teeth and tossed the scarf into my lap. ‘Don’t forget it, and stay until Wilhelm arrives. Don’t leave the square with the key still in your pocket.’

I peeked over my bed, reaching for the hooks she had brought with a searching hand. ‘I won’t,’ I said, and the bag flopped to the ground like a fat bottomed sack of flour with metal barbs sticking from it.

Following Claudia’s firm request, I anchored the hooks into the base of each curl. ‘You didn’t have me do this last time.’ I used my grip on her hair to move her head around to look at me.

‘Pull my hair nice and tight on the top,’ she said, and I did, drawing her temples back with a fine pull. After a few minutes she clawed her way around her scalp, silently memorizing the location of each hook.

An hour of silence passed before I noticed the tips of my fingers were as raw and red as fleshy little tomatoes. They burned with each thread of her hair, but the backs of my hands felt like my knees, cold and numb. As the clock ticked, my shadow on the wall withered smaller and smaller next to hers, like a grape left on the vine, but then I noticed it wasn’t me changing.

It was Claudia.

Gone was the anxious girl that slumped between my legs and in her place a stoic, complacent young woman, whose arrow-straight shadow on the wall loomed over mine like a steel beam. Her arms stretched out to feel the warmth of the candle’s flame just as I tied the last of her hair up. I broke the silence with a breathy sigh.

‘I’ve never seen a wig made out of real hair before, Claudia.’ I sat back, and let my limbs fall where they may. ‘This poor woman must be bald!’

A pin fell from my lips. ‘She’s dead,’ Claudia said.

It landed, clear as a bell, and rolled but neither of us moved to stop it.

2

Wagner blared from the front room and my eyes popped open from my bed. A steadfast nationalist, Aunt Bridget only played German composers in the morning, with a nod to the English late in the afternoon, but only when she thought she was by herself.

I lay still, sliding my eyes toward the door, following the sound of Auntie’s footsteps as she walked down the corridor. Shadows wrestled with the breaking sunlight under my door as she made one last pass before knocking.

‘Good morning,’ she said, slightly elevated, careful not to offend the pomp of Valkyrie in the background. I pulled the blanket up around my neck, mentally telling her to walk away, but then she called me by my nickname, Sascha, and I knew I’d have to answer.

‘I’m up.’

My feet met the floor again, as they had earlier, but this time they were more aware. A pang of loneliness hit me as I looked at the spot where, just hours ago, a crime had been committed. The imprint of my body still pressed into the sheets tried to lure me back, but it was too late. The day had begun.

My door flew open with a bang.

‘Ah!’ I jumped to a stand, only to slump in place when I saw Auntie’s smiling face. ‘Auntie, you scared me.’

She threw a fluffy white robe on top of my bed, the warm smell of morning eggs trailing in behind her. ‘I thought you heard me.’ Her hair was wound up into a braided bun behind her head, and it looked very tight, which made me wonder how long she’d been up. ‘You’re awake now, that’s what matters.’ She smiled, patting my shoulder.

I put the robe on, listening to her as she moved about my room and picked magazine clippings off the floor. ‘I don’t understand today’s fashion,’ she said, holding up an advertisement for women’s trousers. ‘What are you going to do with these?’ She bundled the clippings into her hands.

‘Paste them to my wall. All the girls do it, Auntie.’

‘Hmm,’ she said, stuffing the clippings into a drawer. ‘Girls these days. Well, can you at least keep your room a little cleaner? I feel like I’m always straightening it up.’ The pink in her cheeks reddened and lightly blackened lashes fanned out from her eyes as she smoothed her white apron against her waist.

I yawned, nodding. ‘Sorry, Auntie. I’m still so tired.’

‘Are you? Your eyes look very bright to me.’ She swept a lock of hair behind my shoulder, and her hand briefly touched the nape of my neck. Then she paused, and looked into my eyes, deeply, as if she had lost something. ‘You know, your mother was my favourite sister, and although she gave birth to you—’

‘She was your only sister, Auntie.’

‘Be that as it may…’

‘Yes, yes, I know the whole story. You were the midwife who delivered me, and your blue eyes were the first I ever saw.’

She moved to the dresser, rearranging my things to look more orderly, and picked up a photograph of my cousins, Joseph and Alex. She got lost for a moment staring at their faces. Both had left for Munich last summer, one for medical school and the other for the Reich, which left only me and Auntie to run her antiques shop. She wrote them every Tuesday, but only Joseph wrote back, and I felt sorry for her, which is why I didn’t mind when she made references about me being more like a daughter to her than a niece.

‘Everyone is gone now,’ she said, wiping a little tear from her eye. ‘Your uncle, on business with the Party, and now my children.’ She took a deep breath and then smiled, looking at me. ‘Except you, my sweet. I’m glad you are here.’ She set the frame down. ‘Now, come into the kitchen. Breakfast is ready.’ Her dampened gaze slid to the ground, noticing the swirl of dust Claudia and I had made on the floor with our bodies. Auntie didn’t like Claudia, said a mother who drank more often than she cooked wasn’t a true German. I’d get punished for sneaking friends into my bedroom, but it would be double if she knew that friend was Claudia.

My heart sped up the longer she stared at the floor. ‘Something wrong?’ I moved toward the door, trying to coax her out of my room, smiling nervously, hoping she wouldn’t read anything into it.

Auntie swiped the wood planks with her foot. ‘No, no. Everything is fine.’ And she walked out of my room, only to stop in the corridor and adjust Hitler’s portrait hanging on the wall. ‘Everything is perfectly fine.’

*

My stomach was already upset, thinking about Claudia’s key, and then as soon as I saw the slivers of meat and yellow cheese Auntie had out for us in the kitchen, my insides twisted into a cluster of mushy knots. I forked a piece of salami, lifting it in the air, examining the multi-coloured sheen glistening on top.

Auntie turned to see her hind-end reflecting in the windows, unaware I was making faces at the meat. A tiny frown questioned the sag in her apron tie, which she tightened with two quick pulls, before running her thumbs in between the apron and her waist. I set the meat down just as she reached for a silver tray that had two hardboiled