Gudrun gritted her teeth in helpless fury. She wasn’t scared of her father’s punishments, even the threat of his belt, but she was scared of being told she couldn’t go back to the university and study. Even if she hadn’t been involved in the… whatever they came to call their little group… the threat would have scared her. She needed her father’s permission to study at the university and, no matter how clever she was, they wouldn’t allow her to stay if her father changed his mind. The Reich wouldn’t allow the university to call into question a husband’s or father’s role as head of the household. Hell, she knew girls who had been withdrawn a few weeks after entering the university because their parents had thought better of it.
I’m not going to let him take me out, she thought, grimly. But what could she do? Her father had ultimate authority over her, as long as she was unmarried. And it wasn’t as if she could marry Konrad tomorrow. What do I do?
She paused outside Grandpa Frank’s door, feeling beaten and defeated. It wasn’t fair! She knew she was smarter than her brothers, she knew she was a better student than half the boys at university, yet the mere fact of being born a girl hampered her future. She’d never be truly free, she’d never be truly independent; she’d never even be able to get married without her father’s consent. Unless, of course, she allowed herself to get pregnant out of wedlock, which would have its own complications. Her parents would be furious and her in-laws wouldn’t be very pleased either.
Rapping on the door, she pushed it open. The stench of beer and smelly old man seemed weaker, somehow; Gudrun wondered, savagely, if her mother had given the room an airing out while her grandfather had been downstairs, then dismissed the thought as she stepped inside, closing the door behind her. Grandpa Frank was sitting up in bed, reading a small leather-bound book; he looked up at her, then slipped the book under the sheets. Gudrun guessed, as she put the tray down and cleared away the remains of his lunch, that it was a dirty book. A handful of French books had been passed around at school before the teachers confiscated them and they’d been very explicit indeed.
“Here’s your dinner,” Gudrun said shortly, as she picked up the tray and put it on the bedside table. “Mother will be up later…”
She broke off as Grandpa Frank’s hand lunged out with terrifying speed and caught her wrist, pulling her towards him. Gudrun struggled, trying to pull free, but his hand felt like a band of steel. She couldn’t understand how he was so strong, when he spent most of the day in bed, yet it hardly mattered. All that mattered was that she was trapped.
“Sit down,” Grandpa Frank hissed. “Don’t make a noise.”
“Let go of me,” Gudrun said. If she shouted… what did Grandpa Frank want? Her imagination supplied too many possibilities. “Please…”
“It was you,” Grandpa Frank whispered. “You helped write those leaflets.”
Gudrun stared at him in shock. “How do you…?”
“It was written all over your face when you saw the leaflet on the table,” Grandpa Frank rasped. He pulled her into a sitting position on the bed, then met her eyes. It struck her, suddenly, that he sounded surprisingly sober. “You knew what it was before you opened it, before your mother snapped at you for even trying. I hope your father didn’t read that on your face.”
“I hope so too,” Gudrun said, trying to keep her voice level. She’d feared her father somehow guessing her involvement, she’d suspected Kurt would deduce her involvement… but Grandpa Frank? He was a drunkard. She’d assumed he wouldn’t pay any attention to anything beyond the next bottle of beer. “How…?”
“I read the leaflet,” Grandpa Frank told her. “Not a bad piece of work, really.”
“Thank you,” Gudrun said. He hadn’t let go of her wrist and it was starting to ache. “I… Grandpa… let go of me?”
“I have something to tell you,” Grandpa Frank said. He met her eyes. “Promise you won’t run?”
“I won’t,” Gudrun said. What choice did she have? Maybe her father wouldn’t believe Grandpa Frank, but if he took one look at her former uniform the game would be up. “What do you want to tell me?”
Her grandfather let go of her wrist. “I never told anyone this,” he whispered, hoarsely. “Not even your grandmother, may she rest in peace. She knew I had nightmares – your mother knows I have nightmares – but she never knew why. There are… things… I never wanted your mother to know.”
Gudrun shivered. She’d been woken, sometimes, by Grandpa Frank screaming in his sleep, calling out names of people she didn’t recognise. Her father had said that it was a legacy of the war, but he’d refused to say anything more and forbidden her from talking to her grandfather about it. No doubt he knew something about his father-in-law’s military service – he’d have needed Grandpa Frank’s permission to marry his daughter – yet he’d never seen fit to share the secret. In time, Gudrun had decided that there was no secret.
Her grandfather sat upright and pulled up his right sleeve, revealing a blue tattoo. Gudrun stared; she’d seen Konrad’s tattoo, more than once, but Konrad hadn’t had a skull and crossbones over his ID number. She’d never even heard of anyone having anything more than a number, as long as they were in the military. Kurt had once asked for a tattoo and his father had bawled him out for even thinking of it before he completed his time in the Hitler Youth, let alone the military.
Gudrun tried to think about what it meant. “You were an SS stormtrooper?”
“I was Einsatzgruppen,” Grandpa Frank said. “Do you know what that means?”
He answered the question before she could find the words. “Of course you don’t know what that means,” he said, bitterly. He gave a harsh little laugh that chilled her to the bone. “We were the Reich’s dirty little secret. You don’t know, none of you know, just what the Reich did to secure itself. How can you know? You’ve been lied to from the very start.”
Gudrun swallowed. “What secret?”
“I drink to forget,” Grandpa Frank said. He eyed one of the bottles – an unopened bottle, she noted with some surprise – and then shook his head. “I always wondered why they didn’t round us up and kill us all, Gudrun. It wasn’t as if we could have stopped them from exterminating us. The secret would have died with us.”
He caught her wrist again, holding it tightly. “You weren’t there,” he said. “You couldn’t understand. I joined the SS when it started; I helped purge the SA when the Fuhrer decided their leader had gone a little too far.” He snickered. “But you won’t have heard of them, will you? Röhm is an unperson now, serves the bastard right. I did well in my work, too well; they offered me a chance to transfer to the Einsatzgruppen when they were founded and told me there was a promotion in it for me if I did well. And they were right. I did very well.
“We went into Poland and Russia behind the armies, Gudrun. We rounded up soldiers, political leaders, everyone on the hit-list… we marched them into the camps, at first, and then we killed them. Hundreds of thousands of men, women and children were killed – and, after they were dead, we stripped them bare; we even stole their teeth. The bodies were dumped in unmarked mass graves, which were soon wiped from the records. I watched as entire villages were given to the flames, their populations destroyed so that new German settlers could be moved eastwards. Germany East is built on a giant mass grave.”