Content warning: mentions of euthanasia, depression, suicidal thoughts. It's a doozy.
1940
Alice had been right about the deportations. In the middle of October the SS had started taking Jewish families from their homes and deporting them on trains and trucks out of the country. It was no longer a secret by that point, even the international press knew they were being deported – out to Poland, was the word, to the ghettos, or to empty fields or reservations. Anywhere but here, said a police chief laughingly at a party at Alice's uncle's house.
Eight of the twenty families Alice and Jilí looked out for were sent away.
Alice spent one night crying for them, and for Franz, and for the children with red crosses on their patient files, and the next night got to work again. They helped people find emptied-out homes to squat in, helped get food to those already hiding, helped others flee from the deportations: most of them heading toward Palestine.
The war marched ever on, with bombs dropped in Munich and the Thames. In November the Russians invaded Finland. Germany continued to snatch up the holdouts in Poland.
Alice performed Pichler's new song (called Birds of Glory, very obviously about the Luftwaffe air force) for the social elite in Vienna. As she sang she looked around at the room full of champagne glasses and pink, smiling faces and thought How can we live like this while ravaging another country? While ravaging our own?
After her song she accepted a glass of champagne and went to stand by the generals speaking to her father. When they turned to her she smiled prettily.
Christmas was strange. The Nazi party had been leaning away from Jesus as a whole for a while, given the whole Jewish thing, so the celebration was more about Germany than about Jesus's birth. It didn't affect Alice all that much, save for the fact that she sang Christmas carols with different lyrics and that her uncle put a swastika at the top of the Christmas tree instead of a star. Alice cut her own star out of newspaper and put it over the mantelpiece at Jilí's house. The two of them cooked a large dinner for a gathering of some of their friends, shivering in the poorly-heated room, and on her way home Alice tried not to notice the stores selling SS toy soldiers and toy tanks and Luftwaffe planes as Christmas gifts.
Steve's Christmas letter came three weeks late but he'd drawn her a picture of the Rockefeller tree (larger than ever this year), another of Bucky wearing an enormous beanie that slid over his eyes, and sent her a novel that had been banned in the Reich. Alice devoured the drawings, trying not to smudge the pencil with her fingertips, and gave the novel to one of her friends at the bakery once she'd finished it. She hoped Steve had liked the art book she'd sent him. It would be a while until she found out.
Tom's letter arrived a day later, full of colorful observations about Matthias's family and all the strange and wonderful things they'd done over the holiday. He was eleven now. Steve had sent her a drawing of him a while ago and Alice had burst into tears at the image. The small, bright-eyed toddler she'd known had grown tall, and frizzy-haired, with a quirky look of mischief about his eyes. He had gone almost half his life without his sister.
As they entered a new decade Alice watched skirmishes, victories, and losses unfold in the newspapers. Because that was all the war was so far – a series of headlines. No battles were being fought in Vienna, but the city continued to change all the same.
Alice realized, one day as she rushed to a house in a back alley of Vienna under the cover of darkness to check if the family inside had been arrested during the day, that she was drowning in desperation. The small things she had done to help people were not enough. Never enough.
She gave no hint of this in her letters to Steve.
In May, Alice woke up to the news that the German Army had invaded France, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands all at once. Her stomach turned over as her uncle read her the paper with excitement in his voice. She nodded, pale, then went back into her room and did not come out for the rest of the day.
The world is falling apart around me, she wrote to Steve. I feel like everyone around me has gone crazy. Or maybe I'm the crazy one.
That same month Alice found out from a surgeon at one of her performance afterparties that the vanishing children (and adults as well, she'd found out) were going to Hartheim Castle. "Don't worry about that," he told her. "They know how to deal with conditions like theirs up there. Cripples, the feeble minded, that sort of thing."
Alice asked if she could maybe visit, but then her uncle appeared and whisked her away before the surgeon could reply. A cold stone sat in the pit of her belly for the rest of the evening. She didn't sleep that night.
She told everyone she could to get their disabled relatives out of the asylums and sanatoriums and take them home.
One by one, the countries the Nazis invaded fell like chess pieces. On June 14th the German Army entered Paris. Alice felt dizzy at the thought of it – she'd visited Paris twice before, and the thought of German tanks rolling down those streets turned her stomach.
She'd thought war was slow, fought in trenches over the course of months, not this greedy snapping up of territory with seemingly no resistance. At this rate the Germans could cover the world in a matter of years.
Alice thought of German tanks rolling through Brooklyn. She thought of the Germans looking at weak, diseased Steve Rogers and drawing three red crosses on his paperwork to send him away. She thought of the synagogue around the block from Matthias's tailor shop burning.
Alice's dreams were plagued by these images. She imagined the nightmare that Vienna had become played out on Brooklyn's streets. Sometimes her dreams would shimmer, becoming golden light and sweet song. A way to forget. It was tempting.
She kept her head down. She sang when asked to sing and smiled when asked to smile, and when she could she fled from the fine house on the corner of the street to go to Jilí's house and work until her fingernails bled and her heart ached: mending clothes, collecting food and money, wearing her boots thin walking from one place to another trying to help, help, help.
More people went missing.
At the end of June France signed an armistice with Germany, essentially surrendering, and Alice's uncle began to talk of touring there. She said nothing.
The next day the paper came, and the image on the front froze Alice in the middle of the living room.
The photograph was of the distinctive silhouette of the Eiffel Tower, but in front of it stood Adolf Hitler. He leaned against the bridge overlooking the tower with driving gloves in his hands and his Nazi cap on his head. And Alice knew, with every fiber of her being:
This is wrong.
It was one of the first clear thoughts she'd had in ages, she realized, this sudden knowledge of wrong. It was fortifying.
With each country that had fallen, Alice had fallen further into some kind of intangible, murky depth. Everything that gave her joy was done in secret; listening to jazz, writing to Steve. Even her friends who she really loved were Romani, Jewish, other. Outsiders.
She used the fortification to develop a plan to get penicillin for Rupert, the youngest child of the Hofmanns, who were living in their cousin's garden shed. She ended up stealing the medicine herself after booking a checkup, and then got it to the family by handing it to one of the Hofmann's childrens' best friends who worked as a clerk at a shoe shine booth. Alice eyed the system all around her, the city churning away day by day, and worked out where the cracks were. That is where I must slip through.
Steve had made friends with the mailman. The guy kept going on about his sweetheart in Portugal, and Steve didn't have the heart to let him down so he never corrected him.
"How's your sweetheart?" The mailman would ask, his mustache twitching with a smile.
"Missing home, I think," Steve would reply. It wasn't a lie.
He spent most of that year drawing art for the third most popular newspaper in Brooklyn and working as a drug store clerk. Every morning he grabbed the first most popular newspaper and devoured the news from Europe.
It felt so strange – each troop movement, each battle and political maneuver was something that affected Alice day to day. She never appeared in the news, but it still felt like he was reading about her.
The war felt distant in New York. Sometimes Steve would put down the paper and look at the people walking up and down the streets.
Don't you care? He wanted to yell at them. Don't you care that there are thousands of people across the ocean hurting?
But maybe he wouldn't if it wasn't Alice over there. No way to know.
Bucky kept setting Steve up on dates. He understood that Steve was all hung up on Alice, but he didn't see why Steve couldn't have fun and enjoy his life some.
The war'll clear up soon, Bucky would say as he slung an arm over Steve's shoulder. Alice will be on a ship back to Brooklyn in no time.
Steve wished he had some way of knowing, some countdown he could check. But as the German troops rolled out across Europe he began to have a sick feeling in the back of his throat. What if this isn't a war, he thought, but the world changing forever?
In Vienna, a woman spoke out.
Her name was Anna Wödl. Alice first met her outside Vienna City Hall. Alice had just been in to meet her acquaintance Hans in the records office, who didn't like Jewish people but sure liked gossiping about them. She walked out into the warm July sun and couldn't see for a moment. When her eyes got used to the light, Alice took a step back at the sight of a small crowd of people standing in the road outside the City Hall. When she realized they weren't Gestapo, she stepped forward curiously.
A woman with dark hair and intense eyes, maybe mid-thirties, approached her. "Will you sign this letter to the Reich Ministry of the Interior to prevent them from transferring my son out of his care center?" She held out the piece of paper, which already had close to a hundred signatures. "They're transferring them to the facility at Hartheim, and the children there don't survive. The beds are emptying."
The woman must have taken Alice's wide eyes as hesitation because she continued: "I'm a nurse, I understand how the system works. This is not normal, they are…" her voice quavered. "They're doing something to those children. Will you sign?"
"Of course." Alice took the proffered pen and signed her name. A small voice at the back of her mind told her: be careful, but she could not say no to this. As she wrote, she spoke: "I… I've heard about this."
"Everyone knows what they're doing," the woman said. Her eyes went dark. "I'm not the only one protesting." She gestured around at the other people outside the City Hall, many of whom looked like her family members, but there were others too.
"I've been telling my friends to take their family members home, care for them there."
"My son's care facility won't let me," the woman said. "They've already put in his transfer paperwork. I must fight this."
"Of course. I-"
But at that moment the voices outside the City Hall peaked in volume and Alice looked up to see a unit of SS soldiers running around the side of the building, their brows lowered and their hands on their weapons.
Alice grabbed the dark-haired woman's wrist as she turned to face them. "Don't fight them," she hissed. "They will get you out of here with words or with force, but you cannot stand against them. Go send your letter." And with that she turned around and walked away – not briskly, but at an even pace. As if she had all the time in the world.
Excerpt from 'The Killing Programs' by Paula Weller (2003), p. 12
In October of 1939, the Nazis implemented Aktion T4 (though it would not become known by that name until after the war), backdating the orders to September of 1939 to disguise it as a wartime initiative. Within months it involved nearly the entire German psychiatric community. The program was framed as a 'mercy'.
After that, the Siren started visiting hospitals. She sang to wards of patients, charmed the administrators, and asked questions. At first she publicly supported Anna Wödl (she'd met her again since and found out her name). But then her uncle seized her by the arm one night and said she was destroying her reputation, that he'd confine her to the house again if she pulled another stunt like that. It was eye-wateringly frustrating to be forced to hide her true feelings lest she be grounded.
So she supported Wödl the best she could. She offered money and advice and asked around the officials she knew about the best way to prevent the transfer of Wödl's son Alfred. As she worked, she ended up bribing a few doctors. Not any that had any say over Alfred, but ones she found out were connected with the oversight of deciding which children and adults were to be transferred to Hartheim. She handed them an envelope full of her uncle's money and asked them to consider leaving a few more patients in the facility here. No doubt their families would like to visit them often.
She had no way of knowing if they ever considered it.
When she came back home from the last hospital, Alice knew she'd stuck her neck out. She didn't tell Jilí what she'd done. She was already cooking up excuses for if she got caught. I just adore children so much, Herr SS. I'd love one of my own one day, and the idea of them being whisked away to some dreadful castle just breaks my heart.
Each time the door at her uncle's house knocked she flinched.
A week before Alfred's transfer date Alice and her uncle went to a party. A social mixer for the social elite of Vienna, the kind of party where you had to be introduced before you could speak to someone and where the champagne was free. Alice wore a glittering silver dress and her hair pinned in curls, and her uncle walked her into the large bustling hall with her arm in his.
Alice had never quite gotten used to these kinds of parties. She'd known that they existed back in New York, but they were for… an entirely different class of people than she belonged to. She'd been running the backstreets of Brooklyn with grubby hands and elastic around the end of her braid. But here, she'd been transplanted directly into the world of people knowing your name before you met them, of champagne and servants and never being asked to pay. She might not be comfortable here, but she knew how it went – she would make conversation about music and gossip about other people, she would deftly turn away the young men trying to clumsily seduce her (whether they were genuinely interested or trying to make a buck, she didn't care), and she would listen quietly as her uncle had conversations with men whose power terrified her.
Alice didn't sing this time since there was already a band, so she set her sights on mingling. Her uncle watched her closely. So Alice spoke to him instead, asking his opinion on whether she should produce a single song or an album next, and handing him glasses of champagne.
When he finally went to the bathroom Alice strode across the glittering hall toward the representative from the Ministry of the Interior, who was visiting Vienna for the weekend. Herr Schneider. She stood nearby, sipping her champagne, until someone introduced her into the small circle of conversation.
"Nice to meet you," Alice said as she lightly shook the man's hand. He was in his fifties, wearing a fine dark suit with a timepiece hanging from the breast pocket. A thin blonde mustache sat on his upper lip. After a brief appraisal her eyes slid away, as if there were others more interesting in the group.
The general who'd introduced her started waxing poetic about her singing.
"Oh, please," Alice said with a smile. "Though it is difficult to perform in Vienna now, what with all the disruptions."
"Disruptions?" asked a young officer, new in town. His eyes slid over Alice's dress and she made a mental note to avoid him.
She flapped a hand dismissively. "Parades and celebrations are perfectly fine, but when it comes to protests? Petitioning? You can hardly get around town."
Bring it up, she prayed as she laughed into her champagne at her own 'witty observation'. Bring it up.
The general's wife did. "Oh, like that woman protesting all over the place about the medical facility transfers?"
The group as a whole took up the new topic of conversation, and Alice let them discuss it for a few moments as she stood in silence, smiling vaguely. The usual opinions got tossed around – awfully disruptive, shame about the son after all, not much hope for him no matter where he is.
When Herr Schneider piped up he said: "She had better let the facilities do their work, instead of disrupting ordinary peoples' days. There's a war on, after all."
Alice smiled and replied politely: "Surely, though, it's a little cruel to a sensitive mother? My friend has a disabled son herself, one can hardly blame her for a mother's love. It can't hurt to let her keep her son close."
Her tone was bland, conversational. Alice wanted to scream at them for killing children, because she hadn't acknowledged it out loud yet but she knew, but she also knew screaming wouldn't work and her uncle would do something drastic. As if her thought had conjured him, her uncle appeared back in the entrance of the room and looked around. She felt his eyes fall on her, and saw his teeth grind.
The representative sighed. "You're not alone, Fräulein. So many young women and mothers are writing to us, it seems you're onto a struck nerve. We're in talks though, you needn't fret." And then he offered her a genial smile and turned back to the rest of the group, who had already changed the topic.
"Sir," she said a little louder. He looked over at her with raised eyebrows. "If you would consider-"
"Alice!" her uncle called as he strode across the room to her. "There you are, I thought I'd lost you."
"Not quite," Alice said with a thin smile. The Ministry of the Interior representative looked away.
Alice's uncle took her arm in a rigid grip and walked her across the room to one of his friends. Alice let him. She felt like a grain of sand in a riptide – she moved, she scraped across the bottom and was whisked up and around, but despite all that she had no true power to do anything to change her situation.
And as she whisked to and fro, others were pulled into the depths.
In the end, they did move Wödl's son. But not to Hartheim, to a children's clinic in Vienna. Wödl ceased her protests under immense pressure from the police and government and under the hope that in raising her voice this time, she had saved her sons life.
Alice tried to feel hope. But she just felt cold.
Excerpt from article 'The Rise and Fall of SHIELD' by Amanda Glass (2014)
… SHIELD's parent agency, the Strategic Scientific Reserve (SSR), had noble beginnings. In mid 1940, on the orders of President Franklin D Roosevelt and alongside similar agencies forming overseas (see: British Special Operations Executive), Colonel Chester Phillips was tasked with heading up a new top-secret war agency to combat the Nazis' startling strides in technology, notably their HYDRA science division. At the time, the SSR's foundation would have been a beacon of hope, however secret, amidst the desperation and devastation of war. Little did they know then that the division they'd been founded to fight would become their downfall.
One night at the end of August, the British dropped bombs on Berlin. Alice felt… hopeful, maybe. But then she thought of the people she'd met in Berlin – not the officials and socialites who she went to parties with, but the people she met when evening fell and she crept out of her uncle's lodgings. She didn't know if those people – singers and street urchins and barflies – had access to bomb shelters.
A government official came to Alice's uncle's house and instructed them all on what to do in the event of an air raid. As he spoke, Alice pictured a dark sky and the shudder of bombs hitting the streets. For the first time, it felt like the war had come to Vienna. Even if just in her mind.
Then Alice went to the war.
Her uncle had been talking about a tour of occupied France for a while, but Alice hadn't thought he was serious until she came home from a visit downtown with Jilí to find a folder of papers on her dresser table. French Tour Schedule. Her heart shot into her mouth and she had to plant both palms on the dresser to keep herself upright.
She knew there was no saying no to this.
So she went.
The tour lasted two weeks: Paris, Marseille, Vichy (the new seat of the French government), Bordeaux, Lyon, Nice. She'd been to Paris before, but the others she'd only ever imagined. Her friend Edith at school had told her about these cities, about the patisseries and cafes she had visited as a child, and how the French countryside felt to her like the simplest and most perfect place on Earth.
Alice hoped Edith would never see her country like this.
Over two weeks, Alice saw what the war had done to France. Nazi flags hung in the cities and soldiers marched the streets, and from the train window on her way from city to city Alice saw metal blockades and tank tracks churning through fields. The German troops only occupied the north half of France, leaving the southern "free" zone to organize the day-to-day running of the country under collaboration with the Germans. No matter what half they were in, though, the people looked the same: they wore stunned faces. Faces that said this can't be real.
Alice knew how they felt.
She was touring France, but really she was just singing for more Nazis – German troops, officials, generals, French politicians who were sympathetic to the Nazis. Her voice rang true but the words felt like nothing to her, as if she were just a record that one touched a needle to and it would peal out the same old song like clockwork.
On the way out of her concert in Paris, a man wearing overalls and a threadbare cap pushed through the crowd and spat on Alice's pure white dress. It all happened so quickly she had only a second to look up and stare at the man's furious face before the soldiers outside the concert hall ran over and slammed the butt of a rifle into the man's face. The crowd outside the hall exploded into uproar – shouts, excited chatter, fussing over Alice and her dress. Hands touched Alice's arms and guided her back inside just as the man with the broken face was hauled away by the soldiers.
Alice did not say a word as she was tended to. She'd been taken back into the hall and aides were cleaning her dress while apologizing profusely the whole time. She could hear her uncle yelling at someone.
Alice wondered if she'd feel anything if the soldiers struck her like they'd struck that man.
John Lempriere: "Some suppose that the Sirens were a number of lascivious women in Sicily, who prostituted themselves to strangers, and made them forget their pursuits while drowned in unlawful pleasures."
That night Alice changed out of her evening gown into a pair of brown trousers and a loose shirt, and tucked her hair into a cap (she'd stolen the clothing from the hotel's laundrette after dinner). She looked at herself in the mirror and slid on the unseasonably thick coat she'd brought with her. She tilted her head so the cap shadowed her face.
A sigh of relief escaped her lips. This wasn't Die Sirene. This could be anybody. Any man.
She crept out of her room, slipped down the hotel corridor and down the staff stairs. Each step she took away from her ordinary life felt like a weight off her shoulders.
It was only until she began walking the dark, silent streets of Paris that she remembered the Nazis had imposed a curfew – nine in the evening until five in the morning. Not a light shone in the city. She could hear the distant coordinated steps of patrols.
But the air felt cool and fresh on her skin and her disguise made her feel as if she could fly, so she stayed out.
At night you couldn't tell what the city had become. All flags were the same color in the dark. She turned down narrow alleys that smelled of trash and paced down wide avenues with her ears alert for the sound of footsteps. She could hear the city, if she listened hard enough: there might be a curfew but no one was asleep. She heard snatches of conversation and song and even laughter in the buildings she passed, the crackle of the radio and clattering dishes. Paris was still alive even in the dark.
Two hours of walking later, Alice walked past a building where the sounds of life in the dark were somehow brighter than anything she'd heard before. She paused, cocked her head, and spotted a halo of light peeking out from under a door across the street. She squinted and read the sign, silently thanking Edith for teaching her French back in junior high: she'd found a music shop. Though the large closed sign under the name of the shop wasn't encouraging.
She listened at the door for a minute or so – certainly didn't sound like music inside. Just chatter and clinking glasses.
Then she heard tramping footsteps at the other end of the street.
Alice had pulled the music shop door open and whirled inside before considering that she might be better off trying her luck with the patrol than with whatever waited inside.
The noises within fell dead at her sudden appearance. Alice looked up, blinking, to see about thirty people staring at her. They sat at wobbly tables that had been pushed into the disused music shop, and on the other side of the room the cashier's counter had been turned into a makeshift bar. Brown, dusty bottles of alcohol gleamed dully.
She'd just interrupted a quiet night of illicit drinking, judging by the suddenly-afraid faces now looking back at her. Wine glasses and beer flagons were gently set on tables and shoulders tensed across the room.
Alice swallowed and tilted her head to shadow her face. She cleared her throat. "Bonsoir," she said in a low pitched voice, mimicking the Parisian accent she'd heard throughout the day. Just that simple word seemed to relieve the sudden tension in the makeshift bar. She jerked her head over her shoulder and continued in French: "The patrol is coming."
The man standing behind the bar checked his watch. "Ah. Eleven o'clock patrol. Audric?"
A dark-haired man near the door leaned over and hit the light switch, casting the bar into the same darkness that lurked outside. Everyone listened in the dark as the tramping footsteps outside grew louder, louder, seemed to be at the very door… and then faded away.
Alice let out a breath.
Audric switched the lights on, and with a shared laugh and a clink of glasses the French men and women inside got back to drinking.
Alice cautiously walked through the room toward the counter-turned bar. The bartender, a round-faced man with a quirked mustache, looked up and tipped his cap at her.
"Thank you, stranger," he said. "When the patrols come knocking we usually offer them a beer and they leave us alone, but it's better to be safe than sorry. What'll you have, sir?"
Alice blinked and looked around again. She could see how this used to be a music shop – empty shelves on the walls, a bare spot on the wooden floor where a phonograph stand must have been. But now it was empty save for a collection of mis-matched chairs and tables, bottles of alcohol, and a collection of Parisians who did not seem to pay all that much mind to the newly-imposed curfew. Their bright faces were enticing after the company Alice had been keeping these last two weeks. They chattered and gossiped and told dirty jokes, a low hum of words Alice felt lucky to understand.
She turned back to the bartender. "Can you make a Paris Side Car?"
He made a face. "Goodness, normally folks just want whatever will get them drunkest fastest. Let's see…" he leaned back, surveying his many bottles, and then shrugged. "I can make something close enough. With the way rationing is going I won't be able to soon, but for now you shall have your Side Car."
Alice leaned against the counter and watched people as the bartender made her drink, letting the warmth of collective body heat wash over her and the smells of stale alcohol and dust fill her nose.
"What's your name, stranger?" asked the bartender as he mixed her drink.
She angled her head away. "Al."
"Well, Al, welcome to our small establishment." He slid the cocktail over – it was in a gin tumbler, but she didn't mind – and Alice took it with a smile.
She found herself a spare chair and took a sip of her drink as she closed her eyes. She remembered the first time she'd tried a Paris Side Car, how Bucky had complained about it being a fancy drink and how Steve had fearlessly taken his, raised it and said 'to Alice'.
When she opened her eyes again she was alone in Paris, hiding from the world outside in a bar that had once been a home for music.
Alice spent the next few hours in the strange room with the others who didn't want to stay home. She drank and spoke as little French as possible in order to keep her cover, and began to feel the city open up to her. She heard her fellow patrons curse the Germans and complain about how hard it was to get a decent fucking wine these days. They drank a round to General Charles De Gaulle, who had fled to London but who hadn't forgotten his country, and complained about the regulations, censorship, and propaganda that the Germans had brought.
"Not much changed at first," said one woman when she noticed Alice looking over, "but things are getting worse."
They drank to their family members trapped as prisoners of war in Germany, and hoped that the Germans would just win already so they could get their country back like had been promised.
When Alice's mind was pleasantly blurry, she nodded farewell to the bartender and then walked home in the dark. As she walked, she looked up to see a man and a woman silhouetted in a window, entwined in a kiss.
Why am I here? She thought. Her stolen shoes pinched her toes. Why am I seeing this place? What can I do?
Excerpt from 'The "Refus Absurde": Life in Nazi Occupied France, 1940' by Pierre Montague (1997), p 2
… after such a complete and total defeat, there was little the French population could do but submit to Nazi domination, and wait for the war to end – inevitably a German victory. Resistance was futile. Those who'd fled to the countryside slowly trickled back into the main cities. The overall feeling after the lightning-fast invasion was shock, and alienation. A great portion of military-aged men were trapped in POW camps, and those who were left behind were left to the rigid rule of the puppet government in Vichy (in the unoccupied "Free Zone") and the Gestapo.
But even in that shocked, defeated summer, a budding resistance began to bloom. Writer Jean Cassou called this resistance in the face of inevitable Reich victory the 'refus absurde' – "absurd refusal".
September 17th, 1940
Vienna
Dear Steve,
Just got back from France and had a letter from you waiting for me – a perfect welcome home present. Needed the laugh from that story about Bucky and his sisters, so thank you.
France was fine, you don't need to worry about me – they never took me anywhere dangerous. Nothing bad happened. It was sobering to see the changes that have happened there: there's a curfew now, and of course Nazi flags everywhere, and there's a labor shortage which makes things even more difficult for them. I hope my uncle doesn't take us on another tour there. It felt wrong.
I just heard they're introducing conscription in the States. I know the US isn't in the war, but I was wondering: they can't take you, right? Surely you could get a letter from your doctor to exempt you.
I know you'd rather join, but this feels like the beginning of something serious. What are the rules of conscription? The news here is so full of propaganda I couldn't find anything useful out. I think Bucky must be eligible, but surely they don't automatically take every young man of a certain age? He hasn't been drafted, has he?
This isn't the time to be a soldier, Steve. Germany is winning.
Please write soon.
Yours,
Alice
September 29th, 1940
Brooklyn
Dear Alice,
It was good to hear from you too. I'm glad nothing happened in France, but I still feel like you maybe haven't told me everything. That's okay, I know there's some things you can't put in the mail, but I want you to know that I hope you stay safe. You're in a war, Alice. Be careful.
As for conscription, not much has actually happened in that regard yet. They've got a cap of 900,000 per intake across the country.
I know you're worried, but if we go to war I'll be out there with everyone else. I've got no right to do any less.
Sorry.
Bucky's nervous, but more for me. He hasn't said anything but I think he might enlist under his own steam if we go to war.
If Germany's winning, now is exactly the time to be a soldier.
Yours,
Steve.
One morning, Alice knocked on the door to Jilí's house and let out a sigh of relief when the door swung inward to reveal her friend. Walking through the cooling streets of Vienna had felt like striding through treacle. Alice felt small and tired, and arriving at the familiar apartment was a source of comfort.
Jilí frowned at Alice as she walked past her into the apartment. "Aren't you meant to be having visitors over at your home today?"
Alice shrugged and went to the kitchen to start the kettle. "They're my uncle's visitors."
"He'll be angry," Jilí said softly.
"What's he going to do, force me to stay at home again?"
"He might."
"Maybe I could run away. Live here."
"You don't want to do that, Alice. Don't throw yourself away."
Alice just bunched her shoulders and made herself busy in the kitchen. When she turned around a couple of minutes later Jilí had sat at the table to assemble food packages in brown hessian bags. She didn't look up when Alice set down a cup of tea for her, but then Alice moved past her to sit on the other side of the table and she looked up with a wrinkled nose.
Her dark eyes flicked over Alice. "Isn't that the same dress you wore yesterday?"
Alice sipped her tea. "No one notices."
"I do."
Alice looked up into her friend's dark, serious eyes, and then glanced down to pull a hessian bag towards herself and began packing it. Cans and packets of dehydrated goods, unpleasant to eat but utterly necessary for a family hiding and surviving in a garden shed or a basement.
For twenty long minutes, Alice and Jilí worked in silence. Alice let herself get lost in the repetitive work.
But then they ran out of food. The two of them sat across from each other in the quiet apartment and listened to car engines rumble outside.
Alice thought wars were meant to be noisy – shouting, explosions, gunfire. But so far the war had brought nothing but silence to her life.
Jilí broke the silence. "Do you think that we might…" her eyes dropped. "Do you think there's some way of pushing back against all this?"
Alice looked up at her friend. "Against the war? What, a resistance?"
Jilí met her gaze. "Exactly." Her eyes were resolute. It was clear this wasn't a spur of the moment thought.
Alice sighed. "There's no resistance in Austria, Jilí. There's not even one in France, not really. They don't see the point. And in Austria… this isn't an invasion or an unwelcome tyrant. People wanted this."
"I didn't," her friend replied with a bite of anger in her voice.
"Neither did I," Alice said in a softer tone. She recalled how they'd found Franz: frozen and bloody. "But I don't think what we want counts at all."
"It counts for you," Jilí said in a firmer voice. "You are not like me, Alice."
"Why not? Why should we be different?"
"Now you're just being naïve," Jilí said dismissively as she leaned back in her chair. "I'm not telling you to speak out, I know that's too dangerous. But you are not helpless, Alice."
"I'm not naïve," Alice replied. She was no longer looking at Jilí, but out the window. "This world just makes no sense."
Alice stopped writing songs. No one noticed. Songwriters at the production company and the propaganda department kept up a steady stream of songs for her to perform, and her uncle kept bringing her to concert halls and parties.
But this was the first time in ten years that Alice had not had an unwritten tune nagging at the corner of her mind, the first time she didn't feel song waiting to trip from her tongue. It was as if her mind had fallen silent.
October 16th, 1940
Brooklyn
Dear Alice,
Went to go see a film with Bucky today, and I definitely don't think this one will have been allowed in Austria. It's the latest Chaplin film, called 'The Great Dictator.'
I was in two minds watching it. Chaplin plays a Jewish man and Hitler himself, and it's… a comedy, I suppose, but it's serious too. It shows Kristallnacht in Berlin. I suppose it's good to turn Hitler into satire – make fun of his flaws, that sort of thing. But the other half of me thinks that we ought to take this seriously. Like you said, he's a serious man. I don't know how you or anyone else living under all that would feel about it all being turned into a joke.
Also I read somewhere that apparently the Nazis are convinced that Chaplin's a Jew. As far as I know he's not, which makes it all kind of bizarre. Maybe they're just trying to find a reason to hate him.
I haven't heard from you lately. I know the mail's slow, and I know you must be busy, but I'm worried about you. You've been writing long enough letters but you've been saying less and less. Let me know how you are. How you really are. You're not alone, Alice.
Yours,
Steve.
October 1940
New York City
Peggy Carter strode into an unmarked office in a nondescript building just outside of Manhattan, her army regimentals neatly flatironed and her red lips pressed together. First day on the job – had to make a good impression. They didn't have to like her, but she'd make damn sure they respected her.
The man at the desk inside looked up with a vaguely irritated expression on his face. Peggy knew who he was already: Chester Phillips. His dark brown uniform bore a Colonel's stripes and Peggy instantly saw from his rigid face and the flat line to his mouth that this was a man who would take no nonsense.
"The hell are you?" he said by way of greeting.
Peggy straightened and saluted. "Agent Carter, sir."
"Ah." Colonel Phillips set down the file he'd been reading. "MI5, right?"
"Yes, sir."
He eyed her. "I didn't agree to your transfer. MI5 and the army went over my head."
Peggy returned his gaze flatly.
After a few more seconds of silence he let out a harrumph like an unhappy bull and picked up the file again. He continued to read as he spoke to her. "Your official title is 'advisor', but I think you probably know enough about how things work around here to know that official titles don't mean all that much."
"Yes, sir." She'd been quick to learn, first as a codebreaker at Bletchley Park and then with MI5. The war had been a whirlwind since her brother died on the front.
Colonel Phillips shot her another quick, irritated glance. "At the moment we're gathering intel on HYDRA. They're-"
"The Nazi science division," Peggy finished. "I've been briefed, sir."
His jaw tightened. "We're also working on bringing Stark into the fold, but he's not taking the war all that seriously right now."
Peggy tried not to grimace. "Do you want me to-"
He waved a hand. "Don't' worry about him for now, we'll bring him around. No, your first assignment will be in the field."
Peggy's eyebrows rose. "Sir?"
"We're planning a rescue mission."
October 30th, 1940
Vienna
Dear Steve,
I'm sorry I haven't written lately. I don't even have a good excuse to give you, I'm afraid. Time seems to drag on, dripping slow… and then the next thing I know three months have passed. I think it's because I'm trying to pretend that the reality around me isn't happening – the war, the Nazis, the violence creeping closer and closer to home.
When I sing I feel like I'm in a dream. Sometimes, I think I see things out of the corner of my eye: flashes of light, and sometimes a figure. Sometimes I think I'm going mad.
My uncle is flourishing. I think he likes how he fits into the political structure here. He's a big, important man and he will only get more important as the war marches on. He's gotten us an invitation to Castle Kauffman in Bavaria, the headquarters of one of the top Nazi generals (head of their new science division), for a gathering of SS generals and officials. My uncle is ecstatic.
He says I ought to be happy too, but… I don't know if I know how to be happy anymore.
I'm sorry, this is depressing. I suppose I haven't really thought all that much about my situation until just now when I sat down to write to you. This is nice, at least.
Thank you for telling me about the film. I hadn't heard about it.
I have to go now.
Yours,
Alice.
That night, after delivering the letter for Steve to Jilí, Alice climbed the stairs to her uncle's house. Jilí was frustrated with her for some reason, her words had been curt. Alice had been too tired to fight with her.
She didn't stop climbing the stairs when she reached the level of her bedroom. She kept climbing, one foot in front of the other, until she arrived at the roof. She kept walking towards the very edge, then set her hands on the low stone barrier and looked down.
She was four floors up, breathing in the night air. The October breeze snatched at her hair and made her eyes water.
She wouldn't get a reply from Steve for weeks. When he did reply he would be worried, and she would feel bad for worrying him, and he would tell her that she should come back to Brooklyn, and… every time Alice considered it guilt twisted in her gut like poison.
She had a whole month of performances ahead of her, and after that probably another month, then another, until…
Her hands clenched on the stone barrier. There was no until. This looked like forever.
Her life had become cold, lonely, terrifying. It had happened so gradually that she hadn't noticed until she found herself short of breath from anxiety each morning and realized that she could go days, weeks, without smiling. She had Jilí, but their friendship was a secret that more and more became an alliance, a bond to keep death at bay. Alice knew that she was letting Jilí down, but she didn't know how to stop it. More often than not she only had her uncle: cold, disappointed, thrilled by everything Alice despised. She was pretty sure she hated him, but she didn't have the energy to hate any more.
Steve was a distant, warm memory. His letters no longer felt like a promise for the future. They felt like a reminder of her past, a memory of what might have been – what if, what if.
Alice's gaze traveled down. Down past the terraces of the building across the street and its darkened windows, down past the iron street lamps, to the cobbles of the footpath below. The street was nearly empty; just a few pedestrians a few hundred feet away. They couldn't see her.
Alice stretched up on her toes.
It would be easy.
A short, fluttering flight, like a bird released from a cage. Then nothing.
She stared at the cobblestones below for so long that her eyes burned and her fingers grew rigid and uncomfortable from gripping the stone barrier. The wind caressed her wet cheeks, her neck.
She pressed her lips together.
What's the point?
After another moment to stare down at the empty air below, Alice pushed her rigid fingers against the barrier and stepped away. Wiping her cheeks, she turned and went back downstairs to bed.
~ It doesn't need to hurt. ~
I drew heavily on the Encyclopedia Brittanica website for the information about the Aktion T4 program, and Wikipedia for the refus absurde. I've got a history boner for the French Resistance, what can I say. And Anna Wödl was a real woman. Thanks for your patience as the plot progresses, let me know if you're still enjoying!