Apologies that this is a day late, I've been travelling and haven't had time to edit this chapter. Read on!
Nazi Minister of Propaganda Jospeh Goebbels: "Music affects the heart and emotions more than the intellect. Where then could the heart of a nation beat stronger than in the huge masses, in which the heart of a nation has found its true home?"
Until this point, Alice and Jilí had been planning day-to-day, week to week at the most. But for the first time they set their sights on the future.
That January the British forces began to push back against the Germans in North Africa. Alice followed their lead.
She began by saying no to her uncle. She stopped performing so much for the Nazis, but to appease her uncle she performed more and more in general; she booked public performances on her own and agreed to tour in several occupied and neutral countries: France, Hungary, Poland, Greece, the Netherlands, Italy, Switzerland. The music lurking in her mind woke up once more and she wrote four songs in the space of two weeks.
Her uncle was happy, the public was happy, the Nazis were more or less happy. Goebbel's propaganda department kept reaching out to her uncle to get Alice to perform for them, but Alice managed to stave them off.
"You seem… better," her uncle told her over a stiff one-on-one dinner at home one evening. He didn't look at her as he spoke. "Whatever has inspired you like this, keep doing it. The reviewers are much happier."
"I intend to, uncle," Alice replied with a polite smile.
Alice and Jilí had begun coordinating underground activities. They put out the word: do you need help? Can you provide help? And their network spread through quiet bars and hidden attics and the back of shops. They set up a regular food donation system under the radar of the police and most of Vienna's population; through friends and friends of friends they identified food vendors who might be willing to set a little aside for the needy and transported it with the help of grandmothers, cousins, paper boys and in their own bags. They organised donations for the families of Jews, protestors, or political figures who had been arrested.
Alice returned to the old swing club with Jilí. She hadn't been since before the war started and she found that like everything else, it had changed. They still played forbidden records and spoke in English, but they'd started calling themselves the swingjugend [swing youth]. Alice loved the place – the atmosphere was warm and there was always a gaggle of laughing, interesting people to fill the place with noise and song. A plinky piano sat in the corner.
"Do they know how dangerous this is?" Alice asked Jilí in a whisper as they sat in the club, watching two slightly tipsy eighteen year olds burst out onto the street loudly singing Nat King Cole.
Jilí sipped her drink. "Yes. But they don't care. Don't you remember feeling young and invincible?"
"No." Alice watched another group of teens across the room mockingly singing one of the Hitler Youth anthems on the wooden dancefloor. "And anyway, Jilí, we're only twenty two."
"Exactly. I've already exceeded my life expectancy."
"Don't say things like that," Alice frowned, but Jilí was smiling. "Where'd Hugo go?"
"He's just there." Jilí pointed across the club as their tall curly-haired friend made his way back through the gathered youths with a cup held over his head. He winked at them as he spun past a group of girls in laddered stockings and then dropped down in the seat across from them.
"Sorry, you were asking questions and I needed coffee." He drew in a deep whiff of his coffee, which smelled like black market stuff if Alice was any judge. Hugo was a gangly, effervescent nineteen year old and the unofficial leader of the group of kids who hung out at this club/café. Alice had met him years earlier the first time she came, when he'd been sixteen, trying anything to avoid conscription, and the life of the party. Well, he was still the life of the party. Hugo leaned back in his chair and beamed at them. "What did you lovely ladies want to know?"
"You said you knew people in… Hamburg?" Jilí asked, her chin in her hand. "They have a place like this?" She gestured around at the club.
Hugo nodded. "Hamburg, Berlin, Linz… there's groups like this all over. The Gestapo don't care except for when we get in fights with the Hitler Youth."
"Is that often?" Jilí asked with a raised eyebrow.
Hugo shrugged. "Only when they're being especially annoying."
"And you're in contact with these other kids?" Alice asked.
"Yes, letters and phone calls and such. And what with the war there's a lot of bed hopping between cities. Winnie from Margareten is engaged to one of the men from Berlin." Hugo cocked his head at her. "Are you going to sing today, Alice?"
"If you want to hear me sing these days you have to buy a ticket, Hugo," Alice said sweetly.
"You're a businesswoman, I can respect that. So why're you asking about our friends?"
Alice and Jilí glanced at each other. "We'd like you to put us in contact with them. Days like these, it pays to make friends and get news from other cities. And also… keep us in mind. If anything comes up."
"If anything comes up?" Hugo said with raised eyebrows.
This was the dangerous part. Alice eyed Hugo evenly. "You guys get in trouble a lot. You need help with that, you let us know."
"In return for…?"
Alice smiled. "Believe it or not, Hugo, I'd like to see you all stay out of trouble. So it's an end in itself. Jilí and I… we're just trying to make friends. Being lonely is dangerous."
Hugo nodded carefully. "Fair enough." He drained his coffee. "I'll ask around, get people to give you some addresses for you to get in contact with some people."
"Great," Alice said. "And tell them I'm touring soon and I'd like to meet them. Fellow tastes in music, and all that."
They spent the next few minutes chatting about the latest records and the stuff on the radio. Jilí asked Hugo how his girlfriend was doing, and he gushed about her and her new job.
Eventually, Hugo set his head on his hand and eyed the two of them. "You know, one of my friends in Hamburg was talking about how he's been learning French to speak to some new friends of theirs in Paris. Some friends who might not want their names circulated in public. That wouldn't have anything to do with why you two are here?"
"What do you mean?" Jilí cocked her head at him.
He just smiled. "You know… making friends. Did you guys know about that?"
Alice returned the smile. "We didn't. But it's always nice to learn something new."
Excerpt from article 'What were the Germans listening to?' (2008):
The Swingjugend (Swing Youth – a parody of the national socialist 'Hitler Youth') were a widespread group of German and Austrian teens which began as a celebration of jazz, swing, and American culture, and evolved into increasing nonviolent resistance against the Nazi powers following the outbreak of war…
… with the increasing force and ferocity of the Nazi regime the Swingjugend were forced to continue their activities in secrecy. Most members did not organise politically, though some broke off into protest groups. Interestingly, some members of the group formed friendships with the famous French political resistance group the White Rose (which ended in tragedy in 1943), though no formal alliance was ever reached.
Alice started hosting parties of her own, inviting the usual crowd along with a few other, seemingly random newcomers: high-ups in the police force and gestapo, diplomats, a visitor from the German Abwehr (the Nazi intelligence agency), members of the Foreign Office. She gave them no special attention, but she did charm them with her song and with her attentive, smiling conversation. Alice had learned long ago that most men didn't want her to be intelligent in conversation – just receptive.
Alice and Jilí also set up what Jilí called their wireless telephone network, which was in reality mostly a gossip chain. If anyone heard about a new police strategy, they would tell one person and by the end of the day fifty more would know. If someone had a spare children's coat, a few hours later a recipient would be found. People asked about missing relatives and the network trickled back with scraps of rumor and potential sightings.
Resistance – because it was becoming rapidly apparent that this was what Alice and Jilí were up to – was difficult in the heart of Austria. They played a dangerous game of trust and suspicion: what to say to who. They kept their names out of it for the most part.
Alice spent her nights in a thick coat and a headscarf by Jilí's side, meeting with people in the dead of night and passing on information about where to get food, or shelter, or a way out of the country. And then that person played a game of trust in their turn; was this a true offer of help, or a death sentence?
Alice spent her days singing and making appearances around town. More often than not she had some dangerous thing or other in her bag – a wad of money or cans of food, usually. Flitting about the city as a socialite was a perfect excuse for meeting people across her ever-expanding group of friends.
Her career began to soar. It turned out all she'd needed was a modicum of enthusiasm for it.
Late that winter, Alice and Jilí's cautiously rising confidence crumbled at its foundation when the 'Jewish Emigration Office' introduced a new quota. 4500. Four thousand, five hundred people to be whisked up and sent east.
Despite their best warnings, rooms and attics across the city went dark. Stolen property got snatched by police, soldiers, and neighbors. Silence crept into spaces where there'd once been life.
Alice watched a canvas-covered truck drive east out of Vienna as she stood behind a window with her fingernails pressing so hard into her palms that her fingers creaked. She hadn't seen the soldiers force the families in at gunpoint as mothers and fathers wrapped their arms around their children, but she knew it had happened all the same. She'd heard the whispers.
She thought of the glimpses she'd had of the ghettos in Poland, where people were sent to waste away. She thought of whispers of soldiers in the east forcing people to take off their clothes and line up along the edge of a ditch. No way to find out if it was true. Not a doubt in her mind that it was.
Do something.
What can I do? Everything I have done was not enough to protect the people sitting in that truck.
The truck turned a corner and vanished from view.
Excerpt from Austrian newspaper Kleine Zeitung, February 27 1941 [Translated]:
THIS EVENING'S RADIO: Listen to 'Whisper A Promise To Me', the latest hit record from The Siren, on RRG.
In February Alice came home from a secret meeting with a woman with ties to the communist party to find the maid Julia waiting with a card for her.
"It was delivered an hour ago, Fräulein. No name, just an address."
Alice took the card with a tight smile and her heart thudded when she saw the address. She'd been there once before.
She fetched her coat from the hook and went right back out the door.
Alice had kept in touch with Anna Wödl since they first met last year. Anna had prevented the transfer of her son to Hartheim, but the system of mysteriously transferring and disappearing disabled children and adults had gone on. It was full public knowledge now. Anna had held a few demonstrations since, though they were quickly put down by the Gestapo, but she wasn't alone now – the Catholic Church had condemned the disappearances and pressure was increasing on the government. Alice thought that maybe, in this, they might be successful.
But when she knocked on the door to Anna Wödl's house in Alsergrund, her stomach churned with dread.
Something has happened.
The door opened to Anna Wödl's pale, tear-stained face.
"No," Alice breathed.
Anna's eyes welled at the sight of the Siren in her doorstep, and after a moment she stepped back to let Alice in. Alice followed her into the darkened house. She strode past photos of Anna and her son on the walls, past the huddles of gathered family members talking together in low tones, and into the living room. Alice felt something rising within her. Bile, maybe. Maybe pure, unfettered desperation.
A photograph of her son Alfred as a baby rested on the mantelpiece. He was a round-faced boy, dressed in his white christening dress, his pale hair swept to the side and a toothless smile lifting his cheeks.
When Anna sank down beside the coffee table Alice found her tongue. "What… how?"
"They said it was pneumonia," Anna murmured. Her eyes, normally intense and passionate, had gone flat. "I have no way of knowing if that's true."
Alice lowered onto the sofa beside her and set a gentle hand on her back. "But I thought…"
"It seems the clinic he went to was no safer than Hartheim." Anna shuddered, and Alice put her arms around her. For a few minutes they sat like that: Anna shaking in Alice's arms as the heavy silence of the house oppressed them.
"I'm so sorry, Anna," Alice said. Her tongue felt leaden. "I should have-"
"We all did as much as we could," Anna croaked. "I've never fought so hard in my life and he still…" her voice cracked.
Alice smoothed her fingers over Anna's shoulder. "When is his funeral?"
"Tomorrow. I got his body back, which is more than other parents can say." Alice closed her eyes. A moment later, Anna added: "They kept his brain."
Alice's eyes snapped open. "What?"
"They cut out his brain and put it in a jar. For science. They didn't tell me that, of course, I found out from an orderly."
"They can't-"
"There's nothing they can't do, Alice," Anna said in that same wooden tone. She drew in a long, deep breath and Alice felt it fill her chest. When she let out the breath again, four words escaped with it:
"He was only six."
Alice began her international tour in March, leaving Jilí and her cousin Vano to run things back in Vienna. She took to the stage with the songs she'd written before the war and the ones she'd written more recently, enthralling theaters and halls of people who had paid to hear her voice. In the Axis-allied countries she dined with officials in the evening and when they'd all gone to bed she went out into the city to meet the people who really ran the town. In neutral countries she got to sing whatever she wanted, because they certainly didn't want to hear German patriotic songs.
She swapped correspondences with everyone she could and entrenched herself in gossip. She made friends with everyone from diplomats to porters. In the occupied countries she disguised herself in men's clothing and crept through cities, poking at the edges of tensions and secrets.
She met with Hugo's friends in the Swingjugend, and as she'd suspected they were an excellent way of making friends in the counterculture of each city. They knew how to get around the Gestapo, and knew who needed the most help. Alice was careful not to give too much of herself away; either she didn't reveal her true intentions with the people who knew her name, or she visited in some form of disguise.
Her life became a blur of song, landscape rushing past train windows, her uncle's rigid face, her heart pounding as she crept through cities in the darkness, vague and dangerous conversations, and extravagant parties. Her tour kept away from the front lines of the war but she still saw it everywhere she went, in the dead eyes of a soldier and the scars in the earth glimpsed from a train window. Sometimes she closed her eyes and thought of home: Brooklyn, with the sun beating on the sidewalk and the feel of her friends by her sides. She pictured Steve: his flax-gold hair and tentative laughter. She could still mimic his voice, despite not having heard it for four long years.
She found herself in France once more, following whispers to those who were not willing to stand by and watch any longer. Resistance was just as dangerous in France, maybe even more so, as some French citizens were collaborating with the Nazis and informing on their own people.
But, as Alice found with mounting excitement, there was resistance there. Either she hadn't noticed last year or it hadn't appeared yet. She came across tiny pockets of people in illegal bars, smoking in alleys, creeping in and out of what looked like an abandoned warehouse. It was all small moments: a maid telling a courier about what one Nazi general had mentioned in a brothel, and the courier's knowing look before he started his car engine for a journey to Marseille. A pamphlet lying out on the street for anyone to see, declaring the Vichy government a farcical tool of the Nazis, until a police officer snatched it away. A Nazi Foreign Office representative in Paris complained to his friend at a party that somehow intelligence from France was leaking to Britain. Alice might not have noticed any of it if she hadn't been looking for it.
The biggest signs of resistance were when they got caught. Some students had been shot last year after demonstrating in Paris. Posters lined the streets, warning that anyone who 'resisted the might of the Nazis' would be similarly shot.
Dressed as 'Al', Alice started talking. She told an old man with a veteran's attitude what she'd heard about the Nazi's New Order. She told a group of university students about how she'd heard that a certain three Nazi generals planned to meet in Vichy next week. She talked as much as she could about the things she'd overheard and seen, with no way of knowing if any of it was useful or if her audience could even pass it on to someone who could act on it. But it was something. In return she absorbed gossip and rumors like oxygen.
Some of the people she spoke to were living underground with no fixed address. These were the ones who really didn't trust her; the ones who caught a glimpse of a stranger's face and vanished back into the night. They were the ones Alice wanted to talk to the most, but every time they slipped away.
The moment Alice returned to Vienna she ditched her uncle and took a circuitous route to Jilí's house, only to find that her friend wasn't there. She pressed down her initial surge of worry and made her way to a café two streets over, where the owner didn't care who his patrons were as long as they paid.
When she spotted Jilí's ink black hair in the back corner, she let out a silent breath of relief and paced over, nodding to the waitress.
Jilí sat with her head bent over a cup of steaming coffee, her face shielded by her thick hair. Alice couldn't see her eyes, but she could tell that her friend's gaze rested on the plain silver wedding band on her left ring finger.
"I'm back," Alice said softly.
Jilí's head jerked up, eyes wide, and when she saw Alice standing over her in her brown coat she beamed and shot up. "You're back," she echoed, and pulled Alice in for a quick, tight hug. Alice patted her friend's back. "You're safe? Nothing happened?" Jilí held Alice at arm's length and looked her over.
"I wasn't exactly performing at the front," Alice replied with a small smile. "I'm fine, I promise. I've got lots to tell you."
Jilí gestured for Alice to take the seat across from her, then ordered a second coffee from the waitress. "I've got lots to tell you too," she said. Once the waitress had gone far enough away, she leaned across the table with glinting eyes. "Vano" – Jilí's cousin, who had joined in their efforts after being beat up by the Gestapo last year – "and I have been running the usual network, but we've also been looking around. Vano's friends at the university put him in contact with this political group of students, they're anti-Nazi," Jilí dropped her voice further. "They've been trying to spread the word."
Alice kept her voice low but didn't lean in or cover her mouth, or in any way appear that she was trying to speak secretly. "Spread the word how?"
"Vano's still earning their trust but he thinks they're writing articles and pamphlets, that sort of thing."
"Okay, tell him to-"
"Be careful, I know," Jilí said with a quick smile. "That's not it, though. While you were away the church has been kicking up a fuss."
"They don't like the Nazis' take on religion, I know."
The waitress came with Alice's coffee, and Alice and Jilí pretended to talk about edible arrangements until she left.
"It's not just that," Jilí said after telling Alice that fine cheeses were so hard to get these days. "The church has been organising donations for families in need, which has the Gestapo all riled. Your friend at the music school says that some of the clergy still support Prince Otto."
Alice rubbed her jaw thoughtfully. The Crown Prince of Austria had been living in exile in Basque for years, but she knew he'd strongly opposed fascism and the Anschluss. He could afford to, given that he didn't live here. The Nazis had put out an execution order for him. "Let's keep the church in mind, then," she said slowly. "But don't reach out. They're a target if they're being so public about this, and the last thing we need is to be aligned with the Prince."
Jilí nodded. "I agree. We've been funnelling some donations their way, though."
Alice nodded. "Anything else?"
Jilí cocked her head. "Maybe. Katrin – you know Katrin, she works at the library – her sweetheart is a labourer, she says he's been up in the western mountains since winter working on some big project: scientific installations." She shrugged. "Thought it might be worth mentioning. Not that it's likely that her sweetheart will stay hired for long, they've been using prisoners from the camps more and more as labor."
"We'll try to keep an eye on it," Alice replied as she sipped her coffee. A frown furrowed her brow. "Nazi science installations?"
"I think so. Katrin says the division running it don't dress much like Nazis, though."
"I'll ask some of my friends who work those kinds of jobs, see what they turn up," Alice said.
Jilí nodded and slowly turned her empty coffee cup in her hands. Her wedding band clinked against the side. After a few long moments, she said: "We're not alone, Alice."
Alice sighed, looking at her friend. Jilí didn't often let her sadness show, but she could see it now in her dark eyes. "I know, Jilí. We know there are people out there willing to help us. Let me tell you about the people I met abroad, it's not just us-"
"I mean in Austria." Jilí looked up. "I can see it – signs of people like us. The other day I saw a marking in chalk on a street sign near the city hall. O5. Yesterday I caught one of the Swingjugend kids carving the same thing into a table at a café. But it's not just them doing it. It can't be."
"O5," Alice repeated slowly. Her mind churned, thinking over codes and symbols that might be similar. "O… maybe there are five letters after it. Maybe OE? E is the fifth letter of the alphabet."
Jilí's lips quirked. "I thought you might get it."
"OE? But what does it mean?"
"You might not have lived here long enough to know. OE is the short version of Osterreich."
"Austria," Alice translated. Her fingers fell still on her coffee cup. "You think…"
"It has to be some kind of resistance," Jilí said softly, her dark eyes gleaming. "It has to be. It's a sign. Of a free Austria."
Alice leaned back slowly, turning it over. Was it possible there were others like them out there, whispering in the dark, playing the terrifying game of trust and suspicion, scratching signs into walls in some hope of a reply? "O5," she breathed.
Jilí nodded and laced her fingers together. "Anyway, that's what I've been up to. Did you find anything interesting on your tour?"
Alice met her friend's eyes with a smile. "Perhaps we'd better order another coffee."
May 25, 1941
"… And then she says she's just been writing more songs, working with a composer from Hamburg." Bucky flipped over the one-page letter in his hand, shading his eyes from the beating sun. He had to raise his voice to be heard over the shouting, cheering crowd inside Ebbets Field stadium. "Some more stuff about her songs… then she's telling me off for not listening to my ma…"
"- she's right," Steve cut in. His eyes were on the field even as he listened to Bucky. "You should've quit that job months ago. They ain't treating you right."
"And where am I meant to work then, genius?" Bucky snarked. He watched the Philadelphia player go up to bat, dusting off his white trousers. "Watch this fella, he's tricky." He glanced back down at the letter from Alice. "Anyway, then she basically just talks shit about me until the end of the letter."
Steve glanced away from the field and smiled at the letter as if he were smiling at Alice herself. "Sounds like she's doing better."
The Dodgers pitcher, Pearson, pitched a curveball at the Phillies batter. It connected with the bat with an audible crack and went flying high and outside. Bucky grabbed his hair, crinkling the letter, and the crowd groaned.
"Damn it all," Steve huffed as the Phillies third base runner ran home. "We're tied now."
"Our innings, though."
The crowd at the Brooklyn field settled back in their seats, grumbling and scowling at the scoreboard. It was a bright, sunny Sunday and thousands of Dodgers supporters had come out to cheer on their team. Bucky had checked his mailbox on his way to the stadium with Steve, and both of them had been surprised to find a letter from Alice there. Letters came so irregularly now.
As the Dodgers batter strode up, Steve leaned back in his seat and rolled his head to look at the letter again. Alice's elegant script flowed down the page. "D'you think she's lonely?" Bucky glanced up in surprise. "She doesn't mention people in her letters anymore."
"Can't imagine Nazi Austria is the best place to be making friends," Bucky said darkly. "And I don't like that she's traveling through all these Axis countries. I mean I know she lives in one, but Italy? Greece? The Germans just invaded Greece."
"I doubt she's going anywhere near the fighting," Steve said. He shaded his eyes and squinted at the Brooklyn batter. "That's Pete Reiser. Reckon he'll make it?"
"He's young. Maybe. Ain't he the one that got his skull damn near cracked by a Phillies pitch last month?"
Steve hummed and eyed the letter. "She's hiding things."
"Of course she is, Steve, it's Alice." Bucky tapped the paper. "And she's sending letters that might be intercepted."
Steve's brow furrowed. "She promised me once that she'd always tell me her plans."
Bucky looked away from the field, his face softening at the tone in Steve's voice. The crowd was on the edge of their seats around them, the energy buzzing. "You think she's planning something?"
"It's Alice," Steve said. "She's always got plans. She wouldn't still be over there if she didn't."
"Well I just hope those plans involve her staying safe."
"You and me both, Bucky."
The crack of a pitch connecting with a bat and the crowd cheering jerked their attention away to the field again.
"That's three in the bag!" Bucky shouted, leaping to his feet as he watched the ball soar to the outfield. White-clad players sprinted across the green grass of Ebbets Field and the crowd positively screamed.
Steve didn't remember jumping to his feet but before he knew it he was bouncing on his toes as he watched the batter, Reiser, reach third base. "They're waving him in!" he realized excitedly as the coach on the sideline waved his arms.
The outfielder tossed the ball to one of the infielders, who wound up and threw it home. Reiser's legs pumped across the diamond. Bucky and Steve grabbed each other's shoulders, jumping and shouting along with the rest of Ebbets Field, hearts pounding – and then Reiser slid home.
Anyone who'd still been sitting exploded to their feet as the stadium lost its collective mind.
"Pete Reiser with an inside-the-park grand slam!" cried the announcer over the roar of the crowd. "Oh my goodness. The crowd is going absolutely wild here at Ebbets Field… the Dodgers take the lead here, eight to four!"
Bucky flung his hands into the air, one in a fist and the other waving a letter from across the ocean. Steve jumped beside his friend, his lungs already wheezing, and thought I can't wait to tell her about this.
Excerpt from: S.H.I.E.L.D. Incident Report #508-GH-72 (October 9 2011) r.e. SR Containment Malfunction, compiled by Agent P Coulson:
… the preliminary failure, of course, being the chronological inaccuracy of the containment unit in the form of a radio broadcast. In subsequent interviews the team responsible for the containment design reported that they were unaware of the baseball game broadcast's original date: May 25, 1941, Philadelphia Phillies vs Brooklyn Dodgers (in fact quite a memorable game for Brooklyn fans).
In their defense, the date was stated nowhere in the broadcast itself, and no physical evidence has been found of SR attending the game in question – no ticket stubs found in remaining files – but it was a clear oversight to use a game from approximately four years before his crash in the Arctic. A game from before his exposure to Project Rebirth, even.
Recommendation: Next time, employ a historian. Or a baseball fan.
Under the fresh blue sky and crisp air of an Austrian summer, Alice traveled around Austria on a home tour. She met old friends, made some new ones, and traveled with a suitcase with a false bottom full of pamphlets. Jilí's cousin Vano had secured the trust of the university students who opposed the occupation of Austria and had offered to help distribute their publications. Through Vano, Alice and Jilí offered the students money for their printing presses and volunteers for distribution.
Alice had taken it upon herself to get the leaflets to other towns and cities across Austria.
She never saw the fruits of her labors. She passed brown bags full of paper to students in other towns who knew how to distribute them, and left them in post boxes and on doorstops.
It never appeared in the newspaper, of course, but when she returned to Vienna she heard rumors about showers, snowstorms, of pamphlets across Austria, with the title WIDERSTEHEN [RESIST].
The Gestapo never caught the students who had tossed the leaflets around libraries and government buildings and schools, nor did they catch the hand in the night who'd gotten the leaflets to them. They didn't find the printing presses, or the group of angry students who'd written it in the first place.
Alice read her copy of the leaflet and her heart soared at the denunciations of the Nazi party's persecution and rigid policies, and at the calls for resistance. Then she took her matchbook and set the leaflet aflame.
On June 22nd, Alice woke up to the news that Germany had invaded the Soviet Union.
Her stomach dropped. One more country falling away beneath their feet. Her uncle talked excitedly over breakfast, poring over the paper and predicting that Hitler would spend his Christmas in Moscow, and Alice ate silently.
She wondered if she was crazy for thinking that anyone could stand up to this ever-expanding tide.
A week later proved her sinking feeling right – the German Blitzkrieg had stormed across the Russian border and tens of thousands of Soviet soldiers were dead. Alice kept writing letters and visiting 'friends', strengthening her hold over the places she could. Rumors drifted back about Einsatzgruppen [operational groups] roaming the occupied countries in search of Jews – not for arrest and deportation, but for murder. The rumors also told of locals helping the death groups. Each whisper chilled Alice to the bone, turning her hard as ice.
The letters from New York brought warmth and a reminder that life didn't have to hurt. In early July Steve wrote to Alice that New York had just gained two television stations.
I don't have a television of course, he wrote in his neat hand, but Bucky's family and their neighbors pooled together to get one. It's electronic, and as far as I can tell the basic concept is that the station turns moving images into code, then sends the code via radio waves to television sets. WNBT's first program was a newsreader, but then they played the Dodgers game!
We watched at Bucky's place, and the whole street was packed in there to watch it. It's bizarre seeing something on a television screen as it happens. Had to shake myself a few times to remind myself I wasn't watching a movie.
I wonder if they've figured out how to transmit television across the Atlantic.
Alice sometimes pressed her face into the pages he wrote her, inhaling the scent of ink and maybe, just faintly, of Steve.
Excerpt from '1941: The Year of Change' by Harley Harrison (1988), p. 31:
1941 was the year that the Nazi policy toward Jews and other minorities shifted from deportation and imprisonment, to annihilation.
'Concentration camps' have come to be synonymous with the Nazi death-camps such as Auschwitz and Dachau, but before this time the term referred to any camp where people (usually prisoners of war) were detained for a period of time. The Germans did not invent concentration camps – indeed, before the second world war, countries like Britain, France, Denmark, Canada, and even the USA had established concentration camps for soldiers and civilians. Until WWII, the term was synonymous with enforced labor, cramped conditions, and occasionally disease and hunger – but not extinction.
Those sent to concentration camps in 1941 did not know what the camps had become. They did not know to fear them.
In August, as the streets of Vienna sweltered and Alice's uncle planned yet another tour of France, Alice was at a party when she heard an acquaintance of hers in the Austrian police say: "Himmler has finally given us the go ahead to crack down on those traitorous Swingjugend." Alice did not respond to him, did not even give any indication that she'd heard at all, but the minute she left the party she ran to the old swing club to warn them.
Those who believed her accepted her offer of shelter. Hugo and some others went to stay with Jilí, others bunked with friends, and Alice found beds for the rest. They sent off letters of warning to their friends in other cities. But they weren't an organisation, not really – it was a collection of young people who didn't fit in with the marching blonde-haired rule-followers they were expected to be like. Many of them shrugged off Alice's warning.
Two days later the Gestapo kicked down the doors of the swing club. They arrested anyone inside and tracked down everyone else they could. Most of them were children.
Alice breathed a sigh of relief when she found out that mostly, those arrested had just had their hair cut and were sent back to school. But the crackdown had been throughout Germany and Austria, not just Vienna, and Alice heard of Swingjugend leaders elsewhere being sent to concentration camps.
When she saw Hugo that evening at Jilí's house he hugged her tightly, shaky and bright eyed. "Thank you, Alice," he breathed as he pulled away. "If we hadn't known-"
"But now you do," she said. She gestured for him to sit down, then cleared her throat. "Hugo, these orders came from Heinrich Himmler. The chief of the Gestapo. You're not in a counter-culture youth group anymore. You're in a prohibited minority." She watched Hugo's wide dark eyes as the words sank in. Alice leaned over to grip his arm. Jilí watched silently from the kitchen. "These kids trust you, Hugo. You must teach them to be careful. They can't dance in the street anymore. They can't fight the Hitler Youth. They can't go back to that club."
Hugo's fear sparked at that and his jaw tightened. "But-"
"No buts," Alice snapped. He shut his mouth. "You do what I say, or your friends will die."
His eyes widened again. "You think…?"
"You heard about Wilhelm in Hamburg, right? They shipped him off."
"To a concentration camp, that doesn't mean he'll never come back-"
"You can't afford to be naïve anymore, Hugo," Alice said softly. She sat at the table beside him with her hand still on his arm. "This is wartime, and the Nazis are winning. And even though they're winning, they're afraid. Afraid of people who are different. That means people like Jilí, and now it means people like you. The Nazis can't afford to let difference exist. They won't let it exist."
They sat in silence for a few long moments as Hugo looked down at his hands in his lap. Alice glanced over to Jilí, and Jilí nodded solemnly.
Finally, Hugo looked up. Tears clung to his lashes. "What can I do?"
Alice squeezed arm and smiled. "I'm glad you asked."
That week, Alice watched with wide eyes as the Nazi government caved to pressure from the Catholic and Protestant Church, the Austrian Communist Party, and countless other organisations, and abolished their T4 policy – the one that had been euthanizing the 'incurably sick' since the start of the war.
Alice spent the night at Anna Wödl's, holding her as she cried into her handkerchief, but when she walked back at dawn the next morning she felt only darkness.
They won't stop, she thought as she eyed a massive red swastika flag hanging from a corner of a building. They won't ever stop, until we stop them.
Excerpt from 'The Killing Programs' by Paula Weller (2003), p. 54:
Hitler publicly halted the Aktion T4 program in August of 1941: they'd reached their target of 70,000 'forced euthanisations', and personnel were needed for the Soviet front. But despite the public "roll back" of the program, killing of disabled and mentally ill children and adults continued in secrecy.
Some historians posit that the program was continued by the Nazi powers, to align with their other 1941 policies such as the Einsatzgruppen and the lethalization of concentration camps, which had shifted toward obliteration of 'undesirables'. Others argue that there is no evidence for continued national organisation of the killings, and that the killings likely continued under the direction of local hospital directors and doctors.
Whatever the case, it is certain that by the end of 1941 another 30,000 patients had been killed.
A month later, Alice lay on the floor of Jilí's apartment (there wasn't anywhere else to rest) with her hands folded behind her head and her eyes on the ceiling. She listened to the rustle of paper as Jilí looked over her tour itinerary at the table.
"It's only a week long trip," Jilí said wryly. "You think you'll have time for all this?"
"I'll make time," Alice said with a concealed smile. She rolled so she could see her friend. "Quiz me."
Jilí held her gaze for a few moments, then set down the itinerary of Alice's official activities and crossed one ankle over the other. "Alright. How are you going to meet the contact in Paris?"
"After my performance on the second day, I'm going to rue des Rosiers. I'll wait under the streetlight outside L'Etoile Boulangerie at a quarter past four, and the contact will find me," Alice recited. "And then it's anybody's guess."
"What are you going to tell this person?"
"I'll offer them our friendship. Monetary support, escape routes, an exchange of information."
Jilí's face turned hard, distrustful. "You know you'll have to tell this person your real name."
Alice sighed. "Hugo's sister studied in France for three years, and she says we can trust this person. Says she's connected."
"Hugo's sister is only twenty-"
"And I've only just turned twenty three," Alice finished for her. "I've looked into this, Jilí. It's the best way." Jilí's mouth turned down. "I'm also going to try to pass on what I heard about those troop movements on the Eastern Front."
"They're French-"
"I know, but if they know anyone-"
"Alice-"
"I have to try, Jilí." Alice rolled to her feet and went over to hug her friend, leaning over her chair from behind. Her cheek pressed against the top of Jilí's head. "I'll be back in no time."
She felt Jilí's scowl against the side of her arm. "You'd better be."
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