Hi, so here is another chapter. I hope you enjoy this one and though the plot is moving slowly there is something regarding a plot so thank you for hanging in so long.
Again there will be another time jump with the next chapter but after that we run from 1942 until the end of the war.
Disclaimer-Nothing here is mine just this chapter.
Please Read and Review and let me know what you think.
And my usual notes for historical accuracies/inaccuracies.
A Sister's Love
Chapter 11-Lost Girls
As 1941 begins the war news becomes increasingly grim. Jon gets a shock when he comes across one of the men on Special Branch's wanted lists and Liesl gets a letter from the Red Cross which tells her exactly what she expected to hear.
The year turned again to 1941. The news was grim. Australia was being prodded and poked by the Japanese who were coming increasingly close to the mainland. Edith had taken to getting the newspaper, but she was getting increasingly more worried and frustrated with it often times retreating to her bedroom and not coming out. Liesl did not know what to make of it or of the depression that seemed to stalk the woman who had taken them in. the loss of her granddaughter had hit her harder she suspected than she wanted to let on, and Liesl knew that whatever Jon was doing (he never said in his letters home) was not giving him a guarantee of safety, and here they were, seeing the consequences for the first time.
They were issued pamphlets about gas and air raid sirens and shelters and ration cards were introduced. It was a mark of how quiet and nervous everyone was that nobody asked if there was a reason they received their ration cards with ease. Brigitta would crawl up in front of the radio listening as the sweeping regime of Nazism would crawl increasingly closer. Austria had been under Nazi hands for nearly three years and it was hard when they got to February to put enough effort into celebrating Brigitta's birthday.
She was twelve now. When she thought of her baby sister she seemed to almost be frozen in those happy days as a gloriously intelligence naïve ten year old and all the juxtapositions that came with such an observation. There had been nothing from the Red Cross, nothing from their families and though she had tried her best to make the day as special as she could she knew it was as painful for Brigitta as it was for her. Both of their last birthdays had been clouded under the fog of war, for Liesl it had been in Switzerland and they had managed to put one foot in front of the other for so long that it was hard for them to remember things such as birthdays. She was now eighteen years old. She was older than Rolfe.
She was older than Rolfe would ever be.
For Rolfe was dead.
She found as the weather grew hotter and they heard no news from Jon—her husband—that she thought more and more about the man who she thought once she might have married. Now she was thinking about it she knew that they would have faced her father's intense disapproval and that in the same moment the way her feelings were poised to him she would have married him regardless as early as she could have done. She would have never grasped the concept that it was about Rolfe's politics and not about his age or status. That her father could never consider having someone who thought that the occupation of Austria by Germany was a good idea in his immediate family married to his daughter and that she at sixteen going on seventeen would not have seen the wide implications of his inevitable refusal.
She found that as those two years had gone by in the fog of war and conflict that she had grown more wiser as when she had grown older. She had struggled with the changes not to the world but to herself. And perhaps the most confusing one was that she was still a virgin bride. Liesl remembered what her mother had said—her new mother—Maria about waiting a year or two. She had waited two. She was eighteen and the reality was in 1941 even without the invasion most of her friends in Austria would be married by now.
She would have been married by now.
She was married by now.
She just hadn't…
Ugh.
It was all so very confusing. Jon was hardly here in those long days as Brigitta turned twelve, she turned eighteen, Edith turned more and more to her room as the stress and the depression hit her in different ways. Everywhere they looked there were things changing, schools were being shut as teachers went off to fight, ration cards were introduced. There was a terrible sense that the Australian Army fighting all over North Africa were struggling and there was still no sign of the American Army.
Now Liesl might not be as politically bright as her sister or Edith but even she knew that the American's would significantly make things better both in Europe and in the slowly dominating Pacific. The Nazi's had continued to increase their territories, France was now split in two and it had only been (as Brigitta had told her) a combination of sheer luck, daring bravery and the fact that they were an island no doubt that had stopped them from taking England. It was hard now to even remember a world where Hitler did not being and end the conversations of the day and though he was a concern to the Australian people Liesl found that when she went grocery shopping the one conversation turned to the Japanese.
She could see why. They had encroached on the small island until they were close and Liesl had a terrible sense of foreboding. She had seen this happen before after all and though she was almost amused by Mr Hodgeson the green grocers insistence that it would not happen here she was sure that her old green grocer in Austria had also had the same opinion.
And look where that had ended up.
It wasn't just the emotional changes that came with the two years of separation from their family but now there were physical ones. She was nothing close to the girl she had once been in Austria who danced around in homemade dresses and pink silk and learnt how to sing.
She had not sang for nearly two years. Neither had Brigitta. It had been almost like when they had lost their family, they had lost that part of themselves. That part of them that liked…no that loved to sing. That loved music, the freedom and the expression of it had been sucked away, at least for her. She thought of the simple happy little songs that they used to sing and she felt her heart tremble. For two years now Liesl had been burrowing away pieces of herself so that nobody could touch them. Nobody could break them and now she was finding herself in the same situation she had escaped from in the first place.
She thought that morning as she punched her pillow that it would be fucking ironic if it wasn't so fucking sad.
And then she felt awful for thinking that. Because it did not matter how bad it was for her or for her sister or for Edith trapped in the constant cycle of worry, of loss and love and exhaustion weather it be of the body or of the mind because no matter how bad it got for her or how dark the spells of apathy were she knew she was one of the lucky ones because she was living in a country that recognised free speech, whose soldiers all spoke English and not German. Where the buildings stood tall and not battered on the ground and where half of the population was not getting their rights stripped away as easy as one, two, three.
Where people were accepted regardless of what language they spoke or what country they came from. She was beginning to realise that she didn't just like Australia, she was loving Australia.
But today as she dressed (they had new clothes now but she had kept some of the Austrian ones though they were considered horribly old fashioned—Edith declared them something out of a foreign world which she supposed that they were. Once upon a time they had looked like this.
Now her clothes were some of the very best. She was dressed in a lilac dress of silk that fit in around her waist with a golden sash and she had short sleeves as well. It should have clashed but Edith knew all when it came to fashion and she knew what clashed and what didn't. It fitted her and she slipped on stockings and shoes that were soft and slippery and she went downstairs. It was morning. Early morning and nobody in the house was up yet. Evans had been taken to the war as well as Jon. It was just the three of them now.
And besides, she never slept longer than the sunrise. Liesl used to love sleeping. She would fall into the sheets of her soft bed back in Austria and she would sleep
Now her hair was longer and she pinned it back rather than let it fall loose into a simple bun that nine times out of ten became messy. Her eyes were still the same shape and shade but her face had grown skinner and her cheekbones more obvious with a combination of fear and hunger and loss.
She came downstairs to see the post. But it was the letter that was on top of the pile that managed to catch her attention freezing her in place before she finally managed to move.
It was stamped with the sign of the Red Cross.
And it was her name.
Her married name.
And she knew what that was.
She knew what that letter was.
And more the point she knew what was in it.
Liesl thought that deep down she had always known what was in it.
The words stared up at her uncompromising, unflinching, unforgiving.
There had been so sighting of her family, there had been no record of them ever going through the Switzerland Red Cross. There had been no mention of her father or her mother ever looking for her or Brigitta. It seemed that even if they had arrived in Switzerland they had not stopped more than a day, maybe two. Perhaps they had already gone through when they had arrived.
The sixteen year old girl that she still was when she thought about her family wanted to break something but the eighteen year old who she now was, who had forged this new identity out of nothing more than sheer determination and love for her baby sister knew the practicalities of it. Her father had chosen to save the family he had.
She sat there for a long time or what felt like a long time. Brigitta came down and Liesl hid the letter.
"Anything from the Red Cross?"
It was Brigitta's standard morning question now. Worse was the fact that she still hoped for a response from the Red Cross.
Liesl folded the letter into a tight square and hit it behind her skirt.
"Nothing" she lied smoothly. "Nothing at all"
It was true…in a way.
Jon had been at Canberra for about three months now. He had gone through basic training which had been hard but then again he had bodily fought his way in and out of a heavily guarded house so he found that he was rather good at that. What he had not been expecting was to be placed here in uniform looking at documents on famous Nazi's and trying to find new information on them regardless of the fact that they were arguably the most wanted men in the world right now.
He was board.
He was here he knew because he was half German and spoke fluently a fair amount of European languages but he was hoping for an assignment. He had been in uniform now for nearly a year he was board at a desk though he was not sure if the Army were heavily invested in sending men over to Europe at the minute.
Perhaps London.
Maybe London.
But then again…
"Van Braun!"
"Yes Sir?"
His officer was a nice man as officers went by the name of Richard McCallister. He was young but he was good, he tended to just gently prod instead of commanding.
"New one. Look…this one is gonna hit close to home but this is the reason why you are here. You get the information to the main men and I promise you the posting that you want. Listen…my office is always open…just…just take your time ok?"
"Yes sir"
It was the look of concern that told him without the words what it was that he was going to see when he opened the file that was place in front of him.
Some officers were like that. Almost friends, almost human.
He turned the page and saw his father.
He made it to the bathroom just in time.
When he looked at himself in the mirror afterwards he washed his face and winced as the cold water hit his face. He looked at himself in the mirror and thought that he was looking older today than he had done when he had seen himself in the mirror the morning of his wedding.
Christ he felt like an old man.
The oddest thing was, the strangest thing was, that as he thought about his father, about the Nazi's and the agony that was going to happen when he read his father's file and thought of ways that the higher ups of his country could hunt him down and kill him, Jon Van Braun found that all he wanted to do was to confide in his wife, Liesl Von Trapp.
Of what that meant…well…he simply could not begin to comprehend.
And there you go. I hope you enjoy and I will post the next chapter sooner rather than later-hopefully.
Next Chapter-America enters the war bringing with it a new sense of hope, Edith gets the long face from the doctor and plans a special trip and Darwin is bombed causing both Von Trapp girls to be grow up a little bit more in the aftermath.