Chapter Twenty-Three
Pain is a gift. It means he is still breathing, still living. So long as they’re watching him, finding pleasure in every blow he suffers, it means they aren’t looking for her. Pain means she’s still hidden. Still safe.
BERLIN, GERMANY
Anna watches as the books pile higher, a mountain of bound paper and leather, when she feels him at her elbow.
The face he wears differs from the one she’s grown to love.
Blonde hair cut short around his ears, face pale and freckled.
If his eyes were blue instead of brown, he could be the regime’s poster child.
He stares out over the parade, a scowl hardening the smooth lines of his face.
“You need to leave,” he says, the words barely reaching her before the shouts and cheers of the crowd swallow it up.
She leans into his space, their elbows touching. “I don’t remember asking your opinion,” she says in near perfect German.
He turns to her, hand gripping her upper arm with a fierceness that feels out of place. Dipping his head, his words hiss against her ear. “This isn’t a joke. You need to leave. Now, before things get ugly.”
She pulls away, eyeing him suspiciously. “What do you know?”
He rolls his eyes. “Nothing good ever follows a book burning, Anna.” He tips his chin, discreetly, toward the students. “Look at them. How can you watch them revel in such blatant destruction, such violence, and not know where this is going?”
Anna turns to him; hopes he sees the stillness in her heart—the commitment. “Why do you think I’m still here?”
Her words only seem to push him—a prodding poke instead of the soothing caress she had meant it to be.
The hand on her arm tightens. She can feel the press of his individual fingers through her jacket.
“This is beyond your reach,” he snaps. He must have hidden them from prying eyes and ears, because no one turns his way despite his volume rising and his German switching to English mid conversation.
“What’s coming isn’t a battle, it’s an extermination. ”
“Thanks for the warning.”
His hands are on her shoulders before she can turn away, pinning her as effectively as his stare. “What is this, Anna? Are you trying to punish me? Fine. Consider me admonished. I will take all your blame, all your anger, so long as you leave.”
She jerks her arm away from him, her glare as stiff and frigid as the words she has for him. “This isn’t about you.”
Khiran recoils, as if struck. His eyes wide and his lips parted, Anna watches as surprise bleeds away to desperation. “Anna, please. I’m begging you. Leave before this escalates into something that strips you of all control.”
She laughs, the sound dark with her amusement.
“Control? Khiran, nothing has ever been in my control. Not the plague, not the famine. Not the wars.” She shakes her head, taking a step back.
His hands slip, limp, from her shoulders to her wrists.
A tentative hold she could easily break from.
“Control—manipulation—seems to be your vice. Not mine.”
His expression twists. “How—it’s been years, Anna. How are you still this angry with me?”
There’s a stone lodged in her throat, as bitter and cold as the empty feeling in her chest. “Because it still hurts.”
The hands at her wrists flex, tightening, but the edge in his eyes softens. “I’m sorry. It was never my intent to cause you pain.”
She pulls away from his hold, lets her fingers replace the empty space he left behind. “I know.”
It’s the truth, but somehow it only adds to the hurt—the difference between a clean cut and a serrated one. It’s harder to heal when the wound is jagged, harder to forget when there’s a scar left behind.
His hands fall to his side, looking at the crowd that’s built around them. “I have little to no control over it, either. Anna, I’m worried about the control they’ll take from you.” He releases a wavering breath, shaking his head. “Everything points to something terrible to come.”
She turns back to the pyre, sees with a pang that it’s doubled in size.
“‘Where they burn books, they will, in the end, burn human beings too,’” Anna quotes.
She turns back to him. “I’m not the same naive girl I once was, Khiran.
I’m not staying here because I’m hoping for the best. I’m staying because I fear the worst.”
“Heinrich Heine.”
“Yes.”
“He was Jewish.”
“Yes.”
“They will be burning his words, too.”
Anna has no doubt. Heine’s poetry is sure to sit amongst the pile of every other writing the regime has deemed to be not German enough: Albert Einstein, Karl Marx, Helen Keller, Kurt Tucholsky, Sigmund Freud.
Anything that fostered ideas that worked against their agenda; anything that contradicted their false narrative and weaponized propaganda.
A voice booms across the opera square and the chants of the crowd go quiet.
Anna’s eyes find the man in front of the microphone, recognizes him as the Propaganda Minister.
“Fellow students, German men and women! The age of extreme Jewish intellectualism has now ended, and the success of the German revolution has again given the right of way to the German spirit!”
A chill skirts up her spine. The sudden, horrifying realization that he isn’t just speaking to the crowd, but to every citizen tuned into the radio. A disease of hate spreading across the airwaves, sinking its plagued teeth into any ear that will listen. A virus.
Khiran’s hands grasp her shoulders, turning her back to face him. There is a desperation lining his eyes. “Please, Anna. I’ll take you anywhere you wish. Anywhere else.”
“Brightened by these flames our vow shall be—”
She brings a hand to his cheek. Around them, the energy from the crowd is toxic. Thick as poison and just as deadly. Nationalism disguised as patriotism.
“The Reich and the Nation and our Führer Adolf Hitler—”
She gives Khiran her softest smile, hopes he sees the forgiveness and the apology in it. “I can’t.”
“Heil! Heil! Heil!”
Khiran stares down at her while the crowd, all tens of thousands of them, cheer as a torch is brought to the pyre.
The roar is deafening, drowning out the sound of catching pages and crackling spines as the fire feeds and grows.
The weight of their complacency is a vice on Anna’s chest. She’s not sure what’s more horrifying: the thought that they’re too blinded by the regime’s propaganda to see the hate and prejudice behind it, or that they do and support it, anyway.
She takes a deep breath, reaches for his hand before meeting Khiran’s searching gaze. “This is why you gave me my immortality. To be your hands in the places you cannot reach.”
She faces the bonfire. It’s grown so high, she can feel the warmth of it on her face despite being on the outskirts of the crowd. Flames lick up at the night sky, smoke rising like a storm to blot out the stars. When she turns back, she can see the burning reflection in his eyes. “Let me.”
People start disappearing.
Men and women from Berlin’s once thriving gay community are arrested and sent away to labor camps.
Those that dare to speak out against the regime follow.
The ‘Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring’ has seen asylums and specialized schools, nursing homes and prisons, put under a microscope.
They round up anyone with conditions ranging from epilepsy to alcoholism and subject them to forced sterilization.
The thousands of black men and women living in the country suffer the same fate, all in the name of racial purity.
By September of 1935, Jews, Roma, and people of color are stripped of their citizenship and banned from flying the German flag. By October, the regime has declared passports invalid for German Jews—forcing them to submit for a new passport marked with the letter “J”.
Her Jewish neighbors begin to dwindle, seeing the same warning signs she does.
Most of them stay, convinced that the Nazi party can’t hold power for long.
That their lives, and their country, is sure to return to normal.
Anna hopes they’re right, but can’t shake the fear of what it will mean if they’re wrong.
So Anna waits. She does what she can to support the neighbors who have lost their businesses, steers those struggling to attain passports and visas to the same counterfeiter who made hers.
When they don’t have the money to pay his fees, she suggests they go to Shanghai—one of the few places without a visa requirement to enter.
Then, in November of 1938, the Nazi regime enforces the program of Kristallnacht—The Night of Broken Glass.
Families flee, the hopes of a better tomorrow shattered and strewn in the dirty streets with the remains of their livelihoods.
Anna flees with them. Watching in horror as the numbers of refugees surge …
and the world’s nations do nothing to save them.
They shouldn’t be there.
She doesn’t have Silas’ magic to tell her when and where to go; can’t travel Eira’s paths.
In this, she is on her own. That didn’t scare her before.
For three years, she has relied on nothing but her own knowledge and instincts as she helped refugees slip over Switzerland’s borders.
For three years, those alone have been enough.
Tonight, it isn’t.
Gloved hands throw her to the ground, the snow and ice stinging her eyes. The cold seeps into her bones like a slap. Anna can hear the two other soldiers shouting over the storm—searching for the others. They won’t find them. Not today. Not in this.
They shouldn’t be here.
They never come this far out on patrol when the weather is this poor. It’s just bad luck, that the hour they crossed would align with the travel of three nazi soldiers foolish enough to drive in a blizzard.