Nothing Sung and Nothing Spoken Read online

  Dedication

  For all the queer teens throughout history. Your stories matter.

  And

  For my parents, without whom this book would not exist.

  Epigraph

  Keine Messe wird man singen,

  Keinen Kadosch wird man sagen,

  Nichts gesagt und nichts gesungen

  Wird an meinen Sterbetagen.

  Not a Mass will be sung then,

  Not a Kaddish will be said,

  Nothing sung, and nothing spoken

  On the day when I am dead.

  —HEINRICH HEINE, “GEDÄCHTNISFEIER,”

  TRANSLATED BY A. S. KLINE

  Nein, das Nazi-Regime konnte meine Liebe zum Swing nicht brechen.

  No, the Nazi regime could not break my love of swing.

  —GÜNTER DISCHER

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prolog

  Part I

  April 1938

  Mai 1938

  Juli 1938

  August 1938

  November 1938

  Part II

  September 1939

  Oktober 1939

  Mai 1940

  August 1940

  Dezember 1940

  Januar 1941

  Mai 1941

  Part III

  April 1942

  Part IV

  Mai - August 1945

  Acknowledgments

  Fact vs. Fiction: Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Books by Nita Tyndall

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prolog

  10. august 1945

  ALLIIERTEN-BESETZTES DEUTSCHLAND

  IT BEGAN the summer before the war. An urgent, thrumming summer, the summer we were fifteen, the summer Geli was obsessed with Heinrich. Not some boy we knew, fair-haired and porcelain, but the Jewish poet Heinrich Heine. She’d found a book of his poems, and despite the fact that his words had been forbidden since 1933—or maybe because of it—she clung to that book like a lifeline.

  War was coming, but we didn’t know it yet. We were too young to remember what it had been like before. We grew up in shadows, threats looming overhead, and by the time we paid attention to them, it was too late.

  We were often together, she and I, staying awake late into the night. Our bodies close, our arms touching, her voice softly reading those verses.

  “Do you think,” she whispered to me one night, “that it’s really possible? Being so in love with someone like Heine was?”

  “Ich weiß nicht,” I replied. I don’t know.

  But I did know, because Heine’s longing was spelled out plainly in every word she read me, reaching inside me and threatening to expose my own longing for her.

  “What about you?” I asked her. “Do you believe it’s possible? That kind of love?”

  Her breathing was deep and even; I assumed she was asleep, for she did not answer me.

  It was only later, looking back, that I realized she never had.

  She dragged me to the club first, before Minna and Renate joined us. She took me because out of all of us, I was the one who was by her side.

  I was always by her side.

  To the very end, I was by her side.

  I promised her I would be.

  Part I

  APRIL 1938—AUGUST 1939

  April 1938

  BERLIN, DEUTSCHES REICH

  IT BEGINS with a secret.

  It begins with Geli’s hand in mine, pulling me along Fasanenstraße, the two of us practically running, the April air biting through the thin fabric of my jacket.

  “Geli, slow down!” I say, but she either can’t or deliberately doesn’t hear me, because if anything she picks up the pace, letting go and running ahead of me. We pass couples on the street, SA guards in brown uniforms, who scowl as Geli breezes by them.

  “Geli!”

  “Komm schon, Charlie,” she says, finally slowing enough to allow me to catch up to her. She takes my hand in hers again, laces her fingers through mine. “We don’t want to be too late.”

  “And what exactly are we going to be late for?”

  “You’ll see,” she says. I look up. We’ve finally stopped on Kantstraße, in front of a large set of stairs leading up to an imposing building with the name Delphi written on it. Around us are adults in glittering dresses and furs, immaculately made up and precise.

  I shrink back. This has to be a joke, Geli bringing me to a Tanzpalast like this. I don’t belong here like she does.

  But from the look on her face, I know it isn’t.

  “Geli, was ist?”

  She smiles, shakes her head. “Ask me in English, Charlie.”

  “What?”

  “They don’t like German being spoken here.”

  “Geli, you know my English isn’t as good as yours—”

  “Just try,” she says, smiling that dazzling smile at me, the one she uses whenever I have her full attention. The one that makes me feel special.

  I take a breath, try in English, because I need to feel special. Because after next school year our paths will split; Geli will continue on at her Gymnasium and I will have to work, and we live in two completely separate districts and she’s not going to have time for me anymore.

  I almost didn’t come tonight. It’s a Tuesday, and tomorrow is the Führer’s birthday, tomorrow I have duties and responsibilities to my family and the Bund Deutscher Mädel group to which Geli and I are both required to belong, and I almost didn’t come.

  But Geli has those same responsibilities, and yet here she is. Here we are.

  “What is this?” I ask carefully, the words heavy in my mouth. She laughs.

  “You’ll see.” She throws her arms out and spins before turning back to me, her eyes wide. “Charlotte Kraus,” she says, drawing out the syllables of my name. “I need you to pick a different name.”

  “What?” I ask.

  “When we get inside,” Geli says, “German names aren’t allowed—well. It’s better if you have an English or American one.” She smiles.

  “And what is your name going to be, Angelika Haas?” I say, and her nose wrinkles at my use of her full name.

  “Nancy,” she says immediately.

  “Nancy,” I repeat.

  Geli stifles a laugh behind her hands. “Let me pick your name,” she says once she’s recovered, and I nod, content to let her. She circles me, studying. I try not to shiver under her gaze.

  “You look like a Peggy,” she says in English with an air of finality.

  “Peggy,” I repeat.

  “It’s a nickname for Margaret,” Geli says.

  I frown. “How do the English get ‘Peggy’ from ‘Margaret’?” I ask, and Geli shrugs.

  “Are you ready, Peggy?” she asks, leading us up the stairs toward the entrance to the Tanzpalast.

  “Ready for what? What is this?” I ask, frustration creeping into my tone.

  “The surprise,” she says, and then I hear it.

  Music.

  Not the Goebbels-approved songs from the radio, not the Volkslieder I grew up singing. I realize with a start that I know this music like a memory: Papa playing it on the record player when I was young, dancing around our small living room with Mama while my little sister, Greta, and I watched, laughing.

  It’s jazz.

  But it feels different from Papa’s records, most of which were in German. I can’t make out the words of these English songs, and this music feels like a living, breathing thing, not something coming out of the speaker of our small Koffergrammopho
n, the record player that lives in its own suitcase house.

  It’s also forbidden. Outlawed. Not “German” enough.

  “Geli . . . ,” I whisper.

  “Nancy,” she corrects. “We’re American now.”

  I frown, but at the look on her face, I play along. “Nancy, this is . . .”

  “I know,” she says, and pulls me inside.

  I can’t help but stare. There are people dancing everywhere, some our age, some older—eighteen or nineteen—all flailing their arms to this music, which is coming from a group of boys onstage. Geli pinches my arm and I realize I’m gawking, blinking before turning my attention to the rest of the room.

  It’s magnificent, and against it, I feel even smaller. The ceiling is lit with lights like stars, the columns like something from ancient Greece rising up to meet them. I watch as Geli drops a Reichsmark in a tin by the door.

  “Geli, I don’t have any money . . .”

  “Don’t worry, Peggy, I’ll cover it,” she says, and drops another mark in like it’s no big deal. “Besides, it’s just a suggestion.”

  I think of the torn skirt lying on my bed at home that I will have to fix myself because we cannot afford to replace it, and wish money were just a suggestion.

  But I don’t have time to linger on this, the sharp sting in my chest at her words, because Geli shrugs off her coat and motions for me to do the same, then tosses them both in a heap by the door. She pulls her lipstick out of her dress pocket and touches it up before turning back to me and grinning.

  “What do you think?”

  I try not to stare. She looks like an American flapper, golden hair curled, lips painted that bright red, the absolute antithesis of what a good German girl is supposed to look like. My fingers play with the fabric of my dress; when Geli told me she had a surprise for me, all she’d said was to wear something nice. But my nice isn’t her nice, and compared to her, I just feel plain and small and unremarkable.

  Why did she bring me here? Renate’s more outgoing than I am, Minna more musical, so why did she bring me, of all our friends?

  As if she can sense what I’m thinking, Geli takes my hand. Her nails are the same bright red as her lipstick. I have no idea when she had the time to paint them; it’s not like the BDM allows us to wear nail polish, and Liesl would have commented on it earlier at our meeting if Geli had been wearing it then.

  “Charlie,” she says, and I tear my attention away from our intertwined hands. She leans in closer so I can hear her over the music. “Come dance with me.”

  I look around the magnificent room, try to ignore the feeling of her hand in mine, and I do what I always do—

  I let her lead, and I follow.

  At first I don’t know what to do. This music doesn’t follow a strict rhythm, and I have trouble trying to move and dance to it. The people around us are flailing their arms, bodies twisting this way and that, and I awkwardly try to copy them for a song before Geli cuts in. She dances with me for a few beats before laughing and pulling away again, always dancing and swirling at the periphery of my vision, the sight of her hazy through the smoke-filled room. She dances with a boy with hair longer than hers, catching my eye and winking when he dips her. One of his friends takes my hand and, on my nod, spins me around the room. We dance for two songs—or is it three? Or four? I lose count so quickly, each melody blending into the next.

  Boys have never danced with me like this before. No one has. We sing songs in the BDM and sometimes we have approved dances with boys from neighboring Hitlerjugend groups, but nothing has ever felt like—like this. This electric.

  The band takes a pause and I’m finally able to catch my breath as the boy—Jimmy, he said his name was, though I know it wasn’t—gives me a bow and heads off to rejoin his friends. I look around, but I don’t see Geli. I’m about to go looking for her when a shout from the stage stops me where I stand.

  “Swing Heil!” one of the boys onstage calls, throwing up his arm in a mock Hitler salute. I freeze. A few of the other people around me laugh nervously, but other than that, none of them even give this boy a second glance. His blond hair is long, longer than a boy in the HJ would be allowed to wear it, his nose crooked in a way that suggests it’s been broken before. His friends onstage jostle him, and I recognize him then as the boy Geli was dancing with earlier. As I look closer, I realize none of the boys look like ones I would know from the HJ—not just their hair but their clothes, suspenders and trousers and hats I’ve only seen in some of Geli’s British fashion magazines. The girls standing around me, too, all look like Geli—curled hair instead of braids, lips painted outrageously bright colors, skirts above their knees.

  My heart hammers faster, as if trying to keep up with the desperate tempo the band has struck up again.

  I need to find Geli. She’ll be able to—to explain this. If she tells me I belong here, then I do. If she tells me this is safe and exciting, even though it feels forbidden and dangerous, then it is.

  I turn, trying to spot Geli in the crowd, finding her after a minute. She’s sitting at one of the tables pushed against the wall, her legs on the lap of a different boy who looks much older than us. A lit cigarette dangles out of his mouth, and I watch as she plucks it and takes a drag off it before handing it back to him.

  “We have to go,” I tell her, ignoring the thudding in my chest at the sight of her with this boy. She opens her mouth like she’s about to argue but stops at the look on my face. She stands and kisses the boy on the cheek, her lipstick leaving a bright mark.

  I turn away.

  Outside the hot haze of the dance hall the world is sharp and clear; outside, you can barely hear the music.

  “Didn’t you love that?” Geli says as we stand on the sidewalk, quickly reverting to German. “Oh Charlie, please tell me you loved it.”

  “Yes,” I say, breathlessly, before I can even think about what it is I’m saying. “I loved it, but Geli—how did you hear about this? How—how is this allowed, how have the SA not found it, what . . . what is it?”

  “It’s jazz,” Geli says, again in that American accent she’s perfected. “Hot dancing!”

  I frown. She grabs my hand and starts humming one of the songs, laughing, trying to spin me around. I dig my heels into the cobblestones.

  “Geli, I’m not playing. The—the boy doing the mock salute, the music, I just—”

  “Relax, Charlie,” she says. “It’s nothing serious.”

  “How did you even find out about it?”

  “Tommy told me,” she says.

  “Tommy?”

  “The boy from onstage. That’s not his real name.”

  “I know that,” I say, frustrated. “How did you even meet him?”

  She shrugs. “The boys’ Gymnasium isn’t so far from mine. I talk to them sometimes,” she says, giving me a wink. “He asked if I liked music, I said yes, and he brought me to this club a few weeks ago. And I wanted to show it to you.”

  “But—”

  “It’s just dancing, Charlie,” she says. “It’s fun. It’s a way to relax. You had fun, didn’t you?”

  God, she knows me so well. I don’t even have to answer; she can see it on my face—yes, I did have fun, my hair loose and skirt flying. I liked how the music filled my body, how it made me feel.

  How dancing with her made me feel.

  It’s just dancing, she says.

  But it feels like something much more dangerous than that.

  Geli and I part ways at the U-Bahn stop by the Zoo. Her home isn’t far, but mine is a few stops away in Kreuzberg, near Renate’s flat. She briefly hugs me before pulling back.

  “Let’s go again,” she says. “Soon.”

  “When?”

  “I don’t know—they meet at least once a week, but not always at the Delphi.” She smiles. “Once I find out the next meeting place, I’ll tell you—you can draw me one of your maps. We could even bring the others! You can invite them tomorrow before the induction ceremony, r
ight?”

  Something in my chest tightens when she says that. The others. Minna and Renate.

  “Sure,” I say, hoping she doesn’t hear the jealousy in my tone. I know they’d love it, the music, the dancing, but I want it to just be me and Geli, just for a little while longer. “I can invite them then.”

  “Perfect!” she says, and hugs me again. This time when she pulls back from me, her hands linger on my shoulders.

  “Thank you,” she says.

  “For what?”

  “For coming with me. I wouldn’t have wanted anyone else by my side tonight.”

  “Oh,” I say, because I’m not sure what to say, how I’m supposed to respond to that.

  Warum ich?

  Why me?

  Before I can stop her, Geli leans in and kisses me on the cheek, then flounces off to her side of the street.

  I place my hand to my cheek as if I can keep her kiss there. As if I can keep her with me.

  The lights are off when I enter our flat, Mama and Papa’s door shut. I head down the hall, trying to tiptoe past my little sister Greta’s room to my own.

  A whisper in the dark. “Charlie.”

  No luck.

  I go into Greta’s room, shutting the door before I turn on the light.

  “What are you doing up?” I ask her, perching on the edge of her bed, careful not to mess up her new JM uniform that’s neatly folded at the foot of it. “Mama will be cross with you tomorrow if she thinks you didn’t sleep.”

  “I was waiting for you. Where did you go?” She frowns. “You smell like cigarettes. If Mama finds out . . .”

  “Keine Sorge, Gretchen, I didn’t smoke.”

  “Then where were you?” she asks. “You told Mama you had to go help Fräulein Schröder for the induction ceremony tomorrow.”

  Tomorrow is the Führer’s birthday, a national holiday. Tomorrow my little sister is being inducted into the Jungmädelbund, the little sister organization of the BDM. I helped her memorize her induction speeches, took in her uniform so it fits on her small frame.

  Greta’s eyes narrow. “You were out with Geli, weren’t you?”

  “Yes,” I say, and the frown on her face deepens.