Übermensch Master

I still remember when the Übermensch conquered Poland. I was seven years old.

I remember my brother Anton leaving. My mother cried until she lost her voice. We have a photograph of him from that same year hanging in the dining room. A black mourning ribbon draped over it reminds us, always, of the tragedy.

My father stood by the window and watched him go, his eyes fixed on nothing. It wasn’t until much later that I learned he’d been spared conscription because he was an essential worker.

My parents spent their evenings huddled by the radio. Every night, at the end, my mother would turn the volume down with two fingers, slowly, as if she were afraid someone might hear her. Absurd, isn’t it? That’s what fear is like when you live under the rule of the Übermensch.

Then came the flag, flying over the post office. It was a vivid red, with a white circle at its center. Inside the circle, the three-headed eagle, the symbol of the Übermensch, seemed to watch over everything.

That was the idea, of course.

Twelve years later, it was still flying there, and over every official building. Each morning, crossing the courtyard of my academy, I saw it presiding over our lives. I no longer felt anything. You can pretend, but the fear never really goes away.

My life followed the routine of every good citizen of the Reich. Until one winter day, when I heard trucks rolling into the grounds. I was bent over a bench vise in the second-floor workshop when I heard them.

I looked up.

“Soldiers,” Greta announced, leaning out the window.

Her voice didn’t waver. She was always braver than me. Or more reckless. My sister was a year older than I was, taller, beautiful. Every detail of her seemed to have come straight out of a propaganda committee. Next to her, I was nothing. She was a goddess. I was smaller, blonde like her, pretty in my own way, but not striking. My legs are slightly bowed, a legacy of the invasion years I’d rather not think about. It’s barely noticeable, as long as I don’t have to run. I compensate when I walk, the price is a stab of pain in my left hip if I walk too far.

“Could it be an inspection?” someone in the class asked.

“No,” Greta said flatly. “You don’t need that many men for an inspection.”

She was right. As always.

They called us down to the courtyard and lined us up in rows of eight. Forty-eight girls in all, from the senior classes. A thin drizzle chilled us to the bone. The drops felt like ice against our skin. I remember thinking they could just as easily have done this in the gymnasium. It wasn’t the discomfort that bothered me — it was the inefficiency.

Making us stand in the cold was part of the procedure, of course.

“They’re looking for traitors,” someone murmured a few rows back.

“Daughters of saboteurs,” a second voice added.

Then, from the back, a single word froze us all:

“Untermensch.”

After that word, you couldn’t hear so much as a breath. We glanced at each other out of the corners of our eyes. Greta stood motionless beside me. We Brandts were German. Our surname was German. We were almost pure stock. Our ancestors were almost all German. Almost all. That almost could make all the difference.

We lived in a town near Danzig, though on Polish soil. But we were Germans of Poland, Valide, as attested by the stamp they’d put on our family’s identity papers when the war ended.

I focused on the officer in charge.

He jumped down from the last truck. In his hands he held a strange device, a metal plate that reminded me of a missal. It had an amber screen and a small copper antenna on the right-hand side.

He gripped it tightly. It was clearly something important.

It struck me as odd. You don’t bring something that valuable just to hunt for traitors among schoolgirls. Its purpose was something else. That’s how I knew they weren’t looking for traitors at all.

“Your attention, please, young ladies.” The officer’s tone was cordial, almost kind. “We have instructions from the Institute to proceed with your evaluation. Please roll up one sleeve, whichever arm you prefer. It will be a quick and painless procedure. There is nothing to worry about.”

That last word set off alarms in my head.

“What Institute?” one of my classmates asked out loud. Inge, I think it was. Good with her hands, but never very bright.

The officer ignored the question.

“Silence in the ranks, please,” he ordered.

He began the screening from the left. He pressed the device briefly against the inside of each girl’s forearm until it gave a beep. Depending on the tone, one of the soldiers would point to a corner of the courtyard.

That was how they divided us into four groups.

I worked out the system by the time they finished the first row.

High tone, short: by the door of the main building. No one was guarding those girls.

High tone, slightly longer: by the kitchen pavilion.

Low tone: beside one of the trucks, packed close together, with several soldiers who never took their eyes off them. When I thought about what that kind of watching implied, my mouth went dry.

No tone at all. Only one girl in the whole first row got no tone. She was also escorted by a soldier to stand beside a truck. But she was treated differently, more carefully. There was something strange about the way they watched her. Or so it seemed to me.

They reached us.

Greta went first.

They passed the device over her arm. The tone was low and long. The guard didn’t hesitate.

“You go there.” He pointed to the most heavily guarded group.

He took her arm, gently but firmly, and pulled her toward it.

“No, Greta,” I said.

“Be quiet,” she ordered me.

As always, she wanted to protect me.

My turn came. The amber plate felt even colder than the rain on my skin.

While I waited, my mind was scrambling for a way out. Greta was in trouble. I studied the device instead of paying attention to the officer.

The beep never came. It was the second time that had happened.

“This way,” the officer indicated.

A hand pulled me toward the solitary girl. I didn’t move.

I had found a solution.

“The device isn’t working properly,” I announced.

Silence.

The officer looked up and studied me. A half-smile formed on his lips. I couldn’t tell whether it was disdain or interest.

“I beg your pardon?”

“The device. It’s out of calibration.” I spoke quickly. He was obviously no technician. I had to snow him under. “It’s the cold. The metal casing contracts, and that makes the sensors lose accuracy. It’s the same thing that happened to your trucks. They came up the hill sputtering because they were started cold this morning, I’d bet on it.”

I hoped it would stick. It was half truth, half lie.

“This is an engineering academy,” he murmured, as if for the first time we were something more than numbers to him.

“I’m a student here. I have the top marks in mechanics.” I took a deep breath. “I know that when the device passed over my sister it was cold, and it malfunctioned. I’m certain the reading was wrong. Please, test her again inside, once the device has warmed up, and you’ll see the result is different.”

The officer’s half-smile deepened.

“Why should I go to the trouble?”

A very good question. I was nothing to him. Neither was my sister. He was just one more cog in the machinery of the state, with nothing to do but carry out his orders.

I looked at the solitary girl. She was staring at me, wide-eyed, stunned by my outburst of defiance.

“Because I gave no tone,” I said. “It would be very strange for my sister to test so differently. I believe the group I’m going to matters, somehow.”

The officer cleared his throat.

“Are you sure of that?”

I decided to play humble.

“I hope so.”

“What if the tone is the same the second time?”

“Then you’ll only have lost five minutes of your time,” I said. “But if I’m right, you may gain another person like me.”

The officer hesitated a couple of seconds more. Then he pointed at my sister:

“You. Come inside with me.”

They were the longest five minutes of my life. I spent them trying not to think too much, fixing my attention on small details, on the way the raindrops slid down the windshield wiper of the nearest truck.

Greta and the officer came back.

“You were right,” the officer announced, pleased with himself. “But not entirely. She’s not like you. Her tone was high. Good thinking, about the temperature.” He gave me an approving nod. “I’ll include it in my report so it’s taken into account from now on.”

Greta wasn’t free. But at least she wasn’t bound for the most heavily guarded group.

She tried to run to me, but the soldiers held her back.

“We’ll find each other again,” she promised, her voice hoarse. “Trust me.”

“I know,” I answered, holding back tears.

I was lying. Because lies are always easier. What could I possibly know about our future?

When they had finished evaluating us all, I was told to climb into the truck. In the end there were three of us in my group. They closed the canvas flap and left us in half-darkness. The vehicle shuddered as the engine turned over, fighting the morning cold. Then we pulled away and began to leave it all behind.

Through a gap in the canvas I watched my sister, smaller and smaller as the distance grew, climbing into another truck.