THE HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPION OF THE SCHOOL-YARD
The summer of '39 was in a hurry, or perhaps Liesel was. She spent her time playing soccer with Rudy and the other kids on Himmel Street (a year-round pastime), taking ironing around town with Mama, and learning words. It felt like it was over a few days after it began.
In the latter part of the year, two things happened.
SEPTEMBER-NOVEMBER 1939
1. World War Two begins.
2. Liesel Meminger becomes the heavyweight champion of the school yard.
The beginning of September.
It was a cool day in Molching when the war began and my workload increased.
The world talked it over.
Newspaper headlines reveled in it.
The Führer’s voice roared from German radios. We will not give up. We will not rest. We will be victorious. Our time has come.
The German invasion of Poland had begun and people were gathered everywhere, listening to the news of it. Munich Street, like every other main street in Germany, was alive with war. The smell, the voice. Rationing had begun a few days earlier—the writing on the wall—and now it was official. England and France had made their declaration on Germany. To steal a phrase from Hans Hubermann:
The fun begins.
The day of the announcement, Papa was lucky enough to have some work. On his way home, he picked up a discarded newspaper, and rather than stopping to shove it between paint cans in his cart, he folded it up and slipped it beneath his shirt. By the time he made it home and removed it, his sweat had drawn the ink onto his skin. The paper landed on the table, but the news was stapled to his chest. A tattoo. Holding the shirt open, he looked down in the unsure kitchen light.
“What does it say?” Liesel asked him. She was looking back and forth, from the black outlines on his skin to the paper.
“‘Hitler takes Poland,’” he answered, and Hans Hubermann slumped into a chair. “Deutschland über Alles,” he whispered, and his voice was not remotely patriotic.
The face was there again—his accordion face.
That was one war started.
Liesel would soon be in another.
Nearly a month after school resumed, she was moved up to her rightful year level. You might think this was due to her improved reading, but it wasn’t. Despite the advancement, she still read with great difficulty. Sentences were strewn everywhere. Words fooled her. The reason she was elevated had more to do with the fact that she became disruptive in the younger class. She answered questions directed to other children and called out. A few times, she was given what was known as a Watschen (pronounced “varchen”) in the corridor.
A DEFINITION
Watschen = a good hiding
She was taken up, put in a chair at the side, and told to keep her mouth shut by the teacher, who also happened to be a nun. At the other end of the classroom, Rudy looked across and waved. Liesel waved back and tried not to smile.
At home, she was well into reading The Grave Digger’s Handbook with Papa. They would circle the words she couldn’t understand and take them down to the basement the next day. She thought it was enough. It was not enough.
Somewhere at the start of November, there were some progress tests at school. One of them was for reading. Every child was made to stand at the front of the room and read from a passage the teacher gave them. It was a frosty morning but bright with sun. Children scrunched their eyes. A halo surrounded the grim reaper nun, Sister Maria. (By the way—I like this human idea of the grim reaper. I like the scythe. It amuses me.)
In the sun-heavy classroom, names were rattled off at random.
“Waldenheim, Lehmann, Steiner.”
They all stood up and did a reading, all at different levels of capability. Rudy was surprisingly good.
Throughout the test, Liesel sat with a mixture of hot anticipation and excruciating fear. She wanted desperately to measure herself, to find out once and for all how her learning was advancing. Was she up to it? Could she even come close to Rudy and the rest of them?
Each time Sister Maria looked at her list, a string of nerves tightened in Liesel’s ribs. It started in her stomach but had worked its way up. Soon, it would be around her neck, thick as rope.