Excerpt
Far From Home
Chapter 1It was a glorious, warm, sunny day in July 1944, driving back to Berlin from Brandenburg, where Arielle von Auspeck’s husband’s family schloss was located. It was a sixteenth-century castle, large, drafty in the winter, and expensive to maintain. But Gregor von Auspeck was deeply attached to it. As an only son, he had inherited it when his parents died. Gregor and Arielle spent weekends there year-round, and part of every summer. They usually had gone to the south of France for a few weeks in the summer too, in honor of Arielle’s roots. Her father was German, and her mother French. Arielle was also an only child. She had grown up in Germany, but had strong ties to France. Her mother had moved to Berlin from Paris when she married Arielle’s father. Arielle’s parents were aristocrats too. Her mother spoke to her in French, so she was fluent. Both Arielle’s family and Gregor’s were from Berlin.
Arielle was a slim, blond, blue-eyed beauty with a great figure. She was forty-four years old. Gregor was five years older, tall, athletic, with dark hair and blue eyes. Their families had been friends, and Gregor was the dashing “older man” when she fell in love with him at twenty and married him at twenty-one. They had been married for twenty-three very happy years. Their daughter, Marianna, was twenty-two, and had recently become the wife of Jürgen Springer, a young lieutenant in the Luftwaffe, an ace pilot, and a delightful boy Arielle and Gregor both approved of. The wedding had been lavish, held in their Berlin home in the Zehlendorf district. It was one of the largest, most beautiful homes in the city. They had a ballroom, and there were three hundred guests at Marianna’s wedding, many of the men in military uniform and the women in exquisite ballgowns.
Gregor was a colonel, retired from the German army, after an incident at the beginning of the war. He had been accidentally shot and his left arm remained stiff and his shoulder permanently damaged. It had spared him the agonizing decision of resigning from the army, which he’d been considering at the time. He was fiercely opposed to Hitler’s policies and his anti-Semitic programs. The accident had given him the perfect excuse to retire, and had spared him from taking an overt position in opposition to the Führer, which would have been dangerous. Instead he was able to remove himself gracefully from Hitler’s army.
Arielle and Gregor had a son as well, Viktor. He was nineteen now and had been an earnest and eager member of the Hitlerjugend, the Hitler Youth, since he was fourteen, just before the war began. He had finally been able to enlist at eighteen. He was fighting for the Fatherland in Poland, and his parents hadn’t seen him in several months. Both their children were loyal supporters of the Third Reich, Marianna as the wife of a young ace pilot in the air force, and Viktor thrilled to be in the army at last. Much to his father’s chagrin, Viktor had been exposed to Nazi propaganda throughout his teens. They had had many heated arguments before Viktor enlisted. He was young and naïve, and swept up by the policies of the Nazi party that he’d grown up with.
Arielle had lost her parents young. Her mother had died in the Spanish flu pandemic when Arielle was eighteen. Gregor didn’t know Arielle well then, although he’d met her and his parents always said what a lovely, elegant, kind woman her mother was, and that Arielle was a great deal like her. She said that her father had died of a broken heart after her mother’s death. He was more than twenty years older than his wife, and died a few years after Arielle and Gregor were married.
Gregor soon became the center of Arielle’s universe, even more so after she lost her father, and she was a devoted mother from the moment Marianna was born. Gregor and Arielle both adored their children. He had never had a profession. He oversaw his investments and ran the extensive property around the schloss, with many tenant farmers. He was a nobleman through and through, a famously skilled rider, and attended many hunts on horseback. His injured shoulder didn’t interfere with his riding, but he couldn’t shoot anymore. He joined his friends anyway at their hunts for the fun of it and the pleasure of being with his fellow sportsmen and social circle.
He and Arielle enjoyed traveling and engaged in many charitable activities. As best he could, Gregor protected his wife and family from the harsh realities of the world, which became harder to do once the war started. He thought all of Hitler’s plans for Germany were outrageous. He and Arielle shared that point of view, although they only expressed it privately in circles of friends who had the same sympathies they did. It was too dangerous to share their opinions openly, and they were discreet about it. Gregor was part of the Kreisau Circle, a group of conservative aristocrats philosophically opposed to Adolf Hitler, including many high-ranking military officers. Their dream was to seize power from Hitler, and put Germany back on a more honorable, humane path.
Gregor’s closest friend was Ludwig Beck, a retired general who left the army in 1938, a year before war was declared, once he guessed what was coming. It had proven to be even worse than he predicted, with crimes against humanity beyond anything that civilized men could tolerate. He thought Hitler was a madman and Gregor agreed. The war had been going badly, run by Hitler.
Ludwig Beck came to the house often for long, private late-night talks with Gregor over cognac and cigars. Their philosophies hadn’t wavered about Hitler’s barbarism, but only strengthened.
Arielle and Gregor were on their way back to Berlin because he had meetings with his bankers on matters he said were important. Arielle never questioned his decisions. He made all their plans, which was quite comfortable for her. He was an extremely reasonable man, who always put her and their children first. They were his top priority. And she wanted to see Marianna, who hadn’t been to visit them at the schloss in weeks. She lived near them in Berlin and was always waiting for an opportunity to see her husband, if he had a few days’ leave between missions. He had been flying almost constantly. From January to May, he had been part of Operation Steinbock, the “Little Blitz,” bombing London, Bristol, Hull, and Cardiff. Hitler was determined to conquer the English, take over the country, and make it part of his growing empire, as he invaded all of Europe.
The past five years, since war had been declared in September 1939, had been challenging for the country. And recently, the war hadn’t been going well for Germany. It made Gregor and his like-minded friends more eager than ever to find a way to remove Hitler from running the war and the country. Gregor was a loyal German, but not loyal to Hitler.
The Kreisau Circle included many of Gregor’s close friends, men he trusted implicitly, like General Friedrich Olbricht, Major General Henning von Tresckow, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, and Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel, who was the commander of Occupied France.
Gregor and Arielle had been to France several times since the war started. Arielle loved it there. It always reminded her of her trips with her mother when she was a young girl. Her mother had shared the wonders of Paris with her, and she had shared them with Gregor, who was less familiar with the city than she was, but also loved it.
Arielle’s mother’s family still owned their ancestral château in France, two hours outside of Paris, in Brionne, in Normandy. All the elders of her parents’ and grandparents’ generation were gone now. The only French relatives she had left in the de Villier family were her cousins Jeanne and Louis, who were brother and sister and lived at the château. There was plenty of room for Jeanne’s husband and two children. Arielle used to visit Jeanne and Louis, and they had been close when they were growing up. They were both slightly older than Arielle. Jeanne had a son Viktor’s age and a younger daughter, Sylvie, and Louis, a widower now, had never had children. Arielle hadn’t seen them in five years. There was a chill between them, since in their eyes she was German, and married to a German. She hoped they would be able to reconnect after the war and make peace. They were the only family she had, other than Gregor and their children, and she missed them. She hadn’t heard from them in four years and didn’t dare to visit them when she and Gregor went to Paris.
