Chapter Text
CRACK! BANG! Ranpo shot straight up in bed, his heart racing. That sound—it was like someone had kicked the front door in. Or had he dreamed it? Ranpo listened, straining his ears in the dark. He wasn’t used to the sounds of this new flat, the smaller one he and his family had been forced to move into. They couldn’t afford their old place, not since the Nazis told Ranpo’s father he wasn’t allowed to practice law anymore because he was Jewish.
Across the room, Ranpo’s little sister, Yosano, was still asleep. Ranpo tried to relax. Maybe he’d just been having a nightmare. Something in the darkness outside his room moved with a grunt and a scuffle. Someone was in the house!
Ranpo scrambled backward on his bed, his eyes wide. There was a shattering sound in the next room—crisssh! Yosano woke up and screamed. Screamed in sheer blind terror. She was only six years old. “Mama!” Ranpo cried. “Papa!”
Towering shadows burst into the room. The air seemed to crackle around them like static from a radio. Ranpo tried to hide in the corner of his bed, but shadowy hands snatched at him. Grabbed for him. He screamed even louder than his little sister, drowning her out. He kicked and flailed in a panic, but one of the shadows caught his ankle and dragged him face-first across his bed. Ranpo clawed at his sheets, but the hands were too strong. Ranpo was so scared he wet himself, the warm liquid spreading through his nightclothes.
“No!” Ranpo screamed. “No!” The shadows threw him to the floor. Another shadow picked up Yosano by the hair and slapped her. “Be quiet!” the shadow yelled, and it tossed Yosano down on the floor beside Josef.
The shock shut Yosano up, but only for a moment. Then she wailed even harder and louder. “Hush, Sano. Hush,” Ranpo begged her.
He took her in his arms and wrapped her in a protective hug. “Hush now.” They cowered together on the floor as the shadows picked up Yosano’s bed and threw it against the wall.
Crash! The bed broke into pieces. The shadows tore down pictures, pulled drawers from their bureaus, and flung clothing everywhere. They broke lamps and lightbulbs. Ranpo and Yosano clung to each other, terrified and wetfaced with tears.
The shadows grabbed them again and dragged them into the living room. They threw Ranpo and Yosano on the floor once more and flicked on the overhead light. As Ranpo’s eyes adjusted, he saw the seven strangers who had invaded his home. Some of them wore regular clothes: white shirts with the sleeves rolled up, gray slacks, brown wool caps, leather work boots. Most of them wore the brown shirts and red swastika armbands of the Sturmabteilung, Adolf Hitler’s “storm troopers.”
Ranpo’s mother and father were there too, lying on the floor at the feet of the Brownshirts.
“Ranpo! Yosano!” Mama cried when she saw them. She lunged for her children, but one of the Nazis grabbed her nightgown and pulled her back.
“Aaron Edogawa,” one of the Brownshirts said to Ranpo’s father, “you have continued to practice law despite the fact that Jews are forbidden to do so under the Civil Service Restoration Act of 1933. For this crime against the German people, you will be taken into protective custody.”
Ranpo looked at his father, panicked. “This is all a misunderstanding,” Papa said. “If you’d just give me a chance to explain—” The Brownshirt ignored Papa and nodded at the other men. Two of the Nazis yanked Ranpo’’s father to his feet and dragged him toward the door.
“No!” Ranpo cried. He had to do something. He leaped to his feet, grabbed the arm of one of the men carrying his father, and tried to pull him off. Two more of the men jerked Josef away and held him as he fought against them.
The Brownshirt in charge laughed. “Look at this one!” he said, pointing to the wet spot on Ranpo’s nightclothes. “The boy pissed himself!”
The Nazis laughed, and Ranpo’s face burned hot with shame. He struggled in the men’s arms, trying to break free. “I’ll be a man soon enough,” Ranpo told them. “I’ll be a man in six months and eleven days.”
The Nazis laughed again. “Six months and eleven days!” the Brownshirt said. “Not that he’s counting.” The Brownshirt suddenly turned serious. “Perhaps you’re close enough that we should take you to a concentration camp too, like your father.”
“No!” Mama cried. “No, my son is just twelve. He’s just a boy. Please—don’t.”
Yosano wrapped herself around Yosano’’s leg and wailed. “Don’t take him! Don’t take him!”
The Brownshirt scowled at the noise and gave the men carrying Aaron Edogawa a dismissive wave. watched as they dragged Papa away to the sounds of Mama’s sobs and Yosano’s wails.
“Don’t be so quick to grow up, boy,” the Brownshirt told Ranpo. “We’ll come for you soon enough.”
The Nazis trashed the rest of Ranpo’s house, breaking furniture and smashing plates and tearing curtains. They left as suddenly as they had come, and Ranpo and his sister and mother huddled together on their knees in the middle of the room. At last, when they had cried all the tears they could cry, Raki Edogawa led her children to her room, put her bed back together, and hugged Ranpo and Yosano close until morning.
In the days to come, Ranpo learned that his family wasn’t the only one the Nazis had attacked that night. Other Jewish homes and businesses and synagogues were destroyed all over Germany, and tens of thousands of Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps. They called it Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass.
The Nazis hadn’t said it with words, but the message was clear: Ranpo and his family weren’t wanted in Germany anymore. But Ranpo and his mother and sister weren’t going anywhere. Not yet. Not without Ranpo’’s father.
Mama spent weeks going from one government office to another, trying to find out where her husband was and how to get him back. Nobody would tell her anything, and Ranpo began to despair that he would never see his father again.
And then, six months after he’d been taken away, they got a telegram. A telegram from Papa! He’d been released from a concentration camp called Dachau, but only on condition that he leave the country within fourteen days.
Ranpo didn’t want to leave. Germany was his home. Where would they go? How would they live? But the Nazis had told them to get out of Germany twice now, and the Edogawa family wasn’t going to wait around to see what the Nazis would do next.