Summer of My German Soldier

Saturday is the busiest day at the Bergens’ store, and Patty is excited to help out and feel useful. Once she arrives, however, her mother insists that she go to Mrs. Reeves for a perm, and her father verbally abuses Patty in support of her mother. Patty spends hours in the summer heat under the additional heat of the permanent wave chemicals. Patty intensely hates her mother’s insistence on perms for her; she believes her best physical feature is her wavy auburn hair, which the perms ruin. Ruth, too, hates how her parents insist on “messing up something beautiful” (81), and she tries to remedy the perm by cutting away the worst of it.

Patty spots Anton at night by the railroad tracks, and at first she cannot believe it. She runs and calls to him, and he recognizes her. She shows him the room above the garage, where he hides. That night at dinner, her parents get into an argument. Patty tries to take leftovers to Anton after her parents go to bed, but her father hears her in the kitchen and tells her to get back to bed, so she is unable to bring Anton any food.

Patty stays in bed until after her father leaves for work. When she gets up, she sees the newspaper on the breakfast table with a huge headline announcing the FBI’s seizure of eight Nazi saboteurs. Patty feels a sense of panic reading that any American acting as a spy during war will suffer death. She consoles herself, however, by thinking that Anton probably hopped the train that runs near the garage during the night.

When she checks the hideout, though, Anton is still there. He tells Patty about his family. His father was a professor who criticized Hitler in the early 1930s by claiming that he slept with a Raggedy Ann doll. Anton also tells Patty about Hitler’s burning of books. Anton is pro-Germany but anti-Hitler. When Patty asks about how he escaped from the POW camp, he explains that he followed a model he learned from studying Hitler. He explains that deception has three layers: a foundation layer of truth, a second layer that is both flattery and truth, and a third, top layer that is a lie. Anton gives an example of Hitler’s deception: The German worker is poor, the German worker deserves to be prosperous, and the Jews and communists have stolen what is rightfully the German worker’s. Anton’s deception of a prison guard is based on the foundation of his excellent English, which is the result of his having an English governess. His English leads people to believe he is rich. He then spread the lie among the guards that his father would give $5,000 to the guard who helped him escape, delivered in the form of the (fake) diamond pin he bought at the Bergens’ store. Patty is worried that the guard who drove him beyond the gate might be punished. Anton feels no guilt, though, as he says he acted to survive, and the guard acted for reward. However, he does not wish to implicate the guard. Patty tells Anton she is Jewish, and he is taken aback at the irony of a Jew helping a German hide. Anton asks why Patty is helping him, and she says she would never want anything bad to happen to him.