Readers first meet 17-year-old Johannes (Hans) Schmitt on November 9, 1938, as he is walking with his father to the synagogue in Briedheim, Germany. His father is a tailor, and they are bringing clothes to the children in the orphanage attached to the synagogue. Hannah Becker (Hans’ girlfriend) and her father are also at the synagogue. It is a day that will end in Hell: The German Gestapo, riding in their long black Mercedes automobiles, fill the streets. While Hans and his father are at the orphanage, the Nazis attack the kosher butcher shop, breaking the glass windows, stealing all the meat, and beating the butcher to within an inch of his life. Hans and his father escape back to their tailor shop, but soon enough, the Gestapo arrives and kills Hans’ father. It is a scene repeated all around Germany on an occasion now known as “Kristallnacht,” the night of broken glass. Hans and his mother move into the orphanage, and in August 1939, Hans learns that his mother has arranged for him to go to America, under the sponsorship of his father’s old WWI friend—now a professor at the University of Virginia. Professor Cohen is permitted to sponsor only one German, and Hans’ mother insists that he must be the one to escape Germany. Hans boards the MS Batory, the ship that takes him from Gdańsk, Poland, to the port in New Jersey. Moments after the Batory pulls out of the harbor, a German battleship, ostensibly in port to begin peace treaty talks, begins firing rockets at Gdańsk; it is the official beginning of World War II. In November 1943, Hans is inducted into the U.S. Army and posted first to Camp Pickett in Virginia and then to the secret Camp Ritchie in Maryland.
It is at Camp Ritchie that the novel gains steam, moving beyond Hans’ emotional, personal story to encompass the extraordinary tale of “class twenty-two” of the Ritchie Boys, whose unique mission was to elicit real-time battle plans and weaponry details from captured German soldiers. In the narrative’s first, terrifying heavy-action scene, class twenty-two, under fire from the ground, parachutes into France behind enemy lines in preparation for the invasion of Normandy: “The night exploded into day as the Skytrain flying beside us erupted in a fireball of brilliant orange and red. For a single moment, I watched in awestruck silence, too dumbfounded to react as the plane cartwheeled away, not a single parachute emerging from the tumbling wreckage.” Saye’s meticulous prose is graphic, frightening, and packed with military details, including intricate descriptions of German weaponry and organizational structure. From the fields behind Normandy to the Battle of the Bulge in Belgium to the discovery of the concentration camps, the chilling brutality of war pours off the pages. Hans is a passionate narrator who viscerally communicates his raw emotions throughout the story, particularly his love for Hannah and his mother, his raging hatred for the Nazis, and his fierce determination.
