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Color and life sudden and everywhere, lift the pawl of silence from the train. Car conversation picks up tentative low, who does not speak quietly in public these days in the seat behind him, a woman says. I wonder if the white rose will come here to Stuttgart, a companion, a man hush. I only wondered if the woman says I didn’t say hush all the same. You know it isn’t safe to speak of resistance, not in a place like this.

The narrow confines of a train where anyone may hear and no one can hide in this country. The centers emerge like ants from every dark crevice. They are small and scuttling, but before they are crushed, they will bite the descending heel and leave a painful sting. The white rose is not the only party of resistance. The social democrats, the zopah day may have been banned when Hitler seized power, but despite the imprisonment and murder of their leaders, despite their dissemination by exile, they have not left us entirely.

The fire Arbeiter union has not forgotten the part they played in the November revolution. Their pamphlets have been outlawed, merely to possess, one could mean death, but still, they are printed still. They are red, Catholics and protestants who refuse to see eye to eye on matters of doctrine, and have joined hands in this cause. It seems that every week Anton hears of another speech given by some brave father in a public square, another treatise written by a preacher or a Jesuit or a doomed earnest nun exalting the german people to listen to reason to heed the cold, choking voice of their Own hearts, resistance is everywhere, but the white rose is perhaps the most poignant incarnation. It is a children’s movement or at least Anton can’t help but think of them as children, half his age and braver than lions braver than he ever was.

The young students of Munich have taken to the streets with pamphlets and paint since June. They have covered brick walls with their slogans imploring their fellow germans to resist Vedic stunts. They have covered the streets with their leaflets, god alone knows who prints those subversive and deadly things. In the three months since these children have risen to their feet, Anton’s mood has grown darker and his sleep more restless. How long can resistors hold out once Hitler turns his flat cold stare on Munich?

The white rose will wither and fade. The fiora will pluck those tender petals one by one and grind them underfoot Anton, could almost accept it if these were grown: men and women, but the founders of the white rose and the students who follow them. They are too young too precious. The whole of their lives lies ahead or should lie ahead. If God had more power in Germany than Hitler, there was a time when children sang before church.

Dear God, keep me pious, so I will go to heaven. Now we chant in pubs and on the streets at dinner parties and in our sleep, lord god, keep me quiet. So I don’t end up in da chao after a pause. The woman on the train says I thank god. We’Ve has been spared the worst of it here.

There’S much more damage in berlin. Funny thing too, thank god, says the man beside her. What do you mean by that silent? Listening Anton watches the countryside pass by a hedgerow of sunflowers splits, a moon field? He remembers playing among the sunflowers as a boy.

Their dry smelling stalks were like a palisade, the whisper of their leaves’ yellow light that came down filtered through the petals. His sister made a playhouse among the sunflowers Anton. You must be the father of my house and tell my little children. If you don’t wash up for supper, the mother will be cross, I mean says the man there isn’t any sense in bringing God into the war. What does he do with any of this?

Don’t tell me you think anything. The fuhrer has done is part of god’s plan. The woman does not speak, nor does Anton the sound of his sister’s voice vanishes from memory at length. The woman says you talk as if you don’t believe in god at all. She sounds as if she might cry a companion is quick to answer quickly to defend it’s only this I’ve never seen god.

Why should I credit him for a blessing or leave him? Any blame men are quite capable of destroying the world on their own, as we can plainly see, they don’t need any help from above before he can stop himself before he can think Anton turns in his seat.

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