“I made this for you.” He placed a tray with a piece of piping hot apple strudel and a desert zinnia in front of her. He smiled, looking deeply into her eyes as if he knew exactly what had happened in Phoenix. “You missed lunch. I’m glad you’re back,” he said. Then he turned and retreated to the kitchen. Elinor was so stunned that she didn’t even get a chance to thank him.

The other nurses giggled and started to pick at her strudel. She smiled. The day’s degradation was suddenly a distant memory.

She went to bed thinking about Frederick, who in one instant had made her feel like a human again, a beautiful, desirable human, something she hadn’t felt since she enlisted, and something she knew she wanted and needed. A German, of all people, made her feel this way. A German in Hitler’s army.

1. Elinor

1.

Elinor

TWENTY-THREE-YEAR-OLD ELINOR ELIZABETH Powell arrived at Fort Huachuca, a military installation in southern Arizona, with an ID number (N758592), an acceptance letter from the United States Army Nurse Corps, and a sense of relief that she was not returning to her family home in Milton, Massachusetts, to live with her demanding mother. Just a year earlier, in 1943, she had graduated from the Lincoln School for Nurses, a privately endowed institution in the Bronx, New York, founded in 1898, one of a small number of nursing schools that admitted African American women at the time.

Elinor’s life in New York City couldn’t have been more different from her upbringing in the white suburb of Milton. She’d become a city girl, living in Harlem, dating, partying, studying, and finishing near the top of her nursing class of thirty-nine students. The population of blacks in Harlem had been approximately 327,000 in 1930, after the first wave of migration from the South.1 By 1940, they had been joined by thousands more, making it astronomically larger than the black population in Milton. Harlem had jazz, clubs, liquor, dancing, drugs, numbers running, and sex. The cultural influences of the Harlem Renaissance were cemented in African American culture by that time—poetry readings, “rent parties” where hosts charged entrance fees to help pay their rent, jam sessions, and NAACP meetings were regular occurrences. Elinor’s new social life was unlike anything she’d ever experienced before.