The Huntress

by Kate Quinn

They called her die Jägerin—the Huntress. She was the young mistress of an SS officer in German-occupied Poland, the hostess of grand parties on the lake, a keen shot. Perhaps she was the rusalka the lake was named for—a lethal, malevolent water spirit.

Judgment, thou art fled to brutish beasts, and men have lost their reason … Ian let out a slow, controlled breath. But not me. Control was what separated men from beasts, and they were the beasts.

That business about the six refugees she killed after feeding them a meal—” “Children,” Ian said quietly. “Six Jewish children, somewhere between the ages of four and nine.”

“The file still lists her birth name. Tony Rodomovsky, allow me to introduce Nina Graham.” The woman in the hospital bed, the woman who had seen die Jägerin face-to-face and lived, the woman now standing in the same room with him for the first time in five years, a razor in her boot and a cool smile on her lips. “My wife.”

“Seb had promised to get her there. I kept his promise for him.” Ian looked at his partner. “He was my little brother. The only family I had left. And Nina watched die Jägerin murder him at Lake Rusalka.”

Dad, she thought, oh, Dad, what have you brought into our family?

The world will know your name,

And that is a promise.

We’re standing in the ashes of a war like no other—if we don’t try harder to see the shades of gray involved, we’ll find ourselves in the thick of a new one.”

“Just because you can’t fight doesn’t mean I can’t,”

“Revolutions talk big about women being the same as men,” Nina said. “Now when you ask permission to join up, they tell you to go be a nurse.”

There was some relief in the thought, some regret, some pleasure. No need to rank one over the other.

Control is what separates men from beasts.

“I know better than to take an armed woman to bed.”

“Fathers want to build something they can leave to their children. Sometimes they don’t stop and think if what they’ve built is anything their children want to be saddled with.”

“Is a Russian thing. Sit around, drink too much, talk about death.” She pushed her empty plate away. “It makes us cheerful.”

Building a generation is like building a wall—one good well-made brick at a time, one good well-made child at a time. Enough good bricks, you have a good wall. Enough good children, you have a generation that won’t start a world-enveloping war.”

Time is a wheel, vast and indifferent, and when time rolls on and men forget, we face the risk of circling back. We slouch yawning to a new horizon and find ourselves gazing at old hatreds seeded and watered by forgetfulness and flowering into new wars. New massacres. New monsters like die Jägerin. Let this wheel stop. Let us not forget this time. Let us remember.