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When Karl came downstairs half an hour later, she tried to think of a way to explain what had happened, but she didn’t understand why Germany was attacking Russia. She had understood the offensive against the French – during her childhood her father had talked incessantly about the injustices of the Treaty of Versailles – but she could think of no reason to justify their attack on Russia, especially since Russia in the Non-Aggression Pact had agreed not to attack Germany.
At breakfast, Karl noticed his mother distressed and anxious, but she said nothing and he didn’t ask; he had to meet a boy from a neighbouring village to go to a youth group meeting. When they arrived, he soon learned what had upset his mother: the attack was on everybody’s lips. One boy said his father was killing Russians at that very moment.
‘I thought he was an army cook. The only way he’ll ever kill someone is with food poisoning.’
A boy from Warschken, another village nearby, turned to Karl and said, ‘Maybe your father will send sweets from Moscow.’
‘Maybe he won’t go there,’ Karl replied.
‘Of course he will. The whole army’s going.’
They were convinced that the German army would beat the Russians, and anyone whose father or grandfather had fought at the battle of Tannenberg compared it with what was happening now. No one had grasped that the present offensive, three or four hundred kilometres to the east, was not just a battle but the start of a new war: the Soviet-German War.
Three million German soldiers were pitted against the same number of Russians, whose opposing army would soon grow to six million. The largest military invasion ever was under way. Across eastern Europe the boys’ fathers were behind thousands of heavy guns, pounding Russian positions. Soon the front would extend over four thousand kilometres, from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south, the entire land mass of eastern Europe sealed behind a wall of German soldiers and guns.
One boy announced that Hitler himself was in East Prussia, unaware that the Führer had constructed new headquarters there from which to direct the offensive. The Wolfsschanze – Wolf ’s Lair – was buried deep in the forests south-east of Samland.
Before the offensive had begun, the Prussian army commanders – a constant source of irritation to Hitler – were far from united behind the decision to invade Russia. Some had agreed that if they had to go ahead, now was the best time to surprise the enemy because Stalin had murdered his best commanders during the Great Purge of 1936 to 1938. Others, though, would have preferred to abide by the Non-Aggression Pact: the steppes were too vast and the war was being fought on too many other fronts. Hitler himself had once written that an attack on Russia, as well as a western theatre, would spell the end of Germany.
BOOK II (#uabdd5c80-f896-5e1f-8427-2e869cd17448)
A Childhood
Chapter 1 (#uabdd5c80-f896-5e1f-8427-2e869cd17448)
Once the war with Russia was under way Germau remained oddly calm. For a time photographs were published in Königsberg newspapers showing Latvians, Lithuanians and Ukrainians welcoming German soldiers as liberators freeing them from Stalin’s tyranny. Ida’s sister, in Berlin, rarely mentioned the war in her letters.
That spring, shortly before the Führer’s birthday, a Hitler Youth representative had come to the village to talk to Ida about a ceremony that Karl was to attend. Ida was reluctant to let him go, but she had no choice. Karl by contrast was more excited than she had ever seen him. He had gone with the man and a large group of boys from the peninsula by train to Pillau where they crossed the Bay of Danzig on a Strength Through Joy cruise liner.
Two older boys had stolen some photographs of Jewish prisoners, which they wanted to get rid of now – they knew they would get into trouble if the theft was discovered. They had concealed the evidence among the younger boys’ belongings. When Karl found three photos in his clothes, he became frightened and pushed them to the bottom of his bag. He would throw them away when he got home.
From Danzig, the younger boys went on to Marienburg, the ancient headquarters of the Teutonic Knights with the largest castle Karl had ever seen. They arrived at dusk and joined thousands of others. Karl’s group entered a huge chamber illuminated by torchlight. They stood to attention for nearly two hours as they sang Hitler Youth songs and listened to a long speech: the Reichsjugendführer, the highest-ranking official in the league, talked endlessly about commitment, discipline and personal strength. Later, each new recruit took an oath under the flickering torches: ‘I promise that, in the Hitler Youth, I will always do my duty, with love and faithfulness, and help the Führer, so help me God.’
Afterwards the hall reverberated to the boom of drums, the boys’ faces glowing orange in the torchlight. Soon they were singing again – a thousand boys in harmony – ‘Forward, forward …’ The sounds echoed in Karl’s mind long after he had returned to Germau.
In July he went camping with his group to Palmnicken where they pitched tents on a plateau above the Baltic. On the first night after the leader had told everyone to go to sleep, Karl felt the hand of the boy to his left slide across his belly and downwards. Startled, he pretended to be asleep. Soon he felt a new and pleasant sensation, one he’d never experienced before, between his legs. He turned over – and the boy on his right kissed him on his mouth. Karl tensed, and the first boy whispered that he would report him if he didn’t join in with their game.
The next morning, the three behaved as if nothing had happened. Karl climbed out of the tent and walked over to where the ground fell away to the sea below and watched two men in a pit carrying a burlap sack filled with amber. When he turned back to see the other boys coming out of their tents, he wondered if they were harbouring a similar secret.
That afternoon the leader took the boys through the woods and across a field, beyond which the blue-green waters of the Baltic stretched to the horizon. At points along the western edge of the peninsula, steep sandy cliffs fell as much as ten metres to the beach below. The leader announced that to earn a dagger, each boy must run at top speed to the edge of the cliff and jump out as far as he could.
‘What if we’re killed?’ a boy asked.
‘I’ll give the knife to your mother.’
Laughter erupted.
‘It’s only sand, idiot,’ a boy near the back yelled.
‘But my cousin broke his leg falling from the cliff in Rauschen.’
The leader told them that each boy would run and jump, then get up, move out of the way and remain on the beach with the assistant, who was already down there. ‘If you do break your leg don’t scream. You don’t want to be captured by the Russians, do you?’
He pointed at a terrified-looking boy. ‘You first. Run on the count of three.’
‘But—’
‘One. Two—’
The boy started running.
‘I said on the count of three!’ shouted the leader. ‘Faster!’
The boy’s pace increased and the group held their breath when he neared the edge of the cliff, expecting him to stop. But he didn’t hesitate. He ran forward, his eyes on the horizon, until the ground fell from beneath his feet and he disappeared. They heard him scream, and the distant roar of breakers.
The sixteen-year-old leader walked back to them grinning. ‘Let’s hope he’s not dead.’
This time nobody laughed.
‘Anyone scared?’
The group were mute.
‘I’m going to stand here and watch until every one of you has jumped off the cliff. Anyone who slows down before he jumps doesn’t get his dagger.’
As Karl waited, he looked over the tall grass to the cliff’s edge, feeling as if he had been called to a duty greater than himself. That spring the leader had come to his village only for him: no other local children had gone to the castle at Marienburg. He felt an epiphany of quietness as he prepared for his jump – and dismissed the fleeting thought that last night’s illicit adventure might have contributed to today’s confidence. He pictured himself walking into Germau with his shoulder strap across his chest and his new dagger on his belt.
When the leader signalled to him, he started to run and felt himself stride, with a sense of supreme confidence. As he neared the edge of the cliff, his eyes rose above the horizon – he leapt as high as possible, aware that his body sailing into the sky towards the sea created a silhouette seen by the leader and boys who still waited their turn. Airborne, he squeezed his eyes shut. He wanted to remember for ever how it felt to float over the earth, the air above coalescing with the water below, whose merging currents buoyed him as he floated outwards into its transmuting body.
Chapter 2 (#uabdd5c80-f896-5e1f-8427-2e869cd17448)
When he got home two days later, Karl didn’t tell his mother what had happened in the tent, but he showed her his new knife. She wasn’t very interested; he decided she hadn’t grasped its significance. However, he would always have been the first in his village to join the youth group, which no one in Germau would forget. The children were already asking him about his adventures.
Ida took the dagger from him and read the inscription, ‘Blood and Honour’, then handed it back. ‘We have enough knives. I wish they’d given you something useful.’
‘It is useful.’
Ida didn’t argue. ‘It’s time for your piano practice.’
‘But I told everyone I’d go back out after I’d shown you the knife.’
‘All right then, just for a little while. But I want you to practise before supper.’
When Karl opened the front door the children had gathered round the tree at the centre of the square, waiting for him.
‘Can I hold it?’ Werner asked.
‘In a minute.’
The children followed Karl up past the church to the field beside the cemetery, where he pulled the dagger from its sheath and sat down in the grass. ‘Don’t cut yourself,’ he said, as he held it out to Werner. The knife went round the circle. Even the girls were fascinated.
‘Did they make you kill anyone?’ Werner asked.
Karl looked at him with contempt. ‘You’re such an idiot. Why would we kill anyone?’
‘I’m just asking.’
‘They made us jump off a cliff, though.’
‘Did anyone die?’
Karl ignored him. After he had put the dagger back into its sheath, he suggested they play Search and Destroy. They stood up and milled about for a while, deciding on the names of the units they would pretend to be in. Karl told them the best was called Das Reich. ‘You can do anything you want in it,’ he said. ‘Not even the regular army can tell you what to do.’ He had heard that the élite SS unit couldn’t get into trouble for anything – even killing people.
Paula, who would be ten next spring, said, ‘The Jungmädel is better than Das Reich.’
The boys laughed: the girls’ youth group better than Das Reich? Ridiculous!
Karl tried to imagine Paula riding on a tank as he chose sides for the game. Suddenly the girls realised he was only picking the boys.
‘We’re playing, too,’ Paula demanded.
‘Fetch us some food if you want to join in,’ one of the boys shouted.
‘And don’t forget to wash the dishes,’ Peter added.
Any semblance of order broke down as the girls ran at the boys, who raced off in all directions across the field. When Peter caught a girl at the far end of the field near the woods he said, ‘Pull your pants down and maybe we’ll let you play.’
‘You first,’ she said.
‘The leader doesn’t go first.’
‘Then I shan’t.’
For no apparent reason, Peter threw up his arm and shouted, ‘Sieg Heil!’
The boys on the other side of the field stopped and looked at him and the girl.
‘Don’t waste it on a girl!’ Karl screamed.
Over the following year the children carried on playing new games, imitating the stories that the older youth group members shared. The games acquired a distinctly militaristic element, the children both inventive and dogmatic. But no matter how disciplined they pretended to be, the games always broke down by the time the play day ended, order giving way to chaos, discipline disintegrating into confusion.
Karl and Peter did not hear from their father for six months. When a note did finally arrive in December 1942, he told them he was in Russia, but didn’t say where. ‘We’re busy,’ he wrote. ‘Always busy.’ Something in the tone, or perhaps the note’s brevity, made him sound even more distant.
Ida tried not to worry about the lack of communication between herself and her husband. He was so far away and, after all, the country was at war: she shouldn’t expect any more. She tried to forget that an acquaintance received a letter every month from her husband in Russia. Ida had stopped visiting her: the only thing the woman talked about was her latest letter from her husband.
Rumours were spreading that the troops in Stalingrad were failing against the Russians, but Ida had heard no such news over the radio. Hitler continued to broadcast to German women, desperate to hold their loyalty. Many, like Ida’s sister, felt a strong bond with him that had developed from the broadcasts and were sure that he would tell them if the situation changed. Ida worried that the radio news neither confirmed nor denied what they all heard from injured soldiers returning home.
Karl continued attending school in Pillau near the military base that sprawled through much of the port town. He had been top of the class in the three Latin tests that year. His teacher had told him that he would recommend him for the Adolf Hitler School. Karl knew that if he won a place, he had a strong chance of one day reaching a high position in the government. Early in 1943 Hitler Youth received the annual slogan. It hung above the blackboard in the mathematics room: ‘War Service for German Youth’.
That winter the only thing he didn’t like about going to school in Pillau was coming home by train after dark, especially during a new moon. He dreaded the moment when the train dropped him off on the empty platform two kilometres from his house. The forest was so dark when he walked alone back to the village and he always felt as if something or someone were watching him among the trees. He would walk in the middle of the road so that nothing could reach him from the edge, feeling his way through the darkness between tree cover and the clouds, the lack of light sometimes making him feel as though he had been locked inside a giant room from which he had to find his way out. Whenever his feet touched the dirt at the edge of the road, he would sprint back to the middle. Over time he developed the ability to steer down the middle as he slowly became accustomed to his temporary blindness. When he reached the rise that led over the small climb before dropping into Germau, he increased his pace. Every night was the same: he never felt safe until he reached the top of the small hill and saw the shimmering lights below surrounding the square.
Chapter 3 (#uabdd5c80-f896-5e1f-8427-2e869cd17448)
By the autumn of 1943 little of the news that filtered into the peninsula villages was good. During the summer the Russians had started a counter-offensive and wounded soldiers occasionally came home on leave. A young man from Sacherau had lost his hand, but planned to return to the front as soon as the wound healed. He told the children how retreating German troops destroyed everything they came across. He was part of an SS demolition squad and had blown off his hand as his regiment pulled back across the Ukraine towards Poland. He said they had set entire villages ablaze and used flame-throwers to scorch wheatfields so that the Russian divisions had no shelter or food as they pushed across the steppes towards Germany. He was confident that they would be stopped by the time they reached Poland and he wanted to be there for the celebration when the Russians had been defeated.
In Berlin the constant bombing had forced Ida’s sister Elsa to send her son to his aunt: on the peninsula there was still little sign of war, except for a rare troop transport passing through the square on its way between Memel and Pillau. Elsa remained in Berlin: she had secured a coveted job at the Chancellery.
Ida felt certain that Karl and Peter especially would be delighted to see Otto and sent them down to Pillau to pick him up. She thought they’d find it easier to get to know each other without her presence. As soon as they had gone, she began to prepare the evening meal – she had invited her father and stepmother, too. The boys returned earlier than she had expected, so after she had kissed Otto she gave them each a basket and dispatched them to the forest for mushrooms.
As always, Karl took it upon himself to act as their leader. An only child, Otto wasn’t used to taking orders from someone of around his own age, but he soon realised that he would have to if he didn’t want to get lost. Like the children in the village, Otto was fascinated by Karl’s knife. He knew many boys in Berlin who had joined the Hitler Youth, but none had offered to let him examine theirs. Karl told him about the camping trips and his leap from the cliff. Peter then suggested they show Otto the photographs. When Karl had returned from Marienburg he hadn’t thrown them away. Instead, he had told his brother to hide them in an abandoned shed near a local farm. Now he thought again for a moment, then told Otto he could look at them, provided he didn’t tell anyone.
When they reached the shed, Peter went in, pulled up a decaying floorboard and got them out of the box he had hidden beneath it.
The first showed a group of men huddled together for warmth. In the second photograph four women were standing in what looked like dormitories. One of the women didn’t have a shirt on, her breasts fully exposed to the camera. The last was of a girl with a boy, perhaps her older brother, and a woman who appeared to be their mother. Whenever Peter came to the shed alone, this was the one he looked at most often.
‘Jews?’ Otto asked.
His question unsettled the brothers. They had been staring at the girl, who seemed to stare back.
‘Who else?’ Karl snapped.
In an attempt to absolve himself, Karl explained how some older boys had stolen them and hidden them among his possessions.
‘Does everyone have photos like these?’ Otto asked.
‘Of course not! Why do you think they had to get rid of them? No one knows I’ve got them except you and Peter, and if you tell anyone about them I’ll say you brought them from Berlin.’
‘I said I wouldn’t tell.’
Peter returned the photos to their hiding place and the boys went back to the main road, making sure nobody saw them as they emerged from the bushes. The woodland where Ida and the children found mushrooms was a few kilometres further on. Karl and Peter knew all the varieties, including the poisonous ones. Amanitas grew everywhere on the peninsula and Ida had warned them that a single cap could kill an entire family. The first time Karl saw one his mother had said, ‘Nature made them bright red so you’ll notice them and eat one. Then your body will fertilise the ground so that more can grow.’ She then had picked a few caps, which she placed in a separate cloth to take home. That afternoon, she filled an old pan with water and boiled them, let the liquid cool, then placed it inside the door of the slaughterhouse where it enticed flies to land, drink and die. ‘It’s nature’s way of controlling pests too,’ she had added.
Along the road to the forest, Karl told Otto not to touch the bright-red mushrooms with white spots: ‘They’ll kill you.’
Otto wondered about these woods: the only woods he had ever been in were in the Tiergarten near the centre of Berlin, and Grunewald, at the edge of the city, where he had always felt safe, because other people were invariably around. Germau seemed to be in the middle of nowhere.
When they reached the edge of the forest, Karl pointed out the path. ‘Follow us and you won’t get lost, but if you get separated just yell. We won’t be far.’
As soon as they were among the trees Karl and Peter were finding and picking mushrooms. Otto stayed with them, but instead of looking for mushrooms he was remembering the stories his mother had read to him about children leaving peas or breadcrumbs along their path so that they could find their way out. Once in a while he would hear a rustle and rush to tell his cousins, but they laughed at his fears. Karl led them off the path into a darker area where the trees grew so close together that almost no light reached the forest floor. ‘Mushrooms grow better in the dark,’ he said. ‘We’ll find plenty here.’
Suddenly the ground had become too wet to walk across, so Karl set off in a wide arc round the bog. Then, as they were pushing through a thicket, they heard a shrill scream. They stopped in their tracks. The sound faded, then came again.
‘Is it an animal?’ Otto whispered.
‘Maybe something’s stuck in a trap,’ Peter suggested.
‘It’s coming from the direction of Lengniethen,’ Karl decided.
It was a lonely place, but the local trapper, Ludwig Schneider, lived there with his family. The boys followed the sound until they came to a little glade. Karl held up a hand to stop the others, as Peter saw something move on the other side of the clearing. He stepped close to his brother and pointed silently.
