We were German citizens during world war two.
The framed photo of the Führer waved to us.
“Heil Hitler,” Von led.
“Heil Hitler,” Tomas followed.
I stared at the shopkeeper’s orange hair. I had never seen hair quite like his before.
“Heil Hitler,” he responded, straightening taller behind the counter. “And you?” He glared at me, and I promptly gave him my defiant left-handed “Heil Hitler”. Von laughed, but the shop owner and Tomas were not impressed.
Tomas gave me a look that could only come from a judgmental sibling. Without words, he was able to convey his growing frustration. “Why can’t he be normal?” I swallowed the bitter taste of sadness, but it lingered.
When the heil Hitlering finished, it didn’t take Von long to dig the coin out from his pocket and slide it along the counter under the ash-coloured eyes of the shop keeper. “A hundred one-Pfennig frogs, please.” The look on his face said something like “See, you bastard. I have money now.”
The shopkeeper smiled. His teeth elbowed each other for room in his mouth, and his unexpected kindness made us smile as well.
He bent down, did some searching, and finally found the box of Pfennig frogs. They were Von’s favourite. We watched in awe as the cardboard man scooped the candy frogs with his shovel-like hands. He counted the first ten but afterward made no real attempt to count them at all. I was sure we had well over a hundred. He threw the sweets on the counter. “Here.”
Von took them, grinning. “Danke.” He said it cheekily, ran out, dragging me with him, and we carried on our way. “Thank you.”
Von walked slower than usual behind us; then, something flashed beneath the surface of his glowing expression. It was just a small change – a slight grin. But still, I hurried to investigate the sudden shift. Quiet Von meant trouble.
“Was ist los mit dir?”
“What’s wrong with you?”
Von could hardly control his excitement as he pulled the coin out of his shorts pocket, waving it around like a flag. He was showing off again.
It took a few seconds for me to realise.
“Where the hell did you get that?” Tomas asked.
He hadn’t caught on yet.
“He’s a little thief,” I explained, snatching the coin from Von and giving it to its rightful owner..
“The idiot didn’t ask for the money,” Von argued.
We laughed like it was the best thing to ever happen to us. If only this kind of humour could have spilled over into adulthood. But sadly, like many things, you have to leave it behind. For the better, apparently. The red-haired shop owner caught on later, and when Tomas came the next day to get more sweets, the man asked for payment. Tomas laughed a grin of compliance and handed the Reichsmark over.
The April air cut through our skin like razors as we sat on the kerb, just outside of our cabin. We shared the sweets with Manfret Wünderlich, who got kicked out of the daily game of trappers and Indians for being too slow. We decided to share them out equally. It was Tomas’ idea, and Von Bacchman had what was left. Talk turned to Kröger. A stern man with a tragic past that no one knew about. He was sent to Inland as a bit of cruel punishment.
“Tragic. It was tragic,” Von Bacchman said.
“What happened?”
He shrugged. “He doesn’t want it getting out.”
Ahead of us, a youth leader was giving Stefan and other younger boys cider and cigarettes. They performed rather well in training. To their left, a little boy sat with a bandaged-up arm and a bruised face. He was sobbing. I gave him a sweet.
I could only just see the setting sun, hiding behind the dips and dives of the hills, colouring the sky various shades of orange, each one more beautiful than the next. I tried to recreate that colour in my paintings, but my attempts were fruitless. I didn’t have enough colours.
One day, I swore, I would paint the perfect sunset, but could never find the words. It didn’t feel right. I realised I wasn’t painting with the right emotion. I should have been painting with resentment, not adoration. Sunsets are an illusion, making us believe, foolishly, that we want the day to end quickly so we can have another.
“Tomas.” I nudged him gently. His blond hair turned first, his eyes second, the warmth of the sunset still trapped behind his eyes.
And then I saw them.
Mother and Father.
Memories were fading and made anew. Our last name was gone.
Mother and father were gone.
And soon our childhood would be gone, too.
The last memory.
We were sitting by the fireplace in our tiny living room. Mother knitting mittens on her chair and Father reading his favourite book, hiding behind the pages and his fringe.
I would love for it to be more than just imaginary; I’d have loved to be back in the comfort of our small home and the lovely hearth. The warmth of that fireplace gave me even more comfort than the sunsets I learned to resent.
Oh, how I missed them.
Tomas was waiting.
“Do you see th—”
“The colours?” My brother’s words collided with mine. “Yes, I see them, Josef.”
It’s not very often that you meet another boy who not only sees the colours but speaks them.
32
Youth and Punishment
*Yale Blue*Yellow-green*Yellow Orange
I was in Inland for five summers. One pleasure was the smell of hearing the older boys wheeling down the projector on a trolley. Its sound meant that we would be watching a film. We slid down banisters and hoped to make it down alive.
We watched these films three times a week.
Somehow all of the buildings in Inland felt cold, even if you were previously warm. I could feel the room ever so slightly shaking from the children shouting. It smelt like the sort of smell that got bigger the more you smelt it and then burst open like a balloon. A boy behind kicked my chair, but I said nothing.
We sat slouched in our seats, some legs dangling, unable to touch the ground, as music was projected onto a large wall. Younger boys sat on the floor. A ten-minute sequence showed Hitler’s emotional appearance before the enthralled assembly inside a sports stadium amid frequent shouts of “Heil!” In his speech, he told us, “Regardless of whatever we create and do, we shall pass away, but in you, Germany will live on.” Hitler burned like the sun on that wall.
Our eyes were held open with sticks, and our mouths gaped with grins. Some boys wiped away tears with their shirt sleeves. Derrick Pichler realised he could play with the shadows, making various animals with his hands, sound and all. He continued for a while until he was told to shut up, which he did and started paying attention.
Some things to note about Adolf Hitler (thirteen-year-old Josef addition): the strange man behind the monster.
He loved animals – except cats. He had a phobia of them. Believed to be a vegetarian, during the war years, Hitler was addicted to cocaine.
In a strikingly bizarre turn of events, Hitler became the first European leader to ban human zoos.
They made a shorter film about the Jews in the camps, and everything was shiny. People were playing soccer on the street, laughing, dancing, and drawing. We were told it was better this way. That they were happy. And every one of us fell for it.
We were Germany’s highly impressionable.
And history would judge us severely.
I cannot recall much more about the strange students that sat around me or the musty, crowded room. But I do recall something vividly — the picture projected onto the wall and the room seemingly tightening around me.
A boy. A Jew in the camp. It felt like I was looking in a mirror, and the glass was breaking from the hammering of the cerulean stars.
Manfret tapped my shoulder. The same coloured stars. I jumped.
“Look, Josef! It’s you.” The children nearby had quiet laughs. “Sorry if I scared you.”
A harsh hush came from
somewhere at the back.
I closed my eyes and breathed in the colours and air until the slides changed, and the stars disappeared. I was squashed like laundry in a basket.
The concentration camps, as we know of them today, were just scary stories parents told their children to frighten them when they were naughty. We knew nothing of the atrocities and unfolding destruction that took place.
Flash forward to 1946.
An eighteen-year-old boy sat in an unlit room. Paint and guilt on his hands, the walls and Herr Müller. On the page, the colours tried to stretch out and give him the comfort he needed, but he did not want their pity. He was undeserving of it, he thought.
The ones who were deserving of the pity were the ones forced into bunkers one and two. Trucks carried the ones too infirm to walk. Everyone else marched, unaware that they were fated to die. Told instead they were going to a work camp. The hope-filled, hopeless humans got undressed and went for a shower. They never came back out.
There was no punishment harsh enough for us. The boy wanted them to torture him. Wanted them to pull him out of the house and throw him into the fire, colours and all. When retribution was to come, the innocent ones would suffer too, he realised. But we were all guilty. Directly or indirectly. Many things felt wrong, smelt wrong, tasted wrong, and still, we said nothing. We did nothing.
But then, what could we have done?
Between fighting the tears with his words, heavy breathing, and battling a hug, he managed to break through the tiny amount of air that remained. Enough to speak. A whisper through a crack.
“I should have done more.”
Hitler deceived many.
I’m not interested in being a Nazi apologist – we all know Nazis are bad, but I’m not going to stand here and lie either. At one point, I thought we were the good guys. I realised later how naïve that was. You might be able to see the scattered tears I left behind on the page if you look really close.
Hitler found my weak spot through the arts. In 1909, he was just a starving artist walking the streets of Vienna for a second time. He sold paintings he had copied from postcards, and he was filled with burning denial when they told him he was unfit to be a painter.
Although I now recognise the resentment-filled words burning on every page, as a child, I felt for him. A feeling boy would. I could taste his pain on my tongue, and I swallowed it whole, letting it seep into my bones. They thought he was stupid like they thought I was stupid.
I’m not stupid.
This alone was reason enough for a thirteen-year-old boy to subordinate himself to him.
We all want to be more than what we are.
And we truly believed that we could change the world in that classroom. Many others, after us, thought the same thing. What they somehow always failed to see was that war was not the answer. War was the cause of the pain, not the cure for it. How do we keep getting this so wrong?
A collective identification of humanity is war.
1950-53 Korean War.
1961 Cuba.
1961-1973 Vietnam War.
1965 Dominican Republic.
1982 Lebanon.
1983 Grenada.
1989 Panama.
Somalia.
Haiti.
Let’s not forget the 1994-95 Bosnian war. Kosovo.
And Iraq. Afghanistan. Libya. Sierra Leone. Chechnya. Ukraine. Syria.
All in a lifetime. All since the square-moustached man and his army of fanatical Germans. It all happened again, and you didn’t have to be German.
When the films were over, and the tears dried up, we were glowing in Nazi pride, and it triggered a wave of excitement in our stomachs. We ate Teichmann’s terrible food, and we joined in doing drills around the main building of Inland.
Even Penn and Derrick were friendly. They weren’t so bad. I started separating the two in my mind. Unique personalities.
Younger boys jumped onto the backs of the older ones.
Pure joy filled their souls. They breathed innocence into their lungs. Naïve hearts, perhaps, but I liked the fire we were playing with.
If only this could be a picture painted more often in Inland.
We climbed the highest tree in Inland so I could have a better view of the playing children. I sketched them. Von and Tomas told jokes that no one would understand, and I watched the sun wrap around their faces.
If you’re beginning to think that it’s all a bit too happy. Too safe. Well, don’t worry.
Life will throw us a curveball soon enough.
This story is not for the faint of heart.
I will give you a glimpse of what’s to come in part two if you will be joining us.
I realise, of course, that I keep spoiling the story. How rude of me. But if you are reading this, I’m sure you have ideas about how it’s all going to end. What’s important is the how and why, the story, and the humans, not just what happens. So, don’t try to rush through. Just enjoy the colours.
Come with me on a tour.
This tour is unlike any other.
A tour of pitiful humans.
We all love a good tragedy. Not to be a participant, of course, but to be a spectator.
Pop corn-filled hands at the ready. Here we go.
Right now, I’d like to take a minute to familiarise you with some safety precautions. First, I ask that you remain seated until we reach our destination. No flash photography is permitted. If you must be sick, do so in the paper bags provided. Or out of the window. Either one. But please, not over the leather. It’s new.
Strap in.
To your left, there is a man hunched over in pain. A sadness in his bones that only gets worse with each grief-fuelled movement. His little boy lies beside him, a single bullet in his head. Killed by communists. What did the boy do? He was in the legally compulsory Hitler Youth.
To your right, there’s a Jew with a golf ball head, his ribs protruding, and the lines on his face rendering him a scarecrow.
Please, sir, no flash photography.
And please, remember that there are better places to learn how to walk on a balance beam – not the site which symbolises the deportation of hundreds of thousands.
Sorry. It’s probably not a shock to learn that offensive things offend me. Moving on.
Above, the men with pink triangles. Witness as they are forced to kiss each other and dance for the enjoyment of the prison guards. Nothing is funnier than faggots dancing.
Look straight ahead – down the tunnel of colours – melon-pinks, earthy-greens, soothing-yellows. It tastes like disappointment.
Disappointment for the human race.
Now that you’re prepared for the road, our little story will resume; I will take you back to where we left off.
The tree.
I have no idea how we got back down. The only thing I recall was Von Bacchman’s taunt directed at Tomas. “Jump, you fucking pussy.”
That evening, the three of us, Von, Tomas and I, sat atop the grass overlooking the hills. Moving on from the sketch, I painted the sky green and the grass blue. I was inspired by the film. There’s nothing like a bit of madness to inspire madness. I spat into the watercolours. No water. I splashed scarlet red on the page that was propped up on rocks, some of it missing the paper, landing on the grass and my hand. I almost always had brightly-coloured paint stains on my skin.
Red clouds went quite nicely with a green sky. Then the word again: faggot. You’re a faggot, Josef. I painted over it.
Tomas lay on his stomach, legs kicked up on the grass, looking through a book. The grass was wet, but we still sat on it.
Each boy was given a performance booklet, detailing his progress in athletics and Nazi indoctrination throughout his years in Inland. Tomas sat with shame on his shoulders as he read his, and Von tried to point out what he should work on to make improvements. Rouvon taught my brother how to do pushups, helping his body lower to kiss the grass, before showing off by doing ‘clapping-pushups’, as he called them. It
was truly impressive, omitting the small detail that he rushed through the twentieth push-up and face-planted the soil.
“Do some training to get a bit stronger, and you will do fine,” he told Tomas. I could feel Von’s corner-of-the-eye gaze. “Better than Josef, at least.” I was unable to hear him over the sound of the colours. Certainly, I wish I could have listened to every unheard thought that came out of that boy’s mouth, but the Josef of my childhood did not understand the complex emotions of an adult. The mid-life emotions that catch up with us when we least expect it. He shouldn’t have to understand it. I go back to that moment on the hill many times, as well as others like it. I pause, I rewind, I laugh, and I cry.
After a few hours, Tomas still had his head stuck in the book, but now Von was beside me, staring at my painting with varying questions marked on his face – in each of his freckles.
“That makes no sense, Schneider.”
“The world doesn’t make any sense. Why should my paintings?”
A rush of contemplation. “Maybe you could paint the pictures and make them make sense.” He wiped at his light-coloured, growing hair. It was a question, as well as a statement.
“Maybe by painting them, I am.”
After many, now vexing statements from Von, it was decided as a team that we would steal something from Teichmann. We didn’t know what, but something better than water. Something more theft-worthy.
Something like chocolate. Yes, it was to be the coveted Fliegerschokolade chocolate again.
Now understand this, I know it would have been easier to simply ask. We may have caught her in one of her bizarre moments of being nice. But where’s the fun in that? Something about the stealing was thrilling. It fuelled something inside me. Perhaps it was just a case of childhood stupidity, but damn it, we made the plan and acted it out like our very lives depended on it. We were like the three musketeers that evening. We meant business.
When childhood dies, we come back as the corpses we call adults. I think that’s why most of us hate children, even if we love them. They show us the state of our decay.
The Boy Who Saw in Colours Page 20