Goodbye, Mr Hitler

by Jackie French

  At school a big new photo of Herr Hitler hung in every room now, and in the hall of Vati’s hospital as well. Herr Hitler looked courageous and determined. But he looked cuddly too, quite small and with a little moustache, like someone had shaved a teddy bear. A new teacher taught them all about Herr Hitler’s victories.

  One day the whole world would be united under the glorious Third Reich! There would be peace and justice for all, and the world would be cleansed of Untermenschen, people who were not fit to live in the great Third Reich. Even now, Hitler’s planes were conquering England, just as they had conquered Belgium, France and all the other countries marked with swastika pins on the big map of the world in the classroom.

  Herr Hitler’s victory stories were so exciting that it was easy to ignore the tears of boys whose brothers had been wounded or had died, and anyway, the Führer, who was Hitler, would never cry. Crying was for girls.

  And Johannes knew Vati would never have to go to war. Vati’s hospital was too important, a sanatorium for those who had tuberculosis. Important Nazi Party members were patients there.

  The soldier billeted in their house was a major, an important man, because their house was the best one in the village. The major had a room with a good fire, and Lottie fed him on produce from the hospital’s orchards and vegetable gardens, hens and pigs.

  The major was a tall thin man, with a nose like an eagle’s beak and tired eyes. Johannes hoped he would tell him exciting Hitler stories too. But the major stayed in his room when he came home each day, and Lottie took his meals to him there.

  The major stayed there for every meal until the night dinner was late because Lottie and Mutti had been working at the hospital. Johannes had eaten bread and cheese to stop his tummy rumbling as he did his homework. But at last the good smell of chicken stew came from the kitchen — Lottie and Mutti must be back. He left his books and walked down to the living room, but turned as he heard a step behind him.

  The major!

  Johannes bowed politely. ‘Guten Tag, Herr Major!’ He pronounced the German proudly, glad that his accent was good.

  The major ignored Johannes. He brushed past into the living room.

  Mutti must have heard his steps too. She came quickly from the kitchen, taking off her apron. ‘Major! I hope you have had a good day. Sit, please, I will bring coffee . . .’

  It was not real coffee these days, but as Johannes was too young to drink coffee, according to Mutti and Vati, he didn’t care.

  ‘No coffee,’ said the major. He blinked, then added, ‘Danke.’ He held up a bottle of vodka.

  ‘I will get a glass,’ said Mutti hurriedly. ‘Johannes . . .’ She broke off as the major put the bottle of vodka on the table and began to talk. ‘Go to your room,’ said Mutti softly to Johannes, but the major shook his head.

  ‘The boy should stay! He has to know. Everybody has to know!’ The major’s words slurred, like they had been dragged out from the snow. His eyes did not see Mutti, or Johannes, or even the fire snickering up the chimney.

  Johannes sat, trying not to hear. For the major spoke of marching down streets where the dead hung from the lamp posts, and others were piled higher than the snowdrifts; of trains with compartments that could kill everyone inside with gas; of camps where Untermenschen, Juden and many others who were unfit to live in the Third Reich were killed in tens of thousands; of letters from his family complaining that other officers sent back jewels and paintings. Why did they get none?

  The vodka bottle was empty. When Mutti motioned Johannes to leave the room, the major didn’t notice his departure.

  The next morning the major was gone, posted to the place called ‘the front line’, at the edge of the country called war.

  ‘The poor man was drunk. Homesick,’ said Mutti. ‘Germany is a great country. A man like your father would have heard if things were bad.’ Some boys at school had whispered that their parents did not like Poland being under German command. But Mutti and Vati were more interested in medicine and the hospital and their family than in politics. They had always spoken German at home, as well as Polish, even before the country of war.

  ‘I will ask Vati tonight,’ said Johannes, sure that Vati would say the major had been sick a little in the head, for Vati had explained how sometimes things like that could happen. And Johannes smiled, for his was a house of happiness and smiles, and next month a branch of the Hitler Youth would be started in the village, and he could march and go on camps.

  Vati would explain it all. And life would be sensible again.

  Chapter 4

  FRAU MARKS

  GERMANY, NOVEMBER 1944

  They came at night.

  The scream woke her as she dozed against the wall as the children slept, their heads on her lap, their small bodies so warm and precious. Frau Marks froze, and then relaxed. Women in labour screamed, and then there was a baby, and smiles instead.

  Babies were joy. When she had first come to the Sisters after losing Simon and Georg, she had felt no joy, not even at the gurgle of a baby, not in prayer, not in the music that had made her soul dance before. Sister Columba had saved her heart as surely as she had saved her body. One night, as they sat with Frau Hechner dozing, the contractions easing, Sister Columba asked, ‘Would you undo it all, if you could? Not marry, not have your son? Avoid the pain?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘I didn’t think so. Love has two faces, always. Don’t think because I am cloistered here I do not know these things. We always pay for love.’

  ‘So I am paying?’

  ‘More than you should, I know. But perhaps the gift of love was great as well?’

  Frau Marks whispered, ‘They killed my husband! I have lost my son . . .’

  ‘Then look at the pain and hold it gently,’ said Sister Columba. ‘Hold your Simon and your Georg in your hands and see the love as well as pain. But hold it high, so you can see the joy around you too.’

  ‘There is no joy.’

  ‘No joy in God’s great sunsets? No joy in a baby’s breath? No joy at a lark’s song or its dance upon the light? All these are God’s gifts. If you turn your back on them, you turn your back on Him.’

  ‘All I feel is hate,’ confessed Frau Marks.

  Sister Columba nodded. ‘Hate is like bacteria. Hate grows inside a person and then it spreads to others, until even whole countries are infected. There is only one medicine to cure it.’

  ‘What is that?’

  ‘Goodness,’ said Sister Columba. ‘Doing good is contagious too. We must believe that. Do good things and, slowly, others will do them too, until once again the hate is driven back. But unless one person has the strength to say, “I am made of love, not hate,” the world’s cure cannot begin. Who do you wish to be? A woman of hate or love?’

  ‘I . . . I don’t know if I have the strength . . .’

  ‘Not even for your son? Of course you have the strength,’ said Sister Columba, then turned to their patient again as she woke with a gasp.

  Tonight other women lie above us and the miracle of life continues, thought Frau Marks, resting her head back against the wall to sleep again. Babies, and the joy of new life . . .

  Another scream from the corridor above the coal cellar. A shriek cut off sharply. And then boots tramping in the cellar beyond the hidden door.

  Soldiers! Someone, one of the Nazi mothers, must have seen more than she should, had guessed, somehow. Perhaps even one of the families they had given a child to —

  And then she thought no more, for the door swung open. Light glared in, so sharp it cut her eyes, so she only dimly saw the shape of the two men.

  ‘Found them!’

  She wrapped her arms around the children. Stupid. Ineffective. Instinct only: the instinct of a mother, a woman, a human being.

  One of the man shadows tore her arms away. She shrieked as someone wailed on the floor above her, begged, ‘No, no, no, no . . .’ and suddenly, far worse, silence.

  Gretchen cla
sped Pieter in her arms, a small parcel of two children become one. And that was how the soldier killed them, bayoneting first one and then the other, in the stomach and then the throat, so they died with an anguished gurgle, Frau Marks lunging to get to them, held back by the other soldier’s arms, crying, pleading . . .

  ‘No,’ she gasped. ‘No!’ Though it was done — the children dead — every human decency dead to kill babies like that.

  ‘Jüdische rats,’ said the soldier, wiping his bayonet on her skirts. He laughed at her expression. ‘You think we should waste poison gas on them? Or bullets? Or gasoline to burn them in a pit? We save those for the enemy these days.’

  She could not look again at the tiny crumpled bodies. Her mind tried to shut down, to turn all sight to night. She could not walk. The soldier with the bayonet dragged her by the arm, the hair, across the cellar to the stairs. She managed to stumble up them. In the hall an old woman stared at her. A stranger in a white nightdress, streaked with blood, a white cap, bloody as well.

  The stranger gazed at her with Sister Columba’s eyes. Eyes that looked at her, at the body of Sister Martin curled up in death upon the floor, looked at them both with love, not at the soldiers in the corridor with hate.

  ‘Macht schnell,’ said the officer. ‘Hurry.’

  Frau Marks managed to whisper, ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘You are going to work. To have the chance to serve the Fatherland as nurses, which is more than you deserve, traitorous cows. Far more.’

  We have served the Fatherland here, she thought, caring for your wives, your infants. But she knew that wasn’t what the soldier meant.

  She and Sister Columba — and any of the other Sisters left alive — were the ones who must march now. March along the streets, march to the death trains, to the labour camps from which no one ever returned.

  She looked at the soldier with the bloody bayonet, and saw the hate that pulsed in him. She felt it spread to her too, its fire renewed.

  All she could feel was hate.

  Chapter 5

  JOHANNES

  POLAND, DECEMBER 1944

  Christmas was coming, a time for stories!

  The carol singers carried stars and performed scenes of Jesus’s birth in the streets. Mutti and Lottie served hot almost-coffee and gingerbread.

  Vati had not explained why the major had said Germany was doing bad things, horrible things. Instead he had met Mutti’s eyes and shaken his head, then said quietly, ‘We will not talk of this.’ Later, in bed, Johannes heard them arguing in the living room below him. Vati had refused to admit the wife of the head of the local Nazi Party to their hospital. ‘She just thinks she is sick! There are no signs of disease!’

  ‘But wouldn’t it be wiser . . .’ began Mutti, and then her voice lowered, and Johannes couldn’t make out any more.

  But he heard no more arguments. And now it was nearly Christmas!

  St Nicholas arrived on the night of his Feast day. He left books — books in German, and English too, for Vati and Mutti had studied in Edinburgh, which was where they met. One day they were going to take Johannes there too, but Edinburgh was in the land of the enemy now, so the visit would have to wait till Führer Hitler won.

  The house smelled of gingerbread and happiness. Johannes helped Mutti and Lottie to cut Christmas dough into the shapes of deer and lambs and hearts to bake. They hung the tree with glass ornaments and painted eggshells, kept in tissue paper in the attic from year to year, and bright garlands, and Mutti placed the star on top.

  The year before Vati had done that, but these days he had fewer doctors in his hospital, so he came home later and later at night, and in the mornings Mutti went to help too, or even stayed there overnight.

  Johannes stood back to admire the tree, sparkling and gleaming, though the candles would not be lit till Christmas Eve. That was the tradition, but it was also necessary, for with the war there were few new candles to be had. ‘Will Vati look at the tree before he goes to bed?’ he asked Mutti.

  ‘Of course!’ said Mutti.

  ‘Can I stay up until he comes home? Just for tonight?’

  She smiled. ‘Just for tonight.’

  Lottie served supper then, roast rabbit from the rabbits on the hospital farm, with home-made noodles and vegetable soup. Johannes read in bed and tried to keep awake, listening for Vati’s steps in the hall below, so he could run down and see Vati’s face when he saw the Christmas tree.

  He turned the pages, and more pages. More hours passed, and Vati didn’t come.

  At last he fell asleep.

  Vati was not home at breakfast either.

  ‘Stay home today,’ Mutti said, putting on her fur coat, her white fur hat and her boots. ‘I am sure it is nothing, just a little trouble at the hospital.’

  Johannes played with Maus, then read a book, the one about the cow, which was too young for him now but made him remember Opa’s voice. Was that what Opa meant by words cannot be burned?

  Lottie served potato soup with specks of ham in it, but still Mutti did not return.

  And then she did. Her lips were pale. Her eyes were dark. ‘Vati has gone to Germany,’ she said and tried to smile. ‘It is an honour, a clever doctor like your father, to be invited to be a doctor in Germany.’

  ‘But our hospital?’ asked Johannes. ‘Who will care for it now?’

  ‘The German army needs the hospital for their soldiers,’ said Mutti; Johannes could almost hear other words she didn’t say.

  ‘You mean it isn’t ours now?’

  ‘I . . . I don’t know. Perhaps one day, when the war is over.’ Mutti tried to smile again. ‘Yes, of course, when the war is over. But the German soldiers say we are allowed to join Vati now. We will have a big house, as big as this one. They say he is doing a most important job. We must take all our things, as much as we can carry. Our furniture will be sent to us.’

  And so they packed, quickly. Two suitcases for Mutti, her jewels in one in a small locked case of their own; one suitcase for Johannes.

  ‘Who will look after Maus?’ he asked.

  ‘Maus will stay here, and Lottie too, to look after the army doctor who will supervise the hospital. Just until the war is over,’ said Mutti quickly. ‘Then we will all come back and it will be just as it was before.’ She didn’t sound as uncertain now.

  Lottie peered from the doorway. ‘The master is not in any trouble, is he?’ she asked quietly.

  ‘How could he be, if we are told to join him?’ replied Mutti. ‘Besides, he has done nothing wrong. The soldiers say he has gone to a most important job. A secret one,’ she added sternly to Lottie.

  Johannes thought of the books hidden high on the shelves. What if the army doctor found them? But probably the army doctor would not want to read. The books would stay there, dusty, till they returned.

  Soon they would be with Vati. In a city, perhaps, where there would be parades, as he had seen on a newsreel at the movie house when they had visited the town to order supplies. He might even see Hitler, standing on his balcony, saluting as the troops went past, the people cheering, and Johannes cheering too.

  And Vati and Mutti would cheer on either side of him.

  Chapter 6

  JOHANNES

  POLAND, DECEMBER 1944

  A car came for them, a big car shining with importance. The soldier packed their suitcases in the back. Mutti’s fingers glittered with her rings, and she wore her fur coat too. The car drove and drove, not to the station outside the village, but to another, a siding, away from houses, where cows and pigs were transported from the farms. A cattle train stood there already, topped with clean white snow, just like the snow on the siding.

  The soldier helped them out. ‘Your train will be here soon,’ he said.

  The car drove away.

  They waited. Another car came, with neighbours, and then a truck, crammed with farm women and their children, and then another truck, followed by two more. ‘This cannot be right,’ said Mutti. She wen
t to speak to a woman whose husband worked on the hospital farm, and then to two neighbours. When she came back, her face looked colder than the snow. ‘Their men have all been sent to work too,’ she said.

  ‘But what about their farms? Their houses?’

  ‘Other people are coming to work their farms.’ She bit her lip. ‘The whole village is being sent away. I should have brought the title deed to the hospital from the bank. Everyone has brought their valuables, but no one it seems has brought the deeds to their homes or farms. I . . . I think I will ask if we can go tomorrow.’

  Another truck drew up.

  This one held soldiers, with rifles in their hands. ‘Heil Hitler!’ yelled the men. The women and children chorused, ‘Heil Hitler!’ in return.

  Mutti approached a sergeant. ‘Excuse me, my son and I need to stay a couple of days. There are matters I must attend to . . .’

  The sergeant did not seem to hear her. The soldiers opened the door of the cattle car.

  ‘Excuse me,’ repeated Mutti firmly, then stopped as the sergeant pointed his revolver at her, and then at Johannes. Mutti stared at the cattle car.

  There was no other train coming. This train was not for cattle. It was for them.

  Women cried. Protested. Mutti grabbed Johannes and pulled him back from the crowd. One of the soldiers fired a shot into the air.

  The shouting stopped. The silence hung like a great blanket, broken only by the crying of a child.

  The people moved, like cattle, into the car, dragging their suitcases, laying them on the floor, standing on them, for there was no other room. An old woman cried in pain, trying to force her bent body to stand straight, to take up less room.

  ‘I think there has been a mistake,’ said Mutti carefully to one of the soldiers. ‘My husband is a doctor. So am I. We are to join him . . .’