Goodbye, Mr Hitler

by Jackie French

  ‘Inside! Macht schnell!’ The soldier shoved Mutti away with the barrel of his rifle.

  Mutti clambered in, trying not to show too much of her legs under her skirt, then turned to help Johannes. There was no room to sit. There was hardly room to stand. But still more bodies were pushed into the car. The soldiers pushed and shoved. Johannes heard three shots.

  More jostles. The door shut, leaving them crushed in the dark and stink. The cattle car did not move.

  It is a mistake, thought Johannes. It must be a mistake. Soon the right train will come, with a dining car and leather seats.

  The cattle train began to rattle.

  It kept on moving.

  Hour on hour in darkness. A farm woman managed to open her case, and took out a chamberpot. Another woman held out her coat for privacy as the pot moved from hand to hand.

  Then it was full, but there was no way to empty it, except trying to tip it from the small, high windows that breathed ice air. Some of the contents dribbled down the wall, then froze.

  The cattle train kept moving.

  And then it stopped. The door opened.

  Snow scent. Snow light, blue bright, that ripped his eyes.

  ‘Heil Hitler!’ yelled men’s voices. Johannes had to blink many times, and even then could only see them dimly, for the sharp light bouncing from the snow-covered trees blinded his eyes. Soldiers held up jugs of water. They held rifles too.

  ‘Please . . .’

  ‘Please . . .’

  ‘My mother is ill . . .’

  ‘My aunt, my aunt is dying . . .’

  ‘Water. Please!’

  ‘How much will you pay for the water?’ asked a soldier.

  Mutti held out a ring.

  ‘More,’ said the soldier. Mutti took off another ring and held it out too. Two rings for two jugs of water. It was not enough.

  The thirsty women’s faces stared at Mutti. The thirsty children’s faces. Mutti bent and opened her case, and took out all her jewels. Jewels for water. No food, even for a pearl necklace. The woman with the chamberpot tried to empty it through the door, but a stick beat back her arm.

  She dropped the pot.

  ‘Heil Hitler!’ yelled the soldiers. And then the door was shut.

  The train moved again.

  Women still cried then, and children. But soon they did not cry. No one had the strength to cry or speak.

  Johannes tried to think. This was impossible. But it was real, so it must not be impossible.

  Why was it happening? And how?

  They had been kidnapped, he decided. Even though the soldiers cried ‘Heil Hitler’, they must have deserted. That was why they stole the jewellery. But Herr Hitler would not let the soldiers escape for long. Soon the train must stop, and the soldiers would be captured and punished. Herr Hitler would rescue everyone in the carriage, and all would be well.

  Babies cried again, small canary cries, and then more weakly still. Then they did not cry at all. Women slumped, unconscious. They were so tightly packed no one could fall. Sometimes Johannes thought he slept. He dreamed he’d wake back in his bed.

  But even before his eyes opened into blackness, he knew by the stench he was still there. At last he tried not to sleep, because the ogre came in the nightmares, the ogre that ate not just small boys but whole carriages of women and babies. At last there seemed no difference between sleeping and waking, for he knew the ogre stalked them, pacing along the railway tracks, his breath snorting like the engine of the train.

  The boy in the book had saved everyone. But Johannes was not strong. They needed a true hero, like Herr Hitler. Surely the Führer would save them soon!

  And then the train stopped. This time it didn’t move again.

  Chapter 7

  JOHANNES

  POLAND, DECEMBER 1944

  The train doors stayed shut.

  The living lay upon the dead, or almost dead. So many lay unmoving on the floor of the cattle car now that there was room for the others to sit, or stretch out slightly, although that meant lying on the dead. But there were so many now that they must either stand on or lie on them.

  Johannes could feel Mutti’s hand. It squeezed his, so he knew she was alive.

  Time passed. A day? A night?

  Back in the village, perhaps, they were eating the Wigilia supper, with carp and beetroot soup and gifts, and with hay on the table to remind them how Jesus was born in a stable and laid in a manger. Stories and songs around the Christmas tree. No, not in their village. In other villages.

  But perhaps Christmas was past. Perhaps the ogre had eaten Christmas too . . .

  Sounds, doors sliding. An immense blanket of electric light. Light too bright to see. Light that swallowed colour, swallowed the world. Then Johannes saw beyond the light to night, darkness and barbed wire.

  So much light, blue bright. So much barbed wire, grey and rusty red. A concrete railway platform, grey too, with puddles of fresh red and dried black. Dogs, giant German shepherds, laughing with red tongues lolling, like wolves in storybooks.

  A few women tried to clamber from the cattle car. Men with machine guns gestured them back.

  No one tried to leave the cattle car now, and at least the air smelled of snow, not death, or rather, death and snow.

  Two skeletal men in faded rags brought buckets of water and two cups. The strongest or greediest women drank first. Mutti was one of the last, making sure Johannes drank before she did, then patiently trying to lift the heads of the almost-living so they could sip some water too.

  The black sky turned to morning grey. The electric light switched off, leaving grey snow and greyer concrete.

  Men marched to the platform. Grey men. Grey skin, grey rags flapping from arms as thin as children’s. Skeleton men. They stood in rows.

  An officer in green yelled, ‘Heil Hitler!’ Then, ‘Get out!’

  The women and children stumbled from the cattle car, most of the living, some helping the weak. The officer yelled, ‘Come!’

  The almost-living remained where they lay.

  They will take the sick to hospital, thought Johannes. Because that was what happened when people were ill.

  ‘Heil Hitler!’ yelled the soldier again.

  The crowd mumbled back, ‘Heil Hitler.’

  ‘Put down your suitcases. Do not try to carry anything with you. Move into rows. Five in each section. Move!’

  Johannes moved.

  Ambulances ploughed along the snowy road. They stopped. ‘The ill will be taken to hospital,’ said the soldier. Johannes felt the world shift slightly back into place. ‘Doctors and nurses stand over there!’

  Mutti moved, nodding to him as she stood with the nurses. The world still lurched to its right position. Doctors and nurses were needed for the sick. Soon he and Mutti would be with Vati . . .

  Mutti’s line moved, each person stopping at a desk, showing their papers, then marching away to the side.

  ‘Mutti!’ called Johannes.

  A guard jabbed him with his rifle, hard in the stomach. ‘Quiet.’

  The pain was . . . just pain. After the forever in the cattle car, pain could be ignored. He forced himself to stand upright, so Mutti didn’t think he was badly hurt. He tried to smile at her.

  She turned to look at him. Don’t speak, thought Johannes desperately. If Mutti called out, the guard might hit her too.

  More trains drew up as they stood on the platform, and ghosts stumbled out.

  Johannes stared. Were these truly people? Thinner even than the grey men, stooped, hunched, faces scared or desperate or simply staring. Soon the lines of ghost people stretched a long way beyond the station’s platform, grey ghosts in white snow. One by one they stumbled to officers at a table, who looked at their wrists and checked off numbers, or merely glanced at them and waved them on, over to the right, to march and march, from the station through the snow.

  The ghosts carried no suitcases. They almost looked as if they carried no life or hope either
.

  At last Johannes’s line began to move. A soldier stared at Johannes. ‘How old are you?’

  He should have said, ‘Ich bin zehn Jahre alt.’ I am ten years old. Instead he asked, ‘Why?’

  ‘Children under twelve and old people go to the right. Men to the left.’

  And the ghosts from the other trains, thought Johannes. All the ghosts had been sent to the right.

  He should go with the other children. He should follow the ghosts to the right. But Mutti was in the line to the left.

  ‘I am twelve years old,’ said Johannes.

  The soldier gestured to a rope stretched between two poles. ‘Walk under that.’

  Johannes stretched himself, trying to stand inconspicuously on tiptoe. ‘I am too tall.’

  ‘To the left,’ said the soldier. A guard shoved him into a line with older boys, then hit him across the face when he edged to the side to see Mutti’s line again.

  Behind him, children screamed as they were forced into the line to the right. Mothers sent to the left shrieked and wailed. They held out hands to try to reach their children. The dogs growled, darted forwards, bit, then sat back, grinning at their SS masters.

  More grey-faced men like the ones who had brought them water marched forwards. They lifted the dead out of the train and piled them on the platform. They lifted the women’s suitcases with effort, and carried them away.

  And still more cattle people turned to the right or left.

  The air shuddered with children crying, ‘Mutti!’ or whimpering with pain. Some women sobbed, collapsing on the ground.

  Mutti’s line began to march. Once more she turned to him. Their eyes met. Mutti spoke, but not with words. Words in the heart, thought Johannes, cannot be burned away. Even an ogre cannot swallow those. Mutti would find him. They would be together. He pushed the words deeper into his heart as she looked at him, making sure they were safe and could not leak away.

  Mutti marched, with the other women, nurses and doctors, into the blankness of the snow.

  Chapter 8

  JOHANNES

  GERMAN-OCCUPIED POLAND, DECEMBER 1944

  The boys marched in their groups of five, step by step along the snowy road. The air smelled faintly of old roasted meat, which should have made him hungry. But hunger was gone, and pain too, and even terror.

  He just walked.

  The light bounced from the snow. It was too bright. He looked for Mutti at first, but her line had vanished. He looked ahead instead.

  The world in front of them was ringed by barbed wire, vast as a city. Giant cement posts held enormous eye-like lights. Inside the barbed wire, squares were marked off by snow and barbed wire-clad banks.

  The gates opened. ‘Heil Hitler!’ shouted guards on each side of the great gate. Johannes’s line marched inside.

  Wooden buildings, each in its own cage. Skeletons in grey rags held out hands through the wire to the new arrivals, pleading for bread.

  Lunatics, thought Johannes. That was why Vati and Mutti had been brought here. They need doctors to care for lunatics.

  They waited. At last the doors of a giant shed opened. They marched inside.

  ‘Heil Hitler!’ barked a guard.

  He waited till the line replied, ‘Heil Hitler!’

  ‘Undress!’

  Guards yelled the order in many languages, German, Polish, English, others Johannes did not understand.

  They undressed. They marched. They stood, naked, as guards clipped their hair. Johannes tried not to look; hoped no one looked at him. They showered. Each drop stung with ice.

  Another room, piled with rags.

  ‘Dress!’

  A guard handed Johannes what had once been a shirt, grey as a duster. It reached down to his knees. Trousers, missing one leg, the other so long he had to roll it up. The letter ‘P’ was painted on his shirt. He supposed it stood for Poland.

  The boys lined up outside again, barefoot now. The snow fell in soft wet handfuls. Pain, then numbness.

  They marched. He could no longer feel his feet, but they still marched. A forest rose on either side, the green trees dappled with snow. The sun shone like a red ball, low on the horizon, below the snow clouds.

  Somewhere in the real world it would be Christmas. Somehow, soon, he would be rescued and he would be in the real world again.

  They marched past a red-brick building and the strange roasting smell was stronger: not like anything was cooking now, but as if it had been cooked for a long while, some time ago — no smoke came from the chimneys. Great piles of logs were piled neatly on either side. A bakery, thought Johannes.

  More barbed-wire gates. More giant electric eyes. The gates opened as the sun hid itself for the night.

  They marched into a shed, divided into wooden cages, three wooden tiers in each. ‘Heil Hitler!’ yelled the guards who had escorted them.

  Dim shapes called from the cages, ‘Heil Hitler!’

  The doors shut behind them.

  And finally Johannes realised. This was the belly of the ogre, and there was no escape. For the ogre was called Hitler.

  Chapter 9

  JOHANNES

  GERMAN-OCCUPIED POLAND, DECEMBER 1944

  Warmth. Or rather, cold that was not desperate, so he could think. His feet hurt, but it was good to feel them there again. If he opened his eyes, Mutti would be there . . .

  He opened them. Saw wooden planks above his head. Two bodies moved either side. Boys, thin-faced, in rags worse than his own. Another rag of blanket covered him.

  ‘Good,’ said the older boy. ‘He is awake.’ He held out a hand, twisted and scarred, and touched Johannes’s cheek gently. ‘It is time to eat.’

  ‘Eat,’ snorted the other boy, sitting up. He slid off the wooden shelf and shuffled over to the door.

  There was no room to sit up. The older boy said, ‘Stay. Rest while you can. I’ll bring your coffee.’

  ‘I don’t drink coffee.’

  ‘That is good. Because it is not coffee, but it is warm and liquid. Listen!’

  He did not want to listen. He wanted to drink warm not-coffee and then sleep.

  The boy looked at him intently. ‘Pay attention. You need to know things. If you do not, you will die.’ The boy shrugged. ‘Probably we will all die. But if you know things, you have a chance of life.’

  Johannes forced himself to focus. This made sense. In every land there were new rules. New rules for the land called ‘war’. New rules now in the ogre’s belly. ‘What must I know?’ he whispered. ‘Where are we?’

  ‘We are in a camp at a place called Auschwitz. I used to be at the camp next door, Birkenau. It is a labour camp, a place where people are put to work, and work, and work. I worked in a factory making coats.’ His face hardened. ‘Others made fuses, or paints or enamelled pots. They became sick from the fumes.’ He shrugged again. ‘Then I was sent here.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I collapsed. This is where the weak are sent.’ He grinned, showing gaps in his teeth and bloody red gums. ‘But I am not ready to die.’

  ‘Why didn’t they send you to a hospital?’ There must be a hospital, he prayed. A hospital where Mutti and Vati are working and safe.

  The boy shrugged once more. ‘It takes days, weeks, to be admitted to the hospital here. No, this is the place where people die. But if you are strong enough, you can still be chosen to do camp work and live. For a while.’

  How could he be so cruelly matter-of-fact? Then Johannes saw his eyes. The boy was not cruel. Johannes too needed to know these things, if he was to live.

  For a while.

  The boy looked at Johannes assessingly. He said quietly, ‘You are not twelve, are you?’

  Johannes shook his head.

  ‘Say you are twelve.’

  ‘Why?’

  The boy lowered his voice even more. ‘I say this softly. If you are seen to know too much, you are taken out. Those who are taken do not come back.’

  ‘They go home?’ H
e knew as soon as he said it that it was stupid.

  ‘They are killed,’ said the boy flatly. ‘You came here on a train?’

  Johannes nodded.

  ‘All of the people who went to the right at the station have been killed already: all the children, all the old or weak. Until a few months ago all Juden were burned in the ovens. Others were killed with injections or bullets or gas. Now?’ He shrugged. ‘I do not know what happens to the Juden now.’

  ‘You mean they have stopped killing?’

  ‘The killing goes on. Even more now, the killing goes on. But by starvation or . . .’ he glanced at Johannes’s face, then added quietly, ‘by other ways. Those who fail the labour selection at the parades are killed too. If you do not know enough, you may make a mistake.’

  Johannes thought of the vast bakery they had passed, and deeply, horribly, knew it was all true. If he had turned to the right, he would be dead now too . . .

  ‘Stand straight at parade. Look down. Do not meet a guard’s eyes. If you do, you will be whipped. If you are whipped, you may fall sick and die. Eat, drink, even if it is stinking. Work steadily. Do not ask questions. Do not do anything to make them notice you.’

  Johannes nodded. He understood rules. These were the rules of the belly of the ogre.

  ‘And live!’ said the boy fiercely, as the other boy who’d shared their bunk brought over two bowls of some stinking brown stuff. He offered a bowl to the older boy, who shook his head. ‘How long since you have eaten?’ he asked Johannes.

  ‘I don’t know,’ whispered Johannes.

  Again the older boy shrugged. ‘You can have my bowl too today.’

  It was perhaps the most generous thing anyone had done for him. But you could not say that to other boys.

  He looked around the barracks. Some of the newcomers sat sobbing on their bunks. No one had distributed food to them.

  ‘Sometimes you need to fight to get your share,’ said the older boy grimly. ‘There is bread too, but the two of us are not strong enough to get any. Tomorrow you can help us. Those who work in the kitchens can hide food sometimes too.’ He assessed Johannes again. ‘Newcomers are strong. Perhaps you will be given kitchen work.’