Max

by Sarah Cohen-Scali

  Sometimes it really annoys me that I have to get off. After all, now that I’m immortal, why couldn’t I go and check out Auschwitz? But Ebner is watching over me; he asked a soldier to keep an eye on me whenever I get onto a train.

  Nevertheless, despite his vigilance, there’s trouble now and again. One night, a dog bit me really hard on the leg. The soldier holding the leash lost control of it. The dog tore off a piece of my skin and I had to stay in bed for a few days. Now I’ve got a long scar like a war wound. Which makes me even tougher. Lucky the dog didn’t bite me on the cheek, or I would have lost my angel-face good looks.

  But most of the trouble comes from the mothers. They just don’t seem to be able to resign themselves to handing over their children to us. Like the one from whichever village it was—I forget the names—who chose to hang her child rather than let it be kidnapped. Can you imagine that! Or the other one, who lay down on the train tracks as the train left.

  Mothers have the strangest ideas sometimes. They’re mad! I’m so pleased I don’t have one.

  One particular night, I was spotted by one of them. She’d managed to escape from under the soldiers’ noses and had climbed into the Kalish train to rescue her child. Obviously I denounced her to Doctor Ebner, and when the soldiers grabbed her, she started shrieking at me like the devil.

  ‘Damn you! You evil child!’ she yelled.

  I’m not even sure she was Polish. Gypsy probably. Everyone knows that, like Jews, Gypsies perform black magic and take it out on children. But I’m not just any old child. Her curse will never harm me. I am immortal.

  Soon enough, I get sick of my work at the station.

  It’s the same with toys. When they’re new, you enjoy them, then you forget about them. The thing is that I’ve had enough of seeing children heading off together every night, while I’m left standing alone on the platform. I have to go back to the bombed-out house and spend the rest of the night in my room, still alone. And face Frau Lotte again in the morning. I can’t stand her any longer, with her shark eyes and her stinky breath.

  To hell with it. I’m out of here.

  It’s a big step for me. A new chapter in my young life.

  I’m six. I’m going to school.

  I don’t have a satchel or any school supplies. No new clothes either. I’m wearing my Pimpf uniform. In my suitcase is the candelabra the Führer gave me when I was born, with its six candles, along with a few toiletries and a couple of changes of clothes. Even though Doctor Ebner is taking me, we’re not hand in hand like a father walking his son to school on the first day. I’m trying to keep up with the perfect rhythm of his step. Left. Right. Left. Right. The soldiers stand to attention and salute as we pass.

  It’s not your usual first day at school. That’s normal. I’m an unusual child. And Kalish is not your usual sort of school. It’s an old converted monastery, surrounded by a very high wall, covered in barbed wire—no way you could climb over it. No child has come willingly to this unusual school, nor have they been brought there by their mother or father. All of them think of only one thing: escaping. It’s not surprising, I suppose, when there’s a guard with his submachine gun stationed near the main gate and soldiers with their dogs trekking back and forth in the courtyard.

  Kalish is the school for the stolen children. The SS Gaukinder Home, or the central district home of the Polish Lebensborn in Poland.

  It’s about nine in the evening. It’s dark and the courtyard is deserted. The children must already be in bed. But they’re not all asleep yet, because I can hear muffled screaming from various spots: behind a locked door, a window, up there on the first floor, and the floor above. If I strain my ears, the sounds seem to be coming from everywhere, like background noise, a continual whirring that makes all the buildings seem to vibrate. And I can hear crying, from the chapel near the entrance.

  I just keep going, pretending nothing’s wrong, imitating Doctor Ebner, who remains unfazed as we cross the courtyard. Herr Ebner explained everything to me during the car ride here from Poznan. He said Polish children are learning how to become German at Kalish, that it’s a rigorous and difficult apprenticeship. The severe punishments and beatings are only for their own good, so they’ll be happy later.

  Anyway, I’m so happy, so excited at the idea of being surrounded by kids my own age, of living with them, that I manage to distance myself from their screaming and crying. I’m used to it; the kids screamed and cried at Poznan.

  But I don’t cry, even if I am a bit scared to meet the director of Kalish.

  Johanna Sander: tall, blonde, blue eyes. When we enter her office, all I can see of her at first is her tall outline and her brown uniform. When she raises her arm to salute us with a booming ‘Heil Hitler!’ I glimpse a pistol stuck in her belt. A nine-millimetre Luger. She reminds me of Josefa. But she’s the next model up. Stronger, stricter. Josefa didn’t have a gun in her belt.

  I try to make my ‘Heil Hitler!’ response as forceful as I can, but my voice sounds feeble, pathetic.

  The interview doesn’t take long. After shaking hands with Frau Sander, Herr Ebner goes to his desk and starts in on his files. Frau Sander and I stay in the doorway of her office. She announces that she already knows everything about me, thanks to the correspondence Doctor Ebner sent her. Holding the letter in one hand, she slides on her glasses and reads, ‘Konrad von Kebnersol, born in the Steinhöring Home in 1936, on the 20th of April, our Führer’s birthday…(she skips the rest)…Baptised by the Führer himself!’

  She takes off her glasses and looks me up and down. I do the same to her, trying not to seem arrogant. She’s imposing, with a large face, high forehead and well-defined lips, the corners of which turn down, giving her a nasty, ferocious expression. To tell you the truth, if I wasn’t one of our Führer’s young wild men, I’d be scared to death of her. It’s obvious she’s not the type to go weak at the knees in front of my angel face, my platinum-blond hair and my blue, blue eyes. I hope the rest of Doctor Ebner’s letter clearly specifies, with the statistical evidence, that I am a perfect specimen of the Nordic race. And that I also have to my credit some remarkable acts of bravery: my endurance as a baby in the face of kidnapping and illegal confinement by a dissident whore, my participation in ‘Operation Buddies’, at first with the Brown Sisters, then with a Polish informer, and last but not least my incredibly useful performance at the Poznan railway station.

  ‘Baptised by the Führer himself!’ Frau Sander repeats, after a long silence. Her blue eyes fill with tears. ‘Baptised by the Führer himself!’

  How long is she going to bang on about it? She’s like a broken record.

  She turns to Doctor Ebner, who glances up from his dossier to nod distractedly.

  ‘The Führer in person!’ A tear rolls down her left cheek and, miracle of miracles, the edges of her mouth lift into a twitch that could be a smile. But the smile is not for me. Frau Sander isn’t looking at me anymore; she’s focused on a spot at the other end of the corridor outside her office. As if someone had just appeared there. But I can see out of the corner of my eye that no one’s there. She must be seeing a vision of the Führer walking right up to her.

  She turns back to me and pats my head. Gently, almost fearfully, as if my head was made out of porcelain and might break. But somehow I can tell that this large, strong hand, caressing my cheek and now my chin, is used to giving out smacks…I think Frau Sander is only caressing me like this in order to have the honour of touching something that the Führer himself touched, to have vicarious contact with him via a proxy—me, as it happens.

  I’m feeling uncomfortable. My heart is beating too fast. I really don’t like this hand touching me. But I force myself to put up with it.

  Finally Frau Sander comes to her senses and removes her hand, brushes away her tears, and wipes the smile off her face. In a second, her face has regained its ferocious look.

  ‘Do you know what we expect of you here, Konrad?’ she snaps in an authoritarian voice t
hat has nothing of the exalted tone she used earlier.

  ‘Yes, I do know. Doctor Ebner told me. I’m here as a role model for Polish children my age. They have to think I’m Polish like them, but that I’ve taken in every aspect of the teaching at Kalish, and been transformed into a perfect little German boy. That’s why I speak excellent German, and have forgotten my mother tongue, Polish. I have to be positive and encouraging to my buddies and tell them as often as I can how lucky they are to have been adopted by Germany.’

  ‘Perfect!’ she exclaims. ‘Perfect! Now go and unpack.’ She clicks her fingers and a warden appears. ‘This is Konrad. Baptised by the Führer himself!’

  Like it’s my surname.

  It must be a code language, because the warden’s stern, icy expression changes instantly. Hearing ‘BBFH’ (‘baptised by…’ you know the rest, I don’t have to repeat it), she smiles and asks me kindly to follow her. She tells me that she’s taking me to my dormitory, but if I’m at all hungry we could stop by the kitchen. I decline. She insists on offering me a bar of chocolate from her pocket. I bet she offers the Polish kids a taste of the whip I can see stuck in one of her boots.

  ‘No, thank you.’

  I don’t want any special treatment. Anyway, what if one of my future buddies saw us? My cover would be blown and that’d be the end of me playing my role here.

  I can’t sleep. I’m not used to going to bed so early. The dormitory noises don’t bother me; it’s just a whole lot of creaking, sighing, snoring, coughing, rustling of sheets—a rhythmic background sound. The SS and the German whores made much more of a racket in the bombed-out house in Poznan. The children stifle their crying so the warden standing at the door like a guard dog doesn’t hear them. There’s one recurring word, over and over, whispered, like a chant, a prayer: mamo (‘mummy’). Then the whole sentence: ‘Chce moja mame’ (‘I want my mummy’). The Polish kids haven’t yet erased the damn word from their vocabulary, like I did a while ago now. That’s why they’re sad. One of the first things I’ll teach them over the next few days is how to get rid of that word from their memories. They’ll feel so much better afterwards.

  It’s as dark as the inside of an oven, but when the warden took me to my bed she had a torch and I counted about forty beds. Twenty on each side. All I could see of my buddies were their shadowy outlines under the blankets. Of the ones who hadn’t pulled the sheet over their heads—as if this thin material could somehow protect them—I glimpsed some hair, a hand, a foot.

  The kid on my right isn’t sleeping either. He just tosses and turns. From the creaking of the bedsprings, I can tell that he’s leaning towards me. He wants to speak to me but is too frightened. The warden might hear him, or see him by the light of the torch she sweeps around the room every few minutes.

  Eventually he falls asleep. His breathing is regular, with the occasional gentle snoring. There’s a smell of urine coming from his bed, unless it’s from the bed on my left, or from all the beds. It stinks.

  The whole dormitory stinks of piss. I’ve never wet my bed, or else it was so long ago I’ve forgotten.

  As well as the stifled sobbing and the whispered ‘mamo’, there’s also nightmarish screaming. ‘Aj!’ ‘Nie! Nie, nie mnie!’ ‘Litosc!’ A body shoots up then collapses on the mattress again. I know those screams. I heard them often enough in Poznan. ‘Ow!’ ‘No! No, not me!’ ‘Please!’ The warden isn’t worried about the screaming, she must be used to it.

  I’m still awake. It’s hard for me to change my routine overnight. In the bombed-out house in Poznan, I wandered around freely all night long, listening at doors without Frau Lotte noticing a thing. Compared to the warden, Frau Lotte seems like an angel now.

  I want to get out of bed. Too bad about the rules. The warden won’t be able to punish me anyway. When her colleague brought me in here earlier, she repeated the magic words ‘BBFH’, with the same reverence Frau Sander used. (It must be a code name that was communicated to all the staff before I arrived.) So off I go, out of bed to tell her I want to go to the toilet. She’s already removed the whip from her boot, and is about to lash me with it, when she sees I’m the BBFH, so she stops and lets me go. I pretend to head for the door she’s pointing to, but as soon as her back is turned I head the other way.

  I venture to the end of the corridor, where there’s another dormitory. I can hear babies screaming behind the closed door. That’s why there’s no warden on guard duty. Obviously these prisoners aren’t about to escape. I push open the door.

  Chaos. Cradles everywhere. It reminds me of Steinhöring. Except, in my memory, the cradles were much more attractive, not half-broken, wobbly and dirty, like these. The walls were white and clean, and there were windows. Here the walls are grey and there’s only one tiny skylight in the roof. The babies must range from about six months old to a year. The one-year-olds are longer but no larger. They’re like rabbits.

  Rabbits.

  I suddenly remember that code word. One of the first I learned. Are all these babies going to be packed into vans and delivered to a hospital where they’ll be chopped into pieces and stored in jars? No, I’m getting everything mixed up! Herr Ebner already told me that, as well as older children, there are babies at Kalish, and that the babies don’t stay long: they’re sent off first to Germany, where their adoptive families are waiting for them.

  I hope they get a bath before they leave, because they really stink of shit. It is foul! In some of the cradles I can see liquid shit running out of the nappies and all over the sheets. The smell is absolutely atrocious! I have to block my nose so I don’t faint.

  There’s screaming and crying everywhere. Obviously, with all that shit, the babies’ bums must be chafed and infected. There are only two wardens for all these stinky, wailing babies. And they’re lying down, asleep on two beds at either end of the room. When one of them wakes up, grumbling, she goes round handing out more smacks and swear words than bottles and clean nappies.

  I’m getting out of here. The incessant noise is deafening and the stink is making me nauseous. I don’t want to see what the other dormitories are like anymore. And now I’m tired; I’d better sleep if I want to be in good shape tomorrow. Tomorrow is the start of my life as a schoolboy. I get back into bed and fall asleep straightaway.

  I start having nightmares of sinking into a huge swamp of piss and shit. I dream of sitting alone in the dining room and being forced to drink piss and to eat shit. I see the babies from the dormitory at the end of the corridor all rising together from their cradles, like an army of evil little creatures. They encircle me and bombard me with their filthy nappies dripping with shit that burns my skin and disfigures my little angel face.

  I wake up with a start. My sheets are soaked and I’m scared I’ve wet the bed. But it’s only sweat. BBFH doesn’t wet the bed! I soon fall asleep again and this time I sleep peacefully, dreaming that my buddies are all neat and tidy, clean as a whistle, impeccable.

  Germanised.

  The next morning, at 6 a.m., the warden is striding along the dormitory aisle with her stick, hitting beds, and sometimes the legs of children, who bounce up instantly like springs.

  The days are full at Kalish. The timetable is scheduled to the last minute, with no down time and not a moment of respite.

  It’s designed that way so the children go from one activity to the next without stopping. If they stop, they’ll think. If they think, they’ll remember—their parents, their brothers and sisters, their home, their toys, their favourite food, everything about their lives before they were kidnapped. But they have to forget that life, once and for all.

  I can personally attest that it’s a very effective system. The longer I’m here, the more distant my stay in the bombed-out house in Poznan seems. It’s like a dream now. Frau Lotte and the Brown Sisters are like faceless ghosts. If I didn’t happen to run into Doctor Ebner regularly—his work here is to select the newcomers—I think I’d have forgotten him too.

  6 a.m. Gymnasti
cs.

  ‘The German youth must be athletic!’ says our Führer. So we might as well start as early as we can to build up our muscles. Gymnastics is good for the body, and good for the mind. Physical activity is a great way to cleanse the brain of any harmful thoughts.

  We jump out of bed in our singlets and underpants, half-naked, and run ten times round the courtyard, while the wardens set the pace with their whistles. If we slow down, we get hit. If we break formation in the perfect running circle, we get hit. If we don’t lift up our knees in time—one, two, one, two!—we get hit. Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out: that’s all we think about. Otherwise, in this winter cold, we’ll cough and choke. In the heat of summer, we’ll suffocate and fall down faint.

  In the winter, it’s hard to see. Our eyelids are swollen with sleep and our legs are like jelly. We all shiver because it’s a brutal contrast between bed and the icy air. In summer, it’s also hard to see because of the blinding contrast between the dark dormitory and the bright courtyard, and because we’re still damp from bed and it’s already stifling.

  In the beginning, we say, ‘I’ll never be able to do it!’ and then, somehow, we manage. Because there’s no choice. There’s no calling out ‘Mummy!’ when you’re running. Mummy won’t come. Not anymore. Never. While we’re running, we forget the meaning of the word ‘Mummy’. One! Two! One! Two! Faster! Faster!

  Those words are the only thing in our minds.

  IT WAKES US UP.

  Once gymnastics is over, we head back to the dormitory, still running. Then we each stand to attention next to our beds, while the warden inspects the sheets. Those who have wet their bed in the night have to go without breakfast and be punished: they carry the rubbish out, clean the toilets or unpack the deliveries. Everyone else makes their bed with hospital corners, a smooth bedspread, no wrinkles, and the top sheet folded straight, parallel with the wall.