Max

by Sarah Cohen-Scali

  I freeze. The whole school freezes. Even though I’m alone, I can sense it, as if we were all together in one body. Mine. My blood freezes in my veins. Each slow heartbeat is like a death knell in my chest. I can hear the minister’s voice. I can hear his words, but those words don’t make sense. Or if they do, I refuse to admit it.

  What has happened is impossible, inconceivable.

  What has happened, says the minister, is that today, 20th of July, 1944, at 12.30 p.m., there was an assassination attempt against the Führer. There was a bomb planted in the room where he was meeting with his generals.

  Then, nothing. Amplified crackling of the microphone.

  The attempt failed. Only just. It was a miracle, the minister concluded.

  The Heimführer takes over, to announce that nothing further is known about this tragic event, and that we will be told as soon as news comes through.

  It feels like the ground has been cut from under my feet. I collapse onto my bed and stare at my pillow as if it could fill in the gaps for me. But the damned pillow doesn’t say a thing, apart from reminding me that, a few weeks earlier, it had been my hiding place for the toy Lukas gave me, the farting Führer—that I had broken and chucked in the bin. I can still see it, smashed, in pieces, the strings and springs that held the limbs together all broken. Like a body after a bomb explosion. With that evil toy, did I predict what happened to the Führer? The minister said Hitler survived the attack, but not what state he was in. In pieces? Pieces that somewhere in a hospital doctors are trying to stick together again? And, even if he’s in one piece, wouldn’t he have lost his marbles? Are they going to announce in a few hours that Germany no longer has a Führer? Which would mean that, this time, I really wouldn’t have a father. That I am, once and for all, an orphan and I would have been better off leaving with Manfred?

  Assembly in the dining hall at 1 p.m. Everyone is here, but the room seems somehow empty. There’s barely a hundred of us now. This room that I used to think was so dazzling is now a shadow of its former glory: the ceiling has been bombed, the paintwork is cracked, some of the swastikas have lost their colour as well as their arms, and look like cripples. Just like the faces of the Jungmannen: hollow, starving, exhausted.

  I notice in passing that Lukas is here, and that he’s clean, dressed and without that moronic look on his face. But I couldn’t care less. I’m not worried about him in the slightest anymore.

  Perched on his chair, the Heimführer begins by reassuring us that the Führer is safe and sound. He only sustained a few scratches, nothing more, and didn’t need to be hospitalised. He even honoured his appointment with Mussolini, and went to pick him up from the station, as arranged.

  A sigh of relief passes through the rows. Faces relax. The Heimführer explains how the assassination attempt occurred in Rastenburg, in Eastern Prussia. It was more than an assassination attempt, it was an attempted coup d’état, incited by a group of opponents of the regime, who wanted to take power, hasten the end of the war, and hand over Germany to the British. The Führer and his generals were studying maps, when the chief conspirator, the vile traitor, Count Claus von Stauffenberg, Chief of Staff of the Reserve Army, planted a booby-trapped suitcase next to Hitler, under the table, and left the room on the pretext of an important phone call. Fortunately, one of the generals pushed the suitcase out of his way slightly, so that the Führer ended up being protected by the leg of the table when the bomb went off.

  There’s chatter among the assembly now; everyone is hugely relieved. The de rigueur cheerfulness emerges again. Everyone has a theory about what happened. No, the Führer wasn’t protected by a common or garden chair leg, he was protected by the Germanic gods! In fact the Führer doesn’t even need protection, nothing can touch him, this is the proof: he’s immortal!

  The voices get louder, the sound punctuated by a rallying cry: Heil Hitler! They roar is repeated several times and the Heimführer joins in his students’ chorus. He doesn’t silence them, because he knows that his young boarders have just had a terrible fright and need some relief from their tension.

  The Jungmannen shake hands, pat each other on the back, and break rank without receiving the order, some even taking the liberty of going to sit down, their heads between their hands, sobbing for joy.

  The Heimführer suddenly raises his hand. Silence! He’s just heard that the Führer himself is on the radio.

  We all stand to attention. An edgy voice echoes through the hall. I only remember one sentence of the long speech: There will be severe reprisals.

  Another assembly a few days later. This time in the projection room, where we watch pictures of the traitors’ trial. One is particularly memorable: a general, whose name I’ve forgotten, standing before the judges, has to hold his pants up with both hands, because he doesn’t have his belt any longer. When the judge orders him to stand to attention to hear his sentencing, his pants fall down and we see his underpants.

  Everyone in the courtroom laughs, echoed by the Jungmannen in our room.

  The Heimführer informs us that the traitors were executed straight after the trial, in the courtyard of the Benderblock. The conspirators were executed one after the other and their bodies hung on butcher’s hooks.

  And that’s exactly when the thing I wasn’t thinking about anymore happens.

  Even though the images of the trial, and of the executions, which I can easily imagine, are playing in a loop in my mind; even though I can still hear the Führer’s voice announcing the severe reprisals; even though I’m desperately hoping one of the Jungmannen next to me doesn’t suddenly take out of his pocket my smashed farting Führer and hold it up, pointing an accusing finger at me and shouting, ‘Him, he’s another conspirator! Look what he did!’—it turns out that what happens is none of those things.

  One of the Jungmannen does stand up, but not just any old Jungmann. It’s Lukas. He stands in the middle of the room and, in front of us all—students, teachers, and the Heimführer—he unthreads the belt on his pants, which fall round his ankles, just like the general in the film. As if that wasn’t enough, Lukas then takes off his underpants and leans forward to stick his bum out at the whole assembly. ‘Long live the conspirators!’ he starts shouting. ‘Your Führer has just about had it! He’ll be dead soon! It’s all over! Listen up! I’m not German, I’m Polish. Polish and a Jew!…A Jew! A Jew!’

  There’s panic in the room. A speechless panic. Nobody says a word as Lukas, out of his mind, keeps on and on, repeating his last sentence, in Polish! ‘Jestem Polakiem! Polakiem i Zydem! Zydem! Zydem!’

  Everyone is staring at him, agape, incredulous.

  Finally, under orders from the Heimführer, the first one to react, two Jungmannen grab Lukas and drag him off to an isolation cell.

  This time he’s really done it. He’ll be executed too. He’ll hang on a butcher’s hook in the courtyard.

  So the scandal broke, but not how I’d imagined it would. Just like I said before, things never happen as expected. This is unbearable.

  And that wasn’t it for surprises.

  I’m asleep, overwhelmed by nightmares. All the images I saw during the day are jumbled into some kind of diabolical dance. There’s Hitler with his pants down, showing his bum to the German nation. There’s Lukas being shot, slumped, bleeding, his body riddled with bullets. As for me: I’m hanging off a butcher’s hook like a giant ham, while starving Jungmannen with knives circle me, chopping off bits of my flesh, tearing them into strips and eating them. Just as I’m about to scream, I’m woken up by someone shaking me violently.

  What’s the matter? An earthquake? An air raid?

  No, it’s Lukas, completely together, alert, in a hurry, and carrying a suitcase. He puts it on the ground, opens it and rummages in my drawers, tipping everything into the case, higgledy-piggledy. ‘Got any money?’

  I point under the mattress where my stash is hidden.

  He yanks me out of bed and grabs the notes. ‘Hurry up! Get a move on!’ he
shouts as he throws me my clothes. ‘Get dressed, we’re getting out of here.’

  ‘What do you mean, we’re getting out of here? Where to? How did you get out of the cell?’

  ‘I never went,’ he says, showing me his dagger of honour covered in blood. ‘I bumped off those two guys. And, five minutes ago, I set fire to the school. So, if you don’t want to end up barbecued, Skullface, follow me!

  Make your present something useful, give a coffin!

  The slogan for Christmas 1944. It’s written everywhere on the walls all over Berlin, as well as in the U-Bahn where we’re holed up like rats.

  For five months now, we’ve only seen underground Berlin. Only occasionally do we sneak out above ground, where there are fires, mountains of rubble, buildings that have been destroyed or are in ruins. The air is clogged with plaster dust that sticks to your skin, sifts into your mouth and gets encrusted on your teeth. It’s impossible to get rid of and makes you cough and spit. Endless columns of smoke climb into the blazing sky to form dense black clouds that clump together and never dissipate. It’s as if the light itself is dirty, or there’s no more light at all.

  The Third Reich was supposed to take us out of darkness. Instead it seems to have thrown us right inside.

  When Lukas dragged me out of bed to flee the Napola, and told me we were heading for Berlin, I was thrilled. At last I’d see my country’s capital city. But I couldn’t work out why we were walking in the opposite direction from everyone else; why the Germans were deserting the city, marching night and day, with their suitcases, exhausted, their faces blank, like crazed sleepwalkers; why we’d come across ditches filled with a mess of weapons, kitchenware and horse carcasses. I realised soon enough that it was a massive rout, every man for himself in a terrible debacle.

  So it ended up being nothing like the tourist trip I had imagined.

  And we had to keep clear of the Volkssturm. Somewhere along the way we came across a group of Jungmannen who were organising their own resistance at the edge of a village. They were piling up tree trunks, hoping it would serve as a blockade against a tank. Their leader, about fifteen (the same age as Lukas), saw we were wearing the Napola uniform and wanted to enlist our help. I would happily have joined his unit. Why not? I still wanted to fight to defend my country, to try to save it.

  Lukas stopped me. ‘Come off it, Skullface, forget all the bullshit they’ve indoctrinated you with. Save yourself, that’s all there is left. And cut the crap.’

  Then he knocked out the leader of the group and when the others, scarcely older than me, tried to protest—even though they had no weapons—I went up to them. ‘That was a close shave for you lot. He could have decapitated him or stabbed him to death. He’s already killed four Jungmannen, you know. He’s a serial killer!’

  I left them standing there, half-hidden under their oversized helmets, their eyes as round as saucers, and ran off to catch up to Lukas.

  Since our departure he’s taken his role as big brother very seriously. He decides everything. I prefer him like this to the zombie he was at the Napola over the last few weeks, but I’m pretty sick of him ordering me around.

  But I should never have followed him to Berlin. Lukas wants to be there when the Russians arrive. He says they’re his friends, which means they’re my enemies, doesn’t it?

  He’s started to call me Skullface again, so I’m getting him back by calling him Lukas, when he’s now insisting on his Polish name, Lucjan.

  In the subway. We’re surrounded by women, children and old people, all squashed up together like sardines in a tin. There are mattresses and pillows between the train tracks and coathangers with clothes—suits, dresses, coats—hanging from the train signal cables. It’s giving Lukas the creeps.

  ‘What the hell are they on about, the Krauts? As for their obsession with hygiene and appearance…What do they think is on the cards—a dinner dance at 8 p.m. tonight?’

  He’s right: the coathangers are just taking up precious space. What’s the use of ironed clothes if they’re covered in ash? What’s the use of a change of clothes when you can’t even wash yourself? During the blackouts all those coathangers on the cables look like ghosts, or hanged people swinging above our heads. But, when you think about it, the nicely ironed clothes on hangers help to maintain a bit of dignity around here. Lukas doesn’t get it, of course. And I hate the way he criticises my compatriots.

  ‘At least the Krauts are clean,’ I snap. ‘Not like the Polish pigs.’

  And the proof is that the filth and lack of sanitation doesn’t upset Lukas as much as me. He doesn’t give a damn about having torn, dirty, stinking clothes. He does his business in any old place, even in the disgusting toilets, which are blocked, covered in shit and all manner of matter, liquid and solid, the composition and provenance of which I do not want to know. I still manage to piss okay, but taking a shit is difficult. I’m constipated most of the time. And, if I do manage to push out a tiny turd, I hop around stark naked because there’s no toilet paper and my bum gets so itchy when it’s dirty. In the end it’s probably better we have so little to eat—we don’t have to go through the toilet business if there’s not much to get rid of.

  Anyway, so much for Christmas spirit. I couldn’t care less about Christmas. At the Napola, that was when we celebrated the winter solstice and I don’t miss those all-night candle vigils in the snow.

  ‘Do Jews celebrate Christmas?’ I ask Lukas.

  ‘They celebrate Hanukkah. They have a lit candle in a candelabra for eight days and at the end of the week the children receive presents.’

  Right, so it’s almost the same deal. Candles in a candelabra, or tinsel on a pine tree, plus the presents—it’s six of one, half-a-dozen of the other.

  A little girl sitting next to us must have been listening and asks her mother, ‘Will we have roast turkey for dinner? And will Father Christmas come down into the subway?’

  With a forced smile, her mother ruffles the girl’s hair. ‘We won’t be having roast turkey, my darling.’

  She looks furtively at her suitcase where, under a pile of linen, she’s hidden a loaf of canned bread and a thermos of tea that she managed to grab as she rushed out of her apartment. ‘But Father Christmas will come, I’m sure. Look at all the messages on the walls to show him the way.’

  What a lie. Just like outside on the walls of buldings, all the scribblings here in the subway are messages left by families to a brother, a son or a husband returning from the front, so he’ll know where to find them.

  Why doesn’t she tell the truth? That this year Father Christmas will look redder than usual, Bolshevik-red, blood-red. That he’ll turn up on a tank, not a sled, that he’ll have weapons in his sack and that he’ll shoot anything that moves?

  The little girl has got my mouth watering with all her talk of roast turkey. It’s torture: I’m salivating, I’ve got cramps in my stomach, I can picture that turkey before my eyes, steam coming off it, making my nostrils twitch. I could take revenge on her by spilling the beans about the truth of our situation. I could.

  We can speak freely now. There’s no longer any danger of being denounced for your opinions, or your nationality, religion or whatever. Lukas could stand on the tracks and yell through a megaphone that he was Jewish and I don’t think anyone would react. I’m not a hundred per cent sure, but I don’t feel as paranoid about it as before.

  On the other hand, I’m having trouble with a few new habits. For example, no one raises their arm to salute anymore. It’s all over. No one says Heil Hitler! That’s actually bad form. Instead, they say, Bleib übrig! Which means ‘Stay alive’. I still sometimes instinctively go to raise my arm. Lukas, who anticipates my reflex even before I move, grabs my wrist and forces me to stay still.

  ‘Stop acting like a fucking robot!’ he says, glaring at me.

  The Berliners don’t have any respect. Their graffiti is making a joke out of everything. They’ve turned the initials LSR, for example, which mean Luftschutzrau
m (air-raid shelter), into Lernt schnell russisch, ‘Learn Russian fast’.

  I’m scared to death.

  Before we ended up in the subway, we stayed for a few weeks in the zoo’s bunker. It’s one of the biggest air-raid shelters, a fortress of reinforced concrete with a battery of anti-aircraft defences on the roof. It’s a huge safe haven for countless Berliners.

  One day I wanted to get out. After all, we were at the zoo and I’d never visited a zoo. At first Lukas said no, then, as I kept asking, he seemed tempted, too, so up we went. It was a quick visit. Not because of the bombing raids—it was calm for the time being—but because all that was left of the animals were corpses. The cages were broken, smashed, and the monkeys, bears, gorillas were all dead, as if they’d taken part in some violent battle. The corpses of the monkeys were totally butchered. Lukas and I realised that we’d already had our visit to the zoo without knowing it. In our stomachs. The evening before, a woman had shared a big piece of meat with us. We’d feasted on it without wondering where it had come from.

  We had to leave the zoo’s bunker because of the toilets. The hygiene was disgusting, but, worse than that, people would go there to commit suicide. That’s where my constipation started. It’s pretty hard to do your business when swinging right in front of your eyes are the feet of someone who has just hanged himself.

  Before that we were in the bunker at the Anhalter train station. Made of reinforced concrete, it has three storeys above ground and two underground. The walls are four and a half metres thick. In the beginning it was quite comfortable. There were big benches so people could sit down, like in a dining hall, and a good supply of tinned sardines. But the sardines didn’t last long and the benches were turned into firewood to keep us warm. Then the water supply was cut off and we were all unbearably thirsty.

  The zoo’s bunker and the station’s bunker are connected to the U-bahn by five kilometres of tunnels, so you can walk through without danger.