Last Train from Kummersdorf

by Leslie Wilson

  ‘I’ll give you a toast,’ she said. ‘I’m drinking to the dead.’

  ‘To our soldiers?’ asked Dr Hungerland. ‘Too many of them, and the best ones at that. What will become of Germany’s future now?’

  ‘Leave it to this pair,’ said Frau Magda in a sour voice. ‘They’ll have babies soon enough, can’t wait to be at it.’

  ‘You need something to sweeten your tongue,’ said Effi, grinning. She got up and started bringing in the tinned peaches, the macaroons, condensed milk and tiny coffee cups to drink it out of, marrons glacés. This is the land of Cockaigne, she thought, like in the fairy tale, as much as you like to eat and drink and no need to do the dishes afterwards. Hanno had put his thin blue and white dinner-plate on the floor for the dog to lick, but Cornelius found better things to do. Barbara was holding a macaroon out to him.

  Dr Hungerland started to talk. You’d think he was giving an after-dinner speech.

  ‘The problem was,’ he said, ‘that while German men were dying in battle – and you must remember that we already had lost more good men than we could afford in the First Great War – we were keeping worthless specimens – no, dangerous specimens – alive in our own country. Idiots, for example, or those born blind and deaf. Clearly something had to be done. For one thing, if they had been left to breed freely Germany would soon have become a nation of defectives.’

  ‘What?’ asked Ida Rupf. She was angry all of a sudden. ‘Defectives: does that mean innocent, sweet children who have to wear leg-irons?’

  Dr Hungerland looked at her as if she’d no right to speak. This, thought Effi, is where the piano goes out of tune.

  Ma Headscarf broke in as if she wanted to shut her mother up.

  ‘We have some children left,’ she said in a hurried voice, ‘and when they’re old enough they’ll help build Germany up again.’ She turned round to Hanno and smiled at him – she must really want to make a diversion if she was smiling at Hanno. ‘What work would you like to do when you’re grown up, boy?’

  Hanno’s cheeks burned, and he said: ‘I want to be a sculptor.’

  ‘A sculptor?’ said Magda, disapproving in spite of herself.

  Otto let out a harsh laugh. ‘The only thing your conquerors will allow you to be is a peasant, boy. If the Russians don’t drag you off to be their slave. You needn’t bother with any ambitions. It’s finished.’ He bit his lip.

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ said Effi. ‘You can be a sculptor, Swing Boy, that’s really cool. You’ll be famous and you can come to America, you can have an exhibition in some big art gallery in Los Angeles and we’ll go out on the town in my limo.’

  Ma Headscarf tut-tutted. ‘A limousine! The lies the girl tells.’

  ‘Leave their dreams alone, Magda,’ said old Ida sharply.

  Dr Hungerland looked round them all, thought they’d finished their unnecessary interruptions, and resumed his speech. He was crazy, after all.

  ‘I spent two years working in America after I qualified,’ he said. ‘Under Professor Baines.’ He spoke the name reverently, he seemed to think they’d have heard of the Prof. ‘He was undertaking a major programme to sterilize carriers of unworthy genetic stock. Individuals from criminal families as well as the physically and mentally unsound. He always said to me that I should carry his message back to Germany. And indeed, when the new government came, there were soon opportunities to transfer the policy to our own country. It was only during the war, as I have already said, that it became imperative to deal more radically with the situation behind the lines. It was costing more money than we had available to care for bad genetic stock while healthy children were going short of schoolbooks. These individuals were a burden that we had to get rid of. I was a major participant in the programme. It was a way in which I could fight for my Fatherland as if I was a soldier at the Front.’

  Ida said, ‘I will speak, Magda. Don’t try to stop me. When I hear this fellow preening himself – Dr Hungerland, I had a little son. He was born much later than Magda. He had a weak leg, and had to wear an iron. Such a good boy he was, he was slow to read, but he stuck at it and he managed in the end. He had the nicest smile, always cheerful, always brave. It used to make me so happy to have him put his arms round my neck. And he helped me with the hotel, he was anything but an idiot, it was only the reading he found hard. He didn’t sleep very well, and he suffered terribly with his digestion. Dr Steinberg used to come out any time I was worried about him; he loved Hans too. He found out some exercises for him that helped him to move better. Then the Nazis came to power and they said our doctor couldn’t attend to Hans any longer because he was a Jew. The doctor who replaced him wasn’t so helpful – I thought he wasn’t interested. But one day he came and said they could carry out an operation on Hans. It was a new operation, he said, and it might make all the difference to him. So I took him to the hospital. It was a long way away. In Brandenburg. I stayed in the town, but I wasn’t allowed to visit him. They said he died during the operation, his heart was unsound, they said. Later, though, Cardinal Galen preached about how they were killing so many people in the hospitals, and I understood what they’d done to Hans.’

  ‘Adults were selected for treatment as well as children,’ said Hungerland, as if he was pleased to explain to her. ‘But I participated only in the children’s programme. We used luminal. It’s a sedative. We administered it dissolved in a tea, or injected. There were some subjects who were so excitable that they had become tolerant of luminal, so we gave them an injection of morphine-scopolamine. I was aware that I was dealing with organisms who could feel fear and pain. I was compassionate in my proceedings. Unlike Pfannmüller, who starved them to death. I would never have done that to my subjects. We kept the programme going in secret, even after the Cardinal’s ill-judged intervention. Of course the public was told it had been brought to a halt. It has to be said that I did not make the final decision. I filled in the forms and despatched them to the central authorities. If the names came back marked with a plus sign, that meant the subjects were to be put to sleep. Unfortunately, my nerves – it started with the occasional hallucination, but as soon as I left the hospital the eyes were with me all the time. But not here, not inside the train.’

  ‘The eyes of the children you murdered?’ asked Ida. She was shivering. Effi put her hand on hers and Ida gripped it hard. Effi felt cold, too. She thought of Claudia. Maybe Hungerland had filled in a form for her and it had come back with a plus sign.

  ‘There was one girl,’ said Hungerland. ‘Bettina Grauss. She had black curly hair and black eyes like this girl.’ He pointed to Effi as if she was an illustration for his lecture. ‘She had gypsy blood on the mother’s side. She was six, she would have been pretty if she hadn’t been an idiot. She danced in the ward, the nurses permitted it. I admit it was pleasing to see her dancing. She called me Daddy. She seemed to like me. On the same evening that she was to be given her dose I picked her up and bounced her on my knee. I know now that I should never have done so. The nurses were amazed because I had never taken a personal interest in any of my subjects. The child laughed, she shrieked at me, “Go on, Daddy!” I didn’t understand myself, but I continued. Then she had to go to bed and we carried out the procedure. In the morning I certified her death. In the evening I went to my room and I saw her eyes looking at me. Later, all the other eyes came to torment me. And they have made me suffer till this moment.’

  Otto laughed bitterly. He stood up and went to the desk and picked up the picture of Hitler that Ida had laid on its face. ‘We failed him,’ he said. ‘All of us. We hadn’t the strength or the resolve to live up to his vision. We couldn’t be hard enough. For all they had been outlawed, we still fell prey to ideas about humanity, compassion, the rights of the individual. But what about the right of a people to exist, what joy is there for any individual when the people is decaying from within? And we were undermined by sentimentality.’

  ‘You mean mother-love,’ said Ida, still holding Effi’s hand ti
ght.

  ‘What you call mother-love is the perverted love of a perverted woman, a self-confessed Jew-lover. Admit it,’ said Otto, ‘when you couldn’t corrupt German stock by producing wretched mongrel offspring, you tried to keep alive a monstrosity who should have been killed at birth. We should have killed so many more people. When the Führer came to power in 1933 we should have been ruthless.’

  ‘What do you mean,’ said Effi, ‘you didn’t kill enough people?’ It was too late to be careful. ‘I thought you killed plenty. And the Jews in Russia, and the Russians, how many of those did you kill?’

  ‘Not enough to finish the job,’ said Otto. He got his gun out and swung it round his finger by the trigger. She ought to be really scared now, and yet she wasn’t. There was something going on that had to be finished. She was cold, that was all.

  Old Ida took her hand out of Effi’s and put it to her throat. ‘Is it true, then, about those camps? Where thousands of Jews were gassed?’

  ‘Of course it’s true,’ said Otto, impatiently, as if it wasn’t important. But it was important – they’d discussed it once, Pierre and Aunt Annelie and Effi, and Aunt Annelie had said, ‘It has to be a rumour. Even the Nazis wouldn’t do anything so horrible.’

  Effi felt giddy and sick.

  ‘My Felix,’ said Ida. There was anguish in her voice. ‘Did they gas him to death in Poland? I should have married him. We could have gone abroad together.’

  ‘Mother?’ asked Magda. ‘I wouldn’t have been born. Or Hans.’

  ‘Oh, God,’ said Ida, ‘it’s all so difficult.’ She started to cry.

  Effi passed her a damask napkin, but it was too hard. The old dame needed a soft handkerchief to comfort her. Or maybe nothing would comfort her. But supposing her boyfriend had gone abroad and been friendly with Mama and Papa?

  ‘What was Felix’s surname? Did he get famous?’ she asked again.

  Ida said, ‘I don’t know if he became famous. I never heard about it if he did.’

  Otto broke in: ‘We should have killed this boy’s father.’ He was staring at Hanno. ‘All right, boy, you wanted to know this. In 1930 your father and I were both second lieutenants and I was the secretary of the Nazi Officers’ Association. I invited your father to join us and work for our national renewal. He wouldn’t. He belonged to a filthy leftist police union. The Schrader League it was called.’ Otto bit his lip. ‘Frisch laughed in my face – I hope you’re right, boy, and he’s really dead. Or else he’d be laughing again now. He said he couldn’t understand how any policeman could be a National Socialist, I’d never get promotion that way, he said, the Nazis were a disorderly rabble, he’d treat them fairly if he had to break up one of their demonstrations, and that was all he’d do for the Nazis. That was when Prussia was ruled by the Social Democratic swine, so Frisch soon got promotion himself, to first lieutenant. That was how you got promotion in those days, by being a leftist. Then one evening I was out with some friends and we met Sternberg’s deputy to the Reichstag. He was a filthy Social Democrat. We cornered him and kicked the living daylights out of him. Who should happen along but Frisch? He arrested me. I was demoted to sergeant – lucky to keep my job, the tribunal told me. Only three years later the Führer was in power. Suddenly I was the most important man in the Sternberg police station.’

  ‘And making the most of it,’ said old Ida. Her voice was harsh.

  ‘Why not? Hadn’t I suffered? But now the Schrader League had been disbanded. Frisch was out in the cold. The Party was passing a law to get politically unreliable people out of public service. So he thought he’d make himself safe by joining our Officers’ Association after all. He got one of our members to put his name forward. I opposed it, but they overruled me, because your father, the rat, had a way of sneaking himself into his comrades’ good graces.’

  ‘You mean he was a good comrade,’ said Hanno angrily.

  ‘I denounced him. Leftists like him were a danger to the Reich and we prosecuted him under the new law.’

  In the same harsh voice, old Ida said, ‘Those were frightening days, lad. The storm troopers were coming round to get whoever they liked and killing them in their concentration camps. Most people said it was good to get rid of the Communists. Because of all the battles there’d been on the streets between the Communists and the Nazis. I wasn’t sure it was a good thing to be left with the Nazis. But I kept my mouth shut.’ She was shivering even more violently now. ‘Because I was afraid. And we had a hotel to run and Party high-ups were coming to stay there. And I had two children to consider, dear God, I had two children. I never even asked where Dr Steinberg had gone.’

  Otto said, ‘They were good days. Frisch was found guilty. On good evidence, too. I was on the commission that judged him. We got information from one of the other filthy leftists.’

  ‘What?’ said Effi. She’d never have thought she’d feel sorry for a policeman. ‘You denounced and judged him? And what did you do to the other man to get him to confess?’

  Otto ignored her. ‘Bernhard Frisch’s career was on the scrapheap. And he was an ambitious rat, he’d thought he was really going somewhere, first lieutenant already at thirty-four. But the ruling on people like him was that they’d be put out to grass at some little village police station. They’d never get promotion.’

  ‘But it would never have come to that,’ said Effi. ‘Would it? You’d have sent the storm troopers round to get him.’

  ‘I wish I’d had the chance,’ said Otto. ‘Everything seemed to be pointing in that direction. I said to Frisch: ‘If you want a widow’s pension for your wife, the best thing you can do is go and shoot yourself.’ I don’t know if he ever got his gun out, probably he was too big a coward, because he sent your mother to go and bat her eyelashes at a bigwig who’d got connections in Berlin. Fontane, he was called. She was a pretty little thing, I’ve often wondered what favours she did Fontane to save your father. Half an hour’s work on her back probably swung it.’

  Hanno was white in the face. ‘You swine,’ he shouted. ‘You swine!’

  He launched himself at Otto. Oh, God, thought Effi. Otto’s going to get his gun out and kill him.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Hanno wasn’t thinking about the gun when he hit out at Otto; when he remembered it he was already hunched together, coming at Otto. It was too late to draw back.

  Otto had hold of the gun’s handle, his finger was closing on the trigger. Hanno brought his arm round, a good strong punch, and managed to send the gun flying. He didn’t see what happened to it, because Otto put his fists up and started to fight in earnest.

  He was bigger and stronger than Hanno, but drunk. Also it wasn’t always bad to be smaller than your opponent. Angry though Hanno was, a cold, clear voice in his head reminded him of the upward jab he’d once used on big Willim in the playground. You pushed into the punch from your feet and legs. His fist went into Otto’s chin from underneath.

  Now Otto was furious because Hanno had hit him twice. Something made Hanno fake a punch to the right. Otto lashed out to protect himself and now Hanno got him in the belly on the left. No boxing rules here. Otto teetered, shouted; he was tearing at Hanno’s hair. Hanno butted him. Otto had his arms round him. There was a crash of plates going flying. Hanno heard the old woman cry out as they hit the floor together, Otto’s weight on top of him, Otto’s quick breaths coming close and hot in his ears. And as he struggled underneath Otto Hanno knew, somehow, that Effi had the gun. But she mustn’t use it, he thought. I don’t want to be rescued. I want to fight him myself, to the end.

  Otto’s hands were coming round his neck, wanting to throttle him. There was all of Otto’s weight on top of him, and his drunk breath in Hanno’s face. Hanno pushed his hands into Otto’s face, feeling the hardness of his cheekbones, shoving his thumbs upwards into the eye sockets. He found Otto’s eyeballs, and though he was fighting and retching for breath he dug into them as hard as he could. Otto shouted. His hands were off Hanno’s throat, he was sh
oving against Hanno’s hands. Hanno wriggled, reached out with his foot and found the edge of the desk. He pushed against it, using it as leverage to heave himself and Otto over. Otto’s bloodshot eyes were staring into his, but his hands were on Hanno’s face, he was trying the thumbs-in-eyes trick now. Hanno turned his mouth round and bit his hand. Hard. Otto yelped. He punched Hanno in the mouth with his other hand. Hanno had a mouth full of blood, but he kept struggling, down on the floor with Otto. Then Otto kneed him in the stomach, pushed him away, and was on his feet while Hanno’s belly fought for breath. Otto kicked at Hanno: Hanno rolled away, only copping half the kick. The next minute he was up on one knee, then on his feet before Otto could take another step and kick him again. But he was tired and winded, he only had his anger to keep him going. He zigzagged away from Otto. ‘Coward,’ he said in what was meant to be a shout, but he didn’t have the breath to shout, so it came out like a half-sob. ‘You ran away from the fighting. Coward. Coward.’

  Otto didn’t answer, but came after Hanno with his fists clenched. Hanno ducked away from the punch. Otto’s punch went into the air and he all but toppled. He got his balance back and came after Hanno again. Hanno went backwards. Then he felt the two walls behind his shoulders. Otto had him in a corner. I’m a fool, he thought, and, Where’s Wolfgang? But he was fighting alone, Wolfgang couldn’t come to back him up now.

  The next second Otto was punching at him again: it was meant to get his stomach, but Hanno managed to dodge sideways and it caught his hip instead. Now Otto went for his head. Hanno just fought off the punch, and then the cold, clear voice was talking in his head again – use his own strength against him, it said. You did that to big Willim, too, remember? Keep your eyes on his fists.