As he made his way through the ruins and the smouldering city he kept looking out for toppling walls and mortar battered by the nightly raids, cupping his nose and mouth intermittently to protect himself from the billowing acrid smoke: pyres of human and horse flesh set alight to stem the spread of disease. There was hardly enough time between raids to collect the dying, let alone the dead. No time to grieve. No time to dignify them by whispering a hurried prayer over their mangled corpses.
He wanted to pause and feel the intense pain that the annihilation of his beloved city wrought on him. But there was no time even for that.
He staggered over the rubble on what used to be pavements, watching the ambulances and the fire trucks lurch by, their sirens more mournful than urgent. Every so often they would stop momentarily and then continue on, overwhelmed.
Between the corpses and the walking dead, soldiers shuffled in an absent daze, wondering what happened to the Great Reich: the Thousand-Year Reich that had been cut short so abjectly and abruptly. Squeezed in a merciless vice by the Russians to the east, and the Allies pushing through the Ardennes to the west.
Helmut no longer allowed Anna to leave the house. He tutored her in the evenings. Magda still went out on occasion, beaming with feigned confidence that the Reich’s armies would prevail. She had heard through friends that a General Wenck was retreating to retaliate. Hitler had ordered him to protect Berlin by any means.
Helmut did not bother arguing that Hitler and his delusional high command could issue whatever orders they wanted from the Führerbunker. The reality was that the momentum had irrevocably shifted: Germany was in retreat, and the Allies and Russians were on the offensive. It was only a matter of time before Germany would be forced to capitulate; the only question was, how long?
The longer it went on, the greater the carnage and the potential peril to Helmut’s family.
He had not heard back from Martin, which in this climate could be construed either way - there was just no way of knowing. He could only hope that they both made it safely across the border to Zurich. Helmut wished that he had had the prescience to ask Martin to take Anna as well. At least she might survive and have a life after this madness ended. But he knew that even for an officer of Martin’s rank, ferrying two girls across the border would have been too risky. He mightn’t get either through, and the danger to Ruth was much greater. So Anna had to face the risk of Germany’s destruction and inevitable capitulation.
Magda was just relieved that Ruth was gone. She didn’t ask whether there was any word from Martin. Anna simply said that her friend had gone away to be safe. Magda frostily agreed; “Good - we can be safe now, as well.”
While Helmut felt bolder in his defiance of the Nazi regime, now that it was on the retreat and facing a final and punishing defeat and demise, he also knew that should he vocalise his views openly, he would be placing himself in grave danger. Desperate people, such as those that still clung to the current regime, would act impetuously, figuring that they had nothing to lose.
Especially the SS troops, whose fate would be dire once the Nazi rule collapsed: patrolling the rubble-strewn streets, exhorting the weary and shell-shocked Wehrmacht soldiers back into battle and certain death. They would not hesitate to pull their pistols and shoot. Anybody. They wouldn’t even ask for papers.
Life became cheap when there was so much death and destruction around.
So Helmut kept to himself, his anger smouldering inside of him, his rage directed at the lunatic corporal who kept on issuing orders to phantom armies instead of trying to save what was left from the onslaught that rained daily over Germany.
By the time he made it to the university grounds he was inclined to be grateful to some deity that had spared his life for another day, if for nothing else than to witness the abject capitulation of the Nazis.
At times Helmut was tempted to call his cousin again, who had since risen to the rank of Oberkommando der Wehrmacht in the Third Reich, but each time he refrained. He doubted Alfred could reveal anything substantive without imperilling them both, ultimately not shedding any new light. But even a tiny morsel would be more than the vacuous propaganda spewed by Goebbels’ diatribes and Streicher’s vituperative Der Stürmer.
Helmut remained reluctant: on the one hand he believed that Alfred - principled, ambitious, loyal, a man of honour - would not sit well with the excesses of the Third Reich. The favour that Alfred granted some years ago had proved Helmut right: family traits prevailed above all. Yet the halcyon days of the Thousand-Year Reich were pulverising to dust. Would Alfred be as magnanimous in this climate of defeat, treachery and desperation?
Added to this was the fear that the Gestapo would intensify their eavesdropping scope and efforts to include the Nazi elite in the aftermath of the Schwarze Kapelle; a plot in which a group of high-ranking German officers and commanders conspired to assassinate Hitler, resulting in the execution of some five thousand co-conspirators. A frank conversation between two cousins on the dire status of the Reich would mete out a similar fate to Alfred Jodl, regardless of his rank, and without a second thought to his cousin Helmut, given his penchant for being a burr in the side of the Third Reich.
It couldn’t be denied that the smell of capitulation was in the air: the unopposed nightly raids, the exhortation to phantom armies, and the strident tenor of the propaganda that was beginning to sound more hysterical than lyrical. But even a regime on the brink could last a while by sacrificing every able-bodied and even infirm person in the Reich to rise to the defence of Hitler’s ideals: young, old, even women.
Helmut needed to know how far from the edge; how imminent the demise: days, weeks, months - surely not years? He could ask Martin when he returned, but he was an official engulfed in the same fog of propaganda drivel that Helmut and the rest of the nation were subjected to.
But Alfred would know.
If the answer came back that the regime was tottering on the edge of collapse, maybe Helmut could be encouraged to shift his effort from passive to active. If, on the other hand, it was a matter of months, then maybe it was time to flee the Reich before the unrelenting onslaught killed them all.
He had to take the risk. He called his uncle. He would know how to reach his son Alfred without stirring the tentacles of the Gestapo.
MASCOT, SYDNEY
WINTER 1986
The nondescript two-bedroom house lay two hundred metres from the street, bordered by a manicured hibiscus hedge, a small patch of lawn, and a petunia and bougainvillea flower bed flush against the small patio. In its heyday it was referred to as a small English cottage, but nowadays it was just a dilapidated small house, disadvantaged by bordering onto a busy street and without parking.
The owner, when she first came to Sydney from Germany more than half a century ago, had thought the suburb quaint and quiet. Particularly this street. Yet with the passage of time the street had turned into a busy byway from the airport to every other suburb. It had missed by little distance the middleclass suburban status accorded the nearby suburbs of Eastlakes, Kingswood and Pagewood. Mascot aged ungracefully into a lower middle class.
Most new tenants who came to live here bought into small plots and tore down the dilapidated cottages, replacing them with two-storey houses with the de rigueur parking taking over the small patches of front lawn and hedges. Helga Dreschler didn’t drive, so the lack of parking did not figure in her decision. Back then it wasn’t even a consideration. Few people in Sydney’s inner suburbs owned vehicles - or if they did, parking on the street was plentiful.
Either way, by the time her place sold she would be dead and the proceeds would go to her chosen inheritor: the German Lutheran Church in Sydney. Until then she continued to live, driven not by the fear of death as some were at her age, or the love of close family - she had none - but vengeance. A single purpose driving her determination to seek out and have her revenge on the one person that she held responsible for destroying her life and cheating her out of her fate.
AUSCHWITZ
WINTER 1944
The doors on the boxcar slide open front and back and soldiers with bayonets prod us to the sodden ground from behind. We tumble like sacks of grain, no one has the strength to clamber down. We land in puddles of slush, breaking our fall, with Heinrich stumbling and falling and Alana helping him stand up. In front of us is a wide wrought-iron archway with the words Arbeit Macht Frei wrought over the massive gates. On either side of the gates are tall barbedwire fences surrounding barrack-like buildings with watchtowers, guards, dogs, and armed German soldiers ordering us into a snaking queue parallel to the width of the boxcar, four deep.
Wizened though I am for my years, I come to the instinctive realisation that the nightmare that I thought had ended, has actually just begun.
A German officer on horseback trots to where we are standing and looks down at us with loathing as though we are a herd of diseased cattle. He yells a command to his left and three soldiers come running from inside the gates. He begins issuing directions to each of us individually.
I am close to the front of the queue. I steal a glance sideways, astonished at the number of people that have been compacted with me for three days. As the queue starts to move forward I quickly notice that the older members of the group are instructed to go straight ahead, the younger men to the left and the rest of us to the right. When it is our turn at the front of the queue I am directed to the right. No instruction has been given to the Lipschutzes - they are directly behind me.
I muster a reserve of strength that I didn’t know I had, and in a voice hoarse from enduring three days without food or water I utter weakly up to the soldier monitoring the splitting of the queue, “I am not their daughter; they are not my parents.” I point to the Lipschutzes directly behind me.
He doesn’t respond. Instead he looks up at the officer mounted on the horse, who narrows his eyes quizzically. The soldier repeats what I said. The officer grins savagely at the soldier, who proceeds to approach me, reaching for the club holstered on his belt.
A large, burly man I haven’t noticed before, not part of our contingent, races over from the sidelines and grabs me, apologising obsequiously to the soldier and the officer in turn. He pulls me over to the procession on the right, having already passed the selection. Once we are out of earshot he kneels close to my ear and whispers, “Do not ever speak to them - he was going to beat you to death.”
I look back to see the Lipschutzes. They are not following me; instead they are trudging with the group going straight ahead. The showers, we are told. They look over at me, smile wanly, and that is the last I ever see of them. I know now that I am totally alone.
It is not that I felt a sense of attachment to Heinrich and Alana, despite having spent three days standing in their midst. But they were the last link I had to my old life that vanished in the demi-light of dawn. They were a crumb to help me find my way to Berlin, and from there trace my life back to Munich. I belong somewhere, even though my Oma let me go. There has to be a place left for me that will not disintegrate into nothingness once it becomes my home.
On this cold, overcast, blustery day we pass underneath the looming iron gate, abandoning a life that we once knew. Even though the last three days are hardly ones to yearn for wistfully, they were our last vestige of a time when we were theoretically free, before we were dragged from the warmth of our beds, before we were thrust into a cattle boxcar in numbers three to four times the ordained capacity, and before we were subjected to the cold terror presaging our eventual fate. With the first few tentative steps a life that once belonged to us as individuals is taken from us. We become a mass, a multitude, treated as such as the women in our group are herded into Barrack C. Despite the dismally dark, dank and stark circumstances that greet us as we walk in, I am not repulsed. The train journey experience was a preamble that emotionally inured me to this.
In here the women are arrayed on pallets four high, with a dozen bodies lying across each row head to toe. The occupants study us with the vacant, sunken eyes of doomed beings. They are dressed in threadbare, sack-like outfits that are meant to replace dresses, a further attempt to denude us of any trace of the individualism that marks us as people. I am directed to a pallet three high from the ground. I crawl in and try to squeeze in among the bodies there. I find a wedge and force myself in. Courtesy is not a useful attribute here.
Beyond the immediate stench there is a generalised burning smell that pervades the entire camp: acrid, dense and constant. Through the slats that look out onto the yard directly in front of me, I don’t see a fire. But off in the distance there is a massive smokestack, and it is billowing; what are they burning? Our clothes, our luggage, our possessions, the dead who expired in transit, or some unknown thing that I am yet to discover? I mysteriously arrived carrying nothing.
I lie back on the wooden slat in the space that I claimed for myself and close my eyes. I try to wonder what will happen to me. Then I feel a tap on my shoulder. I jolt upright and look to my right. A shrivelled hand belonging to a woman who must still be young, but has aged through the experience of the inhuman conditions that pervade the camp: exhaustion, starvation, terror; the boxcar was a prelude to this. She is speaking to me in a language that I have never heard before. I shake my head. This time she speaks in accented German.
“Where are you from?”
“Munich,” I reply, and fall back onto my wooden pillow. I am not feeling particularly chatty.
“I am from Budapest.”
I say nothing.
“I didn’t want you to fall asleep. There will be a roll call in a few hours.”
I still do not reply. But I wonder about the roll call. It is probably another obsessive preoccupation with numbers: The corpse stays on the train. Otherwise the body count will be short. So what? I fail to understand this; it’s not like they care if we live or die. So what if the count is short?
It must be that they keep a register of all people arriving at the camps and match it against the numbers deported. It is simply accounting for stock. We are herds of undesirable people. I recall again the reference to Jews. But is it just Jews in here, or are there others? Again I think of how I am going to speak out without getting clubbed to death.
“People who come from transport fall asleep and they miss roll call. If you are absent they will kill you.”
No doubt, I think to myself. And then you are transferred from the register of the imprisoned to the register of the dead. But the total count is correct.
I might be able to learn something from this woman - at the very least I won’t be beaten to death.
I open my eyes, rising up on my elbow. “Are you a Jew?”
She looks at me like I am an idiot. “Of course.”
I fall back again. What if Oma lied? About everything - not just about my father being killed by communists or Jews, but the whole pretence about him being a Hitler supporter, a loyalist to the Nazi Party, letting me wear the Hitlerjugend uniform, the nightly broadcasts? I know Oma was displeased with the latter; her face always turned sour at the sound of Hitler’s voice. Yet, she crossed herself twice a day, went to church, and there were crosses all over the house. I distinctly recall that she prayed with a Bible with the imprint of the cross on it.
Was that all a subterfuge as well, an attempt to cover up her Judaism, so that we wouldn’t get deported? Yet my aunt in Berlin, Magda, she is definitely not a Jew. She didn’t bother with any pretence.
Ultimately I ended up with the Lipschutzes. They are Jews. What if I am a half-caste; my father was non-Jewish and my mother Jewish? That might be a possibility, and would explain why Aunt Magda was so disapproving of my arrival. No, that does not make sense - my mother was her cousin; the other way around it might be plausible. But then Father died for Hitler; but what if he didn’t die for Hitler, but because of Hitler?
I have to make some sense of this.
“You are not?” My pallet companion is interested in the same
thing that I am puzzling over.
Without rising to face her, I pose the question, “What if my father was killed by Hitler, but my mother is not Jewish?”
“Then you are not Jewish.” She sullenly leans back and loses interest in me.
That’s it for our budding friendship. I wait for roll call.
I manage to doze off for a short while. No dreams. Just the portentous sense that the rest of my foreseeable life is cast in darkness, and that each passing day, if I survive, will be a struggle to keep doing so. What ominous events might befall me, I don’t know, but with the abrogation of my freedom I have no choice but to face them. That is the horror of it - the inevitability of doom.
Roll call.
We are led outside by a group of burly women who are dressed akin to prisoners but carry a level of authority delegated by the uniformed Germans. I learn from one of the prisoners of the recent boxcar journey that they are called Kapos, and the one in charge Blockälteste, or block elder, who is in charge of our barrack. They are in effect prisoners presiding over other prisoners - namely us. I readily observe that their zealous level of cruelty exceeds that of their masters. You move too slow, you are clubbed; you move too fast, you are clubbed. You pause, you are kicked to the ground. Needless to say, if you fail to appear for roll call, as already advised, you are killed.
I stride per the convoy tempo.
We assemble in the yard abutting our barracks in quadrants. There, a total of about a thousand inmates are amassed in front of a dozen or so gallows arrayed with ropes hanging from their masts, a thick noose at the end of each one.
I stare, reflecting on my short life and wondering if, after all I have endured, I will be selected for one of these. I dare not ask the prisoner to my right. Her head and shoulder are swollen for providing me with the information about the Kapos and the Blockälteste.
THE MADNESS LOCKER Page 19