The Auslander

by Paul Dowswell

  Segur was lying in his bed, black and blue with bruises. ‘What on earth happened to you?’ said Peter.

  ‘A gang of Polack street cleaners,’ he said. ‘Or maybe they were Ukrainians. They just turned on me for no reason.’

  ‘Gerhart, you must report this,’ said his mother.

  ‘I will. I will,’ he said. ‘Just as soon as I can stand up without wincing.’

  She left to prepare them coffee and cakes. Segur beckoned Peter to lean closer. ‘They beat me, God in heaven they beat me,’ he whispered. ‘They got me in a shop doorway and kicked the shit out of me. I couldn’t move. But the stupid bastards left me there. Rounded up the rest. Left me. I saw them bundle about fifteen of them into a lorry. Who knows what will happen to them. When I saw what they were doing, I just curled up into the shadows and hoped they’d forget me.’

  ‘Did any of them know you?’ said Peter.

  ‘Only by my first name. It’s better that way, isn’t it.’

  ‘And what’s this about “Polacks” and Ukrainians?’ said Peter. ‘If the police follow that up, there’ll be random punishments. Even executions.’

  ‘I didn’t think of that,’ said Segur. ‘I’ll say you’re going to report the crime. I don’t want her to.’

  Peter went along with this. He assured Frau Segur that he would go at once to the police station with a report of exactly what had happened. Gerhart had given him a good description, he said. The police would find the culprits.

  ‘Slav scum,’ said Frau Segur. ‘We give them work and food and spare their miserable lives and what do they do to thank us?’

  Peter felt indignant but he had learned to hold his tongue. There were too many people like Frau Segur in the world. He cycled home feeling elated. They were safe. They would not be getting an early morning knock at the door. He went at once to the Reiters’ and banged impatiently on the door. Frau Reiter answered.

  ‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said coldly.

  ‘Can I see Anna, please?’

  ‘Anna is not at home.’

  ‘Can you tell her Segur is all right. I’ll tell her more when I see her.’

  ‘You won’t,’ said Frau Reiter. ‘We have decided you and Anna will not be seeing each other any more. But thank you for your message. Goodbye, Peter.’

  The door closed with a firm and decisive click.

  .

  CHAPTER 19

  November 1942

  .

  Peter saw Anna in the library two days later. She sat the other side of the reading room and pretended not to see him. He felt hurt, angry even, and buried himself in his studies. After ten minutes or so, he was vaguely aware of someone passing close by his desk. By the time he looked up she was walking back to the far side of the room but a little folded piece of paper lay tucked under one of his books.

  .

  Meet me outside. Five minutes.

  Ax

  .

  It was one of those rainy, cold autumn evenings, when the threat of winter hung heavy in the air. Anna carried a large umbrella and she beckoned him to stand underneath it with her. They kissed and walked off together arm in arm – the umbrella held low to hide their faces.

  ‘Frau Schrader here, she knows Mutter. I don’t want her telling on us.’

  Anna never called her mother ‘Mutter’. She’s angry with her, thought Peter. Good. He was worried she’d be angry with him.

  ‘Your mother,’ said Peter, ‘she said I was not to see you.’

  Anna blew an exasperated stream of air through her lips. ‘Yes, we really messed things up going to that dance. But never mind. It will blow over. Let’s be careful for the next month or so. Look, I’ll talk to them after they’ve calmed down a bit. But let’s not antagonise them by meeting up like this. It’ll just make . . .’

  Mid-conversation, two policemen grabbed them either side, abruptly flipping the umbrella away from their faces. ‘Papers,’ demanded one of the men in a voice so menacing neither Peter nor Anna dared protest.

  They produced their identity cards and waited, rain falling down their faces. Peter hoped the men had not overheard anything of their conversation.

  ‘Good,’ said one of the policemen, as he handed back the cards. The other laughed. ‘It’s usually the U-boats who are so keen for everyone not to see them. On your way.’

  Both of them were shaken by the incident. ‘What did he mean?’ said Peter. ‘U-boats?’

  ‘It’s what the Jews in hiding call themselves,’ said Anna. ‘When they get their summons, for “relocation in the east” – the shrewd ones know what it means, and they go into hiding.’

  Peter was all ears. She was being very indiscreet.

  ‘I wouldn’t expect a policeman to use the same term.’

  Peter wondered how she knew all this. ‘And what does “relocation in the east” really mean?’ he asked cautiously.

  She sighed deeply, shaking her head. ‘I don’t know,’ she said defensively. ‘I’m sorry, Peter. We can’t go on talking about this. It’s too dangerous.’

  She kissed him tenderly on the cheek and then ran off down the street. The more the rain soaked into his clothes, the more bewildered he felt.

  .

  Peter had always enjoyed the autumn. The crisp cold, the frost and mist, tattered trees silhouetted against sharp blue skies. Despite the coming winter, October and November always filled him with hope for the future. He supposed it was because the school year started in the autumn. Then there was Christmas to look forward to, and after that, the promise of spring.

  But this year was different. Everyone felt it. The Russians had still not given in. The Americans were over in England, building up their forces. The constant parade of victories that Hitler had presented to the German people had come to a halt. Still, at least in the Caucasus – in the deep south of the Soviet Union – the German Sixth Army were making progress. German and Japanese forces would soon meet up in India. Paulus’s troops were within a whisker of taking Stalingrad.

  That’s what the newspapers said. Before they fell out, Ula Reiter had told him her magazine had been sent a press release announcing the fall of the city with the proviso ‘Hold until authorisation from Reich Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda’ at the bottom of the page. That authorisation never came.

  There was something titanic going on in Stalingrad. Traudl was one of the many squads of BDM girls sent to greet injured soldiers from the east at the railway stations. She brought bunches of wild flowers to wounded men in the military hospitals and wrote letters for the ones who were too ill or injured to write themselves. When Peter asked her about it, he expected her to trot out a cheerful line about Germany’s inevitable victory. But instead she shook her head and looked troubled. ‘There are so many of them . . .’ She wouldn’t tell him any more.

  .

  Peter missed Anna keenly, especially as Segur had been keeping his distance too. The beating seemed to have knocked the spirit out of him. He no longer made those wisecrack put-downs that Peter liked so much. Segur and Anna especially were his safety valve. He could talk to them about anything, which made everything seem a little more bearable. Without them, he had these awful dreams, of standing up in class, or at the HJ meetings, and saying all the wrong things.

  Frau Kaltenbach noticed the change in him. ‘That lovely girl, Anna. Have you fallen out?’ she said to him one day in the kitchen, as he peeled potatoes in the sink.

  Peter lied badly. ‘Yes. A bit. It was getting a bit too serious. I wanted to spend more time with my friends.’

  Frau Kaltenbach laughed. ‘She dumped you, didn’t she? You’ve been looking really glum.’

  It was not a cruel laugh, and Peter was pleased that she was offering him a little sympathy.

  ‘Well, that’s her lookout. She’ll have to go a long way to find as fine a looking boy as you.’

  Peter blushed. He really wanted to talk about something else.

  .

  It was only in early Dece
mber that Anna finally got back in touch. Since the hurried exchange outside the library, they had seen each other in the street only once or twice, and just once more at the library, although he had often gone there hoping to see her. She had always avoided him. Not even a wave or a smile. It had begun to worry him.

  But one day, walking home from school, she had come up to him and slipped an arm in his. Bold as anything. ‘I was right,’ she said with a grin. ‘They relented. Mutti said “I can’t bear to see you looking so glum. If you want to see Peter, see him. But no more dances. Nothing silly and dangerous.”

  ‘That means no more listening to the radio either. If we get caught doing anything by them, then they’ll probably send me to a convent to keep me out of mischief!’

  Three days later, she turned up on the Kaltenbachs’ doorstep. Her eyes were red from crying. ‘It’s Stefan,’ she said. ‘He’s back in Berlin.’

  ‘Well, that’s good, isn’t it?’ said Peter. Anna had often talked about her brother and how worried she was about him fighting out in Ostland.

  She shook her head. ‘He’s in a military hospital in Charlottenburg. He’s been badly wounded in Stalingrad. Vati thinks he might lose a leg. Come with me to see him. I don’t want to go on my own.’

  .

  They went the next day, taking the U-Bahn from the Zoological Garden. Anna told Peter all she knew on the way, and he strained to hear her over the clatter of the wheels on the track. ‘He’s been evacuated from within der Kessel – that’s what they call it – the cauldron.’

  Stalingrad had been in the news a lot. The Sixth Army had almost conquered the city, but now they were surrounded by Soviet troops and fighting for their lives.

  Even Peter’s Hitler-Jugend magazines did not attempt to hide the difficulties facing the troops there. In the sketched illustrations that accompanied the articles, soldiers were shown wrapped in scarves and winter clothing, surrounded by snow and often wounded. They projected an air of heroic defiance, but they were also unshaven and looked close to exhaustion. If that’s what they’re showing us, thought Peter, what must it really be like? He thought of the HJ boys who longed to join the military, almost desperate to fight. This would not be what they had in mind.

  The corridors of the hospital were unsettling. Relatives, grimly silent, sat in chairs beneath frosted windows. Patients without limbs hobbled by on crutches, nurses and doctors hurried anxiously between wards. Although an eerie quiet hung over the building, the place was bursting at the seams.

  Stefan was in a ward with about twenty other men. All of them were badly wounded. Peter guessed this because, although it was visiting time and almost every man had a cluster around his bed, they were all talking in whispers.

  The smell of the place, sharp antiseptic and bleach that caught in his throat and nostrils, almost masked another sweetly putrid stench. But not quite. Peter’s first reaction was to flee. He thought he was going to be sick.

  When Stefan smiled, which he did with some difficulty, Peter could see what a handsome fellow he was. You could tell they were related, he and Anna.

  ‘So you are Peter!’ said Stefan, and slowly moved a hand out to shake his. There was no ‘Heiling’ with him.

  ‘I can barely move, mein Liebling,’ Stefan said weakly, when Anna tried to kiss him. ‘My leg’s got a piece of shrapnel in it and it’s badly infected.’

  She leaned forward, placing her hand on the bed to steady herself. Stefan stifled a scream, as the bedding pressed against his injury. Anna jumped back at once, embarrassed by her clumsiness.

  They sat down and leaned as close as they could, listening hard to hear his story.

  ‘I was lucky to get out,’ Stefan said in a low voice. ‘The airfields round Stalingrad are a disaster. Planes crash every day trying to fly in and out in the snow. And they’re under constant bombardment from the Ivans. The walking wounded at the field hospitals around the airbases, they’re so desperate to get out they’ll cling to the wing of a taxiing Ju 52 until they’re swept away by the slipstream . . .’

  He winced at the memory.

  ‘Don’t trouble yourself, Stefan. Just rest,’ said Anna. ‘We’ll stay here and keep you company.’

  ‘No. Hear me out. I have to tell you,’ he said.

  ‘So, what happened?’ said Peter.

  Stefan leaned forward and told them in a low whisper.

  ‘We had our headquarters close to the riverbank. A bombardment came out of the blue, prolonged and intense. We were amazed the Ivans still had that much strength in them. Eventually it stopped. That was the most frightening silence I ever heard in my life . . . then we heard the sound of tanks firing up their engines. Tanks – almost on top of us. They must have come up during the bombardment when we couldn’t hear them. It was terrifying. We were trapped in this factory. I can still see it all. The broken bricks and twisted steel rods, and stairs covered in blood and dust and God knows what kind of human remains . . .’

  He stopped while one of the nurses walked past. ‘They told us not to tell people what it was like. But I spent my military career gathering intelligence. Now I’m passing it on to you, so you can know the truth. Because I don’t think they’re going to be telling the German people what’s really happening . . .

  ‘I still see it in my nightmares. That stairwell, leading to the floor above. They were there, right above our heads, the Ivans. In my dreams I have to climb that staircase to find out what lies behind the turn on the landing. Or sometimes I’m there, trapped in the workshop while the Ivans tumble down, throwing grenades before them, and it’s me lying there on the filthy floor with my guts hanging out.

  ‘We all thought we’d won. General Paulus. He’d even done rough sketches of the campaign victory medal . . . We’d taken almost all of the city. But they held on by their fingernails . . . they’re going to hold on until they’ve driven us out of their land.’

  He slumped back. Unburdening himself had wearied him.

  He didn’t speak for a while, then he tried to sit up. He beckoned them closer and spoke again.

  ‘Now we’re like a man who has grabbed a wolf by the ears and daren’t let go. This whole campaign, it’s been a magnificent disaster. How extraordinary. To take an army from the Reich to the very gates of Asia. It was an incredible achievement . . . But you know, in the early days, when we first arrived, many of the peasants welcomed us as liberators. They came out, the girls in their national dress, all smiles, throwing flowers, offering us bread, holding up their crosses and icons. We were liberating them from Stalin and the Godless Bolsheviks. But they soon found out we were much worse. All this Untermensch nonsense. It was madness treating people so badly – so of course they just turned against us. It’s like a fairy tale . . . it’s so obvious.

  ‘I was glad to be posted to the front. At the rear, you never know when you’re going to be killed. The partisans attack out of nowhere. And whenever they do, we round up and kill entire villages in retaliation. Hundreds . . . thousands, slaughtered like insects. That just drives even more of them into the forests to fight against us. At the front, at least you know who and where the enemy is. And you don’t have to concern yourself with the slaughter of innocent civilians.’

  He reached out a hand to Anna. ‘You carry on doing what you’re doing,’ he whispered, just loud enough for Peter to hear him. She looked startled, panic in her eyes.

  ‘Hush now, Stefan, you’ll wear yourself to a frazzle.’

  He turned to Peter. ‘She’s a good girl. You look after her.’

  ‘We must go,’ said Anna. She seemed anxious to get away.

  On the U-bahn home the carriage was half empty. Peter could not wait any longer. ‘Anna, what is it you do?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she said quickly. ‘Stefan was delirious, Peter.’ She held on to his arm.

  .

  Anna didn’t take Peter to see Stefan again, which disappointed him as he wanted to go. Whenever he brought it up, she just brushed it aside. ‘Stefan needs peace an
d quiet.’

  Peter still asked about Stefan, of course, and in the week before Christmas Anna had some very good news. ‘He’s doing a lot better now. His leg is healing, so he’s not going to lose it. I thought he’d spend the rest of his life hobbling around on crutches. We’re all so grateful to the hospital staff. He says they’ve told him he’ll always have a limp though, and will have to walk with a stick. But that’s better than we expected. I had hoped he would be invalided out, but he thinks they’ll send him back to his unit.’

  ‘Surely they don’t expect him to fight?’ said Peter.

  ‘No. He’ll be working at headquarters. So that’s good. He won’t be on the front line. Maybe he’ll survive the war after all.’

  .

  CHAPTER 20

  January 16, 1943

  .

  When Peter first arrived in Berlin, the Kaltenbach girls had told him excitedly of the air raids they had witnessed. ‘Feeble little bombers. Mainly the RAF,’ said Traudl. ‘The Ivans sent some bombers over too, just before you arrived, but we shot them all down. I saw one of them crash! I don’t think they’ll be back.’

  Professor Kaltenbach had always reassured his family that they were safe in their city. The Soviet front line stretched from Leningrad and Moscow down to the Caucasus, he reminded them. No Soviet bombers could fly that distance. The British were nearer, he conceded. But they seemed reluctant to venture as far as Berlin. The towns and cities to the west had seen some raids but, so far, the Luftwaffe and anti-aircraft defences around the capital were formidable enough to keep them away.

  But that did not stop the authorities preparing for the worst. In the last year the air-raid sirens had gone off nine times, but nothing had happened. ‘Just testing them out, I imagine,’ the Professor said.

  But soon after New Year, the British took the city completely by surprise.

  The Kaltenbachs were all in bed and the sirens only sounded when the bombers were over the city. Peter was deep in sleep and at first the rising and falling wailing seemed part of a strange dream. Then Herr Kaltenbach burst into his bedroom to shake him awake. ‘Hurry, Peter,’ he said. ‘Get dressed. It’s too cold for just a dressing gown. This is a strange time to have a drill, I must say.’ But he had barely uttered the words when a distant whistling was followed by explosions loud enough to rattle the windows. Charlotte began to cry and her mother hushed her with a sharp slap on the leg.