The Auslander

by Paul Dowswell

  ‘No time,’ said Kaltenbach. ‘Just grab a blanket.’

  The siren wail faded and instead they could all hear the distant drone of aircraft engines – there were scores of them by the sound of it.

  The family stumbled down the staircase to the basement, along with other sleepy residents of the block. Peter was surprised, but also a little amused, to see Frau Kaltenbach without her carefully applied make-up. She looked bilious and pasty, like someone who had been constipated for a week.

  The basement was locked and the block warden, Herr Schlosser, was nowhere to be seen.

  ‘Obviously, no one was expecting this,’ said Herr Kaltenbach. He seemed remarkably calm. Another stick of bombs whistled down, exploding somewhere to the west. Children started to cry, but not Charlotte. She was too frightened of her mother. Her father picked her up and told her what a brave girl she was.

  Schlosser came five minutes later. He was dressed and had obviously been somewhere else when the bombs started to fall. He pushed through the anxious residents with a belligerent swagger. Basement door unlocked, they hurried through to sit on the stone floor and wait.

  ‘I shall bring a cushion next time,’ said Kaltenbach with a smile. Charlotte and Traudl nestled under his arms, the three of them wrapped in one blanket. He really was brave, thought Peter, and he really loved his daughters. It was quite touching. He felt a twinge of envy for those girls. His own father had never hugged him like that. He was always formal and reserved.

  Now there were so many packed into the basement it was impossible to move from where they were sitting. It wasn’t as cold as they had feared, though. A lot of people close together generated heat.

  Two bare light bulbs lit the room and in the harsh glare Peter glanced at Elsbeth. She was looking sour – irritated at the disturbance rather than frightened. Frau Kaltenbach’s face was like a mask. He wondered what was going on inside her head. It was impossible to tell.

  Some of the other children started to play a game of ‘I see something that you don’t see’. They thought this was a great adventure. Their attitude was infectious. People began to chatter and crack jokes in a slightly hysterical way, like students before a big exam. The children got through Cobwebs, Dust and Broom before a huge explosion shook the building and the lights flickered, then failed. There was screaming, and an awful smell – someone somewhere had soiled themselves. It was so dark they could not see their hands in front of their faces.

  Schlosser called for silence. He sounded drunk. ‘Stay where you are. I shall get some candles.’

  As he opened the door another smell wafted in with a blast of cold night air. It was brick dust. In the distance more bombs fell. The aeroplanes could no longer be heard. What they did hear, though, was an ominous rattle that gathered pace and ended with a crash and clatter that went on for ages. That was a building collapsing. Peter wondered where. It was obviously quite near. Then, with terrible alarm, he realised it could be Anna’s apartment block.

  Schlosser returned with a couple of candles, and closed the door. ‘Sounds like they’re going,’ he announced. ‘But we shall stay here until the all clear.’

  Peter could see his bloated silhouette in the door frame. He was a great bear of a man with a formidable beer gut. Before Hitler came to power, Peter had heard him boast, he had been a standard bearer at Nazi rallies, marching through the Reds’ territory over in Wedding, north of the centre of the capital, spoiling for a fight. He loves Hitler so much, thought Peter, he even has a little Hitler moustache. And how he loves his little bit of power. Schlosser was not like the other residents. He was as rough as a block of wood.

  Anna’s parents knew of him too. He often told people he had been a Nazi since 1924. This was his reward, said Otto. A block warden for all these nobs – with his own little apartment and the power to tell these academics, civil servants and haughty hausfraus with their little dogs to put out their swastika flags and ‘Sieg Heil’ along with the rest of the nation.

  .

  They waited another tedious shivering hour before the all-clear siren sounded at 3 a.m. and everyone stumbled back to bed. Peter looked out of his window and could see nothing close to the apartment. He was still desperate to know if Anna was all right, but Kaltenbach had forbidden him to go outside. ‘You’ll just get in the way of the rescue people,’ he said. ‘Besides, you’ll be fit for nothing in the morning, if you don’t get some sleep.’

  At first light, the whole family crowded round the radio to listen to the news. Frau Kaltenbach even allowed them to sit in the living room to eat their breakfast, rather than round the dining table.

  The bombing of Berlin was third or fourth down the agenda. The report was entirely positive. The ‘terror bombers’, the newsreader said, had caused little damage apart from at the Deutschlandhalle, which was a couple of kilometres to the west of Wittenbergplatz. A circus had been performing to ten thousand people. All of them, and the animals, had been successfully evacuated, crowed the announcer, although the building itself had been damaged.

  Peter hurriedly finished his bread and coffee and asked Frau Kaltenbach if he could go and see what had happened so close to them. She nodded and he dashed down the stairs. Traudl wanted to go too, but her mother forbade it. ‘It might not be pretty,’ she said tersely.

  Peter ran out into the street to be blinded by the sharp winter sunshine. He just followed his nose, and, as he grew closer, he could see wisps of smoke from the still smouldering ruins. In the street next to theirs the devastation lay spread out before him and small fires still burned, both in the building and among the rubble. Anna’s apartment was the other way.

  There, on the cobbled street, he watched a burning grand piano with a detached fascination. As the flames ate into its glossy black frame, the tortured strings groaned and then snapped, the tinkly top notes first, then the fatter, lower ones. There was other debris too from last night’s air raid, spilled out from the ruined apartments on to the cobblestones: smouldering armchairs, shattered glass cabinets, books splayed open with their pages fluttering in the fierce winter wind . . .

  One whole building had collapsed. Next door to it, three of the top floors had tumbled to the street. The smell of ruptured gas pipes and drains mingled with charcoal and burned flesh. Charred bodies lay on the street awaiting identification, not yet covered. Some of the dead were barely marked. They, especially, had a terrible stillness about them. Only the hair on their heads moved in the wind.

  Others gathered in clusters, to stare in anxious silence. Herr Schlosser came to take a look too, his boots crunching on the frost and broken glass. He began to rant about the ‘terror bombers’ and how the British would soon be getting a dose of their own medicine. No one replied. Peter wondered if they were thinking as he was. This was just the beginning . . .

  .

  CHAPTER 21

  January 18, 1943

  .

  The bombers returned surprisingly quickly. Not the next night, although they tried. The radio reported thirty Lancasters and five Halifaxes shot down over Germany with the rest ‘scuttling back to England’. But they came back to Berlin the night after that. This time the air defences were waiting for them. Searchlights surrounded the city, their luminous beams criss-crossing the sky. This time the thunder of the anti-aircraft guns matched the roar of the bombers.

  Photographs of the British bombers appeared in the newspapers. The boys at Peter’s HJ den studied them with great interest. ‘Look at these Lancasters and Halifaxes,’ said Segur. ‘Four engines. Eight machine guns. Seven crew. 10,000 kilograms of bombs. They are quite a piece of work.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Peter, ‘but you wonder why they haven’t put a gun on the belly of the bomber. If we were up there in our night fighters, all we’d have to do is nip underneath and blow them to pieces.’

  Lothar Fleischer was eavesdropping. ‘You boys haven’t a chance in hell of getting into the Luftwaffe – they only take the best. And those Tommy bombers aren’t a patch
on our Condors. And just look at their Stirlings . . .’ He jabbed a finger at a photograph of another British bomber there in the paper. It sat on the airfield tarmac, looming over the ground crew like a prehistoric bird of prey. The boys all snorted in derision.

  Segur spoke up. ‘It’s true. The Tommies have ugly aeroplanes and not a patch on our elegant machines, but they carry far more bombs than the Luftwaffe ones.’

  Fleischer punched him in the shoulder. ‘That’s defeatist talk, Segur.’ Other boys began to jeer. Segur looked wounded. Peter came to his defence.

  ‘It’s a plain fact. It’s here in the newspaper.’

  It was too. The specifications for the planes were there for all to see.

  Fleischer sneered. ‘If you like them so much, you should join the RAF!’ he said and clipped Peter around the back of the head.

  Peter saw red. He stood up and floored Fleischer with a swift punch to the side of his face.

  The other boys pulled them apart to prevent either of them landing further blows. Walter Hertz, the squad leader, spoke up. ‘Save your quarrels for the Yids and Ivans, boys.’

  Fleischer, nursing a bloody nose, gave Peter a look that said ‘This is not the end of it. Not by a long way.’ As Fleischer walked home with his friend Mehler, he said, ‘I have a trick up my sleeve. Dig a little into the ancestry of these Polacks and there’s usually a Jew in the woodpile. That’s what Vater says, and he’s been out there long enough to know. When he comes home on leave, I shall have a word with him about Peter Bruck.’

  Mehler cackled. ‘How does your father stand it – out there among the scum of the General Government? But you are right about Bruck. He lacks the correct National Socialist attitude. He’s always reluctant to use the “Heil Hitler” when we meet. It’s sloppy, but it also gives away his inner thoughts. I’m sure there’s a little Jewboy lurking inside.’

  .

  It was not a good start to the year. A few days after the bombing raids, there came more bad news from the Eastern Front. General Paulus’s Sixth Army in Stalingrad were facing disaster. Segur had whispered to Peter, ‘What they’re telling us is bad enough, so heaven knows what it’s really like out there.’

  At the end of January a message from General Paulus to Hitler was broadcast to the German people. The Kaltenbachs listened in respectful silence.

  ‘On the anniversary of your assumption to power the Sixth Army sends greeting to the Führer. The swastika still flutters over Stalingrad. May our struggle stand as an example to generations yet unborn, never to surrender, however desperate the odds. Germany will be victorious.’

  Professor Kaltenbach wiped away a tear and announced, ‘With such indomitable will, how can we lose this war?’

  Three days later General Paulus surrendered. The German people were introduced to their first major military defeat by hours of solemn classical music, playing across all radio stations.

  Peter met up with Anna the next day. ‘This bodes ill for the future,’ she said. ‘A cornered beast is always more dangerous. You’ll see. The Nazis will come out of this more fanatical, more irrational, than ever.’

  Herr Kaltenbach seemed stunned. In the days after the announcement he wandered around in a daze. One morning he did not even shave. This was unheard of. If any of the girls spoke to him, he would shout at them. Charlotte ran to her mother in tears. Not that she got any sympathy. Frau Kaltenbach seemed even more pinched and closed up than ever. Peter almost felt sorry for them.

  A few days later, Peter heard them arguing after the children had all gone to bed. Listening through the wall of his bedroom he heard Frau Kaltenbach say, ‘Don’t ever say that again, Franz. I cannot believe you, of all people, would betray your Führer and the German people with such defeatist talk.’

  Peter was astonished. He pressed his ear tight against the wall. Frau Kaltenbach had calmed down a little now and was talking quietly. But Peter was sure he heard one of them say ‘Switzerland’ somewhere in the conversation. Perhaps they were planning their escape?

  When Peter told Anna about it, she sneered. ‘Some of these Nazis, the worst of them, they’ll carry on fighting to the bitter end. Let’s hope there’s more Professor Kaltenbachs out there. The ones who’ve enjoyed the ride and know when it’s time to get off.’ Then she stopped scoffing and sounded very upset. ‘Otherwise there’s not going to be much of Germany left when the war is over.’

  Peter had never thought about what would happen if Germany lost the war. The Nazis seemed as solid and permanent as their great swastika-covered stone buildings. Hitler often talked about a ‘Thousand Year Reich’ but now it seemed there was something flawed in this dream of invincibility.

  Since he had been forgiven, Peter had become a guest at the Reiters’ again. He had missed his visits. Anna’s parents fascinated him. Colonel Reiter asked him how he thought the war would end.

  ‘I’ve never really thought about it,’ Peter replied. ‘I suppose the Ivans and the Yanks and the Tommies will make peace with us and leave us to rule some of the new territories in the east. At least I hope that will happen. I want to go back to my farm in Wyszkow.’

  Anna spoke next. ‘That’s just not going to happen, Peter. I listened again to the BBC the other day. Churchill and Roosevelt. They’ve said they’ll only accept an unconditional surrender.’

  Something inside Peter tightened up. A little ball of fear. Anna had promised not to listen to the enemy radio. But now she was talking about it in front of her father. And he wasn’t chastising her for it. Things must be serious.

  ‘If they won’t negotiate peace terms with the Nazis, there’ll be no compromise. The war will end with the occupation of Germany. They’re stupid to announce it. Now the Nazis will fight to the bitter end,’ said Colonel Reiter.

  The Colonel shook his head. ‘The bombers will keep on coming,’ he said. ‘The Americans and the British. They’ll bomb us like we did to Warsaw and London and Rotterdam . . . And then, one day, the Russians will arrive and God knows what they’ll do to us after what we’ve done to them. And people like you and me, we’ll be right there in the middle of it all. And if we survive the bombing and the street fighting it will be too late to say to the Soviet soldiers, “We never liked the Nazis. Don’t kill us.” Everyone will be saying that then, even the wild-eyed fanatics, and the foaming Jew-haters. I don’t think the Soviets will be inclined to make a distinction.’

  .

  In early February, the Nazi regime spelled out how they intended to react to the catastrophe of Stalingrad. The propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels made a major speech on the radio. This was trailed all day, in the manner of the ‘special bulletins’ that had reported army successes in the heady early weeks of the Soviet campaign.

  Once again, the Kaltenbachs gathered around their radio and listened in silence.

  Peter could see they were spellbound. Goebbels was speaking in the packed Sportpalast in Berlin. Kaltenbach several times voiced his disappointment at not being there in person. The atmosphere in the hall seemed feverish, hysterical even. The crowd cheered Goebbels’s every strident utterance. The Jews were to blame for this war, he reminded his listeners, and a wave of hatred swept through the audience – so profound and vicious you could almost feel it through the static of the radio waves. ‘Two thousand years of western history are in danger,’ he told them. Now the Bolsheviks were coming, Germany was Europe’s only hope.

  ‘Do you want Total War?’ Goebbels asked the crowd. They cheered wildly. ‘Then people rise up,’ he barked. ‘Let the storm break loose.’

  The Sportpalast erupted in a frenzied ovation.

  ‘Now the gloves are off.’ said Kaltenbach. ‘We’ve barely been trying. The world will soon find out what a formidable foe Germany really is.’

  Frau Kaltenbach seemed as jubilant as her husband, but the girls were subdued. Peter wished he could ask them what they were thinking.

  Hearing Goebbels was exactly the tonic Kaltenbach had needed. ‘The lousy Jews who started
this war won’t know what’s hit them. Now we will teach them a lesson they’ll never forget.’

  .

  CHAPTER 22

  February 3, 1943

  .

  The air raids grew more frequent. It wasn’t just the big bombers now. The British had invented a fast two-engine warplane called the Mosquito. It was aptly named, as it buzzed low over Berlin causing havoc. Peter had first seen these aircraft at the end of January. One had flown over the apartment and he had immediately been struck by its strange shape, with the wings well forward on the fuselage. Now, whenever the air-raid sirens went, nobody knew whether they were getting a single Mosquito or hundreds of heavy bombers.

  Everyone’s life was affected in some way by Goebbels’s ‘Total War’ speech. The Kaltenbachs lost their maid. Yaryna was conscripted by the armaments ministry and sent to work at a factory in the west of the city. Frau Kaltenbach was unable to find a replacement. Now all the family were expected to help with the chores – especially the younger girls. ‘Why shouldn’t Peter help with the dishes and dusting?’ said Traudl, whose extra household duties were cutting into her swimming routine.

  Professor Kaltenbach chuckled benevolently. ‘Our Führer has said a good German girl’s life should be focused on her home. You should see your chores as part of your National Socialist duties. Besides, Peter is required for more hazardous work.’

  Boys in the Hitler Youth had been ordered to join the Berlin Luftschutz – the anti-aircraft defences. Some of Peter’s school friends had to man the guns, others made up squads of firefighters. It was potentially dangerous work. Even in training some of the boys on the guns ended up with crushed fingers or mangled arms. The firefighters could find themselves in collapsing buildings. Peter was glad he wasn’t doing that. And, it was whispered, they would also have to pull dead bodies from the rubble and stack them out in the street after a raid, so they could be identified. This wasn’t a job for boys, surely?