The Auslander

by Paul Dowswell

  Coming back to the Kaltenbachs’ for supper, after that, was almost as unsettling as making the delivery. Sitting round the table he felt entirely disconnected from them. Every one of them, he reflected with mounting anger, if they knew what I’d just been doing, they’d betray me to the Gestapo without a second thought. He felt a deep longing for his parents and the safe life he had known on the farm.

  He forced himself to smile and asked Traudl about her hockey match that afternoon. ‘We lost four nil,’ she said without looking at him. No one else spoke. Peter realised they were all as wrapped up in themselves as he was.

  .

  CHAPTER 24

  March 2, 1943

  .

  The British came back again in force on the night of 2nd March. When Peter heard the wailing rise and fall of the air-raid siren, he was just getting ready for bed. He was already exhausted and desperate to sleep, having made another delivery for the U-boats that evening. The task itself was not hard work. But the worry, the fear of being caught, the excuses he had to make to the Kaltenbachs to cover his tracks, they were more draining than a twenty-kilometre HJ route march.

  He threw his clothes back on, hopped on his bicycle and pedalled for his life. The Fire Observation Station was a mere five minutes on his bike. By the time he arrived, there were still people hurrying home from the theatres and the bars to the shelter of their basements.

  There was trouble in store. When the siren went during the day, it was almost certain to be a false alarm or one or two Mosquitoes at most. Unlucky for whoever caught the bombs they dropped, but a pinprick on the rest of the city. But night raids promised something more dangerous. ‘It’s a big one,’ said the Fire Observation Officer. ‘Should be here in half an hour. Unless they change course and go to Stettin or Rostock.’

  They didn’t. This was much worse than the raids they had had back in January. Judging by the thunder of engines, there must have been hundreds of heavy bombers up there. The watchers up on the roof could see explosions and fires raging in the south-west of the city. Peter spent the night listening to the distant crump of high-explosive bombs and praying they did not come any nearer. At first light he was despatched to Wilmersdorf, the nearest district to have been damaged in the raid. ‘Go and see if you can do anything to help,’ the officer told Peter. ‘I hear there’s been a lot of damage.’

  As soon as he ventured out into the cold winter dawn, the sulphurous smoke caught in his throat. There seemed to be a strange yellow fog over the city, which the light of the morning did little to dispel. This he had never seen before, even in the raids back in January.

  Wilmersdorf was twenty minutes’ hard riding away, and when he arrived at Detmolder Strasse, he was faced with a scene of utter devastation. Before, he had seen one or two apartment blocks or town houses destroyed by stray bombs. Here, whole streets close to an electrical machinery factory had been gutted. The fire services were still struggling to put out blazing buildings, and many others were still smouldering. The awful smell of fire and drains and leaking gas mains filled the air.

  People walked amid the smoke and debris like zombies, their clothes and faces blackened by soot and smoke. Others screamed hysterically. The whole width of the street was filled with rubble and furniture. Some of it barely recognisable, some of it still intact. A wardrobe here, a metal bed frame there. Peter thought of Charlotte’s doll’s house. It was as if a giant’s hand had swept through the homes, scattering their possessions out on to the street.

  There were bodies too, already laid out for identification, including quite a few children. Some were charred and contorted. They looked like grotesque, brittle statues. Others, virtually untouched by death, had that terrible stillness he had seen back in January. Occasionally, the air would be pierced by the cries of a relative or parent, finding a loved one in that grisly parade. It didn’t seem right to Peter that children should be killed in these raids. He felt a violent anger towards the British for perpetrating this atrocity.

  Although he had long ago lost patience with the endless HJ training and the Winter Relief collection, he felt what he was doing here, assisting these victims of the air raid, was noble work. He helped a local HJ squad fill wheelbarrows with rubble from a collapsed apartment block, until he was faint with hunger and thirst.

  ‘Attention!’ called an HJ squad leader, holding up his hand for silence. ‘There’s someone underneath here.’

  He called down into the rubble. ‘Can you hear me?’ Then he shifted a few more bricks and pulled out a pale hand. ‘He’s cold,’ he announced plainly. ‘Let’s get him out anyway, stack him over with the others.’

  Peter came over to help. As they cleared away the bricks, the dead boy began to look naggingly familiar. His head was shaved and he was terribly thin – gaunt face and a flimsy jacket torn open to show ribs stark against sickly white skin. It was Wladek.

  ‘It’s a lousy Ostarbeiter,’ said the squad leader as soon as he saw the blue triangle on his jacket with a P on it – showing he was a Polish worker. ‘Forget him. Carry on looking for our own people. He’s probably crawling with lice, anyway.’

  Peter tried to keep the anger from his voice. ‘I’ll dig him out,’ he said.

  ‘Very well,’ said the squad leader. ‘We can’t leave him there for ever.’

  Peter carried on clearing rubble from around the body. How long had it been since he’d last seen him? It was that awful night in Gleisdreieck when the other Polish boy had held a blade to Peter’s throat.

  Wladek had changed in those eighteen months, but not as growing boys would usually change. He had grown skeletal. There was so little flesh on his bones, Peter wondered how he had managed to walk, let alone work. He wondered what he was doing here, out in Wilmersdorf. Maybe he had been at the electrical factory, or on another building or bombsite. His hands were scarred and rough from hard physical work, and his body was covered in small sores and abrasions. Peter thought about the ancient seafarers he had read about and how their bodies were ravaged by scurvy. Poor Wladek’s body had suffered similar torments. Peter remembered the German official in Poland, when they had first selected him, talking about giving food to Germans and not Poles. They’d been true to their word. But Wladek looked peaceful now. Peter hoped he’d just been caught by a bomb blast and died in an instant.

  Once he’d cleared away enough to free Wladek from the rubble, he picked him up and carried him to the side of the road where the other bodies were laid out. There was so little of him, Peter thought, he could have carried two of him. He placed him down gently with the other bodies, his head resting on the kerb, and then straightened his legs, closed his eyes and crossed his arms on his chest.

  ‘Stop wasting time with that Polack,’ barked one of the squad leaders and ordered Peter over to a building on the other side of the street. He worked on for another hour, trying not to think about what had just happened.

  Too tired to cycle home, Peter caught the U-bahn, which, he was surprised to find, was still running. Although he was exhausted, he could not let himself go to sleep until he had scrubbed the acrid stench of sulphur from his hair and body. Even then, as he lay in clean sheets, he kept thinking of Wladek. The airmen were murderers; it was true what the Nazis said. The British bombers killed indiscriminately. But he detested the Nazis too, for starving that poor boy before a British bomb put him out of his misery.

  .

  The next day, the city was full of rumours. Thousands killed, a hundred thousand made homeless. The radio news said there had been some damage but casualties were not as bad as feared. For once, especially having seen some of it, Peter took the official view over the rumours. But it irritated him to hear the announcer declare that the people of Berlin had helped to clear the damage in ‘a magnificent expression of National Socialist enthusiasm’.

  The air raid in early March shocked a lot of people. Even Peter’s HJ squad were muted for days afterwards. Many of them had been dispatched to the nearest bomb-damaged areas, a
nd most had now had their first direct encounter with death.

  A week later, when he was invited to tea, the Reiters told Peter there had been rumours of mutinies – soldiers refusing to go to the front – but discreet enquiries at Bendlerstrasse had revealed this story to be pure fiction. ‘Still,’ said Peter. ‘There’s grounds for hope. Like those thousands of leaflets they gave out in Munich.’

  ‘That story has a rather unhappy ending,’ said the Colonel. He had also heard about this through his colleagues in the Home Army. ‘It was a group of students calling themselves “The White Rose”. They scattered leaflets calling for the overthrow of the Nazis. One of them – a girl I heard – threw a whole stack of leaflets from the stairs of the university entrance hall,’ said the Colonel. ‘She must have had a death wish. There have been four executions – I think within a week of the arrests.’

  The Reiters took some comfort in the continuing misfortune of the German Afrika-Korps in North Africa. ‘Perhaps, if we are lucky, the war will be over in six months,’ said Ula. Colonel Otto shook his head. ‘No. The Nazis will fight right to the end.’

  .

  Despite the bombing, and the imposition of stricter food and clothing rationing, it was still possible to forget there was a war raging around them. In the final week of March, Professor Kaltenbach took the whole family to a concert at the Beethoven Hall. The celebrated Dutch pianist Karlrobert Kreiten was playing. As they sat there in the packed auditorium, Kaltenbach whispered to Peter, ‘Kreiten was brought up in Germany, and his mother is German. But his father is Dutch so he’s considered a Dutchman. Ridiculous really – he’s one of us. You can tell by the way he plays German music. It’s just engraved in his heart.’

  Kreiten did indeed play beautifully. His programme was exclusively German or Austrian – Beethoven, Mozart and Bruckner. The Bruckner particularly pleased Herr Kaltenbach. ‘No one understands the German soul quite like him,’ he said.

  Peter sat next to Elsbeth and was surprised to see her wiping away a tear during a Mozart piano concerto.

  .

  CHAPTER 25

  April 1943

  .

  Whenever the air-raid siren sounded, Peter and all his schoolfriends were expected to hare off to their stations. It played havoc with their school work, but nobody seemed to care. ‘The defence of the Fatherland is our primary concern,’ said the Headmaster to them all in school assembly. ‘You will have plenty of time to catch up on your schooling after the war.’

  The air raids were happening with increasing frequency, although they were mostly nuisance raids – rather than the heavy bombing the city experienced in January and March. Peter was sometimes on standby all night, snatching a few hours’ sleep in a bunk in the Fire Observation Station. So far the phone lines had not been damaged, and he had not had to go out on his bike during a raid. Sometimes he went to school. When he was too tired, he came home. The rest of them would be out, although Elsbeth, who worked shifts at the post office, was sometimes at home.

  He came back one mid-morning and caught her wandering naked between her bedroom and the bathroom. She shrieked and ran back to her room. ‘Stop staring at me, you horrid little boy,’ she shouted. Peter was too flustered to respond. He felt angry at her constant hostility, but he was still mesmerised by the sight of her.

  Why did she dislike him so much? He mentioned it to Anna. ‘Elsbeth doesn’t like anyone, Peter,’ she laughed. ‘She’s an icy one, isn’t she. But she’s got something. She looks like a wicked fairy, with that black hair and milky skin. Whooo! She’ll put a curse on you if you don’t watch out!’ She waved a hand around, as if she was holding a magic wand.

  It wasn’t just Elsbeth that made the apartment an uncomfortable place to be. Charlotte had recently joined the Jungmädel and she was often fractious and exhausted after an evening or afternoon of their activities. Liese and Traudl both chided her when she showed little interest in knitting gloves for the troops or making straw slippers for the soldiers in hospital. Peter felt sorry for her. She was only ten and tired enough already from school. But he didn’t dare say anything.

  Mealtime conversation, when they could not avoid talking to each other, was sparse and sullen. Gone were the days when the Professor would hold forth about the great opportunities available in Ostland, or the best scientific methods for ridding Germany of its social parasites.

  Sometimes, though, Kaltenbach still fumed about something he had read in the newspaper. Peter would sit there bursting to disagree with him and wondered how much longer he could hold his tongue.

  In early April the papers reported that the concert pianist Karlrobert Kreiten had been arrested. The charge was ‘undermining military strength’. Peter was flabbergasted. He remembered Kreiten as a rather effete young man, with a great floppy fringe that fell down over his forehead as he played. How could he have undermined Germany’s military strength?

  Kaltenbach read the piece to the family. Kreiten had been additionally accused of ‘paralysing and undermining the will of the German people’ and ‘making malicious remarks about the Führer’.

  ‘His head will roll for this,’ said Kaltenbach.

  ‘You mean they’re going to kill him?’ said Peter. ‘How can a little man like that be so dangerous?’

  Kaltenbach looked at Peter with a quizzical frown. ‘Don’t they teach you anything in school or at those HJ meetings?’ he said impatiently. ‘In the last war, the German nation was brought to its knees by traitors on the home front. We were undefeated in battle, and no enemy soldiers had set foot in the Fatherland, yet we had to surrender. The Führer is determined not to let that happen in this war. That “little man” should know better – spreading defeatist poison. And him in a privileged position too – playing his music while other young men his age give their lives to defend our country from the Soviets.’

  Peter shook his head. ‘But it was us who invaded Russia. We attacked them!’

  Kaltenbach snapped. ‘That is Bolshevik poison, Peter. The Führer ordered our military action in self-defence.’

  ‘Onkel Franz,’ said Peter. ‘I was there when it happened. My family’s home was close to the border. There was no Soviet attack.’

  ‘Go to your room and do not join us at the table again until you have apologised for your traitorous talk,’ said Kaltenbach. ‘And if I hear another word against the country that has taken you into its arms, then you will be on the first train back to Warsaw.’

  Peter fled before he lost his temper. This is a madhouse, he thought. You are all mad. And that pianist – that harmless little man who had probably just said some home truths everyone knew but no one wanted to hear – he was going to be killed for it.

  .

  Franz and Liese were reluctantly coming to the conclusion that their project was failing. Peter had many qualities they wanted in a son – he was tall and Nordic, brave and bright. But he was never going to be the ‘political soldier’ and standard-bearer for National Socialism that they had hoped to mould. He was too good-natured. Too much of a ‘soft egg’. He had too much sympathy for the underdog.

  ‘It’s the Polack in him,’ said Liese, just before she and Franz went to sleep. ‘He lacks the German ability to apply himself to a task until it is done. And I’ve seen him staring at the Ostarbeiters in the street. He looks sorry for them.’

  Kaltenbach nodded in agreement. ‘And when I talk to him about our politics, he always trots out the party line – but he’s just saying what he thinks we want to hear.’

  ‘Never mind,’ she went on. ‘Next year he will be going to his army training and that will knock some sense into him. We’ll see a change for the better then. Just you see.’

  Kaltenbach softened. ‘He’s not been a total disappointment though. At least he has a decent girlfriend. And from a good family too.’

  Liese gave a rare smile. ‘The Führer himself would surely approve of the match.’

  .

  Peter slept so badly these days, he was usual
ly awake when the birds started to sing. Over long restless nights he would worry about when Frau Reiter would ask him to make another delivery or whether the Kaltenbachs would send him back to Poland. Since the defeat at Stalingrad they had been especially brittle with him. Perhaps it was their pride. They didn’t want to admit to friends and neighbours that Peter had failed to flourish under their guidance.

  Stalingrad had shaken them all to the core. One evening, Charlotte was looking particularly distracted. Eventually she asked her father, ‘Do you think the Ivans will come and kill us?’

  Kaltenbach smiled indulgently. He went to fetch an atlas. ‘Look, mein Liebling, Stalingrad is there.’ He pointed to a spot past the Black Sea and close to the Caspian. ‘We are here. Look how far away they are.’

  Frau Kaltenbach spoke. ‘The Führer will protect you, meine Kleine.’

  They all talked about ‘finishing the job with typical German thoroughness’, a phrase they had borrowed from one of Goebbels’s speeches, and told themselves over and over that the German army was the best in the world.

  ‘The Russians will never triumph. They’re Untermenschen,’ said Frau Kaltenbach. ‘Eventually we shall grind them down. Our soldiers have been poorly led by commanders who lack the correct National Socialist spirit. I am sure the Führer is doing his utmost to rectify this problem.’

  .

  One early spring day Peter returned from an exhausting shift. He had been up all night ‘on standby’ just hanging around in case he was needed. It was the boredom that wore him out, just as much as the odd hours he was expected to be there. Since the March raids, the Tommies had only been back with their Mosquitoes.

  The front door to the apartment was double-locked, a sure indication that no one was home. At first, all he wanted to do was run a bath and then collapse into his bed. But he liked being alone in the place, so he took his time eating his breakfast and sitting in the bright sunshine that poured into the living room.