A Boy in Winter

by Rachel Seiffert

  “The Sturmbannführer called at your boarding house this morning.”

  The driver hails Pohl across the mud as he climbs out of the vehicle: it is one of Arnold’s subordinates, with orders to speak to Pohl directly.

  “I tracked down your foreman here at the roadworks.” He gestures to Brodnik, getting out of the jeep behind him. “But there was no sign of you.”

  Where has he been all this time?

  The question is implicit. It is impertinent too; this SS driver has no authority to be asking. Except Pohl knows Brodnik must be wondering also: Why has he not come out for the usual inspection? He can see it in his foreman’s face as he walks over to join them: Why is he staying here and not at the boarding house?

  “I prefer to be out here,” Pohl says. “I can work out here,” he tells the SS man curtly. “I am here to see this road is built. And properly.”

  He does not like the way the soldier looks at him. Too direct, too certain.

  “I have been working on the schedule,” Pohl continues, looking to Brodnik to confirm this. But he does not lie well; Pohl knows this about himself, so he adds: “Our other encampments are well ahead of us.” Because this is true. “If we had more labourers on this stretch, we could be working at the same pace; I have said this before to the Sturmbannführer.”

  The subordinate hears him out, letting him talk on until he has finished. But then he gives a brief nod—brisk, impatient—as though he didn’t need to be told any of this.

  “I was sent only to find you, nothing more. You need to speak to the Sturmbannführer directly. So we will go to him now.”

  Was that an order? It sounded like one. The soldier is already walking to his jeep: refusal is not something he expects.

  “I’ll drive ahead,” he tells Pohl. “You follow. It will be faster.” He says all this over his shoulder.

  Pohl had been expecting to walk the usual site route, conduct the usual inspection of works, which this man wouldn’t understand in any case. But now it seems he must climb back into his car, most probably return to the town, and Pohl does not want to go there; even less with an SS man.

  “Your foreman will drive,” the soldier calls, and Pohl is grateful for that much at least, for Brodnik’s company.

  But the drive back to the town is interminable.

  Pohl has to wait before he can speak freely; Brodnik takes the wheel and updates him on the morning first, in case Arnold asks them: how many labourers are still laid up, and how many are back at work—the damp and cold have led to influenza, not helped by the cheek-by-jowl living quarters.

  “In the town yesterday morning,” Pohl starts. “You should know this before we get there.”

  But Brodnik stops him, shaking his head, pointing through the windscreen at the SS man in the car ahead of them.

  “He already told me,” he says. And then: “I know what they do. They did this in my home town too.”

  Pohl thinks Brodnik must have seen the same thing he did. The shouting and herding. Are they doing the same thing everywhere they get to? But his foreman is terse, closing down the conversation. “Better you think now, sir, what the Sturmbannführer wants with us.”

  Pohl looks out at the dank and passing landscape, disquieted.

  He thinks of his plan last night, to speak to Arnold. Foolish. Pohl thinks of the things he wrote yesterday—all those torn and angry pages in his wastepaper basket at the encampment—and he fears he has been reckless.

  Even the things he wrote this morning seem dangerous. Neat and carefully phrased, but critical all the same. He took pride, even, in sneering between the lines at the Nazis here. At their ineptitude and over-reaching. First comes pride, and then the fall. Pohl imagines the pages falling into Gestapo hands, and his stomach shrinks at this possibility.

  Pohl tries telling himself he is small fry: just an engineer, just a road-builder. A man of no consequence. The SS and the policemen here in the district, they will have enough on their hands—surely—tracking the partisans in the marshes, and all the people in the villages who shelter and supply them.

  They have enough on their hands transporting the Jews away.

  Pohl’s mind turns back to the pounding on doors, to the old people he saw hurled onto the pavement yesterday morning. The SS are even rounding up the old, who could be of no harm to them.

  It does not help him to be reminded.

  They are nearing a turning—the last they must pass before they get back to the town again—when Pohl sees headlamps in the grey ahead of them. Two sets: there are two vehicles lurching out of the nearby village, drawing up to the road along which they are driving.

  Not jeeps this time: Pohl is grateful not to see more SS officers; no Gestapo either. They are trucks, both of them, and their dark and bulky outlines are just passing the last of the village houses. The rear truck is covered but the other one is open to the elements, and as they draw nearer, Pohl’s eyes pass quickly to the shapes in the back of this lead vehicle.

  It is a truck full of men; he can make that much out, even through the fog. But they are not Jews, as he first feared—at least Pohl does not think so; he sees no white armbands. They are all dressed in rough clothes such as the peasants here wear for toiling: it looks like a work detail, picked out from among the villages along this back road.

  Pohl thinks—Pohl hopes—that the SS have picked up workers, and now they are taking them elsewhere. And then the road curves as they get closer, and his view of both trucks becomes clearer.

  The rear one is covered by a tarpaulin, and in the other, all the men are standing. How many? Thirty? Maybe more, even. The men grip the metal frame as their truck lurches; one by one, both trucks turn onto the road ahead of them, and when Pohl sees they are heading for the town as well now, he finds himself thinking: perhaps this is a new labour team for him and Brodnik to take to the encampment. It could be the quarrymen they need to speed up the breaking of stone and the shovelling.

  The men are all hunched against the cold, but a work detail seems a reassuring thing; the sight of a potential labour team is welcome after all his anxious brooding. Even if the SS are leading him a merry dance to take delivery.

  The trucks are slow on the road ahead of them, so the SS man overtakes, and Brodnik must do the same. And then, for a few long seconds, they drive alongside the lorries, and Pohl can’t help but turn to look as they pass them.

  The first is empty—just a flapping and dark tarpaulin; in the second, the men stand with shovels. But the kind for digging sod and soil, not rubble.

  They are not the quarrymen he was after; perhaps they are not road workers at all.

  Pohl watches in his wing mirror as the trucks fall back into the fog, and he sees that some of the men watch him too. Grim-faced, they make a grim sight in the cold.

  The landscape and the receding figures are the colour of ashes.

  What do the SS want with him?

  —

  When they come across the town bridge, Pohl keeps watch on the trucks through the rear windscreen, wary that they seem to be following for so long. But then they slow and peel off behind them. And when Pohl turns to check one last time, after they pass the orchards, he finds them receding; soon he loses sight of them entirely behind the long wall of the factory buildings.

  The SS man drives on another minute, two, and then they draw up on rough ground by the new police headquarters.

  There are jeeps there, more than Pohl is used to seeing here. Brodnik parks by the SS man, at the end of a long line of vehicles beside the new barrack building.

  “What is this about, do you think?” Pohl sits beside his silent foreman, unwilling to get out and start proceedings.

  But the SS man motions them to get moving, pointing them beyond the barracks to the older building, stone and solid, that the SS have requisitioned, so he and Brodnik must climb out of the car to follow him.

  Inside, they are led through the ground floor, to the wide back office where Arnold is at a tabl
e. Papers are spread before the officer, a plate of bread and cheese and apples in the middle of piles of folders, and he signals acknowledgement as Pohl and Brodnik enter, but keeps attending to his paperwork.

  Left to stand across the desk from him in silence, Pohl can’t help but feel a point is being made here. He kept the Sturmbannführer waiting, now he will have to stand until this is understood; he has to know his place here. Unnerved, Pohl steps over to the window.

  Beyond the pane, beyond the barrack boundary, there is a wide stretch of empty ground, cleared within the past week from the rough-churned look of it. It reaches as far as the factory on one side, and the scrubland on the other; the abundant undergrowth that marks the end of the town, and the start of the countryside. The acre or so before him probably looked just like that until recently: Pohl can see all the scrub has been dug out, leaving wet and empty earth and a few root remnants, while at the near edge, there are piles of sand and grit and timber; to make ready for more barracks, perhaps, or other buildings.

  No end to what the SS want to build here; there is no end, Pohl thinks, to their need for labourers.

  He finds himself wondering: If the SS mean to extend this town further, will they still supply road labour teams, or only look to man their own construction work?

  No more work details. Is this what Arnold will tell him now? We’ve done all we can for you and your schedule, Pohl.

  But then Arnold calls to him. “You need more manpower.”

  Caught off guard, Pohl turns to find the SS man is standing, waiting.

  “I may have the solution,” Arnold announces, and then he points to the open doorway; a loose gesture to somewhere beyond it—perhaps to the factory.

  “I have some here for you.”

  —

  Brodnik is at his heels, and Pohl can feel the man’s misgivings as they follow the Sturmbannführer inside the former brickworks. They stride through one brick passageway and then the next, a brisk procession, passing open doorways, disused offices and storerooms. A few of them are empty, most are peopled with policemen off duty; with soldiers too, sitting and waiting and smoking inside them. Why so many soldiers here?

  And then they come to a high and guarded doorway that has Pohl uneasy as it is pulled open.

  A mass is gathered inside.

  A throng of people. So many.

  They sit and squat and stand, each pressed against the other, leaning chest to back, cheek to shoulder. Families with children, women, old people, all of them with white armbands between shoulder and elbow; all with trunks and bundles piled beside them.

  Lauf, Dreckjuden! Pohl thinks of the SS outside the schoolhouse and the old couple hounded; his stomach tightens at the memory as he steps inside behind the Sturmbannführer.

  A narrow walkway has been left clear at this end of the factory floor; two metres of empty space, marked by a rope that the people are crowded behind. At the far end of this clear space is another doorway. Police guards stand at intervals all along the wall leading to it, but there is just enough room for the Sturmbannführer and his company to pass through, and Pohl wishes the man would get a move on, pass along here swiftly.

  But he looks, too, at the Jews—Pohl can’t help himself.

  His eyes scanning for a frock coat and shawl, the old couple he saw herded, he finds more faces than he can count; not the two he saw yesterday morning, but many old and many young.

  Pohl sees women squatting on the floor, their arms around their sleeping children; and that these arms are there to shield them from being trodden—by the people around them, or by the procession he is part of. Pohl sees their shame too, at having to squat like this, at being looked at this way by a group of passing officials. He is ashamed to be caught staring.

  Pohl lifts his face, wanting an end to this discomfort, thinking there must be another room beyond this, housing the labourers he is after. But the guards have come to a stop here, so he turns to the Sturmbannführer for explanation.

  “I need road workers.” Pohl points at the far doorway. He sees only families in this press before him, people with trunks packed for travelling. Pohl thinks: All of them have been brought here to be taken elsewhere.

  “Where is the work detail?” He turns to the Sturmbannführer again, still expecting to be led onwards.

  “Here, man,” Arnold tells him, short. “You must select them. You must take whoever you think will be useful.”

  And then he points to the assembled townsfolk: shopkeepers and clerks, schoolteachers; respectable and indoor people in suits and spectacles. But there is something in this gesture: it is tight, abrupt; the man does not have his usual dry and careful composure.

  “There will be some you can take,” he says. “There will be. Take now; this is what they are here for.” And then, a little quieter, a little more pointed: “We have delayed things here, Pohl, so you can choose from among them.”

  Pohl looks again to the faces, to the coats and shawls and shoulders, and then he looks to Brodnik. But he still does not move: Pohl still does not see labourers, and perhaps the Sturmbannführer knows this, because he steps forward.

  Casting his eyes across the crowd before him, Arnold selects a young man, beckoning him out from behind the others. He has to keep on beckoning, because the young man is nervous.

  “Come on, now,” he urges.

  The Sturmbannführer summons the young Jew forward, motioning for him to duck under the rope, to stand clear of the rest—and then: “You see? Here you have a labourer.” He gestures to the young man.

  But the boy is not a peasant, not a toiler. He does look like a worker of sorts: his shoulders are broad enough, and his hands work-toughened for one so young. But Pohl does not move to take him.

  “Foreman,” Arnold orders, impatient.

  He turns away from Pohl, dismissive, motioning for Brodnik to assist him. And then, while Pohl watches, his foreman takes the lead.

  “What can you do?” he asks the selected boy, first in Ukrainian and then—with a glance to Pohl—in German, so he can understand him.

  The young man speaks in a mutter.

  “Wood,” Brodnik translates. “This boy here is an apprentice. We can use joiners like him to build the next encampment.”

  Arnold nods in agreement; Pohl sees him.

  And although Pohl has agreed to nothing here—nothing—the foreman takes the SS man’s cue instead, continuing with the selection the Sturmbannführer has started, calling out across the assembled heads in German first, then Ukrainian: “Hold your hand up if you are a joiner. If you can work wood—well enough to build with.”

  A few hands are raised in response, broad-palmed, like the young man’s.

  “Hold your hand up too if you are a quarryman,” Brodnik continues. They need quarrymen most of all, Pohl thinks; if they can find more stonebreakers here, then this might be worthwhile—perhaps. But he does not like this, and he sees no likely candidates; no more palms raised.

  “If you’re a stonemason, then. A stone-worker of any kind,” Brodnik qualifies, and this yields another two arms.

  The foreman looks to Pohl, and then to Arnold: they need more stoneworkers than that, this is clear enough to all of them.

  “Bricklaying? Hod-carrying? Who can turn their hand to labouring?” Brodnik spreads the net wider, and then the young man who was first selected raises a hand behind him.

  He says something to the foreman, words Pohl can’t understand, but he repeats himself, insistent, and then Pohl sees that many in the crowd are listening, intent now. Enough faces are turned to Brodnik that he has to respond to the young man’s questions.

  He offers curt words, but they set off a flurry of whispers, and these only get louder when the boy calls into the section of crowd he came from. Pohl can’t see who he calls to, just that his gestures are urgent: the boy points at Brodnik first and then at Pohl as well, and he keeps calling until the police guards step forward, raising their truncheons.

  “What did he say,
the boy there? Why was he pointing?” Pohl strides across to his foreman while the guards call for silence. “What did he ask you?”

  “If selection means he can stay here.”

  Brodnik looks at him, blunt.

  “He was telling them to put their hands up—all his cousins, and the uncle he came with.” His foreman points into the crowd.

  More hands have been raised there in the meanwhile, and more faces are turned to Brodnik, waiting for his attention. But many more in the crowd are watchful, eyeing both him and Pohl, mistrustful, holding their bags and bundles close to them.

  “So what did you tell him?” Pohl asks. “Did you tell him how it is?”

  Once the barrack house is built, this apprentice will have to break stones like the rest of them, or dig ditches. Or he will go east to the new encampments being marked out beyond here: the labour teams move with the road; some among their workers even came with Brodnik from Poland.

  “Did you?” Pohl insists.

  But Arnold cuts across his questions: “Foreman? Foreman, continue, please.”

  Brodnik can only glance at Pohl in answer before he turns to the crowd again.

  “Any labourers,” he calls out. “We need labourers of all kinds. If you have done farm work before, you put up your hand now.”

  Brodnik starts pressing through the crowd, forcing his way through to those who have raised their arms, and Pohl watches as he talks to each man briefly before pushing onwards.

  “Keep your hands up so I can see them.”

  Some he sends to the front, to where the apprentice is standing, others he leaves where they are—not accustomed to toil, perhaps, or just not strong enough—and Pohl is somewhat reassured by this. Any men Brodnik chooses will have to work outside, long hours, and in all kinds of weather, and his foreman will not choose those who cannot cope with this—surely.

  There are seven at the wall now, including the apprentice. Pohl thinks they will have fifteen, perhaps twenty new workers at most, at the rate Brodnik is choosing. They need more than that, but it is plenty enough from among these people. It would be asking too much of them, and Pohl has already seen more than he wants of this selection. He turns to Arnold to signal this, but the Sturmbannführer shakes his head.