by Paula Wynne
‘The Wolf.’
Aron glanced from Johan to Ima and back to Johan. ‘What?’
‘The Wolf!’ Ima’s words spat out through what remained of her teeth. ‘The Wolf of Terezín.’ Her eyes, circled as always with dark smudges, were on fire. ‘He is an entirely evil man, and because this is an evil place devised by the mad devils who have captured power in Germany, he has risen quickly to prominence. He brings out the worst impulses of the other guards, lessens their humanity. He is everywhere here, always seeking ways to hurt and humiliate more. He…’ Ima’s head bowed, and silent sobs shook her frail body.
Resting a tender hand on his mother’s arm, Johan told Aron how The Wolf punished prisoners by thrusting them face down on the floor. Often making them lie face-to-face with a dead body he had just shot, or others bloated and gnawed on by rats and stinking of rotting meat.
Ima added that they had to lie there for hours not knowing if they would be shot or let go. Other times, as the prisoner being punished lay nose-to-nose with a corpse, The Wolf would force them to kiss the dead lips before they were shot, laughing as he told them it would get their soul into heaven.
Of course, Ima had told him, because The Wolf was the devil he did not have a soul. He did not even know what one was, or he would not taunt the people as he did.
Aron stroked the side of Ima’s face. ‘But your teeth, Ima, you still haven’t told me―’
Johan butted in, ‘A few days after we arrived I was flying my plane in the courtyard.’
‘The one grandmother gave you. I remember how you loved it.’ Aron’s face lit with a cautious smile.
‘Yes,’ Johan held his arms high above his head with a closed empty fist to demonstrate, ‘and The Wolf snatched it away.’
Ima remained silent; her eyes haunted.
‘He said…”You think scum like you could ever become a Messerschmitt pilot?” Of course,’ Johan’s eyes took on a sudden steeliness, ‘I did not tell him that one day I will be a better pilot than any Nazi.’
Ima sighed and murmured, ‘When Johan reached to try and take it back The Wolf struck him across the face, and then kicked him so he fell backwards into the dirt. He told Johan that he would be sent for later to clean our filth off his boots.’
Aron looked from Ima to Johan and back again.
Johan’s voice dropped, ‘Ima cried out, shouting that it was only a toy. That’s what broke Ima’s teeth. The Wolf smashed her with the butt of his pistol, right in her mouth.’
Ima stroked Johan’s head. ‘My poor boy has had to clean The Wolf’s boots every night since…such humiliation.’
‘And I have to see my plane on the desk in front of the window and listen to the taunts of the guards. They call me the flying schweinchen.’
Ima twisted an imaginary ring on her finger. The ring that had been stolen by the soldiers on the day they arrived. ‘I think my jaw must have been damaged too. When my pain and fever finally broke, I could only mumble, like a baby. I had to learn to talk all over again,’ she smiled again, this time trying to keep her lips over her teeth, as she did most of the time but had forgotten to with the joy of seeing Aron again. ‘At least I’m alive.’
She looked like the old lady who used to live across the road from their home in Würzburg, who always forgot to put her false teeth in her mouth. Johan reached out and hugged her. He loved Ima even more for trying to save his plane.
‘And they still keep your aeroplane?’ Aron’s eyes were fixed on Johan.
‘Yes. I don’t understand it. Why did the Wolf want my plane? He steals whatever he wants from us. The gold and jewels people bring and try to hide, things of value. But why take my aeroplane?’
Aron patted his shoulder. ‘Because he knows you love it, that’s why. He’s a putz! I remember you running around the garden at home, pretending you were a fighter pilot.’ Aron ruffled Johan’s bristled hair once more.
Ima’s gaze was fond. ‘When the other children painted and drew pictures in the dirt with their fingers, Johan used to run up and down the barracks pretending he was a pilot coming to save us.’
Aron leaned over him. ‘You are a pilot, a brave one.’
Johan shook his head and said in a soft voice, ‘I don’t do that anymore. Who can be a pilot without a plane? It would be like a bird flying without wings.’ Bitterness rose up into his throat, but he swallowed it down again, his jaw set hard. ‘Now…I’m a spy.’
9
Almost everyone has retreated inside themselves to cope, shutting the world out, but here, at last, is hope…
The next morning, Aron slept long. Johan, meanwhile, had been up early and, by redoubling his previous efforts and taking risks which would have shocked Ima, had amassed a whole handful of dried skins and other morsels. Even though his fingers twitched, and his mouth trembled, desperate to stuff every last bit into his mouth, he would give it all to his brother when he awoke.
While Aron slept, again, through the afternoon, with Ima waiting patiently to ask after their father, Johan darted in and out of all the barracks.
As he hunted for food, he thought back on their relationship before they were taken from their home.
The terror of life, and his sister’s death, in the camp had left his memories of Aron vague. As the eldest, he knew Aron had always looked out for his sister and brother, so now it seemed strange to be turned into a scavenger by an urge to look after his brother. Aron was five years older―Johan still looked up to him and always would.
Now he felt a strange sensation flowing through him. Somehow things were different. He didn’t mind that it had changed between them, at least their brotherly bond was still there.
As he came near the gate, Johan heard the guards talking in loud, panicked voices of the Russians advancing too close. Their routine inspections hadn’t taken place for two days.
Normally, The Wolf marched around the camp giving orders for the prisoners to fix anything broken he spotted, or to build things if there was nothing to fix. His eye for both detail and also maintaining his dominance had always been merciless over the years, such as ordering even the tiniest gap in the roof fixed so that the prisoners could not supplement their drinking rations with rainwater, but these past few days he had hardly been seen and no longer seemed to care about fixing things. Whispers had hissed through the camp, from the men’s barracks, saying that The Wolf was just trying to get as many as possible of the Nazis’ dirty secrets hidden.
A series of distant artillery thumps and the faint crackle of gunfire drifted out of the murk to the east. All the gate guards were now standing outside their hut, pre-occupied with what was happening on the other side of the valley. Through the open door, Johan could see that they had left their food inside.
He ogled at plates only half-eaten, bread still buttered and untouched, and an apple that had just one bite taken out of it. Even the sight of it made his mouth water as he recalled finding peel outside the guards’ window the previous year and stuffing it into his mouth before anyone could see him.
Ever since that day, whenever he passed nearby, his gaze was drawn like a magnet to the spot where those few juicy scraps had lain.
Soon after they had arrived here, The Wolf had tempted Johan to eat grilled pork sausage. Having starved as never before in his life during their train ride, he hadn’t hesitated. Yet with every mouthful he ate, and while The Wolf and his men watched, laughing and making pig noises, Johan had feared the punishment that would strike him from heaven above.
Ima had refused the small pieces he had bitten off for her, tucked into his palm and slid into his pocket right under The Wolf’s nose.
She followed the commandments in every sense of the word. She had stroked his hair and told him that God would surely not punish him, but that this should be a lesson and he should be stronger in the future. He wondered if she would eat the meat today, but there was no way of knowing as the soldiers had never tempted him again. Just thinking of that day, his stomach growled with hunger
and his mouth watered.
Now, holding his breath, Johan removed his shoes and hid them under a rock where none of the other prisoners would either see them or steal them. He only had shoes at all because their previous owner had died and they were too small for any of the adults to take. Their thin, hard leather soles would make more noise walking on the freezing grit than his bare feet. Next, he crept up to the wall of the hut, checked that the guards were still concentrated on the valley, and slipped in through the door.
On one side of him stood the table with its banquet. On the other his red aeroplane blinked at him in the sun.
For a moment, he froze. A child would have grabbed the aeroplane and some of the food and run, but he could no longer afford to be a child. He had Aron to care for. He had to think about consequences. If The Wolf found the aeroplane gone, he would know where to look for it, and the punishments he would inflict would be worse than horrible.
Johan hesitated for barely a moment and then, with twitching fingers, he tore off just small, unnoticeable parts of the bread, left the apple because its theft would be too obvious, and allowed himself just one quick, last glance at his beloved aeroplane. Sprinting away on the tip of his toes, he grabbed his shoes under the rock and ran to the barrack.
Inside, he found Aron huddled next to Ima in quiet conversation. He panted up to them and offered the food to Ima first. She shook her head and motioned with her eyes to Aron.
Johan sat down beside his brother as he ate. He didn’t tell Aron how, only last week, another tooth had loosened in his gum and fallen out. Nor did he mention to Ima the recurring temptations to eat pork.
When he and Aron were alone, he would show him how to slide through the barbed wire to where the Nazis threw away their rubbish. Maybe the only reason he and Ima were not chewing on their gums, like most of the others, was because he stole little bits of stale or rotting food from the garbage pile for them to eat.
Most times, he and Ima ate what he found immediately, but any they kept had to be hidden from the other prisoners, and sometimes in the night he had been awoken by the hands of those who knew or guessed at his secrets searching him for hidden scraps. Many times he and Ima fell ill from what they ate, but it had at least filled their bellies for a little while.
Without intending to, he suddenly burst out, ‘I’ve become a gonif, an expert thief!’ Desperation shone in his eyes. He dropped his voice to a whisper, ‘I have stolen food many times for Ima and me, but today, I stole this from under the guards’ very noses.’
Ima turned her face, preferring not to listen, but she muttered, ‘They’re so short of guards, now that most of the SS have fled. I hope you were careful, Johan?’
Johan nodded. ‘I was, Ima. And with the Russians across the valley the gate guards have more to be concerned about than eating, so we can feast on their bread.’
Aron whispered to Ima, his eyes closed, ‘I remember the smell of your cholent. I can smell it now…hmm, stew braising in the pot with onions and carrots.’ His eyes flashed open. ‘Ima, every day I imagined chewing on soft pieces of meat and potato. It stopped me getting hungry.’ A loud grumble came from Aron’s stomach, perhaps complaining that it had been tricked.
‘Here,’ Johan shoved the last of the food into Aron’s hand. ‘I’ll get more.’
Behind them, someone cracked their knuckles. Johan’s gaze flicked round to meet glaring eyes that were cold, hard and flinty. The woman was only watching, not making a move to ask for nor try to take the chunks of bread. Was she jealous that his brother had returned and not her own son, or just that he had found food for Aron?
No, only last week Ima had told him that it was a futile anger that had festered until it set inside like cement, and so many of the women now looked like that all the time.
Ima leaned over and stroked their heads at the same time. ‘My boys! Back together again! Promise me, Aron, promise me, Johan…you will always look out for each other.’
Aron ruffled Johan’s bristles. ‘Of course, Ima, that is why I came back to Terezín.’ His laugh soon turned into a cough, but even the little bit of bread seemed to have restored him.
Ima now took a deep breath and asked Aron, ‘What happened…that day you disappeared? I thought we were brought here because your father was a prominent member of our community,’ her chest puffed out a little even as her quiet voice allowed itself a hint of pride, ‘an upstanding citizen…but then he just disappeared.’ She deflated and slumped into a heap.
‘Papa was forced out of bed in the middle of the night. The kommandant told him that they needed skilled printers, like him, in Berlin.’
‘And you?’ Johan looked puzzled.
‘Papa insisted they bring me with him. He said I was his apprentice and he could not work the machines without me.’
‘So you have been in Berlin all this time?’
A sudden round of artillery fire whistled low over the barracks and burst close by. The earth shuddered as though it had cracked like an egg. The dull thump of yet more shellfire drowned out the cries of the little girls.
‘The Russians are coming,’ Ima muttered to herself, as she had done for much of the past few days.
‘We saw tanks on our march,’ Aron reported. ‘They are crawling all over. We even heard rumours that Hitler is dead.’
Ima grimaced, unsure if that was good or bad news.
‘The world is coming to save us,’ Aron smiled.
Ima was impatient now. ‘Thank God, but tell me about Berlin.’
Aron shook his head, ‘First, we were in Sachsenhausen, a camp outside Berlin. Papa’s job saved our lives. Like Papa and me, about a hundred other prisoners were taken into some barracks that they had sealed off behind barbed wire. The soldiers even painted the windows. That’s when I knew that what we were doing was a big secret.’
Johan was enthralled, hanging onto every word.
‘The soldiers had stocked the place with printing equipment, and we found out these other men were all bookbinders, engravers, paper makers, or printers like Papa.’
Johan couldn’t hold his curiosity any longer and blurted out, ‘What were you doing?’
‘We were forced to print fake money.’
‘What?’ Ima looked puzzled. ‘Why?’
‘I heard them say we were working on Hitler's secret weapon.’
Ima groaned again. ‘Not more ways to kill us.’
‘Not us, Ima, the Allies. The Nazis wanted us to print fake foreign money. First, Papa and the other men had to copy the British pound. And then it was the American dollar. It was my job to clean the machines,’ he pointed at black oil smudges and smears on his shirt. ‘If papa hadn’t insisted that I knew how to do that job, I would be dead.’
A little trickle of dust fell from the ceiling as another blast shook it.
‘There were some really clever men in there, and they all agreed that if the Nazis flood the world with fake money it would weaken the Allied currencies. Papa said it was a plan to bankrupt the West. But we also had to fill envelopes with smaller, specific amounts of the money we printed, and Papa thought that these were to pay Himmler’s spies.’
Johan’s eyes widened.
‘Papa kept whispering to me and showing me what to do with his eyes. At night he taught me everything I would need to know the next morning. I survived from day to day, never knowing when I would do something wrong and get a bullet in my head,’ Aron ran a hand over his hair and then did the same to Johan. ‘Yours is longer than mine.’ He flicked Johan’s bristles.
Ima ran a hand over the stubble on her head. ‘Even the women are shaved bald to try and control the mites and lice, but they’ve forgotten to do it for these last two weeks.’
They all looked at each other with glum expressions while the whistle of an explosion found its way through the increasing number of gaps in the decaying building. A change was coming, but they’d all long since learned that life could always get worse.
‘We should be happy,’ Aron whi
spered, ‘but we don’t know if we’ll be dead tomorrow.’
Ima nodded and rested her forehead against Aron’s face. She could not stop running her hands over his cheeks.
Johan sat between them, thinking that he was happy that they could almost be a family again. If only sweet Elza was here, too.
He asked, ‘So you came from Sachsenhausen today?’ Admiration shone in his eyes.
‘No. We were in five concentration camps over the past three-years. Each time we moved, we were ordered to pack up the equipment and all the printed money into boxes. They were numbered and we were sent to the next camp. But look,’ Aron tugged at the cuff of his shirt and eased a piece of paper out of it. He and Ima bent in towards each other instinctively, making a space that prying eyes couldn’t see, as Aron gently unfolded it.
‘What is it?’ Johan asked, looking at the curly writing as Aron delicately spread it out flat.
‘A bank note.’
10
Ima had retreated into a kind of trance since Elza had died. She appeared to be living in slow motion, but with Aron’s return she seemed to have found a new energy. Even though she could do little to ever see her beloved again, Ima’s spirit, like me, held onto hope…
Aron gazed down at the bank note. ‘It’s what we were doing. Making English money.’
Johan stroked the crumpled paper. He’d never touched paper money before.
‘A schande,’ Ima muttered, ‘a disgrace to your father’s good name.’
‘We had made millions and millions of British pounds. I didn’t get a piece of American money because in February, when Papa and the other men had finally copied it properly, we were to start printing, but we got an order to stop and dismantle the machinery. They said the Russians were too close. So we all moved to another camp again.’
Above, the noise droned on as more planes flew over, drowning out their conversation. Their eyes all followed the path of the roar above them.
As the noise receded, Ima lifted Aron’s feet and unwound the prison cloth. She spat on her fingers and rubbed off the dried, crusted blood.
