Goodbye, Mr Hitler

by Jackie French

  He struggled out of the deep snow bank of sleep. ‘Mutti?’

  ‘They are taking the doctors and nurses away. We must march. The Russian soldiers are coming.’

  He began the dark journey to sit up. Her hands pressed him down. ‘Only the doctors and nurses,’ she said, her voice breaking. ‘The patients must stay here.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘I would take you too, if I could. But they would see right away you are too young to be a doctor.’ She lowered her voice still more. ‘I will escape. Nurse Stöhlich and I, together. We have a plan. I will come back for you.’

  He clutched her. ‘Mutti, I —’

  Johannes had not seen the guard. He grabbed Mutti by a tuft of hair. Mutti screamed, then held the scream back and struggled to her feet. She gazed back at Johannes.

  ‘I love you!’ her lips formed, but she did not say the words, in case the guard noticed, in case he killed them both.

  He swung his legs off the bed to run after her, to at least watch her march away. Sister Columba’s blistered hand grabbed his arm. It was a thin hand, and it must have cost her agony to touch things, but all her remaining strength was in it. ‘Stay.’

  ‘But Mutti —’

  ‘If you call out to her, they may kill her, just to see you cry. Or kill you, to punish her. Stay.’

  ‘But what will happen to us?’

  ‘Johannes, you must listen to me. You have to hide. Now.’

  ‘But —’

  ‘Sshh.’ He could feel her pulling together every thread of strength. ‘Soon the guards will come to kill us. Kill every one of us so no one can tell those who win the war what monsters the Nazis have been. That is why they burned the records, why they have marched the doctors and nurses away. Go, now! I will pray for you,’ she added.

  ‘I . . . I do not want to leave you.’ Not to die alone, he thought. She had given him gingerbread and roast potatoes, and her arms and warmth.

  ‘Pray for me. Live for me. But go, quickly, while the guards are busy with the medical people.’

  He hesitated, kissed her cheek. She winced as if even that gentle pressure hurt. She had been hugging him the past two weeks. How much had that hurt her too?

  No time to think. ‘I love you,’ he said, because that was all he had to give, and he had forgotten to tell Mutti.

  But Mutti knew. Surely she knew?

  He put his feet onto the floor. He had no shoes, only his grey rag of nightgown . . . but a pair of boots had been left by the door, flapping at the sole. They were too big, but he put them on and slipped out the door.

  It was as if his body knew where to hide, even if his mind could not accept it. He ran towards the pile of bodies behind the barracks, the land of rats.

  Chapter 14

  FRAU MARKS

  GERMAN-OCCUPIED POLAND, 14 JANUARY 1945

  She had never seen Dr Wolcheki weep, but she wept now, gazing back at the barracks door behind which Johannes lay. Johannes, so like Georg . . .

  No. Georg was older. And safe. He must be safe!

  She put her arms around Dr Wolcheki as they stood, hour after hour, in their lines in front of the barracks. Flames leaped and snickered from vast piles of burning records all across the camp as darkness seeped around them.

  Gunfire rumbled in the distance. Explosions snorted great gleams of red and yellow snot into the air. The light from the burning records was too bright to let the stars shine, but now and then the sky was ripped apart by fireworks. No, not fireworks . . . warworks . . . She forced her mind alert.

  At last they moved, thousands of women, the doctors and the nurses first, and then other prisoners, shuffling towards the camp’s barbed-wire gates, then stopping. Thirty guards stood at the gates. Frau Marks watched as nurses and doctors in front of her were examined one by one, by torchlight. Nurse Strzelecki was roughly shoved back to the camp: her hands were ulcerated, as were her feet. She would not be able to march far. The guards knew it.

  Another reject. And another. For the first time Frau Marks allowed herself to hope. If the weak and ill were being left here to die, then the doctors and nurses and others from the camp must be going to a place where, just possibly, they might live.

  She thought of Nurse Strzelecki. Of Sister Columba. Of Johannes. Of all her patients too weak to leave, left in the bunks. Guilt closed her throat so that, for a moment, she could not breathe. Beside her, she felt Dr Wolcheki tremble. ‘Perhaps they will send me back to the hospital too,’ she whispered, glancing back at the hospital hut hopefully.

  Not after only three weeks in hell, thought Frau Marks. Dr Wolcheki was the strongest of them all.

  Frau Marks stepped forwards, stood obediently looking down as the torchlight shone into her face, along her body. Hands shoved her onwards, and Dr Wolcheki too.

  She grabbed Dr Wolcheki’s hand. ‘He will hide. He is a clever boy, your Johannes.’ But Sister Columba could not hide. Impotent rage flooded her. A woman who had done so much good, to be killed by so much evil. The least she deserved was not to die alone.

  Her mind stilled, even as her body shuffled forwards with the others. She could hear Sister Columba’s laugh, the soft one of joy she gave at each new birth. ‘But I am not alone. I am with God.’

  The road turned. Dr Wolcheki looked back, yearningly. Frau Marks looked back too, in hatred, and in hope.

  The SS guards surrounded them as they marched along the Auschwitz road. The snowy air felt like shards of glass each time she breathed. More rockets lit the skies, red and yellow and strange streaks of metal blue. The screams and thumps of battle sounded closer.

  She had been trained to save lives, had spent her adult life doing just that. And yet now she felt a deep and savage glee. Let the Russians kill every SS man, every Nazi, everyone who cheered for Hitler, everyone who looked away as the death trains passed their homes . . .

  ‘Schnell! Schnell!’ Faster! Faster! The guards fired shots, urging the prisoners to run. The big German shepherd dogs ran beside the columns, snarling, nipping at legs, ankles, to make sure they all stayed in line.

  Sweat ran down beneath her clothes. Women collapsed into small shaking heaps. A woman in front of her stumbled, raised her hands in a silent plea towards a guard. The guard pointed his revolver.

  Crack. The woman fell, dark blood in a dark night.

  Bodies tumbled into the ditches along the road.

  How many of us can survive this? thought Frau Marks.

  And then she realised. This was not a march to safety, to work in a hospital for wounded soldiers as she had hoped. This march was just another cheap, efficient mass murder. Like the children’s washing, where no gas, no kerosene, no bullets or lethal injections had been wasted. The SS had no intention of leaving anyone alive who might tell what they had done. This way the bodies would be scattered along the roadways, with no piles of corpses to hide.

  Daylight crept under the fierce light of flames and rockets. The women still stumbled along. The guards took turns riding in horse-drawn carts, but even the horses were exhausted, plodding with dull, sunken eyes and stick ribs.

  Through villages, some shredded into matchsticks by the bombs, others strangely untouched by war or death, neat curtains at neat windows, neat trees in neat gardens, but no people to be seen. Either the villages were deserted, or the inhabitants had decided the line of marching dead should not be seen.

  A forest, a farmhouse nestled into trees. Another village, then another. Night gathered around them again. The beat of war seemed neither nearer nor further behind them.

  ‘Halte dort an!’ Stop there!

  A barn. The women in her group stumbled towards it. No hay. A pungent stink of cows, but the animals this barn had sheltered were gone. Frau Marks dropped upon the ground next to Dr Wolcheki, plunged into what was partly sleep, partly black exhaustion of mind and body.

  Shots just outside the barn woke her. She raised her head and looked around. The other women slept, or were unconscious. The guards dozed too, except fo
r one.

  If she and Dr Wolcheki did not escape soon, then they would die. If they tried to escape, they would probably die too, but at least that way they had hope, could die in defiance, not just in fear.

  She touched Dr Wolcheki’s shoulder lightly, felt her instantly alert, whispered, ‘We must escape. Now.’

  She felt rather than saw Dr Wolcheki nod. Of course she would escape if there was the slightest possible chance it might take her back to Johannes.

  Frau Marks tried to calculate. They could probably make it out the doors and to the trees before the dozing guards could aim their machine guns at them. But the guard by the door would fire at them as soon as he saw them move . . .

  Yells, outside. Shots. Other women were escaping. Or dying as they escaped?

  She did not know. Did not have time to think. She grabbed Dr Wolcheki’s hand as their guard ran towards the noise outside. Together they plunged at the door.

  Clean night air. No time to stop. Trees, night-shadowed forest, to the left. They ran, heads down, not looking to either side. Shots, and more shots. She heard Dr Wolcheki gasp. Bullets cracked around them.

  Trees! Their shadows gathered them and hid them, but they still ran, for bullets snickered all around. A mound of snow . . . She pulled Dr Wolcheki down behind it as more bullets snickered above.

  Blood bloomed on the snow, a red flower on Dr Wolcheki’s dress.

  ‘Can you go on?’

  Dr Wolcheki pressed a hand to her bloody side. She nodded.

  They crawled along the snow bank, keeping their heads down. Crawled and crawled . . .

  Footsteps, running towards them. And suddenly she knew she had no more strength left to run. She waited for the death shots.

  A voice said, ‘Go to the house on the left. Hurry!’

  She looked up. An elderly man in ragged farmer’s clothes, his boots held together with twine, peered down at the two women. ‘Hurry!’ he whispered. ‘The Germans are in the village. Head for the barn behind the house.’ He hesitated, then added, ‘If you are caught, I have not seen you. Tell them no one in the house knows you are there. You understand?’

  ‘I understand,’ muttered Frau Marks. A good man. But he must think of his family too.

  Dr Wolcheki slumped unconscious beside her. The farmer swore, under his breath, as Frau Marks tried and failed to lift her. The farmer bent to help.

  They dragged the unconscious woman towards the barn.

  Chapter 15

  JOHANNES

  GERMAN-OCCUPIED POLAND, 14 JANUARY 1945

  Trucks rumbled under bright electric light, all through the night, lined up waiting for the guards at the gate to check the drivers’ papers, taking people and equipment away into the darkness beyond the barbed wire. At last Johannes moved, a thin shadow, towards a line of trucks that idled as the guard looked at the drivers’ papers. He grabbed onto a truck, managed to climb up its side, then clambered under the tarpaulin.

  The truck was filled with suitcases. He wriggled into a space among them, then felt the vehicle move, the bump of wheels and the occasional skid on the icy road.

  He wanted to look out to try to see the marching women, but the guards might notice movement under the tarpaulin. Nor could he hear the shouts of guards that would mean the marchers were nearby.

  Hours passed. Days? He dozed from exhaustion, and had no way to tell.

  At last the truck stopped. He peered out from under the tarpaulin. It was still night, and probably the same night he had left. He slipped out, down onto the snow, glad of his too-big boots. His legs did not work properly, nor his arms. He forced himself to move. In among the trees, then deeper, into the forest, the tree trunks dark on dark.

  There was a light, a single candle. He moved towards it. There was a door. And knowing he could not keep moving, and that if he lay to sleep in the snow he would never wake, he knocked, not with hope, but because he could see no choice.

  The door opened. A woman stared at his grey rags, the letter ‘P’. ‘Jude!’ The woman’s word was a grunt.

  ‘Nein! Nicht Jude!’

  ‘Go! We don’t want your sort here!’

  ‘Grossmutti, he is just a boy!’

  ‘A boy who will bring us trouble!’

  The other voice sounded both scared and weary. ‘The Russians will bring us more trouble than a boy.’

  Hands reached out, pulling him inside. Soup, made of potatoes and cabbage, thin, but the first proper food he had eaten since home. A bench by a fire, a feather-filled quilt, and true warmth. And around him, two women bustling and a child crying.

  And sleep.

  Chapter 16

  JOHANNES

  GERMAN- AND RUSSIAN-OCCUPIED POLAND, 15 JANUARY 1945

  He woke to a thunderstorm, kind hands and more soup. The younger woman’s voice said, ‘Drink it quickly. You must get dressed.’ She thrust clothes at him. ‘These were my son’s.’

  Were. Her son must be dead.

  The woman said hurriedly, ‘We must get to the train station. The Russians will be here soon.’

  Johannes suddenly realised that the thunder must be shelling, like the noises he had heard at the movie house.

  His hands trembled, but he dressed himself in the unknown boy’s clothes. He joined the old woman, who glared at him crossly. The younger woman carried a baby girl.

  Outside it was late afternoon. They walked, the old woman carrying two suitcases, the younger woman one suitcase and the child, through the trees, then through a village. He wanted to ask their names, but thought: If they capture us, I must pretend I do not know them.

  But no one would know he came from the camp now that he was dressed in proper clothes. He was in no more danger than these women.

  Nor any safer.

  Thunder screamed about them. Someone shouted, ‘In here!’ They scurried through a doorway, down a ladder, into a cellar dark with the scent of fermenting jam.

  Noise grew till it was impossible to tell one explosion from the next. The universe was noise. Johannes covered his ears, to block out the bombs, the screams, the memories. Did Mutti have a cellar to hide in? Warm clothes, like he had, and food? Was she still marching?

  Time passed. So did the night. At last a square of light appeared. The cellar door, opening.

  One by one the villagers climbed up to the surface. He could not see the two women and the child he had arrived with. Perhaps they did not want him to see them, so didn’t meet his eyes.

  The cottage above them was shattered sticks, a window, a dead cat. He thought of Maus, but could not cry.

  They were a mob now, thirty villagers perhaps, mostly women, children, a few old men, running-walking along the road. No one asked who he was. A railway station. Carriages, true carriages, not cattle cars. It was impossible to fit everyone in.

  They did.

  He lay across the laps of two farm women. Big fat laps, and warm. For some reason it hurt to breathe. Again he slept.

  He woke to find the world was slipping in and out of blackness. He thought: I have a fever. I am ill. Breathing hurt so much the world went black.

  And then he thought nothing, except dreams.

  Chapter 17

  JOHANNES

  GERMANY, LATE JANUARY 1945

  And then the dreams stopped.

  Johannes knew they had stopped because the girl who sat beside him was not like anyone he had seen before, not in a dream or a nightmare.

  She was small, his age perhaps. She was strange too. It took him a moment to work out what the strangeness was. Not the mark on her face — that might be a bruise or a burn — but that she was . . . not fat, but not thin either. How long in this ogre’s world had it been since he had seen a girl who was not thin?

  And then he realised something else: he could breathe. It still hurt to breathe too deeply. But air went in and air went out without the world turning black again. He could almost hear Mutti say, ‘This is good.’

  Mutti! He had to find her. And Vati. Or they had to fin
d him.

  The girl held a spoon and a cracked cup of water. Johannes felt his moist lips. She must have been spooning water drip by drip into his mouth as he lay unconscious. That is what Mutti and Nurse Stöhlich and the others had done when people were unconscious back in the camp, so they did not die from lack of water while their bodies were trying to recover. Often it was all that they could do to help them. But it could save lives.

  Perhaps this girl had saved his.

  He managed to look around. A barn, piled with hay. He lay on a blanket on the hay, with another blanket over him, the hay fluffed up to help keep him warm. A little way away a thin woman lay on blankets in the hay too. She muttered as she slept. A boy, thin too, about eight years old, sat next to the woman, holding her hand.

  ‘What happened? Where am I?’ he whispered.

  ‘I am Helga Schmidt,’ said the girl, which wasn’t what he’d asked.

  ‘I am Johannes. Johannes Wolcheki.’

  The girl nodded. ‘This is my brother, Hannes.’

  The smaller boy nodded a greeting. ‘I am really Johannes too. But I like Hannes better.’

  ‘And this is our mother, Frau Schmidt,’ said Helga.

  ‘Do you live here?’

  ‘In a barn? Of course not,’ said the boy, Hannes. ‘We live in a big house, in Berlin.’ His face twisted. Johannes could see he was trying not to cry. ‘But then the tanks came. We hid in the cellar, but the Russian soldiers found us. They hurt Mutti and Helga —’ He stopped and corrected himself. ‘They hurt Mutti. So we ran and hid, and H-Helga had a pass that got us on a train . . .’

  Johannes tried to follow the boy’s story, turning to the girl for clarification. ‘Did the soldiers hurt you? The bruise on your face looks bad.’

  ‘I was born with the mark on my face. It’s called a birthmark,’ said Helga quietly. ‘The soldiers didn’t hurt me.’

  ‘Helga,’ moaned Frau Schmidt. ‘Do not hurt Helga! Please! Please, stop!’

  ‘Mutti!’ Hannes bent to her again. ‘Wake up! Helga is here. Safe. See?’