Diary of a Dead Man on Leave

by David Downing

  What I must now do as a matter of urgency is investigate Paul Giesemann. Until I know whether he is or isn’t an agent provocateur, there is no way I can approach the group on Moscow’s behalf.

  Sunday, September 11

  The sky was blue and clear this morning, and Verena decided that she and I should take the boys out for a picnic. After a short ride on a local train we took what was clearly a popular walk along the Ems. It was pleasant enough, but Anna’s absence cast a long shadow. Some days I’m amazed by how well we’ve adapted to her not being here; on others I’m aware of how thin the pretense is.

  Walter was clearly making an effort not to spoil it for the rest of us, but I could see how hard it was. Yesterday we went to collect his Jungvolk uniform, and he stood there in the brand-new outfit, staring at himself in the tall shop mirror as if he couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing. “Think of it as a disguise,” I told him quietly, and received a wan smile in return.

  Monday, September 12

  Today was the final day of the Nuremberg Rally. I missed last week’s cinema newsreel, but there’s been no shortage of pictures in the papers and magazines, most of them showing either our glorious leaders or long columns of tanks and marching troops. I shouldn’t be thinking it, let alone writing it, but swap the hooked crosses for hammers and sickles, and you could be looking at May Day in Moscow.

  This evening we adults all gathered around the wireless for Hitler’s closing speech. I suppose there was an air of foreboding. For weeks now the government has been using every opportunity to put pressure on the Czechs and their ever-more-reluctant allies—would this be the moment that Hitler threw caution aside?

  The answer was no, not quite. The Czechs are worse than scum, and enemies forever, but Hitler’s not quite ready to fire the starting pistol. He’s waving it around, finger on the trigger, but he’ll wait a while longer because he’s such a peace-loving man. And the horror of it is, the man’s blend of fiction and fact can sound so believable. There’s just enough truth there to cover the lies. When he says that democracy is little more than the manipulation of public opinion by money and the press, he’s telling the truth, and everyone knows it. When he accuses the Western democracies of gross hypocrisy for supporting cruel regimes and doing virtually nothing to help the Jews, he can hardly be gainsaid. When he claims that Czechoslovakia demeans the idea of self-determination, he has a point. And so it goes on. I’m sure that most of my countrymen and women are lapping it up. They’re as angry as he is at all the hypocrites who stand between their country and the fairer deal Hitler claims it deserves.

  Most people are inclined to hear what they want to hear, and Hitler knows that only too well. He also has a genius for helping them set aside any doubts.

  Coming back to the rally and May Day, there is, I suspect, one huge difference. When Comrade Stalin looks down from his Red Square podium at all his military hardware, the question uppermost in his mind is probably: Will this suffice to keep our enemies out? When Hitler looks down from his podium, I’d lay a bet he’s wondering: How far will this lot take me?

  Given the situation Hitler has put himself and Germany in, he doesn’t have a great deal of choice. Only war can prevent—or mask—the collapse of the economy he’s created, so it’s all about timing, about choosing the moment to strike. If he thinks that’s now, then he’ll use the Sudeten Germans to provoke a general showdown. If, as seems more likely, he’s not convinced that the odds have swung far enough in his favor, he’ll simply bide his time. The man is drunk on success and as such has no reason to think enough is enough. Eventually someone will have to stop him, and no one seems keen to put themselves forward.

  It was a strange feeling, sitting in our parlor, listening to that voice for over an hour, watching the faces around me, serious, worried, trying to work out what the man really means and whether it’s what they want him to mean. Trying not to acknowledge what they already know in their hearts—that his is the voice that will take them to war.

  Tuesday, September 13

  Despite the rain, there was good attendance at this evening’s group meeting—all who had come since June were there, and the Woszes’ porch was thick with umbrellas. Ottilie came for only the second time and, no doubt aware how distracting some had found her prettiness on that first occasion, was even more soberly dressed. She flashed me a smile across the room, which I happily returned—we’ve shared a canteen table a couple of times in the last few weeks, and I enjoy her company. For herself, of course, but also because she reminds me of the old days, when comrades could speak their minds with each other, and wry asides about the party’s shortcomings were not considered grounds for suspicion.

  Unsurprisingly, Hitler’s speech last night was still on everyone’s mind, and most of those present had bones to pick. We have all learned to voice our criticisms constructively—anyone reading a transcript might be forgiven for thinking we really were trying to help out our Führer—but the tone was mostly contemptuous, the angry frustration beneath it impossible to miss.

  As people had their say, I kept my eye on Giesemann. Yesterday I followed him home and then to the bar where he met up with friends. None of the latter looked like Gestapo or, indeed, like anything other than single young men out for a drink. As I watched him this evening, I wondered if my intuition had failed me for once. He wore a look of rapt concentration throughout the discussion, but that was no crime. He might have been storing up others’ treasonous words for a report he meant to write later; he might have just been showing a youth’s fierce commitment.

  If the former, he must have been disappointed. The anger was palpable, but so was the sense that the group is marking time. Someone needs to push them over the edge, and Moscow’s expecting that to be me. I don’t think the time is ripe, but I’m very aware that I may be letting other considerations warp my judgment.

  In the meantime the group just keeps talking. We confine ourselves to workplace issues—toilet breaks took up much of this evening’s agenda—occasionally straying across the invisible border that separates these from their political context. Giesemann always seems keen to press the wider connections, but young people often have a weakness for righteous generalizations. Provocation or exuberance? I still don’t know.

  Before the meeting broke up, Müller surprised me by bringing up Anna’s arrest. It was clear from the facial expressions that most of those present knew who she was, but Müller didn’t mention her being a former comrade. He said Frau Gersdorff was a local widow whom the Gestapo had recently arrested for making seditious statements, purely on the word of an informer. It was, he said, a matter for our group, because the denouncer concerned was her lodger Aksel Ruchay, a fellow Reichsbahn employee whom many of us knew. “We don’t know what she’s accused of saying,” Müller told the room, “but we do know that she had only just turned down his offer of marriage.” Some sort of action was required, and he asked for suggestions.

  The only one offered that seemed practical—making life hell for Ruchay at work—was not about to help Anna, and after explaining that I was also one of Frau Gersdorff’s lodgers, I got up and explained the rather less punitive strategy the family favored, at least in the short run. The general consensus was that appealing to Ruchay’s better nature was like looking for mercy in one of the Führer’s speeches, but all conceded that treating the man like a leper could wait a few weeks.

  Müller walked part of the way home with me and seemed eager to tell me how upset he was about Anna’s continued detention. He sounded genuine, and again I considered raising my concerns about Giesemann. So why didn’t I? I’m already as sure as I can be that Müller isn’t a traitor, so the risk of revealing myself is not going to get any smaller.

  It might be age and experience making me more averse to any sort of gamble, but I don’t think that’s the reason. If Anna or Erich were here to look after Walter, I think I’d have spoken up by now.

>   Wednesday, September 14

  Walter came up to see me this evening, the first time he’s done so in quite a while. I’ve missed his visits, but I haven’t taken the decline in their frequency personally—he spends more time with his grandfather now that Anna can’t, and with Marco living here, he has someone roughly his own age for company.

  Yesterday evening, while I was out, he had attended his first Jungvolk meeting. I asked him how it had gone.

  He sighed the Walter sigh. “All right, I suppose.”

  I asked him what they had done.

  A lot of physical exercises, he said. Climbing ropes, vaulting horses, “like PE at school, except that we have to carry things.”

  Military training for twelve-year-olds, I thought.

  An outdoor exercise is scheduled for the weekend after next, and they’ve all been assigned to competing teams. Last night his team was studying maps and working out how to reach their objectives ahead of the others.

  With the future in mind, they have also all been asked to think about which of the three special groups—ground transport, ships, or planes—they want to join when they turn fourteen.

  “You’ll say planes,” I guessed.

  “Of course.”

  The meeting had concluded with a game of “trappers and Indians,” which from Walter’s account was a brawl by another name. “One boy fell on his wrist and broke it,” he reported, “so the troop leader had to take him to the hospital, and the rest of us were all sent home.”

  Seeing my grimace, he insisted it hadn’t been that bad. He’d even enjoyed the map reading.

  A silence ensued, which I filled by asking him how he was feeling.

  He took the question seriously, which was probably more than it deserved. “Useless,” he said. “I feel useless. Mama’s in prison, and there’s nothing I can do. I worry about her all the time. All except when I’m playing football and sometimes when I’m reading—then I forget for a while. But then I remember, and there’s nothing I can do. I can’t put things right the way Tom Shark could. I couldn’t even if I was grown-up.” He looked at me. “I can’t tell them how much I hate their Führer.”

  That shocked me, though God knows why. I told him he could tell me. And Verena, and Jakob, and his grandfather. “We have to stick together,” I said. “And we have to keep hoping for the best.”

  “I know,” he said in a very small voice.

  I asked if he liked having Marco here.

  He said he did. “He’s a good friend. He looks out for me. And I want to get him a Hitler dagger, but we’re only allowed one each.”

  I was about to say I’d look out for one when he asked if I knew where Herr Ruchay had gone to live.

  “Why?” I asked him. “Are you planning on sending a Christmas card?”

  He smiled at that and didn’t ask again. “It just feels like he’s escaped,” Walter explained, as much to himself as me.

  “He hasn’t,” I promised, probably falsely.

  Walter smiled again. “In class today we all had to stand up and say what we want to be when we grow up. Most boys said scientists or soldiers or pilots, but Emil Wollheim said he wanted to be the Führer’s barber. A few boys laughed, and the teacher thought Emil was making a joke. But he wasn’t. He’s just not very clever.”

  I asked Walter what future he had chosen for himself.

  “The thing that came into my head was what I didn’t want to be, and that’s an orphan. But I couldn’t say that, so I said an airplane designer—it pleased the teacher.”

  That reminded me of the day’s headline news—the maiden flight of the new Graf Zeppelin airship. We had passed around the picture in the evening paper at supper, and Walter had barely given it a glance. I asked him what he thought of it. What had the engineers done to improve on the ill-fated Hindenburg? I expected the old Walter’s head full of technical detail; what I got was an older boy’s interest in moral dilemmas.

  He asked if I knew why they were filling the gas cells with hydrogen instead of what they now know is the much safer helium, and when I said no, he told me the reason. Apparently helium’s available in large quantities only in America, and the American government has reneged on a promise to supply it because of the Anschluss with Austria. How, Walter asked me, could making an airship less safe help anyone?

  I agreed that it couldn’t. Seeing him so downcast, I searched my brain for some way to cheer him up and actually came up with something that did. When I suggested that the two of us and Marco could go to a Schalke game, his eyes truly lit up. And when I added that I’d have to ask Verena about Marco, he happily replied that she’d love a few hours without him. I thought that a trifle cruel for Walter, but thinking about it later, I realized that he was actually being perceptive. Over the years how many neighbors can Verena have had who would willingly babysit a mixed-race boy? Finding any time for herself can’t have been easy.

  Walter took his leave—it was almost his bedtime, and he wanted to check his fixture list for Schalke’s next home game. He would tell me at breakfast.

  I listened to his usual thunderous descent of the stairs and wondered what he’ll eventually make of this life he’s been given. Something worthwhile, I decided, because anything else would be a terrible waste.

  Thursday, September 15

  The last two days have been really busy at work. Keeping the Reich’s normal trains running, while simultaneously preparing to launch a possible invasion on one side of the country and delivering the wherewithal to build a huge defensive wall on the other, is proving more than a little challenging. One piece of good news I have for Hitler’s future targets—the Wehrmacht may have tanks and bombers to spare, but Germany’s railways are in no shape to fight a war.

  But as our work gets harder, the workplace grows more beautiful! All our buildings are again being painted inside and out, mostly by “volunteers” from the local Hitler Youth. A new sports field is being laid out on the land beyond the loco works, and a lorry load of shiny white goalposts has already been delivered. A number of saplings have been planted in the pots around our office to replace the ones planted six months ago, which all wilted and died in the smoke drifting across from the sheds.

  Friday, September 16

  We learned today that Prime Minister Chamberlain has visited Hitler in Berchtesgaden; the desire to see the Führer was apparently so overwhelming that the sixty-nine-year-old British leader took to the sky for the first time in his life! And for seven hours each way! If he also laid flowers at Hitler’s feet, that hasn’t been reported.

  And neither has any outcome to their talks. Since Hitler’s speech on Monday, the German press has ramped up its outrage at the Czechs’ treatment of the Sudeten Germans, but the government in Berlin has not moved a muscle. Perhaps Hitler has now persuaded Chamberlain to do his dirty work for him and pull the rug out from under Beneš’s feet.

  Sunday, September 18

  I took Walter and Marco to the cinema this afternoon. There was a lengthy queue, but we were in our seats in time for the newsreel, which was mostly about last week’s rally. Whoever organizes these events, he or she certainly knows how to make them dramatic, and for those who believe in the message, I imagine they leave a lasting impression.

  The feature was the latest spy thriller Secret Code LB 17. The story concerned a terrorist plot to assassinate the war minister, which almost succeeded because of a traitor in the authorities’ ranks. Like most bourgeois escapism, it wasn’t very realistic, but it distracted Walter for a couple of hours.

  This evening I sat with Andreas, who talked a lot about Anna: what she was like as a child, how angry her mother’s early death had made her. Andreas had loved his two sons—both of whom died in the war—and like most fathers had seen them as his personal legacy, but he’d always known that his daughter was something special, cleverer than either of her brothers, more det
ermined, bigger hearted. Not to mention a lot more stubborn.

  I came away feeling more hopeful that she will return.

  Monday, September 19

  Jakob and I got home from work this evening just before Walter and Marco. They’re usually back at least an hour before us, but on this occasion they’d clearly wanted to put their homecoming off as long as possible.

  There’d been another fight at school. Our boys were showing no visible wounds, and for a moment I wondered why they weren’t leaving us adults in blissful ignorance, but the answer soon emerged—one of their foes had lost a tooth. And he wasn’t just any foe—Kurt Pietzch was the only son of a local block warden.

  “We didn’t start it,” Marco told his mother, who looked close to tears.

  Walter just shook his head. He knew it didn’t matter who had started it.

  “So what happened?” I asked.

  Walter described what had happened. Several other boys had cornered him in the toilet and started pushing and shoving him. “They were calling me names, but I didn’t hit back . . .”

  “What names?” I asked.

  “Oh, ‘son of a traitor,’ ‘secret Jew,’ lots of stupid stuff. And then Marco came in and saved me. He hit Kurt in the mouth and knocked his front tooth out, and then they all left us alone.”

  Verena asked what had happened after that.

  Nothing, her son said. Nothing yet, Walter corrected him. It had happened after classes, and there weren’t any teachers around. “It all depends on what Kurt tells his father,” Walter explained. “He won’t want to admit he lost a fight.”