Max

by Sarah Cohen-Scali

  I’m not dreaming. The smell is real, it gets in my nose and makes me cough. With a gigantic effort I get my eyes wide-open and my head off the pillow. And there’s Lukas sitting on my bed, bending over me. Armed with his little ash box, he’s smoking away, and must have been at it for a while, judging by the three butts I can make out on the ground when I sit up. A ray of moonlight from the dormitory window illuminates his face, accentuating his pallor, so that his head seems to be floating by itself, detached from his body. Once my eyes get used to the darkness, I see that his head is well and truly attached to his body, a body wearing striped pyjamas that are nothing like the mandatory shorts and singlet worn at night in the Napola dormitories. He’s wearing…the uniform of a concentration-camp prisoner.

  I glance around to make sure no one else is awake.

  ‘Are you completely crazy, smoking in here? And what the hell is this outfit? Are you out of your mind?’

  I quickly grab the cigarette out of his mouth and stub it out. He doesn’t protest but just as I’m about to demand an explanation, he places a finger on my mouth to shut me up, while also checking that no one is watching.

  So is he going to speak, or write his secret on a piece of paper for me, just like he did in the study hall after Gunter’s murder? (If he’s come here, in the middle of the night, it must mean he has something of vital importance to tell me.) But he still hasn’t made a move. I wait without pushing him away because, despite not moving, he hasn’t got the same empty look about him that he’s had recently. I’m guessing that he’s just finding it hard to speak, as if the words are too difficult, too much, to pass his lips. Is he about to tell me that he’s killed the Heimführer himself?

  After a few moments that seem like an eternity, he brandishes in front of my face the wooden box filled with cigarette ash.

  ‘That’s how they end up.’

  ‘What do you mean? What’s that? Who ends up? You’re making no sense at all!’ I’m trying to whisper but it feels like I’m shouting loud enough to wake the whole dormitory.

  ‘The Jews. That’s how they end up. They go up in smoke, reduced to ash.’

  My turn to be speechless. Lukas’s answer makes no sense at all, and yet he was his usual confident, articulate self. ‘It’s a program called “The Final Solution”,’ he continues. ‘It started in 1942, when we were in Kalish. It’s been very successful, and is functioning more and more effectively. In every single concentration camp, Jews from all over Europe are piled into gas chambers, then their bodies are burned in crematorium furnaces. Tens of thousands die at a time.’

  ‘No! No! That’s impossible. We would have known. Our biology teachers would have told us about that, they…’

  I don’t finish my sentence because in biology we did study the issue of ‘the necessity to exterminate the Jewish people’, without ever finding out exactly how this extermination might be carried out. The events of the last few months have shown me that they don’t tell us everything at the Napola. Information is filtered, altered. The things Lukas told me before he left for his training, things I refused to believe, have proved to be true. The reason I chucked the farting Führer in the bin was that I realised the puppet was nothing but a pale reflection of the real thing.

  While I’m trying to work all this out in my head, I feel a weird sensation. A physical reaction. Like flashes in my brain. Like auditory memories, voices, overheard conversations at Kalish, and earlier, in Poznan, when I was in the bombed-out house and I heard snatches of conversation at night, from behind Doctor Ebner’s door. Those voices start to come back to me, little by little, then stronger, confirming what Lukas has just said. Doctor Ebner and his colleagues were listing figures, so many for this camp, so many for that camp, and they talked about ‘increased efficiency levels’.

  Lukas explains that he got this information about the Final Solution from the SS guy he pretended to be friendly with at the factory. The SS guy had worked at Treblinka. He saw everything. He himself herded hundreds of Jews into the gas chambers. On the last day of training, he gave Lukas the horrible pyjamas as a present, a memento.

  A memento. Flashes start in my brain again. Those pyjamas are atrocious, disgusting, and yet I’m attracted to them. I delve back into my earliest memories…and there it is: the dissident-whore-who-kidnapped-me-when-I-was-a-baby. The story Josefa told me over and over has stayed there, filed away in one of the compartments of my brain. The whore wore those pyjamas, I was in her arms, my face buried in that rough, filthy material, my source of warmth and reassurance.

  I look up at Lukas.

  He’s lighting another cigarette. I can’t think of a thing to say in protest. And there’s no point anyway. He stands up and walks out of the dormitory, leaving in his wake a cloud of smoke and the taste of ash in my mouth.

  Everything has turned to shit.

  Black shit that lasts for weeks. The sky is more and more threatening. I don’t mean rain or storms, but bombs. Enemy planes crisscrossing the sky above the Napola.

  It’s new, disturbing, traumatic. Planes circling above our heads like birds of prey. No one ever led us to believe this would happen one day.

  The first time the siren went off, it was the middle of the night. We didn’t take any notice, thinking it was one of the night drills, like ‘the gas siren’, when the instructors release tear gas through the buildings. In total darkness, and plunged in toxic gas, we have to put on our uniforms and gather in the courtyard for inspection. If a student is not dressed properly he has to charge back to the dormitory, then come out again for inspection. Everyone hates these drills. So many of my young friends end up almost choking, as they are made to dash back again and again for a forgotten cap, belt, or because their boots weren’t properly polished. And if the drill wasn’t stressful enough, it was often followed by a night march or a river crossing.

  This particular night, when the siren went off, hardly any of us got up. Those who did manage to stir got dressed in a rush. Who cared? Most of the instructors were away, so no one would check uniforms. But, as soon as we were outside, we could tell that the orders were being shouted differently. Panic was in the air. This wasn’t a drill; it was an ‘air-raid warning 15’, which meant enemy aeroplanes were fifteen minutes away. We rushed back to get the lazy boys who might have ended up asleep forever after the bombing. Then we all hurtled down to the air-raid shelters.

  Lukas didn’t come down with us that night.

  And he doesn’t come down any other night. In fact, he doesn’t get out of bed at all. He just lies there, refusing to speak, smoking, smoking all day long. He doesn’t respond to the sirens, and refuses to turn up for training. Because of his excellent student track record, the directors turn a blind eye and ascribe his ‘depression’ to the distress caused by the deaths of Gunter and Herman. But not for long: depression is a shameful, intolerable condition for a Jungmann. Especially for a Jungmann who is expected to excel in order to soon join the ranks of the Volkssturm.

  I’m chosen—they still all think we’re brothers—to get Lukas back on track. I’m given a month to do it, an ultimatum that seems almost identical to the one Ebner gave me in Kalish. But I really don’t want to relive that experience. And I’m fed up with this role reversal. Lukas is the big brother; I’m the little brother. And it’s about time he woke up to that.

  Still, I do as I’m told. I don’t have a choice: the directors might not be aware of it, but I have a much stronger connection to Lukas than our so-called status as siblings.

  My only real success is to get him to hand over his striped prisoner pyjamas and let me dispose of them. Otherwise, all I can do is rescue his meal rations from a greedy student at his table, and take them up to him in the dormitory. I spoonfeed him, like a baby. He only eats at most a third. But he keeps on smoking like a chimney, as if he wanted to incinerate himself, disappear in smoke like those others. And I’m the one who provides him with cigarettes. The Heimführer told me that, given the present circumstances, my b
ank account, funded by Doctor Ebner over the years, has been closed, but I can have the money in cash instead. I said yes. So I have plenty of money, but I can’t buy chocolate, or butter, or jam, because there’s no longer any available on the black market. The quartermaster at the Napola—the nerve centre of the black market—is only selling cigarettes. I give most of mine to Lukas and smoke the rest, which makes me lose my appetite a bit.

  The trouble is, with all that smoking, Lukas coughs and spits and stinks. It’s disgusting. What’s he on about? Dying a slow and horrible death so he can share the same fate as those Jews?

  I try to keep him occupied as best I can. While he’s slumped on the bed, I ask him, ‘What about we masturbate? Like we used to before you left for training?’

  No response.

  At the end of my tether, I even incite him to murder. ‘Why don’t you kill some more students? It’s easy now with the sirens. When the air-raid 15 siren goes off, you quickly knock off one or two and then head down to the shelter, you can’t go wrong.’

  ‘Nie dos´ć! Not enough.’

  At least that got a response. So he hasn’t turned completely stupid, his hearing and speech faculties are still functioning. Of course, his latest thing is to start speaking Polish again. He doesn’t utter a word of German.

  I think for a moment. ‘Why don’t you go for the teachers? They should be your main targets, and then there’d be fewer at the front!’

  ‘Nie dos´ć!’

  Whatever I say, he comes out with the same thing, as well as a few Hebrew prayers. He looks so ridiculous when he mumbles in that barbaric language, with his handkerchief on his head and the cigarette stuck in his mouth.

  ‘Why do you pray? You said you weren’t religious.’

  ‘Musze uczcic pamiec mojego ojca.’ I have to honour the memory of my father.

  ‘Well, your mother wasn’t religious. What would she say if she saw you risking your life because of a prayer?’

  ‘Moja matka zginela.’ My mother went up in smoke.

  ‘You don’t know that! She might still be alive.’

  There’s a glimmer of hope in his eyes. For a second, he stops sucking on his cigarette butt, then shakes his head. ‘Nie. Nie ma zadnej szansy.’ No, not a chance.

  End of dialogue.

  Fortunately his mates don’t bother speaking to him anymore. They’re determined to fight the Russians no matter what, so for them Lukas is now just a loser.

  ‘You really want to help him?’ one of them says to me. ‘Tell him to commit suicide. It’s the only way he’ll get out of this and save face.’

  Thanks for the advice.

  By staying in bed during the air raids, he seems hellbent on suicide anyway. One of these mornings, I’ll find him reduced to a little pile of ashes, incinerated in a fire started by one of his damned cigarettes. Or reduced to a pulp on his mattress after a bombing raid.

  It stinks. It really stinks.

  Things never go according to plan in life. It’s so annoying. When you’re taken by surprise it makes you flustered. I hate that. I hate it when events don’t follow a predetermined, logical order. I hate things being subject to a series of unexpected accidents.

  Here are the three most serious accidents in my life to date:

  Lukas being Jewish.

  The affection I have for him despite that.

  The imminent defeat of the Reich.

  The last of these being by far the most aberrant, the most unimaginable, the most unpredictable of all possible events. I still can’t get my head around it.

  And yet…

  There are rumours that the British landed in Normandy last month, that soon France and Belgium will be liberated. Others say the Soviets are already in Germany. The directors of the Napola haven’t confirmed the rumours, at least not in words, but recent decisions speak for themselves.

  Once again the Napola is undergoing changes, little by little losing its primary identity. There’s an air of desertion about the school.

  For the younger children, it’s an authorised desertion. Most of them have been sent home. For good. A mass exodus was already organised a few weeks ago, when no one knew for sure that elsewhere the shit was hitting the fan. Parents—those still alive, with a house somewhere in the country, outside the cities under siege from the enemy, and with means of transport—came to collect their sons. Up to now, the children who didn’t hear from their families were gathered in groups from the same region and had to find their own way home, one of them designated as platoon leader and issued with a regulatory travel order.

  This return-to-sender system seems to have worked well in the case of the most resourceful children. (Although no one actually knows if they made it home. Perhaps they stepped on a mine, or perished in a bombing raid, or were shot by enemy guns.) In any case, they didn’t come back here, unlike some, the really dumb ones. Just like those dogs, abandoned in the middle of nowhere by their owners, who somehow find their way home, kids arrived back at the school two or three days after leaving. They were in a dreadful state, wretched and starving. Sobbing, they told us how, when they produced their travel order to use as a train pass, the stationmaster sent them packing, telling them they could ‘wipe their bum with it’. They were allowed a few days’ rest at the Napola, before being sent off again.

  Manfred is one of a group that is leaving today. Carrying his little case, he heads over to say goodbye to me. I’m quick to put my hand out and avoid him kissing me, which is clearly his intention. (Oh my God, he’s such a faggot!)

  ‘Why don’t you want to leave with us?’ he asks tearfully.

  I am a ward of the state. I have neither parents nor home. Nowhere to go. That’s why I’m the only one of the younger children allowed to stay at the school. But I’m free to leave if I want to. Manfred knows this and launches into an emotional appeal that he hopes will touch me. (He is seriously kidding himself.)

  ‘What will you do, all alone here with the adults? What’s so great about that?’

  ‘I’m not alone, I’ve got my brother.’

  ‘Your brother’s sick, he won’t be able to protect you from the Russians when they arrive.’

  ‘Who says I need protecting, you piece of shit? Who says my brother’s sick? Who says the Russians are coming? Why are you so full of bullshit?’

  Manfred lowers his head at my outburst. ‘I need to be protected,’ he mutters after a moment. He looks at me with eyes filled with tears, and flutters his eyelashes like a girl. ‘I’d feel safer with you than with Erwin. I bet he pisses off on us as soon as we get to the station.’

  He’s on the money there. Erwin is the platoon leader assigned to Manfred’s group. He is a total idiot, not the slightest bit reliable. ‘Oh, come on, don’t worry, everything will be all right.’

  I have to encourage poor Manfred. I feel sorry for him now. He looks like he’s about to piss his pants, he’s so petrified. He’s never felt at ease at the Napola. I often heard him calling out ‘Mummy’ at night in the dormitory, and now…Now, how do I tell him that it’s highly likely his ‘Mummy’, and his ‘Daddy’, are dead. It’s obvious, otherwise they would have come to collect him while there was still time. But I’m not trying to break his spirit, so I give him a friendly pat on the back.

  ‘Don’t worry, you’ll be fine.’ I force myself to smile, try as hard as I can to reassure him, so that we part on good terms. I do it all in good faith. And then the stupid numbskull goes and puts his foot in it and says exactly what he shouldn’t have said.

  ‘You know, my parents are really nice. I’m an only child and you’re an orphan. I’m sure Mummy and Daddy would love to adopt you, and then we’d be brothers and we could live together once the war was over.’

  Orphan. Adoption.

  Those words give me goosebumps. Especially the second one. It’s bloodcurdling. It makes my hackles rise. It makes me crazy. I do not want to be adopted. I have never wanted it, even when I was a baby.

  So I smack my fist into M
anfred’s face, and finish him off with a kick up the arse in case the message didn’t get through. ‘Your parents are dead. Get out of here!’

  Now I’m alone in my dormitory. They said I could join another one but I don’t want to. I’d feel like a deserter. At least here, as I go to sleep at night, I’m free to imagine things: I’m a hero! I’m the last soldier left on the battlefield. I’m as tough as the Jungmannen who have stayed at the Napola. They’re the fierce ones, the fanatics, those most devoted to the Reich. Those who renounced their parents a long time ago. The Heimführer and the instructors are counting on them to defend the school when the Soviets arrive at our gates. Well, despite my youth, they can count on me, too!

  But, try as I might, I just can’t motivate myself. It’s like there’s a broken spring inside me. It’s sinister in the dormitory. The silence is sinister. I’ve almost got to the point where I’m hoping for an air-raid siren at night, to smash the lead weight that’s suffocating me. On top of that, the weather is exceptionally stifling this July.

  I’m stewing in my own sweat, and in a torpor.

  20th of July, 1944.

  I know the date because I make myself say it out loud every morning when I wake up, so I can keep my bearings a little. (Gone are the days when a student wrote the date on the blackboard in class. No more students, no more class, no more anything.)

  It’s 6.30 p.m. and the heat is still extreme. I’m hanging around in the dormitory. Late afternoon used to be the time we’d do supervised homework, and I always hated it; now I can’t bear not having it. I wander among the empty beds, talking to myself like an old man, trying to fill the silence, when another voice talks over mine. It takes me a few seconds to realise that it’s a radio announcement broadcast over the school’s loudspeaker system.

  Joseph Gœbbels, the Minister for Propaganda, is speaking to the German people. It seems he’s about to say something quite extraordinary.