The Boy at the Top of the Mountain

by John Boyne

  Now the little boy who had been brought to the mountain in short trousers began to ascend it for the last time.

  He stayed there, uncertain what to do next. Reading the papers, he followed the arrival of the Allies into the heart of Germany and wondered when the enemy would come for him. A few days before the end of the month a plane flew overhead, a British Lancaster bomber, and dropped two bombs onto the side of the Obersalzberg, just missing the Berghof itself but sending enough debris back to shatter most of the windows. Pieter had been hiding inside the house, in the Führer’s own study, and as the glass exploded all around him, hundreds of tiny shards flew towards his face, sending him hurtling to the floor, screaming in terror. Only when the sound of the planes had gone did he feel safe enough to stand up and make his way into the bathroom, where he was greeted by his bloodied countenance in the mirror. He spent the rest of the afternoon trying to remove as much glass as possible; he feared that the scars would never go away.

  The last newspaper arrived on 2 May, and the headline on the front page told him everything he needed to know. The Führer was dead. Goebbels was gone too, that awful skeletal man, along with his wife and children. Eva had bitten into a cyanide capsule; Hitler had put a gun to his head. The worst of it was that before the cyanide was taken, the Führer decided that it needed to be tested, to ensure that it really worked. The last thing he wanted was for Eva to be left writhing in agony and captured by the enemy. He wanted her to have a swift release.

  And so he tried a capsule out on Blondi. And it worked, quickly and efficiently.

  Pieter felt almost nothing as he read the newspaper. He stood outside the Berghof and looked across at the landscape that surrounded him. He glanced down towards Berchtesgaden and then towards Munich, remembering the train journey where he had first encountered members of the Hitlerjugend. And finally his eyes turned in the direction of Paris, the city of his birth, a place that he had all but disowned in his desire to be important. But he wasn’t French any more, he realized. Nor was he German. He was nothing. He had no home, no family, and he deserved none.

  He wondered whether he could live there for ever. Hide away on the mountainside like a hermit and live off whatever he found in the forests. Perhaps he would never need to see humans again. Let them all get on with their lives down there, he thought. Let them continue with their fighting and their warring and their shooting and their killing, and perhaps they would leave him out of it. He would never have to speak again. He would never have to explain himself. No one would ever look into his eyes and see the things he had done or recognize the person he had become.

  For an afternoon, the idea seemed like a good one.

  And then the soldiers came.

  It was late in the afternoon of 4 May, and Pieter was picking up stones from the gravel driveway, trying to dislodge a tin can from its perch. The silence of the Obersalzberg began slowly to be infiltrated by a deep sound that rose from the base of the mountain to where he stood. As it grew louder, he stared over the side to where a troop of soldiers were ascending, not wearing German uniforms, but American ones. They were coming for him.

  He thought of escaping into the forest, but there was no point in running and nowhere to run to anyway. He was left with no choice. He would wait for them.

  He went back inside the house and sat in the living room, but as they came closer he began to feel afraid and went out into the hallway in search of a hiding place. In the corner was a small closet, barely big enough to accommodate him, but he climbed inside and closed the door behind him. A little string hung from just above his head, and when he pulled it a light came on, illuminating the space. There were only some old washcloths and dustpans in there, but something was poking into his back and he reached round to see what it was. Pulling it out, he was surprised to find that a book had been carelessly thrown in, and he turned it round to look at the title. Emil and the Detectives. He pulled the light cord again, condemning himself to darkness.

  Voices filled the house now, and he could hear the boots of the soldiers as they made their way into the room. They were calling out to each other in a language he didn’t understand, laughing and whooping with delight as they looked inside his bedroom, the Führer’s room, the maids’ rooms. Inside what had once been his Aunt Beatrix’s room. He heard bottles being opened, corks being popped. And then he heard two sets of boots making their way down the corridor towards him.

  ‘What’s in here?’ asked one of the soldiers in an American accent, and before Pieter could reach out to hold it closed, the door to the cupboard swung open, letting in a burst of light that forced him to shut his eyes quickly.

  The soldiers let out a cry, and he heard their guns cocking as they pointed them at him. He cried out in return, and a moment later there were four, six, ten, a dozen, an entire company of men gathered around, pointing their guns at the boy hiding in the darkness.

  ‘Don’t hurt me,’ cried Pieter, curling himself into a ball, covering his head with his hands, wishing for all the world that he could make himself so small that he would simply disappear into nothingness. ‘Please don’t hurt me.’

  And before he could speak again, an unknown number of hands reached into the darkness and pulled him back out into the light.

  EPILOGUE

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  A Boy Without a Home

  Having spent so many years in near isolation at the top of the Obersalzberg, Pieter struggled to adjust to life in the Golden Mile Camp near Remagen, where he was taken immediately after his capture. He was told on his arrival that he was not a prisoner of war, since the war was now officially over, but part of a group known as the ‘disarmed enemy forces’ instead.

  ‘What’s the difference?’ asked a man standing near him in the line.

  ‘Means we don’t have to follow the Geneva Convention,’ replied one of the American guards, spitting on the ground as he took a packet of cigarettes from his jacket pocket. ‘So don’t expect a free ride here, Fritz.’

  Incarcerated with a quarter of a million captured German soldiers, Pieter made a decision as he entered the gates that he would talk to no one and employ only the few bits of sign language he recalled from his childhood in order to pretend that he was deaf and mute; a charade that worked so well that soon no one even looked in his direction any more, let alone spoke to him. It was as if he didn’t exist. Which was exactly how he wanted it to be.

  In his section of the camp there were more than a thousand men, ranging from officers of the Wehrmacht, who still held nominal authority over their subordinates, to members of the Hitlerjugend, some even younger than Pieter himself, although the ones who looked particularly youthful were released within a few days. The hut where he slept contained two hundred men who crowded into cots that held only a quarter of their number, and most nights he found himself trying to find an empty space by a wall where he could lie down with his jacket rolled under his head, hoping to get a few hours’ sleep.

  Some soldiers, mostly the senior ones, were interrogated in order to find out what they had done during the war, and having been discovered in the Berghof, Pieter was questioned about his activities many times, but continued to feign deafness, writing on notepaper the true story of how he had come to leave Paris and find himself in the care of his aunt. The authorities sent in different officers to question him, hoping to find a discrepancy in his tale, but as he always told the truth there was nothing they could do to catch him out.

  ‘And your aunt?’ one of the soldiers asked him. ‘What happened to her? She wasn’t at the Berghof when you were discovered.’

  Pieter held his pen over the notepad and tried to steady his trembling hand. She died, he wrote finally, unable to look the man in the eye as he passed the pad across.

  Fights broke out occasionally. Some of the men were embittered by their defeat; others were more stoical. One evening a man who Pieter knew – from the grey woollen Fliegermütze side-cap he wore – had been a member of the Luftwaffe bega
n denouncing the National Socialist Party, sparing nothing in his contempt for the Führer, and an officer from the Wehrmacht marched over and slapped him across the face with his glove, calling him a traitor and the reason they had lost the war. For ten minutes they rolled about on the floor, striking each other, kicking and punching, while the other men formed a circle around them, cheering them on, excited by the brutality, which came as a relief against the tedium of the Golden Mile. In the end the soldier lost to the airman, a result that divided the hut, but so severe were both their injuries that by the next morning they had disappeared and Pieter never saw either of them again.

  Finding himself standing by the kitchens one afternoon when none of the soldiers were standing guard, he crept in and stole a loaf of bread, smuggling it back to the hut inside his shirt and nibbling on it throughout the day, his stomach growling in delight at this unexpected offering; but he had only eaten half of it before an Oberleutnant a little older than him noticed what he was doing and came over to take it from him. Pieter tried to fight him off, but the man was too strong for him and eventually he gave up, retreating to his corner like a caged animal aware of a stronger aggressor, trying to clear his head of all thoughts. Emptiness was the state he longed for. Emptiness and amnesia.

  From time to time English-language newspapers would circulate between the huts, and those who could understand them would translate, telling the gathered men what had been taking place in their country since the surrender. Pieter heard how the architect Albert Speer had been sentenced to prison; how Leni Riefenstahl, the lady who had filmed him on the terrace of the Berghof during Eva’s party, claimed to have known nothing of what the Nazis were doing but was being held in various French and American detention camps nevertheless. The Obersturmbannführer who had once stood on Pierrot’s hand in Mannheim station and had subsequently come to the Berghof with his arm in a sling to take control of one of the death camps, had been captured by the Allied Armies and went with them without complaint. Of Herr Bischoff, who had designed the camp in his so-called ‘zone of interest’, he heard nothing, but he learned how the gates had been opened at Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and Dachau, at Buchenwald and Ravensbrück, as far east as Jasenovac in Croatia, as far north as Bredtvet in Norway, and to the south in Sajmište in Serbia, and how the inmates had been released to return to their shattered homes, having lost parents, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts and children. He listened intently as the details of what had gone on in these places were revealed to the world, and grew more numb as he tried to understand the cruelty of which he had been a part. When he couldn’t sleep, which was often, he lay staring at ceiling, thinking: I am responsible.

  And then one morning he was released. About five hundred men were brought to the courtyard to be told that they could return to their families. The men looked surprised, as if they suspected it might be a trap of some sort, making their way towards the gates nervously. Only when they were a mile or two away from the camp and certain that they were not being followed did they begin to relax, at which point they looked at each other, confused by their liberation after so many years of army life, and wondered, What do we do now?

  Pieter spent much of the following years moving from place to place, seeing the destructive signs of the war in the faces of the people and the landmarks of the cities. From Remagen, he travelled north towards Cologne, where he saw how badly the city had crumbled beneath the bombs of the Royal Air Force. Everywhere he turned, buildings were half destroyed, streets were impassable, although the great cathedral at the heart of the Domkloster remained standing in spite of the number of hits it had taken. From there, he made his way west towards Antwerp, where he found work for a time at the busy port which stretched along the waterfront, living in an attic room overlooking the Schelde river.

  He made a friend, a rare thing for him, as the other dockyard workers had him down as something of a loner, but this friend – a young man of his own age named Daniel – seemed to share something of Pieter’s loneliness. Even in the heat, Daniel always wore a long-sleeved shirt, when everyone else was bare-chested, and they teased him about it, saying that he was so shy he would never be able to find a girlfriend.

  Occasionally they ate dinner together or went for a drink, and Daniel never mentioned his wartime experiences any more than Pieter himself did.

  Once, late one evening in a bar, Daniel mentioned that it would have been his parents’ thirtieth wedding anniversary that day.

  ‘Would have been?’ asked Pieter.

  ‘They’re both dead,’ replied Daniel quietly.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘My sisters too,’ confided Daniel, his finger rubbing at an invisible mark on the table between them. ‘And my brother.’

  Pieter said nothing, but knew immediately why Daniel always wore long sleeves and refused to remove his shirt. Beneath those sleeves, he knew, was a number scarred into the skin, and Daniel, scarcely able to live with the memory of what had happened to his family, was forced to see an eternal reminder every time he looked down.

  The next day Pieter wrote a letter to his employer, resigning from the shipyard, and went on his way without even saying goodbye.

  He took a train north to Amsterdam, where he lived for the next six years, changing vocations entirely as he trained as a teacher, securing a position at a school near the train station. He never spoke of his past, making few friends outside his job and spending most of his time alone in his room.

  One Sunday afternoon, taking a stroll through the Westerpark, he stopped to listen to a musician playing the violin beneath a tree and was transported back to his childhood in Paris – those carefree days when he had visited the Tuileries Garden with his father. A crowd had gathered, and when the performer stopped to run a cake of rosin across the strings of his bow, a young woman stepped forward to throw a few coins into his upturned hat. Turning back, she glanced in Pieter’s direction, and as their eyes met, he felt his stomach contort in pain. Although they had not met in many years, he knew her instantly and it was clear that she recognized him too. The last time he saw her she had been running in tears from his bedroom in the Berghof, the fabric of her blouse ripped at the shoulder where he had pulled at it before Emma had sent him sprawling to the floor. She walked over now without any fear in her eyes and stood before him, even more beautiful than he remembered her from their shared youth. Her gaze didn’t shift; she simply stared at him as if words were unnecessary, until he could bear it no longer and lowered his eyes to the ground in shame. He hoped that she would walk away but she didn’t, she stood her ground, and when he dared to look up again, she wore an expression on her face of such contempt that he wished he could simply disappear into thin air. Turning away without a word, he made his way home.

  By the end of the week he had resigned his position at the school and understood that the moment he had put off for so long had finally come.

  It was time to go home.

  The first place Pieter visited when he returned to France was the orphanage in Orleans, but when he arrived it was no longer fully standing. During the occupation it had been taken over by the Nazis, the children scattered to the winds as it became a centre of operations for the Germans. When it became clear that the war was coming to an end, the Nazis had fled the building, destroying portions of it as they left, but the walls were strong and it didn’t completely fall apart. It would have taken a lot of money to rebuild it, and as yet no one had stepped forward to recreate the haven it had once been for children who had no families of their own.

  Walking into the office where he had first met the Durand sisters, Pieter looked for the glass cabinet that had held their brother’s medal, but it was gone, along with the sisters themselves.

  The war records department, however, led him to discover that Hugo, who had bullied him when he lived there, had died a hero. As a teenage boy he had resisted the occupying forces and run several dangerous missions that saved the lives of many of his compatriots before being disc
overed in the act of planting a bomb near the same orphanage where he had grown up on the day a German general had come to visit. He was lined up against a wall, and reportedly refused the blindfold as the soldiers pointed their weapons at him, wanting to look his executioners in the eye as he fell.

  Of Josette he could find no trace. Another missing child of the war, he realized, whose fate he would never know.

  Arriving back in Paris at last, he spent his first night writing a letter to a lady who lived in Leipzig. He described in detail the actions he had taken one Christmas Eve when he was a boy, and said that while he understood that he could not expect to be forgiven, he wanted her to know how eternally regretful he would be.

  He received a simple, polite reply from Ernst’s sister, who told him that she had been tremendously proud when her brother had become chauffeur to such a great man as Adolf Hitler and considered his actions in attempting to assassinate the Führer a stain on her family’s proud history.

  You did what any patriot would have done, she wrote, and Pieter read the letter in astonishment, realizing that time might move on, but the ideas of some people never would.

  One afternoon a few weeks later, he found himself strolling past a bookshop in the Montmartre district, and he stopped to look at a display in the window. It had been many years since he had read a novel – the last had been Emil and the Detectives – but there was something there that caught his eye and made him go inside to lift the book from its stand, turning it round to look at the photograph of the author on the back.

  The novel was written by Anshel Bronstein, the boy who had lived in the flat below him as a child. Of course, he remembered, he had wanted to be a writer. It seemed that his ambition had come true.

  He bought the book and read it over the course of two evenings before making his way to the office of the publisher, where he said that he was an old friend of Anshel’s and would like to contact him. He was given the writer’s address and informed that he would probably find him at home as M. Bronstein spent every afternoon there, writing.