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CHAPTER 5
Poland
September 1939
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The Brucks heard that war had been declared on a beautiful late summer morning. The world learned a new word that day: Blitzkrieg – lightning war. Far to the west, the Germans cut through the Polish army, taking less than a week to reach the outskirts of Warsaw where they laid siege to the Polish capital. The reports Piotr heard on the radio were terrifying. Cities in flames, roads so blocked with fleeing civilians that the army were unable to move their troops to the front.
Frau Bruck wept into her apron when she heard how the brave Polish soldiers had been massacred when they charged against German tanks. Herr Bruck received the news stony-faced. It was terrible, he told them, but Piotr could tell he had convinced himself it was for the best.
As Warsaw was besieged, the thing they feared the most finally happened. The Soviets invaded from the east. The Brucks were trapped. To the west was utter chaos. Roads were still blocked with thousand upon thousands of refugees, fleeing with their horses and carts, their livestock, their possessions in prams, wheelbarrows and railway platform trolleys. If there had been petrol for cars, they would have been useless. There were terrible tales, too, of refugees being strafed by German aircraft.
Herr Bruck travelled to the village to buy provisions and was attacked in the street by some of his own neighbours. The Germans were plain and simple murderers, they shouted as they rained down punches on him. Fortunately there were only two of them, and Herr Bruck was a big man. But he decided to stay at the farm after that and Piotr was forbidden to visit the village alone. They lived off their own farm produce and called on friends to deliver the few things they themselves could not supply.
None of them slept soundly after that beating. Whenever their collie, Solveig, barked in the night, or they heard a strange noise, Herr Bruck would be out there with his shotgun.
The weather stayed beautifully sunny – not the usual September rain, which would turn the dirt roads to muddy bogs. The ground baked hard beneath their feet. ‘Ideal weather for tanks,’ said Herr Bruck with some satisfaction. Had their world not been turned upside down, they would have enjoyed that Indian summer.
Piotr had not forgotten his father’s words the previous year about what would happen if Soviet soldiers arrived. When the wind blew in the right direction, they could hear the sound of artillery fire over in the east. The Soviets were drawing closer. Piotr was so consumed by anxiety he now barely slept at night and spent his daytime hours feeling sick, with a tight ball of fear sunk in the pit of his stomach.
There were wild rumours that French troops were pouring across Germany’s western border and heading for Berlin. But as the days went by, no such news was broadcast on the radio. Then they heard the Polish army had made a stand west of Warsaw and the Nazis were in retreat. But if that was the case then it meant no one would be there to stop the Russians. Like the story about the French, it was untrue. The Brucks could breathe again.
When the radio announced the siege of Warsaw had ended and Poland surrendered, the family actually cheered. They heard, too, that the Soviets had stopped at the River Bug, a mere twenty kilometres away from their farm. ‘We’re safe now,’ said Herr Bruck as he hugged his wife and son. Piotr noticed there were tears in his eyes. He had never seen his father like that before.
German motorcycle soldiers arrived in the village three days later – machine guns perched on their sidecars. People began to disappear. Any sense of being ‘safe’ turned sour. There were terrible rumours, too, of piles of bodies in the woods, crawling with flies and maggots.
When Piotr asked about this, his father shook his head. ‘The lesser of two evils,’ he said. ‘The Germans are doing some house cleaning.’ This was a phrase, Piotr noticed, he had picked up from a Nazi radio station. ‘If they have killed anyone, it’s probably the communists. Those traitors don’t deserve our pity.’
The schoolteacher and the village priest had vanished. ‘They’ve probably just taken them away for questioning,’ said Herr Bruck. ‘To make sure they’re not communists.’
‘But what about the Jewish boys in the village?’ said Piotr. His parents fell silent. His mother began to weep. ‘We don’t know what’s happened to them,’ said his father quietly. ‘I heard many of the Jews have been rounded up and taken to Warsaw. I don’t know why they need them all in the same place.’
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After an initial tussle with German soldiers, when Piotr’s father was nearly shot for demanding they treat his farm-workers with greater respect, the Brucks were quickly recognised as being of German stock. They were even allowed to keep their radio while all their Polish neighbours had theirs confiscated.
In October of that year, the whole of the western part of Poland – Silesia, Pomerania, Lodz – became part of Germany. Herr Bruck cursed his luck. That would have suited him fine. Instead, the Brucks were now in a part of Poland known as the General Government. Poles driven from the German-occupied lands were dumped in Warsaw and any other town or village that would have them. Herr Bruck found himself constantly approached by newcomers asking for work and soon he had more farmhands than he really needed. ‘Some of them haven’t got the first idea about farming,’ he said. ‘There’s even one who used to be an accountant.’ He was immediately put to good use sorting out the family accounts. He worked in the kitchen, grateful to be away from the fields and the cows.
Even stranger things began to happen. In the towns and cities, they heard, all the universities, schools, museums and libraries were closed. Then the Jews that still remained were ordered to wear yellow stars. ‘Better the Nazis than the Soviets,’ Herr Bruck insisted doggedly. But Piotr could tell his parents were uneasy.
After the upheaval of the first few months, and when the Poles from the west had been found places to live and work, things settled down. Herr Bruck had always struggled to make ends meet on his farm, but now he began to prosper. The grain, milk and meat he produced were bought for a fair price by the German authorities.
When the war started up again in the west, in the spring of 1940, the Brucks worried some more. What if the Nazis had bitten off more than they could chew? What would stop the Soviets sweeping over the River Bug and swallowing the rest of Poland? Herr Bruck even began to talk of moving back to Germany.
But once again the German army conquered all before it. Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Holland – all swallowed in a month. When fighting started in France, the Germans were at the Channel within a week. And when France fell by the middle of June, the Brucks knew they were going to be spared a Soviet invasion.
So life went on, until the night of 22nd June 1941. Piotr woke before the dawn with the terrible thunder of aircraft flying overhead and the ominous clatter of tank tracks on the roads. Something world-shaking was happening right on his doorstep. He went at once to his parents’ room, but their door, usually closed once they had retired, was still open. He peered inside and was alarmed to discover the bed still made up. They were not there. The previous evening they had promised they would be back by eleven o’clock. It was not at all like them to leave him alone all night.
Piotr called Solveig, who was cowering under the kitchen table, and went into the front garden of the farm. Thick fog hung over the fields and the air was utterly still. Usually he would hear the mournful croak of frogs, but this time their calls were drowned by the roar of artillery. He could see the flashes of the guns lighting up the eastern horizon, close to the River Bug.
He wondered if the Soviets had invaded and the Germans were fighting them off. Perhaps his mother and father had been caught up in the fighting? Piotr began to tremble and rushed inside to sit down. He made some coffee and buttered a slice of bread and waited until first light. Maybe there was a logical explanation for his parents’ absence. Perhaps they had been held up by all the military traffic.
Dawn came. With Solveig close by his heels, he hurried up the driveway linking the farm t
o the main road out of Wyszkow. He could see at once that the aircraft, tanks, motorcycles, lorries and field guns were all going east. It looked like the Germans were doing the invading.
A lorry veered close to the roadside, and Piotr hurriedly leaped out of the way, falling into the verge. Soldiers in the lorry looked down and scoffed. Solveig began to bark and Piotr realised this was no place for his dog. ‘Home, girl,’ he shouted, pointing up the drive. Solveig reluctantly trotted a few paces back but then sat on her haunches and waited.
Piotr turned back to the road. His parents had gone into Wyszkow to have a meal with friends. It seemed to make sense to walk in that direction. He darted across the road in a gap between the traffic and hurried towards the village.
He recognised the car on the side of the road as soon as he saw it, even though it was terribly mangled. The number plate – WZ 1924 – was still there, dangling off the front of the crushed bonnet by a single strand of metal. By the look of the fading tyre tracks on the dirt road, the car had been dragged into the verge.
There were two men by the car, peering into its interior. Piotr knew them. They were two of his father’s farmhands. As soon as they saw him, they waved him away. Piotr ignored them and ran forward. ‘Go back,’ shouted one of the men urgently.
As he came closer, Piotr noticed a trail of dried blood that had seeped out from the passenger door. Through the smashed windscreen he could see, slumped forward . . . a coat? A hat? He recognised these both immediately and looked away before he registered the full horror of the scene. His legs gave beneath him and he fell to the ground retching.
The men came over. One of them put his jacket over Piotr’s shoulders and held on to him. When he’d stopped throwing up, they took him back to their home.
Once Piotr had stopped shaking, he asked to go back to the farm. What else could he do? One of the men walked him back, and he tried not to look at the wreck of the car as they passed. When they got to the track down to the farmhouse, a German soldier waved them away. ‘But it’s my home,’ said Piotr. The soldier knocked him to the ground with the flat end of his rifle butt. ‘It’s the army’s now,’ he said. ‘Now piss off before I shoot you.’
The farmhand held back. To intervene would be to risk his life. But Solveig appeared from nowhere and bounded up to the soldier, snarling angrily. Without a second thought, the man raised his gun and shot her through the head.
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Piotr rushed to his dog but the farmhand grabbed his arm. ‘Go, go, before he shoots us!’ he whispered urgently. Away from the farm they sat by the side of the road and Piotr cried until he had no more tears. Then the two of them walked back to the village.
The farmhands were brothers who lived together in their family cottage. They were kind to Piotr but they could not afford to keep him for long. Within a week, the authorities were informed and Piotr was sent to the orphanage in Warsaw.
On the day he left, the local policeman came to visit. It was a tank that did for his parents, he said. It went straight into the car at speed. They would have been killed instantly. Piotr shook his head in revulsion.
His parents’ last moments constantly replayed in his mind on his first night in the orphanage. The roar of the traffic. The sudden realisation that something huge was hurtling towards them out of the gloom. The awful grinding of metal on metal. Piotr sat up suddenly, fighting the urge to be sick. Then a terrible tightness, like a huge lead weight, settled on his chest. He tried not to cry. When other children cried that night, and many did, the others cursed at them to shut up.
In the nights that followed, Piotr lay there wondering what was going to happen to him. The bed had a single threadbare blanket, with no sheets. His pillow was a disgusting pale yellow and on one side there were ancient bloodstains – at least, Piotr assumed they were bloodstains. Some nights, when it was cold and rainy, he had to sleep in his clothes. At first he worried that he must stink. In Wyszkow, he had a bath three or four times a week. Here, the boys had a cold shower every Thursday. But he soon realised it didn’t matter. Everyone else in the orphanage smelled the same – that stale dishcloth stench of poverty that he remembered from the poorest boys in the village school.
All of them made do with a single change of clothes. There were no arrangements for laundry. ‘You do your own washing here,’ said a boy who slept in the next bed.
Piotr did, in the first week he was there. But when it was rainy there was nowhere to air the clothes and by the time they were dry enough to wear they smelled of mildew. Then a pair of socks he put out to dry went missing. He reported the loss to the woman who managed the orphanage clothes store. She grabbed him by the ear and marched him to a tiny room stuffed full of stinking clothes. ‘Find a pair in there, and don’t ask me again,’ she said.
The food they were given was barely enough to keep a sparrow alive. Thin soup twice a day, with stale bread. Sometimes a sickly pink mince, full of gristle and sharp slivers of bone, with boiled potatoes. Often the bread had green mould on it. Piotr picked it off before he ate it. Other boys didn’t even notice. The first time he was given mouldy bread he thought to take it back. But the supervisor who gave them their food made a habit of hitting any boy who complained. That was what happened at the orphanage. You caused any trouble or complained about anything, you were hit. The boys learned that fast.
The only thing they didn’t hit you for was being horrible to other children. Bullying was something that didn’t seem to bother the adults who worked there at all. Bigger children stole food from smaller children. The more timid children, or boys who had lost limbs or an eye, were endlessly teased. Children who sat in the dormitory reading a book would have it snatched from their hands and thrown across the room.
Piotr couldn’t believe how, in barely a week, he had gone from the comfort and security of his home and parents, to this squalor and misery. It was like a terrible nightmare. A strange, numb grief settled over him like a cocoon, and he wondered if he would ever smile again.
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Warsaw was in ruins. The siege, the street fighting and, most of all, the bombing in 1939, had left livid scars. Now, two years later, a faint smell of brick dust, leaking gas pipes and ruptured sewers still hung over the city and lodged in the back of the throat. Street lights damaged in the fighting stood at strange angles, unlit and awaiting repair. The roads had been cleared, of course, and the trams were running again. German traffic signs and army vehicles were all over the place. Streets had been renamed. Ujazdowski Avenue was now Siegesstrasse – Victory Street. There were no Polish cars. The Poles had to make do with the tram or a horse and cart.
During the day, Piotr would roam the streets. The children in the orphanage were free to come and go as they pleased. No one cared enough about them to tell them otherwise.
He liked Warsaw. He had been here twice before, with his parents. The buildings still fascinated him, especially the Prudential Insurance Agency offices on Napoleon Square, which were sixteen storeys high and the tallest building in Poland. Now it was covered in ugly scars and most of the windows had the glass missing from them.
The people here looked grey, gaunt and downtrodden. Their museums and galleries had been closed, and they were even barred from some of their own parks. Only Germans could enter Lazienki Park. Ujazdowski Park was for the Poles and on a sunny weekend it was as crowded as ever.
But there was something distracted about the Polish people now. They were clinging on to life at their shoddy markets, desperate to trade anything valuable for a little food. More than a few hobbled on crutches; some with missing legs were younger than Piotr. Musicians played at these street markets, sawing at violins, pulling wheezing accordions, grateful for small change.
The German troops were everywhere – those on leave in their soft caps, those stationed there in their helmets and rifles. They treated the locals with casual brutality, especially the Jews, now easily recognised with their yellow star armbands. The soldiers always had a kick up the backside for a
Jew. They had to hurry back to their crowded, stinking ghetto at Chlodna Street. Piotr peered through the windows of the tram as it rattled through the ghetto, wondering if it was here that the boys from the village had been sent. Like him they had lost their homes, and perhaps their parents too. And even in his lowest moments, Piotr suspected fate had treated them far worse than him.
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CHAPTER 6
Berlin
August 31, 1941
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Professor Franz Kaltenbach felt everything was going his way. It was one of those days. Outside his open window, at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics in Dahlem-Dorf, Berlin, the sunshine lit the wide leafy avenue and the sky was a deep blue. The smell of fresh cut grass mingled with the scrubbed bleach tang of the laboratories and the smell of formaldehyde from another batch of human material which had arrived from one of the camps that morning.
For most of the year the avenue below his window would be bustling with students on the way to classes and seminars at the various university buildings scattered along Ihnestrasse. But they were on vacation and he was making the most of his empty timetable to catch up on research and consultancy work.
In that week alone he had made four-hundred Reichmarks for advice to the Reich Committee for the Scientific Registration of Serious Hereditarily and Congenitally-Based Illnesses. He hoped the committee would decide that parents of sickly infants should be sterilised.
Then there was his consultant post with the Genealogical Office of the Reich. Since the occupation of Poland, many Ostarbeiters – Eastern workers – had begun to work in Germany. Now more of them would be coming from the conquered territories of the Soviet Union. Despite the strict laws and draconian punishments that forbade relationships between eastern subhumans – the üntermensch – and Germans, they still came before the courts – a sorry parade of farmers’ wives pregnant from affairs with Polish agricultural workers, and middle-aged factory managers fooling about with Polish maids.
The Auslander Page 3
