The Auslander

by Paul Dowswell

  In the dim light Peter could see the presents under the tree, all wrapped beautifully, and wondered what he would be getting.

  They all sat down at the grand dining-room table, with its candles, folded napkins, carefully arranged crockery and cutlery. Frau Kaltenbach had decorated it. She never let the maid near any job like that. Two weeks ago they had dispensed with Elsa, the surly German maid from Neuköln. Frau Kaltenbach was convinced she had been stealing spirits from the drinks cupboard. Now they had Yaryna, a surly Ukrainian who spoke only a few words of German. Traudl had wondered why they bothered to change. ‘They’re both resentful little miseries. But at least you could make yourself understood with Elsa.’

  Elsbeth, much to Peter’s surprise, had asked what they should give Yaryna for Christmas. Liese Kaltenbach replied, ‘We shall give her the afternoon off. That will be quite sufficient. Besides, I don’t want that sullen, moon-faced brat moping round here spoiling our family Christmas.’

  ‘Perhaps we could give her a little chocolate?’ said Elsbeth.

  Liese snapped. ‘Kindness is not something we show to Untermenschen. You give these Slavs presents and they start thinking they can steal from your cupboard. When you have your own home to look after, you can make your own rules. But take this advice from your mother. Servants should be treated like dogs. You should always make them feel you are the top dog.’

  Elsbeth took this advice with a blank face, neither agreeing nor disagreeing with her mother. Peter watched, intrigued. He never quite knew what Elsbeth would do or say next.

  Singing carols out in the cold had given Peter and the girls a ravenous appetite. The stuffed goose, roast potatoes, peas and parsnips were delicious. The adults drank the finest French wine. Peter was allowed a little too. The girls both had a sip and Charlotte wrinkled her nose in disgust. ‘Why do you drink it? It’s horrible!’

  Kaltenbach gave a little chuckle. ‘The French would be delighted to have such fine wine for their own table,’ he said to her. Then he stood up and raised his glass. ‘We are living at a time when Germany’s future will be decided for centuries to come. This war must end with victory. So let us drink to that, my dear ones. To victory in the New Year! Victory against the Bolsheviks, and to a Europe safe in the hands of Adolf Hitler.’

  Afterwards, as they sat around the light of the coal fire and Christmas tree, Professor Kaltenbach read a passage from Hitler’s autobiography, Mein Kampf – In the home of my parents, where the Führer wrote of his earliest years.

  Then Traudl said, ‘Papa. Can we hear the story we used to hear when we were little? The one about the baby Jesus and the stable and the three wise men.’

  Kaltenbach had her come over and sit on his knee. ‘My darling Traudl,’ he said as she perched there awkwardly, ‘“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” Who said that?’ He turned to Liese. ‘Was it Goethe? Kant?’

  She shrugged and shook her head.

  ‘Saint Paul. Letter to the Corinthians,’ said Elsbeth acidly.

  Traudl, who was much too big to be sitting on her father’s knee, looked confused and uncomfortable. Liese Kaltenbach clapped her hands together. ‘Now we shall open the presents,’ she declared.

  Traudl was given a lurid book on the perils of relationships with Jews. She sat in the corner, reading it avidly. Peter sneaked a look over her shoulder. A picture showed a leering fat Jew, cigar in his mouth, monocle in his right eye, in a smart business suit. He was leaning over his secretary, a young, beautiful Nordic girl, who appeared distressed by his close attentions. The caption beneath read:

  .

  Ignorant, lured by gold,

  They stand disgraced in Judah’s fold.

  Souls poisoned, blood infected,

  Disaster broods in their wombs.

  .

  Traudl noticed Peter behind her. ‘Hey,’ she protested. ‘Girls only!’

  ‘We have something for you now, Peter,’ said Frau Kaltenbach, and handed him over a brown paper parcel. He knew at once they were books. Peter’s mother had always encouraged him to read. He liked his books, but he hoped these weren’t all about the Nazis.

  They had given him six books from the same series – Kriegsbücherei der deutschen Jugend – War Library for German Youth. They certainly looked exciting enough. There was Flammenwerfer vor! – Flamethrowers in Action – and Schlachtschiffe im Atlantik – Battleships in the Atlantic. Peter settled on Vorwärts, immer vorwärts! – Onwards, ever onwards! – an account of the opening weeks of the invasion of Russia. He opened a page at random and lost himself in the excitement of battle.

  At 5.30 the silence ends. The German side comes alive. Along the whole front, the heavy guns open up. As the sound reaches the bank, the explosions are already visible on the far side. Then the thunder is on the far side. The individual shots can no longer be distinguished. There is a single loud crashing, whirring, banging and whistling. Earth and rock fall into the river. Splinters whizz . . .

  Elsbeth handed her father a small parcel that was so heavy she had difficulty holding it with one hand. ‘What is this?’ he said curiously.

  The wrapping came off. It was a hefty doorknocker of solid black iron. The hinged circular knocker itself was decorated in embossed oak leaves with a swastika at its centre. Beneath the swastika, where the knocker actually knocked, was a grotesque caricature of the head of a Jew – broad Hebrew features, a huge nose, face screwed into a grimace, supposedly at the pain of the knocker knocking on his forehead.

  ‘Delightful,’ said Professor Kaltenbach. He was trying to be polite, but the whole family could tell he didn’t like it.

  Liese Kaltenbach spoke. ‘Elsbeth dear, we have a perfectly good doorknocker.’ They had a magnificent brass lion on their front door. Elsbeth was looking hurt.

  Kaltenbach saved the day. ‘My dear,’ he said to his eldest daughter, ‘your mother is right. This splendid knocker shall go instead to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. I will have it placed on the door of my office.’

  In early January, when Elsbeth was out at work, Herr Kaltenbach called Peter over. ‘This knocker,’ he said in a conspiratorial whisper, ‘it’s not quite the thing for the Institute. How about taking it to your HJ den? They’ll be delighted with it.’

  Peter agreed at once. He liked to please Herr Kaltenbach. But he didn’t like it either. Walking to his HJ meeting, he tipped it in a dustbin.

  .

  CHAPTER 15

  February 1942

  .

  Later that winter, Peter’s HJ squad were doing an evening Winter Relief collection in an apartment block in Geisbergstrasse. It was a large nineteenth-century building, with some of the stairwells and corridors partially open to the outside. Peter had begun to resent the amount of time he was expected to perform this kind of ‘voluntary’ work. He would rather be reading at home, or studying in the library. When no one else was with him, he always asked for money in a manner that made it clear he was not expecting any. Walter Hertz, his squad leader, often chided him for returning with the lowest amount. But Peter didn’t care. He was good at everything else they asked him to do.

  Most of the other boys had finished their rounds and gone home. Peter had three more floors to do when he heard a commotion below.

  Four floors down, in the courtyard, he could see a small group of HJ boys he did not recognise. They had surrounded another boy in shabby clothes and were prodding and kicking him. ‘Jew boy! Bloodsucker!’ they taunted. ‘What have you been out stealing?’

  Struck by a mischievous impulse, and without thinking of the consequences, Peter picked up a potato bag full of rubbish that one of the residents had left outside their door, and hurled it down upon the boys. He watched it burst over their heads and ran for his life as their outraged cries rang through the building. The apartment block was a maze of corridors and stairwells and Peter’s first instinct was to go up – after all, he supposed, th
ey would expect him to run away from the building.

  He reached the sixth floor and banged on the first door he came to. ‘Good evening, madame,’ he said to the old lady who opened the door. ‘I am collecting for the Winter Relief fund. Could I ask you for a donation?’

  She asked him in and he seized his opportunity. Some old people, who lived on their own, liked a chat when the boys came calling. She had some gingerbread wafers she thought he might like to eat. Peter stayed for half an hour as she talked about her grandson, who had been posted to Norway with the Wehrmacht. ‘Nice and out of the way,’ she said. ‘Nothing going on there!’

  She looked disappointed when he said he had to go. The HJ boys were still there, marching indignantly up and down the corridors in their stained uniforms. ‘Excuse me, comrade,’ said one. ‘Have you seen anything suspicious here? Half an hour ago we were assaulted by a cowardly Jew-lover.’

  ‘I have been visiting my grandmother,’ said Peter. ‘But thank you for your warning. I have a good sharp knife to defend me.’

  On the way home Peter kept sniggering to himself. He didn’t quite know why he’d thrown the rubbish and he felt strangely proud of himself. But that night he woke before dawn and worried about what they would have done if they had caught him. At breakfast he looked at Traudl and wondered, if she were a boy, would she have been part of that gang of bullies.

  Now she was fourteen she had moved up from the Jungmädel to the Bund Deutsche Mädel and had been selected as the squad flag bearer. She took her duties very seriously. Most nights, when she was not collecting for the Winter Relief fund, she would be knitting socks and gloves for the soldiers out in Ostland. She had won her ‘Life Rune’ proficiency badge for First Aid remarkably quickly, and would ask Charlotte and Peter if she could practise splints and bandages on them.

  Charlotte didn’t mind – it was part of her duty to help her big sister – but Peter always felt uncomfortable when Traudl practised on him. He found her undiluted company increasingly boring. As she worked away, she would chat about who she was supposed to ‘Heil Hitler’ to when she saw them in the street, and which items of BDM clothing you were allowed to wear outside of meetings and parades.

  .

  On the way home from school a few days later, Peter stopped off at the library, as he often did. He wanted to find a book that would tell him more about Poland. He kept hoping one or two would have slipped through the net. But nothing seemed to have escaped the beady eye of Frau Knopf, who had never forgiven him for asking for a Polish author.

  In one section of the library there was a small alcove with a desk and chair behind one of the bookshelves. Peter often went there when he wanted to cut himself off from the rest of the world. It was a good place for quiet study. Today he could see through a small gap in the books that the desk was occupied. He recognised who it was at once – Anna Reiter, the pretty, dark-haired girl he had first noticed at the athletics display in Charlottenburg. Segur had said her family lived close by, and Peter had seen her once or twice out in the street.

  Peering through the books, Peter relished the moment. Picking up a book from the opposite stack, so as not to disturb her, he pretended to read, all the while watching her through the gap.

  Anna was holding a book with a picture of Hitler on the back cover. She held it up and looked on it with disapproval. Certain that no one could see her she began to ape the posture and expression of the Führer. Hand on hip, starch upright, straight back, her face mirroring Hitler’s – that of an indignant, petulant child.

  Peter could not believe his eyes. Anna, the squad leader in the BDM! Not wanting to be discovered he quietly moved away and began to search for some other books to help him with his studies. When he left the library and began to walk home, she was there, not five metres in front of him. He caught up with her.

  ‘You’re the Polish boy, aren’t you,’ she said, neither friendly nor hostile. ‘You live at the Kaltenbachs?’

  Peter nodded. ‘Yes. It’s close by you. My name is Peter Bruck. Perhaps I could be allowed to walk you home? It’s a dark night, you never know who might be lurking around the corner.’

  She laughed. ‘The Führer has made our streets safer, that is for sure.’

  They fell into stilted conversation. A man with a large Alsatian dog walked past. ‘How the Führer loves his dogs,’ she remarked casually.

  A rebellious thought flashed into Peter’s head. ‘Of course he loves his dogs,’ he said. ‘They are obedient, unquestioning.’

  She gave him a sharp look. Then she laughed. ‘Well, wouldn’t we all like our friends to be like that?’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Peter. ‘It’s nice to have friends who have their own opinions, don’t you think?’

  She stayed silent. Then she said, ‘It is a dangerous conversation we are having, Master Bruck. I’m sure Professor Kaltenbach would not approve of such reckless freethinking.’

  Peter felt bolder. ‘Professor Kaltenbach would be severely disappointed,’ he said.

  An awkward silence hung in the air. They barely spoke for the rest of the walk home. Peter began to worry that he had said too much. But when they reached Anna’s apartment block she said, ‘Thank you for walking me home. This was a most interesting conversation. We must talk again some time.’

  When Peter reached the door to his own apartment, he felt like he was walking on air.

  .

  CHAPTER 16

  April 1942

  .

  Anna and Peter saw more of each other after that. They were both frequent visitors to the library, and Peter often stayed there to study. He could get a lot of work done in one of the quiet corners. Professor Kaltenbach approved. He was not totally sympathetic to the Nazi view that boys needed more exercise than education. If Peter wanted to be a doctor or a scientist, after he had done his duty as a Luftwaffe pilot, he would have to pass some tough exams.

  Anna began to join him at his desk, and work alongside him. She was studious – she certainly didn’t sit there to chatter. Then, when it had gone dark, they would walk home together. Sometimes they would talk about friends they both knew, sometimes they would whisper about their homework. One week they both had the same essay: ‘How did Adolf Hitler save the Fatherland?’

  ‘There’s not a great deal of scope for argument in that question, is there?’ said Anna. ‘I just trotted out the usual stuff about communists and Jews and Versailles. It took me ten minutes. It would be nice to do something a little harder.’

  Peter loved it when she talked to him like that. Her and Segur.

  One day in early April, when buds were sprouting on the trees and the sunshine started to feel warm on their faces, Anna asked Peter to come for tea the following Tuesday. His imagination ran riot. He knew, because she had told him, that both her parents would be away. Frau Reiter was off to Falkenburg, reporting on one of the elite Ordensburgen schools where the cream of the Hitler Youth were sent. Colonel Reiter would be flying to the Führer’s headquarters in East Prussia to deliver a report.

  Peter did not tell the Kaltenbachs that the Reiter parents were away, although he had a feeling they wouldn’t mind. They knew about Anna and had been keen to encourage the friendship.

  Peter was nervous. Was she expecting him to kiss her? So far their friendship had been just that – a friendship. But maybe it was turning into something else.

  Segur would know. He seemed to be more up on that sort of thing. But when Peter talked to him as they walked home from school, he blushed. ‘I’ll kill you if you tell anyone, but I’ve only ever kissed a girl once,’ he said. ‘When we were on a HJ/BDM hike.’

  The day came. Peter arrived with a bunch of wild flowers and two cream cakes. Anna hurried him in, anxious that the neighbours should not see him. ‘Frau Brenner,’ she whispered and tilted her head to the door across the corridor. ‘She’ll only gossip . . .’

  She made him a lemonade and started to peel potatoes while they talked – about the war, her br
other Stefan who was serving out in Ostland, about their friends, about school. It was inconsequential chatter. Peter began to daydream as she cooked. There she was, standing by the window, with her white apron over her blue dress, spatula in hand, turning schnitzels. The smell of hot pork filled the kitchen. He felt very grown up all of a sudden, having someone his own age preparing his supper.

  After they had eaten they sat in the living-room armchairs, facing each other and drinking coffee. Peter wondered if she was waiting for him to kiss her. But he didn’t feel bold enough.

  ‘Let’s listen to the radio,’ said Anna. ‘See if we can find some good music?’

  The radio was on a coffee table by the window. Anna turned the dial and stations flitted by. The news reported U-boat triumphs in the Atlantic, another programme announced increases in tank production, then there was a play . . . Anna left it on and for a brief moment they listened to the tale of a Hamburg girl whose father would not let her go out with an SS man.

  Then she came and sat on the arm of his chair and said in a low voice: ‘Do you ever listen to the BBC?’ Peter was shocked by her boldness, but he was thrilled that she was confiding in him.

  ‘Kaltenbach would have me down at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse before I knew what had hit me,’ said Peter. ‘Besides, there’s almost always someone in at our apartment. Frau Kaltenbach or Elsbeth. Even the girls would report me at once. Why, do you?’

  ‘Shall we?’ said Anna.

  Peter was anxious now. ‘But what if the neighbours hear through the walls? I’m sure one of them would report you.’

  ‘We’ll turn the volume right down and listen with a blanket thrown over us. That should do the trick!’ said Anna. ‘Mutti and Vati do it too. They don’t like me to know, but I caught them once when I got up in the night.’

  Anna fetched a blanket from her bed. They huddled together beneath it and she turned the dial. She knew exactly which spot to find.