The Auslander

by Paul Dowswell

  Anna nodded. She was so thirsty she was finding it difficult to talk.

  ‘Just a few more hours now,’ said Peter.

  Twenty minutes later they heard the low throb of the ship’s engines. The whole boat shook as the ferry edged out of the quayside. The cases vibrated so much they both wondered if the glass bottles were going to break. ‘I’ve got to get out,’ said Anna. ‘We don’t look too shabby. We’ll pass for a couple of people who have been travelling for several days. Come on, no one will look twice at us.’

  The temptation was too great to resist. Peter took out his HJ dagger from his coat pocket and cut through the rope on the tarpaulin.

  .

  CHAPTER 39

  Berlin

  August 13, 1943

  .

  Otto Reiter lay on his bunk at Plötzensee Prison. It was just after midnight. Although he was exhausted, the bruises on his battered body and the ache from a missing tooth were keeping him awake. How much longer he would be able to stand up to his torturers, he could not predict. The coming morning or the next day, they had told him, they would start pulling out his fingernails, then his toenails. After that, they assured him, there were plenty of other techniques they could employ. It was just like the Gestapo to tell a man what lay in store for him. Let it fester in his mind. Let him fret about it.

  And then what? He would be shot, or hanged or taken to the guillotine. Which was his preferred method of execution, asked his torturer. Otto Reiter had stared him in the face and showed no fear. He did not know how much longer he would be able to do that.

  Otto heard the low buzz of Mosquito bombers over the city, first as a faint drone then a heavy rumble he could feel in his chest. He stood on his bed to look out of the high cell window. Searchlights were crossing the sky and he instinctively flinched as one of the planes flew right over the prison. A second later there was a loud explosion close to the perimeter wall. Bits of stone and cement peppered the windows and he flinched again as one cracked the glass above his head.

  For the first time since his arrest Otto laughed. He felt an almost childlike glee at the destruction the British were wreaking on this horrible prison. He was still laughing when another bomb blew his cell and the next three or four around him to brick dust and rubble.

  .

  CHAPTER 40

  Baltic Sea

  August 13, 1943

  .

  Kriminalassistent Verner Schluter was not in the best humour. There were many things he would rather be doing than pretending to be a passenger on the King Gustav car ferry between Sassnitz and Gothenburg. He had joined the Gestapo to cleanse the Reich of Jews, not mess around on a little ship. Sassnitz was a dreary little posting. What he really wanted was to be in Berlin.

  Once in a while, there were cases that interested him. Criminals. Terrorists. Jews. All on the run. Maybe making for the ferries. It was exciting work, looking for them. Catching a filthy little Jew on the last leg of their journey – when they were certain that they had actually escaped that noose around their neck – that gave him great satisfaction. Watching their faces fall as they realised they had failed.

  Last week his office had been sent a telex from a Lieutenant Brauer in Berlin, warning them to look out for a woman and her daughter and a young man. Reiter, that was the name of the women, and Bruck, the boy. All of them tall, the boy blond, the females dark. The charge sheet was daunting – they could expect nothing less than the guillotine, all three of them. Maybe they would do them all on the same day – like they did those dirty traitors in Munich – the White Rose lot. From arrest to execution in less than five days. That was the way to deal with scum like that.

  Wire photographs had arrived too – although the pictures were far from clear. They were a handsome bunch – all of them with classic Aryan features. The young man though, it said he was a Mischling. That was funny. He looked just like the boy in the HJ poster.

  .

  Ula Reiter nursed a small schnapps as she sat in the bar of the King Gustav. She had promised herself she would not touch a drop of alcohol until she arrived in Sweden. She still had to keep her wits about her. But she was nervous and persuaded herself that a little Dutch courage was what she needed. She knew, logically, that there should be no more obstacles in her path. Once she had left Sassnitz she would be safe from the Nazis. She still had the papers she needed to get into Sweden. She had her sister Mariel’s phone number. She even had enough money for the train fare to Stockholm. Whatever checks she had to go through at the other end would be nothing compared to that cross-examination in Stralsund.

  She would never forgive herself for leaving the children outside the station. If they had thought about what they were doing, she would have given them their papers – so at least they would have had a chance if she had been arrested. But she was exhausted, they all were, and no one was thinking straight.

  They had kept her in that little room in the station until ten o’clock that night. Someone was highly suspicious. But she had stuck to her story like glue and had been highly indignant at her detention. It was a performance worthy of Garbo, she told herself.

  Eventually they had let her go. Why, she could not guess. Surely, a quick phone call to Berlin would have sealed her fate in minutes. But maybe there had been another raid and the lines were down? Either way, they did not wish to offend the Swedes any more than necessary, and that had saved her.

  She came out of the station and spent the rest of the evening looking for Anna and Peter. She returned to the hotel then walked around Stralsund for another day. It had been hopeless. She could not even ask people if they had seen them. It was too risky. They should have had a plan. Somewhere to meet. But they didn’t and now it was too late.

  That evening she caught a train and arrived at the ferry terminal with no further hitches. She went straight on, no other questions. She felt less conspicuous on her own.

  Ula Reiter was not a sentimental woman. She knew there was no point spending any more time looking for Anna and Peter. If they were captured, they might be tortured and betray her. She even hoped they would, rather than prolong their suffering. She didn’t want Anna suffering to protect her. She even thought of giving herself up, to save her daughter the prospect of torture. They would all be executed anyway. But perhaps they had not been caught. Perhaps they were still trying to get to Sweden like her. There was no sense in her staying behind to be captured.

  All these thoughts were running through her head when she noticed two very scruffy young people at the bar. It took her a second to recognise them. She stifled the urge to cry out. She did not even want them to see her. Not there. She would catch them when there were no other people around. It still paid to be cautious. They were not safe yet. She drained her glass and moved swiftly away.

  But it was too late. Anna saw her and almost screamed with delight.

  .

  Across the bar, one of the customers flicked his newspaper to one side to see what all the noise was about. Something about the two women who were frantically embracing, and the young man who was standing to one side looking slightly embarrassed, rang a bell. The women were blonde rather than dark, and one of them was wearing unflattering glasses. But it was them all right. Kriminalassistent Verner Schluter’s heart began to race.

  .

  Ula was making frantic attempts to calm Anna down. ‘Mein Liebling, we mustn’t make a fuss. We’re not there yet. You never know who’s on board and whether or not they can still take us back . . .’

  Anna calmed down. ‘Meet me outside, on the top deck next to the funnel,’ said Ula. ‘Then we can talk. You’ll find it.’ She left the bar.

  Outside, a warm breeze blew up from the south. It really was a beautiful night and the Baltic was as smooth as a mill pond. Plain sailing. The top deck was almost deserted.

  Anna and Peter found Ula easily enough and they sat down on a bench together and told their tales in urgent whispers.

  ‘I still have the tickets,’ s
aid Ula. ‘They didn’t search me when they stopped me. Too keen not to offend the Swedes for their own good, weren’t they!’

  ‘Thank heavens,’ said Anna. ‘Now we won’t have to get back on that lorry . . .’

  Ula held both their hands and said, ‘In two or three hours we will be safe. We’ve got all the right papers. There should be no problem at the port. Now let us go and get something to eat.’

  .

  Kriminalassistent Verner Schluter had done this several times before. There was usually a fuss. Last time, when he tried to arrest a resistance terrorist, two Swedish lorry drivers had waded in. He nearly had to shoot them, and heaven knows what kind of international incident that would have caused. So he wasn’t going to risk that again. Particularly not with these two handsome females. That would conjure up every gallant Swede on the ship. He would play this one very carefully.

  He had heard them say they were going up to the top deck and had followed them five minutes later. There were just a couple of other people about. He sauntered up to the rail and waited for the other passengers to leave before he made his move. Schluter was just about to approach when all three of them got up from the bench by the funnel.

  This was the perfect moment. He would apprehend them, and then take them to his cabin. There they would stay, under the barrel of his gun, until the ferry returned to Sassnitz.

  Schluter enjoyed the look on their faces when he told them to stop and stand still. The boy even put his hands up when he saw the machine pistol, like he was in some cowboy film. Schluter told him to put his hands down. He didn’t want them drawing attention to themselves. He was sure none of them would be carrying weapons.

  ‘You are Ula and Anna Reiter, are you not?’ he said to them. ‘And you . . . Peter Bruck?’

  The woman spoke up. Out came a lot of nonsense about a funeral in Sweden. And them being Swedish. Schluter spoke to them rapidly in Swedish. What he said was plainly obscene and when none of them even raised their eyebrows he knew at once they were no more Swedish than Reichsführer Himmler.

  He didn’t even have to ask to see their papers.

  Then the ship’s hooter went – so loud and long a flock of seagulls took off from the superstructure around the funnel and swooped around his head as they fled from the cacophony.

  Before he knew what was happening, the boy and the girl had rushed towards him. He felt himself lifted up, his back bending against the wooden rail. Then he was tumbling down. The sea smacked hard against his body and it was so cold it robbed him of his breath.

  He struggled to the surface, weighed down by his leather coat, and gasped in great lungfuls of air. A wave broke over his head leaving him choking again.

  By the time he had struggled out of his coat and summoned the strength to shout for help, the ship’s stern was forty metres away. He called and called, as he bobbed in the fluorescent wash, but the lights of the ferry receded into the distance.

  Kriminalassistent Verner Schluter used all his considerable strength and intelligence to extract himself from his predicament. Was there a weather buoy, or something else like that, close by? Were there other ships? One must be along soon? Far away on the horizon he could see the lights of settlements on the Swedish coast. He began to swim towards them, but they never seemed to get any closer.

  .

  EPILOGUE

  Stockholm

  September 1943

  .

  Peter woke from an afternoon sleep and went out into the garden to join Ula, her sister Mariel and Anna. They were burning leaves in the tired sunshine, and he picked up a rake from the greenhouse and began to scrape together another pile for the bonfire.

  Less than a month ago Mariel had opened her front door to find them waiting, exhausted, on the steps. She simply stared in disbelief, and then rushed to hug each of them, tears streaming down her face. Later, she and her family sat in stunned silence as Ula told them about Otto.

  They lived in a big house on Stora Essingen, on the waterfront overlooking the south of the city. There was more than enough room for three guests. For Peter, the light, airy rooms were the perfect remedy for his months in the Kaltenbachs’ claustrophobic apartment.

  ‘You shouldn’t sleep during the day, Peter,’ said Ula. ‘It makes it so much more difficult to sleep through the night.’

  Peter nodded. He wasn’t going to disagree. But since they’d arrived here he had only been able to sleep for a few hours every night, so he caught up during the day. His dreams were too intense, too frightening: running, always running, or vague shadowy imaginings where he was trapped in a building or a train, just waiting to be caught. He knew Ula and Anna slept badly too. Otto was never far from their thoughts.

  Later that afternoon they took a tram into the city centre. They walked down to the quayside, the three of them arm in arm, and looked over the sweep of the waterfront with its grand pastel mansions glowing in the sunshine. Ula said, ‘All these beautiful buildings. And not a single swastika flag among them.’

  For as long as Peter could remember he had been haunted by a creeping sense of dread. It had sometimes been dim and nebulous – like the fear of Hitler invading Poland – or the more immediate fear of being killed in an air raid. Or the hour by hour terror of being arrested and tortured by the Gestapo. But now there was nothing dark on the horizon. Nothing at all. Peter felt something he hadn’t felt for so long. He felt free.

  .

  FACT, FICTION AND SOURCES

  When writing about such an extreme and grotesque ideology as Nazism, it is easy to lapse into caricature. But instances such as the Christmas carol (p. 101), the Swastika Christmas tree decorations (p. 102), and the school text book questions (p. 59 and p. 89) are all taken from eyewitness accounts or photographs from the era. Charlotte’s doll’s house can be found in the National Socialist era gallery at the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin.

  Sometimes the exact dates of real events depicted here have been altered slightly to fit with the flow of the story. The ‘human material’ research into epidemic jaundice was begun in June 1943, for example, and the more grotesque aspects of Karin Magnussen’s iris research were carried out, as I understand it, in 1944 rather than 1943. Also, Plötzensee Prison was bombed by the RAF on September 3rd and 4th 1943, rather than the middle of August.

  The account of Piotr’s examination in Chapter 2 was inspired by a passage in the autobiography of Gershon Evan (formerly Gustav Pimselstein), Winds of Life.

  Artur Axmann’s speech to the Hitler Youth in Chapter 11 is based on a speech reported in the autobiography Other Men’s Graves by Peter Neuman (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1958), as is the wording of the boys’ oath. The speech is actually by Axmann’s predecessor, Baldur von Schirach, but I’ve assumed Axmann would spout a similar pseudo-scientific ideology. Some of the school text book questions included here also come from Neuman’s account of his childhood in Hitler’s Germany.

  In Chapter 14 the extract from Peter’s war book comes from a translation of Walter Menningen’s Vorwärts, immer vorwärts! Vom Siegeszug unserer Infanterie im Osten (Steiniger-Verlage, Berlin, 1942). You can read more of the story in Randall Bytwerk’s fascinating German propaganda website at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan (http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/ kb135.htm).

  The character of Ula Reiter was partially inspired by Ruth Andreas-Friedrich and Marie ‘Missie’ Vassiltchikov – two brave women who defied the Nazis in wartime Berlin and wrote fascinating journals about their wartime experiences.

  Of the scores of books and websites I used while researching this project, the following were especially helpful:

  Deadly Medicine – Creating the Master Race, eds Dieter Kuntz and Susan Bachrach, the University of North Carolina Press, 2006.

  A Social History of the Third Reich by Richard Grunberger, Penguin Books, 1977.

  The Racial State by Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, Cambridge University Press, 1991.

  Berlin Then and Now b
y Tony Le Tissier, After the Battle, 1991.

  .

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Thank you to my editors, Ele Fountain and Isabel Ford, for their magnificent editing, and to my agent, Charlie Viney, for his support and enthusiasm, and Kate Clarke and Blacksheep for the evocative cover. And to Dorit Engelhardt for her generous suggestions, especially on the ins and outs of colloquial German, and also Anna von Hahn, Katinka Nürnberg and Stefan Roszak who ensured my stay in Berlin was a real pleasure.

  Thank you also to Jenny and Josie Dowswell, Dilys Dowswell, who kindly read my first drafts, Mrs Julie Rose and the pupils of St Peter’s Collegiate School, Wolverhampton, Jane Chisholm, Karin Altenberg, Anne Foster and Adam Guy.

  Thanks are also due to Kaspar Nürnberg at the Aktives Museum Faschismus und Widerstand in Berlin, and to the staff of the Imperial War Museum, London, the Wiener Library, London, the Topographie Des Terrors Bibliothek, Berlin, and the Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand, Berlin, for their valuable help.

  .

  By the same author

  .

  The Adventures of Sam Witchall in reading order:

  .

  Powder Monkey

  Prison Ship

  Battle Fleet

  Copyright © 2009 by Paul Dowswell

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner

  whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief

  quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  First published in Great Britain in 2009 under the title Ausländer by Bloomsbury

  Publishing Plc

  Oublished in the United States of America in August 2011

  by Bloomsbury Books for Young Readers

  E-book edition published in August 2011