The easiest route is via the northeastern Hörnli ridge, on the Swiss side. That was where the first HJ expedition was supposed to climb in the summer of 1943, but that expedition had to be postponed owing to delays in getting permission from the neutral Swiss authorities. Now the war is going much worse but permission has finally been granted.
*
We are astonished by the send-off we get when we leave the camp. Our friends and the younger Jungvolk boys whistle and wave as we are driven away in a staff car. We are taken to Munich where there are a number of photographers waiting for us. Flash bulbs go off in our faces and limping or otherwise disabled journalists – the fit ones have been conscripted – stand by with notebooks on the platform as we board our carriage. Eventually the train pulls out of Munich station, though only after a considerable wait during which most of the well-wishers transfer their interest from us to a newly arrived train carrying wounded soldiers from the Eastern Front. Through the carriage windows we see gray, haunted men peering out at us.
The other climbers are already in the carriage. There are four Bavarian pairs and one Austrian pair. Siggi and I have never heard such absurd accents before; at first, we can barely keep a straight face in their presence. Later, in Zermatt, I share a room with them while we wait for the weather to improve. We become friends and I learn to appreciate their sense of humour. Kurt Gruber is also part of the team, and there are two guides from the Gebirgsjäger, the mountain infantry. They are on leave from Crete, where they have been fighting the partisans. Despite being on leave, they never remove their grey military caps with the Edelweiss insignia. They are both superb climbers.
*
The journey to Zermatt is interminable. It is a wonder we get there at all – the train timetables seem to change almost hourly. It is the first time in two months that Siggi and I have had to sit beneath a roof for more than an hour, so it is hardly surprising that we get twitchy long before we reach our destination. From Munich we go to Karlsruhe, then we board a military lorry which is also carrying our climbing equipment. The lorry takes us to the Swiss border, which we have to cross on foot before taking a bus to Basel. In Basel we spend the night in the dormitory of a youth hostel. The following morning we continue to Zermatt by train.
We arrive in the early evening, just as ominous, low-hanging clouds are moving in. From time to time we catch glimpses of the mountain. It is a truly awe-inspiring sight, a towering pyramid of rock that stands alone and serene, with no other peak anywhere near it. The mountain dominates the skyline from every angle. I feel a healthy trepidation.
Before dinner we go for a walk along the river. As if the atmosphere were not subdued enough already, the guides take us to see a graveyard where there are a number of graves of climbers who have died on the Matterhorn. Four of the seven who made the first successful attempt back in 1865 did not survive the descent. We all offer a silent prayer that there will be no plaques bearing our names on that wall, beside the other fallen climbers.
The following morning the rain is falling heavily, and it is cold. The clouds do not lift all day and we pass the time playing cards in the hostel. I am sharing a room with the two Austrian boys while Siggi shares with Kurt. He spends most of his time in our room and only returns to his own to sleep.
I wake at dawn and look out of the window. It is still raining, so I return to the warmth and safety of my bed. However, when I wake again the sun has burnt the clouds away and is flooding our small wooden room with light. The Matterhorn rises before us with a light dusting of snow against a blue sky. After lunch we go for an acclimatising hike and test our equipment. The sun improves our collective mood and we leave the village of Zermatt gustily singing a number of HJ songs, to the bemusement of the local Swiss farmers in front of their dark wooden hay silos.
The air is still humid on the wooded hillside because of the morning’s rain. The scent of pine needles is overwhelming; it is truly the smell of the mountains. Insects buzz about, glorying in the sunshine. Clouds of butterflies take to the air in alarm at our approach, as do the thousands of flies which cover the steaming cowpats on the path. But we soon climb above the tree line, where there is a slight breeze and the air is less humid. We snake our way up the well-trodden path between bright blue cornflowers towards Schwarzsee. Looking back, I see Zermatt growing ever smaller on the valley floor. I want to continue singing but the route is steep and I am out of breath.
In the late afternoon, we test our climbing equipment on a small rockface just outside the village. Although the newspapers carry frequent reports of equipment shortages on all three fronts, we have been well looked after. Everything we need has been included – ropes, pitons, carabiners, crampons, ice-axes; the full arsenal. We go to bed shortly after dusk, praying that the weather will hold.
We are lucky; the following day dawns clear and windstill. We leave the hostel and head for the Hörnli hut, just above Schwarzsee and at the foot of the Matterhorn. We will spend the first night there and then climb the northeast ridge to the much smaller Solvay hut on the following morning. We will attempt the summit on the day after that. If all goes well, we will be back in the Hörnli hut that same night.
We arrive at the Hörnli hut in the middle of the afternoon. The hut is situated on a rocky outcrop at the beginning of the Hörnli ridge. From the terrace of the hut you can see the summit rising to the sky; it’s an intimidating sight. We hide our nerves by making jokes and playing pranks. We are more boisterous than usual. Only Siggi is subdued. That is hardly surprising – he is the best climber amongst us and therefore, obviously, the least nervous. That is why he can afford to stare calmly into the distance while the rest of us are joking and laughing.
Later that evening I go to get snow from the shaded area behind the hut to boil in order to make tea. We eat as the sun is setting; the shadows chase the orange glow up the Matterhorn. While we eat, one of the Gebirgsjäger explains to us the route to the summit. We will climb roped together in teams of two. The only exception is my own group – I will climb in a three with both Siggi and Kurt. We will leave around seven the next morning and hope to get to the tiny Solvay hut by midday.
We retire to the large dormitory shortly after our evening bread. Some people fall asleep immediately but a combination of nerves and the thin air keep me awake until long after midnight. Even when sleep does come it is intermittent and punctuated by vivid dreams in which I am running through tunnels. Siggi, lying next to me, appears to be suffering from similar difficulties; he tosses and turns throughout the night. At one stage I hear him rummaging in his rucksack. Then I hear the rustle of his clothes.
‘It’s not time yet,’ I whisper to him.
‘I know,’ he says.
The rustling continues. I feel the change in weight as he gets off his mattress, which is pushed up against my own. A few seconds later I hear the creaking of door hinges. I open my eyes and see Siggi framed in the doorway. Behind him I catch a glimpse of snow-covered rocks reflecting the moonlight. I am surprised by the brightness and I think to myself that the moon must be full. Siggi appears to hesitate for a second in the doorway; I have the impression that the world darkens for a moment, perhaps from a passing cloud. I see that Siggi is staring at me and I am struck by the strangeness of his expression – a look of sadness combined with something else, something I don’t recognise.
I assume that Siggi is going outside to pee – I have already been a couple of times myself. But something about his expression prompts me to ask: ‘Where are you going?’
He doesn’t reply. He continues to look at me. The moonlight grows brighter again and I think to myself that his expression is one of pity. Then he says:
‘Wir Jungen schreiten gläubig der Sonne zugewandt.’
I recognise the line from one of the Hitler Youth songs. It means ‘We young step out in faith to greet the sun.’ It is Siggi’s favourite song. Then he slips out the door.
When I next open my eyes, the first grey light of dawn is cree
ping into the room. I roll over and feel something small and hard against my temple. It feels like a pebble. I pick it up and hold it towards the light. It is the piece of amber which I gave Siggi the night we got drunk on the slivovitz. I sit up and see that Siggi’s bed is empty and his clothes and rucksack are gone. I roll the piece of amber between my thumb and forefinger. I have a sense of foreboding.
Is Siggi in the latrine again? Or did he never come back to the hut? Maybe he slipped on the ice outside?
I jump out of bed and approach the less austere of our two guides. He opens his eyes as I get close.
‘Siggi is not in his bed,’ I say.
‘He’s probably in the latrine,’ the guide replies, his voice husky with sleep and with the dryness of the air.
I want to say that perhaps Siggi has had an accident, but I do not want to cause alarm.
Now the others are stirring. The guide tells Kurt that Siggi is missing. Kurt immediately orders us to go out and look for him. We are dressed and outside within minutes. I check the small wooden hut of the latrine in case the door has jammed and Siggi is stuck inside, but the door is open and the hut is empty. We call out his name and climb a small distance up and down from the ridge. Our voices travel far in the cold morning air. I climb out of sight of the hut to where I collected the snow the evening before. The snow is frozen hard on top. I can hear from the direction of the voices that by now the others have fanned out over the ridge. I look closely at the frozen snow to see if there are any fresh tracks, but there are none.
I listen again to the voices of the others and I look around at the peaks which serrate the distant horizon. My eyes come to rest on the rocky flank of the Matterhorn and I follow it all the way up the northeast ridge. Then I see a tiny black dot already two thirds of the way up the ridge. Could it possibly be Siggi? Who else could it be? The dot is climbing with extraordinary speed. I shout to the others and run back to the Hörnli hut. By the time I arrive they have already spotted him. I observe the rare sight of two battle-hardened Gebirgsjäger staring in open-mouthed wonder.
We assemble on the terrace of the Hörnli hut. Everyone is talking about Siggi’s egotism and selfishness. We have been trained to be competitive and to seek glory, but not at the expense of our comrades. Nevertheless, there is also a grudging respect for Siggi’s courage. To climb without a rope at the speed he is going is far beyond the rest of us.
The guides confer briefly, then they announce that we will climb all the same, just as if Siggi were still with us. The only difference is that Kurt and I are now a team of two. As we leave the hut, one of the guides notices that Siggi has taken the HJ flag which we had intended to plant on the summit for the photo. This angers the others; they mutter obscenities. But I can tell that the two Gebirgsjäger are impressed – the flag will have added considerable weight to Siggi’s rucksack.
We head further up the Hörnli ridge. The mass of the ridge blocks our view of Siggi. The air is thin and we are climbing fast. My lungs burn but I only register the sensation intermittently. I think back to Siggi’s expression when he left the hut during the night. Was it a look of pity? Perhaps because he was leaving me behind? Did he feel sorry for me? He need not have done. I know that there is no way that I could have climbed the way he is doing right now. I would certainly have slowed him down. No, I am not hurt that he left me behind.
As we emerge from beneath the shoulder of the ridge, I am astonished to see that Siggi’s progress has, if anything, speeded up. He cannot be more than half an hour from the summit. The early morning sunlight has only just climbed over the ridge of the Italian Alps that lie further south; the first rays brush the very top of the Matterhorn, turning it a delicate pink. Siggi continues to move steadily upwards until the warm glow embraces him. Then he stops. I imagine him up there, alone, facing the sun. And then I remember what he said as he slipped out of the door, that line from the Hitler Youth song – We young step out in faith to greet the sun. Suddenly everything falls into place; it all makes sense. This is not the crazed climb of an egomaniac. It is a private act of worship, a dedication to the Führer and to Germany. He has climbed alone not to beat the rest of us but because the harder a task is, the greater its value as an offering and a dedication.
Soon Siggi starts to climb again. He continues to move steadily upwards, between rocks bathed in sunlight. I wonder whether he has seen us while he was resting. It is unlikely; we are still in the shade. I see him inch closer and closer to the summit and then, all of a sudden, he disappears. I feel a sudden panic until one of the guides announces that the summit is flat. I am reassured. The guides are unable to disguise their admiration for Siggi’s climb. I overhear one say to the other: ‘So ein kleiner Bursche, so ein grosser Berg’4.
I am happy for Siggi. I know he is a much better climber than I will ever be, but he was my climbing partner and, although I am not there with him now, in some way I feel that his success reflects on me too. It is a pleasant feeling to be happy for another person, to share their success without jealousy or resentment. But as I am thinking this, I hear a gasp from the boy next to me. He is staring at the summit. I look up and see a tiny black dot plummeting through the air, a black dot with something red trailing behind it. The black dot grows larger as it falls – it is a human body. A human body with arms extended, holding the Hitler Youth flag like an oversize cape, and it falls with the stillness of a diving bird. Then the body hits the steep rock slope two hundred metres below the summit. It bounces and cartwheels before sliding like a rag doll, limbs jiggling in an inhuman way, down the long, snow-dusted triangle of the east face. Finally it comes to rest at the top of the glacier that meets the bottom of that face, some distance below the Hörnli hut.
Silence. The sound of one boy vomiting, then another and another. I cannot accept what I have just seen. Siggi cannot have fallen after reaching the summit. It is impossible. The summit is flat. There must have been someone else up there. An old man of the mountain. An ogre. Siggi has thrown the ogre off the mountain before he could be thrown off himself. I begin to believe this passionately.
The guides are also shaken. They tell us to wait while they confer out of earshot. Then they instruct Kurt to take us back to the Hörnli hut. We are all trembling. There is nothing to harden you to the sight of a body being broken like that. The others start to climb back down the way we have come but I refuse. I still cannot believe that Siggi fell. I insist again and again that it wasn’t him, that it must have been someone else. In the end the guides agree to take me with them to where the body lies. The route is long but not hard – we drop below the height of the Hörnli hut then traverse the top of the glacier.
We pick our way sideways across the rocky flank of the mountain. My movements are robotic. The slope where the body has come to rest is not particularly steep but we have to rope up because of crevasses. We can see the body from a distance but I am the first to get close enough to identify it. It is Siggi. In the first moments I am filled with hope; his body is lying there so peacefully, almost as if he were asleep. The guide kneels with his cheek to Siggi’s mouth to feel his breath, but there is no breath. And only then do I register that one side of Siggi’s head has been indented like the concave face of a deflated football. I feel the bile begin to rise. I get to the end of the length of rope that connects me to the guides before the retching starts. It lasts a long time and when I have finished the hard granular snow all around me is stained green and yellow.
One of the guides is climbing up the gentle incline of the snow face to retrieve the Hitler Youth flag, which is a bright red dot in the distance. The other guide is standing just behind me.
‘So gings mir auch beim ersten mal,’ he says. That’s what my first time was like.
I turn around. His face is stony. Expressionless.
‘Aber man gewöhnt sich daran. Vielleicht ist das noch schlimmer.’ But you get used to it. Maybe that’s the worst part.
When the second guide returns, they spread the flag on
the snow next to Siggi, then they lift him onto it. That is how we return to the Hörnli hut, with Siggi’s body slung in the flag and carried by the two silent Gebirgsjäger.
The next few days are a blur. A rescue team is called to carry Siggi’s corpse back to Zermatt. A number of party officials arrive the following day and lecture us repeatedly on the necessity of keeping the accident a secret. The officials are polite, but underlying their words are hidden threats. Lowering morale at this critical time is equivalent to treason, they say. They remind us of the punishments for cowardice, for desertion, for treason. They say that it is hard to keep a secret, but it is precisely that difficulty which makes it meaningful. We are instructed to say that the attempt had to be postponed due to inclement weather and that Siggi died of pneumonia caught in Zermatt.
We return quietly to our homes. Siggi’s funeral in Bochum is a rushed affair and there is no viewing of the body. By the time his coffin is lowered into the ground, I too have learnt to assume the stony, expressionless visage of the two Gebirgsjäger. In the days following the funeral, I scan the newspapers for mention of Siggi’s death. I only come across it once, in the Völkischer Beobachter. The newspaper repeats, word for word, the line that the party officials insisted upon: the attempt had to be postponed due to inclement weather and Hitlerjunge Siegfried Rackus (15) died of pneumonia caught in Zermatt. Two weeks after Siggi’s funeral, I volunteer for the
Volkssturm. I am now serving alongside Herr Weiss, my old maths teacher. I accompany him to the Flak installations where I see Max and Sepp. I am not permitted to discuss Siggi’s accident with anyone – that is indeed the hardest part. I could perhaps have spoken to Kurt Gruber, but he is sent to join an SS regiment in the East. We correspond once or twice by letter but we do not mention Siggi. Gruber does not survive the war.
To Greet the Sun Page 16
