To Greet the Sun

by Claus von Bohlen

  The first time I visit Max and Sepp at the installations, they want to know about the expedition. I respond monosyllabically. It seems to me that Max is envious of Siggi’s sudden illness and death: Siggi didn’t have to go through night after night of terror. I want to tell Max that Siggi’s death was a tragedy of a different sort, but that it was preceded by a virtuoso display of skill and courage. But I also realise that, if I tried to tell people that Siggi climbed the Matterhorn all by himself, no one would believe me. It saddens me to think how the truth can be distorted, how a few party officials and an article in a newspaper can shape the beliefs of a nation. However, when I look around at the sunken faces of the other Volkssturm recruits, I also understand the importance of morale. In the autumn of 1944, it was still possible to believe that Germany was not yet doomed. If the distortion of the truth was the price of keeping that hope alive, then I decided that I could live with it.

  3 ‘A heart also beats in the breasts of those who sing out of tune.’ From Desafinado, by Tom Jobim.

  4 Such a small boy, such a big mountain.

  Chapter 19

  I HAVE run out of blank sheets in my notebook, and the last few pages are covered in scrawls. Seu Otto has just finished telling me what happened to Siggi. I feel contrary emotions. On the one hand, I am saddened by the tragedy of a death which seems so unnecessary. And I am moved by Seu Otto’s own reaction. He was clearly affected – once or twice during his narrative, his voice grew husky with emotion. I have never heard him speak like that before. What is more, these are apparently feelings and memories that he has kept in check his entire life. I cannot even begin to imagine what it must be like to dredge them up now.

  On the other hand, I am also delighted. I am delighted because the narrative which Seu Otto has just unfolded exceeds my most optimistic expectations. I do not need to comb through the material, trimming here and padding there, in order to extract a story. On the contrary, two angles clearly present themselves. Firstly, the HJ attempt on the Matterhorn had been a propaganda exercise dreamt up by Goebbels; when it went wrong, the truth was suppressed. Even the newspapers did not report the correct version of events. In these days of Rede Globo’s stranglehold on our own media, Seu Otto’s account of Siggi’s death is highly topical.

  Secondly, it seems to me that Seu Otto himself is unaware of one central aspect of the events. Did Siggi really fall? Might he not have jumped? And might there not be a very good reason why he jumped? These are the questions I must put to Seu Otto now. I do not want to distress him, but it seems he is willing to talk. And, although this may be hard for him, are we not together pursuing the truth? Is there a more noble goal? Seu Otto is not one to flinch from things because they are hard.

  Seu Otto’s eyes are closed but I do not think he is sleeping.

  ‘Seu Otto?’ I say. ‘How do you feel?’

  He does not respond for a full minute, maybe two. Then, like an old sea turtle, he slowly opens his eyes. ‘I feel well,’ he says. ‘Surprisingly well.’ He reaches up for the morphine button. Given how much morphine he must have in his blood, I am not surprised he feels well.

  ‘Maybe it is good to talk,’ he says.

  ‘Seu Otto, there’s something else I would like to ask you.’

  ‘So ask.’

  His lips are dry and I pass him the water. He drinks very cautiously, as if the water were poisioned. Just wetting his lips.

  ‘Seu Otto,’ I say, ‘can I be honest with you?’

  ‘Of course, Pietro. I only ever want you to be honest with me.’

  ‘I don’t want to offend you.’

  ‘Pietro, speak.’

  ‘Well, the thing is, I’ve been wondering… from what you have been saying, it sounds to me like there was something strange, something… unnatural, about Siggi’s relationship with Kurt Gruber.’

  ‘Kurt and Siggi were friends. We were all friends.’

  ‘But there are certain, well, irregularities. Like the fact that you shared with the Austrians while Kurt shared with Siggi. Or that, after you swum across the lake, you didn’t see Siggi again and the next day you were awarded the dagger instead of being punished.’

  ‘We were awarded the dagger for the climbing, not the swimming,’ corrected Seu Otto.

  ‘Yes. But in an environment like that, with only boys and no real accountability, it just seems the sort of place where it would have been easy for an older boy to abuse a younger boy and to get away with it.’

  After a pause, Seu Otto asks, ‘Are you suggesting that Kurt was abusing Siggi?’

  ‘I’m just wondering what kind of a person Kurt Gruber was, that’s all.’

  ‘We all looked up to him. I told you before, he was stern but we admired him.’

  I said nothing, but I had the impression that Seu Otto was holding something back.

  ‘You said that you wrote to him when he was sent to the east?’

  ‘Yes, just two letters. He was attached to one of the Totenkopfverbände.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The Totenkopfverbände. The Death’s Head Regiments. They guarded the concentration camps.’

  I feel a twinge of excitement, the sense of excitement that arises when there is total honesty. I musn’t let this opportunity pass. I hadn’t planned how to broach this topic but Seu Otto appears to have done so of his own accord.

  ‘So you knew about the concentration camps?’ I say.

  Seu Otto takes a deep breath. ‘We knew that they existed,’ he replies. ‘We thought they were for enemies of the state – anarchists, Bolsheviks, Jews who wanted to destroy Germany. We thought they were prison camps and labour camps. We didn’t know they were extermination camps. I didn’t find that out until the end of the war, when the Americans denazified us. They forced us to watch footage of the camps. At first we didn’t believe it was real.’

  ‘But you already knew about the Death’s Head Regiments.’

  ‘We knew they guarded the camps, that’s all.’

  ‘Did you know about the Final Solution?’

  ‘Not at the beginning. We knew that the Führer had a plan to remove the Jews from Germany. We thought they were being forced to emigrate.’

  ‘How did you feel about that?’

  ‘To be honest, I didn’t care very much. We used to have endless lessons about race and eugenics in the Hitler Youth; it was very boring. How to recognise the semitic skull from the curvature of the cranium, that sort of thing. But we were brought up to believe that Jews were the enemies of the state, that it was because of them that the First World War had been lost. In fact, I was taught to read from a storybook called Der Giftpilz, The Poisonous Mushroom. In the story a mother goes out to pick mushrooms in the forest with her young son Franz. There are lots of good, healthy looking mushrooms. Then Franz points to a dark, malevolent, leering mushroom with a Jew’s hooked nose. The drawing used to scare me a lot. Franz’s mother warns him that one such mushroom is enough to poison a whole family. She teaches him that there are good and bad people just as there are good and bad mushrooms, and that just as one bad mushroom can poison a whole family, so too one Jew can poison a whole village, a whole city, even “das Ganze Volk”. When you are young and everybody tells you the same thing, you don’t question it.’

  I can understand how that might be the case. If you are eleven years old and the teacher who teaches you about courage and honour and loyalty is also teaching you about eugenics and the evil of Jewry, it must be very hard to know how to separate the two. An eleven-year-old probably doesn’t possess the critical faculties to make up their own mind. Or maybe there is a very small percentage who do. But they would be the outsiders, the dissidents who would one day end up in the camps themselves.

  ‘Yes, I can see how difficult that must have been,’ I say. ‘But what about when you found out that the Final Solution meant extermination? How did you feel then?’

  ‘It was only at the very end that people started talking about that. At first we didn’t believe it
. When the Americans forced us to watch footage from the camps, we thought it had all been staged; we thought it was Allied propaganda. But, a week or so after the armistice, the Americans who were denazifying us took us to a railway siding outside Borken. They made us open the sliding doors of a freight train that had been on its way to Bergen-Belsen. The carriages were full of rotting human bodies, Jews who had starved to death. We had to bury them. We were continually sick all day. That’s when I realised what had really been going on.’

  ‘Nossa.’

  Seu Otto stares blankly at the ceiling, but I sense that there is turmoil behind that blankness. Once or twice his eyes open wide and a look of fear ghosts across his face. I wonder whether I have already pushed him too hard. But I also suspect that what he is telling me now may never be repeated. I must use this opportunity.

  ‘But when you realised that’s what was happening in the east, how did you feel about Kurt Gruber?’

  ‘Well, that is something that the world will perhaps never understand. Kurt Gruber was a good man. Of course there were bad men too, but Kurt Gruber was a good man. For a good man to do things against which his conscience balks, that is the supreme test. Anyone can fight bravely when he is defending his wife or his daughters from the Russians. The real test is when a soldier is given orders that he does not wish to carry out.’

  ‘What does that test?’

  ‘It tests his loyalty, his devotion, his love for the Führer. The harder a task is, the greater it’s value as an offering and a dedication.’

  ‘Even when that task involves killing innocent people?’

  ‘Particularly when that task involves killing innocent people. Kurt would never have wanted to kill women and children. And therefore that is the greatest sacrifice he could have made.’

  I can see a sort of twisted logic in what Seu Otto is saying. The Hitler Youth trained boys to believe in the absolute value of discipline. What can be more disciplined than carrying out an order which appalls you? If the value of action is measured by how difficult it is, then carrying out such an order would be of the greatest value.

  And yet, I cannot understand Seu Otto’s insistence that Kurt Gruber was a good man. That, surely, is his blindspot.

  ‘But Seu Otto, don’t you think there may have been something unhealthy about Kurt Gruber’s relationship with Siggi?’

  Seu Otto does not reply immediately. His expression is no longer blank; quite the opposite – he stares intently at me. Then he says, ‘Well, there was one thing. One night Siggi and I got drunk on a bottle of slivovitz which we found in the cooks’ storage tent. That was not long after we swam across the lake. Siggi told me that Kurt had been making him do things he didn’t want to do. “Disgusting things,” he said.’

  ‘So what did you do?’ I prompt.

  ‘I didn’t believe him. We were both blind drunk. And Siggi never mentioned it again.’ After a pause, Seu Otto says, ‘And maybe I didn’t want to think about it.’

  ‘But perhaps it was the truth?’ I say. ‘Wouldn’t that explain why you weren’t punished for the swim, and why Kurt shared the room with Siggi? And might it not also explain Siggi’s death? Maybe Siggi didn’t fall. Maybe he jumped.’

  Seu Otto says nothing. But I am more and more certain that I am right.

  ‘Siggi had no one to turn to, no one who would believe him. He tried to tell you, and he couldn’t bring himself to try anyone else. Killing himself was the only escape he could think of. If his death was deliberate, that explains why he left the piece of amber on your pillow; he knew he would never see you again. And it explains why he chose to jump with the flag. His death was the solution to a personal problem and not an indictment of the Hitler Youth. He probably hoped that his body would be carried back wrapped in the flag.’

  I realise I have been speaking very fast. My face feels hot.

  ‘It is possible, I suppose,’ says Seu Otto after a long pause. ‘But there are so many possibilities.’

  ‘That’s just what I was thinking. And there are so many stories here. The censored account of the Matterhorn expedition. Sexual abuse in the Hitler Youth. Siggi’s suicide. Seu Otto, when I’ve finished writing this investigative piece, I’d like to try to sell it to a paper. There’s enough here to capture people’s attention, even sixty-five years after it all happened. If it’s alright with you, I’d like to speak to my professor as soon as possible.’

  ‘Pietro, I only said it was a possibility.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘But the possibility is enough. It’s not like it will go to court.’

  ‘No, I suppose not.’

  Seu Otto looks drained. I should let him rest now. I check my watch. It is not yet midday. I have the whole afternoon to chase down Doutor Monteiro.

  Chapter 20

  PIETRO HAS left and I feel exhausted. I close my eyes but once again, just like during the night, sleep will not come. But this time it is memories of Max which insist on rising to the surface.

  Max, the flakhelfer who helped me dig the foxhole. Max, who died a hero’s death.

  After destroying the tank and running back to the headquarters at Heiden, I was interviewed by Hauptmann Brandhoff. Hauptmann Brandhoff shook my hand and said he was honoured to have met me. I knew that if I tried to tell that to my friends, they would never believe me. But that is what he said – ‘Es war mir eine Ehre’. Those were his exact words. Even now I find it hard to believe. And it was Hauptmann Brandhoff who then arranged for me to be driven by sidecar back to the Volkssturm headquarters at Wulfen.

  Hauptmann Brandhoff’s orderly hands me a piece of Fliegerschokolade wrapped in foil – the chocolate containing methamphetamine which is usually only given to airmen flying night missions. Then I am introduced to the motorbike driver who helps me into the sidecar. The bike is one of the new military green BMW R75’s. I have seen a few over the past year, but I never dreamt that I would ride in one. The driver kicks the starter a number of times then adjusts a valve before the engine finally splutters and catches.

  I lean back in the sidecar and rest my head against the spare tyre behind me. It is uncomfortable but I am too tired to care. There are tall pines either side of the road. I follow the strip of blue sky between the pines. After a quarter of an hour I see a number of Allied bombers returning home. The driver tersely assures me that there is no danger for us. The road is well hidden by the tall trees.

  The last stretch towards Wulfen is across open ground. The driver pauses for a moment to scan the horizon. There are no planes to be seen. The 5th Armoured Division were advancing south while Wulfen lies directly east. We will not meet them again, at least not today. The driver guns the bike out into the open. The snowfields either side of the road are so white that it hurts my eyes. I can see each tiny crystal reflecting the light, or is it the effect of the Fliegerschokolade?

  In the distance, one of the Flak installations is smoking. I cannot see the installation itself since it is in a hollow whose contours have been softened by the snow. But this is where Max and Sepp both work.

  The road passes next to the hollow. As we get closer, I can see the top half of one of the anti-aircraft guns. The body of the gunner is slumped forward in his chair. The driver stops the bike in the middle of the road, level with the installation. He kicks the gearshift lever a few times but the lever refuses to go into neutral. The driver scans the sky then turns off the engine. He strides towards the slumped body. In the absence of the noise of the spluttering engine, I become aware of a quiet whimpering. The driver has heard it too; he remains motionless on the lip of the hollow. His attention is caught by something within the hollow. The driver has his back towards me and so I cannot see his expression.

  I am afraid to look. However, after a short while my curiosity gets the better of me and I stand up in the sidecar. In the centre of the hollow there is a child on hands and knees, whimpering pitifully. He is wearing the regulation issue overcoat which drags behind him in the snow. He has left a trail of concentric
circles, very red against the white, spiralling inwards towards the centre of the hollow. As he turns towards us I see why he has left this trail: where his face should have been, there is just a bloody mess. His face has literally been shot off. The dark hole of his mouth is still there but nothing else; no eyes, no nose. The boy with no face continues to crawl in ever decreasing circles and to whimper. As he turns away from us I notice his curly blond hair, still pristine at the back. And only then do I realise that this poor dying creature is Max.

  The motorbike driver pulls his pistol from his holster. He walks in a straight line through the concentric spirals of blood to the centre of the circle, smudging the spirals as he goes. Max must have heard something because for a moment he stops crawling. The driver stops a metre away from him and points his pistol at the back of Max’s head. The report cracks like a whip across the hollow. Max’s body collapses in the snow. The driver remains immobile for a long moment, his pistol hand outstretched.

  After the shot there is silence. I see the driver’s breath in the cold air and pick up the faint whiff of gunpowder. The driver returns to the bike; his skin is ashen and the muscles of his jaw clench and unclench. None of this seems real. It is a great cosmic joke. I have to fight the impulse to give in to the waves of hilarity which are building inside me.

  I concentrate on the sensation of the cold wind on my face. I realise that I have been crying, but the tears have dried by the time we arrive at the Volkssturm HQ at Wulfen. The driver stops the bike in front of the main gate. I am about to get out when I feel his heavy hand on my shoulder.

  ‘Mach Dir keine Sorgen,’ he says. ‘Er war auch ein Held.’ He was a hero too.