The Auslander (2 page)

The boy who had hit him on the first day, Feliks, had lasted only a fortnight. He refused to accept his fate and ran away twice in as many days, only to be dragged back by soldiers to be beaten in front of them all.

‘Some of you are like wild dogs who refuse to be tamed,' announced Doktor Fischer, after Feliks's second escape. ‘Some of you do not deserve the honour of German citizenship. Feliks Janiczek has been returned to the orphanage.'

Piotr had not liked Feliks, but he couldn't help feeling sorry for him. There was so little to eat. All the children there would surely starve. Piotr thought Feliks stubbornly stupid. He had been offered an opportunity and rejected it. Poland was finished. Germany was the future.

The next day Piotr was called before Doktor Fischer and told that he too would be leaving soon. ‘We are sending you home to the Reich. There's a centre at Landsberg for boys like you. The family I have in mind for you, Piotr, is in Berlin, the very heart of things,' he said. ‘I am prepared to recommend you personally. I trust you will not disappoint me.'

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CHAPTER 3

Between Warsaw and Landsberg

August 24, 1941

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Piotr leaned his forehead against the glass window of the train, and watched the flat fields of the North European Plain roll by. He was tired, and occasionally his heavy eyelids would close and his head drop down, waking him with a jolt. The glass steamed up with his breath and he wiped the condensation away with the sleeve of his new pullover.

Travelling with him was Fräulein Spreckels, the pretty nurse from the holding centre. She chided him at once. ‘That is not a rag, Piotr. You must learn to take better care of your clothes.'

By the end of the day, the Fräulein had told him, they would be in Landsberg. If all went well, he would be in a new home, a real home, within a week or two.

On the opposite track a packed troop train thundered east, anti-aircraft guns perched on a flatbed carriage in front of the locomotive. Inside the passenger carriages and through the open doors of the cargo trucks, Piotr could see soldiers sleeping, drinking, playing cards. Some were singing, and as they flashed by he could just about hear their voices above the rattle of wheel on rail and the chuff of the steam engines. They seemed in good spirits.

Seeing the guns at the front of the troop train made Piotr worry about whether they too might be attacked by aircraft. He had heard about the damage a plunging dive-bomber could do to a village and knew a train would be terribly vulnerable to marauding aircraft.

‘Fräulein Spreckels, why do we have no guns to protect us?'

She laughed. ‘Who is going to attack us, Piotr? Our boys destroyed most of the Soviet air force in the first days of the invasion. And the Tommies can't fly this far from England.'

As the train rattled on, the scenery outside the carriage gradually changed. The scattered farms and fields were replaced by streets and closely packed houses. ‘Where are we?' asked Piotr.

‘We're in the Wartheland,' she answered proudly. ‘You are home in Germany now! This is all territory reclaimed from Poland.'

As the train rounded a bend, they could see the spires and towers of the city centre. ‘I know this place,' said Piotr. ‘I've been here once before. It's Lodz.'

Fräulein Spreckels looked stern. ‘It's not Lodz any more, Piotr. It's called Litzmannstadt now.'

The train stopped briefly at the station and she got out to buy bread and ham from a platform vendor. ‘You won't go running away from me?' she asked, only partly in jest.

‘I want to go to Germany,' said Piotr sincerely. ‘Why would I run away?'

Piotr saw that all the signs on the station had been rewritten in German, in a heavy Gothic script. There was nothing here now that sounded Polish. Yet before the invasion, as every schoolboy knew, Lodz had been Poland's second largest city.

He looked at Fräulein Spreckels shivering on the platform as a chill early autumn wind blew down from the Baltic. Just behind her was the station waiting room. A notice on the door said:

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Entrance is

forbidden to

Poles, Jews

and Dogs.

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The Germans had a cruel sense of humour, he thought. But he was going to be one of them now. He would have to get used to it.

All his life he had felt out of place in Poland. Even though he had been born there and spoke Polish like a native, he had still had to put up with taunts of ‘Adolfki' from the playground bullies. All this would wipe the smiles off their stupid faces. He was going to Germany to a better life. They were stuck in Poland. Slaves in their own country. That cheered him up, although he always felt a little guilty when he thought things like that.

After twenty minutes the train pulled away. Piotr had never been further west than Lodz and was full of curiosity about the places they passed through. When they crossed into old Germany – the land that had been Germany before the invasion of 1939 – the change was immediate. The fields and farms that drifted by looked well kept and tidy. The villages and towns were unblemished by war. This was a land of prosperity and plenty.

At Litzmannstadt, Fräulein Spreckels told him, twenty other boys had joined the train to travel to the
Lebensborn
hostel at Landsberg. ‘Would you like to meet them?'

Piotr shrugged. He was quite happy staring out of the window. He wondered if she was getting bored. She took him to another carriage and introduced herself to the nurses travelling with the new boys and the two soldiers who were guarding them.

‘Guten Tag,' Piotr said to a group of them. They all gave slow, stumbling answers. He felt awkward and instinctively began to talk to them in Polish. ‘Dzien dobry,' he said – ‘Good day.'

One of the soldiers immediately stood up and raised a hand to hit him. Fräulein Spreckels stood between the two of them and angrily told the man to sit down. Then she turned to Piotr. ‘Remember you are not to speak Polish,' she said sharply.

Piotr blushed bright red. Then he felt indignant. Of course they needed to learn to speak German if they were going to live there. But, for now, what was wrong with speaking to these boys in Polish? That was what he wanted to say. But then he thought of the dreadful orphanage he had left behind and he made himself hold his tongue.

The threat of violence hung in the air. Some of the boys looked frightened. Some looked defiant, their lips pursed together in a rebellious pout, hard eyes challenging anyone to dare to speak to them. But most of the boys were quietly wary, like Piotr. Any hope of conversation vanished like the steam from the locomotive.

Fräulein Spreckels steered Piotr back to their own carriage, both of them anxious to be away from the brutish soldier. ‘Do be careful,' she whispered urgently. ‘I know you didn't mean it, but you could get yourself, and the other boys, into a lot of trouble.'

The incident had soured the atmosphere between them and they passed the next few hours in an uncomfortable silence.

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CHAPTER 4

As the train rattled on, Piotr thought about the country he was leaving behind. In the two years before his parents had been killed he had seen with his own eyes how life was for ordinary Poles. Because Piotr and his family had been reclassified as Germans when the Nazis seized Poland, they had been treated better than their Polish neighbours. Pan and Pani Bruck had become Herr and Frau Bruck and carried on farming their land and being paid for their produce. The Polish farmers they knew had been rounded up . . . and taken to who knew where. The farmworkers who stayed now worked for new landowners who had arrived from Germany.

Business had boomed for the Brucks, so much so they bought a new car. The memory of it brought tears to Piotr's eyes. His father had been very proud of that car.

Whenever Piotr thought of his parents, a great black pool of water seemed to rush up to swallow him. He pictured his father, tall and taciturn, with a shock of thick black hair. He was a forbidding man and Piotr had feared as well as loved him. But they had never gone hungry and Piotr's father had been a patient teacher, showing him how to milk the cows, fix a temperamental petrol engine, and tell an oak from a larch.

Piotr remembered his mother more tenderly. She had taught him a lot more than the village school. She always took an interest in his stories, his ideas. They would go on long walks through the fields, talking together for hours. Like him, she was tall and blonde. He definitely took after his mother. They would tell him that every time he went into the village shop.

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Mesmerised by the endless vista of fields and villages, Piotr's mind continued to wander. For as long as he had been aware of the world beyond his village, everything had seemed to be tottering on the brink of catastrophe. Then that catastrophe had happened.

He got his first inkling of its approach when he was ten and his parents were sitting around the big wireless in the kitchen, huddled next to the oven in the late winter, listening to news of the Nazi seizure of Austria. His mother looked uneasy. ‘He's on the warpath now,' she said. ‘Who'll get gobbled up next?'

‘Who's “he”?' asked Piotr.

‘Hitler,' said his mother tersely. ‘The Chancellor of Germany. He's a nasty little man. You only have to hear him speak a couple of words to know how full of hate he is.'

This started a dreadful row between his parents. They rarely argued, and Piotr was so upset he fled to his bedroom. It ended in a stand-up shouting match where he could still hear every word. Piotr's father screaming that Hitler, the one they called
der Führer
– the leader – would make Germany a great nation again. His mother, exasperated to the point of tears, replied that the Nazis were malicious bullies. ‘Just look what they've done to the Jews in their country,' she said. ‘All the beatings out in the streets, those spiteful boycotts of the Jewish shops . . . and they don't stop there. Sometimes there's cold-blooded murder.'

The shouting stopped. Piotr moved to the landing. Now he wanted to know what they were going to say. Herr Bruck began to speak again. ‘The Führer's supporters have sometimes been overzealous,' he said slowly. ‘But the Jews in Germany were too greedy. They took too many of the best jobs, and they stabbed the country in the back at the end of the last war.'

‘Axel, you know that is rubbish,' spat Frau Bruck. She was incensed. ‘You talk like a Nazi – as if there's some great Jewish conspiracy – all of them plotting together!'

Herr Bruck stayed silent. The argument was over for now.

This talk about the Jews puzzled Piotr. He knew Jewish children in the village. Some of them played with him, and if they hadn't told him they were Jews when he asked why he never saw them in church, he would never have known. Others, much poorer children, recently arrived from the east, kept themselves to themselves. They wore their sidelocks long, and the men had big bushy beards and long dark coats. Piotr didn't think they looked very threatening. Were they really controlling everything behind the scenes, like some people said, and taking everyone's money? They seemed the poorest people he had ever met.

Over the summer, the newspapers and radio brought more ominous news. The border regions of Czechoslovakia were seized by the Nazis. Six months later they took the whole country. ‘We shall be next,' said Frau Bruck.

Piotr's father kept his temper. Over dinner that day they discussed the likely fate of their own country. Piotr listened, all ears. He was used to grown-up conversations, being an only child living an isolated life with his parents. He didn't understand everything they said, but he sensed unsettling times ahead.

‘They're coming. I know they're coming,' said Frau Bruck. Herr Bruck nodded and took his wife's hand.

‘Maybe it's for the best, my dear,' he said. ‘Forgive me, but this is a backward little country, and the communists here are always trying to betray us to the Soviets. We'd be safer with the Germans here to protect us. If someone is going to swallow us up, from east or west, I'd rather it were our own kin. I don't want the Polish communists linking up with those madmen across the border in Russia. If the communists take over, people like us will be put up against a wall and shot. All the landowners will. The farms will be taken over by the government and collectivised. Then half the population will starve. Just like in the Ukraine.'

Frau Bruck could see some sense in that argument. She feared the Russians even more than the Nazis.

In the summer of 1939, Piotr had started to shoot up, growing six inches in as many months. He begged his mother to buy him some long trousers as he felt so silly in shorts with his long spindly legs. She promised to make him a pair, but she could never settle to the job. The news they heard of the world outside their farm was too disturbing. Everything, it seemed, was building to a terrible crescendo.

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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 to 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.