The Puppet Boy of Warsaw (24 page)

‘Serves us right,’ Hans, one of the four men who shared Max’s bunk, muttered under his breath one evening.

‘Don’t be stupid, Hans, we didn’t really know,’ Heinz, one of the youngest men replied. ‘We did what we had to do – it was our duty, that’s all.’

Max joined the debate. ‘I’ve seen enough in Warsaw to give me nightmares for the rest of my life. I’ve been part of too much. I’ll never sleep well again.’

‘But we were just following orders! We’re ordinary Wehrmacht soldiers, remember. God, look at Michael here, he even fought in Stalingrad, lost four toes and nearly lost his wits. You blame him for the war, for what happened?’ Heinz’s face was flushed.

‘No, of course not,’ Max said.

‘They labelled him a war criminal for fighting there, while the biggest swines got away.’

Michael was the quietest among them, he hardly ever spoke, but when Max had showed him the prince, Michael’s eyes had filled with tears.

‘Ordinary soldiers we were. Hitler fucked us over. Promised us a land of milk and honey. Now look what we’ve got, a white hell. Fed us like fodder to the war machines, that Herr Hitler!’ Heinz grew even redder.

‘That’s true,’ Max replied, ‘it all seemed so grand and convincing. They fed us their lies and we swallowed them down like sugar cakes. But what about the Jews, the women? Don’t you ever think about them?’ Max’s voice grew louder. ‘It was wrong, all wrong. I know it was.’ He slammed his hand down on the small wooden table.

‘But that’s what happens in a war, people die. Look, Max, we weren’t SS or SA, we were just ordinary soldiers. We did what we had to do. Now give it a rest.’

The camp included about twenty SS men and officers, held in a separate building; but even here the Führer’s elite fought for rank and bullied the other prisoners, still convinced that the German Reich had been a great invention and if only they had had better equipment, if the winter had not been so harsh, they surely would have won the war. Max made sure he stayed away from them.

‘Let’s sleep; it’s no use thinking about all this if we want to survive. It’s over, finito,
Schluss, aus
. If we don’t rest, we’ll die, it’s as simple as that.’ Heinz slumped on the bench, turning away from everyone.

But sleep didn’t come easy for Max that night, nor indeed any night. As on many nights before, he pulled out the prince, clasped the puppet tightly to his chest, and began to talk to it.

‘God, all these terrible dreams. I’m in Warsaw again, looking down the long cobbled street. I am alone with the flame-thrower by my side. I’ve been told to walk from house to house and torch them all, burn them down. And so I do it; I kick in the doors and pump fire inside: one, two, three, four, five, six . . .

‘In my head are the words they fed me on: “Exterminate the vermin, get rid of the
Ungeziefer
, nothing must remain!” I grip the thrower hard. Its fire roars. I know I’m a good soldier and the Fatherland will thank me. Once the staircase and wallpaper have caught fire, I move on to the next house . . . Seven, eight, and nine . . . Suddenly my chest hurts, burns as if my heart is on fire. I look down and it is you! The prince, wiggling under my uniform, burning like embers into my flesh. I rip you from my jacket and try to put out the flames, but I can’t. You’re on fire, your face is melting. Then it changes into Mika’s face, then that of my boy Karl, my wife. Then an endless stream of faces I’ve never seen . . . screaming . . . Then I wake up . . .’

Max fell silent after this.

‘We just did our duty, Max. Don’t torment yourself.’ Anton’s hoarse voice startled Max. He did not reply but quickly stuffed the puppet back under the rancid straw mattress and pretended to sleep.

Hope became as scarce as good food and many of Max’s companions fell sick and collapsed. In the shadow world of the camp they died in droves, like flies at the end of the summer: many in this first year but most later in 1948, when a particularly fierce winter swept across Siberia. The infirmaries couldn’t cope with the sick as typhoid, tuberculosis and smallpox became rampant. The barracks reeked of vomit and oozing wounds, and the constant coughing and moans of the dying kept the rest of the prisoners awake. Many died from sheer exhaustion. The dead couldn’t be buried during the winter and had to be stored in a small shed, stacked like wood, until spring, when the relentless frost finally loosened its grip a little.

Max continued to find solace in his conversations with the prince.

One evening in May, he pulled out the puppet and held it close to his face. The prisoners had been ordered to spend all day digging shallow graves in the slightly thawed earth.

‘I know they can’t feel anything any more, but these guards are treating the dead worse than the logs we harvest from the forest. Just to make sure they’re really dead they shoot the corpses as well. In the neck. Or worse, they swing a pickaxe through their skulls. If I ever get out of this place, what shall I tell their loved ones? That they piled the dead on top of each other and left them there all winter? First Willy, then Peter, and now Michael. I’m not sure how long I’ll last . . .’ Max’s voice quivered.

‘You might not feel anything in that small papier-mâché body of yours, but you know, for me, hope is far more dangerous than despair. It eats away at me like those festering wounds that never heal in this dammed cold. I need to stop hoping, longing for home. They might never let us out of this hellhole. I’ve become a ghost, a shadow of the person I once was. This place is all there is now.’ He slumped forward. As always the prince remained silent and Max tucked the puppet back into the dirty straw.

‘What’s the use, you never say a word anyway . . . every time I look at you I see Mika’s face. I should have never taken you from him.’

Life in Camp 267 dragged on. The Russians’ plan, they said, was to make the Germans rebuild their ruins. They happily told them the good news: ‘You can go home when you’ve rebuilt everything you have destroyed.’ But like the other prisoners, Max knew how impossible this was.

‘Damn pigs. How can they expect us to work with nothing in our stomachs and only rags to keep us warm?’ Anton hissed, pushing and pulling the saw that was so blunt it hardly budged. If they didn’t keep it moving it would freeze and get stuck completely.

‘We worked people to death in the camps too,’ Max replied. ‘What goes around comes around, that’s what they say.’

‘I heard they even had a slogan above the entrance, “
Arbeit macht frei
, work will set you free.” But we weren’t the ones who put that sign there.’ Anton pushed the saw harder and harder. ‘I didn’t personally sign the orders to ship the Jews to their death. I never tortured anyone. I only carried a gun and followed orders.’ Anton fell into a sullen silence. These exchanges always left everyone feeling as if they had slogged through snow for days yet ended up in the same spot.

One day as Max’s squad returned to their quarters exhausted after a ten-hour shift in the forest, a senior Russian guard and three others entered, their heavy boots stomping along the aisles.

‘Everything off.’ Max froze, the last bit of colour draining from his face in an instant. He was sweating despite the freezing temperature.
Oh no, not this, please God. I should have left it with the prince.
His thoughts raced; he had no time to hide the photograph.
Why today? Why now?

They were never safe from random searches but this couldn’t have come on a worse day as he had slipped his precious photograph of Erna and Karl into his jacket pocket that very morning. Although he had cut a little slit in the pocket’s side and had placed it in there, he knew that if they searched him thoroughly one of the three guards would find it.

‘Prisoner 3465 – step forward,’ the senior guard yelled. Willi’s number – a quiet and sensitive man who, like Max, was from the Franken area. The guard moved towards him, holding a small black book right under Willi’s nose.

‘Is this yours?’

Willi nodded.

‘What is it?’

‘A Bible.’ The guard slapped Willi’s face with the book then threw it on the floor and stamped on it.

When Max looked up one of the other guards was holding his photograph. He felt something break inside his heart.

‘3587, forward.’

Max moved slowly.

‘Is this yours?’ The same question, same guard.

‘Yes. It’s my wife and son.’

‘Shut up. There are no women and children in Camp 267.’ With that the guard ripped the photograph into tiny pieces that scattered over the floor.

After the guards left, Max fell to his knees and gathered up the pieces, making sure he didn’t miss any. Anton put his hand on Max’s shoulder. ‘I’m so sorry, Max. But at least they didn’t make you clear out the latrines for weeks or stick you in solitary.’

Max didn’t reply. No punishment could have been greater. He didn’t speak for days after this.

Over time Max became less vigilant, and even took his puppet out when the prisoners had a rare day off.

‘Who’s that little fellow?’ Anton stretched his hands out towards the puppet, pretending to pinch the prince’s cheek. ‘At least someone has red cheeks here. You brought him all the way from Warsaw?’

Max nodded. ‘Yes, he’s a prince.’

The puppet bowed in front of Anton who bowed back. ‘Pleased to meet you, little prince.’ They shook hands and Max paraded his prince in front of his comrades, introducing him with gallant handshakes. The prince was in his element. Max even began to fool around in front of his comrades, and as the men clapped and whistled, Max allowed the prince to give a little speech:

‘Now, gentlemen, even in a place like this I recommend a serious attempt at cleanliness. Rub yourself clean with snow, air your blankets, open the windows so the foul smell in here vanishes. You don’t want to return home looking like a thief, do you?’ While the men laughed at first, this last statement reminded them too much of their dire situation.

‘Enough, Max,’ Hans grumbled.

‘I think our prince here needs some companions,’ Anton declared. ‘How about a whole Kasperltheater, with a princess, a crocodile and a villain. Maybe even a devil. What do you think?’

‘Yes, and Herr Tod as well,’ Sepp’s deep voice boomed.

A whole puppet troupe? That could have potential.

‘So, who’s in? Who’s good with their hands?’ A few men raised their hands, wearing expectant smiles. Max delegated who would create which puppet and gave himself the task of making Herr Tod, Mr Death, and the crocodile. Anton would attempt to make the devil and the girl, and Peter the Kasperl itself. The men had no special materials, but all learned to improvise with whatever scraps they could salvage, and some had a good eye for detail.

Max found a piece of wood, borrowed a small knife from Peter, who had smuggled it through all the searches, and began to carve the crocodile’s teeth. It was difficult to get fabric and a needle, but in the end there it sat, a snapping, whirling crocodile – with a long, stripy body. In fact all the puppets, except Death and the girl, wore clothes made from the stripy prisoners’ shirts.

One night, for his bunkmate Klaus’s birthday, Max gathered the puppets that were ready – the crocodile, the girl and Herr Death – and tried his hand at a puppet play. Birthdays were special even in the camp as the men received a double ration of the thin soup and an extra chunk of bread, so each man tried to celebrate at least three birthdays per year.

For his puppet, Herr Tod, Max had carved out deep eyes in a potato head then used a piece of rag rubbed in soot for his cloak and a stick with a small metal piece from his cup for a scythe. Someone had donated their carefully hidden embroidered handkerchief for the girl’s dress and there they were: the first puppets in Camp 267.

Max stretched a blanket between two bunks to form a makeshift stage and then the play started. It wasn’t Schiller or Goethe but rather a wild chase between the crocodile, Death and the prince. As the prince paraded along the stage leisurely, talking about the finer things in life, Death followed with his sweeping scythe, chased by the snapping, stripy crocodile. Max’s fellow prisoners laughed as never before, a deep rolling thunder of laughter, right from the belly. And then everyone wanted to have a go, reaching out and grabbing the puppets.

The evening passed with more chasing, fighting, devouring, hugging and shouting. Once the prisoners had tasted some fun they wanted more.

‘How about a Kasperl?’ Hans shouted. Kasperl – the famous foolish character with a long pointy nose, peaked cap, enormous smile and apple-red cheeks.

‘Peter was meant to have a go at the Kasperl,’ Max replied. ‘How’s it coming along, Peter?’

‘I’m sorry, I haven’t even started.’ Peter sounded defeated. ‘I got so sad thinking about the puppets. Used to play with my little girl. She’s called Lisa.’ A long pause stretched between the two men before Peter took a deep breath. ‘OK, I’ll give it a go.’

And so, bit by bit, a German puppet theatre took shape with the Kasperl, the devil and his grandmother, a policeman and Herr Tod. The prince stuck out like a sore thumb with his colourful, princely costume amongst this stripy troupe. Not that the puppet seemed to mind.

Max often thought about Warsaw and the plays Mika had put on for the soldiers. How everything had changed – here they were now, grown men, once-proud soldiers who had brought so much death and misery to Poland, to the world, now just bags of bones fighting over a bunch of puppets.

The prisoners worked day after day, year after year, in that dark forest – through the short summers, grey rainy autumns and the relentless winters, with only three days’ rest per month, sometimes even less. They never saw anything being built with all the logs they felled and never received an answer to the messages they had crudely cut into the trunks.

The puppets kept their spirits up for a time, yet Max and his fellow prisoners were becoming weaker with every day. More desperate too, as the camp reduced them to bones and sinew, their eyes sunken, their flesh melting away. The excruciating hunger and persistent cold brought out the worst and sometimes the best in the men: some prisoners shared their very last piece of bread, while others stole their neighbour’s hidden share in the depths of the night. Some who might have considered themselves to be decent men turned into ruthless scavengers, driven mad by the cramps in their stomach, while others discovered a kindness they did not know they were capable of. As hunger bit harder, Max turned out to be as unpredictable as the weather during the Siberian spring.