The Storyteller (20 page)

Now, this was curious; we always wore our uniforms with great pride. And my mother was not terribly inclined to let us out at midnight. But the other members of the HJ—including Franz—and I followed. We ran to the community center, where we held our meetings, and found Herr Sollemach dressed, like us, in street clothes. Parked in front was a truck, the kind used by the military, with an open back and benches for us to sit on. We piled in, and from the snippets of information I received from other boys, learned that some German official named Vom Rath had been assassinated by a
Polish Jew, that the Führer himself had said spontaneous retaliations by the German people would not be stopped. By the time the truck pulled up in Paderborn, just a few miles away from Wewelsburg, the streets were filled with people armed with sledgehammers and axes. “This is where Artur lives,” Franz murmured to me, speaking of his former friend from school. This didn’t surprise me. The last time I’d been to Paderborn was a year ago, when my father had gone to buy my mother a fancy pair of leather boots for Christmas, handmade by a Jewish cobbler.

We were given instructions:

1. Do not endanger non-Jewish German life or property.

2. Do not loot the Jewish businesses or homes, just destroy them.

3. Foreigners—even Jewish ones—were not to be the subjects of violence.

Herr Sollemach pressed a heavy shovel into my hand. “Go, Reiner,” he said. “Show these swine the punishment they deserve.”

There were torches, the only way we could see in the dark of the night. The air was filled with screams and smoke. The sound of shattering glass was a constant rain, and the shards crunched beneath our boots as we ran through the town, yelling at the tops of our lungs and smashing the storefront windows. We were wild boys, frenzied, our sweat and our fear drying on our skin. Even Franz, who did not strike a single business storefront that I saw, was running with his cheeks flushed and his hair matted down with perspiration, caught in the vortex of a mob mentality.

It was strange, being told to cause destruction. We were good German boys, who behaved well and who were reprimanded by our mothers for breaking a lamp or a china teacup. We had grown up poor enough to recognize the value of one’s belongings. Yet this world, full of fire and mayhem, was the final proof that we had fallen
through Alice’s Looking Glass. Nothing was as it had been; nothing was as it seemed to be. The proof lay broken and glittering at our feet.

Finally we reached the store I had visited with my father, the cobbler’s tiny shop. I leaped up and grabbed the bottom of his swinging sign, yanking it from its moorings so that it hung drunkenly by a single chain. I hurled the bowl of my shovel into the showcase window and reached between the jagged edges of glass to pull out shoes, a dozen pairs of boots and pumps and loafers, sweeping them into the puddles of the street. SA Stormtroopers were kicking in the doors of homes and dragging the residents, in their nightclothes, into the center of town. They cowered in small knots, huddled over their children. One father was made to strip down to his underclothes and dance for the soldiers.
Kann ich jetzt gehen?
the man begged, as he twirled in a circle. Now may I go?

I do not know what made me do it, but I approached the man’s family. His wife, maybe seeing my smooth cheeks and my young face, grabbed onto my boot.
Bitte—die sollen aufhören
, she pleaded. Please make them stop.

She was sobbing, tearing at my trousers, grabbing for my hand. I didn’t want her snot on me, her saliva. Her hot breath and those empty words falling into the cup of my palm.

I did what came naturally. I kicked her away from me.

As the Reichsführer-SS had said at Wewelsburg that day:
Blood tells.
It was not that I wanted to hurt this Jewish woman. I wasn’t really thinking of her, at all. I was protecting myself.

In that instant I realized what this night had been all about. Not violence, not riots, not public humiliation. These measures were a message, to let the Jews know they had no hold over us ethnic Germans—not economically or socially or politically, not even after that assassination.

It was nearly dawn by the time the convoy headed back to Wewelsburg. The boys dozed on each other’s shoulders, their
clothes glittering with the pixie dust of broken glass. Herr Sollemach was snoring. Only Franz and I were awake.

“Did you see him?” I asked.

“Artur?” Franz shook his head.

“Maybe he’s gone already. I hear a lot of them have left the country.”

Franz stared at Herr Sollemach. His blond hair fell over one eye as he shook his head. “I hate that man.”

“Shh,” I warned. “I think he can hear through his pores.”

“Arschloch.”

“He probably hears through that, too.”

My brother smiled a little. “Are you nervous?” he asked. “About going away?”

I was, but I would never admit that. It wasn’t officer-like to be afraid. “It will be fine,” I said, hoping I could convince myself, too. I shoved against him with my elbow. “Don’t get into trouble while I’m gone.”

“Don’t forget where you came from,” Franz said.

He talked like that, sometimes. Like he was a wizened old man in the body of an eighteen-year-old. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Franz shrugged. “That you don’t have to listen to what they say. Well, maybe that’s not true. But you don’t have to believe it.”

“The thing is, Franz, I
do
.” If I could explain to him how I felt, maybe then he wouldn’t stick out like such a sore thumb at the HJ meetings when I was not around. And God knows the less he stuck out, the less likely he was to be bullied. “Tonight wasn’t about hurting Jews. They were collateral damage. It was about keeping
us
safe. Us Germans.”

“Power isn’t doing something terrible to someone who’s weaker than you, Reiner. It’s having the strength to do something terrible, and choosing not to.” He turned to me. “Do you remember that mouse in our bedroom, years ago?”

“What?”

Franz met my gaze. “You know. The one you killed,” he said. “I forgive you.”

“I didn’t ask for your forgiveness,” I told him.

My brother shrugged. “That doesn’t mean you didn’t want it.”

 • • • 

The first person I ever shot was running away from me.

I was no longer working at a concentration camp. In August 1939, we had been mobilized from Sachsenhausen and sent to follow the German troops as part of the SS-Totenkopfstandarte. It was now September 20. I remember this, because it was Franz’s birthday and I did not have the time or the resources to write to him that day. We had crossed into Poland seven days earlier, trailing behind the army. Our route was from Ostrowo, through Kalisch, Turek, żuki, Krosniewice, Kladava, Przedecz, Włocławek, Dembrice, Bydgoszcz, Wirsitz, Zarnikau, and finally Chodziez. We were to annihilate any form of resistance we found.

On that particular day, we were doing what we’d been dispatched to do—conducting house searches, rounding up insurgents, and arresting those who were suspicious: Jews, Poles, activists. Another soldier, Urbrecht—a boy with a face like risen dough and a sensitive stomach—had accompanied me to this enclave of homes. It was a miserable, rainy day. We did a lot of shouting; my voice was stripped raw from telling the stupid Poles, who did not understand my German, to get out and join the others. There was a mother, a girl of about ten, and a teenage boy. We were looking for the father, who was one of the leaders of the local Jewish community. But there was no one else in the house, or so Urbrecht said, after canvassing it. I screamed in the face of the woman, asking her where her husband was, but she would not answer. As the rain drenched her, she fell to her knees and started sobbing and pointing back to the house. It was giving me a headache like no other.

Nothing the son said could soothe her. I poked her in the back
with my rifle, indicating where they should march, but the woman remained kneeling in a muddy puddle. As Urbrecht hauled her upright, the teenage boy started to run back to the house.

Now, I had no idea what he was after. For all I knew, it was a weapon that Urbrecht had overlooked. I did what I had been told to do: I shot.

The boy was running, and the next instant, he wasn’t. The sound of the bullet was deafening, hollow. At first, I couldn’t hear anything because of it. And then, I did.

The cries were soft and hitched together like train cars. I stepped over the broken body of the boy and walked into the kitchen. I have no idea how that idiot Urbrecht might have missed the baby who had been lying in the laundry basket, the one who was now wide awake and shrieking her head off.

Say what you will about the inhumanity of the SS-TV during the invasion of Poland, but I gave that woman her baby before we marched her off.

 • • • 

We started with the synagogues.

Our commander,
Standartenführer
Nostitz, explained the
Judenaktion
we would be undertaking in Włocławek. It was much like what we had done with Herr Sollemach in Paderborn almost a year earlier, but on a bigger scale. We rounded up Jewish leaders and forced them to clean lavatories with their prayer shawls; we made them dig ditches in pools of water. Some of the soldiers beat the old men who couldn’t work fast enough, or bayoneted them, and others took pictures. We made religious leaders shave off their beards, and throw their holy books into the mud. We had dynamite, and we used it to blow up the synagogues and set them on fire. We broke the windows of Jewish shops and rounded up masses of Jews to be arrested. Leaders of the Jewish community were lined up in the street and executed. The scene was chaos, with glass raining through the
air and burst pipes spilling water onto the street, horses rearing back from the carts they pulled; blood turning the cobblestones red. The Polish civilians cheered us on. They didn’t want the Jews here any more than we Germans did.

Two days into the
Aktion,
the
Standartenführer
ordered two
Sturmbanne
within the battalion to splinter off and perform a special task. There were lists of names recorded by the SD and the police, names of intellectuals and resistance leaders in Poznań and Pomerania. We were to find and eliminate these people.

It was an honor to be chosen. But it wasn’t until we reached Bydgoszcz that I came to understand the scope of this exercise. The “death list” wasn’t a sheet of names. It was eight hundred people. A tome.

True, they were easy to find. They were Polish teachers, priests, leaders of nationalist organizations. Some were Jews; many were not. They were rounded up and gathered. A small group was singled out to dig a ditch—they believed it was an antitank trench they were creating. But then the first group of prisoners was led up to the ditch and it was our job to shoot them. There were six of us trusted with this task. Three were to aim at the head, three at the heart. I picked the heart. Our shots rang out, and there was a fireworks display of blood, of brains. Then the next group of prisoners stepped up to the edge of the ditch.

The ones at the end of the line, they saw what was happening. They must have understood as they turned toward us soldiers that they were facing their death. And yet for the most part they did not run, they did not try to escape. I do not know if this meant they were very, very stupid or very, very brave.

One teenage boy stared at me as I lifted the rifle to my shoulder. He lifted his hand and pointed to himself. In perfect German, he said,
neunzehn
. Nineteen.

After the first fifty, I stopped looking at their faces.

 • • • 

My fortitude in Poland got me sent to SS-Junkerschule Bad Tölz, an officers’ training school. Before shipping out, I was given three weeks’ leave, and I went back home.

Only a year had passed, but I was markedly different. When I left, I was still a child; now I was a man. I had pulled a screaming baby out of the arms of its mother. I had killed boys and girls my own age—and much younger, too. I had gotten used to taking what I wanted, when I wanted it. Being in the home of my parents chafed; I felt too big for the space, too full of electricity.

My brother, on the other hand, saw our little home in Wewelsburg as a haven. He was at the top of his class at
Gymnasium,
expecting to head to university. He wanted to become a writer, still, and failing that, a professor. He did not seem to understand the simplest logistical fact: Germany was at war; nothing was as it had been. Any childhood dreams we had had were long gone, sacrificed to the greater good of our country.

Franz had received a document stating that he needed to report to recruitment headquarters, but he had thrown it into the fire. As if that might be enough to keep the SS from finding him and forcing him to do it.

“They don’t need people like me,” he had said at dinner.

“They need every able-bodied man,” I had told him.

My mother feared Franz being singled out as a political opponent of the Reich, instead of being recognized as indifferent. I did not blame her. I knew what happened to those who were political opponents of the Reich. They disappeared.

The first day after I came home, I woke to find sunlight streaming through the windows and my mother sitting on the edge of my narrow bed. Franz was already gone to
Gymnasium;
I had slept till nearly noon.

I drew the covers up to my chin. “Is something the matter?”

My mother tilted her head. “I used to watch you sleep when you were a newborn,” she told me. “Your father thought I was crazy. But
I believed that if I turned away, you might forget to take the next breath.”

“I’m not a baby anymore,” I said.

“No,” my mother agreed. “You’re not. But that doesn’t mean I don’t worry about you.” She bit her lip. “They are treating you well?”

How could I explain to my own mother the things I had done? The Jews whose doors I had kicked in, so that we could seize radios, appliances, valuables, and anything else that might help the war effort? The elderly rabbi I had beaten for staying out to pray after curfew? The men, women, and children we herded up in the middle of the night and killed?