The Children's War (25 page)

“I don’t want to go!”

“They’ve already spent a lot of money buying a place there for you. You should take advantage of it. Your parents just want what’s best for you, dear.”

“You don’t think it’s for the best!”

“No, I don’t,” his grandmother admitted. “We’re
Nichtdeutsch
and no amount of collaborating is going to change that. As they say, the English are
Gemischt,
we’ve polluted our blood with mixing. We’ll always be treated as second-class.”

“They want me to speak German, they want me to be one of them!” He had tossed his head in the direction of Gestapo headquarters in a contemptuous reference to the Nazi administration of London.

“Your mother and your father think you’ll have the best future that way. Look at your father, he’s managed a good job in government.”

“Do you like what he does?” he had asked her, knowing full well the answer.

“You know I don’t. You know your grandfather died fighting these bastards, you know what I think of them.” But then she gestured around the pathetic little one-room flat she rented. “But look at this. I’m an old woman with no future, with grown children. I don’t have to live with this for much longer. You do. Maybe you should try to make your way in their world.”

He had shaken his head vehemently. “It’s all because Anna died in that epidemic. Mum thinks I brought it into the house and so she wants to send me away!”

“No, no, it’s not that. She’s worried by how badly you took Anna’s death. She knows how special your little sister was to you. She worries about you, honey, about the way you speak, about the children you play with. She thinks you’re in a street gang, and she wants you out of this neighborhood before you get into bad trouble. She cares about you, she really does.”

“I don’t care. I don’t want to go and I won’t!”

“You won’t have any choice. Try, dear. Just try to fit in,” she had advised.

She was right, he had not had any choice. When he was sent away to school, his instinct for survival, his youth, his loneliness, allowed him to be swayed. He tried to fit in. He was an excellent student; gifted and motivated, he excelled in everything except modern history, where rather than write essays containing the lies he was taught, he left page after page blank on his exams. One or two teachers even said he could make something of himself if only he were not so defiant, and they deplored that such a fine mind, especially in science and mathematics, was essentially wasted. But it was with the other students that he really wanted to belong. He longed to have friends he could talk to and trust. Several other English boys were at the school, but they wanted nothing to do with him or each other—they wanted to forget their common ancestry and blend into the ruling elite. And so did he. He erased the last vestiges of an accent, he joined the sports teams, he struggled to be like the others: anything to assuage his awful loneliness. But they would have none of it: to them he was a born traitor and could never be anything more. He was excluded by birth from their ruling class, and they used every opportunity possible to remind him of it.

Near the end of his third year at the school, his brother, Erich, attained the fateful age of sixteen and dutifully went off to serve in the labor draft. It was a relief to have that Nazi zealot out of his life, but it was the only positive change that year. As he turned twelve, he moved from being one of the eldest in the lower school to one of the youngest in the upper school, and the bullying intensified accordingly. During that year his grandmother died and he lost the only person in the world he trusted. By the end of the school year, he was exhausted by the harassment and the continuous need to defend his place in the ridiculous pecking order. He came home for the summer holiday worn and despairing. Only with the greatest effort of will and the most dire threats from his father was he able to drag himself back to begin his second year at the upper school. It was no better. When he visited home for a short break, he remained silent and depressed, too tired even to yell at his parents about it; he simply wondered aloud as he slumped into an armchair what they could possibly have intended by sending him into such a hell. His mother came over to him and sat on the arm of the chair and stroked his hair, saying, “It’s all right, it will be all right, everything will be okay, trust me.”

He pulled angrily away; forcing himself not to shout, he said, “I
don’t
trust you!”

She answered softly, “Everything has a reason. I know how much you’re hurt.” There was pain in her voice as she added, “Be patient. Trust us.”

All he could say was “I don’t.”

The incident was perfectly clear in his mind. He had replayed it so many times trying to work out what she had meant. He had never found out. He had stormed out of the flat and gone for a long walk. After he had cooled down a bit, he had walked back home. Where else could he go? As he had turned the corner to his street, he had seen the Gestapo van. He stood horrified, watching from a distance as his parents were thrown into the back. He fled then. He never learned what happened to them. Years of inquiries through numerous sources had turned up nothing. They had simply disappeared like so many others into
Nacht und Nebel,
into the night and fog.

Their disappearance left him wondering to this day if they had planned to work him into the system for some purpose other than what they had told him. Had they left him in ignorance to protect him until he was old enough to join a conspiracy? Or had his mother’s words simply meant that in the end he would see that collaborating would be for the best? The pain of their abrupt separation was only made worse by his unanswered questions. After all these years, he still wondered.

“It’s too high!” Gisela wailed, bringing him sharply back to the present. “It’s too much!”

He brought the swing rapidly under control. “I’m sorry, little one.” He glanced around to see if Rudi had overheard them, but fortunately he was involved in playing a war game. “I’m sorry. Are you all right?”

Gisela shook her head. “I’m going to tell Mama.”

“Please don’t,” he breathed. “I said I was sorry.”

“You scared me. You’re a bad man!”

“I know,” he sighed. “I’m sorry. I’m really, really sorry. It was an accident. We all make mistakes, don’t we?”

“The Führer doesn’t!” Gisela corrected.

“No, the Führer doesn’t make mistakes. I meant everybody else does.”

“I want to climb the castle!” Gisela said, pointing toward the pile of rocks that formed the centerpiece of the park. Relieved, Peter took her hand and led her to them. He helped her climb up and together they stood triumphantly at the top.

“I’m a princess!” Gisela pointed regally toward the children playing below. “And those are all my slaves!”

He followed her gesture with his eyes and then surveyed the surrounding area. The park was on a hill, and in the valley around were a series of residential areas, each similar to his own in their arrangement around a small shopping area, but each decreasing in wealth. The last of these, almost invisible on the horizon, was almost shabby—the houses were small, single-story, flat-roofed dwellings of concrete block packed in one against the other.

To his right a thick yellow smog hung low in the sky, shrouding most of the buildings in a permanent haze. The grimy houses of that region gave way to the high, gray walls of an industrial park. Behind the walls, he knew, were the barracks of workers and the factories that kept the Reich supplied with such necessities as tractors and bombs. He had often wondered as a child if his parents had ended their days behind such walls. Or had they simply been killed? He felt a painful jab of conscience as he thought back to the day he had stood and watched them being taken away. How could he have just stood there? Paralyzed with fear, he had not tried to fight for their lives or follow the van or even ask the neighbors afterward what they knew. Instead he had fled back the way he had come. He had run away without looking back.

Lost and alone, he had stopped running far from home, gasping for breath, and realized that he had nowhere to go. He remembered standing under a bridge over the Temms with the fetid water lapping quietly against the crumbling concrete base as he had sobbed silently, too frightened to cry aloud. He had lived rough for days, sheltering among piles of garbage in dark alleys—places where even the patrols did not bother to look, stealing what food he could. Every day he returned to his neighborhood and observed his parents’ flat, but there was no sign of life. He checked the hostage lists and the lists of executed prisoners, but again, nothing. He wandered as if haunted from prison to prison, from one courtroom to the next, searching for a sign of what had happened, but there was no trace of them.

After a number of days, he returned to watch his home and saw shadows moving behind the curtains. He entered the housing estate and climbed the stairs to the sixth floor. When he put his ear against the door of the flat, he heard the sounds of normal living. Someone else had moved in. The state had sold the property, and probably everything inside as well. For the first time he had an idea of how alone and dispossessed he really was.

Gisela was tugging at his hand. “I want to go home.”

He glanced at the sky and nodded. “Okay, we’ve been out long enough.”

He herded the children home and took up where he had left off on his endless list of jobs. As dinnertime approached, he was called into the kitchen to chop vegetables and help Frau Vogel prepare the dinner. Herr Vogel arrived home around half past six, and Peter was expected to be at the door to open it for him. It was a rather awkward time as he could not stray far from his post as doorman and yet was expected to see to everyone else’s needs as they arrived home and settled in for the evening. Herr Vogel finally arrived, and after Peter had taken his coat and hat, lit his cigarette, and served him a drink, Peter went into the dining room and laid the table, then into the kitchen to finish the meal preparation.

He served the evening meal to his betters, cleaned up the dishes, served them their drinks, and then set about finishing some of his chores from earlier in the day. Herr and Frau Vogel settled down in front of the television, the children dispersed to their rooms, and after everything had grown quiet, he crept into the cellar and surveyed his abject stash of food. He was so unbelievably hungry!

He grabbed a limp quarter cabbage and began chopping it up. It looked fairly tainted, so he decided to boil it in water and swore quietly when he realized he had run out of salt. Unsalted, half-rotted, boiled cabbage! God, he was hungry!

“Peter!” Frau Vogel’s voice penetrated into the depths of the cellar.

He turned off the electric coil and headed up the stairs. Waterlogged, unsalted, half-rotted,
half
-boiled cabbage, he corrected. Great.

He found her in the dining room. “Yes,
gnä’ Frau?”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake! Can’t you ever say that correctly!”

“My apologies,
gnädige Frau,”
he responded, carefully pronouncing each syllable of her title.

“Your sleeves are rolled up again. How many times do I have to tell you, it’s untidy!”

He rolled his sleeves down and apologized.

“And your collar button!” she added angrily.

He buttoned the top buttons of his shirt and apologized again.

“What’s with these windows?” Frau Vogel asked, pointing at the dining room windows.

“Gnädige Frau?”
he answered, unable even to guess what she meant.

She walked right up to him and hit him. “Don’t act stupid.”

“I’m sorry,
gnädige Frau,”
he said through gritted teeth, “but I really don’t understand what you want. I cleaned them yesterday.”

Frau Vogel pointed at one of them. “The blind doesn’t open right!”