The Flight. Bryan Malessa
into the forest to the brook below the church, imagining what the ancient Balt-Prussian tribe would do if they saw the Teutonic Knights escaping from their secret tunnel. He imagined some clan members pulling out their swords as they whispered among themselves in the undergrowth. Karl kicked up branches in the snow, until he found one that fitted his hands, so he could join the tribe slaying the invaders. He swung it to get a feel for its weight before sticking its tip into the snow beside him while glancing up the hill at the large church and caught his breath.
He decided to sneak up behind the church – it would be easier to surprise the enemy if he went that way. Crouching, he stalked through the woods. As the hill steepened, he picked up speed. When he reached a point from which he could approach the church directly, he broke into a run, crested the summit and darted out past the cemetery. At the corner, he raised his sword, jumped out in front of the church and swung wildly at a group of Knights. He thrust, parried and turned about until his arms ached, then plopped down into the snow, dizzy.
The clearing was empty. Nobody had walked up the hill that morning so the snow lay undisturbed. He could have killed a couple more, he thought, if he had come up the opposite side. He didn’t like playing this game with the other village children: they were younger and he could run faster so it was too easy to kill them. He remembered the youth group he would soon join – maybe he could play it with them. Most of the boys already in the group were from other villages and he knew they’d want to see the entrance to the secret tunnel in his church.
He stood up and walked across the field to a low wall a short distance above the square and looked away from the village towards Willkau, then looked back at the houses below. His mother stepped out of the shop door and called him.
‘Coming,’ he shouted.
She looked up at the wall. ‘I told you not to be long. Come here – you haven’t finished the jobs I asked you to do,’ she shouted.
He ran down the path, hoping she wasn’t angry. Even when she was, though, she was not like his father could be. While he would never admit it to her, he was relieved his father had gone again – even to the dangers of war.
At the beginning of June, Ida received a short letter from Paul to say that he had been transferred east of Warsaw. He had included a photograph of himself sitting on the motorcycle that he rode to check the food supplies for the hospital he was supervising. ‘I’m not sure when you’ll hear from me again. There’s hardly enough time to sleep, much less to write letters,’ he concluded.
On the twenty-second, Ida was in the kitchen getting breakfast for the children with the radio on. As she leaned down to take a tray out of the oven, an announcer interrupted the music to introduce Joseph Goebbels, who said he had an urgent message from the Führer: ‘Weighed down with emotion, condemned to months of silence, I can finally speak freely to you, the German people. At this moment a march is taking place that, in its extent, compares with the greatest the world has ever seen. I have decided again today to place the fate and future of the empire and our people in the hands of our soldiers. May God help us …’ Before sunrise, Goebbels said, the army had launched an attack on Russia.
Ida thought of Paul on his motorcycle moving slowly alongside a column. The image frightened her, so instead she imagined him in a jeep behind the front line, and then at his desk in the office at the hospital. It was safer there, she told herself. She reminded herself of his arrival in Paris the day after it fell: he had avoided combat then, so why not now? Their love had cooled, but Ida wanted her children’s father to live. She tried to convince herself that when he finally returned for good he would be kinder to her and the children.
When Karl came downstairs half an hour later, she tried to think of a way to explain what had happened, but she didn’t understand why Germany was attacking Russia. She had understood the offensive against the French – during her childhood her father had talked incessantly about the injustices of the Treaty of Versailles – but she could think of no reason to justify their attack on Russia, especially since Russia in the Non-Aggression Pact had agreed not to attack Germany.
At breakfast, Karl noticed his mother distressed and anxious, but she said nothing and he didn’t ask; he had to meet a boy from a neighbouring village to go to a youth group meeting. When they arrived, he soon learned what had upset his mother: the attack was on everybody’s lips. One boy said his father was killing Russians at that very moment.
‘I thought he was an army cook. The only way he’ll ever kill someone is with food poisoning.’
A boy from Warschken, another village nearby, turned to Karl and said, ‘Maybe your father will send sweets from Moscow.’
‘Maybe he won’t go there,’ Karl replied.
‘Of course he will. The whole army’s going.’
They were convinced that the German army would beat the Russians, and anyone whose father or grandfather had fought at the battle of Tannenberg compared it with what was happening now. No one had grasped that the present offensive, three or four hundred kilometres to the east, was not just a battle but the start of a new war: the Soviet-German War.
Three million German soldiers were pitted against the same number of Russians, whose opposing army would soon grow to six million. The largest military invasion ever was under way. Across eastern Europe the boys’ fathers were behind thousands of heavy guns, pounding Russian positions. Soon the front would extend over four thousand kilometres, from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south, the entire land mass of eastern Europe sealed behind a wall of German soldiers and guns.
One boy announced that Hitler himself was in East Prussia, unaware that the Führer had constructed new headquarters there from which to direct the offensive. The Wolfsschanze – Wolf ’s Lair – was buried deep in the forests south-east of Samland.
Before the offensive had begun, the Prussian army commanders – a constant source of irritation to Hitler – were far from united behind the decision to invade Russia. Some had agreed that if they had to go ahead, now was the best time to surprise the enemy because Stalin had murdered his best commanders during the Great Purge of 1936 to 1938. Others, though, would have preferred to abide by the Non-Aggression Pact: the steppes were too vast and the war was being fought on too many other fronts. Hitler himself had once written that an attack on Russia, as well as a western theatre, would spell the end of Germany.
Once the war with Russia was under way Germau remained oddly calm. For a time photographs were published in Königsberg newspapers showing Latvians, Lithuanians and Ukrainians welcoming German soldiers as liberators freeing them from Stalin’s tyranny. Ida’s sister, in Berlin, rarely mentioned the war in her letters.
That spring, shortly before the Führer’s birthday, a Hitler Youth representative had come to the village to talk to Ida about a ceremony that Karl was to attend. Ida was reluctant to let him go, but she had no choice. Karl by contrast was more excited than she had ever seen him. He had gone with the man and a large group of boys from the peninsula by train to Pillau where they crossed the Bay of Danzig on a Strength Through Joy cruise liner.
Two older boys had stolen some photographs of Jewish prisoners, which they wanted to get rid of now – they knew they would get into trouble if the theft was discovered. They had concealed the evidence among the younger boys’ belongings. When Karl found three photos in his clothes, he became frightened and pushed them to the bottom of his bag. He would throw them away when he got home.
From Danzig, the younger boys went on to Marienburg, the ancient headquarters of the Teutonic Knights with the largest castle Karl had ever