The Flight. Bryan Malessa
boys on the other side of the field stopped and looked at him and the girl.
‘Don’t waste it on a girl!’ Karl screamed.
Over the following year the children carried on playing new games, imitating the stories that the older youth group members shared. The games acquired a distinctly militaristic element, the children both inventive and dogmatic. But no matter how disciplined they pretended to be, the games always broke down by the time the play day ended, order giving way to chaos, discipline disintegrating into confusion.
Karl and Peter did not hear from their father for six months. When a note did finally arrive in December 1942, he told them he was in Russia, but didn’t say where. ‘We’re busy,’ he wrote. ‘Always busy.’ Something in the tone, or perhaps the note’s brevity, made him sound even more distant.
Ida tried not to worry about the lack of communication between herself and her husband. He was so far away and, after all, the country was at war: she shouldn’t expect any more. She tried to forget that an acquaintance received a letter every month from her husband in Russia. Ida had stopped visiting her: the only thing the woman talked about was her latest letter from her husband.
Rumours were spreading that the troops in Stalingrad were failing against the Russians, but Ida had heard no such news over the radio. Hitler continued to broadcast to German women, desperate to hold their loyalty. Many, like Ida’s sister, felt a strong bond with him that had developed from the broadcasts and were sure that he would tell them if the situation changed. Ida worried that the radio news neither confirmed nor denied what they all heard from injured soldiers returning home.
Karl continued attending school in Pillau near the military base that sprawled through much of the port town. He had been top of the class in the three Latin tests that year. His teacher had told him that he would recommend him for the Adolf Hitler School. Karl knew that if he won a place, he had a strong chance of one day reaching a high position in the government. Early in 1943 Hitler Youth received the annual slogan. It hung above the blackboard in the mathematics room: ‘War Service for German Youth’.
That winter the only thing he didn’t like about going to school in Pillau was coming home by train after dark, especially during a new moon. He dreaded the moment when the train dropped him off on the empty platform two kilometres from his house. The forest was so dark when he walked alone back to the village and he always felt as if something or someone were watching him among the trees. He would walk in the middle of the road so that nothing could reach him from the edge, feeling his way through the darkness between tree cover and the clouds, the lack of light sometimes making him feel as though he had been locked inside a giant room from which he had to find his way out. Whenever his feet touched the dirt at the edge of the road, he would sprint back to the middle. Over time he developed the ability to steer down the middle as he slowly became accustomed to his temporary blindness. When he reached the rise that led over the small climb before dropping into Germau, he increased his pace. Every night was the same: he never felt safe until he reached the top of the small hill and saw the shimmering lights below surrounding the square.
By the autumn of 1943 little of the news that filtered into the peninsula villages was good. During the summer the Russians had started a counter-offensive and wounded soldiers occasionally came home on leave. A young man from Sacherau had lost his hand, but planned to return to the front as soon as the wound healed. He told the children how retreating German troops destroyed everything they came across. He was part of an SS demolition squad and had blown off his hand as his regiment pulled back across the Ukraine towards Poland. He said they had set entire villages ablaze and used flame-throwers to scorch wheatfields so that the Russian divisions had no shelter or food as they pushed across the steppes towards Germany. He was confident that they would be stopped by the time they reached Poland and he wanted to be there for the celebration when the Russians had been defeated.
In Berlin the constant bombing had forced Ida’s sister Elsa to send her son to his aunt: on the peninsula there was still little sign of war, except for a rare troop transport passing through the square on its way between Memel and Pillau. Elsa remained in Berlin: she had secured a coveted job at the Chancellery.
Ida felt certain that Karl and Peter especially would be delighted to see Otto and sent them down to Pillau to pick him up. She thought they’d find it easier to get to know each other without her presence. As soon as they had gone, she began to prepare the evening meal – she had invited her father and stepmother, too. The boys returned earlier than she had expected, so after she had kissed Otto she gave them each a basket and dispatched them to the forest for mushrooms.
As always, Karl took it upon himself to act as their leader. An only child, Otto wasn’t used to taking orders from someone of around his own age, but he soon realised that he would have to if he didn’t want to get lost. Like the children in the village, Otto was fascinated by Karl’s knife. He knew many boys in Berlin who had joined the Hitler Youth, but none had offered to let him examine theirs. Karl told him about the camping trips and his leap from the cliff. Peter then suggested they show Otto the photographs. When Karl had returned from Marienburg he hadn’t thrown them away. Instead, he had told his brother to hide them in an abandoned shed near a local farm. Now he thought again for a moment, then told Otto he could look at them, provided he didn’t tell anyone.
When they reached the shed, Peter went in, pulled up a decaying floorboard and got them out of the box he had hidden beneath it.
The first showed a group of men huddled together for warmth. In the second photograph four women were standing in what looked like dormitories. One of the women didn’t have a shirt on, her breasts fully exposed to the camera. The last was of a girl with a boy, perhaps her older brother, and a woman who appeared to be their mother. Whenever Peter came to the shed alone, this was the one he looked at most often.
‘Jews?’ Otto asked.
His question unsettled the brothers. They had been staring at the girl, who seemed to stare back.
‘Who else?’ Karl snapped.
In an attempt to absolve himself, Karl explained how some older boys had stolen them and hidden them among his possessions.
‘Does everyone have photos like these?’ Otto asked.
‘Of course not! Why do you think they had to get rid of them? No one knows I’ve got them except you and Peter, and if you tell anyone about them I’ll say you brought them from Berlin.’
‘I said I wouldn’t tell.’
Peter returned the photos to their hiding place and the boys went back to the main road, making sure nobody saw them as they emerged from the bushes. The woodland where Ida and the children found mushrooms was a few kilometres further on. Karl and Peter knew all the varieties, including the poisonous ones. Amanitas grew everywhere on the peninsula and Ida had warned them that a single cap could kill an entire family. The first time Karl saw one his mother had said, ‘Nature made them bright red so you’ll notice them and eat one. Then your body will fertilise the ground so that more can grow.’ She then had picked a few caps, which she placed in a separate cloth to take home. That afternoon, she filled an old pan with water and boiled them, let the liquid cool, then placed it inside the door of the slaughterhouse where it enticed flies to land, drink and die. ‘It’s nature’s way of controlling pests too,’ she had added.
Along the road to the forest, Karl told Otto not to touch the bright-red mushrooms with white spots: ‘They’ll kill you.’
Otto wondered about these woods: the only woods he had ever been in were in the Tiergarten near the centre of Berlin, and Grunewald, at the edge of the city, where he had always felt safe, because other people were invariably around. Germau seemed to be in the middle of nowhere.
When they reached the edge of the forest, Karl pointed out the path. ‘Follow us and you won’t get lost, but if you get separated just yell. We won’t be far.’
As soon as they