The Children's War (2 page)

There’ll be bluebirds over . . .
He pushed his terror back.
. . . the white cliffs of Dover.
He could see them now, could hear the sound of the waves pounding against the seawall. He felt the sting of the bitter salt air as he had awaited the ferry those four years ago. It had been a dark day, a “terminal day” was what Allison would have called it. “It’s a terminal day,” she would state, indicating that the mood of the weather was like some sort of ending. It was never clear whether terminal days were good or bad; they just were. He remembered the impenetrable barrier of gray on the horizon and had nodded his head in agreement. Yes, it had been a terminal day.

The wind had been high, or at least so it seemed to someone who had lived his life in the confines of a city. Seagulls mewed incessantly, and he had looked up at them to try to determine if Allison’s spirit animated one of them. It had been only a month since her murder, and he still did things like that: he still looked for signs. There was nothing though; the birds were just birds. Flags slapped and banged noisily against their poles as the wind whipped around them, their clanging competing with the normal din of an industrial port. The ferry terminal was surrounded by flags, one on each post of the barbed-wire fence, the familiar red with its white circle around a black swastika—the flag of his country, the flag that had, so many decades ago, before he was even born, won its right to dominate his island home.

Hundreds of boys were around him, shifting uneasily, cold and anxious to get under way. He remembered feeling distinctly out of place among all those kids. There were some other men, but the vast majority were sixteen-year-olds; that was the age when every able-bodied male from the conquered nation was required to serve his Reich. They received their notices with their sixteenth birthday and were marshaled once a week at the local train station. From there, hours
of travel and even more hours of organization brought them tired, hungry, and cowed to the docks at Dover.

A few cold drops of rain were carried on the wind. They slapped into his face and he closed his eyes to savor the salt breeze, but it felt hot and the salty taste trickled into his mouth. He opened his eyes to the terrifying blackness and the enforced paralysis of his bonds. He had known it was there, but the reality nevertheless shocked him. It could have been hours later; hunger gnawed at his thoughts, thirst was driving him mad. The knots refused to budge. He could not work his fingers around far enough to get a good grasp on the ropes. Finally, he stopped, tasted the sweat that dripped into his mouth, and wondered what he should do next.

He closed his eyes against the darkness and tried to hear something. There was nothing though, nothing at all. Before the insanity of silence claimed him, he let his thoughts slip back into his memory. He heard the buzz of conversation around him: boys making friends, telling where they had come from, exchanging insights. Most of them had probably never left their native district, and now they were to be sent away for six years to work somewhere on the Continent as
Pflichtarbeiter.
For some it was like a great adventure, a welcome break from the crowding, the shortages, the tedious routine of their homes. For others, the ones who had an intuitive understanding of just how long six years was, it was a painful separation from all they knew and loved.

It had been different for him. Instead of a birthday notice, he had been pulled out of his London prison cell early in the morning and shoved into the last carriage of a troop train heading south. There, along with a few other men, he had remained, manacled, until they had arrived at the docks. Then, somewhat inexplicably, the handcuffs had been removed and they were integrated into the general population of arriving boys, and there he stood, a convicted criminal with twenty years of forced labor to look forward to, guilty of that most basic and heinous of crimes in a police state: the possession of bad papers. A conscription dodger with insufficient and incomplete identity documents had been the best he could manage: a fake name, a fake history, inadequate papers, and a twentyyear sentence were still preferable to death by firing squad.

The wind caught at his hair and he impatiently brushed it out of his eyes. A few more drops of rain splattered heavily. After a time, the great doors of the ferry were opened and they were herded into the hold, divided into groups of about twenty and shoved into small, smelly compartments. The only light was from the hallway, and as the doors were shut, only a narrow beam from the tiny window cut its swath through the thick air.

He began to gasp as the foul air choked him. The dim light of the hold was swallowed by the darkness surrounding, and his dreamlike memories evaporated like wisps of hope. His muscles ached fiercely and he longed to stretch. Timidly he pushed against his bonds but they did not give, so he stopped before his lack of mobility could provoke panic. Again he tried to undo the knots on his wrist.
He worked feverishly, his fingers aching with the effort at pulling. Then he heard it, the clear, unmistakable sound of a train. So, he wasn’t underground; he was near a rail line, or maybe even on a slowly moving train. He tried to determine if there was any movement, but he was shaking so violently from fear and exhaustion that he could not tell. At least now he felt sure he was being sent back. Whether they intended for him to survive the trip, whether they would kill him at the other end, he could not know, but at least now there was an end in sight. Whatever it was.

2

T
HERE WAS NO END
in sight, Richard Traugutt thought as he tapped his fingers lightly on the arm of his chair and hummed a waltz under his breath. He was a tall, lean man with dark brown eyes and dark, almost black, wavy hair that was streaked through with gray here and there. Not the prototype of an Aryan Nazi, admittedly, but he had done well within the system and was moving rapidly upward—rewarded for his brains and devotion if not his looks. He took a sip of his coffee and blinked slowly as he sat in his uncomfortable chair, savoring that precious moment that he did not have to look at the speaker or his interminable slides.

He wondered if he could make some excuse and leave the room or if he had tried that gambit once too often. He lit a cigarette and decided to stay, since the presentation was almost entirely for his benefit. Besides, it would soon be over and it would do well for him to sit all the way through one of these things once in a while. He did not want to get a reputation for being rude, after all.

The cloud of smoke he exhaled obscured his vision for a few seconds, but when it cleared, the room and its tedious occupants came into focus once again. The speaker was a handsome young man with an aristocratic demeanor and a fine mustache that he fussed over incessantly.

“Here we have an overview of the organization’s structure as determined so far,” the speaker explained. “It was difficult extracting this information from our prisoner, but we convinced him to cooperate!”

The small audience chuckled appropriately.

“Unfortunately, it seems our suspicions have been confirmed. The bombings carried out in the center of Krakau were done by a small group of terrorists who are not in any way connected with the Home Army. Desirable as it is, our total annihilation of this little group will not in any way impinge on that other organization.”

There were scattered groans of disappointment from around the room.

Richard’s thoughts turned to that other organization, the Armia Krajowa, the
Home Army: a Mafia, some said; a terrorist army according to others. Whatever it was, it was the bogeyman for the Nazi
Ordnung
enforced upon the subject peoples of the land. It lived and breathed among the occupiers, its heartbeat thumped ominously beneath the city streets, its breath hissed out of dark alleys and struck fear into any who crossed its path. It was everywhere and nowhere, powerful and impotent; its very real threats of retaliations affected the actions of each and every officer posted to the eastern Reich, yet it did not even exist. Their enemies were defeated, subjugated, annihilated, they were told, so it could not exist.

A murmur of approval penetrated Richard’s consciousness. The speaker was showing before and after photographs of the prisoner whom he had personally interrogated. Richard glanced at the pictures, then back at the speaker, and could not stifle the word
arsehole
as it slipped in a whisper past his lips. Always the same thing, always the most brutal, least effective approach. The man should be transferred, Richard decided, and he began to plot. There was a new installation near Breslau, a reeducation center being established inside a large military complex. They could lose this idiot by sending him there—he would no longer be under Richard’s direction and it would almost look like a promotion. The arsehole would do well there with his clubs and his chains and his penchant for inflicting pain with mindless abandon. Yes, Breslau, that would get him out of their hair.

Richard’s assistant, Til, walked over to him and crouched down so he could whisper something in Richard’s ear. Richard leaned in attentively.

“There have been a lot of complaints from Party officials,” Til whispered earnestly.

Richard nodded his head to show he was listening but kept his eyes on the proceedings.

“It seems after the sixth or seventh child, they say their wives don’t feel, um, to put it delicately, don’t feel quite as snug.”

“Um-huh.” Richard maintained a look of concerned interest. His wife was only pregnant with their fifth, but still he recognized the problem.

“So the health ministry has been studying the situation,” Til continued to whisper. “And it seems they finally have a solution.”

“Really?” Richard asked, and sipped his coffee as the speaker showed another gruesome photograph.

“Yes, quite simple, actually. They recommend one buy a large ham, shove it in, and pull out the bone.”

Richard sputtered, spitting coffee in the process. The speaker turned around to glance questioningly at him. Richard motioned that it was nothing.

The speaker continued to proudly explain his techniques. Til smirked and went back to stand where he had been before. Richard glanced at his watch and wondered if he would be late getting home that evening. It was not really important, since his wife was away visiting relatives. It would be difficult for her. She
was
Volksdeutsch,
a woman who had declared herself German after discovering appropriate blood relations long in the past. One of the many curious cases of people discovering lost Germanic roots decades after the establishment of the Reich. Even more curious, but not atypical, none of her family had found this connection or decided to use it.

Richard’s own past was pristine: a father who had served the Reich well, living in London and raising his child there, a bloodline that had been documented pure as far back as his great-great-great-grandparents, active service in the military, Party membership, a brilliant career in government that was advancing quickly; only his wife, Katrin, or as he called her at home, Kasia, was a weak link in this otherwise impeccable background. Though, by all legal measures, she should have been using the language since she was born, she still spoke German with a noticeable accent, and even worse, her relatives insisted on retaining their Polish identity. Richard sighed and wondered how things were going for her. Conceivably, listening to an arsehole drone on ad nauseam about his prowess with a truncheon was preferable to what his poor wife was encountering at the hands of her family.

Kasia paced up and down the platform. The train screamed its warning and slowly chugged its way out of the station. Fifteen more minutes, she thought. Fifteen more minutes. Maybe they’ve encountered difficulty finding transportation, or maybe there is a roadblock and their papers are being checked. But it was none of those things, she knew. No one was coming for her. They did not welcome her visit and they would not greet her at the station—no matter how many advance messages she sent. She checked her watch and paced a bit more. Ten minutes, she thought. If they don’t come in ten minutes, I’ll go on my own. She paced a bit more and absently wiped the tears from her cheek as she checked her watch yet again. Five minutes. Five minutes more. Surely they would come to the station to meet the daughter and sister they had not seen for years? Surely they would not shun her in this manner. She checked her watch again and went to the taxi stand.

When she stated the destination, the driver shook his head. She tried the next cab and received the same response. When the third driver asserted that he would not drive into the neighborhood, she asked to be dropped off as close as possible and she would walk the rest of the way. The cabdriver whistled derisively but took the fare anyway.

Kasia stepped out of the cab at the edge of the township and looked across the vast array of hovels that her people now called home. Each and every resident could at one time have claimed another home: some hailed back to mansions and great estates, others to one-room tenements. All the residents had only two things in common: they had not cooperated with the regime and they had somehow survived. Every now and then the neighborhood withstood a purge as the Germans marched in and seized various people guilty of political crimes or
Jewish ancestry or whatever. Every now and then the neighborhood withstood mass kidnappings as soldiers took the children of illegal marriages for use as slaves or for adoption by good German families. Every now and then the neighborhood withstood roundups, where able-bodied men and women were seized as
Zwangsarbeiter,
forced labor, to work without wages or even the most minimal rights in the Reich’s factories and farms or as domestic slaves for the Reich’s overworked
Hausfrauen.
Every now and then the population of the slum dropped precipitously either through the intervention of their overlords or through disease or hunger. Still, despite all the purges and winnowing of the population, they survived, scrabbling for life on the edge, reproducing and hoping for the future, teaching their children a forbidden culture and a forbidden language. Teaching stubbornness and determination and history. Teaching hate.

Gathering her courage, Kasia pulled her shawl more tightly around herself and stepped off the road and into the dirt alley that led to the stinking piles of garbage and staring faces of her brethren. She had dressed as inconspicuously as possible, but her presence drew attention as if she were wearing a sign saying
INTERLOPER.
She walked with a knowledgeable stride down the paths, afraid of showing even the slightest hesitation. She took a left at an unfamiliar junction and realized that she had probably taken a wrong turn somewhere. Nothing looked familiar.

Kasia decided not to turn around, fearing that if she showed she was lost, she might invite trouble. She continued to walk purposefully, picking her way through the debris, agilely leaping over the sewage ditches, holding her head high with a look of calmness that belied the tumult of fear inside her. She turned a corner and was in a central square. A small fountain in the center was no longer running, but someone had neatly planted flowers around the base. A group of youths played a boisterous game of soccer with a battered old ball that they kicked with reckless abandon. Someone sent the ball flying toward the flowers, and to Kasia’s surprise one of the boys thrust out an arm and batted it back with his hand into the field of play. No one chided him for his action, and Kasia guessed the flowers were sufficiently off-limits to merit violation of the most sacred rules of the ball game.

She walked over to the flowers and read the little hand-printed card that lay buried among them. In Polish was written: “These flowers are planted in memory of those who died fighting for our freedom.” Kasia picked up the card and saw that on the back was written in German: “This card was placed here by A. Mandartschik, who takes sole responsibility for it. No hostages need be shot.” It was signed using a non-Germanized spelling, and below the signature was an address and a tiny map that would help the Gestapo arrest the culprit if need be.

Kasia raised her eyebrows, wondering what Richard would think of such a bold gesture. Carefully she replaced the card and continued on her way, asking directions from one of the old men who lounged in a group near the door of a bar. They explained where she should go, and within a few minutes she was back on familiar turf.

The door to her parents’ hovel was missing, and now only a heavy woolen blanket hung over the entrance. Kasia knocked forcefully on the wooden frame and waited. When she had been a young girl, her family had been evicted from its tenement apartment and had taken refuge here on the outskirts of the town now called Tschenstochau. In the distance the ruins of the ancient monastery loomed, its miraculous history insufficient to repel these modern invaders, its famous Black Madonna missing and no longer able to protect it from the vindictive destructiveness of the new occupiers. Around her were the squalid shanties of the dispossessed. They lived here illegally, unable to obtain legal residence anywhere, and as squatters, they did not merit even the most basic city services and were open to arrest and deportation without notice.

Kasia pounded on the wooden beam again and waited. The move into the squatters’ suburb had nearly broken her parents. They had found living in the tenement wretched enough and had at that time talked longingly of the old days when their families had owned town houses in Poznan. Their home city was now called Posen and the territory had completely and ruthlessly been denuded of all its Polish inhabitants as they had been murdered or forced to flee eastward when the area was incorporated into the Reich proper. Only one family member had shamed them in those terrible times. Kasia’s mother’s uncle had chosen to declare himself and his family
Volksdeutsch
and had been obliged to deny his heritage and adopt the German language and culture, but had in return been able to maintain his property and his family’s lives.