Kindergarten (13 page)

In front of him, perfectly in line, was a huge contingent of men in black breeches, stripped to the waist. Their stance was relaxed, their legs at ease, slightly apart, and they were holding spades, their hands resting on the handle at waist height, the bright metal cutting edge touching on the ground between their feet. At first, with their naked chests and black breeches, they looked like medieval headsmen holding their axes, all the executioners of history gathered together in one place.

Outside the cinema, the crowds moved up and down the streets of the nation which was a city called Berlin.

The people moved quickly, rather jerkily, slightly blurred, in a grainy scratched atmosphere of black and white, or a smeary sepia, as though everything were discoloured with rolling banks of smoke. The synchronisation was not quite right, and the people seemed to rush headlong down the streets. A voice commented on their actions, rather heavily jocular, or theatrically serious, with a liking for alliteration, stressing every fourth word. The voice spoke English, and was totally devoid of all genuine emotion, as though the people did not matter, were already lost in history. The words were quite separate from the scenes they purported to describe.

A little boy called Emil—wearing the dark blue Sunday suit that his mother cleaned by holding him between her knees and scrubbing with a dampened clothes-brush, and who wanted him to go to a good school—pushed his way through the crowds, holding a suitcase and a bunch of flowers for his aunt. He was followed by a crowd of children. He was searching for a thief who had stolen the money that was intended for his grandmother.

Everyone was gazing into the distance, in silence. Children were carried on their father’s shoulders, held by the ankles, gazing into the distance, along with their parents. The people had strong faces, rosy, tanned by the sun in past years, and hands were held up over eyes screwed up against the falling rain. The reflections of the buildings and the crowds were very distinct on the soaked streets. Their right arms were lifted into the air, at an angle up and away from their bodies, pushing forward against each other, like children keen to answer questions in class, thrusting up their hands—“Please, sir! Please, sir!”—all those enthusiastic children, desperate for the approval of their watching teacher, who paused, looking out over the class, noticing those who did not know the answer.

The crowds, stretching far away into the distance, wandering aimlessly year after year, had found someone to give their wandering a purpose, to shape them into a pattern, to make all the millions of them a part of history. Their lives did not belong to them any more. Each individual had ceased to exist. The city, crowded with millions of people, had become a dot on a map.

H
E SAW
a long line of people stretching away into the distance.

He saw women in calf-length grey overcoats, long dark hair, stumbling forward holding their children’s hands, families trying to cling together, men in dark clothes, heads bowed, carrying suitcases, a long procession trudging through the snow, unarmed, surrendering. They did not cry, or call for help, but stared with eyes full of all that they had seen. Their eyes were the only part of them he could see. He could never see them clearly. They were always partially hidden by the falling snow, and the barbed wire which surrounded them. As they moved forward, the snow began to fill in their footsteps. Long, sealed trains travelled eastward, through the snow, to unknown destinations, unknown places with strange names, a foreign country a long way from home, an immense and frozen emptiness.

Their names were not known, and everything about them was forgotten. They would die, just like all the others, he thought, without names, without faces.

H
E WAS
at the beginning of a story of which he already knew the ending.

In fairy-tales collected by the Brothers Grimm, the innocent and the pure in heart always seemed to triumph, even after much fear and suffering: Hansel and Gretel outwitted the witch and escaped; the seven little kids and their mother destroyed the wolf; the three sisters in “Fitcher’s Bird” overpowered even death itself to defeat the murdering magician. But he could still remember the mounting desolation with which he read some of the Hans Christian Andersen fairy-tales when he was little. He had read them over and over again, hoping that this time the ending would be a happy ending, but the endings never changed: the little match-girl died entirely alone, frozen to death on New Year’s Eve, surrounded by burned-out matches; the little mermaid melted into foam after bearing her suffering bravely; and the steadfast tin soldier and the ballerina perished in the flames of the stove, leaving only a little tin heart and a metal sequin behind. He had been unable to put them away and forget about them. He had been drawn, compulsively, to read them with engrossed attention, and had wept as he found himself realising what the inevitable and unchanged end of the story would be.

I
T WAS
raining again outside, and the wind blew in strong gusts. The sea was only a slightly darker grey than the sky, dull, reflectionless, possessed of great depths. The curtainless windows rattled and swam, and the empty playing-fields were drab and distorted. Low black clouds rolled heavily across the sky, like smoke from a burning city.

In the 1930s, though the school, then as now, had been a boys’ school, the Ferry House had been turned into a house for a small number of refugee German girls, sisters of boys in the school, or girls on their own, and the school’s youngest boys, who had previously slept there, had been transferred to the main building. He had learned this from the letters, never having known it before.

He looked around the bare white walls of the echoing, bare-boarded bedroom, and thought of Lotte Goetzel, Hedwig Grünbaum, Anna Kahn, Stefanie Peters, and all the other little girls, lying in bed, pictures and postcards on the walls, listening to rain falling, and thinking of their families in Berlin, writing the letters that he was now holding in his hands.

In July, 1938, Lotte Goetzel had rejoined her parents in Berlin, after being at Southwold for two terms, and had not returned to the school.

Berlin-Charlottenburg 2
9th August 1938

Dear Mr. High,

Growing difficulties make it impossible for us to send our daughter back to Southwold. We have now lost all our business and it is impossible for us to pay the fees any longer. We know no one who can help us. Lotte was very glad to see her family, friends, and her little dog here, but we know she will miss the kindness she was shown in England. She was very unhappy in a strange land sometimes, but we know how much you tried to make her feel “at home.” We think it, perhaps, was too early to separate the child from home. As she is such a shy, quiet girl, we were really afraid that she felt so homesick so far away from us. You may think this is sentimental in us, but I think, as a father, you will understand our feelings. It would be our wish to give her in your school if we could, but perhaps it was too early. She is only 12.

We are leaving Germany, and going to Holland. I have good hope of a position with a firm in Amsterdam. There is a Jewish school for children from Germany, and we hope to give Lotte a practical education so that she may be able to earn her own money by her hands, wherever she goes, with what the future may bring for us. All our furniture is packed and waiting to be sent away, but we do not know whether it will be possible to take it with us.

We thank you with all our hearts for all you have done for Lotte. She sends a letter for you.

With many good wishes for you and your school,

Peter and Aline Goetzel

Dear Mr. High,

I am so sorry that I did not say goodbye properly to you and Misses High. I was too unsure. Thank you for the nice report.

The sea was rough when we crossed, and most of the passengers were sick. Hanno Weiler and I were not. Hanno looked after me very nicely. His mother and father kindly took me home from Hamburg, on their way back.

I am now hier in our house, and it is going to be sold. It was very exciting to help to get everything ready, and empty all the cupboards. A lot of lovely old things we found, where we never knew from. It was great fun.

Grossvater is going to sell his farm and come with us to Holland. It is a big adventure.

Mutti and Vati like the school foto very much. Vati has put it under glass, and all my friends like it.

Love to you and Misses High,
Your affectionate pupil,
Lotte Goetzel

I send you a foto. Please keep me in good memory.

The little dark-haired girl stood at the edge of an empty field, holding a small Scotch terrier, smiling up at the camera. She wore a headband in her short hair, and was wearing a pinafore dress, with a brooch in the shape of a swan.

In October a postcard had come from the Goetzels saying that they were safe in Amsterdam, and that was the last communication the family made with the school.

Anne Frank and her family had been German refugees in Amsterdam.

Some years ago, when they had been in the Netherlands (Jo had been seven, and had told all his friends at school that they were going to Never Never Land), they had visited the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam, where the secret hide-out of the Frank family and their friends was preserved, where they had hidden for two years before being found and sent to Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. Corrie had a blurred memory of darkness, and echoing bareness, and, above all else, a little section of the wall where the remains of some pictures and postcards stuck there by Anne Frank had been preserved. The memory he retained more than any other was a postcard of Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret Rose. That single postcard had brought the dead girl very close to him. On another wall were pencil lines where the parents had marked the heights of their children as they grew towards adulthood, month by month; and a map where pins showed the advance of the allies through northern France, nearer and nearer with every week that passed.

In spite of everything,
she had written, less than three weeks before she and her family were taken away—his father had talked about the visit to the Anne Frank house in a school assembly, before he became headmaster, and read from her diary—
I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness. I hear the ever-approaching thunder, which will destroy us too. I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquillity will return again.

On television, a few weeks ago, a Dutch woman journalist, a sympathiser with Red Phoenix, had been interviewed about her comments on the current trials of terrorists in West Germany (the same terrorists, now imprisoned, for whom Red Phoenix were holding the Berlin schoolchildren hostage), and the interviewer had mentioned Anne Frank’s name in response to a remark about the Palestine Liberation Organisation. The woman had laughed, not sarcastically or ironically, but with genuine amusement, and called the diary her “least favourite work of fiction.” “This figure of six million dead Jews,” she had said, “must have been chosen, I suppose, for some cabbalistic significance, and everyone knows it has little basis in factual accuracy. It is a hoax. Surely you have read the books that prove this? It is a fiction sustained by Zionist propaganda to attempt to give some historical justification for the acts of Jewish military aggression against the Palestinian people. Some Jews did die in the war, of course, but so did millions of Poles and Russian civilians—and the figures here are not open to question. People always die in war.” The programme had ended with her laughing face, amused and incredulous at the interviewer’s naïvety, like a bright young lawyer defending a war criminal. When the film of
The Diary of Anne Frank
had been shown on television, all the characters speaking with American accents, a boy in Jo’s class had written: “It was in black and white. It was about a girl who was hidden from the Germans in a small room, and she wrote a diary about it, but at the end the Germans found her and her friends. It was a long film, but there wasn’t any fighting in it. It was set in the nineteenth century.”

Always, as he worked through the confused and decimated contents of the files, through
1933, 1934, 1935, 1936,
he had been aware of
1939
ahead of him, and of what was to happen in the years that followed. He knew that when one day in
1939
was reached, a door would close forever on these people, and they would never be heard of again.

There were fragments, as he moved—like an archaeologist piecing together the broken bits of bone or pottery in a destroyed and long-forgotten city—through the final files of 1939, badly burned many years previously, the remains of photographs, postcards, and letters, blackened and charred at the edges, falling into ash, crumbling away like documents in a tomb exposed to the light of day: the final letters of those people in Berlin, Leonie Matthias, Nickolaus Mittler, Mrs. Viehmann, and all the others, as the doors closed, one by one.

M
RS. VIEHMANN
, the mother of Kurt and Thomas, was one of the parents he had come to know best.

The last letter he had found from her had been posted on the twenty-seventh of June, 1939. It had no address, was typed—all her other letters had been handwritten—and was unsigned. In pencil, Mr. High’s secretary had written “Mrs. Viehmann” at the top.

Dear Mr. High,

I am ashamed that it is so very long a time, and we have not written to you, and we wished to do it long ago, but you must certainly know what horrible things have happened here in the time since. I have not told you, but my husband is imprisoned since the 10th November. You will, I think, know the events of that time. I have not told my children, and beg you not to tell them, because they will be so frightened and anxious, that they will not be able to learn anything at school, and it would be of no use to concern them, because they can do nothing at all to help us, as, it seems, I cannot myself. I now type all my letters, and write to both my children in the names of myself and my husband, and so they do not realise what has happened to their father. I want, also, so awfully much the money for the posting. I would be grateful if you could excuse me, that I beg you to give the letter enclosed to my sons.