The Chosen Ones (37 page)

Legally, one reached the age of criminal responsibility at fourteen. After having spent four weeks in the youth detention cells on Rüdengasse in the 3rd Bezirk, the court sentenced him in September 1944 to eighteen months in borstal for vagrancy, thieving and refusal to work. The sentence was based on the evaluation Doctor Illing had issued from the Spiegelgrund institution.

An ex-SS guard called Nowotny escorted him from the Rüdengasse police cells to the youth detention facility in Kaiserebersdorf. They walked all the way from Rüdengasse to the tram stop at Oberzellergasse and boarded the 71 tram together, the same tram that he and his little brother Helmut had travelled on once, accompanied by Mrs Haidinger who had picked them up from the Lustkandlgasse children’s home. He remembered how Mrs Haidinger had bought Helmut chocolate from the kiosk at Zentralfriedhof when they were waiting to change to the 73 tram. Mrs Haidinger had told him that he was too ugly to get anything. Now the ugly boy was getting on the same tram, chained to the former SS guard like a beast led to slaughter. And, although Nowotny had already given what little he had to offer to his Führer and the great leader’s army, he felt taking a prisoner from the police cells to the prison was a shitty job well below his proper status and so he shouted
prison transport prison transport!
as they were boarding and hit Adrian over the back of his neck and back to force him into the most remote corner of the carriage. It would have been hard to decide who of the two of them disgusted the other travellers more: Nowotny and his brutal treatment of the prisoner, or the prisoner himself, the deserter and layabout who had been lying low while decent people had obediently made sacrifices but now was hauled out from his lair to be properly punished. Deserters, wartime saboteurs and ordinary criminals were all incarcerated in the borstal institution in Kaiserebersdorf. Arguably, the saboteurs and other miscreants were in the majority, because all young people were regarded as deserters if they had failed to turn up for labour service or ignored the call-up to the Wehrmacht. It was tacitly understood that the prison guards could do what they liked with deserters. Adrian shared a cell for a while with a youth called Viktor Zobel. Zobel had psoriasis, which meant that his arms, back,
chest and belly were covered with large, red, scaly lesions that itched terribly and were made worse by the coarse, dirty prison uniforms they were forced to wear round the clock. Even though Zobel did all he could to stifle his whimpers, the guards heard him. One night, one of them dragged him into the corridor and beat him senseless. After that, Zobel kept back the small ration of margarine that came with their evening meal and used it as an ointment for his wounds, though if his tortured moaning through the night was anything to go by it didn’t help much. The war will be over soon, he kept mumbling, as if the two phenomena were linked – the war and the wounds that gave him no peace. Adrian Ziegler spent a total of seven months in Kaiserebersdorf and all he saw of the sky in that time was a square grey area above the exercise yard where they had to line up in the morning, most of them wearing only wooden clogs. Sometimes snow fell from the square of sky and sometimes it did nothing but, as far as Adrian was concerned, it was just as cold all the time. In snow and ice and drifting rain, their bodies still stiff and sore after the damp chill of their cells, the prisoners had to stand waiting until everyone had been allocated work of some kind in a prison workshop or in the kitchen and its attached bakery. Adrian was sent off to the Hellhole, as they called the laundry in the cellar, presumably because it was the only place in the entire prison that was kept really warm. He and two other prisoners, Heinzl and Matthias, were supervised by a one-armed sergeant called Schwach. The other arm was left behind in Vitebsk, Schwach explained to the boys. Adrian’s job was to see to it that the level and pressure of the water in the two high-pressure vessels were kept constant and to top up with coal or water as required. Bringing the coal twice a day was the heaviest part of the job: it meant carrying the twenty-five-kilogram coal buckets, one in each hand, and tipping the contents into the purpose-built
coal bunker. Every time he did it, the memory of Jockerl came back to him, the memory of how he had reached out his hand to the running boy and how Jockerl hadn’t been able to take hold of it or perhaps hadn’t wanted to and then plunged from the truck. It seemed weird, but Jockerl hadn’t even been mentioned in Adrian’s sentence, as if he truly hadn’t existed, or had once, but been erased from reality. All the same, Jockerl was always very much present inside Adrian. Like a second prison guard, he saw to it that there was no let-up from the memory, not even when dropping off to sleep because, as soon as Adrian became drowsy on his stool in front of the pressure gauges, there was Jockerl, his skin as white as ever, running along the train and Adrian was holding out his hand but Jockerl refused to take it. Over and over again, as if a film loop were running in his head. Unless the air-raid sirens went and he had to stop. The standing order on hearing the sirens was to put out the fires and remove all embers. As far as Adrian could remember later on, the bombing raids over Wien began at about the same time as his prison sentence, in September 1944. It happened that they had to douse the fires and run to the shelters several times a week. One consequence was that the piles of unwashed laundry grew bigger and bigger. One day, the boss of the provisions department at the army base turned up and demanded action. The soldiers couldn’t wait any longer for their clothing: uniforms, socks and underpants. Sergeant Schwach stated that in case of raids, his orders were to extinguish the fires and have embers removed. The officer turned to the prison governor and it was decided to start up a night shift in the laundry. Everyone who worked nights would receive an additional meal consisting of the leftovers from the kitchen at the barracks. As a result, the laundry staff were given bread and decent food, delivered by lorry nightly and in good order. It made existence in the hellhole almost tolerable.
Apart from keeping an eye on the fires and the temperatures in the boilers, Adrian was given the task of going through the mountains of uniforms and greatcoats before they were laundered, looking out for things like coins or faded pictures of women and children. Once, he found a wedding ring and, another time, a cigarette case engraved with initials. His finds were requisitioned by Sergeant Schwach, who let Adrian have big pots of marmalade to spread on the black bread. When the night shift began, Schwach would ask if everything was under control so he could withdraw briefly and Adrian always answered that everything was fine (what else could he say?) and so Schwach went off for a kip, in a small space behind the large laundry pans where he had fitted in a bed. He kept a small radio receiver on a bedside table switched on. During calm nights, Schwach snored in his quarters while the radio, turned down low, was chatting to itself. Sometimes, the cry of a cuckoo cut through the broadcast to warn of another raid and the sergeant shot out from behind the pans with his hair standing on end and his braces dangling at knee height, shouting
Feuer löschen! Feuer löschen!
– which gave Adrian just a few minutes to put out the fires under the pans and, once he was sure that the ashes were dry and free of any glowing embers, sprint the eight hundred metres or so to the exercise yard, then cross it to the building on the other side and down the long, echoing cellar stairs to the shelters where he sat down among the others, seething inwardly because now it would take at least two hours to restart the fires and get the pressure up in the boilers. Now and then, they heard the dull thuds of exploding bombs, sometimes far away but sometimes so close the ground shook. Then, at dawn after a night raid, when he had just got the fires going again, a guard ordered everyone out into the exercise yard for a line-up. Adrian was so tired he didn’t know if he slept standing up. Every time he looked up at the square piece of
sky, the light cut his eyes like a sharpened knife blade. A truck with armed guards in the back came to pick them up. For a short, senseless moment, Adrian thought they were all to be executed. Heinzl, whose face was ashen, sat opposite him, then a boy whose name he didn’t know, who was so frightened his knees were shaking almost too hard for his arms to keep them still. Next to the scared boy, Jockerl was facing him as usual, smiling his terrified porcelain smile. This was in February 1945. He remembers the white sky and the new layer of snow on the fields on either side of the road. The truck bumped along towards Albern where he saw the river for the first time, like a black slash through the whiteness. They passed burnt-down houses, buildings that had been flattened, and there the ground, too, was black, as if a huge wall of flame had travelled along the road, leaving only ashes behind. The truck stopped at one of the grain silos by the harbour basin. It looked unharmed but the adjoining buildings were in ruins. They were ordered into teams, given spades and told to start clearing the site. As he set to work, he heard a diesel engine throbbing somewhere behind him. He couldn’t work out why at first but then he realised that it belonged to a pump draining overflow water from the grain store via long hoses into the harbour. Though the guards were armed, they were not brutal: after digging for a couple of hours, Adrian’s team was told to take a break. They were given bread and sausage and, after the meal, he was even offered a cigarette by one of the soldiers. Adrian looked into the kindly face under the helmet and realised this was a young man, not much older than himself, even though he tried to make himself look as solid as possible with gestures and voice.
It doesn’t matter what they do, soon river shipping won’t be possible anyway
. The soldier waved the barrel of his rifle towards the black river that was rushing along between the white snowdrifts.
The Americans have mined it all the way from here to
Nussbaum
, he said, then puffed up his cheeks and rolled his eyes upwards until they protruded like two white balls, and
BAA-BOOM!
he shouted meaninglessly and flung his arms out as if to mimic the explosion of a floating mine and, all around him, the other guards and the digging prisoners turned and smiled, white grins on their dirty faces. They carried on hacking and shovelling stone and pieces of reinforced concrete until long after dusk. Then the trucks arrived for them and took them back to the prison. The digging teams’ wet and filthy kits were waiting for him in the laundry. He had barely started throwing them into the boilers when the air raid began. In front of him, as if sprung out of the cellar floor, Sergeant Schwach rose up and shouted his
Feuer löschen! Feuer löschen!
in a voice that sounded as if large wounds had been ripped open inside his throat. This time, Adrian had no energy left to move out of the merciful warmth that enclosed him and nobody even tried to make him go anywhere. That night he dreamt about the river as he had seen it when he walked across the Ostbahnbrücke in the early light of dawn: like a huge wall of black water that grew taller and taller as if just waiting to come tumbling down over him.

Upstream
   The beginning of the end was an unmistakable bad smell. It stinks of cow shit, Heinzl said. It did. They had just finished yet another night shift in the laundry and from the other side of the ventilation grid they heard mooing cattle and something sounding like large wagon wheels grinding across the cobbles outside. From one of the windows in the stairwell, they looked out over the exercise yard and it looked like a marketplace, packed full of wagons loaded with every kind of furniture. Between them, cows, goats and pigs ambled about. Where the prisoners used to line up, someone had placed a fodder bin full of hay and a long tin tub that served as a
water trough. They later learnt that Soviet companies had reached the edge of Münchendorf and the local farmers had spent the whole night trying to move themselves and their animals to safety. The decision to evacuate the prison must also have been taken that night. The order went from room to room: all prisoners were to line up in the yard. They had to stand along one wall, all three hundred and sixty-nine of them, hardly anyone above the age of twenty, packed so closely together that they had to contract their back muscles not to touch each other. The day was bitterly cold, with a strong wind driving rain showers that felt like hail against their faces. Above them, an armour-plated sky, covered with heavy, leaden clouds. After about half an hour, the prison governor, accompanied by two officials, came outside. He was in full uniform. Adrian had never seen him like his. It was hard to work out what he was saying, above the wind and the rumbling of the penned-in cattle and the shouting of the soldiers who were trying to inch two covered trucks towards the main gate (the drivers sounded the horns and hung outside the side windows screaming at the cows, who took no notice). Adrian picked up only a few words but remembers that the prison governor held a pair of black leather gloves and was slapping them nervously against his Sam Browne belt while he might have been speaking about heroic courage and the invincibility of the Germanic peoples and so forth. They had heard that kind of thing many times before. He also spoke of the delinquent prisoners who had shamed the native land. However, despite their evil deeds, he wasn’t leaving them to their fate at the hands of the Bolsheviks but would transfer them to safety. To the last man, he said. Or, anyway: in so far as he was able. Or, he might have said something quite different because now the wind was fierce and strong enough to tear the fodder bin from its wooden supports and send it tumbling across the cobbled yard. The noise was so
violent it hit the shaved juvenile necks like a blow. When the hand holding the gloves pushed the governor’s hair out of his face one last time, Adrian noticed his cheeks, dark with untrimmed beard growth, were glistening with tears. The camp guard shouted
Attention!
and then they were made to walk back to their cells to pack and sign receipts for their possessions. Yet another convoy of army vehicles had arrived at the prison, and one of them brought the unit of military police detailed to escort them. They lined up again to be counted and, afterwards, the guards set about tying them together in pairs and then running a long rope from the front pair through to the last one. It took hours before all the names had been called and the ropes tied and secured. Finally, in the afternoon, the prison gates swung open and the prisoners marched off. They were like a manacled chain gang, bound by hands and feet, and guarded by a dozen armed men from the special police who walked along the line on both sides. For as long as he lives, Adrian will never forget this march and the journey on the river that followed. For one thing, he can’t ever get his head round why their tormentors were so dedicated to taking them all along on this mad exercise. Was it because they regarded the risk of them falling prey to the enemy as a greater threat? Or, was it that they had no idea what to do with them but brought them along by default or perhaps because they were simply property, just as the farmers tried to take their goods and chattels with them? But the prison governor’s face had been streaked with tears while he spoke. Could it be that he was convinced that even for lowlife like Adrian Ziegler or Viktor Zobel, the kind of people he and his comrades-in-arms had been trying to wipe off the face of the earth, there might after all be some freedom to find in the crumbling Reich? Or was the plan that they would all go down together, murderers and victims alike, still stuck with each other, the victims to their last breath
remaining under the murderers’ orders? Still in prison uniforms and bound together, they marched towards the city. At first, they stumbled continuously on the ropes because their guards tried to make them move at too fast a tempo. Of that part of the march, Adrian only remembers the furious shouted commands, and that some of the boys ahead of him fell and were dragged along by the others or were brought to their feet with kicks and blows, still with their arms and legs hopelessly tangled in the ropes. They followed the canal in the direction of the generating station and the gasometers in Simmering, then carried on under the Ostbahn viaduct where he once (how long ago it seemed) had run coal for the Silver Knife. He stared fixedly at the ground to avoid having to watch Jockerl tug at the ropes. Not even the wind that swelled and flapped above them like the sail of an abandoned boat could carry away the sickly sweet stench of rotting cadavers. There were dead cows and calves everywhere, in the fields and the muddy ditches. And in the canal, too, where dead bodies that had been stopped by rubbish or tree roots now floated in the water by the banks with their legs helplessly sticking up above bellies distended like fat balloons. The closer they got to the centre of the city, the more terrible the devastation. Near the slaughterhouses in St Marx, whole city blocks had been flattened to the ground with only the odd gable or chimney stack still standing upright, pointing stupidly towards the sky. A burning stench of fire, diesel and decay filled the air. They passed a few horse-drawn carriages that must have received direct hits from shrapnel bombs because the entire vehicle had burnt, including the animals. Some of the carbonised horse cadavers had no heads, others had spilt their innards on the street. Live animals, sheep, calves and pigs, were wandering among the torched ruins, paradoxically liberated by raids aimed at killing the lot of them. At St Marx, the column suddenly
stopped and was then ordered to carry on over the Stadionbrücke. The wind was so strong at the centre of the bridge that those up in front found it hard to keep up the quick-march tempo or even to keep upright at all. The wildly impatient officers walked up and down, shouting, swearing and hitting prisoners with their rifle butts. As they crossed the Prater, along the full length of Meiereistrasse they had to move at a jogging pace and weren’t allowed to stop once. They came to a sudden, involuntary halt on Handelskai, causing the rope to tighten so abruptly that Adrian almost fell. When he turned to look he saw that one of them, perhaps five or ten boys back along the line, had managed somehow to wriggle out of the loops of rope. His clogs were left on the quayside, looking sad and pointless. One of the guards pulled at the slack ropes. Then, very quickly, shots rang out: three sharp cracks in succession. Over by some harbour sheds, he saw the runaway, whose leg had been injured, struggle to sit up and drag himself behind the sheds. His naked, hopeless face was raised in desperation as two of the policemen ran towards him. One of them stopped just about a metre away, raised his rifle and shot once. The boy jerked and sank into a heap. Whispers flew between the prisoners in the column, giving the runaway’s name, Adrian thought it was Alois Riedler, but before the name reached him properly, the officer in charge of the column started to shout at them. He was a large bulldog of a man with chins like car tyres stacked on his broad shoulders. Adrian, who was too exhausted to raise his head, didn’t bother to look at him. They set off again, keeping closer together and moving with tired, shuffling, resigned steps. A tugboat was at anchor by a jetty just below the Reichsbrücke. It had two long barges attached, one at each side. The wind was blowing hard, making all three boats seem to fight to stay pointing in the same direction. At the far end of the jetty, a tall, thin man in a light overcoat was
waiting for them. The man would later introduce himself as Mr Rache, a schoolteacher. If that was true information or not, and how this man had come to take on the responsibility of three hundred and sixty-nine inmates from Kaiserebersdorf, Adrian would never find out. Mr Rache had a list with their names inside a folder, and proceeded to call them out in a loud voice while the pages fluttered in the wind. One by one, the boys stepped out onto the jetty. Adrian’s name was called and Rache looked up from the rustling pages and glanced at him with empty, utterly indifferent eyes. Then he said a number to the guard, who pointed with his rifle at one of the barges. Near the barge, a young woman wearing a pale blue dress and white sandals was handing out a blanket and a small flask of water to everyone in turn. Adrian would later call this woman Miss Santer, though he was as vague about why as about using the name Rache for the man. With her white sandals and her long, tousled hair flying in the wind, Miss Santer looked as if she came from another world: maybe an actress, maybe somebody’s secretary, but definitely not a prison guard. The cargo hold was unbearably hot and stank of stale bilge water, rotting ropes and diesel fuel. Mr Rache let down a large bucket at the end of a rope and shouted to the boys to secure it and use it as a latrine. The tugboat engines were thudding and pulsating below the waterline. He heard shouts from on deck and for a brief moment, the hatch framed the young woman’s face, wreathed in her flying blonde hair. The barge was turning through a semi-circle and he had time to glimpse the Reichsbrücke under a swiftly sliding sky. So, they were going
upstream
. The woman’s face vanished from the hatch as if the wind had carried her off. Heavy boots trod the deck above them and the hatch cover was shut and screwed down. The hold became pitch black. There were three loading hatches but while the barge was on the move, only one of them was propped open
enough to admit a tiny strip of light and it wasn’t the same hatch each time: first, aft and, later on, either at amidships or stern. Each time they stopped and the position of the ventilation slit changed, a wild tumult broke out because the strongest and most ruthless fought with hands and feet and whatever they could use as weapons (things like rope stumps, bailing-out buckets and old oil cans) to get themselves close to the only air gap. A fight to the death, if necessary, to gain a little fresh air and brief glimpses of the open sky. Adrian took one look, gave up the idea of fighting and withdrew to what he reckoned was a reasonably safe place by one of the bulkhead walls. A bucket fell over, it might even have been Mr Rache’s latrine bucket; someone screamed loudly for a long time and a new fight started to shut the screamer up. Then for a while, the hold became completely quiet. Adrian could sense the bodies around him, the warmth of backs and thighs pressing against him. The original sickening smell of mouldy wood and rotting water was thickened by the bitter stench of urine and shit from the presumably overturned latrine bucket. He remembered Uncle Ferenc’s stories about people who had been pulled along by river currents and drowned. Would he be one more of them? If that young soldier at Albern was to be believed, the river was mined, probably all the way up to Nussbaum. Or higher still. And if the mines were carried by river currents, they would be meeting them any time now. To distract himself from the mines, he tried to calculate where their barge was in the convoy by listening to the monotonous beat of the tugboat engine and the blunt waves slapping against the hull. He guessed that they were in the first barge. Sometimes, all the boats moved out into the main channel, which could be felt from the gentler, more rhythmical wave movement and heard from the steadier rumble of the engine. Now and then, the engine sound became slower and more uneven, then cut out and
restarted on an odd, almost quivering note as the noise level sank until all that was heard above the coughing motor was the anxious splashing of water against the hull. He had a vision of the tugboat veering off mid-river and slowly making its way towards the bank. It was the first time they had stopped. No one in the hold had a clue why they were going towards land or what they might expect. Adrian fell to thinking about young Miss Santer, she of the blonde hair and white sandals and long, lovely legs. Then he thought of the bodies of the terrified boys crowded down there, where the air already stank of their waste and the hatch lids were screwed down like coffin lids. And suddenly, his whole body started to shake. To control the shakes, he pressed his hands flat against the bulwark just above his head. The surface of the steel plate was interrupted by two nuts. He touched them, then used his nails to scrape the paint off them while the barge carried on rocking on its own small waves. A ceaseless but faint buzzing sound was coming from somewhere far away. It rose and fell, as if reluctant to approach them. On deck, people were running. Suddenly, it felt as if a giant hand had grabbed the barge from below: it reared and there was a detonation powerful enough to drown the screaming in the hold. Was this a mine? He looked around but could see nothing except eyes and mouths gaping with terror. Viktor Zobel crouched as if in spasms at Adrian’s feet. He bent down to try to help his old cellmate and then the barge rose again. Zobel was now no longer below but above him and vomit sprayed from his mouth like a fountain. Blinded and footloose, Adrian fumbled for something to hold on to but the bulkhead plate with the two nuts slipped away from his hands. There was a burst of firing from a machine-gun position somewhere close by. So they hadn’t struck a mine, then? Adrian bent over to try to find out if they were taking in water and glimpsed, he thought, Jockerl’s shiny porcelain teeth
scattered over the filthy hull. Another powerful detonation tore at the barge and nearly upended it again. He had time to hear the swooshing sound, as massive volumes of water were pushed aside, and then the entire ship tilted until it pointed straight down towards the riverbed and he crashed against the bulkhead wall. The pain hit him at the same time as the icy certainty that he would die. It was not so much a conscious thought as his body’s intuitive grasp of a reality that couldn’t be perceived by his sight and other senses: this cold, stinking place was the final boundary and on the other side was death and beyond death there was nothing. It was as if the dreams about the Mountain that had filled his head all the years in Spiegelgrund had come true. This cargo hold was inside the Mountain. This was what they had been travelling towards all the time. Or, perhaps, towards the torrents of water that whirled past underneath the most remote cavity in the Mountain, which would be cracked open by the bombs falling on them or the mines lying in wait near the banks. And then they would actually have to do what they had already practised thousands of times in the dreams: help each other to sink into the dark, deep, swift-moving water that flowed so powerfully below. They had to push each other’s heads below the surface, just as he had pushed Jockerl’s head under in the dream, until they had all drowned. When they were all disposed of and the barge’s hold empty, the journey could finally continue as planned. While waiting for this, there is only one thing to do: stay as still as possible. Try to stop his runaway thoughts. Concentrate on objects in the ceiling. A rope. A metal eye. Two nuts in the bulkhead, covered in thick white paint. The scratches in the paint made by his nails. Ahead of him, the back of a boy’s neck, its tendons tense like a terrified animal’s. Viktor Zobel’s flame-red face, vomit dribbling down his neck. Someone gets up, slowly and cautiously. In that instant, the distant tugboat engines