The Puppet Boy of Warsaw (22 page)

‘The day before I married my Ruth, I packed the pocket-coat away, together with all its treasures. Over the years I told your grandma some things about the ghetto, the Uprising, even Ellie, but I never mentioned the puppets.’

Mika slipped his hand into one of the coat’s large pockets, searching for the smaller ones, the secret pockets within pockets. Yes, here they were, his old companions: the crocodile, the monkey, the villain, the fool, the donkey, the girl. Nothing had changed . . . but of course everything had changed.

One after another he took out the frail puppets, carefully, as if the sudden light might distress them or reduce them to dust. The puppets had lost some of their bright colours and many of their tiny clothes were ripped, but he remembered them all. He laid them out on the small coffee table, one next to the other. Then, as if emerging from a long sleep, he took a deep breath and looked at his grandson.

A sudden warmth rose in him like pure sunshine. It tasted of gratitude, of love. Of a warmth he hadn’t been able to express to his own child. Hannah, sweet little Hannah, now grown up to be a proud, beautiful woman, yet so burdened by ghosts, crowding her shoulders: the ghosts of little Esther, Ellie, Cara and Marek, ghosts she could sense, but never name.

How often had she woken from nightmares, telling him with wide eyes of roomfuls of children she doesn’t recognise, stretching out their little hands. He had never explained. As if silence could keep them all safe. Hannah, the baby girl he didn’t dare hold too tightly for fear of squashing her, losing her. Today he wanted nothing more than to hold her for ever.

Instead he reached out an arm to Daniel.

‘Come, Danny, it’s late, let’s call your mum and make up a bed for you here.’

Daniel’s mouth was dry. A million questions threatened to explode inside his head and yet a terrible emptiness sat in his stomach like a dark hole. He let his hands move gently over the puppets, picking up one after another.

‘What d’you think happened to the prince, Grandpa?’ The moment the question left his mouth he flinched. But just where should he start? Mika didn’t seem to mind.

‘I’ve asked myself that same question many times, Danny. I guess we’ll never know. All we know is that the princess must have died with Ellie in the ghetto, and the doctor might not have survived the Nuremberg bombings. Or maybe he did, and is hiding in some battered suitcase, who knows. But the prince? I try not to think about him, or the German soldier. These puppets here are all I’ve got left.’

Daniel stretched out his hand, lightly touching his grandfather’s shoulder. A moment of silence lingered between them.

‘Thanks, Pops. Thank you for telling me all this.’

But unbeknown to both, the long-lost prince and his story were much closer than they could ever imagine.

M
ost of the time the soldier forgot about the puppet that lay squashed inside his uniform. It had once been attractive, but now, just like the soldier, the prince looked beaten and shabby, with his faded colours, flaking paint and matted hair. Only when the raw memories tore the soldier back to the city that his army had left devastated did his hand brush lightly over his left breast pocket, shattering in an instant the illusion that the dire situation in which he found himself was a terrible nightmare from which he’d awake. No, this was as real as the lice that had taken over his uniform, his hair, his ears, the whole carriage – a black crawling pelt that tormented him and his fellows with an insane, raw itchiness. As real as the puppet underneath his shirt. With the men packed into bare cattle trucks that rattled eastwards day and night through an icy universe, this journey marked the end of six bloody years of a lost war.

As he sat huddled next to his comrades, his legs stiff and pulled in close to his chest, images flickered like a silent film across his mind: his first day in Warsaw, straining his neck to catch a glimpse of the Führer as he proudly marched past the tribune; months later, a dapper Wehrmacht soldier supervising the building of the ghetto wall before opening the gates to the streams of Jews that would fill it. Most clearly, though, he remembers the day he met the boy and his puppets, that fateful meeting and the many puppet shows that followed . . . Mika. Thin, pale Mika and his puppets. Long before the summer of 1942, before the terrible days of the deportations and his desperate roaming through the
Umschlagplatz
in search of the boy’s mother . . . before the endless blazing fires, the flame-throwers, the poison gas. The ghetto’s last days merged in his mind with the city’s last uprising – how his army had beaten and throttled the Polish people of Warsaw. But for what? So much death over ruins, so much useless slaughter.

It had been snowing on the January day when the Russian tanks arrived with their creaking loudspeakers and proud red flags, rolling through a ghost town. He had hidden in the ruins with the rest of the soldiers, and Max remembered the moment they were marched out of there, arms raised in the age-old gesture of surrender. It was all over – or so he thought. For nothing could have prepared him for the white hell of Siberia. All this time the puppet lay tucked away beneath his uniform, right over his heart. The prince, stolen from a boy and his mother, from a city that no longer existed.

Max scarcely moved any more, as if trying to conserve his energy for what might await him at the other end of this gruelling journey. All sense of time had slipped away. How long since they were pushed into the trucks in a cruel reversal of what they had done to the Jews? Weeks had passed, Max was sure of that. Only a dim beam of light fell through a tiny opening on the top of the carriage.

The men coughed and mumbled but hardly spoke, silenced by the biting cold. There were no blankets and not a single suitcase between them. A small wood stove provided a little warmth for those directly next to it, but after only a few days the wood had run out. So they sat shivering next to each other in their filthy uniforms and overcoats, their glassy, red-rimmed eyes the only parts exposed, the steam rising from their nostrils a faint sign of life. Some moaned softly, while others occasionally burst out with a tirade of swearing, like sandpaper rasping in short sharp bursts over wood.

‘
Die lassen uns hier verrecken
– they’re letting us rot in here! No food, no blankets, we’re going to die like dogs,’ an older soldier next to Max mumbled.

The layer of ice covering the inside of the wooden carriage grew thicker each day, sparkling like caster sugar.

Max sat in the darkness, leaning against the icy carriage wall, drifting in and out of a feverish sleep, as the wheels’ monotonous sounds echoed in his ears; katchunk, katchunk, katchunk . . . relentless rotations taking him eastwards, farther away from anything he had known. They had heard rumours about Siberia, its terrible cold and the back-breaking work in the mines and forests. His back already hurt from the lack of movement and the penetrating cold of the ice-covered boards behind him. He rummaged through his coat pocket with stiff fingers. Ah, the little silver spoon. He had carried it in his pocket all these years, its handle decorated with carved roses. It belonged with their sugar bowl back home. His wife had secretly slipped it into his pocket the day he left Nuremberg for Poland. Was the white porcelain bowl still perched on the kitchen shelf? He could picture its intricate decoration, next to the cups and plates. Not knowing his family’s fate ate away at Max, and he gripped the spoon and started to scratch away at the icy surface.

‘
Was machst du denn?
What’re you doing?’ the man next to him croaked.

Yes, what am I doing?
Max thought, looking at his spoon.
Ridiculous.
But he said, ‘Haven’t you heard that prisoners have dug whole tunnels with spoons just like this one?’

‘Well, good luck to you.’

His comrade’s cynical tone hurt, but Max continued to scratch away at the ice out of boredom, and to keep that small flame of defiance alive. And indeed, after some days, he felt slightly more comfortable leaning against the wall as he’d carved out an ice-free space in the shape of a human.

Besides the puppet Max had hidden a photograph in his coat of Erna with Karl as a five-year-old on a short holiday in the Alps – two happy tanned faces smiling back at him. Sometimes he took the photo out and studied it, although he was hardly able to make out their faces in the dim light. Other soldiers had saved letters and one even a pack of cards, but whenever a small group huddled together to play, the play was listless and worlds away from the roaring games of the barracks.

Whenever the train stopped, sometimes after whole days, the heavy door would open and the men would stumble or fall out, blinded by the daylight and stuffing their mouths with snow to quench their thirst. A guard would throw a bucket of half-rotten potatoes at them as if they were pigs. They fought over those potatoes, cursing and spitting, trying to grab as many pieces as they could. But before they could even finish the meagre food, the guards chased them back into the carriage. They never knew when they would eat again. And still it got colder and colder.

Many of the soldiers didn’t make it. One night Max glanced at the man perched next to him – Xaver, he had introduced himself to Max on the first day in the cattle wagon. Now the exposed skin of his face shimmered waxen grey and Max noticed that no steam rose from his nostrils. Xaver had coughed constantly for days, his hacking tearing at the raw nerves of everyone around him. He was the first of many deaths before their train reached the depths of Siberia. Some froze to death or starved, others simply stopped breathing, defeated by dysentery or a broken spirit.

‘
Raus mit den Toten.
’ At every stop the guards ordered anyone who looked as if they still had some strength to lay out the dead next to the railway tracks. Rows of fallen soldiers, stiff like tree trunks. They took the coats but left their clothes.

Once Max had helped carry the dead out of the carriage. He remembered the first time he’d stumbled over one of the many emaciated corpses in the ghetto and his stomach cramped.

A sudden jolt ended the journey, slamming the soldiers into one another.

‘
Dawai, dawai! Raus, raus!
’ Sharp, commanding voices chased the soldiers out of the carriage. The cold hit them like a fist. Guards, as huge and square as wardrobes, growling thick-pelted dogs by their sides and a glaring whiteness greeted the soldiers. A white nothingness, stretching out as far as Max could see – blinding, sky and earth swallowed up as if they had never existed. In the distance was a line of tiny black dots shuffling through the snow – another load of prisoners who must have arrived shortly before them.

They had reached the end of the line. And now the walk to the very end of the world would begin, step after painful step. The soldiers swayed, like snow-burdened trees, one behind the other, pushing against the ferocious wind. The guards carried large rifles and sinister whips. They loved cracking the cruel instruments on the weaker prisoners who stumbled or fell. If one couldn’t get up again the guards were quick to fire a few shots, always accompanied by the wild barking of the dogs. They never fired just one shot – they wanted to make sure the collapsed shape would never rise again.

‘I can’t do this any more.’ A faint voice behind him startled Max. He dug his hand into his right pocket, grabbing a piece of string that lay coiled there like a snake. He pulled it out and wrapped it around himself, leaving a loose end.

‘Here, hold this.’ He twisted round and handed the end of the string to the man behind. The man grabbed it and, linked by the cord, they trudged on.

After a while the wind picked up even more and with it came a sudden blizzard that made it difficult to see even the person in front.

Hours passed. As the blizzard calmed and the sun began to peep through, a ripple moved through the line of men and they slowed down. Where before they had stared at the ground, counting nothing but the next step, all eyes were now fixed on a black stretch ahead: a line of trees, dark as ink.

Once they entered the forest, it swallowed the men up like Jonah’s whale, complete and whole, and with it the pale daylight. They marched through the dense woods and thick undergrowth, towered over by tall fir trees, sometimes having to cut their way through. Hours stretched into days: one behind the other by day, huddled together at night around meagre fires.

One night a drawn-out howling awoke Max and the other prisoners. The eerie sound encircled them, drawing closer and closer. Max saw glittering yellow eyes in the woods.

‘The last thing we need,’ he mumbled. The guards broke into ugly laughter.

‘
Volki
,
volki
, wolf. For you.’ After a few rounds from the guards’ guns in their direction, the wolves dispersed but Max couldn’t go back to sleep. The next morning the long, wretched line continued its endless march. As the days passed no one kept count of how many men were left behind in the forest, collapsing from hunger or exhaustion.