The Puppet Boy of Warsaw (23 page)

F
inally they arrived at the camp: a cluster of scattered barracks perched at the edge of the forest. Max noticed that, unlike the ghetto, the camp wasn’t surrounded by a solid wall, only a simple wooden fence and one row of barbed wire. Maybe the Russians didn’t expect anyone to try to escape from this godforsaken place? A single watchtower stood like a lone chess piece. Max had arrived in the belly of Siberia, at the very core of the cruel, white wilderness.

As he neared the perimeter, Max saw four guards armed with rifles opening the gate, thick caps sitting on their heads like curled-up cats. Above the gate was a momentous portrait of Stalin, greeting the miserable crowd as they shuffled inside and assembled in the yard.
So this is what the end of the world looks like
, Max thought, letting his gaze glide over the huts amid the sea of snow and forest. The men were assigned barracks and allowed to stretch out on the simple hard bunks for a short while. Max slid into sleep as if he had no other thoughts.

Loud shouting woke him.

‘
Dawai
. Outside and all clothes off.’ A round-faced guard dressed in a thick fur coat growled at the men, chasing them out into the biting cold with a few sharp cracks of his whip. They stumbled into the yard, standing three deep in a long row.

‘
Macht schon, runter mit den Klamotten
, off with your clothes!’ Another guard addressed them in wooden German. The men slowly peeled off one layer after another.
That’s it.
As if it had only hit him now, as their soldiers’ uniforms and shirts piled up in the centre of the yard, Max realised that he and his comrades were prisoners. Prisoners of the Gulag, Camp 267. Prisoners of the snow.

The men stood naked, trying to keep their trembling bodies under control, as anyone who moved or whimpered risked the whip or, worse, a bullet. Not everyone succeeded. Max’s teeth chattered while his neighbour seemed to turn into a crow, flapping his arms about wildly, before one of the guards shouted into his face and pushed the butt of his rifle into his chest. A memory rose in Max’s mind. One November day he had been patrolling the ghetto streets with Franz, a rough, chubby soldier who had been the butcher in a small Bavarian village before the war, when they spotted a boy, trudging along awkwardly, with his back bent and clutching his coat.

‘Bet you he’s hiding something,’ Franz snarled, elbowing Max. Before Max could answer, Franz barked at the boy: ‘
Runter mit den Klamottem
. Take off your clothes.’

It was December and the boy shook like a leaf as he tried to protect his nakedness, a heap of clothes lying by his side. He had smuggled nothing but Max noticed he had a limp.

‘That’s enough, Franz,’ Max said, ‘let’s go.’ Franz laughed, kicked the clothes towards the boy but kept his shirt. Slowly he ripped it to shreds.

Now the tables had turned on this first day in the camp, the former soldiers forced to swap their uniforms for filthy stinking rags: jackets ill equipped for the terrible cold, thin gloves and trousers through which the wind cut mercilessly. Seeing that his comrades before him were allowed to keep their underwear, Max hid the prince and his photograph in his pants. They were given lukewarm water and one bar of soap between a group of thirty – the first opportunity to wash, at least a little, for weeks. They were taken into a barely heated room and shaved of all body hair with a blunt knife, then deloused.
At least we’ll get rid of some of the lice
, Max thought. But he already knew this fight was futile – lice could survive far better than humans in those conditions. The men fell quiet, barely looking at each other. Then, in a last humiliating procedure, the prisoners were ordered to queue up in front of a small table. A clerk in a striped jacket, clearly a prisoner as well, called the men forward one by one, ticking their names off a register.

‘Max Meierhauser?’ Max nodded, stepping before the desk. ‘Your number.’ The clerk handed Max two strips of fabric bearing a four-digit number. That evening, sewing his number on to his jacket and shirt, Max Meierhauser, born in Nuremberg in 1902, became prisoner 3587. Bald and wearing identical clothes, the men had difficulty recognising their former comrades. That night, Max hid the prince and his precious photograph underneath a rancid sack of straw on his bunk and fell into a fitful sleep.

‘
Dawai
, get up,
aufstehen
.’ A rough voice belonging to one of the huge guards woke the prisoners the next morning. Max grabbed the prince from under the straw and placed the puppet under his shirt.

The guard marched the prisoners outside for roll call. The sky, a velvety black, was strewn with stars and the white band of the Milky Way.

‘God, it’s the middle of the night,’ a pale man next to Max mumbled. The men stood silently, trying hard not to move, waiting for their names to be called. An endless procedure.

‘I can’t feel my feet any more,’ Peter, a tall prisoner who even as a soldier had looked thin, whimpered.

‘Just hang in there, should be over soon,’ Max whispered.

Some ten minutes later they were marched back into a larger building.

‘Thank God, I thought I’d collapse,’ Peter said as they queued for breakfast: a cup of grey lumpy gruel and a weak brown liquid which the prison cook passed off as tea.

‘Ah, hot tea!’ Peter’s face lit up.

‘Don’t get excited,’ Max replied, ‘looks like hot water to me. Still, at least it’s hot.’ They had hardly sat down when the guard’s voice thundered through the room once again.

‘
Dawai
. Out, to work.’ They washed down the gruel with the watery tea and stumbled out into the yard. By now the darkness had lifted and a small pink band of light stretched across the sky.

This time the guards dished out a pair of gloves and a cap for each prisoner. Some were given saws, others shovels and pickaxes.

The camp commander, a tall Russian wearing a long brown coat and a thick white fur cap adorned with the red communist star, addressed the shivering crowd.

‘You work, you eat. You make the quota, you get food. You don’t get your quota, you don’t eat. You work good, you live. Forget the life you had before. And don’t waste your energy thinking of escape, no one escapes from here. This is Siberia.
Verstanden? Dawai
. To work now.’

The prisoners were marched off in neat rows, armed guards by their side, through the camp gate, towards the dark forest through which they had crawled the previous day. And there they stayed all day, until the faint November sun had set and they could not see their hands before their eyes.

The prisoners returned there the next day, and the next. Weeks merged into months and then years. Years of felling huge dark green fir trees with blunt saws and axes, cutting away branches, scraping the bark until the pale flesh shone through, dragging the trunks through the forest, four men tied to a trunk like tired horses, before the wood was shipped downriver, never to be seen again.

Max and most of the prisoners of Camp 267 had become lumberjacks, slaves to the forest, ten hours a day, every day.

Each morning began with a wearying roll call before sunrise in the bitter frost and a pitiful breakfast of watery gruel, a small piece of rye bread and thin tea. Then the prisoners were marched deep into the forest, bent over by the heavy tools on their shoulders, which over time seemed to become an extension of their weary bodies. The quotas were brutal, and if one man worked slowly all the men on that team went hungry that night.

Accidents happened every day: some, unable to leap out of the way quick enough, were crushed by falling trees; others lost their grip on their axe and sent the blade straight into their leg. Without medicine and in the terrible cold wounds didn’t heal well and could fester for weeks. Many prisoners collapsed and those who did not get up in time were shot. Most of the time the men shivered in their damp clothing, wearing the same flimsy clothes day in day out. Once the spring rains started, no one could keep dry, and as hard as they tried, the men could never dry out the jackets in the scant warmth of the barracks. The winters were the cruellest of challenges and their beards glittered with snow, small icicles forming under their noses. If the prisoners’ eyes watered the tears froze as quickly as they came and sometimes those tears were red, tears of blood.

Max tried to stay as clean as he could. While some of the prisoners did not bother to wash more than once every two weeks, when they were given hot water, all through the winter, Max rubbed his face clean with snow and, if he could bear it, his arms, chest and legs also.

‘We look and smell like pigs – that’s what they want, to turn us into pigs, until we forget that we are human. If I can, I’ll wash.’

Snow could also be a welcome protection against the lice. Hans once buried his jacket in the snow overnight – in the morning the lice had gathered on one small piece of the sleeve and could easily be shaken off – a trick Max and others took up gladly.

Each day the prisoners marched in groups of thirty into the forest where the Russian guards attached bunches of grass on to the trees to mark the boundary of the prisoners’ work: that far and not one step farther. An inch beyond, and the guards would fire their guns. Some prisoners, tempted by berries that grew beyond the boundary or simply unaware of the grass markers, lost their lives that way.

Late one summer’s day, as the guards lay dozing on the forest floor beyond the bunches of grass, Martin, one of Max’s brigade, took a risk and stepped beyond the boundary to pick some of the orange berries that were treasured by the prisoners for their vitamins.

‘Watch out, Martin,’ Thomas, a cautious boy of barely twenty hissed. Before anyone could take another breath, Martin collapsed. The guard they called ‘Iwan the terrible’ for his random cruelty had shot him right in the chest. He died instantly. None of the prisoners spoke for the rest of the day after they were ordered to bury Martin deeper in the forest. From then on they were even more wary around the guards, whose sporadic acts of violence could cost them their lives.

Max was assigned to the felling team, sharing his saw with Anton, a quiet young man who dreamed of going back to medical school once this was all over. He had been pulled out of university after two years and sent to the eastern front. Despite shrapnel in his legs and the horrors his young eyes had seen, Anton never stopped wanting to become a doctor. But his delicate hands hurt – he had never done any manual work.

‘It’s crazy, four of us do badly what one horse could achieve in no time,’ Max grumbled one day as he and three of his fellows pulled a huge trunk towards the river.

‘The irony. I’ve worked with wood all my life, as a carpenter, but I never really thought much about where my excellent wood came from. Now they won’t let me do anything else but fell these giants.’

‘It’s better than logging, though,’ Max considered. ‘Those poor souls have to balance on logs in the freezing river all day long. If they slip and fall, they’ll be crushed. Disappear for ever under the sea of logs.’

No one knew what the Russians built with all that wood or who would pick up the logs farther downstream. One day Heinrich, another of Max’s fellows, came up with an idea.

‘Why don’t we hack messages into the trunks? No one knows where we are, we can’t send any post, not even a postcard. But maybe we could get a message through that way?’

‘Listen to the dreamer,’ Heinz, a stocky man from the north of Germany, sneered. ‘We’re never getting out of this hell! We might as well forget who we are and that there’s anyone else out there.’

But not everyone agreed, and soon some of the prisoners had hacked short messages into the logs using their axes. Had they been caught it would have been the end, but it was summer and the guards barely patrolled their territory.

They fed the prisoners watery soup, a grey liquid with bits of cabbage, beets and rotten potatoes, hardly ever any meat or fat, and with scarcely any bedding, just one thin blanket to share among five and a plank for a bed, the men shivered day and night. Spooned tightly into each other without leaving the tiniest gap, they lay squeezed together like sardines, and every hour one of the men would command, ‘
Alle umdrehen!
’ As if one body, everyone turned. Every night was divided into these hourly intervals of squirming, moaning and the inevitable turn. Max lay at the end of the row, facing away from his comrades. He was colder that way but he preferred not to be caught tightly between two bodies.

Sometimes in the depths of the night Max would pull out the prince, running his fingers over the puppet’s cloak and face as if he might find an answer in its delicate features. Then, on one particularly icy night, as the whole bed shook from the soldiers’ tremblings and groans, Max started to talk to the prince. He lay with his back to his neighbour, holding the puppet close to his face, pouring his heart out to it.

‘I tell you, it’s not easy here, my fellow. The gruelling work, and the cold. Bites you like those horrible guard dogs that snarl and snap at you any chance they get. If they get you by the throat, they won’t let go, just like the cold – it turns your insides to stone. I’d do anything for a bit of warmth. But you can never get warm in this damned place. It’s a giant freezer, Siberia. It snaps your bones.’

‘You talking to yourself again, Max?’ his neighbour whispered. Max ignored him.

‘Maybe we deserve it after the war. After Stalingrad, Warsaw, Cracow, all that killing. And whatever happened to Mika, little prince? He was the same age as my boy.’

Max had never talked to any of his comrades about Mika, how he had helped to rescue his mother and aunt from the
Umschlag
, nor about the puppet shows at the barracks or indeed anything to do with the ghetto. Only two soldiers who had been stationed with him in Warsaw had ended up in the same camp. They did not share the same sleeping quarters and Max did not seek them out.

D
ays in the camp were utterly grim, flowing like a leaden stream, like grey pearls strung together by some invisible force. Endless days, stolen from the prisoners, just as they had taken days, years and millions of lives in every place they had claimed as their Reich. The difference here, in this icy, barren spot, was that prisoners were not killed with German efficiency, but left to rot or freeze to death like some giant experiment in the survival of the fittest. Sometimes the prisoners debated their situation and how they had ended up in such a terrible mess.