The Puppet Boy of Warsaw (30 page)

Max died in the early hours of a bright September day. At the funeral Karl found himself holding on to the puppet buried in his pockets, his fingers gliding over the prince’s face.

Days later, after the funeral, when Erna was putting away one of Max’s jackets, she noticed a little lump. She reached inside the pocket and her face twisted in disgust.

‘What is this?’ She pulled out a piece of hard, mouldy bread. This is when she finally found her tears.

Karl and Mara moved into a small, tidy apartment in the city of Hamburg. The first night after the funeral, Karl stuffed the prince into the bottom drawer of his bedroom cabinet. Many weeks passed before Karl one night dug frantically among his socks for the puppet.

‘OK, my friend, Mara needs you!’ Dangling the prince in front of his face, he continued: ‘She’s been crying in her sleep, asking about you. Off you go, but I tell you, Mara doesn’t need to know everything you’ve seen. Understood?’ The puppet hung limply from his hand.

In the morning Mara awoke to find the prince sitting on a pillow beside her. She hugged the puppet hard.

‘Where’ve you been? Papa told me Opa wanted you in his coffin with him.’ She stroked the prince’s head, his crown and fur trim, then let the prince gently glide into her pocket. Her hands, like Mika’s and Max’s before her, would often touch the puppet briefly throughout the day, just to reassure herself that it was still there. Whatever Mara wore, she always made sure the prince changed pockets with her clothes.

M
ara remained a single child and Karl a single man. He protected her like a precious flower, but somehow she didn’t flourish. Most days she brushed off her loneliness, but at night it weighed like a boulder on her chest and she found it hard to breathe. After her thirteenth birthday the situation got worse. The doctors said it was asthma: a tightness around her heart – just as Max had struggled for air, for space around his heart.

Mara visited her mother’s grave every week. Brushing along the dense yew bushes that bordered the cemetery, she always arrived with green, scented hands that smelled strong and bitter – like sadness or grief, yet strangely comforting. She would talk about her papa, school or the pigeons she had seen courting high up on a street lamp.

Most of the time Mara played on her own. Besides the puppets, she also owned toy animals of all sizes: a deer, a zebra, a tiger, a giraffe and quite a few bears – all of which became her willing audience, neatly arranged in rows in front of her, ready for another performance. And she did have a knack with the puppets, which was confirmed by the local children whenever they were invited to see a show.

‘You know, little prince,’ Mara said one afternoon, ‘often I feel I belong to a different tribe. I just don’t fit in.’

As lonely as Mara may have been, she loved the company of books: their smell and weight, and the way each one, once opened, carried a whole world inside itself. Week after week, shelf after shelf, Mara feasted on books from her local library. She spent adventurous times with Karlsson-on-the-roof, fought a deadly dragon with Prince Lionheart, dreamt of Pippi Longstocking’s crazy house, trembled in Bluebeard’s chamber, and enjoyed a journey down the Mississippi on Huckleberry Finn’s raft. Sometimes she read aloud with the prince for company on her lap.

‘I think I’m through with the children’s library. I wonder what the adults are reading?’ she proclaimed one day out of the blue. She promptly marched downstairs to the adult library and discovered a whole new world.

And so it happened that Mara found herself one afternoon sitting on the floor of the history section with a large book in her lap, names and blurred black and white photographs tumbling before her eyes:
Auschwitz
,
Buchenwald
,
Mauthausen
,
Treblinka
. Names that rang shrill in her ears although she did not know why. She sat completely still and yet her heart was beating like a drum.

‘What is this?’ she whispered, her startled eyes trying to make sense of what she saw. She leafed through the whole book, then pulled out another. Barbed wire, walking skeletons wearing striped uniforms, corpses in fields, lying mangled in heaps, barracks, soldiers . . . She lifted her head and stared straight ahead. These books were windows into a terrible place she did not know whether she should know about. With a quick gesture she snapped the books shut, left them lying on the floor, and rushed out of the library. Her legs felt stiff and alien as she ran, as if they didn’t really belong to her. She hiked for miles, all the way to the harbour. There, she sat on a bench watching the huge vessels drawing into the harbour, others leaving. She did not speak to anyone and only left long after the sun had set.

That night she took out the prince and placed the puppet on her pillow.

‘I don’t know what all this is, but it scares me. Just last week Papa forbad me from watching this film
Night and Fog
, but when I came in to say goodnight I caught a glimpse: people, lots of people, shuffling along like ghosts in a line. They looked like zombies: almost naked and so thin – like walking skeletons. They didn’t even look human. Then today in the library I realised it’s all true.’

What Mara had glimpsed fuelled a hunger in her, a fierce need to see into the abyss of the human heart. And over time she unearthed photographs, drawings, stories and even poems of those who had survived and could still speak. She learnt the name of that darkness: ‘Holocaust’. It tasted bitter and foul in her mouth. What people can do to one another.

But no one wanted to know. At school Mara learnt about Barbarossa and the hundred-year war, but not much about the man with the moustache.

‘How could this happen?’ She talked long into the night, fretted, questioning herself and the prince.

‘Would I have joined up to the
Bund Deutscher Mädel
, proudly marching along with my starched uniform and orderly plaits? Or would I have risked my life, printing secret leaflets? Would I have had the courage to pick up a gun and join the resistance?’

It devastated her that she would never know.

‘And what about all those
Mitläufer
, all those people who marched with Hitler and applauded his speeches, his war. Some of them didn’t even call themselves Nazis so maybe it is true that some of them didn’t know what happened to the Jews. I suppose they just thought of themselves as nice, civilised citizens. But weren’t they accomplices as well? Helping the Nazis to run their deadly machine by saying nothing or singing their stupid songs? How could they just ignore their Jewish neighbours being snatched away at night, their colleagues, shopkeepers, friends disappearing – just like that? And what about Grandad? My Opa, what did he do in the war?’

Mara was caught in a current of questions that whirled around like driftwood. There were no answers.

One evening she poured out all her questions to her father.

‘God, Mara, all this happened such a long time ago! And you’re a young girl, you had nothing to do with this dark time.’

‘But I’m German, I’m made from the same blood and bone as the people who created those camps, aren’t I? How could this have happened?’

Karl looked at his hands.

‘It was a bad time, Mara. Very bad. But Germany isn’t just that.’

‘Yes, I know our country has brought music, art and poetry to the world. Philosophy even, I know that, Papa! I know about Bach and Goethe, Schiller, Schubert, and all the others. But how can we have created such lovely poetry and music and then produced this terrible slaughter? I heard that the Nazis made some girls play marches and waltzes in Auschwitz for their fellow prisoners on their way to the gas chambers. I just don’t understand!’

Then one night, shortly after Mara turned fifteen, the past finally emerged. Maybe it was the balmy air or the soft velvet of the approaching night that made Karl open his heart as he sat with Mara on the veranda.

‘Mara, you often ask me what it was like then, in the war and before that.’

Mara looked at him with wide eyes. She moved closer.

‘Well, Hitler called the place where we lived, Nuremberg, the “most German of all German cities”, and that’s why all those huge rallies marched through our town and why they built the rally grounds, the Zeppelin field, there. All of Nuremberg was buzzing with excitement as we prepared for the big rallies. Two uncles, Heinrich and Herbert, travelled all the way from Hamburg and slept on blankets in our hallway. I even wet my pants because I didn’t want to leave my spot, waiting for the Führer to march by. My heart swelled with pride as we watched the parades thundering down the cobbled streets. The next day we went to the Zeppelin field. Imagine thousands and thousands of people marching in formation, singing as one. And at night there was the magnificent “dome of light”, hundreds of beams lighting the sky. I even had a good time in the Hitler Youth, singing those Horst Wessel songs, marching with my friends. How could we boys have known it was all so wrong, such poison? They seduced us, fed us lies every day. By the time we found out, it was too late. So yes, I did admire my papa in his uniform, I was sad and proud when Mother and I saw him off on his journey to Poland in 1939. But weren’t all of us proud of our fathers? It wasn’t long before the war started.

‘The Allies bombed Nuremberg in August ’42 and in ’43. We were in and out of our bomb shelter. Our lives had been spared but we were worn out; raw and edgy from so little sleep. Then, on the third of October 1944, the sirens began to howl again. We grabbed blankets and rushed into the shelter. Soon we realised this night would be different. The droning of the planes started as usual, but this time it didn’t stop – it was as if a whole hive of wasps had swarmed over the city and was waiting for the kill. Then bang!! A massive explosion and the earth shook as if a giant had stomped his foot right above us. Everyone screamed. There were about thirty of us down there. If the bunker collapsed, would we all be buried alive? Outside there was nothing but silence.

‘Mother cried. I kept my head in my book. I stared at the words, but never got beyond the first sentence.

‘A tiny girl with a huge big pink bow in her hair moved around the shelter like a restless cat, joining groups of cowering people, making up little stories and songs to comfort everyone. Me, I could think only of myself, needed all my energy to stop myself from shaking. I clenched my jaw so tight it hurt. I wasn’t proud of myself.

‘At some point I nodded off. Then finally the morning came and with it the screeching siren that gave us the green light to abandon our shelters.

‘Someone pushed the hatch and miraculously it opened. One after another we crawled through the hatch. When I scrambled out I couldn’t recognise anything. There were fires and rubble everywhere. Nothing had been spared, every house in our street had been burned down or lay smouldering. Bombed to bits.

‘I looked up at our house – what was left of it. At first I couldn’t understand. Then it dawned on me: the whole front wall was missing! We could see into our kitchen and my room as if it were a doll’s house. On the kitchen table stood an egg in an eggcup and some bread on a plate left over from our evening meal. For the first time I noticed our wallpaper: big fleshy flowers, burgundy on a cream-coloured background. I rushed away and threw up.’

Mara sat, hardly breathing. She didn’t dare speak for fear her father’s stream of words would dry up.

‘We moved into an apartment in Wolkersdorf, a village in the countryside outside Nuremberg. Weeks later nearly all of the old town was destroyed in the space of a few hours. We heard the sinister swarm of bombers approach, ready to drop their bombs on our city. The sky blazed orange all night, the bombs crashing like distant thunderstorms.

‘Those who were still holding out in the city needed all the luck they could get. What a lottery! Otto, one of my school friends, survived the inferno, while our neighbours, the Müllers, never even made it to their shelter.

‘I’m glad Opa Max didn’t get to see his city in such a state. By the time he returned, most of Nuremberg had been cleaned up and ugly new buildings constructed like a quick plaster on a wound.

‘The last months of the war were chaotic, we were all just hanging in there, trying to get enough food, foraging in the forests. And then one day a draft notice arrived, calling me to the front for Hitler’s “total” war. Boys as young as thirteen were now being drafted in a last desperate bid. It was your quiet Grandmother Erna who protected me from this madness. I was told to report to the village hall the next day. Mother took one look at the notice and said, “Pack a bag, Karl, light enough so that you can carry it on your back for a while. We’re leaving tonight.”

‘We spent the next few months hiding with different people in the countryside. Turns out my mother risked her life and mine doing so as deserters were killed as
Vaterlandsverräter
, traitors of the Fatherland. But if it wasn’t for her, I might not be here at all.

‘One day we came across an orchard. Mother tried to pull me away but I had already seen it: four bodies – two soldiers and two boys of about my age, maybe even younger – swaying in the wind with cardboard signs around their necks bearing the word
Deserter
!

‘Mother grabbed my hand. “We’re not going to end up like this, OK? Don’t worry!” But I couldn’t forget these swollen faces, the strange angle at which their heads hung. Those bodies could have been me and Mother.

‘In the last crazy weeks of the war, the Gestapo set up so-called “flying courts martial” along the roadside, executing any soldiers heading home without the necessary authorisation. Some roads were lined with soldiers hanging from lamp-posts and trees.

‘Your grandma never talked about all this afterwards, about her bravery. I doubt she even told my father about it, but I know in my bones that she saved my life. Not many youngsters survived the madness of those last days.

‘Then one warm April day it was finally over. Hitler had killed himself and Nuremberg was nothing more than a smoking pile of rubble. On 20 April 1945, the birthday of the Führer who was no more, the US Army marched into the city and held a victory celebration at the Zeppelin field. They covered the giant swastika that had loomed over the tribune with the American flag, and later that day they blew the hooked cross into a million pieces. The Third Reich was finished, over.