The Auslander Read online

His days were so busy, Peter barely had a moment to reflect on what had happened to him any more. He liked that. Sometimes, when he thought about his real parents and Charlotte caught him looking sad, she would come to sit on his lap.

  ‘When I’m upset I talk to Clara,’ she said, holding up her porcelain doll.

  That put a smile back on Peter’s face. When Charlotte wasn’t parroting Nazi slogans, she was lovely.

  The nights were still hard. Safe beneath the crisp linen sheets that Frau Kaltenbach had the maid change twice a week, Peter’s thoughts would usually drift back to the farm. He tried not to think about that final, awful morning; the mounting feeling of dread in his chest as he waited for the dawn and walked along the track to the main road.

  In his mind’s eye he would close the great front door of the farmhouse behind him and walk through the kitchen garden his mother had tended, the fresh scent of damp earth lingering in his nostrils, the dew glistening on the raspberries, laid out in careful rows along their cane supports. That day he was to help his mother pick them, as he had done ever since he was a little boy.

  He wondered whether the farm would ever be his again. Little things bothered him too. Like those raspberries. Had they just withered or been eaten by birds? Or had the German soldiers picked them? Then there were all his mother’s jams and pickles. Whole shelves of them, carefully ladled into old jam jars and sealed, labelled and dated ready for the winter. Had the soldiers taken them or would they just be left to go mouldy in the dark?

  How could he have known when he left the farm he would never go back? The kitchen stove was still ticking over. His cosy, fusty bed with its soft, old blankets. The copy of Henryk Sienkiewicz’s With Fire and Sword that his mother had been reading aloud from in the evenings, left open on the sitting-room table. He had enjoyed hearing this story of Poland’s struggle against the Russian Empire. The first chapter had stuck in his mind.

  The year 1647 was astonishing in that many signs in the heavens and on earth announced misfortune and unusual events. Contemporary chroniclers tell of locusts swarming in springtime, destroying the grain and the grass; this was a forerunner of Tartar raids. In the summer there was a great eclipse of the sun, and soon after a comet appeared in the sky.

  None of those portents had happened in 1939 or 1941, although the catastrophe that had overtaken Poland was far greater.

  .

  The next day, Traudl took him to the local library to enrol. Peter asked if they had a copy of Sienkiewicz’s book. When he mentioned the author’s name to the librarian, a dour, pasty woman with an enamel Nazi Party badge pinned to her cardigan, she looked at him with scorn. ‘A Polack author?’ she snorted, and so loudly that other people using the library all turned around to look. ‘You’ll be asking for one by a Yid next. Where on earth did you get the idea that we’d have books by Polacks?’

  Traudl had immediately come to his aid. ‘Peter is a new arrival in Berlin, Frau Knopf. He is still learning the ropes.’

  The head librarian came over, increasing Peter’s embarrassment. But rather than admonish him further, the man led Peter away to the children’s section and picked up Winnetou, der rote Gentleman. ‘Karl May’s cowboys and Indians books will be more suitable,’ he said. ‘They were a great favourite of the Führer’s when he was a young lad.’

  Peter took the book home and read about the wise old Apache chief Winnetou and his German ‘blood brother’ Shatterhand, who could knock out his enemies with a single punch. He was puzzled as to why Hitler would enjoy reading about the natives of North America when he had such open contempt for other un-Germanic people such as the Slavs and Jews.

  Another book he had taken out, Durch die weite Welt – Into the Modern World – was far more interesting. It portrayed a future of vast passenger aircraft, twin-deck underground trains shaped like bullets, heliports on the flat roofs of tall buildings, and a massive six-lane highway beneath the Tiergarten. He showed it to his Onkel Franz that very evening. Kaltenbach ruffled his hair again. ‘All of this,’ he said proudly, ‘is what awaits us, as soon as the war is won.’

  Peter could absolutely believe it. He could never imagine anything like this coming out of Poland. The Germans, he had no doubt, were the most advanced nation on earth. And here he was, right in the middle of it all, lucky enough to be one of them.

  .

  CHAPTER 9

  Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, Berlin

  September 30, 1941

  .

  Professor Kaltenbach was especially keen for Peter to attend his opening lecture for the new students at the Institute, on Racial Science and the work of his department. It was one of the big moments in his annual calendar. ‘You must come,’ he said over breakfast. ‘It will be a good introduction to what I do. You may even decide you want to follow this particular path yourself. I will arrange for you to be excused from school.’

  When the day came, Peter and Frau Kaltenbach sat at the back of the lecture theatre at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. The room buzzed with a low hum of conversation as the audience waited for the Professor to arrive. There was a smattering of ordinary medical students, but most of those present were young men dressed in the black uniform of the SS. They were this year’s intake of trainee military doctors, sent for a ten-month course on the intricacies of Racial Science. Seen together, thought Peter, they were an intimidating bunch of stern Aryan übermenschen.

  Peter was nervous. He had an awful feeling that Kaltenbach was going to call him to the front during his lecture and parade him as ‘a perfect example of the Nordic race’. He had heard the phrase often in the last three weeks and it made him squirm.

  Kaltenbach swept in and the room immediately fell silent. He stood at the lectern and tapped his papers, took a sip of water from the glass that had been left there and then began to speak in a clear, confident voice.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ he boomed, ‘and ladies.’ He nodded indulgently to the small number of female medical students, who had clustered together to the right of the room. ‘You are the sentinels of the nation’s genetic health, and you must be ever vigilant as it flows through the generations.’

  He paused dramatically, to let the significance of his words sink in.

  ‘I offer you a vision of a world free from illness, criminality, asocials, prostitutes, beggars and the work-shy, and the bacillus of world Jewry . . . You are the foot soldiers of this future utopia. Servants to the National Socialist vision.

  ‘But to attain this dream you must discard false notions of humanity.’ He paused. They were hanging on his every word. ‘I am reminded forcibly of the words of Reichsminister Goebbels as he addressed the Party Congress in 1938.

  ‘“Our starting point is not the individual, and we do not subscribe to the view that one should feed the hungry and clothe the naked . . . Our objectives are entirely different. They can be put most crisply in the sentence: we must have a healthy people in order to prevail in the world.”

  ‘I am sure I need not remind you of all the racial laws passed by the National Socialists since we came to power. Today marriages likely to produce offspring prejudicial to the purity of German blood are an impossibility in the Reich.’

  Kaltenbach went on to outline the role of his department in this great revolution – and how their mission in the world was to unearth the biological foundations of human difference. He said especially that identifying Jews was Racial Science’s greatest challenge. He outlined the cutting edge work carried out at the Institute – the blood serum and iris research in racial diagnosis – and how this would sweep away the time-consuming and costly procedures currently in place.

  Peter didn’t understand most of what he was saying, but he felt proud of Professor Kaltenbach’s ability to fascinate his audience. After forty minutes or so, the Professor began to summarise.

  ‘In Mein Kampf the Führer wrote “The nation state must set race in the centre of all life. It must take care to keep it pure. It must put the most modern medical means in the serv
ice of this knowledge.”

  ‘We live at a unique time. Never before in human history has a government been so ready to grasp the essential truths of Racial Science. And never before has that science been so ready to serve the interest of the state.

  ‘When our National Socialist future is ensured there is nothing to stop the regeneration of the German people and our creation of a galaxy of genius – übermensch destined to rule the world. Heil Hitler!’

  They all rose to salute in response and then began to applaud as Kaltenbach stood back from the stand.

  ‘Thank you, comrades,’ he said. ‘Do we have any questions?’

  A student in a black uniform asked how long it would be before research into racial diagnosis would offer irrefutable evidence of Jewishness. Kaltenbach assured them such a breakthrough would come within a decade.

  ‘We are making great strides in this area,’ he said. ‘For example, we know that some races – Ashkenazi Jews for one – are more resistant to the tuberculosis virus than others, such as West African bushmen. The answer lies in the presence, or lack of, certain defence enzymes in the blood, and these characteristics, when fully understood, will aid such a diagnosis.’

  Another of the young men in the black uniforms said that he had recently returned from the fighting in the Ukraine where he had been serving in the medical corps. When supplies ran low, he reported, it was common practice to use the local population as involuntary blood donors. Could the Professor see any danger in that?

  Kaltenbach was noncommittal. ‘On this point Racial Science is undecided. For myself, I would say it would be a last resort. Almost like taking blood from a farm animal.’

  The audience sniggered.

  Another student – one of the young women in white coats who looked very young – wanted to know why it was so necessary to develop these diagnostic tools. ‘Surely, if a subject looks Aryan, they are essentially Aryan?’

  The audience prickled with hostility. The woman looked flustered.

  Peter thought Kaltenbach was gallant in resisting the temptation to humiliate her further. ‘A brave question, fräulein. You are plainly new to the subject. Appearance is but one aspect of race. Let me refer you to Baur, Fischer and Lenz’s Foundation of Human Genetics and Racial Hygiene. Let me also refer you to the words of my late Swiss associate, Professor August Forel. “The law of heredity winds like a red thread through the family of every criminal, epileptic, eccentric and insane person.”

  ‘And as with the criminal or feeble-minded person so it is with race. A German tainted with the genetic inheritance of lesser racial elements will pass on unfavourable characteristics to their offspring. A half or quarter Jew will be scheming and untrustworthy, a Slav will be lazy, and so forth. The Mendelian laws of inheritance that bequeath blond hair or blue eyes to a son or daughter also applies to the characteristics of the lesser races. The sooner our nation’s blood is cleansed of these elements the better.’

  Frau Kaltenbach applauded resolutely. It was the first time Peter had seen her look on her husband with anything other than a jaundiced eye.

  .

  CHAPTER 10

  Berlin

  October 12, 1941

  .

  Anna Reiter looked at herself in the long mirror. She was quite pleased with what she saw. She was always turning heads in the street, always fending off male attention. Sometimes it was flattering, when she liked the young man who was making eyes at her. Sometimes it was irritating, like when spotty HJ youths leered at her. She was tall – taller than most boys her age – and slim too. She wished she was shorter. She stood out too much. Her face was too angular, she was convinced, too sharp and pointy. She wished her face was a little more rounded, like Greta Garbo or that German actress who had gone off to America and everyone said was a Jew-loving traitor – Marlene Dietrich. She’d like a fuller figure too, like Bette Davis. But at least she had a good complexion.

  The Bund Deutscher Mädel – League of German Maidens – uniform fitted her well, the short fawn Kletterjacke climbing jacket tight around her small waist, the blue-black woollen skirt hanging neatly to her knees. She fussed with her neckerchief, adjusting the toggle so it lodged exactly in the V of her jacket, as the BDM manual instructed. She pulled out the collar of her white blouse so it lay flat and even either side of her shoulders, and stood up as straight as she could so her black hair was clear of the back of her collar.

  Her grandmother was always complaining about her hair. ‘A bob, it’s too modern. You look like a flapper. Why look like a hussy when you could grow it long and have some lovely plaits? That would be much more Germanic.’

  Anna was fed up with people chiding her about her hair. That morning, that sullen little BDM brat, Gretchen, who wore a home-made uniform and who always had to march in the middle of the squad so no one would notice, had even said to her, ‘You are dark enough to be a Jew. Got Yids in the family, have you?’ Some of the other girls had sniggered, and Anna had had to fall back on cheap insults.

  ‘And you are scruffy enough to be an old washerwoman. Can’t you afford a proper uniform?’

  The girl had sneered, but she blushed too. Those words had wounded her. Anna hated herself for saying that.

  Then, at the end of the school day, she had had a tricky conversation with Elke, a girl who had always screamed the loudest at rallies when Hitler drove past in his big Mercedes convertible, and who was always talking about marrying an SS officer. She had sidled up to Anna in the changing room after gym and whispered, ‘Why does the Führer wear a swimming costume in the bath?’

  Anna had looked at her with a blank face.

  ‘Because he does not like to look down on the unemployed.’

  Anna gave a polite smile and tried to muster an air of disapproval. ‘Really, Elke. The Führer has made great sacrifices for us. And not taking a wife so he can commit himself totally to the German Nation deserves our respect not our mockery.’

  Anna felt like a sanctimonious prig. Elke gave a shrug and maybe she went off to the school authorities to report that Anna Reiter had responded with polite disapproval. Or maybe Elke would spend the night too anxious to sleep in case Anna reported her. Pupils in their school had spent a gruelling four weeks’ hard labour in a youth disciplinary camp for showing such disrespect.

  It was a sad, rotten business, not being able to trust people. Anna had always known that she and her family were different. Finding out who else was like them was a dangerous, treacherous game. The Gestapo, they had heard, sent agent provocateurs to catch people out. It was even whispered someone would tell an anti-Hitler joke, and then report you if you laughed, or even report you if you did not report them for telling the joke. Rumours like this were always going around. It was impossible to tell what was true and what was false.

  Anna bore a striking resemblance to her mother, Ula, who was a magazine journalist. Her father, Colonel Otto Reiter, was on the general staff of the Home Army in Bendlerstrasse. Sometimes Anna thought life would be much easier if her family were like the others. Third Reich robots. The Reiters, when they were alone around their dining table, called them ‘the hundred-percenters’. The ones who were completely in thrall to the regime. Most of them seemed to be. But you could never tell. The staunchest Nazis might be putting on an act.

  Anna also wished she had been born in Sweden, like her cousins Lennart and Tilda. Her mother’s sister, Tante Mariel, had married a Swedish diplomat from the Berlin Embassy in 1930 and had gone to live there that very year. Mariel still came to visit, even now, with the war on. She made no secret of her distaste for the Nazi regime and she worried terribly for Ula and her family.

  As well she might, thought Anna. Ula and Otto had always had friends who were Jews. But then Herr Pfister, their hateful block warden, had warned them that such friendships were un-Germanic, and would bring them to the attention of the Gestapo. The Reiters were not stupid people. They just became more careful about who they saw and how they saw them.

&nbs
p; Anna’s mother had told her about her friend Rachel, who had been fired from her magazine in 1938. She had been the best copy editor in the building and they were all sad to see her leave. Rachel had been transported to the east. ‘Relocated’ or ‘reassigned’, these were the expressions that were used. Now there were only a few Jews left in Berlin. Sometimes they stayed because the work they did was important. Sometimes they stayed because the Nazis had simply not yet taken them. Recently the Reiters had heard it whispered that the Jews were sent to the east to be killed.

  Ula and Otto had discounted such rumours as enemy propaganda when they first heard them. Like the stories the British had concocted during the Great War about how the German army had gathered up the bodies of its fallen soldiers and shipped them back to the Fatherland to make soap, candles and glycerine in macabre Kadaververwertungsanstalten – corpse exploitation factories.

  When Anna’s brother Stefan returned from the Eastern Front on leave, they asked him if there was any truth in these stories. They hoped he would scoff but what he said filled them with revulsion.

  .

  CHAPTER 11

  October 13, 1941

  .

  The day after his fourteenth birthday the Deutsches Jungvolk leader approached Peter at their clubhouse and announced that he would be expected to attend a grand parade on 13th October, to mark his coming of age for the senior branch of the Hitler-Jugend. When he told the Kaltenbachs about it, the Professor looked at him proudly and declared, ‘This is the most sacred moment in the life of any young German.’

  Now the moment had arrived and Peter and his comrades were singing at the top of their voices:

  .

  The Reich with our Führer supreme at its head

  Pursues its relentless crusade without cost

  Come follow us, lad, you are German and proud

  The drums are beating, the banners unfurled.

  .

  The drums were beating, and the trumpeters played a fanfare, their instruments gleaming in the autumn sunshine, black banners with the runic ‘Victory’ symbol unfurled beneath.