The Flight

Chapter 2

When he got home two days later, Karl didn’t tell his mother what had happened in the tent, but he showed her his new knife. She wasn’t very interested; he decided she hadn’t grasped its significance. However, he would always have been the first in his village to join the youth group, which no one in Germau would forget. The children were already asking him about his adventures.

Ida took the dagger from him and read the inscription, ‘Blood and Honour’, then handed it back. ‘We have enough knives. I wish they’d given you something useful.’

‘It is useful.’

Ida didn’t argue. ‘It’s time for your piano practice.’

‘But I told everyone I’d go back out after I’d shown you the knife.’

‘All right then, just for a little while. But I want you to practise before supper.’

When Karl opened the front door the children had gathered round the tree at the centre of the square, waiting for him.

‘Can I hold it?’ Werner asked.

‘In a minute.’

The children followed Karl up past the church to the field beside the cemetery, where he pulled the dagger from its sheath and sat down in the grass. ‘Don’t cut yourself,’ he said, as he held it out to Werner. The knife went round the circle. Even the girls were fascinated.

‘Did they make you kill anyone?’ Werner asked.

Karl looked at him with contempt. ‘You’re such an idiot. Why would we kill anyone?’

‘I’m just asking.’

‘They made us jump off a cliff, though.’

‘Did anyone die?’

Karl ignored him. After he had put the dagger back into its sheath, he suggested they play Search and Destroy. They stood up and milled about for a while, deciding on the names of the units they would pretend to be in. Karl told them the best was called Das Reich. ‘You can do anything you want in it,’ he said. ‘Not even the regular army can tell you what to do.’ He had heard that the élite SS unit couldn’t get into trouble for anything – even killing people.

Paula, who would be ten next spring, said, ‘The Jungmädel is better than Das Reich.’

The boys laughed: the girls’ youth group better than Das Reich? Ridiculous!

Karl tried to imagine Paula riding on a tank as he chose sides for the game. Suddenly the girls realised he was only picking the boys.

‘We’re playing, too,’ Paula demanded.

‘Fetch us some food if you want to join in,’ one of the boys shouted.

‘And don’t forget to wash the dishes,’ Peter added.

Any semblance of order broke down as the girls ran at the boys, who raced off in all directions across the field. When Peter caught a girl at the far end of the field near the woods he said, ‘Pull your pants down and maybe we’ll let you play.’

‘You first,’ she said.

‘The leader doesn’t go first.’

‘Then I shan’t.’

For no apparent reason, Peter threw up his arm and shouted, ‘Sieg Heil!’

The boys on the other side of the field stopped and looked at him and the girl.

‘Don’t waste it on a girl!’ Karl screamed.

Over the following year the children carried on playing new games, imitating the stories that the older youth group members shared. The games acquired a distinctly militaristic element, the children both inventive and dogmatic. But no matter how disciplined they pretended to be, the games always broke down by the time the play day ended, order giving way to chaos, discipline disintegrating into confusion.

Karl and Peter did not hear from their father for six months. When a note did finally arrive in December 1942, he told them he was in Russia, but didn’t say where. ‘We’re busy,’ he wrote. ‘Always busy.’ Something in the tone, or perhaps the note’s brevity, made him sound even more distant.

Ida tried not to worry about the lack of communication between herself and her husband. He was so far away and, after all, the country was at war: she shouldn’t expect any more. She tried to forget that an acquaintance received a letter every month from her husband in Russia. Ida had stopped visiting her: the only thing the woman talked about was her latest letter from her husband.

Rumours were spreading that the troops in Stalingrad were failing against the Russians, but Ida had heard no such news over the radio. Hitler continued to broadcast to German women, desperate to hold their loyalty. Many, like Ida’s sister, felt a strong bond with him that had developed from the broadcasts and were sure that he would tell them if the situation changed. Ida worried that the radio news neither confirmed nor denied what they all heard from injured soldiers returning home.

Karl continued attending school in Pillau near the military base that sprawled through much of the port town. He had been top of the class in the three Latin tests that year. His teacher had told him that he would recommend him for the Adolf Hitler School. Karl knew that if he won a place, he had a strong chance of one day reaching a high position in the government. Early in 1943 Hitler Youth received the annual slogan. It hung above the blackboard in the mathematics room: ‘War Service for German Youth’.

That winter the only thing he didn’t like about going to school in Pillau was coming home by train after dark, especially during a new moon. He dreaded the moment when the train dropped him off on the empty platform two kilometres from his house. The forest was so dark when he walked alone back to the village and he always felt as if something or someone were watching him among the trees. He would walk in the middle of the road so that nothing could reach him from the edge, feeling his way through the darkness between tree cover and the clouds, the lack of light sometimes making him feel as though he had been locked inside a giant room from which he had to find his way out. Whenever his feet touched the dirt at the edge of the road, he would sprint back to the middle. Over time he developed the ability to steer down the middle as he slowly became accustomed to his temporary blindness. When he reached the rise that led over the small climb before dropping into Germau, he increased his pace. Every night was the same: he never felt safe until he reached the top of the small hill and saw the shimmering lights below surrounding the square.

Chapter 3

By the autumn of 1943 little of the news that filtered into the peninsula villages was good. During the summer the Russians had started a counter-offensive and wounded soldiers occasionally came home on leave. A young man from Sacherau had lost his hand, but planned to return to the front as soon as the wound healed. He told the children how retreating German troops destroyed everything they came across. He was part of an SS demolition squad and had blown off his hand as his regiment pulled back across the Ukraine towards Poland. He said they had set entire villages ablaze and used flame-throwers to scorch wheatfields so that the Russian divisions had no shelter or food as they pushed across the steppes towards Germany. He was confident that they would be stopped by the time they reached Poland and he wanted to be there for the celebration when the Russians had been defeated.

In Berlin the constant bombing had forced Ida’s sister Elsa to send her son to his aunt: on the peninsula there was still little sign of war, except for a rare troop transport passing through the square on its way between Memel and Pillau. Elsa remained in Berlin: she had secured a coveted job at the Chancellery.

Ida felt certain that Karl and Peter especially would be delighted to see Otto and sent them down to Pillau to pick him up. She thought they’d find it easier to get to know each other without her presence. As soon as they had gone, she began to prepare the evening meal – she had invited her father and stepmother, too. The boys returned earlier than she had expected, so after she had kissed Otto she gave them each a basket and dispatched them to the forest for mushrooms.

As always, Karl took it upon himself to act as their leader. An only child, Otto wasn’t used to taking orders from someone of around his own age, but he soon realised that he would have to if he didn’t want to get lost. Like the children in the village, Otto was fascinated by Karl’s knife. He knew many boys in Berlin who had joined the Hitler Youth, but none had offered to let him examine theirs. Karl told him about the camping trips and his leap from the cliff. Peter then suggested they show Otto the photographs. When Karl had returned from Marienburg he hadn’t thrown them away. Instead, he had told his brother to hide them in an abandoned shed near a local farm. Now he thought again for a moment, then told Otto he could look at them, provided he didn’t tell anyone.

When they reached the shed, Peter went in, pulled up a decaying floorboard and got them out of the box he had hidden beneath it.

The first showed a group of men huddled together for warmth. In the second photograph four women were standing in what looked like dormitories. One of the women didn’t have a shirt on, her breasts fully exposed to the camera. The last was of a girl with a boy, perhaps her older brother, and a woman who appeared to be their mother. Whenever Peter came to the shed alone, this was the one he looked at most often.

‘Jews?’ Otto asked.

His question unsettled the brothers. They had been staring at the girl, who seemed to stare back.

‘Who else?’ Karl snapped.

In an attempt to absolve himself, Karl explained how some older boys had stolen them and hidden them among his possessions.

‘Does everyone have photos like these?’ Otto asked.

‘Of course not! Why do you think they had to get rid of them? No one knows I’ve got them except you and Peter, and if you tell anyone about them I’ll say you brought them from Berlin.’

‘I said I wouldn’t tell.’

Peter returned the photos to their hiding place and the boys went back to the main road, making sure nobody saw them as they emerged from the bushes. The woodland where Ida and the children found mushrooms was a few kilometres further on. Karl and Peter knew all the varieties, including the poisonous ones. Amanitas grew everywhere on the peninsula and Ida had warned them that a single cap could kill an entire family. The first time Karl saw one his mother had said, ‘Nature made them bright red so you’ll notice them and eat one. Then your body will fertilise the ground so that more can grow.’ She then had picked a few caps, which she placed in a separate cloth to take home. That afternoon, she filled an old pan with water and boiled them, let the liquid cool, then placed it inside the door of the slaughterhouse where it enticed flies to land, drink and die. ‘It’s nature’s way of controlling pests too,’ she had added.

Along the road to the forest, Karl told Otto not to touch the bright-red mushrooms with white spots: ‘They’ll kill you.’

Otto wondered about these woods: the only woods he had ever been in were in the Tiergarten near the centre of Berlin, and Grunewald, at the edge of the city, where he had always felt safe, because other people were invariably around. Germau seemed to be in the middle of nowhere.

When they reached the edge of the forest, Karl pointed out the path. ‘Follow us and you won’t get lost, but if you get separated just yell. We won’t be far.’

As soon as they were among the trees Karl and Peter were finding and picking mushrooms. Otto stayed with them, but instead of looking for mushrooms he was remembering the stories his mother had read to him about children leaving peas or breadcrumbs along their path so that they could find their way out. Once in a while he would hear a rustle and rush to tell his cousins, but they laughed at his fears. Karl led them off the path into a darker area where the trees grew so close together that almost no light reached the forest floor. ‘Mushrooms grow better in the dark,’ he said. ‘We’ll find plenty here.’

Suddenly the ground had become too wet to walk across, so Karl set off in a wide arc round the bog. Then, as they were pushing through a thicket, they heard a shrill scream. They stopped in their tracks. The sound faded, then came again.

‘Is it an animal?’ Otto whispered.

‘Maybe something’s stuck in a trap,’ Peter suggested.

‘It’s coming from the direction of Lengniethen,’ Karl decided.

It was a lonely place, but the local trapper, Ludwig Schneider, lived there with his family. The boys followed the sound until they came to a little glade. Karl held up a hand to stop the others, as Peter saw something move on the other side of the clearing. He stepped close to his brother and pointed silently.

The boys crept forward, then stopped again. Through the brush on the other side of the clearing they glimpsed a man, but they were still too far away to discern who he was and what was going on. They fell to the ground and crawled nearer.

It was Ludwig, Karl realised. He was with Uta – she had gone to primary school in Germau until Ludwig had hired her to help his wife. Now she was leaning against a tree and Ludwig had pulled up her dress as if he were about to spank her. But he was standing too close to her for that and moving in a peculiar way. Then the boys heard that sound again. Was Uta crying? When Ludwig grabbed her hair she stopped.

Terror gripped the boys. They didn’t know whether to run into the field so that Ludwig would see them and be distracted, or race home and tell their mother what was going on. Karl and Peter knew they had to be careful – Ludwig was said to have killed a man for hunting in his territory. It was best to say nothing, Karl decided, and began to inch backwards. He gestured to the others that they should follow and laid a finger over his lips. Once they were back among the trees, each boy grabbed his basket and fled. They didn’t stop for more mushrooms but hurried on until they reached the road. Back in the open, they walked quickly towards the village and agreed not to tell anyone what they had seen.

When they went into the kitchen Ida saw straight away that something was wrong: only a thin layer of mushrooms covered the bottom of the baskets. ‘Have you boys been in trouble?’

‘Otto wanted to come home and see if Grandpa had arrived.’

Ida looked at her elder son sceptically. ‘I told you he’d be here at suppertime. Go back and find some more mushrooms.’

‘But there aren’t any more.’

‘Nonsense! There are so many you couldn’t carry them all. It’ll be cold in a few weeks and then there won’t be any. Don’t come back again until those baskets are full.’

The boys turned to go.

‘Leave the ones you’ve already got and I’ll clean them.’

The boys did as they were told, but before they went out, Karl saw Leyna sitting on the floor in the living room, playing with her teddy bear. He went in and kicked it out of her hands and across the room. It came to rest under the piano stool and Leyna began to cry. He ran to retrieve it and shoved it back into her hands.

‘What’s going on?’ Ida called from the kitchen.

‘Nothing,’ Karl shouted.

‘Leave Leyna alone.’

They slipped out of the front door before Ida had had time to investigate.

‘Let’s go up past the church,’ Karl suggested.

‘There’re no mushrooms up there,’ his brother reminded him.

‘We’ll try the woods on the other side.’

This time they ignored the path. Karl and Peter knew that any mushrooms that grew beside it would have been picked already. None of the older women ventured far from the path: just a few decades earlier, wolves and bears had patrolled these woods. The boys knew that if they went a little way along the brook and pushed their way through a series of thickets, they would find mushrooms sprouting everywhere.

Soon they were picking furiously to see who could fill his basket first in an effort to forget what they had seen earlier. At first, Otto lagged behind the others, but when he forced himself to concentrate on what he was doing, and put the disturbing images out of his mind, he began to catch up. When he had filled his basket, his cousins were still loading theirs.

Karl didn’t like to be beaten, so when Otto appeared with a full basket he ignored him and went on piling mushrooms into his own.

Even though Otto had agreed that he would not mention to Ida what they had witnessed in the forest, he felt uneasy. He had seen people kissing in the Tiergarten and even a girl’s shirt unbuttoned, but nothing like what that man had been doing to Uta. He wondered for a moment if people were different in the country, then thought better of it: even Karl had seemed upset by what they had seen.

When they got back to the shop, Günter was sitting on the steps with Leyna in his arms. Otto had met his grandfather just three times before, twice when the old man had come to Berlin and once when Otto and Elsa had gone to Königsberg for his grandmother’s funeral. His grandfather was almost a stranger to him. Otto greeted him somewhat formally, then Günter asked after his daughter Elsa.

While Otto answered him, Karl glanced at the door to the shop to make sure his mother wasn’t within earshot. Then, when his cousin fell silent, he said, ‘Can we have a drink, Grandpa? It’s Otto’s first day after all.’

Günter laughed. ‘I put a little bottle of Bärenfang behind the turf stack,’ he whispered. ‘Don’t get drunk – and don’t tell your mother I gave it to you when you do!’

Chapter 4

In late spring, although all civilians had been ordered over the radio to remain at home, refugees occasionally arrived in the village – but sometimes a week went by without one appearing on the square, in search of the road to Pillau. Unfortunately, few civilian ships were sailing, so their best chance of moving west was to return to Königsberg and follow Reichsstrasse 1, which connected the city with Berlin.

Near midnight on 20 July, Ida sat alone in the living room, sewing as she listened to the radio. Suddenly the programme was interrupted by the Führer. That morning an army commander had placed a bomb in his meeting room, he said. It had exploded, killing a secretary, but he himself had escaped virtually unharmed.

By now, many officers who had once supported him no longer trusted his leadership: he had destroyed Germany’s much admired General Staff system by demanding to see almost every major order and strategic plan, then revising it before sending it on, without recourse to trained officers. Also, he placed his favourites in high-ranking posts they were ill equipped to fulfil. Now, although the army was still winning minor battles, it was losing ground. The officers who were conspiring to kill him had no intention of surrendering to the enemy when he had gone, but planned to reassert Germany’s military supremacy.

As Ida listened to the Führer’s angry voice, she realised for the first time that her own family might be in danger if the war did not soon turn back in Germany’s favour. She knew the history of the peninsula almost as well as her father did. No one had occupied it successfully since the French in June 1807 and it had been nearly fifty years before that when the Russians had carried out their only successful occupation of the peninsula during the Seven Years War.

Early the next morning when Karl came downstairs, he found his mother asleep on the davenport. On the radio a woman was singing about summer. He went to Ida, wondering if he should wake her, but before he reached her she opened her eyes.

‘Were you up all night?’ he asked.

‘Come here,’ she said, patting the seat beside her.

Karl sat down and she kissed him. ‘I must have fallen asleep while I was sewing. Why are you up so early?’

‘I heard the radio. I thought you were listening to the records Father brought from Paris.’

‘I haven’t put them on since he left.’

His father had bought the radiogram before the war when they had a contract to deliver meat to the nearby military base, Karl remembered. Before Paul’s departure for France, the neighbours had come to listen to it.

‘Would you like to play a record?’ Ida asked.

‘Now?’

‘Why not? Do you know how to put it on?’

Karl jumped up and grabbed his favourite from beneath the sofa, where the records were kept. Perfectly circular and flat, he loved its feel and solid, heavy weight. He knew it would shatter if dropped, so he carried it carefully across the room. Ida knew which one he had chosen. It was the only one he ever listened to – a Hot Club de France recording, with Django Reinhardt, the guitarist, and Stéphane Grappelli on violin. Ever since Paul had bought it, Karl had begged her for a guitar. She had told him that if he learned to play the piano well enough, she’d consider it after the war. The piece Karl liked best was ‘Nuages’, and now, as the unusual chord sequence that opened it filled the room, he came back to sit beside his mother. She held out her arms and Karl snuggled into her as Reinhardt played.

Chapter 5

While Otto enjoyed running around with his cousins, he didn’t like Karl. It was partly to do with the way Karl flaunted his dagger and belt, the only ones in the village, but mostly because Karl ordered him about. Sometimes he ignored him, even if it meant being beaten up – which was how Karl kept his brother in line.

When there were no household tasks to be done, no school or youth group meeting to attend, they went hiking. They’d climb the hill to the church, drop into the forest and follow the path until it petered out, then continue through virgin woodland. They called it their survival game. When they moved south-east they bypassed Krattlau and Anchenthal, which were little more than clusters of houses at a crossroads. They avoided two lone houses at another crossroads and scouted through the forest to Ellerhaus, another hamlet, where they came out to knock on a door and ask for a drink of water.

A man named Volker was working in his field when the boys came into the village. He grinned when he saw them. ‘What are you up to?’

‘Hiking,’ Karl answered. ‘Otto here is still learning. He’s our cousin but he’s lived in the city all his life.’

‘How do you like Samland?’

‘It’s easy to get lost,’ Otto said.

‘Trust your senses.’

‘I’m not scared—’

‘None of us is scared of the woods,’ Volker said and winked. ‘Have you noticed that the houses in every village are built close together?’

The boys glanced around them.

‘Farms and fields surround the villages, but the houses are built in a cluster at the centre. It’s our way of protecting ourselves from people who pop out unexpectedly from behind the trees.’

‘Who would do that?’

‘The enemy.’

‘What enemy?’

‘Each generation has a different one.’

The boys were silent. ‘Have you two taught your cousin about the trees?’

‘I told him there are places where we have to be careful, but I haven’t taken him to the woods near Romehnen yet,’ Karl said.

‘Long ago all Samlanders were given a tree at birth,’ Volker told Otto. ‘For men it was usually an oak and for women a linden, the goddess of fate. Once you had your tree, it could never be cut down – if it was, its owner’s life would be cut short.’

‘Just like that?’ Otto asked.

‘You’d be surprised at the power of a tree. When I was a few years older than you boys I was taking a short cut back through the forest from Fischhausen when I heard someone scream. It was my brother’s voice. I tried to work out where he was and remembered a grove with an old oak in the middle. Our father had told us not to go there and I knew where those screams were coming from. I found my brother pinned under the trunk of a tree that had fallen. His pelvis was crushed and the ground round him was soaked with blood. Even with an axe and three men it would have taken too long to move the tree. He knew that, and so did I.

‘I went to the back of the tree where he couldn’t see me and tried to pull my knife out without him hearing, but I started to cry. I knew he heard because he fell quiet. We had made a vow to each other years earlier that if either of us was so badly hurt that there was no possibility of recovery, the other would help. I slid up over the fallen trunk, hoping he was looking out into the forest, but he was staring straight into my eyes. I could tell he knew that I was going to keep my vow. I sliced into his neck as fast and deep as I could, then fell on my knees and prayed.’