She looked out of the window one last time, a mixture of feelings tearing at her heart. Relief that they were safe, shame that she felt that way, confusion at how it had come to this, hope that it would not get worse, but most strong of all was the realization that somehow their lives had changed for the worse.
Her brother turned the page over and began drawing again.
Elsa turned away. ‘I’m going to try to get some sleep. I have work in the morning. I’ll leave you to your drawing.’
Sickened by the night’s events, she hid under the covers, glad her brother was nearby but angry at him for his composure. The mob had moved away. The sign still hung on the door. Their father had probably been recognized as the local stationmaster, a job given to him by the Nazi Party itself. They would know that his wife was Gretchen Kalbach, who helped support the activities of the local Bund Deutscher Mädel, the Hitler Youth for girls. His daughter, he would have told them, had been a loyal member and, at the age of eighteen, had only recently left. She was now training to be a teacher, ensuring her pupils said ‘Heil Hitler’ many times a day. She had to, for not doing so would signal that she was anti-Nazi and she would lose her job. The Kalbach family could sleep safe in their beds tonight, she told herself, while a voice in her head screamed that their Jewish neighbours had nowhere to hide. And her family, including herself, were accepting this. How had it come to this? she asked herself again.
She closed her eyes. She knew how it had happened. She had lived it, after all. Her childhood had been set against the background of ruinous inflation, high unemployment and political instability. She had been born only two years after Germany had been defeated in the Great War. The German people had lost their self-respect, both individually and as a country.
Elsa was a child at the time but she still remembered seeing her father queuing for hours to collect his unemployment benefit among a crowd of equally disheartened men. She listened to conversations that other children found too boring: heated discussions in the night between parents, between neighbours. Despite her young age, she came to understand that people were desperate for someone to lead them out of their misery. The older generation wanted stability; the younger generation wanted change. Hitler had promised them both. He had told them he would lead their nation to greatness and would serve and glorify Germany and its people. It was what her father and mother had wanted to hear. And, as she grew older, it was what she wanted too.
When she was only ten years old she was one of the first to join the Bund Deutscher Mädel. It was promoted as a safe, fun place to go, where sports and games were encouraged and past political differences, which had pitted family against family, were put aside. Elsa and her friends thought they had found a place where everyone believed in Germany but where politics had no place — at least, that was what they were told. What they believed. Nazi Party parades and marches brought colour and excitement to their lives, along with pride. People began to enjoy themselves again. Germany was once again respected and dynamic. When Elsa was almost sixteen, in 1936, the country had hosted the Olympic Games. No more shame at losing the Great War, no longer suffering the disrespect and punishments meted out by the rest of Europe. At last life was good, just as Hitler had promised them.
Yet all was not good. She could see that now, though at the time she had not. Her fair hair and blue eyes were hailed as the perfect ‘Aryan’ look. Aryan — an old word to signal a new dawn. As a young child she was considered pale, mouselike and ordinary, but in her teens she was envied for her appearance. Itwas a heady elixir to gorge upon and helped her to feel like she belonged to something good, something wholesome, something groundbreaking and far bigger than her.
Yet as her fortunes rose, others’ began to fall. Jews were demonized and Jewish businesses boycotted. Their everyday lives became limited by new discriminatory laws... and it was accepted. By then Elsa and her friends had been taught to be wary of Jewish people, told they were untrustworthy, greedy. Jews were blamed for all the ills of society.
Rumours spread of what happened to those who opposed the new regime, and terror grew. Books that opened up the world in thought or documented the past were burned. Students were taught not to question or be different and an undercurrent of mistrust was always present. To speak out, to take heed of the ‘wrong’ information, was to be a traitor, an enemy. Now, as a trainee teacher, Elsa was teaching her students the same rhetoric.
But for Elsa herself, the seeds of confusion and doubt were planted. How could these changes be as moral, as right, as people said? Those seeds had lain dormant in the dark just waiting for rain to start them growing. And it was tonight that she acknowledged the shame she had felt, the fear that had been growing insidiously. Her mother had once said, ‘We only see the true man when he is given enough power to take.’ Her beloved Führer had complete power over his people and now he had set his sights elsewhere. Only months before, he had announced a union between Germany and Austria. What else was he capable of? Perhaps next time a country would not welcome his presence.
The noise of the riot lasted into the small hours. Eventually she fell into a fitful sleep, waking with a start as the morning sunlight began to shift across her face. She sat up and looked around, reassured to see her familiar bedroom was the same.The dressing table she’d inherited from her grandmother still proudly displayed her brush, her first bottle of perfume and a trinket box she’d received as a Christmas gift from her mother. The small bookshelf in the corner, made by her father for her fourteenth birthday, filled with an eclectic selection of books. Some from her childhood, many she had read, and a small collection she had yet to read. Everything looked the same, just how it had been before the horrors of last night. It should have been comforting, but it felt wrong.
Otto must have gone back to his own room at some point in the night. She sat up straighter and saw that in his place he had left a drawing. She scrambled across the bed and picked it up. It was of a young woman’s face, with the flawless skin, glossy hair and wide clear eyes of youth. Was this how Otto saw her? She was pretty, yet there was no mistaking that it was her. She was gazing off to the distance, as if hopeful for the future, yet the longer Elsa stared at it, the more she saw the deeper sorrow in her eyes. Otto, with his exquisite eye for detail, had captured more than her features caressed by moonlight, he had captured her thoughts, her emotions and the pivotal moment when all her hopes and dreams had died. In the bottom right-hand corner, Otto, who drew to memorialize change, had scrawled ‘Elsa,’ with a satisfied flare.
Chapter Two
June 1940
The station gave Sam no hint of his true location. Somewhere in Germany? ‘Willkommen in Berlin!’ the sneering military police officer shouted. A lie, of course: this was no welcome, and he surely wasn’t in Berlin. No civilian passengers, for a start. But then, he had come to believe that Germans were no longer capable of telling the truth. He’d thought that ever since the Munich debacle and the ensuing invasion of Poland: Britain had been lulled into trusting them in the first place and look where that had got them.
He counted the number of men guarding them on the platform. Too many to attempt an escape, he concluded.
He had been captured at Albert, in France, as his platoon retreated to the evacuation point on the beaches of Dunkirk. He would probably endure a lifetime of reliving the moment he’d been caught. His platoon had been overrun by the advancing German army. The battle for survival was vicious, with bullets piercing the air and shells exploding all around them. Young men fell like lifeless mannequins as the French inhabitants scurried for safety. He had been determined to fight through it, knowing it would break his fiancée Moira’s heart if he did not.
Suddenly he had seen a young child, her dress covered in dust and her little body shuddering with terror. She was alone in the rubble as bullets ate chunks out of the brick wall behind her. He had hesitated, her vulnerability making it impossible for him to drag his eyes away. He had wanted to scoop her up in his arms and whisk her to safety, knowing he would probably die in the act. He didn’t get the chance. The bullet that pierced his leg brought him back to his senses and onto his knees and he was quickly captured at gunpoint. As he was dragged awaya distraught Frenchwoman ran past him. He hoped the woman was the girl’s mother and imagined her carrying the child to safety. He did not glance over his shoulder to see it. He wanted a happy ending for them, his own fate far too bleak to imagine.
That was some days ago — or was it a week? His new life as a prisoner of war had begun and already he was losing sense of time. At least he was not alone, although he had discovered that travelling with fifty men squeezed into one cattle wagon was hardly a pleasant experience. It was said they were being taken to Poland, but no one knew the truth. Rumours soon ignited and swirled around, but he suspected that most weren’t based on fact. After all, the prisoners would be the last to learn what was happening.
He shifted his toes inside his boots and shuffled his feet. His joints were stiff, as if he had aged twenty years, but the wound in his leg was not as bad as he’d first feared. He hoped it would not fester like some of the wounds the other prisoners had. They had already stopped at several passage camps along the way, but the breaks had been few and far between. A journey with no food or place to urinate degraded a man and aged him. Add a few lice in for fun and you’d soon have a weakened, submissive soldier, boiling with revenge and hatred inside. Not good circumstances for optimum wound healing.
‘Hey up,’ said another POW beside him. ‘Something’s up.’
An overweight stationmaster hurriedly crossed the platform from his office and began speaking to one of the guards. The guard’s expression tightened and he quickly relayed the message to one of the military police. The atmosphere changed. The prisoners and their armed guards were ordered sharply off the platform. Herded out of the station and down a narrow neighbouring lane no more than twenty yards away, Sam could still see the platform, which was now largely deserted except for a few German officers. And he hated every one of them.They waited in silence, looking down the track in anticipation. A new waiting game had begun, but this time it was for someone more important than a rudimentary string of carriages carrying hundreds of bedraggled soldiers.
Minutes later, the sound of an approaching train renewed the platform guards’ alertness. They stood to attention, backs ramrod stiff, with gleaming buttons and polished shoes. A large black train rolled into the station and came to a smooth halt. Behind the engine was an open wagon carrying anti-aircraft guns manned by black-uniformed SS guards. Sam braced himself. A black, sleek train manned by SS and protected with heavily armoured plating could mean only one thing: someone very powerful was on board.
His eyes hungrily scanned the carriages for the high-ranking officer. There were four carriages in total, followed by another open wagon carrying manned artillery guns to protect the rear. Who could it be? The black paintwork of each carriage gleamed in the sun, but it was the third that snared Sam’s attention. Adolf Hitler himself was sitting at a table by the window, plain as day, being served drinks and a meal. He appeared oblivious to the hundreds of dishevelled prisoners waiting nearby like cattle herded into a pen. Instead, he was quite relaxed, as if he was on a first-class day trip to Brighton, waving away one choice from the menu and choosing another. A tall officer in pristine uniform entered his carriage, saluted and spoke to him for a few minutes. Time seemed to slow as Sam watched the surreal scene unfold, Hitler accepting his meal without any acknowledgement to the waiter. Even the birds in the trees above him appeared to fall silent. Yet, Sam thought, despite the armour and pomp around him, the immense power he held, the death and destruction he’d caused, Hitler, hunched over his meal, eating, with the occasional dab at his mouth with a napkin, was a great disappointment. In that moment, Sam felt that both he and theworld had somehow been duped all along. Hitler was nothing but a mediocre man with an unquenchable thirst for dominance and he should have been stopped years ago.
Sam felt almost as if he could see the evil emanating from him, like a stench that could be tasted and had the potency to linger long after he’d gone. Once, people had failed to see this evil, believing it could not exist in a man’s soul. They had been wrong not to learn from history. The past was littered with bloody tyrants who had abused their positions of power and killed at will for their own misplaced gains. It was already too late by the time world leaders realized what Hitler really was and that mistake had been fatal, costing countless lives. That was the reason Sam was standing there now, wounded, dirty and hungry — fearful of what was yet to come.
A new train with more cattle wagons arrived soon after Hitler’s train had left, and they were immediately herded onto the platform again and inside the carriages until they were squeezed in so tightly that there was only a little standing space. Sam found himself in the corner of one of the wagons with a view of the outside, albeit through the slits of one of four ventilators which were sited at each corner. The journey began again, rattling and rocking its way through Germany.
Eventually the train came to a stop again. He looked through the vent. His gaze skimmed the empty platform beside his own train, across the two concealed rail tracks, and came to rest on the purpose-built passengers’ platform opposite. The railway spur had temporarily brought ordinary passenger trains and industrial transportation into close proximity and he watched in silence as the platform gates opposite opened and men, women, soldiers on leave and children arrived to wait for their trains. How different their situations were, he thought. At best the people appeared oblivious to the prisoners; at worst they ignored them. His gaze stopped on a young woman. She waspretty, with blonde hair cut to her shoulders and a slim build. Beside her stood a slightly younger man who shared similar features and wore a crisp new army uniform. They sat down on a bench and the young man produced a sketch pad from his rucksack and began to draw. The young woman watched his sketch begin to emerge before her gaze wandered up to his face and then further afield... to a family... to a bag carried by a man... to a child that brought a sad smile to her lips... to the waiting cattle wagon. Her smile faded and a slight frown on her forehead formed — perhaps it had dawned on her what might be inside. He felt compelled to reach out to her with a finger through the vent. She would not see it, he knew, among the many carriages; she would not want to help even if she did. But there was sadness in her face which gave him hope that one day reason and common sense would come to the German people and they would demand an end to the war.
The woman stood, and for a crazy moment he thought she was going to cry out against the crowded conditions they were in. Then a new passenger train arrived, slicing between them, and he knew how foolish his thoughts had been. Her train had arrived and she was preparing to embark. It was madness, but his disappointment was as real as it was ludicrous.
* * *
