The Flight

Chapter 5

In the early spring of 1941, while the last of the snow still lay on the ground, Karl, Peter and Leyna were building a snowman when they saw someone walking towards the village on the road leading from Fischhausen. The children stopped to watch the stranger approach. He was carrying a parcel under his arm. Leyna waved. Karl pushed her hand down: ‘Don’t wave at strangers, stupid.’

A moment later Karl recognised the man. He paused to make sure he wasn’t wrong and took off towards him, Peter and Leyna following.

‘Father!’ Karl grabbed his hand.

‘You’re too old to behave like a child,’ his father said, with no trace of a smile.

Karl paused before asking, ‘Did you bring some chocolate?’

By then all three children were standing in front of their father. When Leyna held out her arms, he smiled for the first time, bent down and picked her up. ‘Have you boys been helping your mother?’ he asked and kissed Leyna’s cheek.

‘We do everything,’ Karl said.

‘We even tidy our rooms,’ Peter added.

Their father’s face didn’t reflect their own excitement, but Karl and Peter could hardly contain themselves. Both ran for home, wanting to be the first to tell their mother that their father was here.

Ida was in the kitchen preparing a goose for delivery to a family in Bersnicken, the next village north of Germau – they were expecting their son home from Berlin: he had been sent to the capital after his promotion to Scharführer of his Hitler Youth unit. Although the shop was closed, Ida continued to make a little money dressing poultry. When she heard the boys come in noisily and run for the kitchen without taking off their boots, she marched to the kitchen door and yelled, ‘Go back and take—’ She broke off as she saw Paul through the living-room window with Leyna in his arms.

She went back to the sink, dropped the knife, rinsed her hands under the tap and began to cry. Her husband came in for the first time in almost two years.

Once she had controlled herself she turned round. Paul walked to the middle of the kitchen, but did not reach her. She stepped forward and put out her arms to embrace him. He stepped back before she was able to slide her arms round him.

For a few seconds she stood in front of her husband. Although there was only half a metre between them, it was as though she were utterly alone, as she had been since his departure for Paris. Tears filled her eyes again and at last seemed to provide Paul with an unspoken cue, for he relented. He moved forward, took her in his arms and held her tightly.

Throughout the morning, as word spread, people called at the shop to welcome him home. After Mr Laufer had insisted on a celebratory drink, Ida pulled Paul into the kitchen. ‘Please, not today. I haven’t seen you for so long. We must spend at least a day alone as a family.’

‘It’s only a toast. Surely you don’t want me to offend him?’

They heard another knock.

‘More drinks?’

‘What do you expect me to do? Tell them to go home? Some are customers. The war will end soon and we’ll need them to come back to us.’

‘Then let’s go to the coast. We can celebrate when we get back. We’ll have two or three days alone. Tell your friends to organise a party here at the shop.’

It was soon settled. Someone offered to lend his horse and wagon for their trip. ‘Could you take us to the station instead?’ Paul asked.

It was nearly dusk when they reached Sarkau. There was only one inn. A sign informed travellers that it was closed. Paul knocked anyway. A woman opened the door and pointed to the sign. ‘Can’t you read?’

‘I’m here with my family. We have nowhere else to go.’

‘We’re closed.’ She began to shut the door.

‘I’ve just returned from Paris,’ Paul said. ‘We need a room for two nights.’ He knew she wouldn’t refuse a soldier.

‘Very well. We’re expecting family at the end of the week.’ She opened the door and pointed up the stairs. ‘The two rooms at the top on the right.’

The following morning the family followed a snowy pathway through the pine forest towards the sea. Halfway there they climbed a small rise and a series of dunes came into view. Covered with snow, they looked like giant cumulus clouds turned upside-down and tethered to the ground. Beyond, waves lapped the shore. Karl ran ahead, climbing to the top of the highest dune, Peter behind him, trying to keep up with his brother. Surrounded by dunes, with the water stretching as far as he could see, Karl felt as though he had reached the end of the earth.

Later, as they walked back through the forest to the inn, Paul asked Ida why she had been so quiet all afternoon: ‘You hardly said a word on the train.’

‘I don’t like the games you’re playing.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘You come home and can’t bring yourself to kiss me.’

‘You’re not the only one who’s hurting.’

‘I’m scared,’ she said.

‘Of what?’

‘I don’t know… of what’s going to happen. It doesn’t seem like the war will lead to anything great.’

‘It won’t last for ever. I’ll be home for good soon.’

‘That’s what you said when you went to Paris.’

‘Well, you don’t seem to want me here anyway.’

Ida didn’t answer. Paul slid his hand round her waist. This time it was Ida who pulled away, but when he persisted she laid her hand on his and their fingers interlocked.

On the morning of their departure for Germau the family walked silently to the road to flag down a vehicle going to Cranz to catch the train home. Ever since Paul could remember, the spit protruding from the northern shore of the peninsula had been a national park, closed to traffic, but while he had been in Paris a new road had been built through the middle for the heavy military traffic that went back and forth to Memel. Three trucks passed them without stopping. When the fourth approached, Paul stepped into the road. The driver and he exchanged a few words, then they all climbed into the cramped cab. Inside the air was stuffy and too warm. Ida rolled down the window a crack.

The driver was young, a boy almost, from Hesse. He soon became talkative, attempting to impress the higher-ranked Paul. He spoke with an accent Ida and the children found odd, but his words were clear enough.

‘It’s my first time in East Prussia. I never realised how far from home it is.’

‘Were you in France?’ Paul asked.

‘No, I was sent straight here.’

Karl and Peter sat quietly between the driver and their parents. Paul held Leyna on his lap. Ida watched the military trucks going north through the pine forest, which had been planted on the wide sandy spit in the late nineteenth century to prevent it from being washed away by the sea.

The family returned home for the party in Paul’s honour. Talk focused on everyone’s plans for after the war. The mood was subdued. Most of the older men seemed certain the war would soon be over, but Paul wouldn’t be drawn.

On the morning of his departure the children followed him and Ida as they walked to the station. The next day Paul was due at a base in Poland. He didn’t know when or if he would be permitted another leave. On the platform, he kissed Ida and the children. He was preoccupied, as if his military duties were more important now than his family, but he had always been like that when he was thinking about work. Now, though, he wasn’t just going to work in the shop behind their home, he was leaving for a month, a year, two years? No one knew.

His father’s indifference that morning stuck in Karl’s mind. The train pulled away, clanking along the tracks. Ida and the children were left alone on the platform to watch it disappear from view. They remained staring down the narrowing tracks long after the train vanished, as an uncanny calmness similar to the silence that follows the first heavy snow each year enveloped the family. Leyna tugged at her mother’s hand. Their sister’s movement caused the boys to glance up at their mother. ‘I want to go home,’ she said.

They walked down the steps from the platform, across the steel tracks slick with ice and to the path in the field. There, they fell into single file. A light snow began to fall. Karl, at the back, stopped to look up. The uniform sky provided nothing against which to distinguish itself as a sheet of ashen grey slowly descended over them. He tried to separate a single cloud from the mass so he could imagine the snow falling from that particular place, but the sky offered no depth of field, refusing to cooperate with Karl’s wish for something to recognise. The snowfall grew heavier, causing even the backdrop of the pallid sky to disappear in a white flurry.

Ida stopped to adjust her hat, leaned down and picked up Leyna.

When they reached the road, the cobbles were buried under a thin layer of fresh snow, which highlighted the imperfections in the road’s surface.

Tirskone, an elderly man from Powayen, the village nearest the station, often walked along the road with a shovel and a bucket of sand with which he smoothed the ground beneath an uneven cobble or poured sand into an empty hole before he inserted a new one. He kept stacks of stones in the brush at intervals along the roadside. Each year a government truck came from Königsberg and left a pile that Tirskone would move, five at a time, to his hiding places. Once Karl had crouched in the bushes to watch him.

Tirskone, like Paul, rarely spoke. When he did it was to make a request, delivered as an order, for a drink of water while he repaired the cobbles in the square. Now Karl glanced up and down the road, expecting to see the old man’s footprints: light snow rarely kept Tirskone indoors.

‘Let’s take the road this time. I don’t want to walk back through the forest while it’s snowing,’ Ida said.

Karl’s eyes were on the low hill that led into Germau less than a kilometre away. ‘Can I take the path?’ he asked.

‘Don’t be long.’

Ida glanced at Peter, shivering beside her. ‘You can come with me,’ she said. ‘You can play with your brother later.’

Karl followed the path into the forest to the brook below the church, imagining what the ancient Balt-Prussian tribe would do if they saw the Teutonic Knights escaping from their secret tunnel. He imagined some clan members pulling out their swords as they whispered among themselves in the undergrowth. Karl kicked up branches in the snow, until he found one that fitted his hands, so he could join the tribe slaying the invaders. He swung it to get a feel for its weight before sticking its tip into the snow beside him while glancing up the hill at the large church and caught his breath.

He decided to sneak up behind the church – it would be easier to surprise the enemy if he went that way. Crouching, he stalked through the woods. As the hill steepened, he picked up speed. When he reached a point from which he could approach the church directly, he broke into a run, crested the summit and darted out past the cemetery. At the corner, he raised his sword, jumped out in front of the church and swung wildly at a group of Knights. He thrust, parried and turned about until his arms ached, then plopped down into the snow, dizzy.

The clearing was empty. Nobody had walked up the hill that morning so the snow lay undisturbed. He could have killed a couple more, he thought, if he had come up the opposite side. He didn’t like playing this game with the other village children: they were younger and he could run faster so it was too easy to kill them. He remembered the youth group he would soon join – maybe he could play it with them. Most of the boys already in the group were from other villages and he knew they’d want to see the entrance to the secret tunnel in his church.

He stood up and walked across the field to a low wall a short distance above the square and looked away from the village towards Willkau, then looked back at the houses below. His mother stepped out of the shop door and called him.

‘Coming,’ he shouted.

She looked up at the wall. ‘I told you not to be long. Come here – you haven’t finished the jobs I asked you to do,’ she shouted.

He ran down the path, hoping she wasn’t angry. Even when she was, though, she was not like his father could be. While he would never admit it to her, he was relieved his father had gone again – even to the dangers of war.

Chapter 6

At the beginning of June, Ida received a short letter from Paul to say that he had been transferred east of Warsaw. He had included a photograph of himself sitting on the motorcycle that he rode to check the food supplies for the hospital he was supervising. ‘I’m not sure when you’ll hear from me again. There’s hardly enough time to sleep, much less to write letters,’ he concluded.

On the twenty-second, Ida was in the kitchen getting breakfast for the children with the radio on. As she leaned down to take a tray out of the oven, an announcer interrupted the music to introduce Joseph Goebbels, who said he had an urgent message from the Führer: ‘Weighed down with emotion, condemned to months of silence, I can finally speak freely to you, the German people. At this moment a march is taking place that, in its extent, compares with the greatest the world has ever seen. I have decided again today to place the fate and future of the empire and our people in the hands of our soldiers. May God help us …’ Before sunrise, Goebbels said, the army had launched an attack on Russia.

Ida thought of Paul on his motorcycle moving slowly alongside a column. The image frightened her, so instead she imagined him in a jeep behind the front line, and then at his desk in the office at the hospital. It was safer there, she told herself. She reminded herself of his arrival in Paris the day after it fell: he had avoided combat then, so why not now? Their love had cooled, but Ida wanted her children’s father to live. She tried to convince herself that when he finally returned for good he would be kinder to her and the children.

When Karl came downstairs half an hour later, she tried to think of a way to explain what had happened, but she didn’t understand why Germany was attacking Russia. She had understood the offensive against the French – during her childhood her father had talked incessantly about the injustices of the Treaty of Versailles – but she could think of no reason to justify their attack on Russia, especially since Russia in the Non-Aggression Pact had agreed not to attack Germany.

At breakfast, Karl noticed his mother distressed and anxious, but she said nothing and he didn’t ask; he had to meet a boy from a neighbouring village to go to a youth group meeting. When they arrived, he soon learned what had upset his mother: the attack was on everybody’s lips. One boy said his father was killing Russians at that very moment.

‘I thought he was an army cook. The only way he’ll ever kill someone is with food poisoning.’

A boy from Warschken, another village nearby, turned to Karl and said, ‘Maybe your father will send sweets from Moscow.’

‘Maybe he won’t go there,’ Karl replied.

‘Of course he will. The whole army’s going.’

They were convinced that the German army would beat the Russians, and anyone whose father or grandfather had fought at the battle of Tannenberg compared it with what was happening now. No one had grasped that the present offensive, three or four hundred kilometres to the east, was not just a battle but the start of a new war: the Soviet-German War.

Three million German soldiers were pitted against the same number of Russians, whose opposing army would soon grow to six million. The largest military invasion ever was under way. Across eastern Europe the boys’ fathers were behind thousands of heavy guns, pounding Russian positions. Soon the front would extend over four thousand kilometres, from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south, the entire land mass of eastern Europe sealed behind a wall of German soldiers and guns.

One boy announced that Hitler himself was in East Prussia, unaware that the Führer had constructed new headquarters there from which to direct the offensive. The Wolfsschanze – Wolf ’s Lair – was buried deep in the forests south-east of Samland.

Before the offensive had begun, the Prussian army commanders – a constant source of irritation to Hitler – were far from united behind the decision to invade Russia. Some had agreed that if they had to go ahead, now was the best time to surprise the enemy because Stalin had murdered his best commanders during the Great Purge of 1936 to 1938. Others, though, would have preferred to abide by the Non-Aggression Pact: the steppes were too vast and the war was being fought on too many other fronts. Hitler himself had once written that an attack on Russia, as well as a western theatre, would spell the end of Germany.

Chapter 1

Once the war with Russia was under way Germau remained oddly calm. For a time photographs were published in Königsberg newspapers showing Latvians, Lithuanians and Ukrainians welcoming German soldiers as liberators freeing them from Stalin’s tyranny. Ida’s sister, in Berlin, rarely mentioned the war in her letters.

That spring, shortly before the Führer’s birthday, a Hitler Youth representative had come to the village to talk to Ida about a ceremony that Karl was to attend. Ida was reluctant to let him go, but she had no choice. Karl by contrast was more excited than she had ever seen him. He had gone with the man and a large group of boys from the peninsula by train to Pillau where they crossed the Bay of Danzig on a Strength Through Joy cruise liner.

Two older boys had stolen some photographs of Jewish prisoners, which they wanted to get rid of now – they knew they would get into trouble if the theft was discovered. They had concealed the evidence among the younger boys’ belongings. When Karl found three photos in his clothes, he became frightened and pushed them to the bottom of his bag. He would throw them away when he got home.

From Danzig, the younger boys went on to Marienburg, the ancient headquarters of the Teutonic Knights with the largest castle Karl had ever seen. They arrived at dusk and joined thousands of others. Karl’s group entered a huge chamber illuminated by torchlight. They stood to attention for nearly two hours as they sang Hitler Youth songs and listened to a long speech: the Reichsjugendführer, the highest-ranking official in the league, talked endlessly about commitment, discipline and personal strength. Later, each new recruit took an oath under the flickering torches: ‘I promise that, in the Hitler Youth, I will always do my duty, with love and faithfulness, and help the Führer, so help me God.’

Afterwards the hall reverberated to the boom of drums, the boys’ faces glowing orange in the torchlight. Soon they were singing again – a thousand boys in harmony – ‘Forward, forward …’ The sounds echoed in Karl’s mind long after he had returned to Germau.

In July he went camping with his group to Palmnicken where they pitched tents on a plateau above the Baltic. On the first night after the leader had told everyone to go to sleep, Karl felt the hand of the boy to his left slide across his belly and downwards. Startled, he pretended to be asleep. Soon he felt a new and pleasant sensation, one he’d never experienced before, between his legs. He turned over – and the boy on his right kissed him on his mouth. Karl tensed, and the first boy whispered that he would report him if he didn’t join in with their game.

The next morning, the three behaved as if nothing had happened. Karl climbed out of the tent and walked over to where the ground fell away to the sea below and watched two men in a pit carrying a burlap sack filled with amber. When he turned back to see the other boys coming out of their tents, he wondered if they were harbouring a similar secret.

That afternoon the leader took the boys through the woods and across a field, beyond which the blue-green waters of the Baltic stretched to the horizon. At points along the western edge of the peninsula, steep sandy cliffs fell as much as ten metres to the beach below. The leader announced that to earn a dagger, each boy must run at top speed to the edge of the cliff and jump out as far as he could.

‘What if we’re killed?’ a boy asked.

‘I’ll give the knife to your mother.’

Laughter erupted.

‘It’s only sand, idiot,’ a boy near the back yelled.

‘But my cousin broke his leg falling from the cliff in Rauschen.’

The leader told them that each boy would run and jump, then get up, move out of the way and remain on the beach with the assistant, who was already down there. ‘If you do break your leg don’t scream. You don’t want to be captured by the Russians, do you?’

He pointed at a terrified-looking boy. ‘You first. Run on the count of three.’

‘But—’

‘One. Two—’

The boy started running.

‘I said on the count of three!’ shouted the leader. ‘Faster!’

The boy’s pace increased and the group held their breath when he neared the edge of the cliff, expecting him to stop. But he didn’t hesitate. He ran forward, his eyes on the horizon, until the ground fell from beneath his feet and he disappeared. They heard him scream, and the distant roar of breakers.

The sixteen-year-old leader walked back to them grinning. ‘Let’s hope he’s not dead.’

This time nobody laughed.

‘Anyone scared?’

The group were mute.

‘I’m going to stand here and watch until every one of you has jumped off the cliff. Anyone who slows down before he jumps doesn’t get his dagger.’

As Karl waited, he looked over the tall grass to the cliff’s edge, feeling as if he had been called to a duty greater than himself. That spring the leader had come to his village only for him: no other local children had gone to the castle at Marienburg. He felt an epiphany of quietness as he prepared for his jump – and dismissed the fleeting thought that last night’s illicit adventure might have contributed to today’s confidence. He pictured himself walking into Germau with his shoulder strap across his chest and his new dagger on his belt.

When the leader signalled to him, he started to run and felt himself stride, with a sense of supreme confidence. As he neared the edge of the cliff, his eyes rose above the horizon – he leapt as high as possible, aware that his body sailing into the sky towards the sea created a silhouette seen by the leader and boys who still waited their turn. Airborne, he squeezed his eyes shut. He wanted to remember for ever how it felt to float over the earth, the air above coalescing with the water below, whose merging currents buoyed him as he floated outwards into its transmuting body.