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.
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
