The Willow Wren by Philipp Schott (free ebook reader for iphone txt) 📕

strained to hold it steady. It became a kind of perverse sport for the boys to make a special effort to fill the bucket as full as their excretory systems permitted when I was on chamber pot duty the next morning. As I said, we were actually a fairly harmonious bunch by camp standards, but the English expression “boys will be boys” applies in this situation with vigour. It was apparently just too hilarious to resist when Schott would return from the privy cursing and having to change his pants and wash his shoes.

Flag raising followed at 07:30. For this we had to stand in a shivering circle with the teachers and other camp personnel while the camp director, Herr Tischendorf, stood in the centre beside the flagpole. One of the dormitory head boys would stride up to the pole and raise the swastika flag of the Third Reich while we gave the Nazi salute and all sang the “Deutschlandlied.” If it was especially cold, we sometimes sang faster and then Herr Tischendorf would make us sing again. Despite his foolish-looking little Hitler moustache and military bearing, he was actually a fairly reasonable man. He had been a biology teacher in Leipzig and was too old to serve in combat but wanted to do something to help, so this is what he was offered. He seemed to genuinely like children, which we were told was not the case with the previous director when the camp was still run by the SS. That director, a Herr Eckhorn, apparently saw children as no more than unripe adults. This annoyed him as fully ripened adults were needed for the war effort. His methods for accelerating the ripening process were apparently as futile as abusing a green banana and making it suffer in the hopes that it would turn yellow faster. Such bananas go directly from green to brown.

A hurried, invariably grim breakfast followed and by 08:00 we were in the classroom. This was without contest my favourite part of camp life. Although the teachers in camp seemed to assume that we were all dullards and moved through the lessons at an agonizingly slow pace, at least the occasional fragment of interesting information would be imparted and at least it was quiet and it was something I could excel at. I was careful not to excel too flamboyantly, lest a repeat of the Ulrich scenario occur. But sometimes it was hard to entirely avoid this.

Lessons continued until noon at which point a hot lunch was served. It was of a similarly dismal quality to the breakfast. Oh, how I missed Mama’s cooking, even with the strict rationing. If we ate quickly enough, we would have some time to rest before the horrors of the afternoon, which began at 13:00. These horrors were the outdoor activities led by the Hitler Youth commanders. Most of the boys aged fourteen and over were members. It was technically a voluntary organization, but those who declined to join were forced to write essays on awkward subjects such as “Why am I not in the Hitler Youth?” and were bullied even more vigorously than I was. The DJV junior Hitler Youth organization for ten- to fourteen-year-olds was perhaps a little looser, but I was still slightly too young for that. Regardless, Hitler Youth–led activities were compulsory for everyone in camp. These activities ranged from team sports, which I hated, to military-style exercises such as crawling under barbed wire or marching with toy wooden rifles on our shoulders, which I hated even more. Worst of all were the activities that combined military training and team sport, such as the objectively bizarre and pointless games of tug-of-war played while wearing gas masks and oversized steel helmets.

The only part I did not hate was some of the outdoor survival skills that they taught, such as compass reading and fire building. These could be interesting and seemed potentially useful, although even here the atmosphere was oppressive with a lot of orders being screamed and public humiliations being given for the slightest missteps. There was always only one right way to do something. Only one German way. Suffice it to say, the afternoons were exhausting and stressful. The opportunities to publicly fail were abundant. I honestly did not care what the others thought of me in any abstract sense regarding my social standing; I only cared in the practical sense that failure could attract abuse and even more chamber pot duty.

By suppertime I was more than ready to withdraw to my bunk and read (I had brought my Karl May with me), but alas the evenings were usually programmed as well. Sometimes marginally tolerable music was offered and sometimes there were newsreels. There was an obvious incongruity between the rosy picture of the war offered by these films and the inescapable fact that we were forced to be in a camp because our cities had been bombed to rubble, but to the extent that we thought about this paradox we kept those thoughts to ourselves.

It took only a few days for the camp routine to begin to feel normal. This is not to say that I hated it any less — in fact the opposite is true — but to say that one’s capacity for adaptation is remarkable. I simply adapted to being in a hateful situation and it quickly began to feel like this was all that life ever was, or ever would be. I was frightened by how quickly my previous life at home in Leipzig had taken on an abstract, dreamlike quality of unreality. Sundays we were encouraged to write home, and I took full advantage of that, sending Mama long reports of the week’s activities in camp. I was proud of myself that I knew enough to underplay the worst aspects of camp life, lest I make her worry too much. I did not write Papa. It is not that I thought of writing him and then rejected the