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

time has come for you to fulfill your sacred duty to your Fatherland! Your fathers and brothers are fighting bravely against an enemy that is pressing in from all sides. Reich Plenipotentiary for Total War Göbbels has decreed that all fourteen- and fifteen-year-old Hitler Youth are now ready to take up the fight! You have been waiting for this day and now it has arrived! We will depart for the front in one hour. Heil Hitler!”

Fourteen-year-olds — this meant Theodor. He did not say anything but went immediately with his cohort to the dormitory to pack. I caught his eye as he went past. He looked unspeakably terrified.

I found Jolf in the crowd of boys milling about. Regular activities appeared to have been suspended while the older boys prepared to leave. Tischendorf was nowhere to be seen, but Kohl was strutting about, supervising the departure preparations and generally appearing to be in his element.

“Which front, Jolf, do you know?”

“Eastern. One of the soldiers told Ernst who told me.”

“Oh no.” I did not know what else to say or how to react.

“It looks like they’re going after Russian tanks. See the Panzerfausts in the backs of the trucks?” Panzerfaust translates as “tank fist” and were like bazookas. The thought of these skinny, half-starved, barely trained boys being flung against Red Army tanks was unbelievable. I could not actually picture it. Theodor with a Panzerfaust. Absurd. While I was trying to process these thoughts Theodor came by again, his canvas rucksack over one shoulder, his lips pursed and his eyes distant and unfocused. He noticed me and briefly snapped back into focus. He shook my hand and quietly said, “Look out for Mama and the little ones, Ludwig. When Papa’s not there you’re the man of the family now.”

I did not respond. And then he was gone. He climbed into the back of one of the trucks and then the tailgate was slammed shut and the truck shuddered out of the camp, belching black smoke. I waved, but I know that he did not see me.

Chapter Twenty-Two

February 1945

It had been extremely cold through all of January. This cold was made worse by the starvation rations now being issued. Cold damp air penetrated into the poorly heated buildings of the camp and it penetrated through our increasingly thin and ragged uniforms. We had recently gone from three to two to now one meal a day. This naturally made the cold feel even worse. To compound our misery, the news from both fronts of the war was consistently bad. We had lost in the Ardennes (the Bulge) and we were losing in East Prussia. Russian soldiers were on German soil for the first time in history.

Finally a day came that was relatively warm, with the sun showing through for the first time in many weeks. We had been called to assemble by the flagpole, so there were scores of bony faces turned towards the sun, eyes squinting. Normally Hauptmann Kohl would insist on “eyes forwards,” but he allowed us this one small comfort. He had assembled us to read another of Göbbels’s speeches. Kohl cleared his throat loudly before beginning to read:

The major Soviet winter offensive that began from the Baranow bridgehead and in an unusually short time spread from Poland into the Wartegau and the other German Gaue in the east has radically altered the military situation. In the past the Reich defended itself far from its borders, but now the enemy occupies German territory that is very important to us both militarily and agriculturally. We can no longer use wide-open spaces as a weapon. We are now fighting almost entirely for and on German home territory. Each village and each acre, each city and each factory, that we are forced to give up means a direct reduction in our war potential, entirely aside from the fact that giving them up is a bitter loss to countless Germans, even costing them their lives. It makes no sense to talk around this or to ignore it. It is good that we all know exactly where we are so that each of us knows what has to be done. The long lines of those fleeing from the east flows towards the west through our cities and villages. Even the most inattentive observer cannot miss them. It is hard to describe their misery and privation. Still the people in these wandering columns are fortunate in comparison to those who had to remain at home and fell into the hands of the Bolsheviks.

The ignorant know-it-alls throughout the world are getting a clear answer to their cynical question as to whether the Soviets are really as bad as we always said, or whether perhaps those stories were only the massively exaggerated product of war propaganda. Naturally there are always people who learn only from experience, not from education. We have never flattered ourselves by believing that they could be persuaded with words or warnings. We did make our own people strong in the face of the deadly danger that threatens them and the entire continent from the east. One can only tear out one’s hair when a leading politician of the USA plutocracy says that the United States would welcome a shift to the left in Germany and all of Europe as long as it did not end in Bolshevism. Looking at our continent, one does not need to be a particularly sharp observer to see that the radical red wave is rising slowly, but with uncanny consistency, and that if we do not halt and restrain it, it will devour all of Europe. Our wandering columns know what that means. Horror is reflected in the eyes of men, women and children. When a farmer leaves house and farm and land and livestock, walking for many hundreds of kilometres with only what he can carry, thinking, “anything to escape from that terrible prison,” it is because hell is behind him. We have reports and