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

at the KLV-Lager as proper school, so it had been three years, which when you’re twelve is an enormous portion of your life.

This excitement did not survive the first day of school. This time it was not the bullying, as we were a generally more intellectually oriented group, so even my sometimes overloud squeaky voice or overeager hand-raising did not attract any hard stares or covert slaps to the back of my head. No, this time the problem was the instruction. First of all, the teachers they had found were, with one or two exceptions, truly the dregs. I knew more than the math teacher and at least as much as the science teacher. Secondly, the curriculum had changed. Now history was being taught through the lens of a Marxist dialectic. Suddenly ancient Greece was no longer a groundbreaking civilization, but rather a prime example of the class struggle wherein a small slave-holding elite exercised violent control over the other classes. History was an evolution towards the ideal paradise of workers and farmers that we were creating right now, right before our very eyes. We were so lucky to be the generation to reach this apogee of human development! Looking out the window at relentlessly shabby and grey Rochlitz, this seemed as disconnected from reality as the Nazi teacher’s assertions that we were winning the war when we had just been evacuated from a destroyed city. I suppose it was still early days for utopian socialist Rochlitz though. Perhaps paradise was still coming.

More interesting was the Russian class. I had always enjoyed languages and Russian seemed as good to learn as any, and for the time being obviously more practical than English or French. Once a week on Fridays there was an assembly for the students in the big hall where the school director would give a speech. Herr Schimmler was a small bald man who favoured bowties. He was often accompanied by a Russian officer who sat silently off to one side. The speeches alternated between rambling and hectoring. The contrast was quite stark. The rambling speeches were delivered in a genial and benevolent tone, but they were obscurely philosophical and difficult to follow, while the hectoring speeches were extreme in their accusations against us. We may not have been the most energetic of groups, which one could easily attribute to the rampant ongoing malnutrition, but to call us lazy filth and fascist sympathizers who were trying to undermine the working class’s reconstruction of our country struck me, even at the time, as excessive.

Then one day in mid-autumn a film projector was set up in the big hall for our Friday assembly. Boys scrambled to volunteer to set up the large linen screen, excited that we would be seeing a movie for the first time in years. Herr Schimmler looked grim, however. There was a short struggle to thread the film properly and then the lights were dimmed, and the picture began to flicker on the screen ahead.

There was no sound, only the rhythmic rattle of the projector and then a few scattered muffled gasps as we realized what we were looking at. It was footage of pits full of corpses. These corpses were naked for the most part and emaciated to the point that every bone I knew the name of was visible on every corpse through thin, tightly drawn pale white skin. There were hundreds, maybe thousands as the camera pulled back and panned across a larger area. A few people beside the pits wandered about listlessly wearing what looked like striped pyjamas. I looked around quickly to see if I could catch Theodor’s eye. He was staring straight ahead. Other boys were covering their eyes with their hands.

Herr Schimmler began stalking up and down the aisles, smacking the boys who were covering their eyes with a long thin stick. “You must look!” he barked at them. He looked really upset, not just angry but distraught. When he was satisfied that everyone was watching he returned to the front at the side of the screen, and with the film playing on half his face and the other half in the dark, he shouted, “You must watch this! All of you! This is fascism! Your fascist fathers, your fascist uncles and your fascist brothers did this! They murdered millions of innocent civilians! Women, the elderly, children, babies. Jews, communists, dissidents, Gypsies, the mentally ill. They sent them to camps and murdered them and disposed of their corpses like they were garbage. Fascism is the greatest evil the world has ever known. You need to be very grateful that you were liberated by the brave soldiers of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The USSR is the only true and steadfast foe of fascism. It will help those of us who opposed the fascists rebuild this country. This can never happen again.”

The room went silent again and the film ran on for another twenty minutes, showing a hell that I had never imagined possible. I mean this very literally. I have a tremendously powerful imagination and I have read some very dark stories, so I have conjured many fantastical scenes of horror while sitting by myself. But nothing like this. Not ever, not even close. The silence made it worse still.

Chapter Forty

Winter 1946–47

This was the coldest and snowiest winter in recorded memory. Temperatures of -20º Celsius were common. Apparently this was the case all across Europe, although we had only the dimmest awareness of anything outside of a small circle around Colditz and Rochlitz. We did not have a functioning radio and the only newspaper was the Neues Deutschland published by the Socialist Unity Party in Berlin. Week-old copies would circulate Colditz and eventually reach our hands, but the ND, as we called it, mostly consisted of the driest possible political news. For me to call it dry, given that I enthusiastically read long-winded descriptions of the habits of snails or the esoteric musings of medieval