*
You have to put this on and go to the German consulate the day after tomorrow.
†
Make sure you hide all that under your sweater or jacket.
‡
I don’t want to put it on and I’m not going anywhere.
§
You have to go there, or else the Hammans are going to throw us out of the house.
‖
You are the Hitler Youth, the future of our empire … You know that the peace-loving peoples of Germany and Russia are fighting against the plutocratic, imperalist aggressors — England and the United States … That’s why you must practice!
a
See what you can accomplish in winter when you have no weapoins and the enemy counterattacks. Shovel snow into the rivers and streams so that they swell and hold the enemy at bay.
b
He can’t win it. He’s a Slovene and his father’s a Slovene.
c
Doesn’t matter. His mother is German and he’s a member of the Hitler Youth …
On Christmas
ON CHRISTMAS Eve Gisela and I got toys and clothes from the German organization in town. Gisela got a sweater that smelled strongly of perfume and some other girl, along with a black doll made of celluloid with a grass skirt and a ring through her nose … really quite nicely made. I got a racket and shuttlecock and a red checked jacket, the kind that bad guys usually wore in the westerns … I put it on right over my shirt and when I went out that evening to look at the toys on display in the tobacco shop’s window, a policeman stopped and scrutinized me from the side. He thought I was planning to rob the store …
The victories of the German army around the world had begun to surround me with friends. My schoolmates became more polite. Those victories and defeats of some army in the distant world were like bingo, where you’d win or lose friends … It annoyed me that they surrounded me for things that smelled of far-off, noisy places that I’d never seen with my own eyes and where something was always exploding … I wanted to get rid of random friendships like that … I already knew how that went: warm today, cold tomorrow. It actually tickled me as I headed to school in the morning to see them crawl out of their houses so they could join me on the way up to Graben … As though I wore one of those uniforms with the ribbons … as though I were one of Rommel’s tank drivers or a Stuka pilot. “The English have got more tanks,” some kid named Bajec said to me. Now he was going to go on about the respective merits of German Tigers and British Churchills … Even Karel changed. All of a sudden he was at my heels more than ever, without my particularly asking him to go places with me … His mother invited me to their place for crepes with crushed walnuts. I sat at a round table at the back of their shop, which they closed over the noon hour, and ate with the whole family. Ivka smiled at me once. For the first time …