Gudrun stared at him. She’d been told, at school, how Hitler had taken Russia as living space, but she’d never thought through the implications. What had happened to the original inhabitants? They’d been subhuman, she’d been taught; they’d deserved to be displaced…
“But it was in Warsaw that it happened,” Grandpa Frank said. “It was 1944; the Americans had invaded Japan, the Russian armies were being destroyed and we were clearing the city of Jews. I was in charge of one block… there was a Jewess living there. She was the mother of a little girl, but she was pretty. I made sure she got to remain there as long as she was my lover.”
“A Jewess,” Gudrun repeated, shocked. The pictures she’d seen of Jews had all shown misshapen figures, so dirty and filthy they could hardly pass for human. “You started an affair with a stinking Jewess?”
Her grandfather squeezed her wrist, hard. “You’ve been lied to,” he said harshly, as she winced in pain and tried to pull away. “They were human. They didn’t have horns, or cloven feet, and they certainly didn’t stink. You couldn’t tell the difference between a Jew and a German if you met them in the streets. Tell me – how could the misshapen monsters you’re taught to recognise at school possibly pass for Germans?”
Gudrun swallowed. She’d never thought about it.
“That woman… I was her lover for nearly a year,” Grandpa Frank said. “Her child… she started to call me papa. I used to bring her little gifts as well as ration packs; I even fiddled the records so she’d be classed as a Pole, rather than a Jew. It wasn’t much, but I thought it would keep them alive for longer. Maybe it did. But in the end they found out.”
He laughed harshly. “They weren’t too pleased at me sticking it in a Jewess, I can tell you,” he said, darkly. “I might have sired a child on her, you know; a half-German child. That really would have upset the Race Classification Bureau. They might even have had to class the child as something other than a Jew. But I didn’t get her pregnant. My CO told me that I had to take her to the camps myself. I had to sentence her to death to save myself. And I did, Gudrun. I bound her hands, put her in the car and drove her to the camps. All the way, the little girl was asking me where we were going, what had happened to her mother…”
“No,” Gudrun said.
“Yes,” Grandpa Frank said. “They took them both at once, of course; they added them to the next batch for extermination. I was forced to watch as they were both stripped naked and marched into the showers, accompanied by dozens of other Jewesses. And then the gas started pumping into the chamber and they started to die. The little girl kept looking at me, as if she couldn’t believe what I’d done to her, until she collapsed and died. And after they were dead, we had to burn the bodies…”
He shuddered, violently. “Do you understand why I drink?”
Gudrun stared at him. She’d never imagined, not in her worst nightmares, that the state could do anything of the sort. Everything she’d been told had been curiously hygienic, as if the natives had merely disappeared after the Germans had arrived. And yet… it never occurred to her to doubt his words. They had the ring of truth and they chilled her to the bone.
She found her voice, somehow. “What happened to you?”
“Oh, they never trusted me after that,” Grandpa Frank said. “I had betrayed the Volk, you see, by making love to a Jewess. There was no hope of promotion. I took early retirement and went back to Berlin. Your grandmother was kind enough to marry me; I never told her the truth, of course, even when my nightmares drove her out of bed. We had the nastiest arguments before she fell pregnant and left her job. And then she died four years after your mother was born. I brought her up on my own. Never married again, either.”
He let go of Gudrun’s wrist. “Every time I close my eyes, I see her face,” he muttered, reaching for the bottle. “If I remain drunk all the time, it helps… I keep thinking about killing myself, but what good would that do?”
“I don’t know,” Gudrun said. It had been easy to dismiss Grandpa Frank when he’d just been a disgusting old man. Now… now she wasn’t sure what to think. “But what else can you do?”
“I was taught that suicide was a mortal sin,” Grandpa Frank said. “And yet, surely what we did in the Einsatzgruppen was even worse.
“We told ourselves that they were subhuman. We told ourselves that we were strong and they were weak and the strong had rights to use the weak as they saw fit. We told ourselves that their mere existence was a threat to the Reich, that they had to be destroyed to save ourselves from certain destruction. And yet, after what I did, I can no longer believe it…”
His voice trailed off. “You wrote that leaflet,” Grandpa Frank said. “And you could possibly pass for a BDM girl if you wore your uniform and kept your eyes downcast.”
“I did,” Gudrun confirmed. There was no point in trying to deny it. “Grandpa…”
“The state isn’t going to let you get away with it,” Grandpa Frank hissed. “They’ve buried so many would-be reformers over the years. Don’t ever underestimate how far they’re prepared to go to root out all opposition to their rule. But don’t stop. Don’t let them get away with it.”
He leaned back in his bed. “I told myself there was nothing I could do,” he whispered, as he closed his eyes. “And at the time, maybe I was right.”
Gudrun waited, her heart pounding in her chest, but he said nothing else. She checked his breathing – for a moment, she thought he’d finally let go of life and surrendered to death – and then relaxed as she realised it was stable. Rising to her feet, she walked out the door and headed down to her room. Suddenly, the threat of her father’s anger seemed unimportant, compared to what she’d been told. She felt sick to even consider her grandfather having an affair with anyone…
But he wasn’t an old man at the time, she told herself, as she closed the door behind her – there was no point in locking it – and sat down on the bed. He wouldn’t have been much older than Kurt.
Her thoughts were so jumbled up that it was a relief when she heard someone tapping at the door. She braced herself, grimly prepared to take whatever punishment her father decided to mete out, then blinked in surprise as Kurt opened the door and stepped into the room. He was holding the leaflet in one hand.
“You may as well read it,” he said, as he closed the door. “I managed to talk father out of beating you, but it would probably be better if you didn’t show your face until tomorrow.”
Gudrun swallowed. “Thank you,” she said, as she took the leaflet. It was identical to the leaflets she’d handed out only a few hours ago. “What did you say to him?”
“Told him you’d jump to the worst possible conclusion, because that’s what girls do,” Kurt said. He ignored the rude gesture she aimed at him. “And that you probably thought Konrad was mentioned by name.”
He lowered his voice. “You’re playing a dangerous game, Gudrun.”