The old man Berlin (prologue)

by Smilodon Fatalis (Tygress) in experimental world of steel wire, where I write for my life

Prologue

In my memories, I am in the house that brought me so much pain. Mutti is upstairs. Vati is in the cellar, feeding the fugitives. The year I do not recall, which is strange. Every day afterwards I can pin a date to, but the day they came I do not remember.

There is a loud banging on the door. I go to answer it. Three men in the dreaded uniform come, push past me and climb the stairs. I repeat a bunch of bad words inside my head, wondering why I was so stupid. The three men are soldiers. The first, I recognise as Johann who lives three doors down, and used to ride his bike with no hands in the summer, and was always loud, which annoyed his sister who is extremely ugly, though Mutti tells me it is rude to say things like that. The second I don’t know, so he must be from the other side of the city, or from far away. He has a silly moustache like the man they all salute. It’s supposed to be cool, but I know it’s stupid. The last is Peter who is Johann’s friend and doesn’t eat meat because he likes animals, more than people. Is that why he shot a man dead? No, there must be another reason. I think his father beat him when he was younger. His mother is a waste of space, so Mutti says. Mutti had a fight with his mother once. Vati despairs of her.

The carpet is green, we bought it before Silly-moustache came to power. I won’t think his name. Not yet. I follow the soldiers, they search my room, and I ask them not to touch my things, I don’t like them touching my books. Especially the stranger. I have never liked strangers, because I don’t know what they are like, or if they are from good families, or whether they do bad things or not, or use bad words in public. I know it is naïve to think like this, and Mutti despairs of me, like Vati despairs of Mutti.

The soldiers laugh, and go into Mutti’s room. She uses lots of bad words to them, they are angry. They march her downstairs, just in time to see Vati coming from the cellar. Something snaps in Mutti. She knows they know. She runs upstairs. Whilst the soldiers are shouting at Vati, I sneak upstairs to see whether Mutti knows what to do. Her door is shut, but I go in. I scream.

Mutti always tied good knots, and I can’t untie her, even standing on a chair. The soldiers come in, and I ask them to cut her down, but they laugh, and the stranger says it saves good bullets. That confuses me, because how can a bullet be good when they take life away like that? I don’t like the soldiers, not even Johann who used to always give me sweets. I keep screaming until Johann shakes me by the shoulders, and asks me if I knew about the filthy Jews in the cellar. I say yes, and they are not filthy because they had a wash only last night. He frowns. He asks what I think about Hitler, and I say he can go to hell.

That is when they drag me downstairs, and I am on my way somewhere. I didn’t know where. Not then. But now, outside of those memories, more than half a century later, I know it was probably Auschwitz. The journey was bad, the time there was worse.

I wake up from my memories, and find myself touching the wall of the house. Everything is so clear, and yet I can hardly remember day to day affairs. Something snapped inside me when I was a child. Probably when they came for us.