Chapter Seven
WOLFGANG SCHWARZSCHILD HAD NEVER raised a hand to his wife, Elke.
He did not need to beat her to break her.
Victor and his older brother, Tobias, grew up eating their meals around a dinner table where their grandfather, the old and wizened Dietmar, sat at the head, while his cruel eyes followed his daughter-in-law around the room.
He inspected every dish, every plate, how she arranged the silver cutlery and the glasses, serving him and her husband first, before she moved on to the children.
Victor’s mother did not sit at the other end of the table—no. Not even Wolfgang had earned the honour of occupying the place opposite his father. For twelve long years the chair had stood empty, wearing the imprint of Hildegard, Victor’s late grandmother.
As a child, and later when he returned home from the Western Front, Wolfgang took his meals to the right of his father.
Across from him, on Dietmar’s left, sat Tobias, while Victor occupied the chair beside his brother.
Victor expected to find his mother opposite him, next to her husband, yet there she was, in the corner of his eyes, half-hidden, eating in silence by the empty chair. Across from other empty chairs.
Instead, Victor remembered how his father stared at Tobias and his crutch. Wolfgang’s jaw had worked, his mouth forcing out a low sound. He muttered something; only later did Victor realise what his father had said. What his father had called his own son.
Overnight, Tobias had turned into der Krüppel, the cripple, his presence at the dinner table an eyesore, a stain on the family’s honour.
There was no honour in filing paperwork for the SD or the SS-TV.
What good would all that paperwork do, Wolfgang mused, when the country needed fighters, not writers?
There was no honour in cowering behind a desk, trying to decipher letters or filling ledgers with numbers.
Honour, Victor turned the word in his mind and examined it.
The words were etched into the blades both he and Tobias had received when they swore the oath years ago.
Tobias’ dagger was lost, but Victor still carried his every time he put on the uniform.
Meine Ehre hei?t Treue[16]. Honour, Victor chewed the word over and over.
Tobias continued to wear a uniform; it was grey, the long coat concealing his limp as he walked, but it was as though he wore nothing.
As if he were nothing. His word, his actions no longer earned him respect.
Neither Dietmar nor Wolfgang ever questioned what it meant to have honour.
They had let Victor and Tobias enlist in the Hitlerjugend[17], and later in Napola[18].
They read their newspapers and listened to the anti-aircraft station on the radio.
They paid their taxes and their donations to the Red Cross and the Reich Colonial League.
Sometimes Victor saw his mother do needlework for the Winter Relief Fund.
Elke had joined the Frauenschaft[19], but she never wore the badge, nor spoke about what the other women did at the meetings.
Victor did not think his mother particularly liked being in the party, but it gave her an excuse to leave the house.
So long as she kept herself busy and out of sight, they left her to her sewing.
Victor had grown used to the occasional odd job rousing him from bed and into a car waiting to drive him wherever he was needed.
His father made it his mission to raise his younger son into the ranks of the Waffen-SS, in Tobias’ place.
Tonight, Victor was called at the train station.
They assigned him to help load the workers onto the trains, and maintain order and civility.
The train was running late, and the platform was overflowing with bodies, personal articles, and furniture.
They had been waiting for hours; the sun was just peeking above the horizon.
Some of the uniformed men were yelling, pointing their fingers at the large trunks and gesturing for their owners to dump them.
Leave them behind, take only the clothes on their back, throw away all other belongings.
Victor huffed; his breath formed a pale cloud above the collar of his coat. When the train arrived at last, the metal wheels screeched horridly into the grey light of the morning, and he was glad to see the mass of bodies finally begin to move.
The prisoners—for this was what they were escorting—climbed into the carriages, some of them clutching what little the soldiers had allowed them to keep. Victor’s gaze moved down the platform and noticed his comrades doing the strangest thing.
They were nailing the doors of one of the carriages shut.
The men leaned their weight against the timber, hammering at the doors that would not close properly.
It might serve as a practical solution to an unexpected problem now, but Victor knew it would cause a commotion when the train stopped at other stations and passengers were unable to come and go as they pleased.
Perhaps this was why the train had been delayed: the soldiers at the previous station had to nail the doors there as well.
When the train departed, it left them amid the abandoned possessions of the prisoners. Victor asked the commanding officer what time he was to report back.
“Report back?” The man glanced up from an open trunk of clothes at his feet and eyed the insignia on Victor’s collar.
“To escort the prisoners back to the station, sir.” Victor said, and when the officer kept staring at him, he added, “After their shift at the labour camp, sir. When do we expect them back?”
The officer laughed, visibly amused. Some of the other soldiers turned to look at them, annoyed by the disturbance. They were rifling through the boxes and trunks, jumbling them further. Railway workers from the station were coming their way, perhaps to help, or join the looting.
The officer patted Victor on the shoulder and moved past him. “They are not coming back, boy.”
Whatever reason had remained was thrown into the nothingness when the bombing began.
Victor found himself sleeping in his uniform, becoming one with its field-grey colour.
He kicked off his boots and lay on his back, sometimes too tired to shrug off the heavy greatcoat.
Other times he flung it to the ground and slept in his shirt and trousers; the muscles on his back pressed against the holster of his pistol and the dagger at his hip.
If a bomb hit their house and the roof buried him, he would die dressed like a true German, the Soldbuch[20] folded neatly in his pocket, with honour.
His father and grandfather would be proud.
The hysteria of the thought made him shake with laughter, the radio in the dining room barely drowning the sound.
Even in his sleep, Victor could not imagine what ‘peace’ might look like; bombs shrouded his homeland, the streets of Berlin where he had played as a child now gone or pocked with craters like an alien moon.
The Gestapo raided restaurants and cinemas in one last, desperate attempt to restore the peace, to find someone to blame for the colossal collapse of order.
Sometimes the dreams took him back to his infantry training: the weeks spent with his comrades learning to strip, clean, and load rifles, wrestling with machine guns and heavy weapons.
Like his brother Tobias, Victor excelled physically, proving a better fighter in close combat rather than as a marksman.
At school he had done boxing, bringing home medals and ribbons from championships, and the occasional broken nose.
During the training he learned map-reading and undertook fieldcraft and tactics, never aspiring to go beyond the station of Scharführer[21].
His brother had been the ambitious one, the one destined for a military career.
Victor was meant to be the second best, following him closely.
A reserve in the Schwarzschild family line.
It was Tobias who failed to make it fast enough to the shelter when the sirens sounded, the crutch slowing him down.
The first time it happened, Victor was out, staying late at the offices of the SD, in expectation of another night spent on his feet.
He heard the sirens, but instead of going to the designated shelter, made for home.
The streets were empty, Berlin was plunged in frigid darkness, the whole city waiting for the sky above to split and burst into flame.
When he stepped through the entrance hall and into the dining room, he was startled to find a man sitting at the table, busy with something in the dark.
The clank and scrape of metal and porcelain was so loud in the silence, it made Victor flinch.
The man appeared to be eating. He worked the knife and fork, cutting pieces of meat and lifting them blindly to his mouth.
He reached out for a glass and spilled some of its contents when he tried to refill it from a pitcher.
“Tobias?”
The man inclined his head towards Victor’s voice. He pulled the chair beside him from under the table, and offered Victor a seat.
“Mutti said to leave you some of the dinner,” Tobias said between mouthfuls.
“Why are you here? Didn’t the sirens go off?” Victor asked, suddenly unsure. He recalled everyone at the office evacuating, while the radio was barking instructions to go and find shelter. Any minute now, the lights were going to come back on and the city would brim with voices full of relief.
He walked towards the table, unbuttoned his greatcoat and tossed his cap on a chair.
“I couldn’t sleep,” his brother said and patted his good leg.