“Dieter “ wake up!” his older brother shouted suddenly in the middle of the night.
“Wha…?” the sleeping blond boy muttered, unwilling to leave the warmth of his bed. He was abruptly aware that the lights had been turned on, so he bid his retreat beneath the blankets…
“WAKE UP! THERE’S A FIRE!” Hans yelled loudly in Dieter’s face “ he was suddenly jerked out of sleep and he bolted upright.
“Mein Gott! The house’s on fire?” Dieter exclaimed worriedly as he scrambled out of bed and put his shoes on, “We have to get out!” He ignored the pain in his eyes that tried adjusting to the bright lights, and started grabbing everything he could, to save it from the fire“
“Not our house, dummkoff!” Hans scolded with ill-disguised amusement. “A house in Adolf Hitler Platz! We have to go help put out the fire!”
His older brother then left the bedroom, no doubt to alert the rest of the family. Dieter had an inexplicable urge to change into his uniform, but his brain caught up to him: no one would care how he was dressed.
After having only put some shoes and socks on, Dieter left the house in his pyjamas. He dived into the chilling cold air and ran down the cobbled length of Erdnuss-Straße all the way to Adolf Hitler Platz.
A crowd of busy citizens was already there, all in a line that stretched from the burning house of Herr Schwalbe to the fountain in the middle of the square.
“You there, boy! Go get some buckets! We’re running short!” a policeman standing on the fountain’s edge wearing a uniform on top and nothing but his underpants on bottom ordered to Dieter. The boy nodded, and ran right back to his home.
Hans suddenly loomed out of the darkness, and… the nerve of him. He was fully dressed in his Hitler Youth uniform, complete with armband and the knife hanging from his belt. “Where are you going, Dieter?”
“Buckets!” he answered without slowing his pace. “They need buckets!”
His older brother skidded to a halt (and almost twisted his ankle on the cobbled street) and abruptly turned back too. Together, they barged back into their more modern brick house and grabbed every bucket-like object they could find. The flower vases and kitchen pots were not spared.
Joined by their mother, father, and brothers and sisters Paul, Marie, and Lena, they rushed back into the dark street armed with the direly needed buckets.
“Get in the bucket line!” the policeman ordered once they had arrived, and they obeyed. Pails, pots, vases, and anything that could hold water was dunked into the fountain and passed from person to person, all the way to the burning house, where sweating men braved the heat to throw water on the flames. In the terrified excitement, some townspeople dropped their containers and were accosted by the half-dressed officer.
The town’s sole fire engine was also there, furiously shooting jets of water into the blazing home. Herr Schwalbe’s house was beyond saving, but everyone worked tirelessly in a desperate attempt to prevent the fire from spreading “ already, the adjacent home was alight!
And so they worked. Firemen manned the hoses and the ordinary citizens operated the endless human conveyer belt, passing the buckets. A few hours passed without anyone fully aware of the time, but finally, the flames flickered away, leaving behind only smoke and the charred timber skeleton of the Schwalbe house.
The townspeople were tired, hot, and drenched in sweat despite the chilling night, and wanted nothing more to return to their homes and wash up. Much to everyone’s chagrin, a black-uniformed Party official (who would have almost vanished into the darkness were it not for his red armband and pale face) had arrived and ordered everyone to stay.
“Please, everyone!” he loudly implored from his perch on the fountain’s edge, next to the half-dressed policeman. “Did anyone see what happened here, what caused the fire?”
There was a torrent of confused shouts as everyone spoke at once. The official made a violent gesture with his arm to call for silence, and once it was eventually achieved, he pointed to a woman in the crowd and said, “You “ what were you saying?”
Her voice free from the former tumult, she answered, “I heard some sort of explosion, so I got up and went outside to take a look. The fire in the house was spreading, and two men came running out, dragging another man… I think that must have been Herr Schwalbe.”
“Where did they go?” the official prodded, and everyone waited for an answer with bated breath.
“I’m not sure; it was very dark, but…” she hesitated, trying to piece together the memory of the group’s strange disappearance of a few hours earlier. “…I think they were headed in the direction of Kartoffel-Straße!”
“Kartoffel-Straße?” many voices chorused in astonishment and anger.
Kartoffel-Straße… it was a small, unimportant street in the town, but it was nevertheless the blight of the small community. The citizens pronounced the name distastefully, as if the very words were bitter “ that street was where the Jews lived. There were probably no more than ten families who lived there (many had fortunately left Germany to plague other countries like France or Britain), but every self-respecting Aryan in the town did their best to avoid that place “ and that street’s infestation thankfully kept to themselves.
But all that changed, based on the woman’s startling revelation “ the Jews had crossed the line. At that moment, everyone forgot their misgivings about the peculiar Schwalbe family; they were odd, no doubt about that, but the Gestapo confirmed that they were just as Aryan as everyone else. And that German family had been cowardly attacked and had their house burned down in the middle of the night by those Jews “ those Untermenschen!
The tired, dishevelled townspeople assembled in Adolf Hitler Platz were in an uproar: there were impassioned shouts, calling for vengeance. Dieter’s mother saw what was coming.
“Come on, Dieter. We have to go back home before something bad happens,” Mutti said to him.
“What? We can’t let those Jews get away with this!” the shocked boy responded. “And how come you’re letting Hans stay, but not me?” he added, noticing that his parents, accompanied by his younger brothers and sisters, had only addressed Dieter and not his uniform-clad older brother, who was standing next to him.
Hans added his weight to the argument on Dieter’s behalf. “He’s not a little child, Mutter. He’s old enough to be in the Deutsches Jungvolk…”
His father nodded understandably, and Mutti conceded defeat. She sighed and said, “Well, be careful you two. Stick close to your brother, Dieter!” With those parting orders, they left Dieter and Hans alone in the crowd of angry townspeople.
The Party official was in his element. He called for silence, and once it was achieved, he announced in a great voice, “We have no time to waste! We must punish the vermin of Kartoffel-Straße, everyone!”
He then thrust a stiff arm out in front of him in salute, and said, “Sieg“”
“Heil!” everyone answered, with their right arms straight and erect, pointed back at the uniformed Party man.
“Sieg“” the official repeated, louder.
“Heil!”
“SIEG“”
“HEIL!”
The cries were deafening, and everyone found themselves caught up in a movement larger than themselves. Their voices chorused as one, unifying them in the solidarity of anger and hate for the Aryan’s most vile enemy “ Dieter wasn’t the only one who screamed himself hoarse.
The heated, noisy mob then followed the Party official out of Adolf Hitler Platz. They thundered down the dark cobbled streets the short distance to Kartoffel-Straße, shouting cries of “Juden, raus!”
The townspeople set about vandalising everything in sight. Windows of the Jewish shops and homes were all smashed. Men charged inside and stole everything they could find “ even some Jews were dragged out onto the street and berated with abuse, and were shouted at with questions of, “Where are the Schwalbes, you swine?”
They had no answers, and they did a very good job of pretending not to know what the Aryans were talking about. “What have we done to you?” a Jewish man with an impressive beard and sidecurls pleaded in terror. “We haven’t done anything, I swear!”
Dieter was suddenly reminded of one of the books his younger brothers and sisters read: You Can’t Trust a Fox in a Heath and a Jew on His Oath.
Just on cue, everyone crowded around the hapless Jew shouted, “Liar!” A man then rushed up with a pair of scissors and proceeded to roughly cut off the Jewish man’s beard. He was soon assisted by others who laughed while they restrained their struggling victim.
It was exhilarating. That was the only way that Dieter could adequately describe the scene. He delighted in smashing windows or simply running around, having his eyes soak in as much of the magnificent sights as possible. The townspeople were all assembled in the raid, unified against the common enemy “ Dieter felt a surging rush of pride for his countrymen and his race, glad that he was fortunate enough to be a part of it.
He spotted a house that was, oddly, completely intact for some reason. “Hey Hans!” Dieter shouted to his older brother, “Those windows haven’t been broken yet!”
“What windows? Where?” he replied excitedly, eager to vandalise and get away with it.
Dieter answered his question by picking up a loose cobblestone and throwing it through the shattering window. “That one!”
“What? You just threw a rock at the wall!” Hans yelled, amused at the antics of his stupid younger brother. Dieter looked back and noticed that Hans had gone back to join a mob in tormenting a family of terrified Jews that had been ousted from their home.
Dieter shattered a second window of the previously undisturbed house, but he observed a bit uneasily that absolutely no one around him seemed to have noticed. The townspeople ransacked everything in the home to the left and the bakery to the right, but completely ignored the home in the middle “ it was as if their eyes refused to acknowledge the structure’s presence, like it wasn’t even there.
Mind racing, Dieter ran up to the front of the house and pressed his hand against the very solid brick “ so it wasn’t a figment of his imagination…
“You’ll notice that the door is over there, my boy,” a voice said.
Dieter jumped. He turned to face the voice and was greeted by the sight of an old man, looking at him through the window he had just shattered. The old man in the pinstriped robe was very tall and skinny, and had wispy grey hair and a long pointed beard that looked sharp enough to puncture a car tyre.
“Who are you?” Dieter asked the old man in a somewhat trembling voice. The boy didn’t sound or look brave and imposing at all. He was, after all, a ten year old in pyjamas.
“Please, call me Strichleiter,” the tall, old man answered kindly, not at all put off by the fact that the little delinquent boy had just vandalised his home like some barbaric Bolshevik. “Come in,” he invited.
Dieter hesitated, buying time to hastily measure the old man. He looked skinny and frail, but lively, and something about his expression told Dieter that he was no Jew. Ultimately, his curiosity got the better of him “ he looked furtively to the sides and behind him, and Dieter came to the conclusion that only he could see the old man and his home. Against his better judgment, he went through the door, hoping for some kind of explanation.
“Don’t worry. I enjoyed smashing windows too when I was a boy. For a real challenge, try breaking one without making any noise,” Herr Strichleiter said lightly to Dieter once he cautiously came inside. “Please, sit down.”
He sat in the indicated chair and surveyed the small room he was in, lit dimly by a clever arrangement of candles scattered about. Directly in front of him in a narrow chair was the old man, who was smiling and holding what looked like a wooden drumstick. The rest of the room was a bit crowded, filled with very quaint and dusty furniture “ there were also some bizarre brass instruments of completely unknown purposes.
“I-I’m sorry about the windows, sir,” Dieter stammered in apology. He gestured to the front of the room… and was shocked by what he saw. His gobsmacked expression bore an uncanny resemblance to a guppy at feeding time.
There were no shards of glass on the floor or empty frames in the wall. The windows were there, completely intact.
Unsurprisingly, Dieter thought for one wild moment that he had gone mad. First there was the house that only he seemed to be able to see. Then he supposedly broke the front windows, but didn’t…
It took a moment for Dieter to realise that Herr Strichleiter was talking to him: “…there’s a perfectly simple explanation, but first “ I’m curious… Why did you break my windows to begin with? Just some good felonious fun?”
Dieter found his voice and blurted, “No “ it was the Jews! We’re here to teach them a lesson!” He then launched into what would have been a long explanation about how they caused all of Germany’s problems, but he stopped, intrigued by the old man’s expression. He looked politely puzzled, as if he had never even heard of the Jews, much less known that he lived in a neighbourhood chocked full of them. Dieter was under the impression that Herr Strichleiter didn’t go out very often.
The old man squinted through the mysteriously intact window, watching the commotion outside “ his brows furrowed in thought. When he turned to speak to Dieter, his expression and voice were still in his light, almost amused tone.
“You shouldn’t waste your time with those… ‘Joos,’ you call them?” Herr Strichleiter said. Then, in a much more serious voice “ “There are more important, greater enemies than them.”
“What “ Communists? Homosexuals?” Dieter threw out quickly. Who could possibly be worse than the Jews? he thought, and anxious for the old man’s answer.
Herr Strichleiter pointed a wrinkled finger at the window. “Them,” he stated simply, looking disdainfully at the crowd outside.
“So… you do mean the Jews“”
“Nein!” the old man declared with surprising force. “I do not mean the Joos or the Columnists or the homosexuals. Come,” he implored as he got up from his chair and walked around the cluttered furniture to the window. Dieter followed, confused.
The old man waved his finger back and forth, as if drawing an invisible lasso around the crowd of townspeople outside the window. “Them,” he spat disgustedly, with all vestiges of warmth and kindness in his old face absent. “Those people out there. Those people are the real enemy “ the Muggles.”
Strichleiter turned to Dieter, who was now genuinely disturbed; frightened by the traitor of the Reich standing in front of him “ he called his fellow Germans enemies and Muggles, whatever that was supposed to mean. He revealed his wooden drumstick and held it rigid, right in front of Dieter’s face.
“You are like me, my boy. You are special, and this,” he nodded his head towards the thin piece of wood, “is what sets us apart from all those people out there in the street.”
The old traitor with the stick was plainly mad, and Dieter wanted nothing more than to get away from him. He wasn’t sure whether the voice was real or just his imagination, but he heard his older brother outside calling for him.
“I have to go,” Dieter said quickly. Without a backwards glance, he fled outside into the frigid Kartoffel-Straße, and was confronted by an agitated Hans. In a confused, frightened daze, he didn’t hear a word of his brother’s lecture about staying in sight as they walked back home.
Dieter’s sleep was troubled for the next few days.