A Quiet Genocide Read online

  It was breathtakingly cold in halls in the morning. The building’s pipes took time to crank up ill-temperedly after being turned off for the night. Jozef saw the charm in it for the first time as he pulled up his trousers around his shrinking waist. Temporary depression had killed his appetite and he had lost weight.

  He checked his features quickly in the mirror and swept his mousy hair, dishevelled from sleep, over to one side. He suddenly remembered how handsome he was as he prepared to scrub his face in his tiny sink. Jozef had few blemishes. He had slept for Germany this last week, had not drunk and was a picture of health compared to most undergraduates. He peered deeper into his green eyes. He felt like himself again.

  ‘I can do this,’ he said out loud.

  He turned the cold tap on – there was no hot – and freezing water spluttered out, quickly filling the basin, which could only take a couple of pints of liquid. Jozef, who had blossomed into a 6ft-tall young man, had to stoop awkwardly to splash water onto his face. If he was not careful he cracked his head sharply on the protruding tap when he rose back up and cursed loudly. If his immediate neighbours in university halls were in, they were startled. They did not think this painfully quiet individual hid such fury.

  Jozef washed his face with soap and rinsed it clean with running water. He did not like to use the water he had just muddied with dirty skin. He felt he was undoing his good work. Jozef was particular that way. He had an ordered mind and he liked to tick things off in his head when they were done. It made him feel good; he knew where he was, he knew what he had achieved and what still needed to be tackled. Now, he had an utterly unsettling chasm to fill in his personal history – who am I?

  He enjoyed the walk from his room in the tower block at the top of campus, winding his way downstream through the early morning rush. This was new for everyone and Jozef revelled in the fact that they were all now in the same uncomfortable boat. There were people like him, pacing alone; there were people who had wet hair who, unlike Jozef, had preferred every precious moment in bed to preparing quietly and conscientiously for the academic day ahead; and there were people who looked a mess and who were clearly still intoxicated from one last night of revelry. Their influence and patter were beginning to grate, Jozef sensed. Thank God, he thought again and his mood improved some more.

  Eventually Jozef reached the bottom of another large tower block, which served as the main lecture hall and the home of the majority of academic departments, including modern history. He climbed flights of stairs until he reached floor seven. He already knew exactly where he was supposed to be, because he had done a dry run of this morning’s commute the previous week. Jozef’s mind had demanded he do it, otherwise he would not have been able to sleep, panicked by uncertainty. Now he walked down a narrow corridor until he reached Professor Zielinski’s door, fifth on the left, first past the secretary’s office. Five-to-nine. Perfect.

  ‘Come in young man,’ greeted the professor, wearing a deep green suit and matching bow tie. His hair was an unkempt mop of greying curls and he was exactly how Jozef had imagined him back home in Munich over the summer.

  He was the first to arrive.

  ‘In good time,’ said the professor cheerily. ‘A man after my own heart.’

  Jozef smiled. It was the first pleasant thing anyone had said to him all week.

  ‘And who might you be young man?’ asked the professor, sat across from Jozef in the small box room, which was no bigger than Jozef’s childhood bedroom. Impossibly crowded shelves of books, a lifetime of learning, leaned up on all sides of the space.

  ‘Jozef,’ he answered nervously. ‘Jozef Diederich.’

  ‘Herr Diederich. Ah, yes,’ said the professor, looking down his list of undergraduates. ‘You are one of six I am expecting this morning.’

  The last to arrive was a young lady who had failed her first year at university and who was now resitting it. She was a relatively seasoned student and apologised ‘profusely’ for the late intrusion before making a maddening commotion with her bag and belongings.

  Professor Zielinski knew she did not mean a word of it. Frau Kluge was always late. The professor had wanted to throw her out of the department but had been outvoted by his fellow history professors who quietly fantasised about her.

  Frau Kluge spoke a lot but made little sense, a trait Professor Zielinski deplored. He preferred quiet contemplation and then only concise utterances rather than Frau Kluge’s 100-words-a-minute bluster before revealing anything of real note. Frau Kluge dominated the early debate – Professor Zielinski had feared as much. His class of shy first-years didn’t stand a chance. Frau Kluge wore dark glasses, which she lied were for an eye condition but which really hid a hard night drinking. An avalanche of them had buried any ambition of passing her first year exams. Professor Zielinski, wearied by Frau Kluge’s aggressive but misinformed arguments, drew the debate to an early close.

  ‘Seeing as we haven’t heard most of you speak this morning, which is slightly disappointing, might I ask a question? What, do you suppose, is the worst thing that could happen this year?’

  ‘You fail,’ said Frau Kluge as soon as the words left Professor Zielinski’s mouth.

  ‘No, Frau Kluge,’ said the professor with a sigh. ‘Anyone else?’

  Jozef felt he knew the answer. This knowledge made him flush with excitement but also with embarrassment. He had felt horribly outgunned in IQ terms in the first university seminar of his academic life. How could he know anything everyone else did not? Blank faces around the room. Someone else piped up. Blast, thought Jozef. They had beaten him to it. He should have been braver.

  ‘We start World War III,’ said another boy.

  ‘Well, that would be pretty bad,’ said the professor, more agreeably. ‘But perhaps not quite.’

  ‘We die,’ said Jozef, simply and without invitation.

  Professor Zielinski smiled and looked at him. He had been hoping he would speak for the last half an hour. ‘Thank you, Herr Diederich. Finally, someone with perspective. Dismissed.’

  Everyone bundled out of the room, bags wrapped around themselves and preventing Jozef from climbing out of his seat until only he and the professor remained.

  ‘You too Herr Diederich,’ said the professor, smiling and without looking up.

  Chapter Ten

  Gerhard and Catharina sat down for dinner. Catharina had prepared it promptly because she knew tonight was Michael’s evening for coming round to drink with her husband.

  Gerhard, famished after hardly eating all day, would normally ask for hearty portions when he arrived home. Not tonight. ‘That is fine darling,’ he said when she had served only a modest plate.

  Catharina knew why. Her husband did not like to drink on a full stomach. It, one, stopped him becoming drunk quite so quickly and, two, alcohol only then further bloated him, he informed her. Catharina no longer went singing in the Munich ladies’ choir on Thursday evenings. Some of the other women had become dismissive of her and she had had enough and resigned, though fearing she was perhaps giving them what they wanted.

  ‘There will come a day when none of us can entertain their kind in this world,’ said Frau Richter-Ostermann, the chairwoman of the choir’s board.

  Catharina had not been supposed to hear that observation upon entering the ladies’ restroom during a break in the rehearsal.

  Frau Richter-Ostermann had been unrepentant. ‘No need, ladies,’ she said when her coven flinched and prepared to skulk away upon Catharina’s entrance. ‘We are done here.’

  The sad truth was Catharina would have agreed with her colleagues had they cared to ask. Catharina now went to bed early on Thursday evenings with her latest book. She made herself a hot water bottle and a mug of hot chocolate and read for two, sometimes three, hours before finally feeling sleepy and turning in for the night. She had come to cherish these occasions. They gave her time to herself, time away from her husband – time she needed. She had all day, every day to herself now Jo
zef was in Berlin, but that still was not enough. When Gerhard returned home from work it felt like an intrusion. What are you doing back so early, she would snap in her head.

  Their home had seemed so cramped, so chaotic while Jozef was growing up and they had had Sebastian round every other evening. She had pined for extra space during those happy years. Now her house felt like an aircraft hangar. She could have invited the Red Army round for supper and still had room to spare if Gerhard decided to drink in the other room. Their home had been emptied of Jozef’s belongings and energy.

  Gerhard was just a man she lived with, someone she shared a bed with. They were no longer intimate. The only married thing she did in that regard was offer a cheek to be pecked routinely before Gerhard left for work every morning. That was it. Catharina had long stopped feeling those kisses. It was like brushing up to an inanimate object – nothing.

  ‘How was your day, darling?’ Gerhard asked while they ate.

  At least he was chirpy. He was about to get drunk and had been looking forward to the sensation all day.

  Catharina felt her husband had started communicating in another language. She did not understand him and had no idea what to utter in reply. ‘Fine,’ she said.

  ‘Did you speak to anyone nice?’ said Gerhard, fast exhausting the short stock list of questions he repeated for his wife every evening.

  ‘No one,’ answered Catharina blankly. She sipped the last of the modest glass of wine she had enjoyed while preparing tonight’s meal. She had finished her plate and she could see her husband had done so and was now reading his newspaper, Süddeutsche Zeitung, while his food settled for a moment. Then he would be up and pouring himself drinks in preparation for Michael. Even though the room and their home felt vast now, the square dinner table they shared appeared tiny. Gerhard was uncomfortably close to her, despite having his head firmly in today’s headlines.

  ‘How is Jozef settling in at university?’ Michael asked Gerhard later that evening, whisky in one hand and the other resting comfortably on the arm of the Diederich’s best chair.

  ‘Fine, fine,’ said Gerhard.

  ‘Any homesickness? It’s a big step.’

  ‘No, I don’t think so,’ said Gerhard, quietly inebriated and unwittingly repeating the lie Jozef had told him on the telephone a few days earlier. ‘Jozef said he was surprised himself he had not felt more homesick.’

  ‘Gut,’ said Michael, happy that Gerhard did not now know his previously gregarious son had become a loner and cried alone in his room at night while fellow undergraduates went out drinking and socialising.

  Michael had placed a spy close to Jozef, reporting back on his early movements away from home. He knew Mathias’ father and had made sure Mathias went to the same institution as Jozef. It had not proved difficult. The Nazis’ true triumph was their unfeeling efficiency and ability to transform previously God-fearing innocents into quiet monsters. Mathias’ father was a Catholic priest and had been one of the few in the influential church to sympathize with the Nazis during their twelve years in power. The church was the only institution to stand up to Hitler with any real success at home and live to tell the tale.

  The Nazis did not solely target Jews and communists. They targeted anyone who physically and mentally strayed from their pure Aryan ideal. That included the handicapped, the homosexual and coloured communities, gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses and those deemed to be ‘asocial’ – socialists, democrats and trade unionists.

  * * *

  ‘Guten Morgen young man,’ Mathias greeted Jozef in Berlin university’s dining hall. ‘Do you mind, dear chap?’

  Jozef did not have time to answer before Mathias seated himself and greedily began wolfing cereal and milk before looking forward to bacon and eggs. Mathias certainly ate well. Most students did at breakfast. First year undergraduates were left to fend for themselves at lunchtime, but were given breakfast and supper back at their halls to calm paranoid mothers’ fears that they weren’t feeding their sons or daughters properly.

  Evening meals, invariably, were awful – cold, lumpy stews, poorly seasoned quickly killed appetites, except on Saturdays when ‘snack suppers’ were served of sausage and salzkartoffeln, which of course everyone devoured happily. Breakfasts, on the other hand, were spectacular. You could eat as much as you wanted. Crisp cereal; cold milk; hot porridge; and a feast of cooked luxuries – sausage, bacon, fried eggs and black pudding.

  It certainly did not pay to sleep in – unless one could afford to eat out on an evening. Some could but not Jozef, who painstakingly eked out a shoestring weekly budget, enough to buy bread and cheese for lunch – and supper if needs be – and five pints of beer on a Friday night. He was usually sick after his fourth. No matter. The fact that he could afford a fifth kept him going through the week. Maybe this week he would manage it. Maybe you shouldn’t try, Jozef imagined his mother warning him with half a smile back home.

  Jozef had left his appetite back in Munich and had quickly lost weight in those first few days away, weight his slight but beautiful frame could ill afford to shed. His broad shoulders and slim stomach were beginning to look gaunt and turn in on themselves. Jozef was quite enjoying the emaciated look. He wrongly felt he had previously been carrying too much puppy fat.

  ‘You never miss breakfast do you?’ asked Mathias rhetorically from across the table the two of them uncomfortably shared.

  The sun poured into the vast dining hall, abuzz with activity and spirits warmed by good food. A trickle of porridge slid distastefully from the right side of Mathias’ mouth. He had not noticed and Jozef was not about to inform him.

  ‘Are you a robot dear chap?’

  Jozef was instantly offended. ‘No,’ he said simply, trying hard to remain polite.

  The first year outcasts shuffled meekly by to take their usual table at the back of the dining hall. There was a pecking order even here and they instinctively knew their place at the bottom of it.

  Jozef felt drawn to one of them – a girl with milk-bottomed glasses, which distorted her face unfavourably, but who was probably very pretty otherwise. Her skin, hidden by a conservative skirt and socks pulled up to her knees, was whiter than snow. She trailed behind the hardcore group of six outcasts, all boys, and it was clear she sensed she did not quite belong. But she did not know where else to go. It was early days, Jozef agreed in his head and then stopped himself from holding an imaginary conversation with her and refocused his attention to the plateful in front of him. He was ravenous.

  Chapter Eleven

  The Diederichs were having Karl and Jana Gottlieb, Sebastian’s parents, over for dinner. It had been more than a year. The Gottliebs were unsure, but Catharina had suggested it and Jana did not have the heart to reject her proposal based on her female intuition. She could hear an SOS in the cracks of Catharina’s voice. Jana knew Gerhard had the makings of a monster when drink took hold and was not about to abandon her acquaintance now. Karl had strongly advised that they make their excuses, even after Jana’s initial acceptance, but Jana stayed true to their commitment. Gerhard hardly wanted the Gottliebs over either, but at least saw an opportunity to drink on such an occasion. His wife would not dare reproach him while they were entertaining.

  The following morning Catharina was up early, tidying things away. Gerhard was still asleep. Last night had not been a success. Gerhard had been too drunk too early, but more than that – the whole evening had seemed wrong from the moment they had greeted the Gottliebs at the door. Their sons no longer lived in each other’s pockets and without that bond tying the quartet together there was little will on either side to maintain good relations. What was the point, thought Gerhard through his stupor. Catharina had broken down while preparing dessert in the kitchen. Jana had followed and comforted her quietly. Catharina found the idea of homosexuality abhorrent, but in that delicate exchange she enjoyed more affection in Jana’s kind caresses than in years of marriage.

  ‘If you ever need me,’ Jana said softly i
n her ear between gentle sobs. ‘Just call round and we can talk, just talk.’

  Catharina had nodded in reply while holding a dessert spoon and small pot of pouring cream, which caught one of her tears. ‘I should throw this out,’ Catharina said.

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Jana with a smile, which Catharina soon returned. ‘Pouring cream. Nonsense.’

  The two ladies served dessert back in the dining room together. Karl was relieved to see them. Gerhard had wanted to talk about the war again. Karl had had enough. It was time to look forward, he thought.

  * * *

  Life seemed hopeless for Catharina, who had started to accept that final fact. She had been happy once, but it had been so fleeting that she had not realised until the magic had disappeared like gold dust down a river. She looked back on that part of her life now like it belonged to a different person in a different time. She was an aging, dutiful wife. Her son had left home and so had laughter. If Catharina got through an evening without feeling like harming her husband it was something of a success. In her head, she was alone. Perversely, those were the kindest moments; the rest were simply to be endured.

  Then, something happened.

  The magic was back, unannounced like all those years before. She met someone and felt like she was fifteen again.

  He worked at the butcher’s on Georg-Elser-Platz and was younger than her but not too young. He was beautiful. He welcomed her from behind the counter, smiling disarmingly like only he could. It was not quite love at first sight, but something in her stirred and she loosened the collar of her scarf with lonely fingers.

  ‘Guten Morgen Frau Diederich,’ said Janus, who was Polish with elegant, dark hair swept over to one side.