Overcome my fear. Resist pain. Tolerate pain. Have the strength of a young wild animal. Just like our Führer wants.

I have to get my imagination working, to persuade myself that all this is…whatever…a simulation exercise, practical training to be one of the Pimpfe in the Hitler Youth.

Except that the reality is I’m not a Pimpf yet, only a baby!

It’s dark. It’s cold. I’m so frightened.

It’s amazing to think that, during the recent weeks, using and abusing my Draufgängertum, I managed to rebuff those adoptive parents who were interested in me. I played a trick and it worked. I’m the only nine-month-old baby still at the Home.

And now I’m being punished.

I’ve just been ‘adopted’ (a code word that doesn’t exist, I’ve invented it for the occasion and you’ll soon understand its hidden meaning).

It was last night, and everything happened so fast.

A strange noise in the corridor, a creaking, then silence. I prick up my ears. There it is again, for longer. Someone’s there. Someone trying to walk as quietly as possible, someone who seems frightened by the noise of their own footsteps, because each step is followed by a sort of gasp. A hoarse panting, like an animal. A dog that escaped into the Home, away from one of the guards on duty outside? Impossible. Even if a dog pants like that, it gets around on four legs, not two. Is Josefa coming for another ‘rabbit’? No, Josefa walks with a firm, rhythmic step, even when she’s trying to be quiet. And Josefa only chooses her ‘rabbits’ from the newborns in the nursery. So who is it?

There it goes again, faster this time. Is the prowler barefoot? Then I can’t hear it anymore and I wonder if it’s a ghost, or perhaps I’m just dreaming. Suddenly the blanket I’m lying on is folded over the top of me and I’m lifted up and carried away. I have no idea if I’m in the arms of a human creature—alive or a ghost—or in the claws of a bird of prey. I can’t see a thing. The blanket envelops me in total darkness. From the bumping I can tell that the creature is running and then tearing down stairs at high speed. A gust of icy air rushes inside the blanket: we’re outside. But not for long. More running, then I’m being pushed through a hole. It feels like an animal’s burrow. The blanket unfolds but I still can’t see anything. It smells like dirt, damp, mould. Dust gets into my mouth and I start to cough. I should be shouting instead—and why didn’t I do precisely that in the dormitory? But before I can start the slightest bit of howling, I’m bundled up once more and we hurtle downwards again. A creature’s left arm holds me tightly against its body. And that’s when I realise it’s not a ghost: ghosts can pass through walls and obstacles, and birds fly; they don’t thrust deep into the earth. That’s also when the creature’s right arm—the free one—grabs onto a sort of ladder and we step down rung by rung. This descent into the underworld seems to last a lifetime.

The getaway finally stops. The creature drops to the ground and I hear irregular, fitful wheezing, as if it’s about to drop dead. I hope it does. A few minutes go by like this, in stillness and silence. I’m in such a state of shock that I still can’t find the strength to scream. Something tells me anyway that it wouldn’t be worth it, as no one would hear me. The creature revives and places me on the ground, gently this time, even taking special care to cradle my head so I don’t bang it on the ground. The creature steps away and I hear a match being lit. The flickering flame of a candle emits a feeble light.

I am in a cellar.

The creature returns quickly and holds me tight. I finally see its face. Thin, gaunt, pallid, its skin so stretched over the cheekbones that the skull is visible. A long scar runs down one cheek; it must be a recent wound, still red and swollen. A head of unevenly shaved hair, bits of scalp visible, tufts of stiff, coarse hairs growing back here and there. Huge eyes, staring, wide-open, almost bulging, like they’re eating away at the face, to devour it. Blue eyes. Light blue. For an instant this reassures me. But these blue eyes have a desperate expression, filled with a wild, animal fear. Or are they a mirror of my own fear?

The creature is a woman.

She stinks.

Sweat and urine, mixed with other odours I don’t yet recognise, and which make me want to retch.

I’m gagging.

I finally understand what’s happened. This woman…is one of the prisoners allowed into the Home to clean, in preparation for the visits by the prospective adoptive families. She managed, God knows how, to escape ‘relocation’ and hide in the cellar. And she kidnapped me. (Damn Josefa and her obsession with housecleaning. She should have asked the mothers to scrub the floors, or got stuck into it herself. That way I wouldn’t have ended up here!)

Me, a baby of the master race, in the arms of one of the dregs of humanity.

Who exactly is this woman? A Jew? A Gypsy? She’s got blue eyes…Unless there are blue-eyed Jews and Gypsies? Can nature really give rise to such aberrations?

What’s going to happen? Has she kidnapped me for food? Is she going to gobble me down raw? That must be my destiny. Jews and Gypsies are abject beings with filthy customs. Vile and lazy, they prey on children. They tempt them with sweets that are in fact poisonous. I’ve seen drawings of them in the newspapers Josefa reads.

I’ll be brave. I’m a Baby Pimpf. I’ll know how to die with dignity.

She didn’t eat me. Quite the opposite: she tried to feed me.

She slept for a while. (She must have been holed up in this cellar for a few days: dashing up to the dormitory to kidnap me, combined with the terror she must have felt, has exhausted her.) Her head and chest are propped against the wall, while the rest of her body is spreadeagled on the ground. Her head is leaning to the side, her neck completely crooked, like a disjointed puppet. I’ve ended up perched precariously on her thighs. From time to time in her sleep she is overcome by a shudder, a violent convulsion that makes her flinch and contract her muscles—which makes me slide further down her thighs towards her knees. Then she relaxes again and sinks into unconsciousness. At every shudder, I progress a few centimetres. Soon I hope I’ll reach the ground. Then I’ll have to muster all my Draufgängertum and try to crawl along using my arms until I can find a way out. (I’ve never tried to crawl or walk on all fours before; it’s time to launch into this new stage in my development.)

But I don’t get a chance to try anything. She wakes up with a start, grabs me with surprising intensity, and holds me to her, hard. As if she’d suddenly seen someone who wanted to grab me away from her. Sadly there is no one. Then she unbuttons the jacket of her uniform (dirty, stinking rags) and squeezes me against her breasts. Her skin is clammy with sweat, even though it’s cold in the cellar. She must have a fever from some sort of illness. Jews and Gypsies spread so many diseases; she’s probably got scabies, or leprosy, or typhoid fever, or worse. I can feel her ribs jutting out under her skin. Her chest, like her face, is nothing but an assortment of bones. I realise that she wants me to latch on to her breast.

At first I’m disgusted. How revolting.

Then some sort of instinct awakens in me. Something deep in my brain is set off, a kind of signal. I remember the time when the fat cow of a wet nurse tried her best to get me to take her milk. But those memories are so distant. For a few weeks now, they’ve been giving me a bottle in the morning and night, and at lunchtime I eat an excellent puree of carrots or spinach, cooked with produce from the Home’s vegetable garden. So sticking a nipple in my mouth is a backward step: that sort of regression is beneath me. But the fact is I’m hungry. I have no idea if it’s still night-time outside, or if the sun’s come up. How would I have a clue in this pitch-black cellar? Especially as I still sometimes get day and night confused: I’ve been known to wake a nurse up in the middle of the night so she can feed me. Right now, my aching stomach demands that I consume something. So, here goes, I’ll try her breast…Except that she doesn’t have any. Worse still, there are bones instead, bones all over, nothing but bones. What am I supposed to do, huh?

After a bit, she helps me; she pinches her skin hard and a bit of a nipple emerges that I can get between my lips. But no matter how hard I suck, pull, inhale and bite, nothing comes out. I must have hurt her—I’m getting my first tooth up top—because she cries out and pushes me away roughly. I really thought she was going to hit me. Or throw me against the wall. But she pulls me gently back and starts laughing and crying at the same time, rocking from side to side, cuddling me, to stop my tears. (Here we go: by now I’m so stressed that I yell my head off.)

She won’t stop repeating the same word in her language. Her barbarian language. (Yiddish? Romany?) It starts with ‘Ma’. Then there’s a strange sound like she’s clicking her tongue against her palate. It sounds like ‘tchetch’ or ‘xetch’.

‘Ma-tche-tche…Ma-xetch,’ she repeats, her lips grimacing in a weird smile.

I can’t quite explain what happens next. The first syllable of this barbarian word, ‘Max’, reverberates in my mind, over and over, producing a sort of echo that rekindles an even more distant memory than that of the fat cow wet nurse. I recall that before her there was another woman who held me in her arms. Who often rocked me, in exactly the same way the prisoner is doing now. And that woman called me ‘Max’.

I stop yelling right then.

With all that thinking, my brain whirring, I feel wiped out. No more Draufgängertum. I’m so exhausted I fall asleep.

We wake up at the same time. What time? No idea. An hour later, a day, two days, perhaps more. It’s hunger that rouses us. I’ve got colic, cramps. And her belly is making all sorts of noises, like water trickling in a cave. I’m terrified again at the thought that she has her meal ready-made: she’ll start eating me now. But she still doesn’t. She takes a bottle of milk out of her jacket pocket. (She must have stolen it from the dormitory before kidnapping me.) She looks at it greedily for a second, then at me. Such a nasty, predatory expression! I can tell from her eyes what she’s thinking: ‘Why should I give you this milk when I’m so hungry?’ And right under my nose she starts drinking, like a glutton—what a nerve. But she only has three or four mouthfuls, no more, and then slides the teat into my mouth.

I drink and drink, glug, glug, glug.

It’s so good. Cold, but good. And then it stops. She takes the bottle away even though there’s at least a third left. I start yelling again straightaway. She cuddles me but, instead of calming me, it enrages me. Then, miraculously, she says two words in German. ‘For later!’

She doesn’t want me to drink it all at once, or I won’t

have any left. I couldn’t care less! I’m hungry now, NOW!

She rocks me again, chanting her ‘Max-whatever’ word. I stop crying. This weird-sounding word is like magic. It calms me down…She starts talking, not in her barbarian language, but in German again. Perfect German, no trace of an accent.

She tells me the story of her life, beginning with the fact that she’s German. (What a relief for me!) I relax and listen. One morning, some months ago, when she was pregnant, she and her husband were arrested by the Gestapo. They were charged with being ‘an insult to racial purity’. (I counted my chickens before they hatched: this woman may be German, but she’s among the people Hitler denounces. She has committed one of the worst crimes possible: she has slept with a Jew! How dreadful!) She says she doesn’t know what happened to her husband, but she was taken to Dachau. When she arrived, she was beaten viciously by an SS soldier who kicked her and bashed her in the belly with a club. Her big baby belly. It made her go into labour on the spot. While she was on the ground in the snow, her face covered in blood, the SS guy screamed at her: ‘Go on, bitch! Get it out! Your Jewish bastard! So we can see what he looks like…Come on! Push! Push!’ She howled. She sobbed. She pushed. And the baby emerged. There, in the bloodied snow. Then the SS guy shot the baby in the head.

The woman is sobbing, me too. But I don’t know if it’s because of the story or because I’m still hungry.

She squeezes me to her even tighter. Between hiccups, she says that she wanted to call her baby Maciej. A Polish name, because her husband was Polish.

Maciej. Maciej. She repeats the name. Over and over. She kisses me.

I’m not Maciej, I’m not your baby! My name is Konrad, or Max…I’m not sure which anymore…My father is not Jewish! A German woman had intercourse with an SS officer to conceive me. The SS officer could be the one who killed your Maciej!

If only I could tell her. But I can’t, so she keeps going.

Maciej. Maciej…Kisses all over me, on my forehead, mouth, hands and feet. At first it annoys me, disgusts me, and then I remember that the woman from ages ago, the one who rocked me like this woman is doing, she used to kiss me, too. And the good thing is that her moist lips warm me up and shield me a bit from the freezing cold in the cellar.

And the ‘Maciej’ litany helps me to go back to sleep.

When I wake up I’m soaking. I mean sopping wet. Completely filthy. Piss, shit, the lot. The bad shit, the stuff that nearly got me sent off in the delivery van. What makes things worse is that Magda (that’s her name) didn’t wake up at the same time as me. In fact she dozes off for longer and longer periods. She doesn’t flinch in her sleep anymore either. Her body, still contorted in abnormal positions, stays as still as a corpse. She does manage to become aware of the disaster when she opens one eye…She thought of stealing milk, but not a change of nappies. She looks panic-stricken for a second—not at the stench, which is no worse than her own—but because she sees that my bum is as red as a monkey’s. It’s so itchy, I’m wriggling around like a worm. Even the blanket is drenched. So Magda takes her clothes off. Everything. Her pants are already in shreds so she has no trouble tearing them a bit more to make a nappy that she slides between my legs and ties on the sides. Then she wraps me in her jacket.

Now I’m wearing a prisoner’s uniform! Things are going from bad to worse. But, after all, no one can see me. No one can hear me either or they’d have come to find me. Has anyone noticed I’m gone? Apparently not. The Home has turned into a factory. One empty bed, so what? At least three others have been filled in the same time.

Even if I’m wearing a shameful outfit, at least I’m dry. Even if the arms around me are those of a woman who has had sex with a Jew, at least they’re keeping me warm; they’re a comfort just like her voice. So soft, so gentle, so close…I can’t hear Hitler’s booming voice here in the cellar. No radio, obviously, and I feel, little by little, his voice getting fainter, a murmur in the distance, far off in my mind, heading towards the section of forgotten things.

Magda feeds me the rest of the bottle of milk. And after that, over the course of hours, days, nights, I don’t know anymore, she lets me nibble on a crust of stale bread—left over from one of her earlier pilferings, before she kidnapped me. She puts the crumbs in her mouth to moisten them, then into my mouth so I can swallow them without choking.

The crust of bread is soon finished. And an apple core, a few scraps of meat on some old chicken bones, and some potato and beetroot peelings.

Then there’s nothing more. Nothing.

Hunger. Cold. Lethargy.

Magda starts talking again. She tells me about Maciej. How she loved him when he was in her belly. How she would have liked to see him grow up.

Maciej. Maciej.

When I shut my eyes for too long, Magda shakes me gently until I open them again. She’s frightened I’ll die in my sleep. And I’m the same about her. I manage to squirm a bit and get my hand or foot into her face and wake her up. That’s what the last of my Draufgängertum is good for. I know I’m bound to her. If she dies, that’s the end of me, too.

And that’s when the penny drops again. Because I’m sleeping in Magda’s arms, and not lying on my stomach as instructed by that other fellow, the one who’s above us somewhere, the Herr Doktor with the eyes like beads of ice—what’s his name again?—I think my skull has changed shape. As it’s no longer dolichocephalic, no longer as long and oval-shaped, distant memories have resurfaced. All of a sudden I remember ‘the magic cord’ that worked with the woman who breastfed me so long ago. That woman was…my mother…Yes, it was Mutti. ‘Mummy’. The word I erased from my vocabulary.

Mutti. Magda says it to me every time she manages to wake up. Mama ist da. Habe keine angst. Mummy is here. Don’t be scared.

But the magic cord doesn’t work for long. After the hours, days, nights spent in the cellar, it stops functioning. When I pull on it, the response takes longer and longer to arrive. Until there’s no response at all. Until I no longer have the strength to pull. This time it really is the end of my Draufgängertum.

I shut my eyes and let myself go. After hours, days, nights in this cellar, those arms close over me. Cold. Stiff as hooks.