It’s a big step for me. A new chapter in my young life.

I’m six. I’m going to school.

I don’t have a satchel or any school supplies. No new clothes either. I’m wearing my Pimpf uniform. In my suitcase is the candelabra the Führer gave me when I was born, with its six candles, along with a few toiletries and a couple of changes of clothes. Even though Doctor Ebner is taking me, we’re not hand in hand like a father walking his son to school on the first day. I’m trying to keep up with the perfect rhythm of his step. Left. Right. Left. Right. The soldiers stand to attention and salute as we pass.

It’s not your usual first day at school. That’s normal. I’m an unusual child. And Kalish is not your usual sort of school. It’s an old converted monastery, surrounded by a very high wall, covered in barbed wire—no way you could climb over it. No child has come willingly to this unusual school, nor have they been brought there by their mother or father. All of them think of only one thing: escaping. It’s not surprising, I suppose, when there’s a guard with his submachine gun stationed near the main gate and soldiers with their dogs trekking back and forth in the courtyard.

Kalish is the school for the stolen children. The SS Gaukinder Home, or the central district home of the Polish Lebensborn in Poland.

It’s about nine in the evening. It’s dark and the courtyard is deserted. The children must already be in bed. But they’re not all asleep yet, because I can hear muffled screaming from various spots: behind a locked door, a window, up there on the first floor, and the floor above. If I strain my ears, the sounds seem to be coming from everywhere, like background noise, a continual whirring that makes all the buildings seem to vibrate. And I can hear crying, from the chapel near the entrance.

I just keep going, pretending nothing’s wrong, imitating Doctor Ebner, who remains unfazed as we cross the courtyard. Herr Ebner explained everything to me during the car ride here from Poznan. He said Polish children are learning how to become German at Kalish, that it’s a rigorous and difficult apprenticeship. The severe punishments and beatings are only for their own good, so they’ll be happy later.

Anyway, I’m so happy, so excited at the idea of being surrounded by kids my own age, of living with them, that I manage to distance myself from their screaming and crying. I’m used to it; the kids screamed and cried at Poznan.

But I don’t cry, even if I am a bit scared to meet the director of Kalish.

Johanna Sander: tall, blonde, blue eyes. When we enter her office, all I can see of her at first is her tall outline and her brown uniform. When she raises her arm to salute us with a booming ‘Heil Hitler!’ I glimpse a pistol stuck in her belt. A nine-millimetre Luger. She reminds me of Josefa. But she’s the next model up. Stronger, stricter. Josefa didn’t have a gun in her belt.

I try to make my ‘Heil Hitler!’ response as forceful as I can, but my voice sounds feeble, pathetic.

The interview doesn’t take long. After shaking hands with Frau Sander, Herr Ebner goes to his desk and starts in on his files. Frau Sander and I stay in the doorway of her office. She announces that she already knows everything about me, thanks to the correspondence Doctor Ebner sent her. Holding the letter in one hand, she slides on her glasses and reads, ‘Konrad von Kebnersol, born in the Steinhöring Home in 1936, on the 20th of April, our Führer’s birthday…(she skips the rest)…Baptised by the Führer himself!’

She takes off her glasses and looks me up and down. I do the same to her, trying not to seem arrogant. She’s imposing, with a large face, high forehead and well-defined lips, the corners of which turn down, giving her a nasty, ferocious expression. To tell you the truth, if I wasn’t one of our Führer’s young wild men, I’d be scared to death of her. It’s obvious she’s not the type to go weak at the knees in front of my angel face, my platinum-blond hair and my blue, blue eyes. I hope the rest of Doctor Ebner’s letter clearly specifies, with the statistical evidence, that I am a perfect specimen of the Nordic race. And that I also have to my credit some remarkable acts of bravery: my endurance as a baby in the face of kidnapping and illegal confinement by a dissident whore, my participation in ‘Operation Buddies’, at first with the Brown Sisters, then with a Polish informer, and last but not least my incredibly useful performance at the Poznan railway station.

‘Baptised by the Führer himself!’ Frau Sander repeats, after a long silence. Her blue eyes fill with tears. ‘Baptised by the Führer himself!’

How long is she going to bang on about it? She’s like a broken record.

She turns to Doctor Ebner, who glances up from his dossier to nod distractedly.

‘The Führer in person!’ A tear rolls down her left cheek and, miracle of miracles, the edges of her mouth lift into a twitch that could be a smile. But the smile is not for me. Frau Sander isn’t looking at me anymore; she’s focused on a spot at the other end of the corridor outside her office. As if someone had just appeared there. But I can see out of the corner of my eye that no one’s there. She must be seeing a vision of the Führer walking right up to her.

She turns back to me and pats my head. Gently, almost fearfully, as if my head was made out of porcelain and might break. But somehow I can tell that this large, strong hand, caressing my cheek and now my chin, is used to giving out smacks…I think Frau Sander is only caressing me like this in order to have the honour of touching something that the Führer himself touched, to have vicarious contact with him via a proxy—me, as it happens.

I’m feeling uncomfortable. My heart is beating too fast. I really don’t like this hand touching me. But I force myself to put up with it.

Finally Frau Sander comes to her senses and removes her hand, brushes away her tears, and wipes the smile off her face. In a second, her face has regained its ferocious look.

‘Do you know what we expect of you here, Konrad?’ she snaps in an authoritarian voice that has nothing of the exalted tone she used earlier.

‘Yes, I do know. Doctor Ebner told me. I’m here as a role model for Polish children my age. They have to think I’m Polish like them, but that I’ve taken in every aspect of the teaching at Kalish, and been transformed into a perfect little German boy. That’s why I speak excellent German, and have forgotten my mother tongue, Polish. I have to be positive and encouraging to my buddies and tell them as often as I can how lucky they are to have been adopted by Germany.’

‘Perfect!’ she exclaims. ‘Perfect! Now go and unpack.’ She clicks her fingers and a warden appears. ‘This is Konrad. Baptised by the Führer himself!’

Like it’s my surname.

It must be a code language, because the warden’s stern, icy expression changes instantly. Hearing ‘BBFH’ (‘baptised by…’ you know the rest, I don’t have to repeat it), she smiles and asks me kindly to follow her. She tells me that she’s taking me to my dormitory, but if I’m at all hungry we could stop by the kitchen. I decline. She insists on offering me a bar of chocolate from her pocket. I bet she offers the Polish kids a taste of the whip I can see stuck in one of her boots.

‘No, thank you.’

I don’t want any special treatment. Anyway, what if one of my future buddies saw us? My cover would be blown and that’d be the end of me playing my role here.

I can’t sleep. I’m not used to going to bed so early. The dormitory noises don’t bother me; it’s just a whole lot of creaking, sighing, snoring, coughing, rustling of sheets—a rhythmic background sound. The SS and the German whores made much more of a racket in the bombed-out house in Poznan. The children stifle their crying so the warden standing at the door like a guard dog doesn’t hear them. There’s one recurring word, over and over, whispered, like a chant, a prayer: mamo (‘mummy’). Then the whole sentence: ‘Chce moja mame’ (‘I want my mummy’). The Polish kids haven’t yet erased the damn word from their vocabulary, like I did a while ago now. That’s why they’re sad. One of the first things I’ll teach them over the next few days is how to get rid of that word from their memories. They’ll feel so much better afterwards.

It’s as dark as the inside of an oven, but when the warden took me to my bed she had a torch and I counted about forty beds. Twenty on each side. All I could see of my buddies were their shadowy outlines under the blankets. Of the ones who hadn’t pulled the sheet over their heads—as if this thin material could somehow protect them—I glimpsed some hair, a hand, a foot.

The kid on my right isn’t sleeping either. He just tosses and turns. From the creaking of the bedsprings, I can tell that he’s leaning towards me. He wants to speak to me but is too frightened. The warden might hear him, or see him by the light of the torch she sweeps around the room every few minutes.

Eventually he falls asleep. His breathing is regular, with the occasional gentle snoring. There’s a smell of urine coming from his bed, unless it’s from the bed on my left, or from all the beds. It stinks.

The whole dormitory stinks of piss. I’ve never wet my bed, or else it was so long ago I’ve forgotten.

As well as the stifled sobbing and the whispered ‘mamo’, there’s also nightmarish screaming. ‘Aj!’ ‘Nie! Nie, nie mnie!’ ‘Litosc!’ A body shoots up then collapses on the mattress again. I know those screams. I heard them often enough in Poznan. ‘Ow!’ ‘No! No, not me!’ ‘Please!’ The warden isn’t worried about the screaming, she must be used to it.

I’m still awake. It’s hard for me to change my routine overnight. In the bombed-out house in Poznan, I wandered around freely all night long, listening at doors without Frau Lotte noticing a thing. Compared to the warden, Frau Lotte seems like an angel now.

I want to get out of bed. Too bad about the rules. The warden won’t be able to punish me anyway. When her colleague brought me in here earlier, she repeated the magic words ‘BBFH’, with the same reverence Frau Sander used. (It must be a code name that was communicated to all the staff before I arrived.) So off I go, out of bed to tell her I want to go to the toilet. She’s already removed the whip from her boot, and is about to lash me with it, when she sees I’m the BBFH, so she stops and lets me go. I pretend to head for the door she’s pointing to, but as soon as her back is turned I head the other way.

I venture to the end of the corridor, where there’s another dormitory. I can hear babies screaming behind the closed door. That’s why there’s no warden on guard duty. Obviously these prisoners aren’t about to escape. I push open the door.

Chaos. Cradles everywhere. It reminds me of Steinhöring. Except, in my memory, the cradles were much more attractive, not half-broken, wobbly and dirty, like these. The walls were white and clean, and there were windows. Here the walls are grey and there’s only one tiny skylight in the roof. The babies must range from about six months old to a year. The one-year-olds are longer but no larger. They’re like rabbits.

Rabbits.

I suddenly remember that code word. One of the first I learned. Are all these babies going to be packed into vans and delivered to a hospital where they’ll be chopped into pieces and stored in jars? No, I’m getting everything mixed up! Herr Ebner already told me that, as well as older children, there are babies at Kalish, and that the babies don’t stay long: they’re sent off first to Germany, where their adoptive families are waiting for them.

I hope they get a bath before they leave, because they really stink of shit. It is foul! In some of the cradles I can see liquid shit running out of the nappies and all over the sheets. The smell is absolutely atrocious! I have to block my nose so I don’t faint.

There’s screaming and crying everywhere. Obviously, with all that shit, the babies’ bums must be chafed and infected. There are only two wardens for all these stinky, wailing babies. And they’re lying down, asleep on two beds at either end of the room. When one of them wakes up, grumbling, she goes round handing out more smacks and swear words than bottles and clean nappies.

I’m getting out of here. The incessant noise is deafening and the stink is making me nauseous. I don’t want to see what the other dormitories are like anymore. And now I’m tired; I’d better sleep if I want to be in good shape tomorrow. Tomorrow is the start of my life as a schoolboy. I get back into bed and fall asleep straightaway.

I start having nightmares of sinking into a huge swamp of piss and shit. I dream of sitting alone in the dining room and being forced to drink piss and to eat shit. I see the babies from the dormitory at the end of the corridor all rising together from their cradles, like an army of evil little creatures. They encircle me and bombard me with their filthy nappies dripping with shit that burns my skin and disfigures my little angel face.

I wake up with a start. My sheets are soaked and I’m scared I’ve wet the bed. But it’s only sweat. BBFH doesn’t wet the bed! I soon fall asleep again and this time I sleep peacefully, dreaming that my buddies are all neat and tidy, clean as a whistle, impeccable.

Germanised.

The next morning, at 6 a.m., the warden is striding along the dormitory aisle with her stick, hitting beds, and sometimes the legs of children, who bounce up instantly like springs.