Read Online The Auslander by Paul Dowswell - Free Book Online Page A

parents did not like swimming,’ he lied. ‘So we never went.’
    â€˜Swimming is the best exercise a girl can take,’ said Frau Kaltenbach. ‘It is the perfect way to prepare the body for motherhood.’
    She turned to Elsbeth. ‘You should go, too, mein Liebling.’
    Elsbeth bristled. ‘I get quite enough exercise with my duties at the post office, thank you, Mutter.’
    Peter sensed a row brewing. Was Frau Kaltenbach going to chide her about not being married?
    As far as he knew there were no men in Elsbeth’s life. He wondered why. She certainly turned heads out in the street. She seemed quite detached from the world, though. There was nothing ‘come hither’ about her.
    An awkward silence followed. Peter chirped up. ‘Perhaps you could take me to the pool, Traudl? Show me how to swim.’
    The idea appealed to her. ‘I like to go first thing. Before school. You’ll have to get up early . . .’
    He promised he would. These little spats made him feel uncomfortable. He wondered why Elsbeth and her mother seemed so quietly hostile to each other, but he didn’t feel he could ask Traudl about it.
    .
    Several days a week, after school, Peter started going to the Deutsches Jungvolk – the junior branch of the Hitler-Jugend . The local squad met in their own ‘clubhouse’ in the basement of a pub. Its location was supposed to be secret, in the tradition of the HJ, but the boys had taken great pride in decorating the room with Nazi posters and flags.
    On Peter’s first evening he had been taken to a nearby playing field and asked to pass a series of tests, like running 60 metres in twelve seconds or throwing a ball 25 metres. ‘Imagine the ball is a grenade,’ said the Deutsches Jungvolk leader, ‘and you are throwing it into the enemy trench.’
    The one he liked the most was the ‘courage test’ where he had to jump from the second floor of a building where, unseen until the very edge, the bigger boys were waiting with a tarpaulin to catch him.
    Most of the boys in his squad were younger than Peter. ‘When you are fourteen,’ said the leader, ‘you go up with the big boys of the Hitler-Jugend .’
    Right from the start Peter felt at home, not least because as soon as he arrived a dark-haired boy close to him in age immediately introduced himself. ‘I’m Gerhart Segur,’ he said with a big smile. ‘When are you fourteen?’
    Peter’s birthday was in early October. ‘Me too,’ said Segur. ‘We’ll go up to the senior HJ together.’ Peter took an instant liking to Gerhart Segur. He seemed to have a hint of mischief about him. A lot of the other boys were very serious.
    Peter enjoyed the meetings, especially when they made model aeroplanes or tanks from balsa wood while the squad leader read exciting war stories to them.
    .
    His days were so busy, Peter barely had a moment to reflect on what had happened to him any more. He liked that. Sometimes, when he thought about his real parents and Charlotte caught him looking sad, she would come to sit on his lap.
    â€˜When I’m upset I talk to Clara,’ she said, holding up her porcelain doll.
    That put a smile back on Peter’s face. When Charlotte wasn’t parroting Nazi slogans, she was lovely.
    The nights were still hard. Safe beneath the crisp linen sheets that Frau Kaltenbach had the maid change twice a week, Peter’s thoughts would usually drift back to the farm. He tried not to think about that final, awful morning; the mounting feeling of dread in his chest as he waited for the dawn and walked along the track to the main road.
    In his mind’s eye he would close the great front door of the farmhouse behind him and walk through the kitchen garden his mother had tended, the fresh scent of damp earth lingering in his nostrils, the dew glistening on the raspberries, laid out in careful rows along