The Boy at the Top of the Mountain (21 page)

There had been no goodbyes between the two. A group of Schutzstaffel officers had simply arrived one morning and locked themselves in the study with the Führer for a long discussion, and then he had marched out, ranting and raging, before throwing himself into the back seat of his car, screaming at Kempka to take him away, to take him anywhere, to get him off this mountain top once and for all. Eva had been forced to run after him as the car pulled out of the driveway, and the last Pieter saw of her was her running down the mountain in its wake, waving her arms and shouting, her blue dress blowing in the wind as she disappeared beyond the curve of the hills.

The soldiers disappeared soon after, which left only Herta, and then one morning Pieter discovered her packing her bags too.

‘Where will you go?’ he asked, standing in the doorway of her room, and she turned to look at him, shrugging her shoulders.

‘Back to Vienna, I expect,’ she said. ‘My mother is still there. At least, I think she is. I don’t know whether the trains are running, of course, but I’ll find my way.’

‘What will you tell her?’

‘Nothing. I will never speak of this place again, Pieter. You would be wise to do the same. Leave now, before the armies arrive. You’re still young. No one needs to know the terrible things you’ve done. That we’ve all done.’

He felt the words like a shot to his heart, and could scarcely believe the look of absolute conviction on her face as she condemned them both. Taking her by the arm as she passed him, he spoke in a whisper, remembering the first night he had met her nine years before, when he had been mortified that she would see him naked in the bathtub.

‘Will there be any forgiveness, Herta?’ he asked. ‘The newspapers . . . the things they’re saying already . . . will there be any forgiveness for me?’

She carefully released his hand from her elbow. ‘Do you think that I didn’t know the plans that were being made up here on this mountain top?’ she said. ‘The things that were being discussed in the Führer’s office? There will be no forgiveness for any of us.’

‘But I was just a child,’ pleaded Pieter. ‘I didn’t know anything. I didn’t understand.’

She shook her head and took his face in her hands. ‘Look at me, Pieter,’ she said. ‘Look at me.’ He looked up, tears in his eyes. ‘Don’t ever pretend that you didn’t know what was going on here. You have eyes and you have ears. And you sat in that room on many occasions, taking notes. You heard it all. You saw it all. You knew it all. And you also know the things you are responsible for.’ She hesitated, but it needed to be said. ‘The deaths you have on your conscience. But you’re a young man still, you’re only sixteen; you have many years ahead of you to come to terms with your complicity in these matters. Just don’t ever tell yourself that you didn’t know.’ She released him now from her grip. ‘That would be the worst crime of all.’

She picked up her suitcase and made her way to the doorway. He watched her, framed by the sunlight that was bursting through the trees.

‘How will you get down?’ he asked, calling after her, wishing she wouldn’t leave him there alone. ‘There’s no one else left. No car to take you.’

‘I’ll walk,’ she said, turning away and disappearing out of sight.

The newspapers continued to be delivered, the local suppliers afraid to stop calling in case the Führer returned and took out his displeasure on them. There were some who believed that the war might still be won. And then there were those who were ready to face up to reality. In the town Pieter heard rumours that the Führer and Eva had moved into a secret bunker in Berlin, along with the most important members of the National Socialist Party, and were plotting their return, masterminding the manner in which they would emerge even stronger than before, with a certain plan for victory. And again, there were some who believed it and some who didn’t. But still the newspapers kept coming.

Seeing the last soldiers preparing to leave Berchtesgaden, Pieter approached them, asking what he should do and where he should go.

‘You’re wearing a uniform, aren’t you?’ said one, looking him up and down. ‘Why don’t you use it for once?’

‘Pieter doesn’t fight,’ said his fellow officer. ‘He just likes to dress up.’

And with that they started to laugh at him, and, watching as they drove off, he felt that his humiliation was complete.

Now the little boy who had been brought to the mountain in short trousers began to ascend it for the last time.

He stayed there, uncertain what to do next. Reading the papers, he followed the arrival of the Allies into the heart of Germany and wondered when the enemy would come for him. A few days before the end of the month a plane flew overhead, a British Lancaster bomber, and dropped two bombs onto the side of the Obersalzberg, just missing the Berghof itself but sending enough debris back to shatter most of the windows. Pieter had been hiding inside the house, in the Führer’s own study, and as the glass exploded all around him, hundreds of tiny shards flew towards his face, sending him hurtling to the floor, screaming in terror. Only when the sound of the planes had gone did he feel safe enough to stand up and make his way into the bathroom, where he was greeted by his bloodied countenance in the mirror. He spent the rest of the afternoon trying to remove as much glass as possible; he feared that the scars would never go away.

The last newspaper arrived on 2 May, and the headline on the front page told him everything he needed to know. The Führer was dead. Goebbels was gone too, that awful skeletal man, along with his wife and children. Eva had bitten into a cyanide capsule; Hitler had put a gun to his head. The worst of it was that before the cyanide was taken, the Führer decided that it needed to be tested, to ensure that it really worked. The last thing he wanted was for Eva to be left writhing in agony and captured by the enemy. He wanted her to have a swift release.

And so he tried a capsule out on Blondi. And it worked, quickly and efficiently.

Pieter felt almost nothing as he read the newspaper. He stood outside the Berghof and looked across at the landscape that surrounded him. He glanced down towards Berchtesgaden and then towards Munich, remembering the train journey where he had first encountered members of the Hitlerjugend. And finally his eyes turned in the direction of Paris, the city of his birth, a place that he had all but disowned in his desire to be important. But he wasn’t French any more, he realized. Nor was he German. He was nothing. He had no home, no family, and he deserved none.

He wondered whether he could live there for ever. Hide away on the mountainside like a hermit and live off whatever he found in the forests. Perhaps he would never need to see humans again. Let them all get on with their lives down there, he thought. Let them continue with their fighting and their warring and their shooting and their killing, and perhaps they would leave him out of it. He would never have to speak again. He would never have to explain himself. No one would ever look into his eyes and see the things he had done or recognize the person he had become.

For an afternoon, the idea seemed like a good one.

And then the soldiers came.

It was late in the afternoon of 4 May, and Pieter was picking up stones from the gravel driveway, trying to dislodge a tin can from its perch. The silence of the Obersalzberg began slowly to be infiltrated by a deep sound that rose from the base of the mountain to where he stood. As it grew louder, he stared over the side to where a troop of soldiers were ascending, not wearing German uniforms, but American ones. They were coming for him.

He thought of escaping into the forest, but there was no point in running and nowhere to run to anyway. He was left with no choice. He would wait for them.

He went back inside the house and sat in the living room, but as they came closer he began to feel afraid and went out into the hallway in search of a hiding place. In the corner was a small closet, barely big enough to accommodate him, but he climbed inside and closed the door behind him. A little string hung from just above his head, and when he pulled it a light came on, illuminating the space. There were only some old washcloths and dustpans in there, but something was poking into his back and he reached round to see what it was. Pulling it out, he was surprised to find that a book had been carelessly thrown in, and he turned it round to look at the title.
Emil and the Detectives
. He pulled the light cord again, condemning himself to darkness.

Voices filled the house now, and he could hear the boots of the soldiers as they made their way into the room. They were calling out to each other in a language he didn’t understand, laughing and whooping with delight as they looked inside his bedroom, the Führer’s room, the maids’ rooms. Inside what had once been his Aunt Beatrix’s room. He heard bottles being opened, corks being popped. And then he heard two sets of boots making their way down the corridor towards him.

‘What’s in here?’ asked one of the soldiers in an American accent, and before Pieter could reach out to hold it closed, the door to the cupboard swung open, letting in a burst of light that forced him to shut his eyes quickly.

The soldiers let out a cry, and he heard their guns cocking as they pointed them at him. He cried out in return, and a moment later there were four, six, ten, a dozen, an entire company of men gathered around, pointing their guns at the boy hiding in the darkness.

‘Don’t hurt me,’ cried Pieter, curling himself into a ball, covering his head with his hands, wishing for all the world that he could make himself so small that he would simply disappear into nothingness. ‘Please don’t hurt me.’

And before he could speak again, an unknown number of hands reached into the darkness and pulled him back out into the light.

Having spent so many years in near isolation at the top of the Obersalzberg, Pieter struggled to adjust to life in the Golden Mile Camp near Remagen, where he was taken immediately after his capture. He was told on his arrival that he was not a prisoner of war, since the war was now officially over, but part of a group known as the ‘disarmed enemy forces’ instead.

‘What’s the difference?’ asked a man standing near him in the line.

‘Means we don’t have to follow the Geneva Convention,’ replied one of the American guards, spitting on the ground as he took a packet of cigarettes from his jacket pocket. ‘So don’t expect a free ride here, Fritz.’

Incarcerated with a quarter of a million captured German soldiers, Pieter made a decision as he entered the gates that he would talk to no one and employ only the few bits of sign language he recalled from his childhood in order to pretend that he was deaf and mute; a charade that worked so well that soon no one even looked in his direction any more, let alone spoke to him. It was as if he didn’t exist. Which was exactly how he wanted it to be.

In his section of the camp there were more than a thousand men, ranging from officers of the Wehrmacht, who still held nominal authority over their subordinates, to members of the Hitlerjugend, some even younger than Pieter himself, although the ones who looked particularly youthful were released within a few days. The hut where he slept contained two hundred men who crowded into cots that held only a quarter of their number, and most nights he found himself trying to find an empty space by a wall where he could lie down with his jacket rolled under his head, hoping to get a few hours’ sleep.

Some soldiers, mostly the senior ones, were interrogated in order to find out what they had done during the war, and having been discovered in the Berghof, Pieter was questioned about his activities many times, but continued to feign deafness, writing on notepaper the true story of how he had come to leave Paris and find himself in the care of his aunt. The authorities sent in different officers to question him, hoping to find a discrepancy in his tale, but as he always told the truth there was nothing they could do to catch him out.

‘And your aunt?’ one of the soldiers asked him. ‘What happened to her? She wasn’t at the Berghof when you were discovered.’

Pieter held his pen over the notepad and tried to steady his trembling hand. She died, he wrote finally, unable to look the man in the eye as he passed the pad across.

Fights broke out occasionally. Some of the men were embittered by their defeat; others were more stoical. One evening a man who Pieter knew – from the grey woollen Fliegermütze side-cap he wore – had been a member of the Luftwaffe began denouncing the National Socialist Party, sparing nothing in his contempt for the Führer, and an officer from the Wehrmacht marched over and slapped him across the face with his glove, calling him a traitor and the reason they had lost the war. For ten minutes they rolled about on the floor, striking each other, kicking and punching, while the other men formed a circle around them, cheering them on, excited by the brutality, which came as a relief against the tedium of the Golden Mile. In the end the soldier lost to the airman, a result that divided the hut, but so severe were both their injuries that by the next morning they had disappeared and Pieter never saw either of them again.

Finding himself standing by the kitchens one afternoon when none of the soldiers were standing guard, he crept in and stole a loaf of bread, smuggling it back to the hut inside his shirt and nibbling on it throughout the day, his stomach growling in delight at this unexpected offering; but he had only eaten half of it before an Oberleutnant a little older than him noticed what he was doing and came over to take it from him. Pieter tried to fight him off, but the man was too strong for him and eventually he gave up, retreating to his corner like a caged animal aware of a stronger aggressor, trying to clear his head of all thoughts. Emptiness was the state he longed for. Emptiness and amnesia.

From time to time English-language newspapers would circulate between the huts, and those who could understand them would translate, telling the gathered men what had been taking place in their country since the surrender. Pieter heard how the architect Albert Speer had been sentenced to prison; how Leni Riefenstahl, the lady who had filmed him on the terrace of the Berghof during Eva’s party, claimed to have known nothing of what the Nazis were doing but was being held in various French and American detention camps nevertheless. The Obersturmbannführer who had once stood on Pierrot’s hand in Mannheim station and had subsequently come to the Berghof with his arm in a sling to take control of one of the death camps, had been captured by the Allied Armies and went with them without complaint. Of Herr Bischoff, who had designed the camp in his so-called ‘zone of interest’, he heard nothing, but he learned how the gates had been opened at Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and Dachau, at Buchenwald and Ravensbrück, as far east as Jasenovac in Croatia, as far north as Bredtvet in Norway, and to the south in Sajmište in Serbia, and how the inmates had been released to return to their shattered homes, having lost parents, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts and children. He listened intently as the details of what had gone on in these places were revealed to the world, and grew more numb as he tried to understand the cruelty of which he had been a part. When he couldn’t sleep, which was often, he lay staring at ceiling, thinking:
I am responsible.