After Read online

  I wish I hadn’t started thinking about this.

  I’ll be awake half the night worrying.

  How did this happen? Last week I decided to do without parents, and now I am one.

  I wake suddenly.

  Somebody’s crying.

  I assume it’s one of the little girls, Bug or Faiga.

  But as my eyes get used to the darkness, I see it’s neither of them.

  It’s Axel. He’s sobbing in his sleep.

  The others have woken up now. Even Dom. We’re all lying here, staring at Axel.

  Helmut gives him a dig.

  ‘Axel,’ he hisses. He says something in German. Probably ‘You’re embarrassing yourself’.

  Axel wakes up. He looks at us all. He shudders a bit, like you do when you’ve been crying. Then his eyes widen and he touches his wet cheek.

  He looks horrified and embarrassed.

  Helmut does the sort of snort that tries to sound like a laugh but isn’t.

  ‘Jesus, Axel,’ he says. ‘Keep a lid on it.’

  ‘Keep a lid on it,’ repeats Faiga, giggling. Bug starts giggling too. They’re carrying on like a pair of five-year-olds. I’m about to tell them off, then I remember they are a pair of five-year-olds.

  Axel’s face suddenly crumples again.

  ‘Why?’ he says. ‘Why should I keep a lid on it? My parents are dead. My whole family’s dead. Our house has gone, my school’s gone, I couldn’t even bury my dog because our garden’s gone.’

  He runs out of breath.

  Snot and tears are dripping from his face.

  Nobody moves. Nobody’s giggling now.

  We just lie silently.

  I see tears on Hannah’s cheeks too.

  I stand in the grey dawn. I pee into the swamp and do what every parent does at the start of a new day.

  Worry about food.

  We’ve been on this island for two weeks. We’ve eaten more than half the tins and potatoes. And Dom has eaten most of his oats and hay.

  I finish my pee, but I don’t go back to the sleeping shelter because this is serious and I have to think.

  If we can’t get more food, we’ll have to leave here in another two weeks and our good protection will be over. Three weeks at the most if we eat less and share some of the tins with Dom.

  But how can we get more food? I spent the rest of the jewellery on the potatoes, oats and hay.

  Which means all we can do is try to steal food and risk being caught by the Nazis.

  ‘Felix,’ says a sad little voice.

  Faiga is wandering towards me, rubbing her eyes. Hannah’s coat is round her shoulders and dragging behind her in the wet grass.

  ‘I’m sad,’ says Faiga.

  I crouch down and pull the coat more warmly around her.

  ‘I miss my mummy and daddy,’ she says.

  ‘I know,’ I say gently.

  ‘Mummy and Daddy were shot in a forest,’ says Faiga. ‘Hannah said so. Will we be shot in a forest?’

  I put my arms around her.

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘We won’t.’

  It’s what a parent has to say. You can’t say ‘I hope not’, or ‘who knows’, or ‘if this war goes on for many more years we might’.

  It’s one of the hard things about being a parent.

  I don’t know how they do it without getting sad and scared themselves.

  ‘You don’t know anything, you idiot.’

  Faiga and I haven’t even got back to the sleeping shelter yet, but I can already hear the others squabbling.

  This is hopeless.

  ‘I do know things,’ says Hannah’s voice. ‘I know you haven’t even got any bullets.’

  ‘That’s where you’re wrong,’ says Axel’s voice. ‘I’ve got plenty.’

  ‘Five,’ says Helmut’s voice.

  I can see the whole group now through the trees. Sitting under the sleeping shelter having their own private war as usual.

  ‘Guns are stupid,’ says Beryl.

  ‘Boys are stupid,’ says Bug.

  ‘Not as much as girls,’ says Helmut.

  I stare at them.

  Did they just say what I thought they said?

  At last. It’s what I’ve been hoping for. No more Nazis against Jews. Just girls against boys.

  ‘What’s the problem?’ I say as I walk over with Faiga.

  ‘We’re bored,’ says Hannah.

  ‘If we have to sit on this dumb island with dumb girls much longer,’ says Axel, ‘our bums’ll grow roots.’

  Faiga laughs.

  Beryl glares at her and she stops.

  ‘We’re sick of hiding away like this,’ says Hannah. ‘We want to fight the Nazis.’

  I look nervously at Axel and Helmut.

  Helmut is sitting on his own, scowling. But Axel is nodding too. Did he hear what Hannah just said?

  Now I’m confused.

  Axel sees me looking puzzled.

  ‘We didn’t want to be Nazis,’ he says. ‘They made us because our parents were German.’

  He looks like he means it.

  ‘And you’d fight them?’ I say. ‘You’d fight against the Nazis?’

  ‘They ruined everything,’ says Axel. ‘That vermin Adolf Hitler has ruined my life.’

  ‘Axel,’ hisses Helmut.

  The two German boys glare at each other.

  ‘Hitler’s ruined your life too,’ Axel says angrily to Helmut.

  Helmut looks like he’s going to argue.

  But instead he droops.

  ‘Yeah,’ he mumbles.

  His little sister goes over and puts her arms round him.

  ‘Our mum and dad were proud of Helmut in the Hitler Youth,’ says Bug. ‘He was keeping our family safe.’

  ‘Didn’t work, though, did it?’ says Helmut sadly. ‘Adolf Hitler should have stayed in Munich and been a travel agent, that’s what our mum said before she died.’

  We all think about this, and how different all our lives would be if he had.

  ‘Here’s what we should do,’ says Hannah. ‘Find poisonous mushrooms in the forest and make a soup and creep into the Nazi barracks and mix it with their food.’

  ‘That’s a dumb idea,’ says Axel. ‘We should ambush them and shoot them.’

  ‘What with?’ says Hannah. ‘Your bullets haven’t even got any gunpowder. Helmut said you dug them out of a wall.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean they haven’t got gunpowder,’ says Axel, hurt.

  My mind is racing. Suddenly I can see a way to let the others do what they want to do and get more food at the same time.

  ‘I’ve got an idea,’ I say.

  I explain what Yuli told me about the local railway line being a major Nazi supply route. I tell them about the Nazi secret weapons. Specially the rocket bombs that fly themselves to England.

  ‘If we wreck a train,’ I say, ‘we’ll be doing big damage to the Nazis. We might even stop some rocket bombs getting to the launching sites up north. And even if we don’t do that, Nazi supply trains will almost certainly have food on them. We’ve got three Nazi uniforms between us. Three of us can salvage food from the wrecked train and blend right in.’

  The others are all looking at me.

  Gobsmacked.

  ‘Wreck a train,’ says Hannah. ‘How do we wreck a train?’

  ‘With a lot of explosives,’ says Axel. ‘Which we haven’t got.’

  ‘That’s not the only way,’ I say.

  I glance across at Dom, who has wandered away from the squabbling to scratch his back on a tree.

  Dom is looking at me.

  I can see he understands.

  He knows that if we’re going to wreck a train, he’s the most important part of the mission.

  I explained to the others that the best way to wreck a train without explosives or parents is to get a big strong horse to drag a section of track away so the train gets derailed and falls over, and they agreed it sounded like a good thing to do, we got busy with the prep
arations.

  Days after days of preparations.

  Finding the railway track.

  Seeing how often trains come past at night.

  Choosing a well-hidden section of the track to remove.

  Working out we need a crowbar to loosen the metal clips that hold the track down.

  Deciding which piece of metal we can unscrew from the cart to use as a crowbar without the cart falling to pieces.

  Taking the piece of metal off.

  Watching the cart fall to pieces.

  Rebuilding the cart.

  ‘Typical,’ says Hannah scornfully. ‘Boys always get things wrong.’

  ‘Typical,’ says Axel, just as scornfully. ‘Girls always think they know best and they don’t.’

  ‘Stop it,’ I say, ‘or I’ll cancel the whole sabotage.’

  At last we’re ready, so we wait for a dry night and set off.

  The bigger ones walk next to the cart so Dom can save his strength for what he has to do. I don’t know what a section of railway track weighs, but it must be a lot. About as much as ten ploughs probably.

  I hope Dom can do it. I stroke his leg muscles as we walk. I’m a bit worried he might have caught a cold from carrying us through the swamp so many times over the last couple of weeks.

  It would have been better not to bring the cart tonight, but Faiga and Bug and Beryl are too small for a long walk through a dark forest, and we couldn’t leave them on the island by themselves.

  Nobody is saying much.

  The little kids are asleep in the back of the cart. Axel, Helmut and Hannah are walking silently. As we pass through patches of moonlight between the trees, I see how tense their faces are.

  I’m feeling the same.

  Trying not to think about how risky this is.

  Axel and Helmut are wearing their Hitler youth uniforms, and I’m wearing the Nazi uniform Yuli left behind, but what if the Nazis see through our disguise?

  I pat my chest under the Nazi jacket to make sure my medical package is safe inside my shirt. Doctor Zajak’s scalpels and needles and a candle, wrapped in my cotton vest.

  If any of the others get bullets in them, I can do clean and hot, but whether that’ll be enough to save them I don’t know.

  This is another hard thing about being a parent. Wanting to give good protection and not knowing if you can.

  You know how when you reach a railway line and you’re desperate to get to work removing a section of track but first you’ve got to unharness Dom and hide the cart carefully in thick bushes so that if Nazis start killing and hurting they won’t find Faiga and Bug and Beryl?

  That’s what Axel and Helmut and me are doing.

  We tear off pine branches and cover the cart, leaving small spaces so the little girls can breathe.

  ‘It’s like a doll’s house,’ says Bug.

  ‘Let’s be dolls,’ says Faiga.

  ‘Partisan dolls,’ says Beryl. ‘Brave ones.’

  Hannah isn’t helping us. She’s staring at the bridge further along the railway line, and the deep valley it runs across.

  ‘I still think we should be doing our sabotage on that bridge,’ she says.

  I explain to her again why that wouldn’t be a good idea. How the derailed train would fall into the valley and we couldn’t get the food from it.

  ‘Also,’ I say, ‘Nazi train drivers are used to being sabotaged on bridges, so they pay extra attention on them. Once the train’s across, the driver will relax and won’t see our sabotage up ahead.’

  Hannah mutters something about how more Nazis get killed when they fall into deep valleys.

  She’s right, but I remind her we’re mostly doing this for food.

  ‘I’m not,’ she says.

  ‘That’s enough branches,’ says Axel. ‘Let’s get started.’

  ‘Just a few more,’ I say. ‘The corner of the cart is still showing.’

  I bend down to pick up more branches.

  Before I can get my hands on them, I’m suddenly rolling over and over in a roaring explosion of wind and grit and stinging pine needles.

  The explosion echoes away through the hills.

  I find my glasses and struggle to my feet.

  Hannah, Axel and Helmut are picking themselves up too. The little girls are still in the cart, whimpering. Dom is still standing, but he’s stamping unhappily.

  I try to calm them down.

  I also try to see what’s happened.

  Axel and Helmut and Hannah are staring down the slope, open-mouthed.

  I see what they’re looking at.

  Clouds of dust and smoke.

  The railway bridge is broken and twisted, more than half of it gone.

  ‘It got blown up,’ says Helmut.

  He’s right.

  ‘Must be partisans,’ I say.

  But which partisans? Yuli and Mr Pavel and the others are all dead. Could it be the partisans from the main camp?

  Below us, down the slope, a figure holding a gun steps out from the trees and starts walking through the dust and smoke towards the broken bridge.

  I stare, my heart thumping as much as when the explosion first went off.

  Gabriek?

  The dust and smoke are starting to clear.

  It’s not Gabriek. It’s a Nazi soldier.

  Other Nazi soldiers come out of the trees and join the first one on what’s left of the bridge.

  Where are the partisans? Why aren’t they shooting the Nazis?

  I signal to Hannah and the others to stay crouching low and out of sight. I don’t take my eyes off the Nazis.

  Two of the soldiers are tying something to the part of the bridge that’s still standing. A small package with a wire attached to it.

  All the soldiers hurry back into the trees, trailing the wire behind them.

  I realise what’s going to happen.

  I can hardly believe it. I whisper to the little girls to put their hands over their ears and not be scared by another loud noise, and then I put my hands over Dom’s ears.

  It happens.

  Another explosion, a smaller one.

  The rest of the bridge collapses.

  Hannah and Axel and Helmut are staring, stunned.

  I know exactly what they’re thinking. Why are the Nazis blowing up their own bridge? I’d be thinking it myself if Gabriek hadn’t given me such a good education. If he hadn’t explained that retreating armies don’t just do looting and destroy other people’s stuff.

  There’s something else they do.

  Remembering it now makes my insides leap.

  Sometimes retreating armies destroy their own stuff as well, but only when they know they’ve lost the war.

  Our journey back to the swamp starts off much happier than our journey earlier tonight.

  When I tell the others what Gabriek said, they all get very excited.

  ‘Does this mean the war’s over?’ says Beryl.

  ‘It could be soon,’ I say.

  I take the Nazi jacket off and fling it away into the trees.

  Everyone chatters happily about the war being over. Axel and Helmut even sing a couple of songs, which they promise aren’t Nazi ones.

  Gradually, though, we all go quiet.

  I know why.

  It’s wonderful when a war ends, but then you remember that things will never be the same.

  Everyone you’ve lost will still be dead.

  Parents and relatives and pets and best friends.

  And some people, even if they’re not dead, you’ll never see again.

  I hate war and the way it makes you have so many sad thoughts, because now I can’t stop thinking about Gabriek.

  I can’t stop thinking about how he’ll be feeling after the war.

  He’ll be glad the Nazis are defeated, but there’s something he won’t be glad about. He won’t be glad he ever met me and Zelda. And I can’t blame him. If we hadn’t arrived at his farm, Genia would still be alive.

  Irenka might even
be born.

  We all walk on in silence.

  The little girls are asleep in the cart again.

  I want to sleep too as soon as we get back, so I can get rid of these horrible thoughts.

  We’re almost there. I can see the dawn mist rising off the swamp.

  I peer ahead to find the place where we cross to the island.

  And see a figure, waiting on the shore.

  The mist is quite thick, but I know instantly who it is. Even when mist is this thick, you can see colours through it.

  This colour is different from how it used to be, not as bright, but it’s still red and it’s still a headscarf.

  Yuli.

  Yuli and I finished hugging, and started hugging some more, and I introduced her to the others and explained she was one of my best friends, I asked Yuli a million questions.

  How she survived.

  Where she went.

  Why it took her so long to come back.

  ‘I was lucky,’ says Yuli sadly. ‘Luckier than Pavel and most of the others.’

  She tells us about the Nazi attack on the camp. How the partisans were outnumbered and overwhelmed. How she was knocked unconscious by the blast from a grenade. How when she woke up, she found herself in a different camp far away in another part of the forest.

  ‘The main camp?’ I ask.

  Yuli shakes her head.

  ‘A new camp,’ she says. ‘With Szulk in command.’

  I pull a face, then explain to the others how awful that must have been for Yuli.

  ‘We had someone like that in our Hitler Youth brigade,’ says Axel.

  Yuli looks at him, but doesn’t say anything.

  She must be wondering what I’m doing hanging around with Nazis.

  ‘Axel’s on our side now,’ I say to her. ‘So’s Helmut.’

  She still seems doubtful, so I tell her how Axel and Helmut were going to help us wreck a Nazi train if the Nazis hadn’t got in the way.

  Yuli gives Axel and Helmut a friendly nod.

  ‘It’s happening all over,’ she says. ‘The Nazis are in a panic and destroying everything. There’s a rumour Hitler has killed himself.’

  Our cheers echo across the swamp.

  Yuli stays silent. And serious.

  ‘Felix,’ she says. ‘I’ve got some other news. Two lots. One bad, the other … well, not so bad. Maybe.’

  I stare at her.

  ‘Tell me the bad first,’ I say.