Page 55 of The Watchmaker of Dachau

No one wrote anything about this life, though. No one said that this could be a possibility. Even when it began, when friends and family disappeared into the night, when my father lost his job and we were made to wear the yellow stars – it still seemed impossible that this could be where we ended up.

We moved as the German army marched into our town on the Polish-German border, first to an aunt in the countryside and then to a friend of my father’s, another academic who told us he could hide us and keep us safe.

The fact that we spoke both German and Polish helped somewhat. It meant that we were not confined to one country, and could pass ourselves off as someone else.

‘We’ll head to France,’ my father said one evening, as we sat in his friend’s basement, our home for over a year.

He was feverish after catching a cold from the damp that lived on the walls, the mould that grew in between the cracks of the bricks, and the drips of water that ran down in summer and froze in winter.

‘Hush now,’ my mother told him, and placed a cool washcloth on his head.

He did not stop, however. He sat in the bed he shared with Mother, bent over papers on which he drew maps, added dates and times of trains that his friend gave him.

I sat with my sister and younger brother, all three of us huddled on a single bed that we had learned to sleep in together – not one of us daring to move in our sleep so it was as if we were mummies in their sarcophagi; their arms across their chests, perfectly still.

I watched Father as he scribbled, his beard now long and white, his eyes squinting behind his wire-rimmed glasses. He had grown old this past year. There were more creases in his brow, more wrinkles around his thinning face.

‘Do you think he has gone mad?’ my brother, Szymon, asked me. He was eating as usual, popping small pieces of bread in his mouth and chewing them slowly.

‘Why can’t you eat it all in one go?’ My sister’s arm flung out and hit him.

‘Because it gives me something to do,’ he said and grinned.

The pair of them loved to fight; my sister Katharina, almost nineteen, Szymon sixteen, and me the eldest, always trying to settle their disputes.

‘Don’t fight,’ I told them. ‘You’re always playing. It’s as though you don’t realise where we are.’

‘I do,’ Szymon said. ‘But I also have a theory.’

‘A theory? Your brain is the size of a pea; I doubt you have any theory in there.’ Katharina laughed.

‘I’ll have you know that it’s not just you two who have brains. I might not understand mathematics, or philosophy—’

‘Or anything,’ Katharina interjected.

‘But,’ Szymon pressed on, ‘I have a theory that if you act happy, even when things are bad, and if you find some humour, then you can survive. If we are serious and scared all the time, then where will that get us?’ He popped another tiny crumb of bread in his mouth, acting as if he were tasting fine chocolates.

‘You two are mad,’ I said, shaking my head, then looking at Father again, who mumbled something to Mother and made her smile.

‘We’ll go to England!’ Suddenly Father sat up straight, then tried to get out of bed, his thin legs like pencils inside his trousers. He stood, wobbly, his dressing gown over his shirt, cardigan and trousers, his kippah on his head.

Szymon elbowed me in the ribs and giggled. ‘Told you – mad,’ he whispered.

‘Listen, listen to me now. We get to France and then we get to England. I have it all worked out. All of it.’ He flapped the papers at us.

I took one of the sheets from him and saw a large circle with lines coming in and out of it, random scribbles by the side. I looked to Mother, whose eyes were filling with tears.

Szymon took the paper next, and he did not joke, but looked to me and Katharina with wide scared eyes.

‘Yes, Papa, that’s exactly what we will do,’ I said. I climbed off the bed and led him back to his, laying him down and covering him with blankets. I placed the damp washcloth on his head, and nodded at his feverish murmurings.

Soon he fell asleep.

Mother sat on one of the two wooden chairs next to him, and sang prayers to him, allowing the weak tears to fall down her face as he slept.

‘It’s bad, isn’t it.’ Katharina had huddled herself into a ball on one corner of our bed; Szymon had stopped pecking at his bread.

I nodded.