cadres from. There'd been hand-grenades in our day, practice grenades that went off with a sharp crack and a sharp little flame on the playground, and then later they'd equipped the boys with real ones. But there weren't enough to go round, so they had to take some old and dodgy captured Greek-made grenades to make up numbers, and one boy had his belly ripped away by one because the pin had got caught up in his shoulder-strap and worked loose, that's how the teachers accounted for the mishap. And then the teachers had given them guns, captured guns with rusty barrels from victorious days, and they were to go with the old men from the Volkssturm reserve, and defend the eyrie—the fastness of the defeated but still bloodthirsty gods—but luckily the gods started eating one another and losing their heads before they could all be killed, and the old Volkssturm men sloped off into the woods and hills, or they hid in hay barns and potato cellars, and the dashing instructors ran around like mice, because now they would be called to account for the bacon they'd filched, and now they were caught in the trap, they were sitting pretty in the nets they'd helped to knot themselves. And then it was announced that there was going to be one more train, and the instructors sent the children home on it, without guns, without hand-grenades, just in their brown uniforms, and how could they get home, home was just a memory. The train didn't get far. It was attacked by fighter planes. Like furious hornets the fighters sent stinging volleys of shot through the splintering glass, metal and wood of the train compartments. Adolf was unhurt. But the train was finished, a crippled worm. The children continued on foot, along the tracks, on the gravel, stumbling over the ties. And then they ran into another train. It was a concentration camp that had been put on wheels and had also come to a halt. The children found themselves eyed by skeletons, by corpses. The children trembled in their Party school uniforms. But they didn't know why they should be afraid. They were German children, after all! They were the elect! Still, they found themselves whispering. 'They're from the camps!' they whispered, 'they're Jews!' And the children looked round and they whispered, 'Where are our men, where is our armed escort?' But there were no guards left, and the train was standing between a wood and a meadow, it was a spring day, the first flowers were out, the first butterflies were flitting about, the children in brown jackets "were confronted by the prisoners in blue-and-white convict clothes, and out of their sunken eye sockets the skeletons and the corpses looked right through the Party Junkers, who began to feel they had no bones, no skeletons, as if they were nothing but brown Party jackets, which some evil charm had suspended in the spring air. The children ran down from the tracks into the woods. They didn't stay together. They scattered. They went in all directions, without a word, without a salute or 'Heil Hitler!' And Adolf sat down in the grass next to a bush, because he didn't know where to go. Now a wraith had concealed itself in the bush, and the wraith watched Adolf. The wraith was exactly Adolf's age, but it had only half Adolf's weight. Adolf was crying. He had always been told not to cry. 'German boys don't cry,' said his parents and instructors. But Adolf was crying. He didn't know why he was crying. Perhaps he was crying because for the first time he was alone, and there was no one there to tell him, 'German boys don't cry.' But when the wraith saw Adolf crying, it picked up the stick that was lying beside it, and emerged from the bushes, a tottering figure, an emaciated body, with beaten skin, shaved child's skull, a death mask, and the wraith in its blue-and-white-striped felon's jacket raised the stick, and its nose stuck out large and bony in its starved face, and Adolf Judejahn remembered the Stürmer picture and recognized his first live Jew,
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