“Thank you, kind sir,” she would say.
When it was Ludo’s turn, she shifted her hands so his weak arm could stay relaxed at his side as they slid around the room together, as easily as the rest of us did. Fergus’s uncontrollable excitement led him to swing around the dancing couple, his nails scratching the hardwood floor. At camp, there were enough boys my mother could have danced from one boy to the next, across the field grounds for the rest of her life, her flower dress spinning on and on. This image has stayed with me my whole life—my beautiful mother in perpetual motion.
During the third week of camp, the buses took us to meet up with boys from other camps on the shores of the North Sea. In total there were over two thousand boys, and for an hour we marched on the sands showing our formations and marching skills to one another. Then we had to face up to the dunes where a procession of military officers gathered around General Spitz of the Luftwaffe, who had come to give a speech to all of us. His chest from collarbone to navel was covered in so many medals it looked like a toddler had gone wild decorating him.
“You are a fine group of young men,” he said into a microphone. “You are making your families proud. Keep having fun. Learn as much as you can, and you will make this nation a phoenix, rising with the scalding light of redemption to bring prosperity back to our people. When you are called, your hearts will know to rise.”
The boys around me shot their arms up so their palms faced the top of the dunes so I did the same.
“Sieg Heil,” the thousands of boys said in unison, and their chorus could have beat back the surf with its force.
When the general finished his speech, the camp counselors said we could strip down to our shorts and leave the rest of our clothes folded at our feet.
As we stood there I looked to see which boys had the first trails of hair plunging from their belly buttons to their pant lines. Who had ribs and veins protruding or developed muscles or was flabby and pale. I was comparing everyone with my own body and the general’s words were already far from my mind.
“Now, raise your hand if you cannot swim or if you are a poor swimmer,” Günter said.
The few boys who raised their hands were asked to come stand behind him. “Now, when the general’s whistle blows, you boys who are good swimmers can go swimming. Those behind me, we will go down to the beach and you will learn how to swim.”
When the whistle sounded, I hardly heard it, but waves of boys peeled out of their ranks and ran across the sand toward the surf. Bodies crashed into the water by the dozens when Edwin, Ludo, and I at last realized we were free to run; the others had expected the whistle from years before.
The three of us turned and ran across the flat sand to the water in a wild stampede of yipping and yelling to one another. The hard crash of my body into the ice cold water knocked the wind out of me, but I dove farther in, closer to the crowd of hundreds of milky-pale boys playing in the North Sea. We began to wrestle one another.
One boy dunked himself under, and came up with globs of wet sand that he threw up into the air, yelling “Incoming!” as the boys around him dove under the surface to avoid the gritty spray that fell in after them.
Other boys yelled “Incoming!” and “Fire!” and “Save yourself!” Their voices carried down the strand. Einfall! Angriff! Alle mann van bard!
Then, Timothy, our bunkmate with the rashed neck, jumped on my back and pushed me under.
“Take that,” he said.
His meaty hands pinched at the muscles of my neck and I thought, You fucker, and tried to swim free and kick up, but he kept me pinned down until I swallowed mouthfuls of water. Then he placed his foot on my back and kicked me into the sandy bottom where I felt his other foot press between my shoulder blades. Then I thought, Jesus, I’m going to drown.
But Edwin came to my rescue. He pushed Timothy away. When I jumped out of the water and gasped for air, I heard the last of my brother yelling at Timothy.
“What’s wrong with you?”
I worked my way to shore and for a moment wished the sand under my feet were the soil of Delfzijl—of home.
Later in the day, after I recovered on the beach, Pauwel, Ludo, Edwin, and I wrestled in the water. We teamed up to get on each other’s shoulders and tried to push one another off. I grappled with Ludo, who kept pushing me into the cold water despite his dead arm, which was thinner at the bicep than the knot of bone at his elbow. We did this until our bodies were blue from the cold and red from the sun. I imagined pictures rising from our bones to our skin. Then we were instructed to come out of the water, dry off, dress on the sand, and board the buses, which we rode home with our skin tight from the salt and sunburn.
Timothy turned toward the three of us on the bus. “I’m surprised the Dutch boys didn’t drown.”
At night we watched a movie that had been set up in a giant tent. The film was about a teenaged Nazi martyr named Hitlerjunge Quex, who grew up in poverty in Berlin. It showed him in 1932, during the pit of the German Depression, when his out-of-work father, a supporter of the Communist party, sent him on a weekend camping trip with a Communist youth group. While there, Quex found the Communists were undisciplined and rowdy. They smoked and drank, danced late into the night, and served their meals by tossing hunks of bread at a hungry crowd that fought for what they could catch. One of the games the Communist camp counselors set up quickly turned into a game of holding each other down and slapping the other’s private parts.
When this scene appeared, the boys who had been to camp before yelled, “Filthy animals,” in unison and then they leaned into each other and laughed.
Quex sneaks off to another part of the park and finds a group of Hitler Youth camping by the lake and he spies on them. When the German boys appeared onscreen, the boys around us started cheering.
“Watch and learn, Quex. Watch and learn,” the boys yelled at the screen.
Quex saw the Hitler Youth working together to make a fire and cook a hot dinner. They listened to speeches, sang patriotic songs, and shouted in unison their support for an “awakened Germany.”
On cue, the boys in the movie tent yelled, “Awakened Germany!”
When Quex returns home, singing one of the Hitler Youth songs, his father comes on the screen, and at this point all the boys in the tent began to hiss.