On the first day of the camp games, foot racing, target shooting, and singing tournaments began. Older boys played a violent group game where cabins put on red or blue armbands and had to hunt one another down and steal all the other team’s colors to win. But the camp-wide highlight was the Roman chariot races.
By then we were practiced enough that we swept past the whirl of cheering boys around the oval track. My whole body shifted to keep balance as the balls of my heels dug into the backs of the boys below me. My rear-end drooped low, and my arms reached straight ahead, yanking in with my right hand and slacking the left to turn, and like one fluid creature, the six of us circled the course. We won our first three meets because other teams kept crashing. One boy broke his arm after a fall, and that put us in the final race with four other teams. The race was held the last night of camp, once it got dark. The campers who were not in the final race lined the track and held flashlights and torches made with wadded, oil-soaked cloth, so winding lines of fire and iridescent light bordered the whole course.
I remember thinking that some of these bulbs must have come from my father’s factory.
Before the race started, Edwin and Timothy talked about how to take the corners. They had begun working together after Timothy made a joke about how the two of them were the only ones who knew that the counselors punched like girls. When they were bound together, they let me climb onto their bent shoulders.
I looked ahead of me at the curve in the track, and the layered flames on both sides of it. The idea of launching off the backs of the boys into the flames suddenly scared me.
“Ready,” I said.
At the starting line other charioteers boxed me in on both sides. The boy to my immediate left smiled, and the boy to my right was already squatting back, legs shaking, and ready to begin.
Günter was at the starting line cheering us on. The camp director, donned in the full military uniform of an SS officer, walked to the front of the racers and held up a Luger. When the gun fired, the boys below me jerked forward and I eased back so the lines in my hands snapped taut. The voices of the boys lining the course pushed against me as we ran past. Wisps of smoke from the burning oil filled my lungs. At the start of the race we were in third place. We made it halfway around the track when one of the teams ahead of us crumpled on a tight turn. On the last stretch, with my screaming matched by all five of the boys below me, we passed the remaining chariot in front of us by the length of my brother’s head and stayed locked for fifty meters before we pulled ahead and won.
Günter met us at the finish line and hugged Pauwel and Timothy.
“We did it! We did it!” he yelled. Then, as if remembering himself, he stood back and raised his hand high in front of our team to salute us.
The noise of all the boys who watched was deafening as they cheered and closed in around us in a dizzy whorl of lights and flames. The camp director ordered everyone to the main revelry grounds, where there was a giant pile of wood. All the boys walked forward and touched their torches onto the pile. Once the bonfire was stoked, the camp director ordered the winning chariot team forward.
“You young men have shown great strength and honor today. Your family and country are proud of you,” the officer said.
Then Günter handed each of us a dagger. I unsheathed mine and held it in front of me so the firelight shone off the blade.
“As is our tradition, the winning team gets to do the final march of heroes.”
Günter and another counselor came forward with a giant shield that had a broken thunderbolt on it.
“We get to carry the fallen soldier,” Timothy told Garth.
“It’s an honor for us,” Günter added.
We lined up at the flagpole, where they had me lie down on the shield. Edwin, the other four boys, and Günter lifted the shield over their heads and started marching. The camp director led everyone in the songs we had learned over the course of the last five weeks. With my dagger pinned to my chest, my head rolled from side to side to see the tips of the torches lit around me. The voices of hundreds of boys, singing in unison about the valor of fallen soldiers, lifted into the sky. I lay on the shield as if I were Quex, and let the singing and firelight soak into me, basking in what would be the first but not the last time Hitler’s nationalists would celebrate me.
4
The buses arrived the next morning to take us back to the train station. I had spent all night imagining myself as a war hero, leading my troop from the Hitler Youth camps east through Russia. We marched, now hardened men, until we hit Stalingrad. I army-crawled on the cool forest floor, and the scope of my gun lined up faceless individual soldiers who didn’t see me hidden behind trees, sniping away at them from a distance, chanting, Smelly old pussies, smelly old pussies, as each figure dropped to the ground.
After the long train ride, we found Uncle Martin and our father waiting for us at the station by the loading docks. There was too much to tell them all at once, but all three of us started shouting to them about it anyway.
“We won the camp games!” Ludo announced.
“We learned how to take target practice,” Edwin said.
“Look what I won,” I said to my father and held up my dagger for him to admire. “Look at this.” The blade glinted like a blue fang in the sunlight. The pad of my finger traced the RZM numbers.
“Jesus,” my father said.
“We did orienteering and grenade fights,” Ludo said.
“Jesus, you did that?”
“We loved it,” I said.
Uncle Martin and my father looked at each other, and I could tell a coded family message passed between them.
Next to the harbormaster’s office, the scaffold radio tower we’d seen before had collapsed into a pile of charred lumber and steel.
“Look at that,” Ludo said.
I looked at my uncle, who didn’t turn but walked ahead of us to the boat.
“Wires must have gotten too hot,” my father said.
I was disappointed my father wasn’t more excited for us. The more animated we became, the quieter he and Uncle Martin got. Later that day, when we cruised the Ems on the Lighthouse Lady, I overheard my father and my uncle talking.
“This is more craziness,” Uncle Martin said.
“What would you have me do?” my father asked.
“You can take them somewhere else for a while. You have the money.”
“But then what? I’d have to shut down the factory. I have to stay and keep that up.”
“There’ll be more trouble. More fighting.”
“They can’t fight anymore. They’ve done that already and ten million people died.”
“You’re na?ve,” Uncle Martin said.
They stood for a long time in silence. I stopped listening and turned to Ludo and my brother, who basked in the glow of how well camp had ended for us. They carried their daggers on their belts just like me.
Hilda met us at the dock and walked home with us. She’d been riding her horse and was dressed in riding breeches, laced boots, and a black, felt-covered helmet.
On our walk, Edwin slapped at his shoulder.
“Got the sucker,” he said, and cupped a fly in his fist. “I can feel the wings banging against my fingers.
“Can I have a strand of your hair, Hilda?” he asked.