“It’s no different than an injury,” Ludo said, stepping by the boy and onto the bus.
Over two hundred boys boarded the row of buses. Some of them already wore their camp uniforms, and others looked like they came from a day playing in the woods, sweaty, dusted in dirt with mud tracing the seams of their shoes. When the three of us sat down, a boy in front of Ludo whose neck looked scoured by sandpaper turned toward him. He had the flattened nose and thick neck of a young boxer. His features seemed set with a chisel and hammer. Deep-set black eyes. Long furrows across his forehead. He kept licking his lips like a parched lizard.
“You know, you won’t be able to compete with any of us,” the boy said, eyeing Ludo’s arm.
Ludo turned to the window. His right hand cupped his left like the lid of a sugar cup.
The buses took us to the camp offices, about fifty kilometers away from the train station, where we had to be checked in.
We were each given a clipboard and told to sign the loyalty oaths. To the camp. To the National Socialist Party. Without reading it, we did.
In the main congregating ground around the flagpoles, we split into groups. Each group was assigned an older boy as a group leader. Edwin, Ludo, and I were, thankfully, placed together. We were led to a cabin that slept ten boys. Our cabin had a row of five cots with chests at their base on either side and a large window at each end.
Our group leader for the next five weeks was Günter Zimmer, a seventeen-year-old boy with blue eyes, nubby ears, and black hair, oiled and parted down the middle. His breath smelled like smoke and mint. His uniform of gouged wood.
“Unpack, change into uniforms, and meet outside in ten minutes,” Günter said.
When Günter went outside, the rash-necked boy from the bus assessed his bunkmates. “Great, our group has been invaded by defective Dutchmen.” The few boys next to him leered at us as we continued to unpack.
“Don’t worry about him,” a boy in the cot next to Ludo said. The boy looked at Ludo and put down a colorful three-tone quilt he unfolded from his bag. “I’m Pauwel,” he said. He had glossy, volcanic pimples around his nose and chewed at the peels of raw skin around his thumbnail.
“Ludo Shoemackher, and these are Edwin and Jacob Koopman.”
“Nice to meet you,” Pauwel said. He had a pear-shaped face with doughy cheeks that made him look like a chubby little Viking. “You’ll settle in fine.”
Outside, we were lined up for uniform inspections by Günter, who had us stand straight, tuck our shirts beneath our belt lines, and fold back the tops of our wool socks. He stood in front of me and ran his hands over my shoulders to smooth the creases.
“Look up and ahead. Not down.”
I looked up and let my eyes lose focus and cursed myself for being scared of people talking directly to me, like anyone, at any moment, might spark into a rage if I said a word.
After inspection we were ready for our first tour of the grounds and marched single file by the rows of bunkhouses, and a giant building that was the camp officers’ housing and offices.
“This is the parade ground with the flagpoles,” Günter said. A red flag with a black, hooked swastika flapped in the breeze, snapping as it fully extended before folding back on itself.
Beyond the main grounds were sports fields that pushed all the way back to a dense stand of woods. In the woods were obstacle courses, firing ranges, and an area where previous campers had built bunker forts and concrete pillboxes to border the camp’s property.
We marched around the campgrounds, then we teamed up for a football match where I ran myself ragged from the pure joy of having so many other kids to play with. After the game, we ate as a giant group at long wooden tables set end to end in rows outside so all five hundred camp boys could eat together at once. I had never seen so many boys, and wondered what had brought them here. For the most part it was the sixteen-to eighteen-year-olds who were in charge of the camp, although there were several camp officers. Alten H?nden, they called them, Old Hands, who we were told had survived hard times on the front lines. They marched through the grounds, scanning, supervising, instructing on Kampfgeist, fighting spirit, or Labenscraum, living space, and then disappeared into cabins near the main office.
Most of the German words were thick and heavy in my mouth. Ludo and Edwin took to nuances of the language we hadn’t learned in lessons, but I was quite clunky at it.
That first night we had campfires and played games. Tests of courage, really. Boys jumped over bonfires. Older counselors carried out giant circular canvases with handles woven along the edge. When rolled out, the canvas was large enough for two grown men to lie end to end in any direction. Thirty campers from my troop gathered around the tarp as one boy crawled into the center. Then everyone lifted his edge of the canvas so the boy in the middle launched off the ground. Günter counted so we knew when to dip and lift the canvas. To his cadence, we launched the boy in the middle up into the air, a free-float ascension until he peaked and sailed back into the taut and ready trampoline. This was how we learned one another’s names. The flying boy shouted his name, and the rest of us repeated it as we heaved.
Ed-win.
Lu-do.
Tim-o-thy, the rash-necked boy.
Garth, another bunkmate.
Pauw-el.
The names felt endless. Our voices lifted the boy upward. When it was my turn, I flew over the whole troop and saw the quick glow of other fires and other boys being launched around the campground before falling back into the soft, giving tarp, my body sinking into it, and then springing back off of it, back into the air. They pitched me into the summer night to the sound of one deep cadence and the voice of thirty other laughing boys.
“Ja-cob. Ja-cob. Ja-cob,” they shouted.
Before going to our bunkhouses for bed, the older boys told us stories about great German soldiers and fairy tales, which were entertaining, sure, but no match for my father’s. His always made me feel like I moved underwater, like the world my body was in was not the world of sight at all, and that it was the world of his stories that mattered most. His stories were so vivid and real, so dangerous and profound, he could have easily scared the piss out of any of these boys.