I

Fostered Children

The Institution    They brought him to Spiegelgrund for the first time in January 1941, on a cold, clear winter’s morning when the pale light closest to the ground shimmered with frost. Near the top of the mountain that rose behind the pavilions, Adrian Ziegler remembers seeing the institution’s church, its dome green with verdigris against a blue sky, an unreal blue like that of postcards or colour-printed posters. The car stopped just inside the hospital gate, in front of the buildings that housed the directorate and the administration. A nurse came to escort them, first to meet the elderly director, a grave, pale gentleman in a dark suit, who signed the documents, and then to a pavilion to the left of the main entrance, where a doctor was waiting to examine him. Another nurse was there as well and she shouted at him to undress at once and step onto the scales. Adrian would claim that he had no idea who the doctor was until much later. It was only then, when he finally saw the medical report and recognised the signature of Doctor Heinrich Gross, that he identified the Spiegelgrund doctor as the man who pursued him for the rest of his life, even long after he had been set free. But on this first day, the doctor is simply a frightening stranger in a white coat who forces his jaws apart as far as they will go, and then probes and squeezes the bones in his skull and spine with strong fingers. The examination lasts for an hour and the doctor uses instruments that Adrian has never seen before. The top of his head is measured using a kind of circular tool with a sharp point at the tip. He is told to sit on a tall seat made up of a loose board with flaps on either side and then Doctor Gross lowers another measuring thing to determine the distance between his eyes, and between each eye and his chin. Next, the doctor pulls on a pair of gloves, prods Adrian’s testicles and pushes a finger up his anus. When the examination is done, the escort nurse comes to collect him. It is still early. They walk along a corridor where the white winter daylight bounces off the monotonous pattern of rhomboid floor tiles and it will often come back to him afterwards how the floors and walls in corridors and dormitories glowed with an unearthly luminosity as if alive in their own right, independent of the children who stayed there and somehow more substantial than they were. But, of course, the nurse has no patience with him. Stop staring and come along, we haven’t got all day! They go outside through a door at the back of the building. Now, he has his first glimpse of the extent of the place that will be his home for several years, of its many pavilions lined up side by side, pale and shut-off in the long, frost-white shadow below the mountain. All the pavilions look the same, with barred windows and plain brick frontages broken by bays. The narrow tracks of a tramline apparently link the pavilions. From a little higher up, a small train comes along, three freight wagons pulled by a red and white locomotive. It looks like a toy train. He is to be housed in pavilion 9, in the third row to the left of the central path. The nurse pulls out a huge bunch of keys from her apron pocket and flicks through them with practised fingers until she has located the right one. The dormitory doors must be locked even though it is mid-morning. If there are any children behind the doors, they aren’t making the slightest noise. The nurse leads the way to a store cupboard next to the washroom and hands him a towel and a piece of grey institutional soap. He has a bath and afterwards she inspects his fingernails and ears, then lets him have his clothes back. She gives him a pair of felt slippers to wear indoors and a short, grey woollen jacket, but he isn’t allowed to put the jacket on even though the corridor is as cold as sin. She leads him to a tall white door with IV painted on it. At first, he thought the children behind that door were just sitting very still and holding their breath. Later, he thought maybe they were already dead but pretended to be alive for his sake. So he wouldn’t lose heart straightaway.

The River    Adrian would sum up his early childhood as hardly the happiest years of his life, but at least a time he could look back on without feeling ashamed. He used to spend his summers with his favourite uncle, one of his mother’s younger brothers who lived out in Kaisermühlen. His real name was Ferenc Dobrosch, though his sister called him Franz. At the time, Adrian and his siblings had the surname Dobrosch, because their mother wasn’t married to their father. Ferenc said that that Dobrosch was a Hungarian surname even though it didn’t sound the slightest bit Hungarian, and explained that the entire family came from a couple of small villages in a part of Hungary that now belonged to Slovakia. Adrian’s mother insisted that the family name was Slovakian and in no way Hungarian, not that it mattered since it was just as good as any Austrian name because all names are fine in Austria, or had been in the old days. Uncle Ferenc had no education to speak of but was a hard-working and enterprising man who earned a living from occasional jobs that he seemed to pick up easily, or at least he did back then. During the summer, he minded the animals down on the allotments at Hubertusdamm, where many of the plot-holders used to keep cows or goats on the old floodplain between the high-water dam and the river. Adrian and his little brother Helmut helped to feed the animals and were rewarded with a churn full of fresh milk to take home. The animals were calm and warm. If it rained, they would stand close to each other, as if asleep. Ferenc and Adrian lay on their backs on the ground. It was covered in animal dung and rubbish like old tyres and nails from the workshops along the road, so if you were running around barefoot you had to look out or you might get hurt. The air was moist after the rain, the summer sky high and bright. Dense insect swarms rose like pillars above the puddles in the river mud. Ferenc wore an old suit jacket and a beret, but had nothing on under the jacket. His hairy, sun-scorched chest was dotted with red insect bites and he would squeeze the worst ones with his hard nails, then suck the blood from his fingers. It didn’t hurt one bit, he said. Sometimes, he taught them things. How to cheat hunger by chewing grass, for instance. Lying there, looking out over the river, Ferenc said that the river was a curse on the land. Once, Kaisermühlen had been one of the numbered city districts – it was the 2nd Bezirk – and the local farmers had come here to have their grain ground to flour in the water-powered mills. Then the emperor ordered dams to be built across the old branching creeks of the river to direct the flow through a new main channel dug along a line that changed the relationship of the land to the river. For instance, what had been the left bank of the Donau ended up on the right, cut off from everywhere else by the river. From then on, Kaisermühlen was changed by word of mouth into Hunger Island. People would come looking for work but never managed to cross the river. The same thing happened when they dug the Panama Canal, Ferenc said. And then, as now, many of the labourers had drowned. Adrian asked if he knew anyone who had been a navvy on the river channel but no, Ferenc had been too young at the time, though he had heard that relatives on his father’s side had worked there. They mostly took on foreign labour, though, because the work was so dangerous. The men had died from typhus or were carried off by the river and surfaced months or even years later, so you never knew who they were or where they came from. Adrian liked the river, especially on clear days after rain, with open sightlines in every direction that meant you could see faraway places like Kahlenberg and the Reichsbrücke and the tower of the Kaiser Jubiläumskirche in Leopoldstadt. He also liked to watch the river, the controlled but irresistible power of the flowing water, and the way it and the sky exchanged light, so that the river looked different from one hour to the next. At dawn, the wind would raise ripples across the mass of water which later, at dusk, could be so still and translucent it seemed you might walk on its glassy surface. This was when they would set out for the walk back home, Ferenc in front carrying the milk churn, followed first by Adrian and then his little brother. Helmut was only three and it was hard for him to keep up. He was a slight, blue-eyed boy with a shock of blond hair. Seeing him, no one thought that this little boy could be Eugen Ziegler’s child, not even Ziegler himself, who accused the mother of having produced this Dobrosch offspring with another man. All the same, Adrian, who shared his life with his younger brother, thought Helmut’s ingratiating smile and the unconcerned look in his eyes made him a dead ringer for their father. The boys walked barefoot because their mother thought it was silly to wear shoes when it wasn’t necessary.

Simmeringer Hauptstrasse    Adrian grew up in Simmering. But not just grew up, as he would say later in life. Apart from the time I was kept at Spiegelgrund, I’ve spent my whole life in Simmering. They had me adopted but even then, where would I end up but in Simmering? Why, I was jailed in Simmering. In Kaiserebersdorf prison. He laughed when he said that but the listener understood that, to Adrian, it had been something like a curse. There are places you never seem able to leave behind. When Eugen Ziegler moved to Simmering, the Social Democrats had only just set in motion the gigantic building projects which they were determined would once and for all wipe poverty off the map, as their election posters claimed. Simmeringer Hauptstrasse was still its old self, as it had been for several centuries: a heavily trafficked through-route that linked a network of workshops, shops and pubs. The family lived in a nineteenth-century building which, like most of the larger ones in the neighbourhood turned a ‘respectable’ front towards the street while the tenements around the inner courtyard were crawling with dubious, lower-class life forms. The house was only two storeys high, but wide, with two separate stairwells on either side of a broad gateway for wagons that wasn’t broad enough, Adrian said, because the oak uprights on either side were deeply scored where loads had scraped past, on trucks as well as horse-drawn wagons. There was a pub in the building next door and the landlord preferred to unload the heavy beer barrels in the yard. Mr Streidl, who owned the shop at the front of the building, brought his stock in the same way. The flats were reached by narrow galleries along the inner frontage, one for each storey. The Dobrosch-Ziegler family lived on the first floor, at the far end of the gallery on the right. Tucked well away in a corner of the yard, where the latrines were clustered under a tall horse-chestnut tree, there was a wash house that served the entire building. Every day, regardless of weather or time of year, the women would be doing the laundry and some would bring hordes of noisy children. One of Adrian’s earliest memories is of coming home on an overcast day in the winter, when a billowing cloud of sour-smelling steam fills the big room, washing hangs on the line in the gallery and over the cooker, and Emilia and Magda, their faces glistening with sweat, lift the big pans of boiling water and shout at him in loud, shrill voices to keep out of the way or he’ll get scalded. Emilia and Magda (Magdalena) were his mother’s younger sisters and, because neither of them had yet got herself a husband, Adrian’s father had condescended to let them live with his family. The flat actually consisted of this kitchen and another, slightly larger room where one wall was covered in mould. That so many people could share this place was really beyond all comprehension. Adrian’s uncle Florian, his mother’s older brother, occupied a kitchen alcove. Florian had always been what was known as ‘peculiar’ and never got round to getting a job, despite his sister’s endless nagging and despite Eugen, Adrian’s father, who whenever he came home would have a go at Florian; although, Adrian said, you wouldn’t catch him saying that he had come home, that was below his dignity at the time, only that he had dropped by, often bringing booze with him and being generous at first, when he would offer everyone a drink, until suddenly he lost interest and broke into a violent rage that almost always targeted Adrian’s mother and her brothers and sisters, whom he abused, called parasites and vermin, and claimed that they stayed in the flat without his permission and that he had to pay for them all, though there was of course no truth in that, Adrian said, because Florian was only one of the Dobrosch brothers who lived with them, and Uncle Ferenc paid for him, always adding a little extra when he could since Ziegler himself never contributed a cent even though he kept telling them about the big business deals he had on the go. Eugen Ziegler treated Uncle Florian especially badly. Adrian clearly remembers one particular row, when his father grabbed a handful of his uncle’s long, black fringe and slammed Florian’s head against the wall, as if it was a wrecking ball. And did it over and over again. The regular, dull thuds sounded like the back of a wedge axe hitting the chopping block. Florian didn’t try to resist or defend himself; the whites of his eyes swivelled further and further up and back into his eye sockets. This was one of the few times that Leonie, Adrian’s mother, dared to speak up against Eugen. She shouted that he was to leave her Florian alone and, if he didn’t, she would leave him and never come back. She might well say that, but if she walked out, what would happen to the others? They were all her dependents: her brother and her sisters and her growing number of children. Instead, she wiped the blood off the floor, hid the empties under the sink and set Uncle Florian to glue the kitchen table leg that Eugen had broken (he was good at simple, practical things, was uncle Florian; all his sense of the here and now seemed concentrated in his hands). And so Leonie pulled on her beret, buttoned up the brown cotton coat she wore in all weathers, and went to catch the 71 tram to Schwarzenbergplatz and then go on to Wieden or Josefstadt, where she spent all day cleaning for one wealthy family after another, scrubbing their floors and beating the dust from their carpets, though some of her employers might live really far away, as when she had to walk all the way to Salmannsdorf in Döbling because she didn’t even have the money for the ticket. What Leonie Dobrosch earned from her skivvying was barely enough to pay the rent so she would try to bring back scraps of food, leftovers from the tables of the well-to-do that she had begged them to give her, things like day-old bread or potatoes or Knödel that could be fried up, but before cooking the family meal she had to start cleaning and tidying all over again the moment she arrived, because everything went to pieces at home when she wasn’t there. She had only one day a week that she could call her own: Sunday. Once a week, she threw them all out and allowed no one back in – you’d be told off if you so much as showed your face in the door – got down on all fours next to a bucket of water, scrubbed the floors and covered them in newspaper afterwards. When the floors were done, Leonie sat down at the kitchen table, on her own or with Florian for company (he alone was allowed to stay), and just stayed sitting there, doing nothing, saying nothing. Because the children had nowhere else to be and because wherever they happened to end up they’d sooner or later be chased away, they ganged up, regardless of age, and drifted from place to place, sometimes begging for things to eat or to trade. They stole, too; mostly easy pickings like fruit and vegetables from the open boxes grocers displayed outside their shopfronts. Adrian, whose aunties rarely had time for him, had belonged to the local gang since the age of just three or four. The children ran about down by the old hospital barracks in Hasenleiten, or by the Donau canal where the banks in the summer were miracles of cool stillness under the canopies of the trees, or they might go to the field with the huge gasometers, monumental brown-brick structures which loomed over his earliest childhood. When they lived on Simmeringer Hauptstrasse, he was often the youngest of the child drifters and would quite often get lost. One story that was repeated about him in the family (his sister Laura kept telling it) was about how Adrian once, when he was four, apparently fainted outside the Sankt Laurenz church. It was in the middle of winter and it took time before anyone spotted the tiny snow-covered bundle at the bottom of the church steps. The verger found him in the end. Since no one knew anything about him and there was no one to ask, the parish priest’s housekeeper took pity on the child and brought him home with her, gave him a bath, a meal, and a bed to sleep in. This was the first time he had a bed to himself instead of sleeping at the bottom of his aunties’ bed or sharing with Helmut or Laura. He spent three days with the kind lady and then his mother, brimming with shame and worry, came to collect him. Not that she was ashamed because he had been looked after by someone else. The other children had of course said where they had been that day, and she’d had a shrewd idea where her little boy was all along but hadn’t wanted to get mixed up with the police (like most people in her position, Leonie Dobrosch dreaded anything to do with the authorities) and, besides, what had happened had happened and the boy might as well stay and sit down to a few decent meals. This was also how Adrian Ziegler himself saw it many years later: his mother had in a way already handed him over to strangers. And it had seemed easy to do because she felt that, when all was said and done, staying with the priest’s housekeeper was for his own good, perhaps even a lucky break. Later on, in Spiegelgrund, he would have nightmares about that housekeeper with her hard, thin-lipped mouth and her unkind eyes with bright blue irises that seemed to suck in everything they saw but never offer anything in return. One day, she had fixed him with those blue eyes of hers and asked him if he knew who He was who was throned in Heaven and what His Son was called and then, when he had no answers, she had smiled haughtily, turned away and refused to explain. At home, they talked of neither Heaven nor Earth. They hardly ever mentioned anything that wasn’t right there in front of you. Only Ferenc was given to hold forth about whatever came into his head and his siblings would often rebuke him for it. When the psychologists at Spiegelgrund asked Adrian where his mother and father came from, because they naturally had to find out what kind of blood flowed through his veins, he couldn’t answer that question either. The past was the one thing no one spoke about at home because it was guaranteed to cause trouble. That his mother had been a sewing machine operator in a Vorarlberg factory for many years before she moved to Wien and got pregnant by that man Ziegler, was something he learnt while at Spiegelgrund, and then only by chance, when one of the staff decided to punish him by reading aloud from his notes; and as for who, or perhaps rather what Eugen Ziegler really was, that is, what he was in terms of biological heredity, Adrian would grasp only when, after being fostered for four years, his foster parents rejected him and sent him off to reform school in Mödling, where the staff informed him that he’d never be any good, what with his father being of Gypsy stock. But then, something happened. Perhaps it was simply that the war began. One morning, in October 1939, he was told to go to the director’s office. There was a surprise for him, the director said and he opened a door that Adrian had thought just led to a cupboard and none other than his Gypsy King father popped out, like a rabbit out of a hat, beaming at his son as he declared that it was time they let bygones be bygones and started afresh. By then he was ten years old but hadn’t seen his father since he was six and even before then, only a few isolated occasions many months apart. The director told Adrian that he was to go home with his father. And seemed to expect him to be happy. Actually, he had never been more scared in his life.

Portrait of a Father    Eugen Ziegler took a great deal of pride in his appearance. Before going to bed, he smeared nut oil into his strong, dark hair and kept it in place by pulling a ladies’ stocking over his head. Whenever he might be coming to stay the night, Leonie always put a towel on the pillow to protect it from the oil. To Adrian, a towel on the pillow at bedtime meant that his father was on his way home. Though the towel on his father’s pillow was often untouched, he remembers how hopeful he would feel every time and then how overwhelmingly disappointed, because his father was a great one for making generous promises about the special things he would bring next time he came home. A toy car, perhaps, or a steely marble or a collection of colourful bottle labels that he had showed Adrian once, promising that, next time, he’d have got hold of another collection just like it for his boy. Then next time, and the next and next again. At times, if and when his father did come home, it could be grim. He often arrived so late at night that Adrian was asleep and never heard the noise of the door slamming. In the morning, his mother was lying half on top Eugen’s body as if she had tried to wrestle him down during the night or as if something inside her had broken and left her unable to move away on her own. Eugen Ziegler kept very quiet about himself and his relatives, which was strange for someone usually so cocksure and boastful. He had told Adrian that the name Ziegler had to do with his descent from one of the thousands of Czech labourers who had travelled to Wien to labour in the brick works – the Ziegelbrenners – without whom no houses could have been built in this city. Or so he said. Ziegler became his name because he was a Czech, and moulding and firing bricks was what the Czechs did. It didn’t take Adrian long to realise that this was no more than a tale. Sometimes, his father would speak of his work as a handyman in a railway station somewhere in eastern Slovakia, and how he had just happened to get on a train to Donetsk in Ukraine where he got himself a job at a steel mill and stayed for years. The revolution had just ended and thousands volunteered to go to Russia because they were fired up by Lenin. I’ve always been a communist at heart, Eugen Ziegler would say, beating his breast. This was sheer bombast. Ziegler had no heart but reckoned he could get away with pretending that he did or, at least, that being so handsome would make up for the defect. As Auntie Magda kept saying, Eugen’s looks made women turn their heads. Well, a certain kind of woman, Auntie Emilia would add. When Adrian asked her if his mother was one of these women, Auntie Emilia told him that Eugen had been different in those days. But if Adrian went on to ask more about what he had been like, in those days, the answers became vague and muddled because one wasn’t to speak about what had been. Still, it was fact that Eugen Ziegler spoke Russian, so there might have been a grain of truth in the story about running off to Donetsk. Once, he and Adrian almost paid with their lives for his language skills. It happened in the autumn of 1939, just weeks after Eugen had collected Adrian from Mödling and they were planning to start a new life. They lived in the 3rd Bezirk, on Erdbergstrasse, which is only a few blocks away from Rochusmarkt. Every day, Eugen would go to the pub to negotiate business deals and, every night, his oldest son Adrian was told to go and walk him home. On the slow, unsteady way back to Erdbergstrasse, Eugen, who was usually dead-drunk, would go on about how Wien was no longer the city it once was, the streets were crawling with Piefkes, he said, traitors and Nazi swine, and, once, when he saw two of them in Wehrmacht uniforms on the square at Rochusmarkt, he swayingly pulled up in front of them and, before Adrian had time to react, let out a stream of Russian abuse, all presumably meaningless to the soldiers. What they did grasp was that this man spoke Russian. Spitzel, a fucking spy, Adrian heard one of them snarl as he whipped the rifle off his back. Adrian grabbed his father’s arm and managed to drag him behind one of the remaining market stalls where they crouched, squeezed tightly together, and heard the two soldiers run past, rifles rattling against the buckles of their Sam Browns, the heels of their boots thumping on the cobbles, and then Eugen pulled his fingers through his hair and turned his face, stinking of alcoholic fumes, to Adrian and hissed:

If you ever get matey with one of these Nazi swine I’ll kill you, you hear me?

It would take six long years before the Nazis were run out of Wien but when it finally happened, a new life also opened up for Eugen Ziegler, incredible as it may sound. Earlier, his business deals had to be managed hand to mouth. ‘Business’ had always been hugely important for him. No day would pass without his doing deals and Adrian couldn’t remember him speaking about anything else. Much later, Adrian would recognise more than a little of this in himself. My father, he said, was incapable of living with what was closed or already decided or concluded in some way. He existed in the present and for the promise of something to come. When the business was done and he was left facing the results, so many tons of brown coal or cubic metres of logs, he had no idea how to handle the goods he had acquired, or even how to transport the stuff. When he turned up at home, it was never to see me or Helmut or even our mother, whatever he might claim at the time, but to persuade Uncle Ferenc to fund the delivery of his brown coal on time or the down-payment on something he was after, Adrian said, and the rows with my mother broke out every time because he kept trying it on with Florian or Ferenc, and Leonie refused to allow either of her brothers to do business with Eugen. You don’t know what you’re doing, she would say. Leonie, who always stepped into the breach, was the one who got hit. When Eugen Ziegler beat up his woman, he went about it in a properly systematic way. First, everyone else was ordered to leave the flat. They gathered in the yard to wait while the screaming Leonie was hauled from wall to wall. The punishment could last from about twenty minutes to more than an hour, with increasingly long breaks in between bouts. Then the beating seemed to be over, until they heard a terrible scream and it started all over again. If in the end Eugen was too drunk to storm out in a rage, he collapsed exhausted in a corner while Leonie limped around, picking things up and tidying as always. Adrian remembered the time when his father had ordered a schnitzel and a beer to be brought from the restaurant across the street. Abusing Leonie must have made him hungry. Without a word, the table was laid with a white tablecloth and they all stood around watching the head of the household eat his supper. He ate as methodically as he beat his woman, but something about the way he brought fork and glass to his lips showed that he was out of his head with drink. Before going away, he emptied the coffee tin of the money Leonie and Ferenc had saved up for the rent. He left afterwards, without a word to anyone.

I know it’s no fault of yours, Mrs Dobrosch, the landlord, Mr Schubach, used to say when Leonie went to see him the next morning and, with an ingratiating smile on her lips, asked him to be allowed to wait with the rent. It’s that man Ziegler, a bastard who doesn’t know how to behave decently. But, you know, this can’t go on.

Foster Home    And they were evicted in the end, on a day in May 1935. Adrian remembers that it poured with rain. Ferenc and Florian had carried the sticks of furniture the family still owned down to the yard: Leonie’s bed, the bed all the children had slept on in turn, and the much-hammered kitchen table, always glued together again by Florian; the chairs, and the wardrobe for Leonie’s dresses. She had packed Laura’s, Adrian’s and Helmut’s clothes into a large suitcase. They had nothing to cover their things with and it rained so hard that the drops bounced many centimetres up in the air when they hit the wooden surfaces. Adrian still remembers this. Their neighbours had come out to watch from the galleries outside the flats. And the boys with whom he and Helmut used to drift around the streets. Now, they stood still and silent, just staring. Next to them, their fathers in their vests, leaning uncaringly against the railings with thin fags squeezed flat between their fingers. Everyone was waiting for Eugen to drive into the yard in the lorry he claimed to have got the use of, but he didn’t come, with or without a lorry, and finally Leonie had had enough of being stared at, told her children to come along and walked away. Laura went to stay with Auntie Emilia, who in the nick of time had managed to rent a room in a flat on Taborstrasse. Adrian and Helmut were led by their mother to the children’s home called the Zentralkinderheim on Lustkandlgasse. She told them afterwards that she nearly fainted on the way there and simply had to sit down on the pavement outside the entrance to a railway station, the Franz Josefs Bahnhof. A man had come along to ask if the lady was feeling unwell and then he fetched a glass of water for her from a nearby café. Which was the only ounce of kindness anyone showed me during that entire time, his mother said. He can’t remember any of it and has little memory of what it was like in the Lustkandlgasse institution, despite he and Helmut spending almost all of the summer there. He stayed close to his little brother all the time, in the playground and when the food was served. Everybody liked little Helmut, who was blond and merry. Ein hübsches Kind. The nursery staff was keen for them to wash properly and, one day, they were helped to dress neatly and comb their hair before being brought into a large room with walls covered in white and black tiles. There were tall benches along the walls and, on these benches, children stood lined up. He and Helmut were to climb up onto a bench and Adrian was told to hold his little brother’s hand tightly and wait obediently for his turn. Suddenly, the room filled with strangers. He was so scared his legs felt like jelly and his one thought was that he mustn’t pee himself now that all these high-ups were around. The strangers walked slowly along the benches and examined the children carefully. One of the ladies who stopped in front of Adrian and Helmut wore a red dress with a white lace collar. She scrutinised Helmut from top to toe and turned to the nurse:

and the red lady said, I’ll have him, he looks nice

and the nurse said, in that case you must take the big one as well

the red lady, oh no, I don’t want him, he’s too ugly

the nurse, I’m sorry but we don’t separate siblings

the red lady, well, too bad, if I have to I’ll take the ugly one as well.

That was that. He and Helmut went with the red lady for a ride on the 71 tram. It was August and he was enjoying the warm wind that blew in through the half-open windows when, after a while, he became baffled by the oddly familiar street outside. Then it dawned on him: the tram was going along Simmeringer Hauptstrasse. This was literally home from home. He even caught a quick glimpse of the greengrocer, Mr Gabel, keeping an eye on the fruit boxes he put out on the pavement every morning. Mrs Haidinger, the lady in the red dress, was sitting opposite him and, as soon as she saw him turn to look out, she reached across the centre aisle and twisted his head to make him look straight ahead. Afterwards, she didn’t take her eyes off him for a second, as if she was worried that he would run away at the next stop or maybe do something worse, like jump at her throat. At close quarters, Mrs Haidinger looked rather less impressive than she had done in the tiled room. Below the hem of her red dress her legs were big and knobbly, and when she smiled, her closely packed, short white teeth reminded Adrian of a crocodile. She acted differently with Helmut, touching him all the time, patting his blond curls, and when they stepped off at Zentralfriedhof to change trams, she went into a shop near the cemetery gates to buy her new little boy a bar of Bensdorp chocolate that cost ten groschen. Obviously, Adrian got nothing because he was so ugly. They got off at the Kaiserebersdorf stop and took a shortcut across the fields and deserted building sites. That way, it was only a ten-minute walk to the Haidingers’ house. Over on the far side of the fields, you could see the jagged outline of the chimneys of Schwechat and when the wind came from that direction it carried the rich scent of malt from the breweries. Mrs Haidinger lived in a large bungalow built to house two families. Mr and Mrs Haidinger, together with her parents, stayed in the rooms on the left, and on the right were her brother Rudolf Pawlitschek and his family. The two lines of the clan were feuding and Mrs Haidinger’s notion of bringing back a couple of foster children did nothing to improve the atmosphere. Mr Pawlitschek was a cripple. Just below his shoulder, where his left arm should have begun, was nothing but a small flap of skin. It might be because he wasn’t serviceable, as Mrs Haidinger put it, that he was such an angry, bitter man. He called the children mongrels and did everything he could to make them feel worthless and rejected. Adrian was set to work from his first day in the Haidinger household. The large back garden included a barn with pens for cows and goats, and a hen house and rabbit hutches. Adrian had to collect greens for the rabbits, clean dung from the coops and hutches, then scrub them with soda. The goats had to be tethered and moved on when they had stripped the patch of land within reach. If Mr Haidinger needed to water his lettuces, onions, strawberries and tomatoes, Adrian was to haul buckets of water from the well and barrow them to the right plot. He was never paid any wages for his labour. Even though he shared a bedroom with his little brother, they didn’t see much of each other. While Adrian worked, Helmut accompanied Mrs Haidinger on her visits to relatives and friends and brought back gifts, new toys or chocolates from the Konsum. Much later, Adrian realised that the city council in Wien made large payments to foster parents who gave the children the right kind of home. The benefits not only covered Mrs Haidinger’s outlays for board and lodging of both children but also left her quite enough to spend on new clothes for Helmut, who grew so awfully quickly, and probably on quite a few outfits for herself. Years later, the thought of this still upset Adrian very much. If all that money was there for the asking, he said to his mother, why not give some of it to you so we could have grown up at home? But his mother only shrugged helplessly in the rather childish way she had adopted of late and replied that she really couldn’t say. But perhaps the authorities had decided to give you just one chance in life to bring up your children the right way, and perhaps she had squandered hers when they had been forced to carry their belongings down into the yard and Mr Schubach had had thrown them out and left them all in the rain while their neighbours lined the galleries, smoking and watching the spectacle.

March 1938    The wireless was always on in the Haidinger household. It was silent only if the battery had run down and then Adrian had to take it to an electrician in Schwechat to be charged. The batteries were heavy and there was always at least one to carry each way, the discharged one that he brought to Schwechat and the fully recharged one that was needed back home. The Haidinger and Pawlitschek families called a ceasefire when it was time to gather around the radio. Together, they listened to speeches by Mr Schuschnigg, the Federal Chancellor, and to the debates about the betrayal of Austria, and were excited to hear the news from Steiermark about the Heimwehrverbande, the local Territorial Army unit that refused to take sides against their German brothers. The day Hitler came marching in, a group of them went off to Heldenplatz: Mr Haidinger, Mr Christian, who was a neighbour and a member of the Patriotic Front, and old Mr Pawlitschek, the father of the man with the missing arm. Pawlitschek senior was a large man with a stiff, bristly moustache. He was a convinced Nazi, Mrs Haidinger said, as if, even among the NSDP members, some were less than wholly convinced. Adrian was allowed to come along on the outing because they needed someone to carry the provisions. They took the tram to Schwarzenbergplatz and walked up Ringstrasse, past the Imperial Hotel where old Mr Pawlitschek insisted that Hitler and his entourage were quartered. When they passed the Opera House, he also pointed out that jumped-up Jews were the only ones parading around in there. The pavements of the wide avenue were crowded with people waving banners and handkerchiefs, shouting Heil Heil Heil! all the time. By the time the group got close to Heldenplatz, the crowd was too dense and they had to cross to the museum side and finally, after re-crossing the tram rails, they once more ended up so far back that all they could see of Hitler was a small, grey blob on the distant balcony. But I did see him, Adrian would say afterwards. Well, sort of. He had been overwhelmed by hearing the Führer’s voice booming through the loudspeakers high above everyone’s heads, even though the words of the great man’s speech were almost impossible to make out because the sound bounced all over the place and was anyway drowned in the wild noise made by the tens of thousands of voices shouting and screaming while people waved their swastika-emblazoned banners and stretched their arms straight up in the air to return his salute; but, Adrian said, all he could think of was how to place his feet so that he could quickly bend down and then get out from under if he risked being trampled on. A few weeks later, his form teacher in the school at Münnichplatz was replaced. The new one, a Mr Bergen, had the title ‘Magister’ and was probably a convinced Nazi, perhaps even a party member. He started to pick on Adrian straightaway. There was a poem by Ottokar Kernstock that should be read with a special kind of solemn emphasis at the end of each sentence and Mr Bergen would read it aloud, standing by the teacher’s desk, and then all the pupils had to repeat after him:

Das Hakenkreuz im weissen Feld

Auf feuerrotem Grunde

Gibt frei und offen aller Welt

Die frohgemute Kunde

Wer sich um dieses Zeichen schart

Ist deutsch mit Seele, Sinn und Art

und nicht bloss mit dem Munde.1

Over and over again, Adrian was told to stand in front of the class and recite the poem by heart and, every time, he lost track. Besides, the way he pronounced some of the lines made his reading unintentionally come across as a comic turn, perhaps especially when he got to ‘um dieses Zeichen schart’. By then, everyone was in fits of laughter and Mr Bergen’s face had flushed as red as the Nazi banner. It didn’t take long for the form teacher to make a personal call to Mr and Mrs Haidinger. He told them that innate stupidity clearly made the bastard boy they had adopted unteachable. Mr Bergen added that they had actually been wrong to take him on. The teacher seemed to know how it had happened and had presumably heard it from someone else. The foster parents weren’t likely to go unpunished for their bad judgement. Mr Haidinger took it out on Adrian afterwards. He went for the most straightforward approach, ordered the boy to strip to the waist and come along to the tool shed where the spare rabbit hutches were kept and where, just as he would when flaying a dead rabbit, he hung Adrian on a hook on the wall using the rope tying his wrists, then took his belt off and whipped the half-naked child until not only Adrian, but Haidinger too, was screaming insanely. Light seeped into the shed and Adrian saw Helmut watching them, eating one of Mrs Haidinger’s titbits and smiling in exactly the same nervously submissive way as their father when he was scared.

Mr Pawlitschek’s Money    Rudolf Pawlitschek had this habit of boasting about his prowess as a huntsman, never mind that he had only one arm. Once, Mr Pawlitschek invited Adrian into his room next to the hallway and told him that he would be allowed to watch how one went about greasing a hunting rifle. The rifle hung on a hook above Mr Pawlitschek’s bed. While he outlined some of his sporting feats, he took it down, laid it across his parted thighs and extracted a tin of gun grease and a cloth from the drawer in his bedside table. The cleaning started with Mr Pawlitschek ramming the muzzle into his left armpit and then rotating the gun by alternately tightening and relaxing his grip with what was left of the stump on his shoulder as he wiped it down using strong, even strokes with the cloth. It looked funny. His armpit kept releasing and catching the gun while his right hand rubbed and rubbed on the same spot. The effort made Mr Pawlitschek sweat copiously and, all the while, the sweat seemed to soften his sour, twisted face until a grimace almost like a smile was spreading across it. When Mr Pawlitschek had finished and put the cloth and the tin of grease back in the drawer, Adrian caught sight of a bundle of bank notes squashed in at the back. It became instantly fixed in his mind. Every morning, as he dragged himself to the school on Münnichplatz, his thoughts circled around the money and the image stayed with him all the hours he spent sitting on the seat Mr Bergen had exiled him to, right at the back of the classroom, where he was left to his own devices because Bergen persistently, patiently ignored Adrian and directed his questions to the other children. Adrian thought that he would count the money one day when Mr Pawlitschek wasn’t at home. He wouldn’t do anything else, only count the notes to find out how much the stash was worth. The right moment arrived sooner than he had dared to hope. When he came home from school one afternoon, the Haidingers and the Pawlitscheks (senior and junior) were out and the rifle had gone from its hook on the wall, so Adrian opened the drawer, removed the tin of gun grease and the cloth, then the notes, pulled off the rubber band and started counting with trembling fingers. Sixty Reichsmarks. In that moment a decision was made, but not by Adrian; as he explained later, instead his mind had been made up for him. Actually, it was more like an incontrovertible fact rather than any kind of choice because what to do next must be done for the simple reason that the money was in that drawer and this was the day when no one was in, except the cows and the rabbits. It took him only minutes to put the notes in his pocket, pack some clothes in his satchel and catch the tram towards Schwarzenbergplatz. Far fewer people were out strolling along the Inner Ring than on the afternoon when Adolf Hitler’s cavalcade ploughed through the huge crowds, and soon Adrian was stopped by a policeman on his beat. In the thirties, school-age children were not usually drifting about on their own in central Wien. Besides, guardian or no guardian, this boy with his dark tinker’s face and grass-stained pants, the only trousers Mrs Haidinger let him wear when he was at home and made to clean the rabbit hutches, didn’t come across as a believable schoolchild. The officer, pretty certain that he had caught an experienced pick-pocket whose school satchel was nothing but camouflage, felt vindicated when he found the bundle of bank notes. Adrian was taken to the police station, the money was properly counted and he had to confess all. He was Adrian Dobrosch (not yet Ziegler!) and, yes, he had taken Mr Pawlitschek’s savings, intending to keep half for himself to pay for food and somewhere to live, and give the rest to his mother for the rent. Tell me, who’s your mother? the policeman asked with a cunning smirk, as if he reckoned he was about to catch an entire gang of thieves, but Adrian fell silent at that point.

The Tinker’s Lad    But they already knew all they needed to know. Mrs Haidinger wouldn’t have him in the house and, once he had got his money back, Mr Pawlitschek requested that he should be allowed not to bring a charge. The thing was, who would be responsible? On paper, which was what mattered, the Haidingers were Adrian’s parents. The boy was dispatched to the institution for abandoned children on Lustkandlgasse in Alsergrund, the Kinderübernahmestelle or ‘KüST’ as it was known for short. This time there was no chance that he would be stood on a bench like some circus animal and ogled and, with any luck, chosen by a lady in a red dress who bought you chocolates in Konsum afterwards. He was there for two weeks, presumably the time it took for the documentation about him to be shuffled by officials from one department to another until his adoption papers were cancelled, and then he was transferred to the old orphanage in Mödling. It was known as the Hyrtl’sche Waisenhaus and looked like a medieval fortress, a large brick building with high flat-fronted towers and a chapel in an inner courtyard. Very soon after the Nazis had taken over the government, the Waisenhaus was turned into a reform school for undisciplined children. Adrian was to be sent to Mödling twice. The worst tour was the second one, in early spring 1943. He does not remember much from his stay in the autumn of 1939, just large, draughty rooms and apparently endless corridors and stairwells, where they were never to be seen alone but always in a troop, singly or in pairs, in Einzel- or Zweierreihen, always on their way to somewhere, to the dining hall or the gym, with one of the older boys in the lead shouting out orders over the sound of angrily tramping feet that echoed down the deep shafts of the stairwells. During the first weeks, he was tormented by guilt. He had not deserved the care offered to him by the Haidingers, or by anybody else for that matter. He had no idea what Mrs Haidinger would decide to do with Helmut. Keep him or make him suffer an even worse fate, which would be Adrian’s fault? He didn’t know anything and the uncertainty pained him more than being pestered by the other boys, who remarked on his looks, his dark skin and oddly shaped ears. They used to ask what kind of glue he used to stick his ears so close to his head. One day, his group leader told him that he had to go to the office. The director, Mr Heckermann, seemed short where he sat ensconced behind his big desk. His moustache was kept narrow, probably not to outdo his lips, which were even narrower, and together the twin lines of lips and moustache made a shape like a small beak. Heckermann’s slightly frail, bird-like body could look threatening, as it did now, when he raised his shoulders and asked Adrian to state his surname. Scared, Adrian shrugged in instinctive mimicry as he replied in the firm, military style that everyone in the school was to use:

Dobrosch!

That ugly, insubordinate name had never sounded more repulsive. Like when one opens an old tin can and some rotting, stinking sludge pours out. For a moment Mr Heckermann looked disgusted, but then his moustache-beak opened again:

You’re wrong there!

What are you supposed to do when a person in authority asks your name and then says you’re wrong? Adrian closed his eyes, convinced that this was it, he was finished. You’re wrong because from now on, your name is Ziegler!

When he said that, Adrian dared to open his eyes again, saw Mr Heckermann standing behind his desk, and in the next moment, as already mentioned, the grinning Eugen Ziegler emerged from a cupboard and stepped forward to hug his prodigal son.

Uncle Florian’s Warm Hands    It was a little like a baptism. At least, that’s how Adrian saw it. He had stepped out of his mother’s ineffective shadow into the radiance of his father’s name. Eugen Ziegler had abused Leonie Dobrosch constantly for ten long years; he had abandoned her and their children countless times, just as no one could have kept track of all the times he had come back home, drunk or broke and, hence, repentant. But when father and son left Mödling together, Eugen put his arm around his son’s shoulders and explained to him that nobody could separate them because, by now, his father and mother were married for real. This was his happy message and he had wanted to tell Adrian face to face, he said, but the paternal arm around the boy’s shoulders, meant to seem strong and protective, was actually no more than one long plea for support. Naturally, it was all because of the war. What else? Unless Eugen Ziegler could prove that he had responsibility for the upkeep of a family, he risked being picked up in the street and driven to the front line, or maybe even some worse place. As it was, the authorities had found him a job on the assembly line in the Floridsdorf locomotive factory. They worked round the clock out there, building locos for the Deutsche Reichsbahn. The job had strings attached, though: Ziegler had had to promise to take his wage packet home to his wife, hand over all the money and then she had to sign for it. Also, the factory foreman had apparently said that once is enough, Ziegler, if I hear you’re coming to work pissed or not taking all the money home you’ll be out on your ear. And even though his sobriety might have slipped some evenings and weekends, officialdom had the whip-hand and, throughout the war years, Eugen Ziegler dragged himself along to Floridsdorf every day and did his bit on the production line that was to build more than 1,000 engines of the type DRB Class 52. They lived in the 3rd Bezirk at the time, in a modern flat with a bathtub and a toilet, and had the authorities to thank for that as well. Ferenc still stayed in Kaisermühlen even though he had got a job in St Pölten, driving coal trucks for a haulage company delivering to businesses that weren’t too pernickety about paperwork like orders and receipts. The job was dangerous because they had to drive at night with the headlamps off and might at any moment get caught by the police. Adrian’s mother was beside herself with worry, but she worried even more about Uncle Florian. He had never been a problem for as long as he was with them. True, he could be confused at times and it could be confusing to talk to him because his speech was so slurred and rambling that it was hard to understand him. But he was a kind man, and if only he had some way to use his hands he was as precise and diligent as you could wish (but you always had to place whatever it was in his hands). For instance, it happened that Mr Gabel, the greengrocer, allowed him to come along on trips to the wholesaler out in Kagran. When they returned, Adrian remembers, Florian would be wearing tough gloves and an apron that made him look like a real stevedore. In the spring, he would help Ferenc with cleaning and waxing the boats in the marina at Alte Donau. Seated on a small stool, he would sit in the white sunlight holding the brush as delicately as if he were painting on a costly linen canvas. His sister, Adrian’s mother, always used to say that Uncle Florian had such warm and sensitive hands. But after the eviction, all this came to an end. No work could be found for Florian. He stayed for a while in a hostel for single men in Brigittenau but could never settle down among strangers, and then his mindset and behaviour changed, he became restless and wandered in the streets, playing the fool, as his sister said. By the autumn of 1937, she had managed to find him a bed in the mental asylum in Gugging. The relief lasted only a few months, until the Anschluss. The old hospital board was replaced only weeks later and Florian was transferred to Steinhof, where he shared a ward with forty deranged men who sat or lay on their beds, sometimes tied down and screaming because there was no one who came to look after them. Leonie would visit her brother at least once a month, always on a Sunday. Adrian has a clear memory of how she would get dressed before the visit, standing in front of the mirror, something she normally did not do. She’d put on a grey, woollen cardigan and a beret. Her face always looked blurred with crying when she came back from Steinhof. She complained that the staff treated Florian worse than they would a dog and that her brother was fading away in front of her eyes, more and more at every visit. (The abyss that separated how they lived then, during that last, unreal year of freedom, from the insanity that was to take over, was so deep that it would take many years before Adrian managed to join up the two periods of time: the one that came before he was sent to Spiegelgrund and the other that began after he had become a registered inmate. He realised only then that the gravelled paths between the pavilions that he had to take to the school building every morning were the very same that his mother had taken on her Sunday visits to uncle Florian just a few years earlier. It was not only that it was the same place, but also that the Spiegelgrund staff recognised her when she delivered him, because almost all of them had been working at Steinhof as asylum nurses. In their eyes, his mother was one of those crazy women who would turn up at every which time and make nuisances of themselves by asking about husbands or brothers or children, even after it should have been clear to them that there were no more Steinhof patients left to ask about. It must have been how they looked at her when she came to visit him, Adrian, the only time she did. For one thing, she was dressed exactly as when she visited Uncle Florian, the same skirt and woolly, grey cardigan and worn coat and beret, so she had presumably stood in front of the mirror and prepared herself in the same old way, her eyes anxiously fixed on her reflection while she applied shiny red lipstick to her thin, pale lips.) In October or November 1940, Uncle Florian and forty-or-so other males had been herded onto buses run by the charity GeKraT (Gemeinnützige Krankentransport) and driven to Hartheim. Leonie Ziegler had not been informed of this. The official letter arrived several weeks later and announced that Mr Florian Dobrocz – some ill-educated clerk had either misheard or simply couldn’t spell – had suddenly succumbed to pneumonia and, despite every effort by the staff, his life could not be saved. Adrian remembers when the letter arrived. The family was seated at the table. So far, one Sunday night after another, his father had sat down, calm and sober, at the carefully laid supper table and, every week, put up in silence with his wife’s tearful face and endless wailing about dear Florian with the warm hands who was simply fading and receding away from her, but this Sunday he could take no more. Enraged, he stood up with such force that the table rocked and sent plates and glasses flying, then crashing onto the floor. He had had it with all the miserable moaning and groaning, he shouted, then he left and slammed the door after him. At first Leonie sat very still, then she hid her face in her hands and wept so wildly her shoulders shook. But it might be that none of this had happened by then. In March 1938, Helga was already born and, just over a year later, Leonie had become pregnant again with Hannelore, who arrived in February 1940. Adrian was a pupil in the school on Erdbergstrasse. Just as in the Münnichplatz school, it was understood that he was an imbecile and, as such, placed at the back of the classroom. By then, the other children in the class wore uniforms with a Hitlerjugend pin on the jacket lapel and, once a week, went off to a Heimabend at someone’s home after school. When his classmates asked him why he and his sister never came to someone’s house for these evening get-togethers, which after all were compulsory, he didn’t know what to say. When Eugen Ziegler had received a document stating that he was wehrunwürdig, he probably felt a certain sense of relief, but for his children the fact that Ziegler was classed as unfit for military service meant exclusion from the Deutsches Jungvolk and presumably all other organisations with a link to NSDAP. Adrian was dead keen to wear the same uniform as the others. It wasn’t because he was crazy about uniforms or the stupid Home Evening singalongs but because the uniform was the one thing that could stop his father from beating him up. All children in an HJ uniform were under the personal protection of the Führer, and no one could punish them except, of course, the Führer himself. At Spiegelgrund it grew quite boring, the way they kept insisting that the Führer was the greatest friend and protector of children. Adrian Ziegler had realised that long ago, and nothing that was to happen later would make him doubt that it was true.

A Christmas Celebration (and its consequences)    In December 1940, the Ziegler family celebrated their first Christmas together. Helmut joined them once the reluctant Haidingers had been persuaded to ‘hand him back for the duration’. They’d had family Christmases before in the Simmeringer flat, with a tree and all the trimmings, but it always ended with everyone, uncles and aunties included, waiting around at the table where the place laid for the head of the household stood empty. With any luck, he would turn up near midnight, drunk, alone, or with mates he had fancied bringing along. If he was on his own, he’d be furious because there was nothing but sweet rubbish on the table and would take it out on Leonie, hit and kick her, shouting that she was a useless slut not worth wiping the floor with. This time, though, they would have a proper Christmas. With one week to go until Christmas Eve, Adrian and his father walked to Rochusmarkt and picked a real fir tree to take home. At school, one of the teachers, who clearly wasn’t a totally convinced Nazi, allowed them to write essays on the theme My Best Christmas and even let them build their own nativity cribs. Adrian’s sister Laura became so excited at the thought of all the fun they’d have over the festive days that she spent an entire afternoon dashing in and out of the shops on Mariahilfer Strasse. She made one of her friends from school distract the shop assistants while she picked all the lovely, shiny things she could find room for under her sweater, like many-coloured glass balls and glittering strands of tinsel. They were sitting on the steps leading up to the Westbahnhof platforms, tarted up like little princesses with tinsel threaded through their hair, when the police caught up with them. It wasn’t the first time that Laura had been caught shoplifting. Most of it was small-scale, like pencils and erasers and other things she needed for school, or chocolate and fruit from the stalls in the market. But times had changed. Before, staff from the departments of social services and health had at least tried to be sympathetic and helpful, but now everyone was relentlessly strict. Vagrancy and larceny were crimes, and correct punishments had to be meted out. Laura’s behaviour was especially vexing, as she obviously ‘tempted others to follow her’. When the social workers came for a home visit two days into the new year, they took note of the fact that Adrian, Helmut and Laura not only shared the same bed but also played ‘Mummy-Daddy-Children’ underneath a rigged-up tablecloth and, furthermore, that Adrian and Helmut were both naked, all of which was interpreted as an indication of incestuous relationships in the family. The children are dirty and malnourished, and their manners have been allowed to degenerate. They are rebellious and foul-mouthed. The report included a long passage about Adrian Ziegler, who is described as an insolent and degenerate boy who, when adults are talking, incessantly interrupts with obscene expressions and invectives. I can’t remember any of us being insolent, Adrian commented when he saw the report much later. On the other hand, I do remember how they interrogated us one at a time, he said, and tried to make us say things about our parents that were not true. For instance, they wanted me to tell them about my mother, how she was slovenly and had failed to look after the family, and then I burst into tears. I knew that my mother had worked, unselfishly and unaided, for more than twelve years, doing her best to keep her children clean and in decent clothes, seven of us in the end, and have food put in front of us every day. They could never make me say that she had failed to look after us. The family was split up again. They decided that Mrs Leonie Ziegler (née Dobrosch) had enough on her hands with her two youngest. The authorities looked for a new foster family for the eldest, Laura, who was almost fifteen and needed to prepare for her Pflichtjahr, when she had to go away and learn how to do practical tasks in the house and on the land. A place in a children’s home on Bastiengasse in Währing was found for Helmut. Adrian was sent to Spiegelgrund, which had just been designated a specialist clinic for children with severe psychiatric or neurological conditions, but which also served as a reform school for boys and girls with disciplinary problems. Spiegelgrund was the place of last resort, the end of the road for those thought effectively irredeemable. He didn’t know all that at time, of course. When he was registered on that January day in 1941, the form recorded all measurable facts about him in neat typescript:

Height: 135 cm

Body weight: 34 kg

Skull type: Flattened; somewhat deformed; ‘Gypsy type’

Ears: Semitic curvature but shapely; close to skull

Hair colour: Dark

Overall pigmentation: Dark

Doctor Gross had made just a few entries under ‘Other characteristics’: R. shoulder blade protruding slightly; feet smell badly; L. shin, an approx. 30cm long scratch. The form has three photographs attached, two from sideways on and one from in front. The photos show an eleven-year-old boy who looks perfectly healthy. His shoulders are raised a little and his half-open mouth and scared eyes complete the picture of a child who surely could harm no one.

Copyright © 2014 by Steve Sem-Sandberg