The Book Thief

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE JEWISH FIST-FIGHTER

Max Vandenburg was born in 1916.

He grew up in Stuttgart.

When he was younger, he grew to love nothing more than a good fist-fight.

He had his first bout when he was eleven years old and skinny as a whittled broom handle.

Wenzel Gruber.

That’s who he fought.

He had a smart mouth, that Gruber kid, and wire-curly hair. The local playground demanded that they fight, and neither boy was about to argue.

They fought like champions.

For a minute.

Just when it was getting interesting, both boys were hauled away by their collars. A watchful parent.

A trickle of blood was dripping from Max’s mouth.

He tasted it, and it tasted good.

Not many people who came from his neighbourhood were fighters, and if they were, they didn’t do it with their fists. In those days, they said the Jews preferred to simply stand and take things. Take the abuse quietly and then work their way back to the top. Obviously, every Jew is not the same.

He was nearly two years old when his father died, shot to pieces on a grassy hill.

When he was nine, his mother was completely broke. She sold the music studio that doubled as their apartment and they moved to his uncle’s house. There he grew up with six cousins who battered, annoyed and loved him. Fighting with the oldest one, Isaac, was the training ground for his fist-fighting. He was trounced almost every night.

At thirteen, tragedy struck again when his uncle died.

As percentages would suggest, his uncle was not a hothead like Max. He was the type of person who worked quietly away for very little reward. He was not a rich man. He did not take what was rightfully someone else’s – and he died of something growing in his stomach. Something akin to a poison bowling ball.

As is often the case, the family surrounded the bed and watched him capitulate.

Somehow, between the sadness and loss, Max Vandenburg, who was now a teenager with hard hands, blackened eyes and a sore tooth, was also a little disappointed. Even disgruntled. As he watched his uncle sink slowly into the bed, he decided that he would never allow himself to die like that.

The man’s face was so accepting.

So yellow and tranquil, despite the violent architecture of his skull –

The endless jawline, stretching for miles, the pop-up cheekbones and the pot-hole eyes. So calm it made the boy want to ask something.

Where’s the fight? he wondered.

Where’s the will to hold on?

Of course, at thirteen he was a little excessive in his harshness. He had not looked something like me in the face. Not yet.

With the rest of them, he stood around the bed and watched the man die – a safe merge, from life to death. The light in the window was grey and orange, the colour of summer’s skin, and his uncle appeared relieved when his breathing disappeared completely.

‘When death captures me,’ the boy vowed, ‘he will feel my fist on his face.’

Personally, I quite like that. Such stupid gallantry.

Yes.

I like that a lot.

From that moment on, he started to fight with greater regularity. A group of diehard friends and enemies would gather down at a small reserve on Steber Street, and they would fight in the dying light. Archetypal Germans, the odd Jew, the boys from the east. It didn’t matter. There was nothing like a good fight to expel the teenage energy. Even the enemies were a centimetre away from friendship.

He enjoyed the tight circles and the unknown.

The bittersweetness of uncertainty:

To win or to lose.

It was a feeling in the stomach that would be stirred around until he thought he could no longer tolerate it. The only remedy was to move forward and throw punches. Max was not the type of boy to die thinking about it.

His favourite fight, now that he looked back, was Fight Number Five against a tall, tough, rangy kid named Walter Kugler. They were fifteen. Walter had won all four of their previous encounters, but this time, Max could feel something different. There was new blood in him – the blood of victory – and it had the capability to both frighten and excite.

As always, there was a tight circle crowded around them. There was grubby ground. There were smiles practically wrapped around the onlooking faces. Money was clutched in filthy fingers, and the calls and cries were filled with such vitality that there was nothing else but this.

God, there was such joy and fear there, such brilliant commotion.

The two fighters were clenched with the intensity of the moment, their faces loaded up with expression, exaggerated with the stress of it. The wide-eyed concentration.

After a minute or so of testing each other out, they began moving closer and taking more risks. It was a street fight, after all, not an hour-long title fight. They didn’t have all day.

‘Come on, Max!’ one of his friends was calling out. There was no breath between any of the words. ‘Come on Maxi-Taxi you’ve got him now you’ve got him Jew Boy you’ve got him you’ve got him!’

A small kid with soft tufts of hair, a beaten nose and swampy eyes, Max was a good head shorter than his opposition. His fighting style was utterly graceless, all bent over, nudging forward, throwing fast punches at the face of Kugler. The other boy, clearly stronger and more skilful, remained upright, throwing jabs that constantly landed on Max’s cheeks and chin.

Max kept coming.

Even with the heavy absorption of punches and punishment, he continued moving forward. Blood discoloured his lips. It would soon be dried across his teeth.

There was a great roar when he was knocked down. Money was almost exchanged.

Max stood up.

He was beaten down one more time before he changed tactics, luring Walter Kugler a little closer than he’d wanted to come. Once he was there, Max was able to apply a short, sharp jab to his face. It stuck. Exactly on the nose.

Kugler, suddenly blinded, shuffled back, and Max seized his chance. He followed him over to the right and jabbed him once more and opened him up with a punch that reached into his ribs. The right hand that ended him landed on his chin. Walter Kugler was on the ground, his blond hair peppered with dirt. His legs were parted in a V. Tears like crystal floated down his skin, despite the fact that he was not crying. The tears had been bashed out of him.

The circle counted.

They always counted, just in case. Voices and numbers.

The custom after a fight was that the loser would raise the hand of the victor. When Kugler finally stood up, he walked sullenly to Max Vandenburg and lifted his arm into the air.

‘Thanks,’ Max told him.

Kugler proffered a warning. ‘Next time I kill you.’

Altogether over the next few years, Max Vandenburg and Walter Kugler fought thirteen times. Walter was always seeking revenge for that first victory Max took from him, and Max was looking to emulate his moment of glory. In the end, the record stood at 10–3 for Walter.

They fought each other until 1933, when they were seventeen. Grudging respect turned to genuine friendship, and the urge to fight left them. Both held jobs until Max was sacked with the rest of the Jews at the Jederman Engineering Factory in ’35. That wasn’t long after the Nuremberg Laws came in, forbidding Jews to have German citizenship, and Germans and Jews to intermarry.

‘Jesus,’ Walter said one evening when they met on the small corner where they used to fight. ‘That was a time, wasn’t it? There was none of this craziness around. We could never fight like that now.’

Max disagreed. ‘Yes we could. You can’t marry a Jew, but there’s no law against fighting one.’

Walter smiled. ‘There’s probably a law rewarding it – as long as you win.’

For the next few years they saw each other sporadically at best. Max, with the rest of the Jews, was steadily rejected and repeatedly trodden upon, while Walter disappeared inside his job. A printing firm.

If you’re the type who’s interested, yes, there were a few girls in those years. One named Tania, the other Hildi. Neither of them lasted. There was no time, most likely due to the uncertainty and mounting pressure. Max needed to scavenge for work. What could he offer those girls? By 1938, it was difficult to imagine that life could get any harder.

Then came November 9. Kristallnacht. The night of broken glass.

It was the very incident that destroyed so many of his fellow Jews, but it proved to be Max Vandenburg’s moment of escape. He was twenty-two.

Many Jewish establishments were being surgically smashed and looted when there was a clutter of knuckles on the apartment door. With his aunt, his mother, his cousins and their children, Max was crammed into the living room.

‘Aufmachen!’

The family watched each other. There was a great temptation to scatter into the other rooms, but apprehension is the strangest thing. They couldn’t move.

Again. ‘Open up!’

Isaac stood and walked to the door. The wood was alive, still humming from the beating it had just been given. He looked back at the faces naked with fear, turned the lock and opened the door.

As expected, it was a Nazi. In uniform.

‘Never.’

That was Max’s first response.

He clung to his mother’s hand, and that of Sarah, the nearest of his cousins. ‘I won’t leave. If we all can’t go, I don’t go either.’

He was lying.

When he was pushed out by the rest of his family, the relief struggled inside him like an obscenity. It was something he didn’t want to feel but, none the less, he felt it with such gusto it made him want to throw up. How could he? How could he?

But he did.

‘Bring nothing,’ Walter told him. ‘Just what you’re wearing. I’ll give you the rest.’

‘Max.’ It was his mother.

From a drawer, she took an old piece of paper and stuffed it in his jacket pocket. ‘If ever …’ She held him one last time, by the elbows. ‘This could be your last hope.’

He looked into her ageing face and kissed her, very hard, on the lips.

‘Come on.’ Walter pulled at him as the rest of the family said their goodbyes and gave him money and a few valuables. ‘It’s chaos out there, and chaos is what we need.’

They left, without looking back.

It tortured him.

If only he’d turned for one last look at his family as he left the apartment. Perhaps then the guilt would not have been so heavy. No final goodbye.

No final grip of the eyes.

Nothing but goneness.

For the next two years he remained in hiding, in an empty storeroom. It was in a building where Walter had worked in previous years. There was very little food. There was plenty of suspicion. The remaining Jews with money in the neighbourhood were emigrating. The Jews without money were also trying, but without much success. Max’s family fell into the latter category. Walter checked on them occasionally, as inconspicuously as he could. One afternoon when he visited, someone else opened the door.

When Max heard the news, his body felt like it was being screwed up into a ball, like a page littered with mistakes. Like garbage.

Yet each day he managed to unravel and straighten himself, disgusted and thankful. Wrecked, but somehow not torn into pieces.

Halfway through 1939, just over six months into the period of hiding, they decided that a new course of action needed to be taken. They examined the piece of paper Max was handed upon his desertion. That’s right – his desertion, not only his escape. That was how he viewed it, amidst the grotesquery of his relief. We already know what was written on that piece of paper:

ONE NAME, ONE ADDRESS

Hans Hubermann

Himmel Strasse 33, Molching.

‘It’s getting worse,’ Walter told Max. ‘Any time now, they could find us out.’ There was much hunching in the dark. ‘We don’t know what might happen. I might get caught. You might need to find that place … I’m too scared to ask anyone for help here. They might put me in.’ There was only one solution. ‘I’ll go down there and find this man. If he’s turned into a Nazi – which is very likely – I just turn round. At least we know then, richtig?’

Max gave him every last pfennig to make the trip, and a few days later, when Walter returned, they embraced before Max held his breath. ‘And?’

Walter nodded. ‘He’s good. He still plays that accordion your mother told you about – your father’s. He’s not a member of the Party. He gave me money.’ At this stage, Hans Hubermann was only a list. ‘He’s fairly poor, he’s married, and there’s a kid.’

This sparked Max’s attention even further. ‘How old?’

‘Ten. You can’t have everything.’

‘Yes. Kids have big mouths.’

‘We’re lucky as it is.’

They sat in silence a while. It was Max who disturbed it.

‘He must already hate me, huh?’

‘I don’t think so. He gave me the money, didn’t he? He said a promise is a promise.’

A week later, a letter came. Hans notified Walter Kugler that he would try to send things to help whenever he could. There was a one-page map of Molching and greater Munich, as well as a direct route from Pasing (the more reliable train station) to his front door. In his letter, the last words were obvious.

Be careful.

Midway through May 1940, Mein Kampf arrived, with a key taped to the inside cover.

The man’s a genius, Max decided, but there was still a shudder when he thought about travelling to Munich. Clearly, he wished, along with the other parties involved, that the journey did not have to be made at all.

You don’t always get what you wish for.

Especially in Nazi Germany.

Again, time passed.

The war expanded.

Max remained hidden from the world in another empty room.

Until the inevitable.

Walter was notified that he was being sent to Poland, to continue the assertion of Germany’s authority over both the Poles and Jews alike. One was not much better than the other. The time had come.

The time had come and Max made his way to Munich and Molching, and now he sat in a stranger’s kitchen, asking for the help he craved, and suffering the condemnation he felt he deserved.

Hans Hubermann shook his hand and introduced himself.

He made him some coffee in the dark.

The girl had been gone quite a while, but now some more footsteps had approached arrival. The wildcard.

In the darkness, all three of them were completely isolated. They all stared. Only the woman spoke.