On this day, according to legend, 130 children were lured away from the town of Hamelin by a piper dressed in multi-coloured clothing, and were never seen again. The legend has it that the piper was a rat catcher hired by the town to lure rats away with his magic pipe. When the citizens refused to pay for this service as promised, he retaliated by using his instrument’s magical power on their children, leading them away as he had the rats. There are many contradictory theories and a few ancient documents regarding the origins of the legend, perhaps the most plausible being that of the linguistics professor Jürgen Udolph. He surmises that the children were actually unemployed youths who had been sucked into the German drive to colonise its new settlements in Eastern Europe. According to the professor, “There were characters known as lokators who roamed northern Germany trying to recruit settlers for the East.” Some of them were brightly dressed, and all were silver-tongued.
