by Celia Rees
“I thought we’d dine straight away. I really am starving. You can show me the photographs while we eat.”
“I’d rather not, if it’s all the same.” Edith put down her briefcase. Something told her that these images were not to be perused over dinner, not to be looked at in a public place.
“We’ll look at them later then. Over a nightcap. I’ve got some decent brandy I picked up on my way through Paris.”
Over dinner, Edith did most of the talking, telling him about her work, what she’d been doing since they last saw each other. She apologized for the food, which was worse than usual. The Potage St. Germain, thin as gruel. The Vienna Steak overdone to the texture and consistency of shoe rubber. Harry didn’t seem to notice. He barely looked up from his plate. He accepted second helpings of everything and ate with the single-mindedness of a man refueling.
“That’s better.” Harry pushed himself back from the table. “I’m sorry.” He smiled. “I haven’t been much company, but I really was starving. Haven’t eaten properly for days.” He patted his stomach. “Full now. Shall we? Or would you like dessert?”
“Oh, no.” Edith grimaced. “The raspberry cream will be syn-thetic pink goo, and the cheese mousetrap.”
“In that case, how about that nightcap?”
Up in his room, Edith went to the desk by the window while he opened the brandy.
“Now, what do you want me to look at?”
He poured the drinks while she took photographs from her briefcase.
“These.” She set them out on the desk. First, the one Jack had taken at Travemünde.
“This is Jansons?” Harry picked up the photograph and held it under the desk light.
Edith nodded. “He’s going out with a young woman from my billet. The photo was taken at Travemünde last week.”
Harry drank his brandy and picked up the next photograph. As he studied the image, his pallor returned. He looked at her, his eyes unfocused and confused, as if he’d been jarred from a nightmare.
“You have others?”
Edith set them out on the desk.
“Where did you get these?” His voice sounded distant, mechanical, as if he was hypnotized.
“The house, where I’m billeted. There’s a hut at the end of the garden. Someone was trying to burn them. A friend and I rescued them. The chap in the middle, the SS man, is Stephan. He lives with our housekeeper, supposedly her husband.” As she spoke, he continued to stare at the photographs, his hand over his mouth. “We couldn’t work out where they were, what was going on. Do you know?”
He nodded.
“I say, are you all right? I’ll get you another brandy, shall I?”
Harry did not reply. Edith went to fetch the bottle. He was positively gray now, the muscles of his face rigid, his skin filmed with sweat. He wiped his mouth again. He looked as though he might be sick.
“Valdema-rs Jansons is not his real name,” he said, teeth clamped together. Harry choked, as if the name had stuck in his throat. “Excuse me.” Hand over mouth, he bolted for the bathroom.
“I’m sorry,” he said when he returned, wiping his mouth with a handkerchief, his face ivory pale. “I shouldn’t have eaten so much.”
“No, no, it’s my fault. I should have warned you.”
Harry poured himself a brandy, filling the tumbler. He gulped and grimaced, putting the glass down with a trembling hand.
“How would you have known?” He passed a hand over his face. “His name is Ivars Kalnin,š. He’s Ara-js Kommando.” He pointed at the smiling young man posing at Travemünde. “Latvian auxiliaries, recruited to help the Nazis. They take their name from their commander Viktors Ara-js, a really nasty piece of work.” He pointed to the group photograph. “Kalnin,š and a man called Ma-ris Ozols. This one in the middle is an SS Hauptsturmführer Einsatzkommando 2. A subdivision of Einsatzgruppe A, mobile killing unit.”
“That’s Stephan.”
“He should be in jail. Her, too, for harboring him. Their orders—” He covered his mouth, as if to arrest the words he was about to speak. “I’m sorry . . .” He cleared his throat and took his hand away. “Their orders were to render the Baltic countries Judenfrei. Free of Jews. Judenrein. Cleansed. Which meant all dead.”
Edith felt the same numbing, freezing horror that she’d ex-perienced when Leo had told her about about Kurt.
“But . . . but,” she managed to say. “That would be thousands of people!”
“Hundreds of thousands,” Harry corrected.
Edith could scarcely take in what he was saying. Just when one thought there could be no more, nothing worse to discover, further barbarities were uncovered, a fresh level of iniquity beneath the one above. It was like prying up the paving stones of Hell.
“Does that mean you know where these photographs were taken? When?”
“Oh, yes. Liepa-ja. I don’t know the date exactly, but it would be mid-December 1941.”
She leaned over, their heads closer together.
“And this one. In the background. We couldn’t quite make it out.”
“We?”
“My driver, Jack Hunter. He was with me when we found them.”
“What do you think you can see?”
“I don’t know. It’s so blurred. Overexposed. At first, we thought snow, then Jack thought it could be sand, but it didn’t look like the desert. We went out to Travemünde, and he thought it might be dunes. We couldn’t quite work out what was happening behind. This fissure, like a crevasse, with what looks like piles of logs, or something, at the bottom.”
“I’ll tell you, shall I?” He put his hands over his eyes, pushing his fingers up to his forehead, massaging his brows as if to ease a physical pain. “You look, but you can’t see. Why would you? Sand is right. Dunes is right. This is a beach, the dunes behind the beach to be precise, in a place called Ške-de, about nine or ten miles from Liepa-ja. Liepa-ja is my town. Where I’m from. The fissure, crevasse you see is a pit. The logs of wood are bodies.” He paused, staring down at the photograph, not blinking, not moving.
Edith bit her lip, nails digging into her palms, forcing herself not to interrupt to comfort his obvious distress, or to show her shock. She stayed very still to listen, to bear witness. “This, here,” his hand shook as it hovered over the deep gash in the sand, “is the site of a mass execution. Here, along the lip of the pit, pale, like little shadows? These are naked people. Jews. Lined up to be shot. Behind them, you see darker marks on slightly higher ground? Ara-js Kommando, local police, SS doing the shooting in shifts.” He closed his eyes, seeing what was not shown. “They’re positioned like that, so the force of the shot propels the body forward and into the pit. Very methodical. If they didn’t fall cleanly, there were kickers to push them down. The people were killed in groups of ten. It went on until there was no light.”
There was a silence between them as Edith tried to take in what he was telling her. She looked again at the photograph. She could see the figures in the bleached and empty landscape, but still the image was an enigma. She turned it in her hands, frowning, squinting, looking closer and closer, as if somehow seeing would bring understanding, but what he was saying was beyond her grasp.
“You were there?” Her voice was scarcely above a whisper. “My God!”
“If I had been, I wouldn’t be here now. I was hiding. In the woods.” He made a strangled, choking sound, somewhere between a laugh and a sob. “They were too busy killing to search. I saw everything.” He bit his lip, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. When he took it away, Edith saw blood. “Let me tell you what happened, shall I?”
He began pacing, arms tightly folded about him.
“There’d been killings before. ‘Actions’ the Germans called them. In July, August, Jewish men rounded up and taken to the dunes, but nothing on this scale. Then we heard from Riga. They’d emptied the ghetto. Killed everybody, thousands and thousands. Taken them to the forest, a place called Rumbula. Dug trenches. Made
them lie down to be killed. One layer on top of another. Sardine packing they call it. I didn’t know all that then but we knew something had happened. You can’t keep a thing like that secret, and the Ara-js Kommando arrived fresh from the killing. Thugs like Kalnin,š and Ozols taunting us, yelling you’re next. Kalnin,š was originally from Liepa-ja. He took a special pleasure in it. On December 13th, a Saturday, Kurzemes Va-rds, the newspaper, published an order saying all Jews had to stay in their homes. We knew then. This was it.”
He stopped. His thin throat worked as he drained the rest of his brandy.
“People ask, if you knew, knew what was going to happen, why didn’t you try to escape? They don’t understand. Such a thing was impossible. We were confined to our houses. Police, Ara-js Kommando, SS patrolling the streets with guns, dogs, looking for any excuse. Where would we go? We wore the yellow star. Even without it, Liepa-ja is a small town. Everybody knows who you are. Latvia is a small country. Anyone helping Jews would be shot, and very few took that risk. We were friendless in our own country, surrounded by hostility, but even to the last minute, we couldn’t believe, didn’t want to believe. Hope is the last thing to go, and when it is replaced by despair, so black and hopeless, all action seems . . . impossible.”
As he talked, he walked the length of the small room and back, turning and turning again as if trying to escape the cage of his memory. As he paced his hands fluttered, making strange little movements in the air, as if fighting off blows in a dream.
“The police began rounding people up in the early hours of the morning, taking them to the Women’s Prison. They were kept in the courtyard. When it was our turn, the yard was full, so they lined us up outside, facing the wall. We were there all day and all night. It was December. Cold. The next day, we were formed into columns and marched out of the city. North to the sea at Ške-de. Men, women, old, young, little children. The local police and the Ara-js Kommando lined the route, so no one could escape. I was with two friends, Osckar and Jan. We positioned ourselves at the edge of the column. The police and Ara-js Kommando were beating people, shouting at them to hurry. Some fell, others stumbled over them, there was confusion, the column bunched and stopped. The police waded in, beating left and right with long sticks. We seized our chance. Osckar lunged at the nearest of them. He had a knife hidden. He stabbed him in the throat. They were locked in a tussle. The police, the Ara-js didn’t want to use their weapons for fear of killing one of their own. The blood, the fight, added to the confusion. Men were shouting, women screaming. Jan and I broke from the column and ran into the forest.”
“Your friend?”
“Already dead. They shot after us. Jan was hit. I didn’t even look back. Just heard him cry out. I ran faster. I’ve always been a good runner, and I knew the woods. They didn’t come after me, didn’t want to risk a mass breakout from the column. I suppose they thought they’d find me later. I could hear shooting, volleys of shots coming from somewhere in front of me. Quite near. I had to know what was going on in the dunes. I crept closer, right to the edge of the woods. I had to see, to bear witness, or else who would believe? They didn’t notice, too intent on what they were doing. I saw . . . what I saw . . . I could scarcely believe it myself.
“I waited until night and walked on through the forest, following the coast. I came to a little harbor with small boats moored there. I stole one and put to sea. I had lived in Liepa-ja for most of my life, knew how to handle a boat. The Baltic in the middle of winter is not an appetizing prospect, but I’d rather die in the freezing water than down in a pit with sand kicked over me. I sailed west, making for Gotland. From there I reached Sweden and safety. My plan was to get to Britain. Join the Army.”
“What about your family?”
“My father and mother went with the Russians. Who knows what happened to them. I have a brother, Chaim, he’s in Palestine. The rest? Grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins. All dead. The worst thing, the very worst thing is, I could do nothing to save them. I just left them and ran. Like I left Jan.”
He stopped pacing and stood at the desk, looking down at the photographs.
“What you don’t see is the color. The blood streaking the sand at the side of the pit. The exposed flesh, fish-belly white in the winter light. Little children shot in their mothers’ arms, babies thrown up, blown apart in the air like clay pigeons. You don’t hear the whine of the wind, the screams, the moaning and sobbing, children wailing and whimpering, calling Ma-min,a! Te-tin,š! Mother! Father! But nobody would help them. Nobody. People standing round watching, drinking schnapps, taking photographs, posing for the camera, like these here. They came from miles around to see it. Like your trip to the seaside. And the guards shouting, jeering, laughing, hurling insults right until the last moment, then the quick percussion of gunfire, silence after that, then the swish of sand.”
“You were near enough to see it all?”
“I am in my dreams.”
He gave a retching, gasping sob, covered his face, and began to weep. Tears squeezed between his fingers, trickling down his thin wrists.
Edith put her arm round his shoulder, drawing him to her, absorbing his trembling, feeling her own deep inside.
“I’m sorry.” He turned his face into her. “I’ve never shed a tear. Walked away from there, dry-eyed. It was as though there was nothing inside me, just hollowness. As if I’d been eviscerated. I don’t know what’s come over me now.”
In the face of such horror, there was nothing she could say. What he had told her was beyond language, beyond tears, beyond imagination. She drew him close, hushing, soothing. She kissed his closed eyes, tasted the salt wetness on his cheeks. She led him to the bed, stroking his neck, the back of his head. She lay down with him and took him into her, offering him the universal, primordial comfort that a woman can give to a man.
Afterward, he was quiet for a long time. From downstairs came faint sounds: a burst of laughter, distant conversation, someone playing a piano. He put his head on her shoulder and closed his eyes. She smoothed his hair, shiny blue green, like a raven’s wing. He had long eyelashes for a man. Along his jaw, a bluish shadow was already beginning to show. He looked up at her, his dark eyes heavy lidded, vacant with sleep. He gave a sigh and reached up to pull her mouth down to his.
Their lovemaking was slower, more leisurely the second time around.
When it was over, they lay talking. He told her something of his life in Liepa-ja, in the time before, how he’d gone with his brother to Spain, to join the International Brigades.
“You were a Communist?”
“You were either one or the other.” He shrugged. “That’s where I first met Leo.”
Leo had been to Spain in some unspecified observer capacity. He certainly hadn’t taken part in any fighting, but Edith knew where his sympathies lay.
“When war looked imminent, Chaim took a boat to Italy, then to Palestine. He begged me to go, but I decided to go home to Latvia to be with the family. When the Russians came, we welcomed them. Then the Germans invaded. My parents and my girlfriend, Roza, went east. I stayed, thinking we could organize some kind of resistance.” He passed his hands over his eyes. “We had no idea.”
“Your parents? Roza? You have heard nothing?”
He shook his head. His face was set, bleak, desolate, his eyes closed. Edith reached over and kissed him then slipped out of bed.
“Where are you going?”
“I have to go back.” She adjusted her stockings. “I can’t be caught here, there would be hell to pay.”
“Don’t go yet. You’re the first woman in I don’t know how long I’ve actually wanted to stay.”
“If I don’t get back to the billet, I’ll be missed.”
“You don’t care about that, surely?” He laughed.
“Of course not, but—” She shook her head. “It’s too hard to explain.”
Frau Schmidt would have one over on her. Molly Slater would feed the mill of rumor and gossip. She couldn�
�t risk that.
“In that case . . .” He got out of bed and padded over to her. He looked smaller, younger without clothes. His skin a milk-pale contrast to the darker tan at his neck and arms and the pelt of black hair, which tapered from his chest, flaring again over his flat belly. He put his arms round her. She could feel him stirring against her. It took awhile to break away.
“No,” she said finally. “I really must go.”
“When will I see you again? I’m leaving tomorrow. Going back to Kiel. I’ll be there for at least a week.” He turned from her, grabbed the bedspread, and wrapped it around himself. He shuffled back, muffled now in the folds, looking like a small boy. “I can be in Hamburg, weekend after next. Atlantic Hotel. I’ll see you there. Shall I?” She nodded and kissed him once again. “And Edith? If you meet one of Leo’s chums, don’t say anything about the photographs you found. Just between us, OK?”
“Of course I won’t, not if you don’t think I should . . .”
“No. Don’t. Not under any circumstances.” He frowned. “I’ve heard that Viktors Ara-js is in the Zone and they’re looking for him.”
“Then finding Jansons might lead them to him. Help bring him to justice.”
“You don’t understand. They don’t want to punish him, they want to use him!”
Harry’s hollow, bitter laugh sounded loud in the quiet room. He didn’t look like a boy anymore. He looked like a man in need of solace. She let him lead her back to bed. She lay back as he began to undress her. Slowly, carefully, rolling one stocking down, then the other. She didn’t want him to hurry as he laid her clothes aside, one garment at a time. His gentleness, his slowness added to her exquisite helplessness.
20
Billet, Lübeck
20th February 1946