by Emma Fraser
The women had been blindfolded and their mouths filled with plaster before they’d been executed – to stop them shouting the Polish freedom slogan. How did these women feel knowing they were going to their deaths? What about those who were leaving children behind? On a board, behind some glass, were some of the farewell letters the women had written on scraps of paper, the handwriting so tiny it was impossible to read from where she was standing. The letters were to their children. What do you say to a child you know you’ll never see again? How do you find the right words? What would she say to hers if she knew she was to die? She forced the thought away as well as the impulse to speak to them.
When she was finished, she took a taxi to the Gestapo headquarters. This was the same route that the women and men would have taken from Pawiak prison, in the back of a truck, knowing they were going to be tortured and probably wondering whether they’d have the strength not to betray their contacts.
Here was the office where they would have been interviewed by a Gestapo officer, some taken out into the courtyard and shot immediately; others, returned to Pawiak to await their sentence.
She was nauseous and frozen by the time she returned to the hotel. While she ran herself a bath she phoned Neil.
‘How are the girls?’ she asked.
‘Irene is on a playdate and Annie is in the kitchen making figures out of Play-Doh. Considering it’s approximately only eight hours since you’ve left me in charge, I haven’t managed to lose one yet.’
‘Don’t joke,’ she said, more sharply than she’d intended.
‘Are you all right?’
‘Hold on a moment.’ She went to the bathroom and turned off the taps. ‘I’m back,’ she said. ‘About to take a bath then get something to eat. I might order room service; I don’t think I can face the hotel dining room tonight.’
‘You should have let me come with you.’ His voice was soft, concerned. He still travelled all over the world as a photo journalist. How could she stop him? He was doing what needed to be done and she was proud of him. She’d learned to live with her terror that one day his luck would run out. She’d learned that courage from Irena.
‘I had to do it on my own, you know that.’
‘Say the word and I’ll be there.’
Her throat tightened. Right now she wanted nothing more than to feel his arms around her. But she didn’t want him to leave the children. Especially not now. She needed to know he was there, the only person, apart from Mum, she trusted completely to watch over them.
She lightened her voice. ‘I know, but I’ll be all right. I’m tired. You know I don’t do well when I don’t get my full eight hours.’
‘I’ll get Annie for you. Take care, honey. I’ll speak to you tomorrow.’
She spoke to her youngest child for a while, feeling the tension drain from her as Annie explained she was making a farmyard from her Play-Doh. She loved her children with an intensity that frightened her sometimes. This was, she now knew, how her mother had felt about her, but tenfold.
The next day she walked to the street where her mother’s family had been killed. This was perhaps the hardest bit of her journey. She walked under the archway, just as her grandmother, mother and Irena would have done. She could feel the sadness, the abject terror of the thousands as they were led to their deaths. Why didn’t more try to run? From what Irena had told her it was clear that they’d known they were going to die.
In here, in this space, this piece of scrub ground with weeds, was where the patients and staff were shot and burned.
Although she couldn’t believe in a God who could have let this happen, she knelt and lit a candle for the dead. After that she visited the house where her mother had been hidden as a child.
Nothing about the streets of Warsaw hinted at the terrible events of the war.
She knew from her research that over 5,500 kilograms of ash, all that remained of most of the people killed in the Warsaw Uprising, had been collected and buried – 5,500 kilograms! How many people was that?
The pictures of Warsaw after the Germans had destroyed it made her think of a science fiction film about an apocalypse. Barely a building had remained intact. It must have been how Hiroshima had looked after the atomic bomb. In these ruins, Irena and others had fought and died, while the Red Army had waited and watched.
The next day she took the train to Krakow, buying a first-class ticket for a few extra zloty. The carriage was much the same as it must have been when Irena lived here. The same deep velvet seats, the same overhead rails for luggage where Irena had once placed her suitcase under the eyes of the Germans sharing her carriage. Was it on a train like this that her mother had been taken from Warsaw and to a place of safety?
She wrote up her notes, pausing periodically to stare out of the window as field upon field dotted with villages and farms, at this time of year barren and brown, rushed past.
Her hotel was close to the Jewish Quarter and not far from the Schindler Museum and the ghetto and she spent the next day visiting the museum, wandering the streets of the old Jewish Quarter. Just before darkness fell she found the townhouse where Irena had lived with her father as a child.
Tomorrow she was going to Auschwitz-Birkenau. She wasn’t sure about the morality of visiting a place where so many had died; there was almost something ghoulish about it, but she owed it to the memory of her unmet grandmother’s family – her great uncles and aunts who along with her great grandparents had lost their lives there – to go.
She had decided not to take a taxi, or one of the organised tours. Neither did she want to go by train. Instead, she took one of the regular buses.
It dropped her and her fellow tourists at the end of a long drive leading towards the museum. Auschwitz itself was a small nondescript village with nothing to suggest that it had once been the final stop for millions of Jews, Poles and other so-called Untermenschen.
It would have been a similar sort of day when Sarah’s grandmother’s family had been brought here. Cold, so cold that even through her layers, Sarah could feel the biting wind. How did the internees survive with only the thin striped pyjamas they were given to wear? But of course they didn’t. Most of those not sent to be gassed died of cold or starvation or other diseases within three months.
Although she’d read extensively about the camp, nothing – no book, no film – could have prepared her for the reality. She joined an English tour guide and trailed after him as he described the horrors as he must have done thousands of times: the places where the internees were made to stand for hours in the freezing wind for roll call, the place where they were hung, the cells where they were made to stand upright while slowly starving to death, the hospital block where the experiments were carried out – all of it.
But it was Birkenau that chilled her most. This is where the trains of prisoners were taken and selected. Right to survive; left to die.
Irena had been in Bergen-Belsen, which although not an extermination camp, was in every other way as horrific as this one. Like the inmates here, she had been billeted in a hut, where the women slept, four or five to a bed, the ones on top leaking pus from suppurating wounds as well as other body fluids onto those below as rats scuttled and gnawed at the corpses of those who had died in their sleep. Like the women here who hadn’t been sent straight to the gas chambers, Irena had to endure unspeakable conditions. Had she not been taken to Bergen-Belsen just three months before the Red Army liberated the camp, she too would have almost certainly died.
They were shown the remains of the gas chambers, the tunnel where those condemned to death would take their final walk, the passage where the prisoners who’d been given privileged roles would come to collect the corpses to shave their hair and remove their gold fillings before taking their bodies to be burned.
There was one place of which Irena never talked, but had written about in her notebook. A fellow inmate – one who’d been marched from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen in the last weeks of the war, had told Ire
na about it. Sarah left the group and crossed over to an innocuous looking building, a little hut near the entrance of the camp. This was where the children – babies mainly – of the women who had been incarcerated were taken to be drowned in a bucket of water. The other women tried to hide them, tried to feed them with what little food they could scavenge, but it was hopeless. Not one baby survived.
When the tour had finished, Sarah felt drained. She walked away from the rest of the visitors. She needed to be on her own. Doubts were running through her head. Could her book really do justice to the horror that had happened? Could her book do justice to the courage of so many?
She smiled to herself. She was being Chicken Licken again. Hadn’t Irena’s story taught her anything? Hadn’t being with Neil taught her anything? Life was filled with risks. Besides she’d promised Irena that she would tell her story.
She looked towards the sky where the setting sun painted it in shades of orange.
‘At the going down of the sun and in the morning, I shall remember,’ she said out loud. ‘I promise you, Irena.’
If you enjoyed We Shall Remember then read on for an extract from Emma Fraser’s new novel, The Shipbuilder’s Daughter. Available now!
Prologue
Glasgow, 1920
The scream was like nothing Margaret had ever heard before and seemed to go on forever. She dropped her book and clapped her hands over her ears. Almost worse was the awful silence that descended a few moments later.
Her heart hammering, she ran to the window and looked outside. Although her father’s office was on the third floor, only a fraction of the shipyard was visible; the rest, sprawling alongside the Clyde, was hidden from view. Beneath her a crowd was gathering, converging on something she couldn’t quite see through the grimy window.
She used the sleeve of her dress in an attempt to clear a patch, but all she managed to do was smudge it more. As urgent shouts filled the silence of moments before, she sped downstairs, emerging into the soot-filled air, her breath coming in painful gasps. She hesitated, suddenly reluctant to discover what horror had precipitated the blood-curdling screams.
‘Where are you going, Miss Bannatyne?’ a man asked, grabbing her by the elbow.
‘What’s happened? Is it my father?’
His lip curled. ‘No, it’s not your father. What would he be doing down here? It’s an accident. Nothing unusual, but not summat a young lass like you should see. Better go back indoors.’
She shook his arm away. ‘Let me go!’ She couldn’t just go back inside – she had to see for herself.
Eyes fixed on the huddle of men obscuring her view, she threaded her way through the grime-stained figures, their stale sweat mingling with the smell of burning coal, welded steel and other odours too foreign to identify, until she was standing inside the circle of onlookers. One of the workers, his face deathly pale, lay on the ground, pinned down by several steel girders. Blood seeped from beneath him, staining the dust red and, just visible through his torn trousers, white bone glistened through a ragged gash in his lower leg. Margaret clamped her hand over her mouth to stop herself from crying out. Part of her wanted to turn away, to slip back through the mass of bodies and return to the safety of her father’s office, but another, stronger part couldn’t tear her eyes away from the scene unfolding in front of her.
The injured man groaned, sweat trickling down his face and pooling in the hollow of his neck. He looked up at his colleagues with frightened, pain-filled eyes. ‘Help me. For God’s sake.’
His pleas galvanised the group into action. Several men jostled past her, almost pushing her to the ground. One of them crouched by his side and grabbed the end of the girder. He turned back to the watching men. ‘We need to get the weight off him. Come on, men, put your backs into it.’
‘Stop!’
The shout, loud enough to be heard over the clanging metal, stopped the men in their tracks. Way above her head, so high up she had to crane her neck to see, a shipyard worker was standing on the scaffolding surrounding the ship currently under construction.
Ignoring the ladders connecting the different levels, he ran across a narrow plank, grabbed hold of a steel pole and swung down to the levels below. As he descended at breakneck speed, Margaret held her breath. If he wasn’t careful, he could easily plunge to his death.
But within moments he was on the ground and the crowd parted to let him through.
‘Jimmy,’ he said, addressing the man who had ordered the others to move the girders, ‘we’ll not be able to lift those off him without a crane. Get one over here. Toni, fetch the stretcher. And a cart too.’
The new arrival couldn’t be much older than her, yet to her surprise the men did his bidding without argument. He shoved dark hair out of his eyes and knelt by the injured man’s side. ‘How are you holding up, Hamish?’
‘I’ve been better, Alasdair. I’ve a feeling I’ll no’ be home for my tea.’
A brief smile crossed the younger man’s face as he ran his hands across Hamish’s body. ‘Aye, well. I’ll get someone to let the wife know. In the meantime, let me have a look see.’
Why didn’t they lift the girders off Hamish? He needed to get to a hospital as soon as possible. Why were the workers listening to this man? Where was her father? He should be here, telling them what to do.
‘Alasdair, lad, we have to get him out from under that weight,’ one of the men said. It appeared she wasn’t the only one wondering about the delay.
The dark-haired man shook his head. ‘He’s punctured an artery at the top of his leg. The pressure of the girders is stopping him from bleeding like a pig. If we take them off without putting on a tourniquet first, he’ll not last more than a few minutes.’ He yanked off his belt and wrapped it around the top of the injured man’s thigh. ‘Hold on, Hamish. We’re going to move you in a bit. I just need to do something first.’
He glanced up, his eyes narrowing as he caught sight of her. ‘You. Do you have anything I can use as a bandage?’
Margaret stiffened. He’d spoken to her as if she were a nobody. Anyway, she didn’t have a handkerchief and her dress was stained with soot from the yard. ‘No. I’m sorry.’
‘You’re wearing a petticoat, aren’t you? Tear a strip off and pass it to me.’
As several pairs of eyes swivelled in her direction, she blushed. ‘I can’t do that. Not in front of everyone.’
‘You’re going to have to. There’s nothing else. I need something to staunch the bleeding that’s not covered in muck.’
‘That’s Bannatyne’s lass,’ one of the men said. ‘Best leave her out of it.’
‘I don’t care if she’s the Queen of Sheba. She shouldn’t be here, but since she is, she can help.’
Her face burning, Margaret lifted the hem of her dress. She tried to rip a piece off her petticoat but couldn’t make even the tiniest tear. ‘I can’t.’
Alasdair gave an exasperated shake of his head. ‘Someone help her.’ When no one made a move, he rose to his feet. ‘Is the crane here?’
‘Aye, son. And the stretcher.’
‘Right then, secure the poles.’ While the men started tying ropes around the girders, Alasdair stepped towards her. Before she could stop him, he lifted her dress and tore a strip from her petticoat with his teeth.
He looked up at her and a smile flitted across his face. ‘Sorry, Miss Bannatyne.’ He was so close she could see the freckles scattered across his face. Thick, long lashes framed eyes the colour of the sky in winter.
As soon as the ropes were tied, Alasdair knelt once more on the ground beside the injured man. ‘Hamish, I know it hurts like buggery now, but it’s going to hurt even more when we lift the girders. You can yell as loud as you like. No one here will mind.’ He squeezed Hamish’s shoulder. ‘Right, lads. As slowly and as carefully as you can.’
The ropes tightened, then inch by inch, the lengths of steel began to lift. Hamish screamed, his arms thrashing about in agony. Margaret watched in horror
as blood spurted over Alasdair’s hands.
‘Hold still, Hamish. For the love of God, just hold still.’
If Hamish could hear Alasdair he was in too much pain to pay heed. He continued to flail his arms, trying to push Alasdair away.
‘Someone hold him down, for God’s sake!’ Alasdair shouted, his bloodied fingers slipping on the straps of his makeshift tourniquet.
One of the men pressed down on Hamish’s shoulders and Alasdair tightened the belt until the blood slowed to a trickle. Satisfied, he moved on to the gash in Hamish’s lower leg, wrapping the strips of Margaret’s torn petticoat tightly over the wound. Within moments his temporary bandage had turned red.
‘Pass me some planks,’ he ordered.
Eager hands thrust several at him. He discarded a few before selecting four of equal length. He placed one on either side of each of Hamish’s legs and tied them quickly with more belts.