The Hidden

by Mary Chamberlain

  There was an old man in the bed, tucked up underneath the eiderdown. He was breathing heavily. Dora walked towards him. He was fast asleep. He had thick white hair, tousled on the pillow. Nasal fracture, badly set. His eyelashes were still kohl-black, though Dora could imagine that his dark eyes were now faded. In repose, his face hadn’t changed, hadn’t aged.

  She leant over and kissed his temple. ‘Geoffrey.’

  He didn’t stir. Best not disturb him. He must be tired. There was a photo on the bedside table. She picked it up. Clipped onto the frame was a picture, torn from a newspaper. A mugshot, her features grainy and indistinct in the newspaper image, the red cocktail dress showing grey.

  She walked around to the other side of the bed, kicked off her shoes, unzipped her skirt and stepped out of it. She climbed into the bed beside him and sidled close, cradling his back. She reached over him with her arm and felt for his hand. She squeezed it. She felt him stir a little and squeeze it in return.

  She pushed her face close to him, burying her nose in his back, breathing in his scent, of soap and sweat, the old fabric of his shirt. She felt the press of his body, its imprint on her own.

  ‘Geoffrey,’ she said again. ‘I’m so very sorry.’

  Dora’s arm across his body cradled him as his chest rose up and down, up and down. She was home, sleepy. When he woke, they’d talk as if nothing had happened. He lay still, putt-putting in his sleep, she a soft companion to his softer silence, like the night they first met.

  The storm broke outside and rain hammered at the bedroom window.

  EPILOGUE

  JOE

  St Helier, Jersey: ten years later

  Joe drained his cup and put it down. It wasn’t like home, but he had his own room and had been allowed to bring in a single piece of furniture and a picture.

  ‘Something familiar, to make your room more personal,’ the manager had said. He’d taken one of the Windsor chairs from the kitchen and put the photograph of Dora and Geoffrey and Barbara into a frame which he’d found in the charity shop.

  ‘That’s nice. Are they family?’

  ‘They are,’ Joe said. Who would understand their story if he tried to tell it here?

  It was shot with Barbara’s camera.

  ‘Take a photo of us, Joe.’

  The three of them, sitting on the old bench outside the house. Geoffrey died of pining, Joe thought, for the years gone and the years that would never come. But he’d been happy for three weeks, the old man and Dora, side by side on the garden seat, looking at horizons they would never see.

  Joe didn’t begrudge her this time with the old man, but it hurt, all the same. Finding out that Barbara wasn’t his daughter but Geoffrey’s had pained, but only momentarily, for the thought flew out as fast as it had flown in, with no time to roost in his heart.

  There had been no point in keeping the place on after Geoffrey died. He couldn’t bring himself to move into the house, and the caravan no longer felt like home. The farm would tick over, but Joe wasn’t sure for how long. He had twinges of arthritis, and what the doctor called bursitis, but, in truth, his heart wasn’t in it anymore. Without Geoffrey, what was the point?

  Once he heard Dora’s story too, the farm was too heavy a burden to carry.

  He got a good price for it. Learned, later, that the new owner planned to build a house on the dell in the upper field, all glass and white walls. It would have a grand view, right enough, with the ocean all the way round, the skies above and the shore below. Perhaps the new owner loved the birds. Joe’d taken his binoculars with him into the home, sat most days in the conservatory watching them. The home was in town, but all manner of tits and finches, gulls and cormorants came into its gardens.

  Joe offered the farm to Barbara before he sold it.

  ‘It’s yours, rightly,’ he said. ‘Seeing that you’re Geoffrey’s girl.’

  ‘What would I want with a farm?’

  She’d moved to London, to be with her mother. Now they did new-fangled tests to find the true parent. He’d seen it on the television. The police used it to catch criminals. All they needed was a hair, or a bit of spittle. They didn’t need to, in her case, though they did it anyway. She had the likeness of Geoffrey when he was younger. He could see it now. No wonder Geoffrey had thought she was Margaret. They had been the spit of each other. Joe’d made a will, left Barbara what remained of his money after he’d paid for the care here, and his funeral.

  She’d been ill, Dora, after Geoffrey died. Off her rocker. They had words for it these days. Soldiers got it, in Vietnam, combat fatigue. Joe had never known it in a woman. Well, there you go. Post-traumatic stress disorder. Barbara said there was a lot of talk about it now. She’d had it too, as if she had inherited Dora’s trauma and lived it all over again. Joe wondered if he hadn’t had a touch of it, in his time, for his soul had died in the war, and wasn’t that much the same thing?

  Dora was happy, he understood. She had married a man called Charles. He hoped she hadn’t made a hasty decision. It seemed a bit sudden to Joe. She’d sent him a photo of their wedding. It was in colour. She’d cut her hair, dyed it too, a soft, faded peach, and he saw again the woman she once was, freewheeling down the road to Geoffrey’s farm, happy, carefree and in love.

  He thought more and more about the war. Whichever way you looked, Trude was at its heart, pulling skeins of lies and death that threaded them together. What had driven her? Joe would never know.

  Pierre visited every day.

  ‘Two old codgers,’ he said. ‘That’s what we are.’

  They chatted about the old days, sat together for meals, played dominoes.

  ‘You may as well move in,’ Joe said. ‘You’re here often enough.’

  Pierre was talking to a woman. Joe couldn’t recall seeing her here before, but Pierre acted like he knew her. ‘Did you have a good holiday?’

  ‘It was grand,’ the woman said. ‘It rained every day.’

  ‘I’d have kept you dry,’ he said.

  ‘Will you get away.’ She was laughing. ‘You old devil.’

  She pushed her tea trolley forward. ‘Would you like another cup?’

  Oh, Joe knew those voices, made for laments. He looked up. ‘You wouldn’t happen to be from Cloghane, would you?’

  The woman almost jumped from her skin. ‘No I’m not,’ she said.

  ‘But you’re from the Dingle.’

  ‘I am that,’ she said. ‘Brandon.’

  He could see the bay in his mind, the fishing jetty, the mountain, the sweep of the Owenmore as it flushed into the sea. It was a hop and a skip to Cloghane.

  ‘And would you happen to know the O’Clearys, in Cloghane?’

  She thought for a minute, finger on chin. ‘Didn’t they used to have a butcher’s shop?’ she said.

  ‘Aye,’ Joe said. Just past the church on the left, before you reached O’Sullivan’s. He could hear the music from the bar in summer, the jigs and reels as the sun went down, the songs of grief and loss as the moonlight glimmered over the bay, as the whiskey turned the blood melancholy. He saw the brown stone cottages, the rough pitted road. Would it have tarmac on it now, street lighting?

  ‘I never knew them,’ the woman was saying. ‘The shop’s long gone. I only ever heard about them.’

  ‘And would you happen to know what happened to the family?’

  ‘One of them died, I think,’ she said. ‘Some went away. I think one of the girls may have stayed. Married. You know how it is.’

  Little Bridey. His favourite sister. She could be a grandmother by now.

  ‘And did you hear talk of a priest?’ Joe said.

  ‘A priest?’

  His heart drummed fast and he wondered if he shouldn’t take one of his pills. She was pulling a face, shaking her head.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’d have heard about a priest.’

  That you would, Joe thought, if they’d had a care for him. It hit hard, all the same, that they never spoke of him again.<
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  ‘Will you be having your tea?’ she said.

  Still, it was good to hear the Irish again.

  ‘Do you work here now?’ Joe said.

  ‘That I do.’

  Well, a little chip off the Dingle to end his days, a monthly call from Barbara and a letter from Dora once a year.

  What more could he want?

  AFTERWORD

  At least 34,000 women were trafficked into prostitution by the Nazis in the Second World War. Some were placed in brothels in the concentration camps, others in military bordellos in occupied Europe, of which there were over 500. Despite evidence of sexual offences against women committed in the brothels, these were not included as a crime against humanity, as defined at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1945–6.

  The victims of sexual enslavement did not speak out after the war. There was little sympathy with, or understanding of, victims of sexual violence, and the women in the military brothels in particular would have been vulnerable to charges of collaboration. Many women suspected of sleeping with the enemy – for whatever reason – were subject to rough justice and humiliation by shaving or tarring and feathering.

  There were military brothels in Alderney, Guernsey and Jersey. The main brothel for the Wehrmacht in Jersey was in the Hotel Maison Victor Hugo, which, before the war, had been a hotel renowned for its aromatic gardens and sea views. It burned down in the mid-1980s and apartments have now been built on the site. A second brothel, located first in the Abergeldie Hotel and then the Norman House Hotel, serviced the men from Organisation Todt. Women were included in an early contingent of Russian and Ukrainian OT workers brought to the Channel Islands in 1942, many of whom may have been destined for work in the brothels.

  Witness statements collected by the Director of Public Prosecutions sent out after the war to investigate war crimes in Alderney provide rare clues as to the women’s identities and conditions in the brothels. According to British intelligence, they were ‘licensed French women’. This included French colonial women and leaves ambiguous their status – while exonerating their abusers. According to the evidence of Oberleutnant Wilhelm Girrbach, the garrison commander in Alderney, the women were ‘volunteers’ engaged in Paris to clean and serve, but the promise of high wages attracted only ‘criminal elements… streetwalkers’. Their use as coerced prostitutes is in no doubt: they were subjected to punishments, imprisonment, forced medical examinations, were ‘ruthlessly’ dismissed if infected, and were unpaid.

  How many women were there at any one time is guesswork. The commandant of Alderney, Oberstleutnant D R Schwalm, who took up post on 23 October 1943, estimated their numbers at ‘about 100’. He ordered them to be quartered together and imposed strict visiting hours. Most of the women in Alderney were evacuated after the Normandy landings in 1944. By the end of the war, there were five women. Details are lacking on the brothels in Jersey, but conditions would be analogous to those in Alderney. The numbers, including both brothels, are likely to be higher, although it is probable that the OT brothel was wound down when the majority of OT men and labourers were moved to the European mainland in 1943–4.

  The Lebensborn programme, one of Heinrich Himmler’s schemes, was a system of breeding, choosing women of ‘pure Aryan’ stock and encouraging senior SS officers to impregnate them. Babies born as a result of this scheme were to be raised in the Lebensborn homes or put up for adoption by suitable German families. Some ‘Aryan’-looking children in the occupied countries were kidnapped and given to German adoptive parents. There were a number of Lebensborn facilities established throughout occupied Europe, including the one at Lamorlaye in France, opened in February 1944 and closed by the Allies in August 1944. The homes offered superior nutrition and hygiene standards and the most advanced medical treatment available for mothers and babies.

  For Hitler, occupation of the British Channel Islands held not only propaganda value but was also critical to the coastal defence of Europe. The Atlantic Wall, built to rebuff invasion by Allied forces, was a system of heavy-duty fortifications stretching from Norway to south-west France. Organisation Todt provided the labour for the construction of these defences. As in the rest of Europe, a small part of the local workforce was employed as skilled labour, but the majority of workers (some as young as fourteen) were forcibly brought in from all over Europe. Some were also political prisoners from Africa or Spain, held by the French.

  There were fourteen labour camps in Jersey, five in Guernsey and four (including a temporary camp) in Alderney under the jurisdiction of Organisation Todt. A fifth camp on Alderney, Lager Sylt, was under the authority of the SS. The commandant was Maximilian List, who earned his spurs in Neuengamme, of which Lager Sylt was a satellite. It was the only SS concentration camp on British soil. The inmates were largely political prisoners, criminals and Jews. An architect by training, List is alleged to have designed and had built the commandant’s house on Alderney. He was recalled to Berlin in February 1944 to answer questions relating to an escape of Jewish prisoners removed from the island in 1943.

  Anywhere upwards of 16,000 forced labourers passed through the Channel Islands under the occupation, 5,000 on Alderney alone. The working and living conditions were inhumane, starvation and brutality was routine, mortality and morbidity high. In Lager Sylt, in particular, they amounted to evidence of war crimes. There had been high-profile convictions in Nuremberg, but prosecution of other war crimes was left to the countries in which they had been perpetrated. The British, however, chose not to prosecute. Maximilian List, wanted as ‘responsible for the brutal treatment meted out to the concentration camp prisoners by the SS guards… [and] for the fact that many of the prisoners died of starvation’, was never prosecuted. He lived out his natural life in Hamburg, dying in the 1980s.

  Similarly, there were no prosecutions for collaboration or profiteering, although, as in continental Europe, women were scapegoated and harsh vigilante treatment meted out to those suspected of fraternising with Germans.

  I have played with these ideas and events in my novel, including some of the key players in the Channel Islands, British and German, although their personas and circumstances are my invention. The character of Dora was loosely inspired by the story of Marianne Grunfeld, a Jewish refugee, born in Upper Silesia, now Poland, who escaped to London in the 1930s. Blonde, blue-eyed, an agriculturist, she took a job on a Guernsey farm in 1940, a few months before the German occupation. She hid on the farm until she was betrayed to the German authorities and deported to her death, presumably in Auschwitz. I hope I have not betrayed her memory. In my novel, I melded parts of this story with parts of another, that of a (Jewish) survivor of the Ravensbrück concentration camp who, with her fair ‘Aryan’ looks, had been identified for the Lebensborn programme, which she refused.

  The detail of life in the brothel, and the existence of the Revier, or infirmary, is pure imagination. It is reasonable to assume that, where possible, women would have looked for a sympathetic officer to protect them from the worst excesses, much as Marta Hillers recounts in A Woman in Berlin. British intelligence reports that the brothel was scaled down, or closed, after D-Day and thirty women were sent to France for fear of revealing information gleaned from the Germans to the Allies; I have chosen to extend the brothel’s life for the purposes of the novel. The evacuation report of 28 May 1945 referred, however, to thirteen women from Jersey, all displaced persons. Nine of them were French. It does not say what these women were doing in Jersey, or how they arrived there.

  Given the regular and intrusive medical checks required, and the compulsory abortions performed, it would also have made sense to have an in-house clinic for the women in the brothel. I have taken another liberty with the historical truth by inventing such an infirmary, which also treated soldiers. In reality, soldiers who had contracted venereal diseases were treated in the general hospital, which had been requisitioned by the Germans. According to evidence, venereal diseases were rife.

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nbsp; I have no idea if certain women were reserved for officers, and others for the rank and file, but have assumed that would be the case. Although the SS were not present in Jersey, the Channel Islands had been earmarked as a place of rest and recreation and it is possible that Maximilian List, the SS Kommandant, or other SS officers, visited Jersey, although how often, and for how long, is guesswork. It is unlikely that Dora would have been allowed to nurse in the Revier; on the other hand, German wounded were evacuated to Jersey after the Normandy landings in 1944 and emergency hospitals and convalescence facilities would have been required. They needed nurses.

  How Dora and the other women survived the emotional and psychological strain of sexual enslavement is conjecture. The scars of sexual violence run deep. Given how little was understood or recognised at the time, its trauma would grip for a considerable period.

  Much of the detail of Joe’s life in Lager Sylt is based on the accounts of its inmates and witness statements. After the Normandy landings, the prisoners from Sylt and the OT camps on Alderney were evacuated to rebuild the Atlantic defences in Europe. The Minotaure was one of the ships, containing prisoners, which sank in the process, on 3 July 1944, with the loss of 250 lives.

  La Ferme de l’Anse is a fiction, as are its precise co-ordinates. That Joe found refuge in the farm is perhaps a little fanciful: a battery was built close to la Coupe in December 1944 and most houses left empty were either requisitioned by the Germans or looted by locals. On the other hand, some escaped prisoners did evade capture for the duration of the war. I wanted to give Joe a break – he had been the victim of enough abuse since childhood.

  The following primary and printed sources were used for the research for the novel:

  Addy, C. Limpet Stew and Potato Jelly: Lillian Aubin Morris’ occupation Recipes (Jersey Heritage Trust, 2014)