The Survivors

by Kate Furnivall

  ‘Well?’ Rafal asked. ‘What did he say?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘He took a long time to say nothing.’ He peered at Alicja’s face. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You don’t look it. Your face is all—’

  ‘Shut up, Rafal.’

  He shut up. They walked back to Hut C without a word, their shadows racing ahead of them, heads turned away from each other. But when they reached the doorway Alicja hesitated. She touched his arm where his sleeves were rolled up. His skin always had an inner furnace.

  ‘I’m sorry, Rafal. I don’t mean to be horrid. It’s just . . .’

  ‘I know.’ His smile was back.

  ‘Go and help your mother at the laundry,’ she urged.

  ‘No. I have to stay here to keep you safe.’

  ‘I don’t need keeping safe.’ It came out sharper than she intended. ‘Thank you, Rafal,’ she added gratefully. ‘Leave me alone now.’

  She walked into Hut C, into its noise and bustle and overcrowded beds. Rafal followed her.

  ‘No, Rafal, please. I need to be alone. I need to think.’

  Rafal shifted awkwardly on his big feet. ‘But your mother said I had to stay with you until she gets back.’

  A flash of anger cut through Alicja’s patience. ‘To hell with my mother.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  I was teaching a class in mathematics. I needed the pittance of money that my lessons earned me and I knew Alicja was being watched over by Rafal. I had faith in young Rafal. And in his slingshot. The class was of mixed ability, both adults and children, so I had divided them into groups and was just about to start teaching when the door opened and one final pupil walked in. It was Oskar Scholz. He took a seat at the back. He cleaned his spectacles.

  For a full minute my brain shut down. Then I persuaded my legs to carry me over to stand in front of his desk. ‘What are you doing here?’ I spoke calmly. The children all listened.

  ‘I’m here to learn maths of course. This is a mathematics lesson, isn’t it?’ His eyes challenged me.

  ‘Yes, it is. But there is nothing wrong with your ability with numbers.’

  He pulled a mock grimace. ‘That’s where you are mistaken. Sometimes I look at things and I fail to see what’s right under my nose. I have to improve my ability to find the right answer.’

  My mouth was dry. This was wrong. All wrong.

  I gave him a nod of warning and returned to the front of the class. The room was bare and rudimentary, only a couple of number charts on the wall, the equipment sparse, but the twenty-three pupils turned up regularly and worked hard. They covered a range of ages from five to fifty, including adults who had never done maths before and it gave me immense pleasure normally to be teaching them the basics of arithmetic. It was a skill that could seriously enhance their future chances in life. Numbers had magic properties.

  But not today. Today was not normal. Each time I wrote an addition or a multiplication sum on the board, the hair on the back of my head prickled. I expected to turn around to find an axe in my face.

  It was a relief when eventually they all trooped out of class, all except Oskar Scholz. He stood by the window observing me as I gathered up the pencils and paper. I came over and stood right in front of him, too close for comfort.

  ‘I thought we had a deal to have nothing to do with each other,’ I reminded him.

  ‘We do. You’re right. But I was concerned. I heard you’d had some kind of accident.’

  His gaze travelled to my throat. It was neatly wrapped up in a clean scarf, no bandage visible. Even so, I felt the blood pump to the wound, making it feel raw all over again.

  ‘You hear wrong,’ I said flatly.

  He held my gaze. I remembered how adept he was at it. Not blinking. Boring into you.

  ‘I was concerned,’ he said again.

  He stepped away from me. How the hell did he find out about my throat? In Warsaw he had always had eyes and ears on every street corner and at every window, and it seemed he was just as well informed here in the camp.

  Never underestimate him.

  I picked up the board rubber and started to clean my chalk numbers off the blackboard.

  ‘You are a talented teacher, Klara.’

  ‘Don’t waste your flattery on me, Oskar.’

  ‘Ah, of course, you are only interested in flattery from the Frenchman these days.’

  ‘The Frenchman, as you call him, is a friend, nothing more.’

  Oskar Scholz smiled and looked around the classroom at the benches and desks. He nodded to himself. ‘You are always good at getting people to like you, Klara.’

  He seemed to swell, to fill out his body and his clothes, taking up more space in the room, stealing all the air for himself. More like the SS Sturmbannführer Scholz of Warsaw. I could feel my heart trip over itself in my chest.

  ‘Maybe,’ he said, expanding his smile, ‘you should work on getting your daughter to like you.’

  I stalked over to the door and pulled it open. ‘Get out.’

  He walked out without another word.

  What was the reason for it?

  Why did Scholz say that?

  What did he mean?

  He knows nothing about my daughter.

  Nothing.

  He is twisting my thoughts. Panicking me. Making me question not only him, but myself. I can see cracks opening up under my feet, the way they did on the Vistula River in Warsaw when the ice was thin and the black icy waters waited to suck you down.

  He can take love and upend it into hate. I’ve seen him do it.

  But I will not let it happen here. Not now. Not with my daughter.

  If that man comes anywhere near my daughter, I will kill him.

  No warning.

  Oskar Scholz, start saying your prayers.

  I ran to Hut C.

  When I saw that our bunks were empty and that neither Alicja nor Rafal were anywhere in sight, I turned quickly to Matylda on the next bed. She was sitting in just a camisole, sewing up a hole in her cream blouse with blue cotton. We all did it. Used whatever colour thread we could lay our hands on.

  ‘Have you seen Alicja?’

  She smiled obligingly, her fingers still busy. ‘Yes, she went down the side of the hut outside. She was with that boyfriend of hers.’

  ‘He’s not her boyfriend.’

  She chuckled. ‘He soon will be.’

  ‘She’s only ten,’ I pointed out.

  She must have heard the alarm in my voice because she paused and studied my face. ‘Of course. I was only joking.’

  ‘They’re just friends,’ I said firmly. ‘Thanks, Matylda.’

  Graufeld Camp was a hotbed of romance. Every week yet more couples, who’d met in the camp, fell into each other’s arms and got married. All desperate for love when they have nothing else. Finding someone to cling on to in order to stop themselves drowning. Matylda was just seeing things that weren’t there, I told myself.

  I found them sitting outside on the ground on the far side of the hut in a patch of sunlight. Alzbeta and Izak had joined them. They were all playing a game of five stones with a tiny India rubber ball and a handful of small stones. I sat down on a nearby tuft of yellow grass and watched. Rafal was winning because he had the largest hands for scooping up the five stones, but Izak was doing well too. I could see he was desperate to win and Alicja was trying to help him. I could not take my eyes off her.

  Something was wrong.

  Even in the sunshine her cheeks were colourless, her eyes the colour of ash. She wore Nik’s scarlet ribbon looped around her small wrist like a bracelet and her fingers kept picking the end of it into fraying strands, like threads of blood on her white skin.

  ‘Are you all right, Alicja?’ I asked casually. ‘Is your back hurting?’

  She shook her head. Did not lift her eyes from the ribbon. Did not look at me. I wanted to reach out across the game and pull her to me. I wanted to hold h
er tight till she told me what was wrong.

  You should work on getting your daughter to like you.

  Scholz’s words dropped like slivers of ice into my ear.

  Don’t, I told myself. Don’t listen to him.

  ‘Go to bed,’ Davide admonished.

  ‘I can’t. It’s only the middle of the afternoon,’ I objected.

  ‘That’s not the point, Klara. You don’t look good. And you had almost no sleep last night.’

  I smiled at his solemn expression. ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘You’re not fine.’ He put out a hand and placed his cool palm on my forehead. ‘You’re hot. Burning up. That settles it. I brought you some more aspirin.’ He rattled a brown glass bottle and instantly I wondered how much Bruno Fuchs would pay me for it. ‘Let’s look at the cut on your throat.’

  The hardest thing to find in this camp was privacy.

  We found ourselves a nook at the back of the hut where a section jutted out to accommodate the stove inside. It meant we weren’t overlooked. Gently Davide untied my scarf and then unwound the bandage.

  His movements were light and swift. But I was conscious of the side of his hand brushing against my collarbone and his thumb sidling along the soft skin under my jaw. My instinct was to draw back. To flee from being so vulnerable. But I didn’t, I stayed, chin up to make it easier for him.

  As he worked, silhouetted against the sheet of pristine blue sky behind him, I studied his features. His fine bones and unruly eyebrows. It was a good face. Not just good-looking, but good inside. Decent, where it matters. There was no harshness to it, no desire to hurt hiding behind the easy warmth in his chestnut-brown eyes. Yet there was something about the boot-black flecks within them. About the tight lines that flared prematurely around his eyes. And about the way the corners of his mouth tended to dip down in moments of repose.

  It was something that spoke of the depth of his sadness. I knew Davide had suffered cruelly as part of the slave labour programme in the V-2 rocket caves and I knew he had lost his family in the war. That much he’d revealed. But the details he kept locked away.

  We all kept our secrets.

  It’s what we carried around inside us now. All of us survivors. Sorrow. Sadness. Heartache. Secrets. You cannot go through a war without being branded.

  Davide smoothed fresh ointment over the wound on my throat. As he did so, I placed the flat of my hand on his shirt front and could feel the vibration of his damaged lungs behind his ribs, a low rumble with each breath.

  My head was throbbing and I thought I heard a whisper that said, Sleep now. But whether it came from him or from me, I couldn’t say.

  ‘There,’ he said finally, ‘all done. Bandaged up again. But Klara, you have a touch of fever. God only knows what that bastard had been cutting open with his knife before he cut you.’

  ‘Skinning a cat, I expect.’

  He smiled and kindly took the weight of my head between his broad hands, drawing me to him.

  ‘Thank you,’ I muttered.

  But when he took away his hands, my head drooped forward. My neck too flimsy to hold it. My forehead came to rest on his shoulder and he stroked my hair. It seemed to me that his fingers were holding my thoughts and stopping them from falling out.

  ‘I want you to listen to me, Klara. I’ve had an idea. I know you are desperate to get yourself out of here as soon as possible. To England. Especially now that Oskar Scholz is here in Graufeld. But we both know that the wheels of bureaucracy grind exceedingly slow around here and that it could be quite some time yet. So I’ve come up with an alternative strategy to keep you and Alicja safe.’

  I let my head loll against his cheekbone. It felt comforting. I wanted to ask what his strategy was but the words didn’t quite make it from my brain to my mouth.

  ‘It’s this,’ he said, as if he had read my thoughts anyway. ‘To get Oskar Scholz out of Graufeld.’

  I blinked slowly as his words trickled into my brain. ‘How?’ I whispered against his skin.

  ‘By getting him a Fragebogen Certificate of Clearance.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  ALICJA

  Was it true?

  Did Mama really live in Warsaw with a Nazi SS officer as her lover? Or was Oskar Scholz lying?

  Alicja was curled up on her bed. Her hand lay across her eyes, blocking out the world that was spinning around her. The fingers of her other hand couldn’t stop fretting at the scarlet ribbon on her wrist. She knew about collaborators. About the women who became the toys of the powerful Nazi occupiers of Poland. The older girls in the convent would whisper in corners about them. Whores. That’s what they called them.

  Mama was not a whore.

  Was she?

  But into Alicja’s mind, like a drip of cold water, seeped the memory of their flight through the forests of Poland and the unexpected appearance of food in her mother’s pocket when they were starving. And that smell on her skin. The sour smell. The farmer smell.

  Alicja shuddered and buried her face in the meagre pillow, buried it so hard she couldn’t breathe. Only when the violent spikes of lightning behind her eyelids threatened to brand whore deep into her brain did she raise her head and let air rush into her lungs.

  She sat up, ignoring the raised voices in the hut. She had gone to see Oskar Scholz to find out what had happened to make her mother so different when she snatched her from the convent. Alicja had thought that she could smooth over their hatred, make them friends. She’d believed that she could chase away her mother’s fear.

  Scholz had been friendly. And he’d been kind. Like her father. Almost. But now it didn’t matter because she no longer cared whether or not he was lying. She’d wanted to help. But she saw now. There was no helping them.

  She had to be ready.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  I was lying in bed, staring up at the webbing under my daughter’s mattress. It was still broad daylight outside but I was dead to it. My limbs ached and the cut on my throat pulsed gently. Nothing I couldn’t handle.

  But there seemed to be a fire burning somewhere inside me, though I couldn’t work out where. Davide had stood over me while I took a couple of aspirins. Reluctantly. The more I swallowed, the fewer I had to sell. Alicja had retreated in silence to her bunk above me, her nose stuck in the ancient book of folk tales that Salomea had presented to me in Hanover.

  A Fragebogen.

  Davide was baying at the moon. How could Oskar Scholz risk filling out a Fragebogen?

  The Fragebogen was an official questionnaire – 131 questions – distributed by the four Allied military governments to millions of Germans for the denazification of Germany. The questions demanded to know every single detail of your association with National Socialism – whether you’d belonged to Hitler Youth; how you voted in the 1932 election; if you’d hoped for a German victory during the war – intending to purge the country of Nazis. To root out all those who were trying to conceal their political past.

  Conviction meant prison or worse. It was exactly what Oskar Scholz was terrified of. In the chaos that had swept through Germany since the war ended, the temptation to slough off his old Nazi identity and reappear as whiter-than-white Jan Blach must have been overwhelming. I can see that. Already thousands of Germans had been interrogated after filling out the Fragebogen and chucked in prison. Scholz had no intention of becoming one of their number.

  That’s what David meant.

  If we could get hold of one of the white Certificates of Clearance with Jan Blach’s name stamped on it, Scholz would leave Graufeld.

  But what about the four thousand Jewish children I saw him help march to the cattle yard in Warsaw? The ones who were packed in trains bound for the gas chambers of Treblinka, terrified and trembling.

  What about them?

  It was winter in Warsaw, the kind of winter that cracks your bones. The kind that feels it is never going to end. Breath froze into pearls of ice the moment it left your lungs and the wide Vistula Ri
ver had turned as hard as iron. At night the moon carved its own secret patterns in the blanket of snow that silenced the once-elegant length of Marszalkowska Avenue.

  I grieved for my beautiful city, so much of it scarred and in ruins now, and I grieved for the spectral beggars who haunted the streets and who were frequently shot at random just for being an eyesore. If the cold and the hunger didn’t do for them, the bullet would.

  Nazi jackboots might have been marching through Poland’s capital for the last two years, but don’t think the war was over for the Polish people. It wasn’t. Poland refused to roll itself in the swastika flag and die.

  Tonight was special. Tonight Poland was fighting back. The grey Nazi uniforms and the death’s head emblems had gathered together like vultures to peck carelessly at Poland’s bones in an evening of drinking and laughter. Their hands on the soft flesh of Poland’s women.

  But like I said about a chess game. The queen is the dangerous one. The one to fear.

  ‘What about that?’

  SS Sturmbannführer Oskar Scholz placed a glass of amber brandy punch before me and raised his own whisky glass in celebration. I left my drink untouched. Beside me, SS Oberführer Axel Fleischer threw an affectionate arm around my naked shoulder and kissed my cheek, his full lips warm and moist against my skin. He liked to do that in public. To stamp ownership.

  ‘Drink, Liebchen.’ Axel laughed. ‘It’s my birthday. I want you to be happy.’ He nuzzled my neck then drew back and studied my expression. ‘Are you happy, Klara?’

  ‘Yes, I’m happy.’

  ‘Sometimes I wonder.’

  I smiled at him and waved a hand around the sparkling nightclub that he had taken over for the occasion. It throbbed with heat and music and desire. Diamonds flashed around slender young throats, the spoils of war, while men strutted in their fine uniforms, flaunting their power and their victor’s sense of entitlement. The band played good German songs with the kind of relentless beat that made your brain shake, as trays of birthday brandy punch in glittering stemmed glasses circulated every table.