by Jenny Hobbs
Victory. Herbie Fredman remembers the stars and stripes fluttering on Sherman tanks clanking into the labour camp, and packets of chewing gum being tossed by well-fed Yank hands to feebly cheering prisoners who lacked the strength to catch them.
Victory. Barbara recalls one of her finest hours when more than half the recitation winners at the Durban Eisteddfod were her students and she was called up to the stage in her Marimekko caftan to acknowledge the applause.
Victory. Rick Savidge thinks back to the last game against the Cheetahs in Bloemfontein when he’d chipped the ball ahead, accelerated through a gap, caught it on the bounce and scored the diving try that nailed the match. Surely he won’t be dropped from the Springbok team?
Victory. Purkey has slipped into one of his favourite daydreams where he has laid out Mr Digby Senior in the ebony casket inlaid with rosewood. Mrs Digby is on her knees begging him to become managing director with shares in the business, because Mr Digby Junior isn’t up to it. And Charmaine, the blonde receptionist with nails like silver teaspoons, is leaning against the door in a tight skirt just short of her fanny, giving him the eye.
Victory. Reverend George strides in through the vestry door, having quelled a crisis and found a minibus to take Groth and his disabled cohorts home.
‘Thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory. Therefore, my beloved brethren’ – and I don’t mean you! Bishop Chauncey glowers at the assistant priest – ‘be ye steadfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in vain. Here endeth the lesson.’
It is a melancholy state. You are in the power of your enemy … The days are very long, the hours crawl like paralytic centipedes … Companions quarrel about trifles … You feel a constant humiliation in being penned in by railings and wire, watched by armed guards.
– WINSTON CHURCHILL, quoted in The Melancholy State, by S G WOLHUTER
Stalag VIIA, Moosburg, March–April 1945.
J J, Kenneth and Ed shared a straw pallet on the hut floor with a mumbling sergeant who should have been in the sick bay for mental cases. When one of them moved, the others had to grab onto the coarse ticking so as not to roll off. Outside, the ice and snow had turned to rain and mud. There was no room for any other activity than plodding through the mud, brushing past other fed-up men, fists thrust into the pockets of sagging greatcoats, telling stupid jokes to mask their dread.
Even in this isolated forest camp, they knew that the Nazis were under siege. Exhausted men straggled in every day from the east to swell the POWs who came from Britain and its dominions, the US, Poland, Russia, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Serbia and Yugoslavia. Men were sardined on bunks and hut floors; as the weeks dragged on, more were billeted in freezing army tents. Rumours fizzed like jumping-jack firecrackers: the Yanks had crossed the Rhine; Hitler was losing his marbles and Goering – no, Goebbels – no, Admiral Doenitz – was running the show; unmanned rockets were bombing London; a Romanian prisoner had typhus; Roosevelt was dead.
The guards, many still in their teens, were nervous and easily rattled – angry boys with high-coloured cheeks and gas-jet eyes. The let’s-keep-our-peckers-up spirit of earlier camps dwindled to stoic resignation. Life had narrowed to a bleak fable by the Brothers Grimm about a defeated tribe of men abandoned to their fate in a forest with wolves.
By the middle of April the camp was teeming, the hospital barracks crammed with the sick and crazy. No Red Cross parcels came through. Meals were black bread and thin soup. Kenneth muttered one morning to J J as they suffered the agonies of the dysentery queue for the latrines, ‘Things are moving. OC asked me to look over a legal letter he wants to hand the camp Oberst.’
‘What about?’
‘Gross overcrowding. OC thinks they’re getting desperate. Allied Forces have taken the east bank of the Rhine. Patton’s on his way.’
Hope surged. ‘Did he tell you for sure?’
‘Yes, but keep it under your hat. There are a hell of a lot of officers here. Jerry may be holding us as hostages or for reprisals.’
Next morning, the guards roused everyone in their hut and ordered them to assemble outside, leaving their kit and blankets and Ed – still hobbling – behind. ‘This is it, boys! Say your prayers,’ someone yelled.
‘Thinning us out, you reckon?’
‘Weeding.’ The gaunt inmate shivered.
Watched by hundreds of silent men, they were led by guards and their hut commander Major Irving through the camp gates and past a wagon with sloping sides covered by a tarpaulin. Feet in worn shoes were sticking out the back.
J J said in a shaky voice, ‘We’re going to be shot. After months of doing fuck-all. I didn’t even get to kill one of the bastards.’
‘They’ll have a hard time digging graves for all of us.’
An economist in civilian life muttered, ‘Far too inefficient for Huns. They’ll use those blokes in the wagon to fuel furnaces or make fertiliser.’
‘They weren’t only blokes. Some of the shoes were women’s.’
‘Peep-toes?’ Nobody even smiled.
J J was silent as they were marched along a gravel road leading deeper into the forest. He was wondering what it felt like to be shot – to have bullets slamming into your body, shattering bones and flesh, bits of your brain flying in pink shreds. When the road opened onto a clearing with a massive log chalet, all fretted eaves and jutting balconies, he thought he was dreaming.
A Londoner at the front said, ‘Crikey, it’s a gingerbread mansion.’
‘What did you do?’ they clamoured when the major arrived back at the hut. Kenneth had been stretchered unconscious to the hospital barracks. ‘I told him about the wagons you fellows loaded at the lodge, though the bastards will have covered their tracks. But there isn’t long to go now. Hold fast, chaps. The Yanks are on their way. BBC says a week at the most.’
III
KICK-START
· 22 ·
‘FATHERS ARE PART OF THE GRAND SCHEME OF THINGS,’ Dot Kitching told her children on the rare days when Victor came into the house smiling or played with them on the grass under the many-stemmed strangler fig that shaded the back of the house. When he came in furious or frustrated and roaring, she’d say, ‘Fathers are a fact of life.’
J J had passed both sayings on to his children as a way of excusing his own failings, always adding that they were lucky he wasn’t like his father.
‘Of course we’re lucky,’ they’d answer, Lin meaning it and Hugh with growing sarcasm. Having a father in the liquor trade wasn’t easy to explain away to his friends, any more than the old man’s war service and Springbok status. But he knows now that it’s not easy getting it right as a father and vows to do better with Sam.
Lin has returned to the congregation with a mission and sits wondering how her father might have helped Darius Groth. J J had mumbled again as she sat holding his hand in the last days, ‘You’ve got stuck in your life, girl. Need a kick-start. Do something new.’
But he was wrong. She’s not stuck. She enjoys her job and knows she’s doing valuable work at the archives. Her life is on track; the tears were just a stress reaction. She has a good income, a paid-up flat, many friends and a singular cat for company. To help that band of desperate men would be a tribute to her father who’d also gone through a war, though he’d at least received recognition and fame.
They’re the ones who need a kick-start. Not her.
All of us without exception thought we were on a death mission.
– D-Day veteran quoted in a D-Day programme on the History Channel
During a halt as they trudged from Moosburg deeper into the Bavarian forest, Major Irving jotted their names and the date on the back of a letter that he tucked into his greatcoat pocket as evidence. Then he tried to brace them to face a firing squad. ‘Chin up, men. Stare the bastards down. This is for king and country. You have done your best.’
‘Etcetera,’ Kenneth muttered. ‘It’s bullshit. I’m too young to die.’
>
They were frogmarched through a dream of sunlight slanting through tall tree trunks, fronds of bracken unfurling from leaf mould, and a scent of fresh piney resin, worlds away from war. And it was all the more surreal because they weren’t lined up and shot. The gravel road opened onto a clearing and they faltered to a stop, a line of scarecrows in worn-out uniforms gaping at the great log chalet.
‘Go!’ The guards prodded them with rifles.
‘Hang on, chaps.’ Major Irving stood his ground, gathering the shreds of dignity left to an officer in battledress fit only for a dog’s basket. He turned to the SS Hauptsturmführer who had been sauntering behind them. ‘What’s this place?’
The man made an abrupt gesture with his swagger stick. ‘Für die Jagd. Go!’
There was mockery in the major’s voice as he led them, boot soles flapping, towards a flight of steps. ‘It’s a hunting lodge. Probably a general’s. It’s relaxing to shoot buck and wild boar and water fowl when you’re weary of killing people.’
They were hustled into a hall with rustic pine walls bristling with antlers and horned skulls and glassy-eyed stag heads, mounted shotguns and fans of daggers with tusk handles. Sailing across the top of a grand piano was a fleet of photos of a heavy-lidded blonde woman and men in hunting gear, all striking genial poses for the camera. Paintings with gold frames were stacked against layers of tapestries draped over a balustrade. Crystal chandeliers hung skew on the stair posts. Stout sofas and leather armchairs had been pushed back to make room for piles of Persian carpets.
‘Loot,’ someone whispered.
They slept on the carpets that night and the next. Their guards spent two days rummaging through every room in the lodge – in chests, cupboards, drawers – for portable treasure. It’s the Kommandant’s exit stash, Kenneth guessed as they wrapped silver goblets and platters and cutlery to stow in trunks loaded onto wagons. ‘He’s planning to sneak away with it before the Yanks arrive.’
‘Hard to sneak this lot. You can bet they’re watching each other.’
‘They’ll collude and hide it. Plenty of caves in this area. After we’ve loaded it all up, then what?’
Nobody wanted to think that far. Chivvied by the guards, they rolled tapestries, swaddled paintings in blankets, bundled small arms and shotguns in layers of embroidered linen.
Kenneth had gone out onto a balcony to pee over the railing when J J went into a side room to collect more things to pack. A guard stood next to an open drawer, stuffing gold coins into a bag. J J backed away, but the guard had heard him and swung round with a guilty scowl. For a long moment they stood staring at each other: both young, both frightened. Then the guard hurried towards him, holding out a coin. J J took it, the silent transaction over in seconds, before he brushed past and was gone.
J J slipped the coin into his trouser pocket and said nothing to anyone, not then or later as they were marched back to camp. It was a talisman. It could be useful for bartering – maybe save his life. It must stay a secret. During their return to the camp he didn’t join in the hilarity of being alive, or respond to a teasing, ‘Cat got your tongue, J J?’ Secrets have their own constraints. He didn’t feel guilty about the coin so much as cagey. It was nobody else’s business.
The wagons they’d loaded didn’t appear at the camp, but two days later a black sedan arrived with two men in the back: a Gestapo officer and a civilian in a dark suit. Major Irving murmured, ‘General alert. Pass the word around. That one’s Kripo. Kriminale Polizei. Evil buggers who do all the dirty work. Something’s up.’
‘What?’
‘An escape?’
‘Or they’ve heard about the looting.’
‘So the Kommandant’s for the high jump.’
There were cheers, stifled when he marched out of his office with a Heil Hitler salute to usher the two men in. The usual straggle of POWs gathered to watch. Half an hour later, the guard J J had caught out was dragged into full view and shot by the Gestapo officer. Standing over his twitching body, the Kommandant ordered Major Irving to gather his men in the guards’ canteen, where they were harangued.
‘The dead man was stealing from the Führer,’ a Dolmetscher translated. ‘He said one of you helped him. Who?’
J J’s knees turned to water. He didn’t want to die. He hadn’t helped the guard.
He’d been given a coin in exchange for silence. That was all. He was only twenty and terrified of bullets thudding into his body. He didn’t want his life to bleed away in German mud.
Not now. Not ever. He couldn’t move. God, please …
‘Don’t respond, men!’ Major Irving rapped. ‘We stand together. This is a trick to shift blame. You don’t have to answer.’
The harangue went on for hours until a man fainted when the Kommandant fired an order, which the Dolmetscher translated as ‘Dismiss. You are confined to your hut. No food. No exercise. You will be questioned one by one. Starting with –’
He looked at the Kommandant. The man had a cruel beak like the spread-winged eagle on his belt buckle that had its claws on a swastika and the motto ‘Gott Mit Uns’ in a semicircle over its head. He raked the prisoners’ faces as if trying to gouge out the truth, settling on a haughty expression he recognised from his mirror when he checked the set of his cap in the mornings.
‘That one,’ he pointed at Kenneth.
The Kripo man in the dark suit had kicked him in the balls and smashed the fingers on his right hand with a hammer before the British Vertrauensmann – the officer who negotiated with the camp staff – could put a stop to it.
‘What did you do?’ they clamoured when the major arrived back at the hut. Kenneth had been stretchered unconscious to the hospital barracks. ‘I told him about the wagons you fellows loaded at the lodge, though the bastards will have covered their tracks. But there isn’t long to go now. Hold fast, chaps. The Yanks are on their way. BBC says a week at the most.’
On 29 April, when the brief battle for Moosburg was over and the gunfire ended, a tank of the 14th Armoured Division lumbered up to the main gate, where it stopped. There was a moment of curious silence, as though all life had been suspended. Then someone shouted, ‘They’re here!’ and the prisoners who could walk or crawl began to emerge from their hiding places.
The best moment of the war was when they gathered later to watch the Kommandant and his officers surrender with stiff salutes as an American flag was run up the flagpole. Most of the guards had slipped away. It was over.
Kenneth’s balls were grossly swollen and his fingers looked like overripe bananas, black in places. They took turns feeding him. Especially J J. He couldn’t do enough for him.
· 23 ·
‘HERE ENDETH THE LESSON,’ SAYS THE BISHOP.
And thanks be to God for that. Reverend George takes his place next to the lectern, smoothes his tunic, and leans towards him to murmur, ‘All clear in the vestry, Your Grace. There are four more eulogies. The first is by Ezekiel Dladla, a director of SAB Miller.’
‘Dladla? Breweries?’
‘Via Michaelhouse, Wits and Harvard. One of our black diamonds.’
Reverend George savours the moment as the bishop’s mindset adjusts before he turns to address the microphones again.
‘Ahhh – I now call on Mr Ezekiel Dladla of SAB Miller. Mr Dladla.’
Lofty scans the immaculate suit of the man making his way towards the dais. ‘I give him ten minutes. These executives like to hold the floor.’
‘You’ve got him wrong. I know Zeke. They call him Speedy Gonzales in Joburg. I’ll bet two.’ Kenneth checks his Omega. He’s glad he decided to come to this service, which is shining new light on painful memories. For sixty years he’s worked at convincing himself that his vicious punishment at Moosburg and lonely life was all J J’s fault. But that’s just an excuse, he realises.
Ezekiel Dladla stands on the dais and says his piece in a minute and thirty seconds, praising John Kitching in English and Zulu, calling him a son of KwaZulu-Natal soil, a
war hero, a rugby icon, his mentor when he first joined Breweries in Durban, and a great South African who truly understood the meaning of ubuntu.
He ends, ‘And may God rest the great Kitchen Boy’s soul.’ After courteous bows to the bishop and Shirley, he leaves the dais and heads up the side aisle past Purkey and Clyde, motioning the usher to open one of the entrance doors. If the limo driver is double-parked in the street outside as instructed and hits the fast lane to the airport, Zeke will just make the 6 pm flight.
‘Right,’ says the bishop, taken aback by the director’s brevity and trying once again to remember who comes next. He knows he should have studied the list of speakers and the Order of Service beforehand. It’s intolerable to be dependent on an interloper. Even worse, Reverend George seems to be reading his mind.
‘Ferdy van der Plank of SARU is next, Your Grace. He’s come up from Cape Town. Mr Kitching had something to do with his election.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I keep my ear to the ground.’
Give me strength, prays the bishop as his voice goes up a notch to announce: ‘Mr Ferdy van der Plank of the South African Rugby Union will say a few words next. Mr Van der Plank.’
A very large man in a dark green blazer erupts from one of the rugby pews and stomps up the red carpet in the centre aisle. Giving a two-finger salute with a hand that looks like a giant T-bone steak, he passes J J’s flag-draped coffin and ascends the steps.
Ferdy van der Plank emerged from the variegated scrum of Boland rugby in the eighties, a formidable player who has claimed at different times to be Malay, coloured, an Afrikaner, a Boesman and sommer ’n simpel hotnot. Tempered in the skirmishes of a thousand rucks and scrums, he knows his game and the intricacies of rugby politics, and has powered his way to the top. There is no way he is going to say a few words for Kitchen Boy. Ferdy always pays his debts. He’s going to sock it to these lanies, not to mention the news cameras. He’ll send J J off in triumph with stories about how he played the finest game in the world and took the high road to another World Cup triumph. Ferdy van der Plank doesn’t do things by halves.