Drawn Out

by Tom Scott

  The camp was the same as it ever was. At the end of the war, Russian troops overran the camp so swiftly the Nazis didn’t have time to destroy their bestial handiwork. It remains fully preserved within its high perimeter fencing, with sixteen guard towers.

  The icy, chill wind made the wire hum a mournful dirge. We walked in stunned silence between rows and rows of creosoted huts, at the end of which backyards with clotheslines were clearly visible. Pity the poor mothers of Lublin hanging out their baby’s nappies during the war. They would have had to watch out for wind-shifts like America’s Cup tacticians lest soot from other mothers and babies being incinerated suddenly swirl in their direction.

  On the far side of the camp there was a Catholic burial ground. While good Catholics were getting a full Catholic burial, children of a lesser god were being slaughtered without ceremony and having their ash emptied like the contents of a vacuum-cleaner bag into a pit.

  I was struck by the concrete walls of the gas chamber being as crudely boxed and poured as a Depression-era Taranaki milking shed—clearly these were people who had a lot of killing to do and had no time for anything fancy. Next door in the crematorium there were crude concrete morgue tables with low rims and a drain in the middle. Our guide told us that because some people were given to swallowing their wedding rings, bodies were routinely disembowelled in search of jewellery. These split corpses were then rolled onto mechanical litters and pushed into roaring ovens like pizza.

  Visitors before us had tossed popsicle sticks into the dusty furnaces. I supposed they thought they were being tidy, though how you could walk through the dimly lit and echoing showers, gas chambers and crematorium while licking an ice cream was beyond me.

  A vast storeroom was floor to ceiling full of shoes. In an adjacent storeroom, behind chicken mesh, was a mountain of human hair, waiting to be spun into thread then woven into socks for U-boat crews. Apparently, when you are a mile under water nothing can beat the warmth, comfort and durability of socks made from human hair. Now that I am bald I can confirm that it has thermal qualities the hirsute take for granted.

  At the rear of the camp, a huge memorial dome bearing the inscription ‘Our destiny is your fate’ protected a giant circular sand-pit filled with seven tons of human ash. Beside it, winding back and forth like an intestine to make the most efficient use of space, was a deep trench. Nazis made Jews—who made up the vast bulk of the prisoners—gypsies, communists, homosexuals and dissidents line up in here to be shot. On one particular day, 3 November 1943, the SS, in a single twelve-hour frenzy, accompanied by loud music blaring from speakers to drown out the screaming and gunfire, pausing only for a tea-break, shot 18,000 people. Lublin parents reading their children bedtime stories would have had to compete with this grim cacophony.

  On the bus back to Warsaw I was angrier than I have ever been in my life. So were all the guys. The girls sat at the front of the bus weeping. This sharp difference in their reactions was a foretaste of something haunting and disturbing that I read in a historical account of the camp purchased from a bookshop in Lublin. It had been translated from the original Russian into English.

  Separated by barbed wire, men and women lived in identical barracks. They endured identical freezing snows in winter and searing heat in summer, they ate the same foul food, they were subjected to the same brutalising, dehumanising treatment, and they were slaughtered at the same rate—yet their lives differed in one profound way. In the men’s huts, if you were too weak to hold your bread other men stole it from you. In the women’s huts, if you were too weak to hold your bread other women held it for you and hand-fed you the pieces. Women are better human beings than men.

  THAT NIGHT MIKE MOORE HOSTED a cocktail party for Warsaw’s movers and shakers in one of the Marriott’s many splendid reception rooms. A prominent New Zealand businessman and Dutch Honorary Consul, Alex van Heeren, was one of the guests. We knew each other and he stepped forward smiling warmly, extending his long right arm inside the sleeve of a beautifully cut bespoke suit palm down. This technique obliged people shaking his hand to approach him palm up, like a spacecraft returning to a mother ship. Donald Trump sometimes does it.

  At my elbow Barry hissed, ‘Is that the owner of Huka Lodge?’ I nodded and began exchanging pleasantries with Alex when Baz hissed at me again, ‘Introduce me!’

  Fearing the worst, I said, ‘Alex, have you met Barry?’ Barry’s hand attached itself like a limpet to the mother ship and could not be shaken loose.

  ‘Soper. Private radio. How about a free weekend?’

  Mortified, I reeled away to the drinks table. They were pouring me a hefty vodka and tonic when Barry approached with a grin. ‘Got it!’

  We flew to East Berlin’s Schönefeld airport next afternoon. There was a small reception for us in the VIP terminal. Erich Honecker had kissed Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Chernenko, Andropov and Gorbachev smack on the mouth when they arrived here. Mike Moore had to make do with a handshake from a lowly official, but wore his disappointment well.

  We drove into the heart of East Berlin at dusk. From the high windows of our bus I could look directly into orange rectangles of light and observe ordinary people relaxing after work, preparing meals and watching television. Television sets must have fetched a good price on the black market in East Berlin back then. The small, flickering set in my room at the Palast Hotel in Potsdamer Platz was chained securely to the wall, as was my desk lamp and the bed itself, though how you smuggled a bed out of a hotel in a suitcase was beyond me.

  Within seconds my phone rang. It was Barry, kindly advising me that there were two free channels of slightly out-of-focus Filipino porn that didn’t need English subtitles. I was too busy to look. I was feverishly writing a ten-page piece on Poland that I needed to fax back to the Evening Post.

  The next morning I walked the short distance to Museum Island and the famous Pergamon Museum, home to all manner of glorious Islamic and Babylonian treasures, and most spectacularly of all, an almost entire second-century-bc Hellenic temple purloined from what is now Turkey by German archaeologists. The altar included a sculptural frieze over 150 metres in length. In awe and admiration, I studied it closely. The level of detail was astonishing, right down to veins on the back of hands and tendons in wrists. Fifteen hundred years before the genius of Michelangelo, scores of artists with equally superb appreciation of musculature and bone mechanics would have needed to work together in harmony over many months to carve it out of stone. After the foul and cloying evil of Majdanek it was uplifting to see what human beings at their best were capable of.

  Museum Island was spared from Allied bombing until the very last months of the war, when the German capital was pounded around the clock. Thankfully the most precious antiquities had been removed to salt mines for safekeeping or walled in for protection.

  The next day we visited Cecilienhof Palace, the site of the July 1945 Potsdam Conference where over the course of two weeks Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin and Harry Truman, plus their small armies of advisers, decided the fate of post-war Europe. The huge Tudor-style house, once the home of Crown Prince Wilhelm, was carefully selected because it had three separate entrances of equal grandeur so that none of the leaders would feel slighted on their arrival.

  Growing up in Feilding, I was obsessed with nuclear weapons. It was an eerie feeling walking through the dark-panelled, elegantly furnished reception rooms knowing that in one of these rooms, in great secrecy, President Truman ordered the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and less than a week later, on 6 August 1945, in a coastal Japanese city of no great military significance thousands of men, women and children were vaporised in an instant.

  THE NEXT DAY A SMALL group of us headed out for a quick look at West Berlin. At the Brandenburg Gate crossing, beefy German border guards and a smattering of pimply Russian soldiers in ill-fitting khaki greatcoats awkwardly cradling Kalashnikovs mustered advancing pedestrians into two streams—tatty locals who were waved through quickly, and
sleek Westerners who needed their passports stamped. Listener columnist and economist Brian Easton, with his heavy horn-rimmed glasses, fleshy Slavic face, swept-back thick, oily hair, short stubbly beard and penchant for polyester, has always resembled a Soviet physicist or chess grandmaster down on his luck. Border guards took one look at him and assumed he was kith and kin and waved him into the rapidly moving ‘no questions asked’ queue.

  Before vanishing from sight, Brian turned to give the rest of us in the stationary queue a triumphant wave. It was a different story later that night. He was refused entry back into East Berlin because he could not furnish proof that he had ever left the place.

  Our queue had to show passports and negotiate a maze of bleak corridors watched by remote-control cameras before negotiating a second gauntlet of hawkers on the other side. Poles and Czechs wanted to change our money. Locals had chunks of the wall for sale. Turks were flogging off Russian military wristwatches and military uniforms which, judging from the greasy lining inside the hats, were probably authentic.

  I phoned the only Germans I knew, Manfred and Anneke. They used to live in the Coromandel, where Manfred painted landscapes. He hadn’t got New Zealand out of his system. Somewhat incongruously, glorious depictions of wild surf and pōhutukawa in full bloom lit up the gloom of their artists’ loft.

  Over lunch, Manfred told us that he was born in East Berlin just as Russian troops were blasting their way into the outskirts of the besieged, ravaged capital of the Thousand Year Reich. The Cold War followed, and when that escalated his father moved his small leather factory to West Berlin. While Manfred finished his high-school education they continued living in East Berlin. They had two residences.

  On 13 August 1961 he went to his girlfriend’s sixteenth birthday party in the East. He could have spent the night with her or stayed on his own in the old family home at 78 Bornholmer Strasse, but for reasons he can’t explain he decided to return to West Berlin on the midnight U-Bahn. He noticed an unusual level of troop activity in the street near the station and woke up next morning to find that just minutes after he had gone through, the border had closed behind him. He never saw his girlfriend or any of his other friends again.

  In the 30 years since, he had travelled all over Europe, Asia, the Americas, Africa and even spent an agreeable week in Bluff staying at the Foveaux Hotel. But he had never made the short trip back across the city to his old home. Not until Barry convinced him to drive back with us.

  We eased slowly through famous Checkpoint Charlie, Anneke steering with one hand and patting Manfred’s trembling arm with the other. Barry thrust a microphone between them and asked him how he felt. Manfred joked that he was a typical German—he wasn’t happy or unhappy, just cool. Which of course he wasn’t—his voice was close to breaking.

  We threaded our way through the concrete chicane, past the strobing orange lights, barbed-wire coils and barrier arms that we had all seen re-created in spy movies, out into East Berlin’s streets. Manfred marvelled at the extensive renovation. Much of what had been rubble when he was a boy now gleamed, but he cautioned against being overly impressed with downtown East Berlin. He was right. While the grand and tidy boulevards were filled with Trabants and smoking Wartburgs, the side streets were largely empty, bumpy and strewn with rubbish. Every building needed maintenance. There were few shops and only a handful of pedestrians, nearly all wearing black nylon jackets and blue-grey denim jeans. Manfred’s old family home on Bornholmer Strasse looked especially neglected.

  ‘Nothing has changed,’ said Manfred, close to tears as we moved through the dark foyer of the apartment and out into the grim, sour-smelling courtyard. ‘It was rotten when I left thirty years ago. It’s still the same.’

  To cheer ourselves up we drove out into the countryside to find the village of Wandlitz, built specially for the politburo members and their families. Honecker, and before him Reich Master of the Hunt, Field Marshal Göring, enjoyed luxurious hunting lodges dotted throughout the surrounding forests. According to legend, when Honecker hosted lavish hunting parties for visiting VIPs, deer were drugged to make them easier to shoot.

  In the end we couldn’t find Wandlitz. That was the whole point. Quite deliberately, there were no road signs. Communist bosses constantly fearing uprising had designed it not to be found. It was hidden behind a high security wall and camouflaged by specially planted trees and vegetation. The people responsible for the Berlin Wall lived nervously behind another secret wall.

  Still, we enjoyed the drive through seemingly unspoiled countryside. There wasn’t a cattle beast in sight on any farm.

  ‘They’re all indoors. They are battery cows,’ joked Manfred, ‘looked after by battery farmers living in a battery society.’

  Back in East Berlin we bought ice creams and took a stroll in the sun. The cones looked and tasted like recycled cardboard but the ice cream itself was delicious. Manfred grinned. ‘This isn’t so bad. I may come back every weekend from now on.’ Anneke smiled and patted his arm. It was no longer shaking uncontrollably.

  —

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING, CHECKING OUT of the Palast, I was presented with a bill for US$1000 for my faxed articles. I didn’t have US$1000 and was nearly in tears. I whimpered something to Barry.

  ‘Leave it to me,’ he said. He leaned across the counter and grabbed a middle-aged man by the tie, rasping, ‘Oi! Squire! This is a fucking outrage. I demand to see the manager!’

  He was the manager. A loud, heated exchange followed. I blocked my ears and fled. Barry was headed for the Gulag Archipelago and couldn’t be saved, but I felt if I distanced myself sufficiently from him the Stasi might let me off with a pistol-whipping and a caution.

  Barry eventually came running after me, grinning from ear to ear. ‘Tommo, I got the prick to shift the decimal point. You owe them a hundred bucks!’ It was still extortionate but it stopped me from having to sell my blood or a kidney.

  Next stop was Prague. We flew in to the capital of the Czech Republic on a golden autumn afternoon. We caught a cab in from the airport and sucked in our breath in collective wonder at our first glimpse of the glorious medieval city. Barry, who is from Southland and fiercely loyal, conceded it was even flasher than Gore. Our driver, his kind, weathered face suffused with civic pride, turned and beamed.

  ‘Is this your first visit to Prague?’

  Barry leaned forward and barked, ‘NO! WE WERE HERE LAST WEEK, SO DON’T TRY RIPPING US OFF, MUSH!’ The details are hazy now, but I think he may have paid Barry when we got to our hotel.

  That night at a lavish cocktail party hosted by Mike Moore I met the new Czech Foreign Minister, a very sweet, unassuming man who just a month earlier as a disgraced opponent of the previous regime was shovelling coal in the boiler room of one of the hideous apartment blocks that framed the most picturesque city in the world. When I asked him what the worst thing was about life under communism he paused for a moment then said sadly, ‘They took away our Shakespeare.’ My mother would totally understand.

  Last stop was Budapest, the glorious Hungarian capital straddling the Danube. We stayed on Margaret Island in the middle of the river in a modern hotel with thermal baths.

  Pattrick Smellie and I were allowed to sit in as observers at Mike Moore’s trade talks with his opposite number. The frenetic pace of the trip was catching up with him—the black rings under his eyes were more panda-like than normal and the syntax had fallen out of his language altogether. He made very little sense. He was given to saying things like ‘Rice. Tapioca. Singapore—same size as Lake Taupō—think about it!’

  The Hungarians listened politely and shook his hand warmly in one of the courtyards of their truly wondrous Gothic revival Parliament building as a car approached to whisk him away. I was depressed but Pattrick, who had worked previously as a press officer for several cabinet ministers, cheerfully assured me that he had seen far worse. This was one of the better bilateral talks he had witnessed. This depressed me even more. He wrote a piece fo
r The Press about this meeting which was headlined ‘Moore Puzzles Hosts’.

  The next morning we went to the Peto Institute, pioneers of ‘conductive therapy’ designed to enable children with cerebral palsy to lead more independent lives. Kiwi mums had brought children with varying degrees of disability to the institute, hoping desperately for a miracle but in their heart of hearts not really expecting one. They were thrilled to see us. It was humbling to observe their patience, kindness and resilience in the face of grinding daily heartbreak.

  ‘What choice do we have?’ asked one of the mums, cuddling her daughter, who hadn’t moved or spoken since being accidentally deprived of oxygen during a routine surgical procedure.

  I was there when a previously immobile five-year-old in callipers took his first steps. The delight of his therapists was one thing. The astonishment of his parents was another. The rapture on his face was something else altogether. I had flashbacks to when I was roughly the same age and wore a calliper. Without warning I needed a weeping bowl. I had to dash to a toilet and plunge my face repeatedly into a deep basin of freezing water until my chest-heaving sobbing slowed to a halt. It took ages.

  That night Mike threw a cocktail party in our hotel and invited the Kiwi mums attending the Peto Institute to come along. It was a lovely gesture. Then he blotted his copybook.

  ‘Look on the bright side,’ he told some mums who had brought their children with them in prams. ‘Other people’s kids grow up and leave home. You’ll always have them with you.’ One of the mothers started screaming, ‘I don’t want to have my child with me forever! I don’t want the rest of my life to be like this!’ Crying uncontrollably, she wheeled her pretty, blank-eyed and mute daughter away. Looking daggers at Moore, the other mums went with her. Mike was genuinely baffled and distraught. ‘What did I say? What did I say?’