As there were so many thousands of prisoners in the camp living under such appalling conditions, he felt confident that from time to time there must be cases in which the mental strain caused some of them to have blackouts and lose their memories. The result was as he had expected. The S.S. man gave him a kick, prodded him with a Sten gun, then marched him off to the camp headquarters. There, after a short wait, he was taken in to a lean, scar-faced Untersturmführer and his case reported.
Apparently in a daze, he stood there staring at the floor; but he knew that the next half-hour would decide the success or failure of his plan. By this time Franz Protze would almost certainly be dead. When the hospital orderlies removed his body to throw it into one of the common burial pits they would collect his clothes and turn them in at the camp clothing depot. With such deaths taking place every few hours it was most unlikely that anyone would notice that the number on the clothes was not that under which Protze had been admitted.
Gregory’s bed would be found empty. But as he had gone in as a mental case there would not be anything very surprising about his having wandered off in the night. The headquarters would be notified, but he had not been in the hospital long enough for anyone there to give an accurate description of him. Where his danger lay was in his disappearance being connected with a man being found who had lost his memory. His hope was in the vastness of the camp and that as it was understaffed no serious effort would be made to trace him. Anxiously he waited to learn how the Gestapo officer would react to the report about him.
The number on Protze’s clothes was E1076 and Gregory had made very certain that the triangles they bore were green, for had they been red to take them would have been the next best thing to signing his own death warrant. The Untersturmführer wrote the number down on a slip of paper and sent an orderly with it to the camp registry. Gregory was marched to a corner of the room and ordered to stand there facing the wall He remained there for ten anxious minutes. The orderly then returned and handed another slip of paper to his officer. After a glance at it the Untersturmführer said to the guard, ‘His name is Protze, and he’s serving a three-year sentence.’
Gregory held his breath. If the register also contained the information that Protze had been admitted to hospital the game was up. He would be sent back there and his imposture discovered. But after a moment the officer added, ‘Take him back where he belongs.’
Although Gregory breathed again, he had other fences to get over. When he arrived at Section E would the officer in charge there, or one of the guards, have known E1076 well enough by sight to declare that Gregory was not the prisoner who had borne that number? He could only hope that with so many deaths and the constant influx of new prisoners the guards never bothered to look on the poor devils as individuals.
A quarter of an hour later he was temporarily reassured. The bull-necked Blockführer to whom he was handed over gave him barely a glance, then said to the guard who had brought him, ‘Lost his memory, has he? Well, perhaps that’s lucky for the poor sod. You can’t miss what you don’t remember, can you?’
Jerking his head towards a hut that had a large 6 painted in white on the door, he added to Gregory, ‘That’s your hut, No. 1076. Get inside and report to the Lagerältester.’
While a prisoner among the Prominente, Gregory had picked up quite a lot about the organisation of the camp outside that privileged section. Only there were S.S. guards on duty night and day. The many thousands of ordinary prisoners were supervised and disciplined by trusties, the majority of whom were habitual criminals. Under the orders of the S.S. Blockführers, there were two types of these. Each hut, containing about two hundred prisoners, was in charge of a Lagerältester who tyrannised over its inmates and was responsible for their good behaviour, while even tougher old lags, the Capos, ran the working parties during the day.
Maintaining the vacant stare of a half-wit, Gregory went into the hut and confronted the Lagerältester. He was a small man with a mean, vicious face. On receiving no reply to his questions he slapped Gregory hard across the mouth. With iron self-control Gregory refrained from kicking the little brute in the crutch then strangling him, and remained there standing passively with drooping head. His restraint paid off. With a contemptuous shrug, the Lagerältester pointed to a bunk that had on it a blanket roll, a mess tin and a tin cup but, unlike the majority of the others, none of the few private possessions that the prisoners were allowed to retain.
Going to the bunk, Gregory put on the shelf above it his safety razor and the few other things he had been able to bring in his pockets. Meanwhile, he thanked his gods that the Lagerältester had either not familiarised himself with the faces of the two hundred men over whom he ruled or had assumed that Protze had died in hospital and his number been re-issued to a newcomer.
Two other men, both obviously so ill that had they been sent out to hard labour they would have collapsed, were in the hut scrubbing the floor, and Gregory was put to work with them. As he got down to it he took stock of his surroundings. Although the furnishings of the Prominente’s huts were far from luxurious, those here were much inferior to them. The bunks were in three tiers instead of two, there were only benches instead of chairs and the narrow table in the centre did not look as though it would seat more than half the two hundred prisoners the hut was supposed to accommodate.
At midday he caught the trampling of feet and the prisoners came pouring in. Unlike the Prominente silence was not enforced upon them. A little group at once surrounded Gregory and asked him about himself, but he returned them only vague looks and stuck to his role of having lost his memory. The majority took no notice of him, their thoughts being centred on the meagre meal of coarse bread and thin soup that was brought in half cold from the cookhouse by some of their number. Although he was still replete from his midnight feast, in order not to arouse comment he entered the jostling crowd and secured his share.
The break lasted only half an hour, then the Capo came in and hustled the prisoners out. Gregory went with them as they were marched to the northern end of the camp, where an extension to it was being made, and set to work there digging shallow foundations for a new row of hutments. From weeks of underfeeding most of his companions were incapable of sustained effort and from time to time the Capo lashed one of them with his whip; but Gregory was still in good condition so escaped such unpleasant attentions.
At five o’clock they were marched back to the hut, then ate a meagre supper consisting of herb tea and a slice of bread with a spoonful of jam apiece. Afterwards some of them talked in groups or played games with small stones or bits of paper they had collected; but most of them turned in, and by seven o’clock they were all in their bunks.
Before dropping off to sleep Gregory lay for a while congratulating himself on having pulled off a very risky venture. Yet within a week he came near to regretting that he had not continued to run the risk of impersonating Prince Hugo.
The fact that he had no longer to talk only in whispers was small compensation for the loss of the other amenities he had enjoyed as a Prominente. Conditions in the Criminal Section of the camp were infinitely worse. The food consisted almost entirely of slops: Linden tea twice a day and vegetable soup with only a few pieces of meat in it. The bread ration was strictly limited and their only solids were a few half-rotten potatoes in their skins or, three times a week, a small portion of sausage. The liquid diet was not only insufficient and gave many of them dysentery but also affected their bladders, forcing them to get up to urinate two or three times every night. Added to this they lived in constant dread of becoming the victims of the spite of the Lagerältester or the Capo, the hut was squalid and stank foully, and they were kept at their dreary task of digging for the best part of twelve hours a day.
Yet Gregory’s companions assured him that they lived like princes compared with the tens of thousands of ‘politicals’ who occupied the other sections of the camp. These poor wretches had no bunks but slept, when they could, on pallias
ses filled with rotten straw inadequate to their numbers; so that if one of them got up in the night, he would find his place taken and have to lie on the hard floor. For the least slackness they were flogged unmercifully by their overseers; they were fed only on raw vegetables and stew made from half-rotten cabbages, potato peelings and consignments of food sent from all over Germany that had been condemned as unfit for human consumption. When too weak to work any longer they were shot or herded into the gas chambers and, daily, scores of them, driven to desperation, committed suicide by throwing themselves on to the perimeter fences which electrocuted them.
From time to time, as Gregory trudged out to work he passed gangs of these miserable beings forgotten by God. Gaunt-faced and terribly emaciated, their striped prison garments hanging loose about them, they staggered along to their daily labour of loading piles of rubble into trucks then pushing the trucks for a mile or more to the places where the rubble was required to make foundations. The sight of them brought to his mind the Zombies of Haiti who, it was said, had been drugged, buried alive, then dug up by the witch doctors and by a magical ceremony deprived of their minds; so that they afterwards laboured in the fields with no knowledge of whom they were or the lives they had led before they had been presumed dead and then buried. In the worst cases the simile was apt, for acute privation had robbed many of the political prisoners of the power any longer to think, and these glassy-eyed living skeletons were so numerous that a special word, ‘Moslems’, had been added to the camp argot to describe them.
As Gregory got on well with most people he soon established friendly relations with several of the men in his hut. They were a very mixed collection. Quite a number were educated men guilty of fraud, manslaughter, hoarding, sexual offences, blackmarketeering and so on; while others were professional criminals. A number of them were serving long sentences and had been inmates of the big Mobait Prison in Berlin, until its partial destruction by bombing had led to its being evacuated.
In two respects Gregory found their psychology interesting. Although in normal times most of them had been agnostics, uncertainty about whether in their present grim conditions their stamina would suffice for them to live out their sentences made all but a few of them turn to religion. It seemed that their only hope of survival now lay in the power of Jesus Christ to accept into His fold repentant sinners and, although there was no ‘man of God’ in the hut to lead them, Catholics, Lutherans, and even the unbaptised regularly joined together in prayer meetings.
The other interesting fact was that, although they were all normally patriotic Germans, they now longed for a speedy defeat of Germany as the only means of bringing the war to an end. Here, too, a mysterious grapevine operated, bringing news only a few days after major events of Allied victories that rejoiced the prisoners. How, Gregory could never discover, but at the end of the first week in September it was known in the camp that the Poles were still resisting the German garrison in Warsaw, that the Allied Army that had landed in the South of France had reached Lyons, and that the British had entered Brussels in triumph.
Soon after he had become No. E1076 he had another clear vision of Malacou. It was at about eleven o’clock in the morning. The occultist was standing in a Law Court with a warder on either side of him. On what charge he was being tried Gregory remained uncertain, but he had a strong impression that it had something to do with the von Altern estate.
At the evening roll-call on September 9th the prisoners had to make a show of rejoicing, as the Blockführer announced to them with delight that the Führer’s long-promised decisive Secret Weapon was at last in operation. That morning the first long-range rocket had been successfully launched and landed on its target—the heart of London. As for months past Goebbels had been declaring that the Flying Bombs had reduced the British capital to ruins, the prisoners were not greatly impressed. Among themselves, they agreed that at worst this new weapon could now do no more than delay an Allied victory.
Their belief was strengthened by the continued advance of General Eisenhower’s armies. By the middle of the month that from the south had advanced to Dijon, in the west the great port of Le Havre had been captured, and the main body of the Allies was pushing the Germans back to the Siegfried Line.
Some of Gregory’s companions began to say that once the Siegfried Line was breached Hitler would surrender. Gregory doubted that but prayed for it, as he could think of no possible way to escape from the camp and an end to the war now seemed the only event which could lead to a termination of his present miserable existence.
Yet, only two mornings later, he was roused from his depression by a most unexpected happening. It brought him no nearer to securing his liberty, but at least gave him something new to think about.
Many of the prisoners were suffering from dysentery, so a latrine had been set up near the site on which they worked. It was no more than a trench with, parallel to it, a long stout pole on trestles over which the men could squat. From a distance the Capos kept an eye on the prisoners making use of it, to see that they did not shirk work by remaining there longer than necessary. But it was used by two other gangs working on the same site as Gregory’s; so there were usually several men perched on the long pole at the same time, and by changing places in the row when the Capos were not looking it was sometimes possible to get a rest there of up to fifteen minutes.
Gregory had soon picked up this dodge and, on this occasion, had just moved down to squat again next to a hunched figure at one extreme end of the pole. He had been there only a moment when his neighbour said in a low voice:
‘Greetings. I knew I should meet you here within a day or two, Herr Sallust.’
Experienced as Gregory was in controlling his reactions to sudden danger, to be identified in such a place was so utterly unexpected that the start he gave nearly sent him backward into the trench. Swinging round on the man who had addressed him, he found himself staring at Malacou.
21
A Strange Partnership
His eyes still wide with surprise, Gregory exclaimed, ‘What the devil are you doing here?’
Malacou smiled. ‘Like yourself, I am a convict. I have just started to serve a sentence of five years for having embezzled money from the von Altern estate.’
Gregory gave an abrupt laugh. ‘So I was right. I saw you in court and thought it had something to do with the von Alterns. I knew, of course, that you had got away from Poland. But whatever induced you to return to your old haunts and risk being picked up by the civil police?’
‘They didn’t catch me. I went back to Greifswald deliberately, in order to give myself up.’
‘In God’s name, why?’
Malacou smiled again. ‘The Germans are queer people. As Nazis, they deny their political opponents the protection of the laws and treat them like cattle, but at the same time they are born bureaucrats. Anyone found guilty of a civil offence is sent to prison, and even if he is known to be opposed to the regime the Gestapo would not dream of taking any action against him until he comes out. As you know, I am a Jew, and I look like one. After that terrifying affair at the cottage I would no longer have dared show my Turkish passport as a protection, and it is certain that I should have been hauled in on my appearance. That would have meant the gas chamber; so I gave myself up, counting on it that I would be tried and sentenced before the Gestapo office in Greifswald had had time enough to learn that I was wanted by their colleagues in Poland. It is not very pleasant here; but at least my life is safe and I shall outlive Hitler.’
‘I see. Yes. That was certainly a clever move. At your age, though, I hope you are right that you will survive the rigours of this camp through the winter; for I’m convinced that Hitler will fight on to the last ditch.’
‘He will. The stars foretell it. But also that I shall outlive him. Moreover, neither you nor I is fated to stay here until he dies. Before I gave myself up I hid for three days and nights in the ruined Schloss at Sassen. I had left most of my astrological impedimen
ta there and I slept for less than six hours. Through all the rest of that time I worked on foretelling the future course of the war, and on my horoscope and yours.’
‘Why on mine?’ Gregory asked.
‘Because I already knew that our fates continued to be intertwined. You saved my life at the cottage, as I predicted; and in a new partnership we shall leave this place. It will mean our going into great danger, but we shall be given an opportunity to strike a mighty blow against the accursed Hitler.’
‘Have you a plan then?’
‘Alas, no. I know only that the rapport we have established between us will prove the key to this business, and that I must use to the utmost my powers as an occultist to make myself regarded by our captors as a special case. With that as my object, I have already made a start by reading the hands of several men in my hut and that of the fellow who is our guard. Palmistry is a sure lure to every kind of person.’
At that moment one of the Capos bellowed from about fifty yards away:
‘You two at the end there! You’ve been long enough. Back to work now.’
‘Meet me here again this afternoon,’ Malacou said quickly. ‘But leave it till about half past four. The guards always get slack towards the end of the work period.’
This totally unexpected meeting dissipated Gregory’s depression and invigorated him as would have a sea breeze suddenly sweeping across a torrid desert. Malacou might be guilty of murder, incest and practising the Black Art, but his blood made him a deadly enemy of the Nazis and he possessed powers which, although their source might be evil, were granted to few. To co-operate with him might lead to freedom, and Gregory could hardly contain his impatience till their next meeting.
Immediately they were seated side by side on the pole above the unsavoury trench, the Satanist said, ‘Your first step must be to get yourself transferred to my hut, so that we can talk whenever we wish and begin working together.’
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