by Alex Gerlis
‘They’ve found another collabo then. It’s not a nice sight. Go and have a look if you want to see what a free France looks like.’
She got outside just in time to see a crowd of people disappearing down the small road outside the hotel. She followed them into the Place Stanislas, where a larger crowd had gathered.
A young woman, perhaps in her early twenties, had been pushed to the ground and was being made to kneel. A man was tying her hands behind her back while another had yanked up her long hair in his hands.
The crowd was quiet, muttering disapproval of the girl.
‘What is going on?’ she asked the woman next to her.
‘You don’t know? Sleeping with Germans. And she’s one of the lucky ones. They shot six men two days ago for helping the Germans.’
She was fixed to the spot, appalled at the spectacle in front of her, yet fascinated by it too. It was carried out in silence, the girl bowed and compliant, accepting of her fate. The older man finished tying her hands and then produced a pair of large tailor’s scissors and proceeded to hack away at her hair. The younger man had his hand under the girl’s chin, keeping the head upright. When most of the hair had been removed the younger man took out a cut-throat razor and scraped away at her scalp, nicking it and causing it to bleed. All along, the girl kept quiet and still, with not a tear in her eye.
She backed away from the crowd as it nodded its approval. A fear was gripping her now. She had been deluding herself over the past few weeks. She was worse than a collaborator, she was a traitor. If the truth were known about her, a far worse fate awaited her.
She ran back to the hotel, her worn shoes sliding against the cobbles. Outside the hotel she held herself against the wall while she vomited. She knew she must move on.
Inside the barman was holding the same beer glass, the bar still empty.
‘Not pleasant, is it?’ he said.
She nodded. A large cognac was on the bar in front of her.
‘I imagine you’ll want this. On the house.’
The next morning she told Lieutenant Jones that she was leaving Nancy. He understood. He had already realised that his interests in her were not going to be reciprocated. Frenchwomen looked like a lot of trouble anyway.
ooo000ooo
By the time she realised she had made a mistake it was, of course, far too late. If only Lieutenant Jones had tried to persuade her to stay in Nancy. He wouldn’t have had to try too hard. She would have been comfortable there, there were hospitals and it was away from the fighting.
The lorry that Lieutenant Jones had arranged to give her a lift had left Nancy early that morning, hugging the line of the Meurthe towards the Vosges Mountains. She was only about sixty miles from home. The front line was nearby and the lorry was delivering supplies to it. The driver apologised in the way that she had discovered Americans were good at. I can’t take you any further. Sorry ma’am. He sounded genuinely sorry.
The late summer sun was streaming down into the square of the village where she had been dropped. There was no shade in sight. Some of the trees were beginning to lose their leaves and a pyramid-shaped pile of them had been swept into a corner of the square. She deeply regretted leaving Nancy: she had been impetuous again, driven on by some kind of nesting instinct. She was feeling exhausted, weighed down by her pregnancy. She had underestimated how tired she would feel. Her back was hurting as it had been on and off for the past few weeks and her ankles were swollen. If only Lieutenant Jones had not been so obliging in helping her leave Nancy.
The Mairie next to the church was decorated with a row of bullet holes. Stacked up on one side of the square was a collection of dismantled German road signs. At first she assumed that the village was deserted, given its proximity to the fighting, but then an old lady dressed in black left a building ahead of her, slowly walking round the square, never taking her eyes off her. A family left the church, followed by a young priest with a wide-brimmed hat and a long black cassock who carefully locked the door with a key on a long chain tied around his waist. A boulangerie looked as if it had closed for the war and was yet to be informed it was over.
She sat on a bench at the edge of the square for a while. Her eyes filled with tears: until a few weeks ago she could not remember the last time she had cried. Now, she seemed to do so most days.
She couldn’t stay in this village, she must keep moving. I can’t draw attention to myself. A large black cat had circled her bench and was now sitting still in front of her, its head cocked as if it was expecting to be fed, the yellow eyes burning into her. A gentle breeze rolled across the square. If she was going to move, she’d need to do so now while there was still plenty of daylight.
She carried on walking. Heading east, always heading east. It did not take long for the village to fade behind her as if it had never existed, like a strange dream, and for the countryside to open up. Ahead of her, far in the distance, was the crump and smoke of artillery fire. Her urge to go home was instinctive, but she had no idea where she was going to spend the night. She wondered whether there was any way she could get back to Nancy.
She was climbing uphill and her pace had slowed to a near crawl. As the incline became steeper, she stopped every few paces. There was no breeze now and she felt light-headed. Although the sun had dropped, she felt unaccountably hot and nauseous. She paused, leaning against a narrow tree. She peered up through the branches; the sun appeared enormous, its yellow edges bleeding into the sky. As she looked down she was sweating profusely and felt unsteady. She had to hold the tree trunk tightly as she was violently sick. Strange, she thought: she had, mercifully, avoided morning sickness in the early part of her pregnancy. She carried on walking painfully slowly, the birds silent and the land swaying gently around her. She was concentrating so hard on reaching the top of the hill that she never heard the car until it stopped alongside her.
The last thing she remembered seeing was a tiny black car alongside her, with a man dressed in black in the driving seat. The words ‘where are you going?’ were the last ones she remembered hearing.
ooo000ooo
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Lorraine–Alsace border
October 1944
That night she was back home, being dragged through the Place St Étienne, stripped naked with an angry crowd hacking at her with razors.
That night she was curled up in bed with Owen in their large London house, their children sleeping peacefully in adjoining rooms.
That night she had her hands round the neck of German soldier in Lille, her well-practised smile fixed on him as she squeezed the life out of him as slowly as possible.
That night was the fourth in a row in which she had endured an interrogation by the British in a dank basement, insisting that she regretted what she had done and had been looking for an opportunity to tell them, but please let me rest now.
That night she was chased down the Avenue Foch; she knew that when she reached the Place d’Étoile she would be safe, but the faster she ran the further the enormous arch slipped into the distance.
That night she told Owen that she loved him and begged for his forgiveness, over and over again, but his face faded away as he began to speak and she never heard his reply.
That night stretched over three days and two nights.
She woke bathed in sweat with an elderly man and a middle-aged woman at each shoulder, both looking anxiously at her. As far as she could tell, she was in large dark room, with a high, beamed ceiling and no windows but the sun leaking in through a part open door. There was an earthy smell about and outside the noise of a farm. She tried to get up, but the man held her down. His touch was firm, but not harsh.
‘Lay still. A moment, please.’
He spoke French, with a heavy accent she couldn’t place. He had a kindly face, with deep wrinkles, silver eyebrows that gave him an owl-like appearance and just a few wisps of white hair. Her head was spinning. The woman wiped her brow while the man placed a stethoscope on her
chest and told her to relax. He moved the stethoscope around her chest, placing it in different positions, listening carefully.
‘Good. You’re strong,’ he said after a while. He was holding the pulse on her wrist as he spoke to her.
‘My baby?’
He patted her stomach. ‘Strong too. But you must rest. You were found just in time. Drink.’
The woman held a flask of water to her lips. The water was cold and she drank the whole flask quickly before slumping back on the pillow.
‘What happened to me?’
‘The priest found you collapsed by the road – collapsing to be more precise. He brought you here. We are about five miles east of the village you stopped in. The priest saw you in the square there. He is a good man and has been keeping an eye on us. You have a fever and exhaustion. I gave you a dose of sodium barbiturate and you’ve been asleep for two days, nearly three, in fact.' ‘
He spoke to the woman in what sounded like a strange dialect of German. She nodded and went away.
‘We’ll get you something to eat, but you must be careful. Not too much for now.’
‘What about the baby?’
‘Don’t worry. The baby is getting all the nutrition it needs from you. It’s you we need to worry about. For now, you must rest. You will stay here with us. When are you due?’
‘Maybe a month? I’m not sure. Soon.’
He moved his hands from her wrist and held them around her stomach.
‘It could be sooner. Have you been healthy throughout the pregnancy?’
She nodded.
‘And active?’
She laughed. ‘I think that you could say that I’ve been active.’
‘Well, now it is time to rest. I’m a doctor by the way, in case you were wondering.’ He lifted up his stethoscope and dangled it. He was smiling, his eyebrows dancing as he spoke.
‘What kind?’
‘Before the war I was a cardiologist in Kraków. In Poland. I studied in Paris for a while.’
‘And during the war?’
The smile dropped and his long fingers drummed on the side of her bed. ‘You don’t want to know, not now. Here, some soup and bread. Thank you, Rachel. Sit up and drink it, then we’ll talk.’
The woman helped her drink the soup and spoke to the doctor in the German dialect.
‘Ask her about’ the woman seemed to be saying.
‘Ah yes,’ he said. ‘I meant to ask you. Who is Owen?’
‘What?’
‘You kept shouting it out in your sleep. You were delirious. It sounded like you were calling the name of someone.’
She shook her head, doing her best to look puzzled. ‘It’s not a name I know,’ she reassured them.
ooo000ooo
It was four days before she was well enough to get up and only then did the doctor tell her how ill she had been.
‘Another hour and I think you would have lost the baby. You were very sick. The fever was strong, but the priest found you in time. He was pleased. It helps confirm his beliefs. They were quite challenged after he met us.’
They were sitting around a large table in the dining room of the farmhouse. The top floor of the house had been destroyed by either a bomb or a shell, but the ground floor was functioning, despite the lack of windows and long cracks down the walls. The atmosphere was heavy with dust. The barn and another out-building alongside the main farmhouse had been made habitable and now she was learning who else was in the odd community she had ended up in.
The doctor was sitting across the table from her.
‘Do you want to tell me about yourself?’
She hesitated. ‘I’m French – a refugee. I was working in the north. Now I’m heading home… south.’ She felt the tears welling again.
‘Don’t worry. In time. Everyone here has a story too big to tell. That’s the story of Europe now. Let me tell you who we are.’
Before he started talking he walked into the kitchen and came back with two apples, handing one to her. ‘Eat, it’s from the orchard. You need to eat more.’
There was a pause while he ate his apple, including the core and the stem.
‘Imagine, four years I went without fruit,’ said the doctor, shaking his head. Another pause.
‘Let me tell you about your new companions. The girl who looks after the animals. Elisabette. This is her farm, or her family’s. Her parents and brothers were killed when it got caught in tank fire. A shell took out the top floor when they were all asleep. She was the only one who survived.
‘The rest of us, we had been inmates at a German camp near the village of Natzweiler, which is further into Alsace. The camp is about fifty kilometres south west of Strasbourg. Until 1943 they kept mainly political prisoners and resistance fighters there. You see Hans and Ludwig over there?’ He was pointing at the two Germans, both sitting on a low wall, surveying the surrounding countryside. ‘Both socialists who refused to help with the war effort in Germany. They were sent to the camp in 1940. It shows. They’re both insane now. It’s probably how they survived this long.’
The doctor got up and stood at the glass-less window, his back to her.
‘The rest of us, well we were taken to the camp from Poland over the past few months. You know about me. The woman who was nursing you, she’s called Rachel. From a city called Łódź. The four boys, they were all in the Warsaw ghetto. The Jewish ghetto. Last year there was an uprising in the ghetto which the Germans crushed. These boys were found in a sewer weeks later. All six of us were at a camp in the south of Poland called Auschwitz. It’s near Kraków. If you imagine hell on earth, you won’t even come close to what happens there. Not even close to it. We’re all Jewish, you probably gathered that.’
She nodded, though she was not sure that she had gathered that.
‘The two women, the mother and daughter. They’re Roma – Gypsies. The Nazis hate them as much as they hate us. They were also in this camp in Poland.’
‘So how come you’re now in France?’
‘The Germans did not bring us to France for a holiday; I can assure you of that. It was not for the mountain air. When I arrived and they found out that I was a doctor, I was sent to work in the camp hospital at Natzweiler. From working there, I discovered why people had been sent to Alsace from Auschwitz.’
‘A German doctor was – still is, as far as I know – running an Institute of Anatomy at the University of Strasbourg. He’s a proper Nazi, this doctor. His work is to help prove that people like the Jews and the Gypsies are a sub-human race: inferior to the Aryans. You have heard that theory, of course.’
Her eyes were wide open and she nodded just once. Of course, she had heard those theories. It was not that long ago that...
‘What this so-called doctor was doing, I am told, was conducting experiments on the bodies of Jews and others to try to provide medical evidence for the Nazis. But he needed his bodies to be fresh, if you understand what I mean. So the Nazis arranged for people to be brought alive from Auschwitz in small groups, thirty or forty at a time. They were then kept at the camp and when their bodies were required, they were killed and taken to Strasbourg to be experimented upon.’
‘How were they killed?’
‘One day, maybe everyone in Europe will know. Maybe not. The Germans do not like to waste bullets so they have devised this method of killing a lot of people at the same time. It’s called a gas chamber. They force a group of people into a large, sealed room and then pour lethal gas in. They suffocate within minutes. They didn’t have a gas chamber at this camp, so they converted a nearby building. I don’t know how many people died there altogether. What I do know is that we were next. Then one day a few weeks ago the Germans evacuated the camp. With no warning. Some of us just wandered out. Prisoners were heading in every direction. The French ones wanted to head for their homes, the Germans were heading for anywhere but home. And us...we somehow randomly came together as a group and just walked. I didn’t think we would survive; the Germans still
controlled the area, but near a small town called Raon-l’Etape a farmer hid us in his cart and put some distance between us and the Germans. We then carried on walking and came across this place. We should really head towards the Americans, I suppose. We’ll be treated as refugees. If it was just me, I would. Rachel too, I imagine, and the Roma women. But the boys, they are terrified. I think if they saw another person with a gun, it would finish them. At the moment, they would not be able to distinguish between Germans and Americans. They would only see men in uniform. They trust me, so I’m trying to make them understand what is happening. They may be ready to move on in a few weeks. That is my hope. Maybe they are young enough to recover. They are the main reason we are staying here, for the time being.’
‘And the Germans?’
‘Look at them.’ Hans and Ludwig had climbed on–to the roof of the barn now and were scouting the sky with their hands turned into the shape of binoculars.
‘I don’t what their countrymen have done to them, but it has an effect on their minds, you understand? The taller one, Ludwig, he was an architect before the war, apparently. A very intelligent man. In his sane moments, he will talk passionately about Bauhaus. Now he tells me that the owls have been sent to spy on us. He passes on to me confidential messages from the chickens.’
She did not know what to say and was not certain she was able to speak, her throat felt tight. She was staring down at the table, drawing patterns on it with her fingers. Between them, she noticed through blurred visions that the light surface of the table was darkening with her tears.
She felt guilty. If she told the doctor the truth now, would he believe her? And if he did, would he then forgive her? It was not as if she had no idea. As much as she would like to believe that she had made one mistake, that there had been a misunderstanding, that she was not aware of what the Nazis were really like, she knew that was not true.
The doctor was sitting opposite her again, his soft hands gently placed on top of hers.