by Wilbur Smith
They stopped. Saffron heard a metal door being unlocked and opened. She was pushed forward as the door was shut and locked behind her. She was shoved onto a wooden chair. Her wrists were freed from the handcuffs, but then tied tightly to the arms of the chair. Her ankles were also bound against the chair legs. The hood was removed.
Saffron opened her eyes but was instantly dazzled by a blinding light shining directly at her.
Someone slapped her face, hard, and she could not help herself from crying out with the pain and shock.
“Open your eyes!” a voice barked. “You will keep your eyes open. If you close your eyes, you will be hit.”
Saffron could not help it. Her instincts took over. She closed her eyes again.
She was slapped.
She forced herself to keep her eyes open and look toward the light. Beyond it she could make out a shadowy figure. It spoke in English, with cold, calm menace.
“Ah, so . . . Please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Stark. I am an officer in the Geheime Staatspolizei, or Secret Police. You may know it in the abbreviated form: Gestapo. Your life is in my hands. I decide whether you live or die. I keep you awake, or allow you to sleep. I starve you, or feed you. I treat you well, or I torture you in ways that you could never imagine in your darkest nightmares. You have no power, no control over your fate . . . Except in one respect. If you cooperate, you will not go free, for you will never go free again. But you may live a little longer and, above all, you may avoid the agonies that will be inflicted upon you if you do not talk.”
Saffron kept her face expressionless. The light had blinded her now to the point where it hardly made any difference whether her eyes were open or closed.
“Understand this: you have no rights, no protection under the Geneva Convention or any rules of war. You are not a soldier in uniform. You are a spy, a saboteur and a murderer. Many good men have died because of you. Their souls cry out for vengeance. Be assured I will provide it. Let us begin. What is your name?”
Saffron thought of what her instructor, Sergeant Greenwood—a small, wiry, but terrifyingly tough Cockney from the backstreets of East London—had told her group of trainees. “You can shove that ‘name, rank and serial number’ bollocks right up your arse. You’ve got no ranks, nor serial numbers, ’cos you’re not in the bleeding Army and you haven’t got no name, neither, ’cos your cover’s a person that doesn’t even exist. So you got nothing to tell the bleeding Krauts, do you? So keep your traps shut and don’t tell them bugger all.”
She remained silent.
Stark repeated the question. “What is your name?”
She did not respond.
This time she received a body-shot to the solar plexus, delivered with a man’s full force. The punch knocked the air from Saffron’s lungs and left her retching, gasping for breath and sick with pain.
Saffron repeated Sergeant Greenwood’s favorite saying in her mind: pain can’t hurt you. Or as he would say, “Pain can’t ’urt ya.”
His reasoning was worthy of a professor of philosophy. ‘Now . . . a bullet can ’urt ya. It can bleeding kill you. A bayonet in the guts can mess you right up. But pain, what can that do? Pain is only in the mind. It’s a feeling. That’s all it is. It don’t do nothing to you . . . I mean, what if you get caught by some bloody-minded Nazi bastard who pulls all yer fingernails out, one by one. Is that painful? Course it bleeding is. But will it kill you? Course not. Whoever died of pulled-out fingernails? Bleeding no one, that’s who.
“And that’s what you gotta remember, right? Them Nazis, they don’t want to kill you, do they? Not as long as they think they can still get something from you. So as long as you don’t tell ’em nothing—and I mean abso-bleedin’-lutely nothing—what’s the worst they can do? Inflict pain, that’s what, and, all together now, ‘Pain . . . can’t . . .’urt ya!’”
So Saffron told them nothing.
Stark asked her the same questions time and time again:
“What is your name?”
“Who is your commanding officer?”
“Where are you based?”
“What were your instructions for contacting the Resistance?”
“Who are your agents in this area?”
But not once did he get an answer.
His men punched Saffron and slapped her till her face was cut and swollen, and her torso, from her belly to her breasts, was a livid mass of purple, black and blue contusions, but still she remained silent.
Two soldiers entered the room, and one of them replaced the hood on her head. Suddenly she was falling backward as they tipped over the chair she was tied to, but before her head smashed onto the concrete floor, a hand roughly held her neck and halted the impact. She wanted to cry with relief. Seconds later icy-cold water was gushing over her nose and mouth, and instantly panic gripped her as she started to drown. Before she passed out, her chair was returned to its upright position and she vomited copiously, dry heaving and inhaling more water as she sucked at the sodden hood for air. They pushed her to the floor again and water spilled furiously down her nostrils and mouth once more, until all her senses were telling her that she was on the point of death. She thought back to Dr. Maguire, another, more gentlemanly instructor than Sergeant Greenwood, who had explained that the survival instinct is the most profound force in any living creature. The body does not want to die. It sends out warning signals the moment there is any prospect of that happening. But those signals are sent out well in advance of the event to give the mind time to organize a response to the threat it faces. The key is to trust one’s capacity to stay alive and not be fooled by the panic signals.
More than once Saffron blacked out. But they’d always pull her up and she’d always regain consciousness.
And still she said nothing.
Her life became reduced to a simple, relentless cycle. Stark and another man, Neuer, took it in turns to interrogate her. In between she would be taken back to her cell. Both her cell and the interrogation chamber were windowless, though their lights were always on. On the walks between them she was kept hooded. Soon she had no idea whether it was day or night, or how much time had passed.
They fed her occasionally, she wasn’t sure how often. The meal, if one could call it that, was always the same: a bowl of thin gruel with a piece of gristle that must, she imagined, have come from some kind of animal, though none she had ever previously consumed. This came with a small portion of stale, black rye bread.
When she was able to pass water into the tin bowl, it was laced with blood. And they would not let her sleep, not for a moment. She was drunk with fatigue, hallucinating with waking dreams that made her lose all distinction between the nightmares in her head and those in the real world. Her mind and her senses were starting to unravel and it was this gradual mental disintegration that slowly broke her will to resist.
“Try to hold out for at least twenty-four hours,” Dr. Maguire had said. “That will give our people some chance of getting away, or covering their tracks. If you can manage forty-eight hours, that would hugely increase their chances of avoiding discovery, but we know that’s asking an awful lot. Just try to do your best. That’s all anyone can do.”
•••
Saffron had tried to do her best. She had tried so hard. But now, as they dragged her down the path to the interrogation chamber, for she could barely stand anymore, let alone walk, she knew that she had been taken to her limits. One more beating and she would start to talk. And it would not be because of the beating. It would be because she needed to sleep . . . even if it was the sleep of death.
They shoved her in the chair. They bound her hands and feet.
She opened her eyes to the blinding light, hardly able to keep her head upright anymore.
Stark asked his questions.
One last time, Saffron defied him. Then her strength failed her. Her eyes closed . . . Her chin slumped onto her chest.
And the next thing she knew, the ropes around her wrists
and ankles were being untied. She half opened her eyes and saw a hand holding a steaming hot cup of tea.
An English voice—it sounded like Sergeant Greenwood—said, “There you go, love. Get that down yer gob. You earned it.”
She looked up and the light was off, and it was not a Gestapo officer called Stark sitting behind it but Jimmy Young, and he was standing up and there was a crack of raw emotion in his voice as he said, “By God, Courtney, that was the bravest thing I’ve ever seen. Damn near seventy-two hours. No one’s ever lasted that long before.”
“I’m sorry, Miss,” Greenwood said. “Just so you know, I hated doing it . . . We all did. But we had to, see, so’s there’s nothing them Nazi bastards can ever do that you can’t handle.” He gave her a rueful smile. “Bloody hell, love, you may be as rich as the Queen of Sheba and posh as Lady Muck, but you’re a tough little bint. I pity the poor Jerry who tries to get the best of you.”
He looked around. “Come on, lads, three cheers for Miss Courtney. Hip-hip . . .”
But by the time the first “hooray!” had echoed around the room, Saffron had collapsed to the floor.
•••
The sun was nearly over the horizon and a cold, early spring breeze blew across the concrete apron of Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport as Dr. Walther Hartmann climbed the short flight of steps to the passenger door of the three-engine Junkers Ju 52 transport aircraft. He paused and rubbed the corrugated fuselage that made the Ju 52 so instantly recognizable. He had always been a nervous flyer and now that he spent more time than ever in the air, it had become a superstition of his to touch the body of any plane in which he flew, like a rider patting the horse he was about to mount.
Hartmann was forty-four years old. He was not an imposing individual, being of modest height, with a face that had never been anything other than instantly forgettable, even in his youth. The addition of a toothbrush mustache, shaped in honor of the Führer, had not altered this fact. He wore round, tortoise-shell spectacles, and when he removed his hat to enter the Junkers, he revealed a scalp that was almost bald. But while Hartmann might not have looks on his side, he could boast a degree of power. For he was State Secretary in the Ministry of the Occupied Territories, and reported directly to the Minister, Alfred Rosenberg, himself. His work took him all over the newly conquered territories that the Reich had acquired thanks to the invasion of the Soviet Union. The distance he had to cover, combined with his seniority, ensured that Hartmann traveled in style.
He was met by a uniformed steward, who directed him through the cabin to his seat. A standard Ju 52 carried its passengers in eight rows of two seats, separated by a center aisle. This craft, however, had been modified for use by senior government officials, right up to the highest in the land. On entering at the rear of the cabin, Hartmann found two sofas upholstered in red leather, positioned lengthways opposite one another, with the aisle between them. The steward led Hartmann into the next area of the cabin, the conference room, in which four high-backed leather armchairs were arranged in two pairs—one facing forward, the other back—with a table between them. The steward offered Hartmann one of the forward-facing chairs. Ahead of him he could see an open door leading to a third part of the cabin, which contained a larger, grander version of the chair in which he was sitting, facing back toward the tail. That was truly a seat fit for the Führer, and it struck Hartmann that the man he worshipped so reverently, to whom his whole life was dedicated, might have traveled on this actual aircraft.
The thought was an inspiring one, but it was overridden by the nervous tension that climbing aboard an aircraft inevitably generated. Hartmann paused for a moment to take the series of slow, deep breaths with which he habitually calmed himself. He considered the day ahead.
He was to travel one thousand kilometers from Berlin to Rivne, the administrative capital of the Reichskommissariat Ukraine, as the southern half of Nazi-occupied Russia had been renamed. The journey would take around seven hours, allowing for one refueling stop. His task upon arrival was to meet with Reichskommissar Erich Koch, the master of this vast domain, and a number of his regional subordinates, local officials of the Reichsbahn, or state railway, and senior officers of both the SS and Wehrmacht. Their agenda concerned the practical steps needed to implement a policy document called the Wannsee Protocol. This was an important and sensitive subject, close to the Führer’s heart, and required coordination at the highest civil and military levels.
Hartmann gave a curt nod as the steward asked whether he would like a cup of coffee before take-off. He rested his briefcase on the table in front of him, opened it and took out a slim manila file marked Streng Geheim, or Top Secret. It contained two documents. The first was a copy of the Protocol and the second consisted of a detailed commentary on the Protocol prepared by his colleague Dr. Georg Leibbrandt, who had been present at the conference three months earlier, on January 20, 1942, at which the policy had been discussed and adopted. Hartmann already knew every detail of the Protocol and all of Leibbrandt’s observations. But it never hurt to go through it all again. There was nothing more reassuring than sitting down for a meeting with the certainty that one knew more about the subject under discussion than any other man there.
Hartmann removed the case from the table and placed it at his feet. He started skimming through the outline of the administrative problem to which the Protocol proposed a once-and-for-all solution. He could almost recite it by heart, he had read it so many times, and it was hardly a piece of prose that repaid repeated examination. The language was dry, bureaucratic:
The work concerned with emigration was, later on, not only a German problem, but also a problem with which the authorities of the countries to which the flow of emigrants was being directed would have to deal.
It was eight in the morning. Hartmann had been working late the night before. His eyes began to glaze over as he plowed on:
Financial difficulties, such as the demand by various foreign governments for increasing sums of money to be presented at the time of the landing, the lack of shipping space, increasing restriction of entry permits, or the canceling of such, increased extraordinarily the difficulties of emigration.
Hartmann reached for the coffee that the steward had placed on the table, served in a cup and saucer of the finest porcelain. He had refused the offer of sugar and cream, and downed the hot, bitter brew. He was about to return to the text of the Protocol when his attention was distracted by the arrival of another passenger. Hartmann frowned. He had been assured that he would be entirely undisturbed on the flight. He glared down the length of the compartment, wondering who had the influence to board a plane that had been set aside for the use of the Ministry.
The newcomer was tall enough that he had to duck as he walked down the aisle to avoid hitting his head on the ceiling. As he bent down, his dark blond hair fell across his brow, causing him to push it back into place. He was wearing a Luftwaffe uniform, and if Hartmann recalled correctly, his rank insignia were those of a Hauptmann, or captain, meaning that he would probably command a squadron of a dozen or so aircraft. His jacket also bore an Iron Cross, First Class, multiple campaign ribbons, his Pilot Badge and Ground Assault Badge. These suggested distinguished, but perhaps not exceptional, service to the Fatherland. But the final decoration that caught Hartmann’s eye, sewn onto the right-hand side of this unknown airman’s uniform, changed everything. It was the German Cross in Gold, awarded for repeated acts of bravery, but only to servicemen who already held at least an Iron Cross, First Class.
Hartmann understood the man’s presence aboard the flight. He was a Luftwaffe hero. The Ju 52 was being flown by Luftwaffe personnel. They would be only too happy to take him wherever he wanted to go.
Hartmann returned to his work.
The newcomer took the other forward-facing seat alongside Hartmann, with less than a meter of aisle space between them.
“Good morning,” he said, raising his voice as the engines were fired up. He smiled.
> Hartmann looked up at the man. He was enviably handsome, but there were deep lines etched around his gray eyes and dark rings beneath them, and his skin appeared to have been pulled tight across his elegant features. Hartmann saw the look everywhere these days. It was the face of a fighting man who lived with too much stress and too little sleep, month after month in combat.
“Good day,” Hartmann replied. “Allow me to introduce myself. I am Dr. Walther Hartmann and I have the honor of being State Secretary in the Ministry of the Occupied Territories.” Hartmann allowed himself the indulgence of levity. “It is my flight on which you are . . . what is the modern saying? . . . ah yes, hitching a lift.”
The pilot laughed politely. “Please forgive me for being so rude,” he said. His accent was Bavarian, but refined, even aristocratic. “How could I think of climbing aboard your aircraft and not introducing myself?” He held out his right hand. “Gerhard von Meerbach, at your service. I’m a squadron captain in the Luftwaffe. But I dare say you’d already worked that out for yourself.”
Gerhard had never thought of himself as a warrior. He was an architect by profession. He wanted to build, not destroy. His dream had been to harness the power of the Meerbach industrial empire to create affordable, easily fabricated housing, so that slums became a thing of the past and everyone in German society could live in clean, modern, functional homes.
But everything had changed after he helped the Solomons family to escape to Switzerland. The SS had discovered what he had done and in the feverish mood of Germany in the early thirties, with the new Nazi regime altering not only the country’s laws but its entire moral framework, Gerhard’s actions were deemed to be criminal. His older brother Konrad was by then making his way up the hierarchy of the SS and had become the Personal Assistant of SS-Gruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, one of the most powerful men in the Reich.