The Lost Girls of Paris

by Pam Jenoff

  “Yes, but my former boss, Colonel Winslow, sent me to investigate.” She reached in her bag and pulled out the photos. “Female agents, lost with no information on their whereabouts,” she pressed. “I received a lead in France that some of them might have been sent here.” She stopped short of the real reason she had come.

  He threw his cigarette down, then ground it out with his heel. “There are no victims of the Reich left here. They’ve all been sent to the DP camps. But you already knew that.” He looked at her evenly. “What is it you really want?”

  Clearly, there was no fooling Mick Willis. “You have Hans Kriegler here. I want to speak with him to ask him about the girls.”

  “That’s impossible. No one is allowed access to him by order of head prosecutor Charlie Denson himself.” Eleanor’s frustration rose. She’d been told no, first by the British, then the French, a dozen times or more. But the Americans were all recovery aid and good intentions; she thought she might have a shot with them.

  “Look, you have to go, but there’s no way for you to get back tonight. I can offer you a bed and a meal. Then first thing tomorrow, you’re on your way. Got it?”

  Eleanor opened her mouth to protest. She had no intention of leaving. She would speak with Kriegler. Nothing less would do. But she could see from Mick’s grimly set jaw that he wasn’t going to acquiesce. And a night here would give her time to figure something out. “That would be fine, thank you.”

  She thought he meant for her to follow on foot, but instead he walked around to the driver’s side of the jeep. “May I?” She nodded and climbed in to the passenger side. “Our barracks are a good half mile from here,” he explained, as he navigated the perimeter of the camp. “We’re lodged in one of the former SS barracks.” She was amazed by the size and scope of the camp that unfurled before her as he drove. It was so much bigger than she’d ever imagined.

  He pulled up in front of a long, wooden, single-story building which, she was relieved to note, was outside the barbed wire of the camp. “Follow me.” He led her inside. There was an office, dimly lit by a lone Anglepoise lamp on a metal desk. An overturned tin was filled with cigarette butts and ash. Someone had pinned up a rogue’s gallery of photos, Germans who were still at large. “I’m going to see about getting you a room for the night. Wait here—and don’t touch anything.”

  Eleanor stood awkwardly in the middle of the space. She desperately wanted to rifle through the papers on the desk and in the files, but she didn’t dare.

  A few minutes later, Mick returned. “They’ll get a rack for you. Best grab some food before the mess closes.” He started from the office without speaking and she assumed she was to follow. They entered a dining hall with long tables that reminded her of the training facility at Arisaig House. She could almost hear the laughter of the girls.

  But the mess here was served cafeteria-style. Mick handed her a tray and led her through the line, where she was unceremoniously served some sort of meat and potatoes without being asked. “Our quarters aren’t bad,” Mick remarked as they found two spots at a table. “Anything beats the winter we spent in the foxholes near Bastogne. Of course, the food is still awful.” Eleanor’s stomach turned as she thought of the starving children she’d passed near the train station in Munich, so emaciated their bones showed through their pale skin. And that, she reflected, surely paled in comparison to the suffering Jews who had been imprisoned at Dachau, scarcely a quarter mile from where they now sat.

  Mick tore into his food without hesitation. “I’m sorry for being rude earlier,” he said between bites. “This whole operation has been completely messed up. While the big shots in Nuremberg prosecute the high-profile cases, the real beasts, the guards who did the actual killing, are down here. And we’ve got precious little to work with. We’ve got a trial starting next week and the work has been nonstop. We’re all exhausted.” He paused, looking her up and down. “You don’t look so good yourself,” he added bluntly.

  She ignored the unintended offensiveness of his remark. “I’ve been traveling from Paris since yesterday morning. And now it seems, I’ll be heading right back out.”

  “At first light,” he agreed, still chewing. He wasn’t trying to be rude, she realized. Rather he ate with the haste of one who had lived through combat, not knowing how long he had to finish the meal or when the next one would come. “Can’t have anything interfering with trial prep.” He paused. “I’ve heard of the female agents.” Eleanor was impressed. Few beyond SOE would have heard about her program. “I read in the reports that some were arrested along with the men. I don’t know if they were yours, of course,” he added hastily.

  “They were all mine. Tell me,” she ordered, forgetting in her eagerness to be polite.

  “We interviewed a guard who spoke of some women being brought in.”

  “When?”

  He scratched his head. “June or early July of ’44 maybe. It wasn’t unusual to have women here. There was a whole barracks for them over the hill.” He pointed toward the darkness outside. Eleanor’s stomach turned. In coming for Kriegler, she hadn’t realized that she’d stumbled upon the very spot some of the girls were lost forever. “But these women were never registered, never went into the barracks. They were taken straight to the interrogation cell.” Eleanor shuddered. She had heard of such places of suffering before death. “No one ever saw them again. Except one prisoner who had worked in that block. We have his testimony.”

  “Can I see it?”

  He hesitated. “I suppose it can’t hurt if I just show the transcript to you. You’re leaving tomorrow anyway. You can see them after we eat.”

  She slid the tray across the table and then pushed her chair back with a loud scrape. “I’m done.”

  Mick took one more bite, then stood and cleared the trays. He led her back to the office where she had waited earlier. There were papers stacked everywhere and it seemed to Eleanor, who had always kept her own records immaculate, that he might not be able to find anything after all. But he walked to the file cabinet and opened the drawer without hesitation. He pulled out a thin folder and handed it to her.

  Eleanor opened it. It was witness testimony from a Pole who had been forced to work as a laborer at Dachau. She skimmed the pages of testimony about the awful job he had been forced to perform, putting bodies in the ovens after the prisoners had been murdered.

  A line caught her eye. “Three women were brought in from a transport one night. They stood out and were very well dressed. One had red hair.” That would have been Maureen. Eleanor continued reading:

  “They did not show fear but walked arm in arm through the camp, even though they were followed with a gun at their backs. The women were not registered as prisoners, but were brought straight to the medical barracks, next to where I worked. A guard ordered them to undress for a physical. I heard a woman’s voice asking, ‘Pour quoi?’”

  For what? Eleanor translated in her head before reading on: “And the answer came, ‘For typhus.’ I heard nothing more after that, and then the bodies were brought to me.”

  Eleanor set down the file. They were injected with something, told that it was medicine. She had known that the girls were dead. But the picture of what exactly had happened was now painted before her. It was almost too much to take.

  But she still didn’t know how they had been caught in the first place. She forced her feelings down and focused on why she had come. “I need to see Kriegler.”

  “Damn it, Ellie,” Mick swore. It was the first time in her life anyone had called her that. She considered telling him not to, then decided against it. “You’re one pushy broad.” Mick pulled out a pack of cigarettes and offered her one. She waved it away. She’d only smoked on the nights she put the girls on the planes to France; she hadn’t taken a drag since. He lit one for himself. “I’ve already told you more than I should. Your girls were killed by the Germans. It’s a d
amn shame, but at least you know for sure now. Isn’t that enough?”

  “Not for me. I want to know everything—including how they caught the girls in the first place. That’s why I need to speak with Kriegler. Half an hour. That’s all I’m asking. You claim to care about bringing these men to justice. But what about those against whom they committed the crimes?”

  Mick took a drag of his cigarette, then exhaled hard. “The female agents had no official status and, other than the one report I showed you, there’s so much we don’t know about what happened. It’s as if the evidence disappeared with them.” Which was what the Germans wanted, Eleanor thought. Just another way justice had been denied to her girls. “I understand your loyalty to these girls and it’s admirable,” Mick continued. “But you have to see the bigger picture. These men murdered thousands—no, millions. And Kriegler is among the worst of them. I can’t risk bringing him to justice just to help you. Especially when we aren’t ready...” He stopped, as if realizing he’d said too much.

  “That’s it,” Eleanor said. “Your case against Kriegler—it isn’t strong enough, is it?”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” But there was a warble in his voice.

  “Kriegler.” Eleanor seized on it. “He won’t talk. You don’t have what you need to convict him, do you?”

  “Even if that was true, the prosecution’s case is classified. You know I couldn’t say.”

  “I’ve got all the top clearances from Whitehall.” Had, she corrected herself silently. “If you tell me, maybe I can help.”

  He raised his hands. “Okay, okay, I get it. Not here.” He motioned her outside the office and down the hall. Eleanor was puzzled: the office, with its closed door, would have seemed the perfect place to talk. Who, she wondered, did Mick think might be listening?

  “It’s Kriegler,” he said when they were outside. It was completely dark now and the air seemed to have grown even more frigid. Mick’s breath rose before him in great puffs as he spoke. “The case against him isn’t as strong as we’d like it to be,” he admitted finally. “Kriegler hid his tracks remarkably well and the few of his underlings we’ve got in custody have been reluctant to testify against him.” The SD were a tight-knit, disciplined bunch. They would sooner go to the grave than betray their former boss. “We’ve had a dickens of a time getting anything from him. We’ve turned all the screws. Applied pressure. He won’t break.” Kriegler was a master interrogator himself, knew better than anyone how to hold out. Eleanor, in point of fact, had never broken anyone. But she had spent enough time at SOE to know how to tear apart a witness.

  Mick continued, “The War Crimes Tribunal thinks the case is too big for us to handle here. They want to transfer it to Nuremberg. But we’re getting a lot of pressure from Third Army headquarters in Munich to keep the case here and get a win for the Dachau trials.”

  “I can help,” Eleanor offered, without considering whether she actually could. She leaned in close. She pictured Kriegler’s dossier back in London, the recounting of his cruelty. “You need the background on Kriegler, the lines of questioning, the details for cross-examination. I’ve got it.” Eleanor had watched the moves of Kriegler and the SD bastards unfold from London like a game of chess. While she still didn’t have the answers she was seeking as to how the girls had been betrayed, she knew the crimes of Kriegler and the others all too well. “I can get you documents.” Another bluff; the proof she could offer had all burned along with Norgeby House. And she couldn’t have gotten it for him in a trial not two days away. “I’ll testify for you, sign an affidavit. And you need to get inside his head, figure out what matters most, where his dark places are.”

  “Then tell me how.”

  She shook her head. “Not until you give me what I need. Ten minutes alone with him.”

  “What makes you think he will speak to you?”

  “Because I know him,” she said, hearing how ridiculous it sounded.

  “You’ve never met him.”

  “And the Nazis you’ve hunted across Europe? You never met them either, right? But you knew them, their family histories, their backgrounds, their crimes.” Mick nodded. “That’s Kriegler for me.”

  “He’s different. He won’t break.”

  “It can’t hurt to try.”

  “This is nuts!”

  “Most unorthodox,” she agreed. “Do you want the trial or not?” He didn’t answer. “Look, I don’t have time for this. If you aren’t going to give me access, then I’ll be on my way to my next lead.” It was a calculated bluff. Dachau was her last shot. She only prayed he didn’t know this.

  “Anyway, it’s impossible to give you access. He’s being transferred to Nuremberg at first light.”

  She had made it here just in time, Eleanor realized. She never would have gotten access to Kriegler at Nuremberg. “Then let me talk to him now.”

  “Ten minutes,” he relented. “And I get to be present.”

  “Fifteen,” she countered. “And you can listen outside the door.”

  “Are you always this difficult?”

  She ignored the comment. She’d spent the better part of her life being called difficult just for doing what the men did. “He won’t talk if you’re there,” she explained.

  He stared at her for one beat and then another. “I don’t see how you can do it,” he said. She held her breath, waiting to be told no, to be turned away as she had been so many times these past months and years. “But I’m out of other options. Not now,” he said slowly. “Turning up in the middle of the night will attract too much attention. We’ll leave at five in the morning. We need to be there before the transport comes to take him to Nuremberg.” She wanted to see Kriegler now. But she nodded, knowing it was better not to push.

  Mick led her into another building and down a hall. It had been freshly painted since the war, she could tell, cleaned to make it suitable for the Allied officers to stay, to erase the awful things that had happened here. He opened a door to a narrow room with a bed and washstand. “I’ll see you in the morning,” he said before closing the door.

  Eleanor did not sleep in the cold, sterile barracks, but waited for the hours to pass. She lay awake, imagining her girls arriving at the camp as the laborer’s testimony had described. She took small comfort in the fact that several of them had come together. How had they found one another? It seemed unlikely they had been arrested in the same place. Eleanor wondered over and over: What would have happened if they had received word sooner that the radio had been compromised and it was a trap? They might have split up and gone to ground. Instead, they were arrested and, in most cases, killed. It was her fault. She could have pursued her doubts, forced the Director or someone above him to listen sooner. But she hadn’t—and her girls had paid the price.

  When at last the sky began to pinken over the pine-capped Bavarian hills, Eleanor washed as well as she could and changed her dress. She started outside. The air was crisp with a hint of dampness, as though it might snow again, but not right away.

  Mick was waiting for her in the predawn stillness, the smoke from his cigarette curling upward as he opened the door to a jeep. Eleanor fought the urge to ask him for one. They climbed into the jeep, letting him drive again, and he navigated to the gate where she’d arrived the previous day. Neither spoke as they passed through.

  He parked the jeep and stepped out. She followed, the edges of her skirt pulling from her boots where she had tucked them. They were inside the camp now. He led her wordlessly through the arch in the guard house, only the crunching of their boots against the snow breaking the silence. She looked for the infamous Arbeit Macht Frei sign over the entranceway, but it was gone. Inside the gate, there were rows and rows of barracks. She stared as though one of the girls might walk from one of the buildings at any moment. Where are you?

  “Show me,” she said to Mick. Though it would tell h
er nothing, she needed to see where the girls had died. “Show me everything.”

  He traced a line in front of them from left to right. “Arrivals came down this road, through the entrance with the railway station by the SS barracks.” Eleanor imagined her girls, exhausted and dazed, being forced to march down the path. The girls would have walked with heads high as they had been trained, showing no fear.

  Mick led her down the semicircle of barracks, stopping at the final one. “This is the interrogation block where they would have been questioned and killed.” His voice was factual, emotionless. “There’s a crematorium out the back where the bodies were taken.” Eleanor had asked for everything and he would spare her none. She touched the bricks in horror.

  “Is that it?” She gestured to a low building with a telltale chimney stack.

  “The crematorium. Yes. The prisoners referred to it as ‘the shortest escape.’”

  “I want to see.” She walked around to see the twisted, charred metal then knelt in the earth, sifting the gravel through her fingers.

  “Come,” he said finally, helping her to her feet. “We only have a little time before they will take Kriegler for questioning. No one can know that I’ve let you in.”

  He led her to the right, where a section of barracks had been cordoned off with barbed wire. “This is where we keep him and the other prisoners awaiting trial.”

  “Not in the interrogation cell then?” she asked. It would have seemed fitting.

  “If only. We need to preserve that for evidence.”

  The soldier guarding the barracks eyed them uneasily. “It’s all right,” Mick said, flashing credentials at him. The guard stepped aside. Mick turned to her. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

  She crossed her arms. “Whatever do you mean?”

  “I’ve been at this a long time and it’s been one heartbreak after another. The truth,” he added darkly, “is sometimes the very opposite from what you expect it to be.”

  And once out, Eleanor thought silently, you can’t put it back any more than returning a mist of perfume to a bottle once it has been sprayed. She could walk away now. But she thought about Marie, who with her endless questions had always wanted to know the truth, about where the agents would be going, what they would be doing. About why. “I’m ready.”