by Julie Thomas
‘We’re Germans, ex-officers, deserters, on the run from the Wehrmacht. If we’re found we’ll be shot. I’m Wolfgang Bach and he is Ludwig Offenbach.’
‘Do you have papers?’ the man asked.
They both shook their heads.
‘No. But we can help you if you let us,’ Levi said.
The man gestured towards the trees. ‘I have to stay here, I have work to do when the German supply train comes through. You, head for that large tree with the fork in its trunk. Twenty yards into the forest, give one long, low whistle and someone will come. Tell them Mario sent you. They may kill you, but they may not.’
Levi didn’t wait to be told a second time. He picked up the bag and started to run, Erik bent low beside him, keeping stride. They did as the man had said. When they’d paced around twenty yards in, Levi gave one whistle and they stood and waited. The first thing they heard was the click of at least three guns.
‘Who are you?’
They couldn’t see who had asked the question. Levi dropped the bag and raised his arms in the air. Erik followed suit.
‘Two men wanting to join your resistance. Mario said to tell you he sent us.’ Levi said, keeping his voice steady despite his thumping heart. Suddenly he felt the barrel of a rifle in the small of his back.
‘Walk,’ a voice said harshly.
About a mile into the forest the ground began to rise. Soon they left the cover of trees behind and found themselves among large moss-covered boulders. They walked on. The men were behind them, two of them with guns levelled at their backs. At one stage Levi started to turn around and was told in no uncertain terms to face forward. He glanced over at Erik. In the thin, cold light of dawn he could see his companion was tiring quickly, and he prayed it wouldn’t be much further. If Erik fell over, he might well be shot.
Ten minutes later they were guided between two massive rocks and came out onto a plateau, where about thirty people were cleaning weapons or splitting wood, making soap or even cutting up the carcass of a wild boar. Behind them, caves dug into the side of a mountain, and in the middle of the plateau was a rough wooden table. The men wore trousers, shirts, with bandanas tied around their necks, the few women wore heavy skirts and shirts. They all stopped to stare at the arriving group. Before anyone could speak, there was a loud explosion and a fireball leapt into the sky from down by the railway, sending a wave of smiles and back-slapping around the circle. Levi and Erik stood silently and waited.
A man emerged from the largest cave, wiping his hands on a cloth. He was over six foot, broad-shouldered, with curly dark hair and a full beard, a swarthy complexion and very quick, intelligent eyes that surveyed the newcomers.
‘Mario sent you?’ he asked.
Levi nodded.
‘You’re German?’ the man asked.
Levi nodded again.
‘Do you speak any Italian?’ the man asked.
‘Yes, we both speak Italian,’ Levi answered.
The man came closer and frowned. ‘Why would you want to join us? Why should we not shoot you and drop your bodies at the gates of the occupying troops?’ he asked.
‘We’ve come from Munich to find a resistance group to fight with,’ Levi said.
The man was watching Erik. ‘Do you speak?’ he asked.
Erik nodded. ‘Yes, I do. I was a German officer in the SS and then I was arrested and sent to Dachau, a camp in southern Germany. The conditions were horrific and I was beaten, starved and abused. My father paid to have me smuggled out. I want nothing more to do with the Third Reich, other than to sabotage its plans.’
The man continued to stare at Erik. ‘Why were you arrested?’ he asked.
Erik flicked a glance at Levi. ‘I found it impossible to support the Führer’s policies. I was party to the atrocities committed in the East. Millions of innocent people are being slaughtered, others are sent to camps to be worked or starved to death. It is inhumane.’
The man nodded slowly. ‘We hear rumours of this. Some of our number are Jews who have hidden from the Germans and fled into the forest and then the mountains. They have watched the rest of their family exterminated in their homeland. What’s your name?’ he asked.
‘You can call me Ludwig. Ludwig Offenbach.’
The man smirked. ‘I take it that’s not your real name,’ he said.
‘No, it’s my battle name.’
‘We all have such names.’
The man turned his attention to Levi. ‘And you? Why are you here?’ he asked.
‘I’m a German Jew, from Berlin. I was persecuted by the Nazis and I have to assume my family are dead or in a camp somewhere. I evaded capture and I want to fight with you. I am trained in armed and unarmed combat.’
The man raised his eyebrow. ‘Are you? Why?’ he sounded unconvinced.
Levi hesitated. He needed to select the information he wanted them to know. ‘The British Army trained me. I’ve killed a man with a knife. I know how to take care of myself.’
‘And your ridiculous name?’ the man asked.
‘Wolfgang Bach. I can be called Wolfie.’
‘My name is Peter, and for my sins I am in charge.’
Peter signalled to another man, who was sitting beside a woman at the table, watching. He came to them. Peter put his hand on the new arrival’s shoulder.
‘And this is our best fighter, Sandro. Show us what you can do against him,’ he said.
Levi sighed and moved away from the group. Sandro followed and they began to circle each other. Sandro’s arms were tattooed, solid and muscular, and the hands he held ready at waist-height were fisted. Levi pounced, hooked his leg around one of Sandro’s and kicked the other out from under him. Sandro stumbled sideward. Before he could regain his balance, Levi landed a single punch to the chin, pulled Sandro’s arm out straight, twisted it up behind his body and pushed the man facedown onto the stone floor. It was over before Sandro could try a move. Levi returned to stand in front of Peter.
‘I’m a little rusty, but I know how to break a neck, slit a throat, and wire an explosive, send Morse code and also some basic first aid. I speak German, French, English and Italian, and it may be completely useless here, but I also play the piano.’
Peter’s face was transformed by a grin.
‘And I’m an excellent shot and know about ten different ways to kill a human being,’ added Erik, keen not to be left out.
Peter turned to face the watching crowd. Sandro was nursing his arm and scowling at them.
‘What do you think? Shall we give these two a trial?’ Peter asked.
There were several cries of ‘yes’, along with one solitary ‘no’ from Sandro.
Peter turned back to them. ‘Seems you’ve found yourself a home. We are the Liberistas, some Catholic, some Jewish, some agnostic, some atheist. All of us hate the fascists and the Germans. Are you hungry?’ he asked. They looked at each other.
‘Yes,’ Levi admitted, ‘it’s been a few hours since we last ate. Bread and cheese has been our staple diet.’
‘Well, we’re given food by sympathetic villagers and townspeople from two settlements nearby. We shoot rabbits and there are fish in a stream about a mile away,’ Peter said. ‘Come this way.’
He led them into a huge cave, with a high ceiling and a cooking fire encircled by stones. A sizeable blackened pot hung over the fire. Peter grabbed two bowls and filled them.
‘Rabbit stew, with pasta and vegetables. Good nourishing food, but not kosher,’ he said, as he gave them the bowls and a spoon each.
‘Thank you very much. I haven’t eaten kosher for a very long time,’ Levi said.
‘I grew up fishing the streams and lakes around my home in Munich. If there are fish nearby, I’ll catch them,’ added Erik.
Peter nodded his satisfaction. ‘And when you’ve eaten, take a rug from the pile in the next cave and find somewhere in there to sleep for a few hours. It’s dry and warm, not soft, but you can’t have everything.’
And so be
gan their time with the Liberistas. Their first assignment was to string a wire at head-height across a road outside the nearest village. When four German soldiers, who’d been drinking in the taverna, rode back towards their temporary compound on motorcycles, the wire brought them crashing to the ground. Levi shot one and Erik another, and the other two were dispatched by Sandro in quick succession. They stripped the bodies of guns, ammunition and cigarettes, then rolled them into the roadside ditch.
Upon their return, Peter broke open a bottle of Chianti and Levi and Erik enjoyed a glass each. Perhaps it was the liquor or the adrenalin that loosened Levi’s tongue, but as they sat beside the fire, alone together, and watched the dawn creep into the cave, he broached a topic he’d been ignoring. Between the two of them they spoke German, but stuck to their new names.
‘Tell me, do you think you’ll ever want to sleep with anyone ever again?’ Levi asked quietly.
Erik didn’t answer. He was using a stick to draw a pattern on the dirt floor.
‘I know it’s been a long —’
‘Why do you ask?’ Erik said, his voice almost accusatory.
Levi shrugged. ‘I just wondered. We sleep side by side, we spend twenty-four hours a day together, and yet you never show me any physical sign. There was a time . . .’
Finally, Erik looked up at him and shook his head. ‘Not here, not now. It might get us killed. But one day.’
‘Are you sure it’s not because I’m a Jew?’ Levi asked quietly.
Erik’s face registered his shock. ‘How could you ask such a thing? Have I shown any prejudice against the Jews in this camp?’
Levi shook his head. ‘No.’
‘I don’t know what to say to you. But I promise you the problem is mine, it’s not because I think you are at all inferior. I’ve never seen you that way.’
‘You have images in your head. Horrible images, real things, you saw and felt them. I understand that. And you can’t get rid of them.’
Erik shrugged. ‘And the more Germans I kill, the fainter those images become. Was it wrong of me to want to kill those men tonight? They were young soldiers, like we were, or at least like I was. Doing their duty for their country, and yet I felt such rage when I saw them,’ he said.
‘It’s not them you’re angry at. We can’t get to the men who give the orders, so we wage war against those we can reach.’
‘What have we become?’ Erik asked suddenly. Levi wanted to touch him, squeeze his arm, cover his hand with his own, but he knew Erik didn’t want such gestures.
‘Soldiers,’ he said, ‘fighting to survive.’
Levi was running, stumbling, trying to catch up, to escape. Guards in greatcoats, with ferocious dogs on short chains, were chasing him. The air was full of noise and flashes of light like huge fireworks. Relentlessly they pursued him, through the gates of the camp and towards the bridge. He could see smoke belching from the brick chimney, and the air was full of a sweet stench that clung to his clothes and filled his nostrils. Inside the building he could see ovens, huge cavernous holes with fire leaping. The air was dry and hot. He fought the hands as they ripped at him, tearing the uniform from his body.
‘You saved the Führer! You must die!’ voices screamed.
Levi shook his head from side to side. ‘NO! No! I didn’t,’ he shouted back at them. He writhed, trying to escape the thin sharp nails that scratched his skin.
‘Wolfie!’
The sound echoed at the back of his brain. He fought against the arms that were holding him.
‘Shhh, Wolfie. You’re having a nightmare. Just a bad dream.’
Hands soothed and caressed him. The visions subsided and he woke. His body was covered in sweat, he was trembling and his breathing was ragged. He could feel Erik’s arms around him, clasping him tightly.
‘It’s just a bad dream,’ Erik repeated.
Levi ran his fingers through his wet hair and blinked. ‘It was so real,’ he said, his voice hoarse.
Erik held a bowl out to him. ‘Here, have some water,’ he said as he let Levi go.
Still his heart pounded, and he felt caught in that strange place between terrible image and dark reality.
‘What were you dreaming about? What didn’t you do?’ Erik asked.
Levi drank from the bowl. The water was cold and sweet. ‘I was being chased and they were accusing me of saving the Führer. That I must die for that. They were trying to push me into an oven.’
For a moment Erik let him sit there and drink, recover.
‘It’s your subconscious mind,’ Erik said at last, ‘it blames you for taking that bullet. You need to reconcile yourself to what you did. Logically you know that if you’d done nothing and Hitler had died, someone even worse might have taken his place. You’ve told me what they were like, the others, and I have first-hand knowledge of Himmler myself. The man is a freak, an ogre. But your emotional self blames you for what was an automatic reaction.’
Levi shook his head to clear the fog that clung stubbornly to his thinking. ‘What are you telling me?’ he whispered.
‘Goering and Gobbles. These men, along with others like Bormann, they would have taken the reins of power and they’re at least as mad as, if not worse than, the Führer.’
Levi looked at him. He could see the general outline of Erik’s face in the glow of the fire, but not his features.
‘What can I do? To stop the nightmares?’
Erik raised hand and touched his cheek. ‘I’m not sure I know. You just have to keep telling yourself that it was not a wrong thing to do. Keep forgiving yourself in your conscious thoughts.’
‘Have you forgiven me?’ he asked.
‘You don’t need my forgiveness,’ Erik said simply.
‘Yes, I do. When I think of what they did to you. The despicable regime that could create a place like that. The brutality. The cruelty. He’s responsible for it. Men like Himmler and Goebbels, they get away with what they do because he encourages it. Allows it. I could have stopped all that.’
‘You have no way of knowing it would have stopped. Maybe it would be even worse with someone else in charge. He didn’t order what happened to me. I was a victim of an efficient and judgmental system.’
Levi took a deep breath and nodded. ‘It will all end, Erik; we have to believe that. One day they will all be called to account.’
Peter ran a very strict organisation. They knew who the sympathetic farmers were, and they tried not to be too demanding. If people were short of food themselves, they were not asked to contribute.
On their fourth day they were put on food-collection duty with Sandro and some of the other men. The farm seemed deserted when they left the cover of the trees and ran across the open ground. The house was empty and the dogs were barking in the yard. They were about to leave when Sandro checked the barn and let out an involuntary yell. They sprinted to join him. Four bodies, two adult, two children, swung from the rafters. They had tight nooses around their necks and one wore a placard in German that said, ‘Collaborator with the partisans.’
‘Damn the Germans!’ Sandro swore as he dragged a wooden bench towards the bodies. ‘Help me get them down. The least we can do is bury them.’
Levi could see his own reaction mirrored in Erik’s pale expression and grief-stricken eyes.
‘They know the risks, all of them,’ Sandro said as he handed Levi a shovel, ‘and they choose to help us anyway.’
Everyone had a job to do, and they all did it willingly. Women cooked, repaired clothing and learned to strip, clean and fire weapons, as if the camp was discovered and overrun by the enemy, all must know how to defend themselves. Older women went on scouting missions, because they could move more freely without attracting suspicion, and if they were caught they might be able to convince the Germans that they were housewives going about their normal lives. Both men and women took it in turns to guard the camp, stationed on the rocks, twenty-four hours a day.
When winter set in it became harder to find
food, and the villagers had less to give. The Germans confiscated stores of wheat flour stockpiled for pasta-making, and vegetables didn’t grow in the frozen soil. Animals that had been kept for milk or eggs, or fattened for bacon, were taken by the Germans for food.
Hunger was an ever-present sensation, something new to Levi but not to Erik.
‘Here, try this,’ Erik said as he sat down beside Levi.
“What is it?’ Levi asked, looking at the brown lump inside the metal cup.
“It’s snow with a little coffee poured over it. If you suck it slowly, it will give you water and the taste helps to keep the hunger pangs at bay. We did it when we could get some coffee in the camp.’
Levi took the mug and smiled at Erik. ‘Thanks.’
They talked endlessly about the parties at the count and countess’s house in Wannsee, and the bountiful food they remembered.
On a particularly cold night Erik found an old coat and tore it into strips of felt.
‘What are you doing?’ Levi watched as the firelight leapt off Erik’s figure, bent over his work.
‘Here,’ Erik picked up a bundle and came to sit at Levi’s feet. ‘This is another trick I learned in the camp. It will help you to stay warm.’ He pulled the boots from Levi’s feet and started to bind the strips around his toes. Levi said nothing, and just watched the bony fingers go about their work. It pulled at his heart to see Erik replicating a skill that had kept frostbite at bay in that terrible place.
As the Germans began to round up the local Jews for deportation to concentration camps, many fled into the forest and found their way behind the rocks. The men would gather in small groups, reading the Torah and praying, and the women would do their best to keep Shabbat. Levi watched them, realising he had all but forgotten these rituals. When some Orthodox men with ear locks arrived, it made him wonder if Erik remembered the group they had abused on the streets of Berlin. It played on his conscience, but he didn’t mention it and neither did Erik. One day Levi sought out a rabbi who had been with them only a few days.
‘I’ve had to break so many laws I hardly feel Jewish anymore,’ he said, as they sat together and ate.