She’d fallen silent. He opened his eyes, and only now did he notice that she was holding between her fingers a small silver cross attached to a thin chain around her throat. He felt her fear like a cold blast of air. A small tap on the trigger, and he would never forget her, he knew. Her eyes were closed. She was waiting for him. Waiting for him to shoot.
“I can’t,” he shrieked, throwing down his weapon. “I won’t do it.”
He fell back against the tree where the rifle had stood, and slid down the thick trunk until he was seated on the ground. A tear trickled out of the corner of his eye and was soon joined by others.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he said, looking at her.
She stared at him in confusion.
“I’m not an evil person. I’m not evil,” he repeated, burying his face in his filthy hands.
He steadied his gaze on her, his face dissolving in tears. “I’ve always thought of myself as a good person. I didn’t mean to kill him. I don’t want to kill you.”
He fell silent except for the occasional sob.
He stared into the air. “Is someone evil because he’s done something evil?” He gave her a questioning glance. “Can a good deed make it right again?” He stood resolutely, then stopped. “Can a good deed make it right again?” He chewed on his own words a moment.
Then he walked resolutely over to her and carefully lifted Vladimir’s heavy body off her broken arm. August helped her to sit up. He unhooked his canteen and filled the aluminum cup with water, then held it to her lips. They trembled. He poured too quickly, and part of the cup’s contents dripped down her chin and onto her chest. Her name was embroidered on the left chest pocket of her shirt. He pointed at the name, and when she didn’t understand, he spun his index finger toward himself and said, “August.”
He pointed at her name again, and she stuttered softly, “Nadia.”
He helped her to her feet. Her arm hung loosely at her side, and he saw how courageously she swallowed her pain.
“Go now,” he said softly, indicating the direction she’d come from with the soldier. “Go.”
She understood the meaning of his words and slowly began edging away from him. She glanced at the body of the soldier, who until a few moments ago had been her lover, then lowered her head and walked off unsteadily. Before long she vanished in the trees.
He sat down heavily. He felt exhausted, sick. He emptied his canteen and tilted his head back to gaze into the treetops, which began to spin. They spun faster and faster until he had to close his eyes so that he wouldn’t throw up. I’ve just killed a man, he thought, because I needed to go to the bathroom. I’ve just taken a girl’s lover away from her. Maybe they were going to get married someday. Maybe they’d known each other since they were children, and everyone in their village had always known they would be man and wife one day. There would be a wedding. Vladimir and Nadia would be married. “We told you so,” the old women in the village would say. Nadia would give birth to five children; they would live in a nice little house, which Nadia would turn into a fine, loving home despite their meager resources. The children would never go to bed hungry, and Vladimir would make sure the fire in the fireplace never went out. They would grow old together. Nadia would die of old age, in her sleep, and Vladimir would follow her to the grave a year later, consumed by grief. But then along came a German, and now Vladimir was dead, and Nadia was a cripple. August shook his head despondently.
“You’re not thinking of running away, are you Strangl?” Falkendorf was suddenly standing beside him. Despite his size, he had a way of moving soundlessly through the woods, like a predator stirred by its hunting instincts.
“Holy shit, what happened here?” He whistled, impressed. “Did you do this, Strangl?”
August nodded silently.
A satisfied smile emerged on Falkendorf’s lips. He held out a cigarette pack for August, who declined with a wave of his hand. “Good work.” Falkendorf grinned. “Maybe I was wrong about you after all.”
August said nothing.
Neuengamme, Germany, October 15, 1942
“Is this where you’d like me to stop?”
“Yes, thank you. This is fine.”
Gerhard watched the car vanish in the direction of Hamburg. Wanting to hold on to the last of his freedom, he’d ask to be dropped off here so he could walk the rest of the way. The flat asphalt road was surrounded by tall trees and fields. The birdsong relaxed him, and he noted how close to the ground the swallows were flying. The gray clouds confirmed what the birds had already told him: rain was on the way.
A red brick watchtower interrupted nature’s harmony, and he knew he’d soon be able to see the outline of the camp. He got a whiff of the smell. A putrid, revolting odor that invariably made him think of the fish market in St. Pauli, but this stench was worse, harsher. A blend of chlorine, latrines, and filthy people, it reinforced the images that he’d formed in his mind. He felt an urge to turn around, to spin on his heels and vanish. He paused and put his suitcase down. His good sense stifled this sudden impulse; he picked up his suitcase and went on.
His steps slowed and shortened as he approached his new place of employment. Flowers in every color of the rainbow bloomed beside the main entrance like a multihued welcoming committee, but the camp’s stench overwhelmed the aromatic florae. The flowers didn’t match the season.
Two columns of around thirty prisoners appeared from the other direction. Their faces were emaciated and sullen, and most of them shuffled bent forward with short, dragging steps. Gerhard started in alarm when a guard—who looked quite like a prisoner himself—shouted at the gray mass. He should have fled, he wasn’t at all ready for this, but it was too late to turn around now. He hadn’t even entered the camp yet, and he was already overcome with an all-consuming mixture of powerlessness, anxiety, and fear of what awaited him.
A uniformed guard stood at the entrance next to a red-and-white-striped sentry box, a rifle on his shoulder. Behind him was a red brick building, above which loomed the watchtower. The prisoners waddled through the gate and past the guard, but he didn’t deign to so much as glance in their direction. Instead, he smiled pleasantly at Gerhard, like a clerk in a haberdashery. Gerhard handed his transfer order to the soldier, who scanned the paper quickly and nodded. The soldier said something to a colleague, who stuck his head out of the sentry box, and Gerhard heard him making a phone call inside the little wooden house. Gerhard watched the prisoners disappear into the camp, and suddenly goose bumps riddled his flesh.
He was asked to wait. He stared at the camp in disbelief. The prisoners looked like corpses. Their striped clothes hung from them as if on clothes hooks. Though he was still outside the camp, the stench filled his nostrils, and he swallowed to prevent himself from throwing up. He couldn’t believe he was going to work in a place like this—that he would, in fact, live in a place like this.
An officer came over to greet him. His gait was self-assured, and he didn’t pay the walking dead any mind. He was a short man, but his girth made up for his stature. His head seemed pressed onto his shoulders as though he had no neck, and his corpulent body bulged beneath his tight-fitting leather jacket. Underneath his arm he held a riding whip with a carved white ivory shaft.
“Senior Assault Leader Edwin Turek,” he said. “Welcome.”
Gerhard’s anxiety had spread to his palm, which was clammy with sweat as he greeted Turek.
Turek was the camp director. He spoke in curt, concise sentences that he fired off at a brisk clip. Since he was clearly used to being obeyed, even regarding the most trivial matters, his pronunciation had grown lazy and the ends of his words vanished somewhere in his mouth. The aggressive barrage of talk, compounded by the smell, made Gerhard woozy.
They entered the camp, and the camp director gave Gerhard a tour, describing the various buildings and their purpose in an animated tone. The camp was in a low-lying marsh area called Vierlande. It was surrounded by a chain-link fence pumped with en
ough electricity to kill a person, Turek explained proudly. The barbed wire made a loud, dry crackle as they walked alongside it.
“Well, well. We got a rat in our trap.” Turek grinned.
Gerhard wasn’t sure if he meant it literally. All he knew was that he would have to get used to this kind of thing, but how was he ever going to do that?
The camp entrance was flanked by the guard building on one side and depots on the other. Just beyond the main gate was a huge, paved courtyard for roll call. The eerily empty space was fenced in with barbed wire that was broken up only by small gates leading to long rows of double barracks. In all there were nine squat, green wooden barracks, which housed around six hundred prisoners per unit. Gerhard could see a gallows with three swaying nooses between some of the barracks. A person was hanging from one of them.
On the other side of the courtyard, there were five sanctuaries, the infirmaries. Vacant faces stared at them from the windows. They looked like mummies—more lifeless even than those he’d just classified as walking corpses. Turek referred to the pale men as Muselmann. He pointed at a red brick building behind the infirmaries.
“That’s where they’re heading. It’s the final station.”
Gerhard eyed the crematorium. A column of smoke plumed from the smokestack.
Turek stopped and faced Gerhard. He looked at him quizzically. “Do you smell that sweet stench?”
There was no way of avoiding the crematorium’s stench. Nausea filled his throat, and he puffed out his cheeks to stifle the unrelenting urge to vomit. He nodded silently.
“It’s the smell of burning people.” Turek started walking once more. “But it’s the right thing to do,” he said as if in apology. “You’ll get used to it soon enough,” he added over his shoulder.
Beyond the crematorium were a number of squat buildings. They made up the Walther-Werke factory, where the prisoners produced pistols and guns for the weapons manufacturer Carl Walther GmbH. Firms like Jastram and Messap also made use of this cheap labor force, loaned to them by the SS. Towering on the camp’s northern end was an enormous tile factory complete with presses, a mashing plant, stoves, and drying facilities. Here they produced bricks that were then transported to Hamburg via the waterway on large barges. At first this had required access to the Elbe River, so the prisoners had dug, by hand, a four-mile long canal connecting Neuengamme with the Elbe. Near the tile factory was a large area with greenhouses and vegetable gardens that supplied the SS camp with tomatoes, turnips, and cabbage. Turek made no secret of the fact that gardening was a popular job among the prisoners, as it gave them the opportunity to steal vegetables. But if they were caught, he groused suddenly, they were killed. As he spoke, he ran his index finger in a slicing motion across his thick throat.
Gerhard noticed the same routine every time they passed an inmate. He would lift his cap, then stand as still as a mouse with his cap at his side, staring at the ground in fright. Over his shoulder, Gerhard watched them hurry away once he and Turek had passed by. The same was true of those to whom Turek spoke. Everyone made sure not to make eye contact with the stocky Obersturmführer, who explained that new prisoners were shaved from head to toe, then given a number. They were handed a set of clothes without concern for size or the condition of the clothes. A colored triangle was sewn or painted onto the clothes to indicate the prisoner’s status in the camp. Red meant political prisoner; green, criminal; black, antisocial; purple, Jehovah’s Witness; and pink, homosexual. Jews wore two yellow triangles that formed a Star of David. International prisoners—and over time there were more and more of these in the camp—were assigned a red triangle.
“Streich!” Turek’s shout cut through the air.
A man in riding pants, tall boots, and a cap was beating a prostrate prisoner with a whip. The lashes made a drawn-out flicking noise. He paused and turned toward the two men.
“This is Franz Streich. He’s the camp senior.” Without waiting for Gerhard’s question, Turek went on: “He’s a prisoner, but he’s in charge of all the others. The barracks leader, the servants, the kapos, and everyone else are under his command.”
Gerhard studied the sewn-on green triangle on the man’s sleeve.
Turek poked the prisoner on the ground with the toe of his boot. “Put him in the chimney when you’re done.”
Streich shrugged and sauntered away.
“On the outside Streich was a murderer,” Turek said, looking Gerhard directly in the eyes. “That’s why he’s here. He’s a murderer in here, too, a real devil. We’re angels by comparison.” He made the sign of the cross. “Even the subordinate SS officers fear him.”
Gerhard closed his eyes for a moment, as though trying to suppress it all. As though his thoughts might somehow find refuge, even if only for a second or two. This place is insane. Quite simply insane. This fat man prances around here as if it were the most natural thing in the world, even displaying professional pride in his work.
“But it’s good to have self-policing among the prisoners. That way we can just lean back, eat, and be merry.” The director patted his belly. They’d returned to the main entrance, and Turek paused outside the largest of the depots.
“Your office is in there.” Turek pointed at the door to the commandant’s barracks.
The door opened right then, and an officer emerged.
“Ah, Dr. Borg. Say hello to our new administrative director.”
Gerhard dutifully uttered his name as he shook the man’s firm hand. He noticed that the doctor, who’d introduced himself as Erwin Borg, had pleasant brown eyes that reminded him of Emma’s.
“Borg, do you have time to show Strangl his new quarters?” Turek asked as he dabbed his mouth with a handkerchief.
“Of course,” the doctor replied.
Inside the camp, separated from the rest by a fence, was yet another camp inhabited by some five hundred soldiers. The troop barracks, garage, workshops, and a bunker surrounded a courtyard that was used, Erwin Borg explained, for military ceremonies and on the anniversary of the march to Feldherrnhalle. The camp personnel consisted primarily of SS members. The commandant, a recently named Sturmbannführer Gerhard had yet to meet, was the camp’s commanding officer; his adjutant, who was in charge of his office, made sure that all orders were followed. In addition there was Turek, a head of the camp’s security detail, a garrison doctor, and a camp doctor. The job of the administrative director, the position Gerhard was to assume, was to oversee all supplies to the camp.
“Make yourself at home, and I’ll come get you when the commandant has returned from Hamburg. Then you can meet him,” the doctor said when they’d reached Gerhard’s new room.
Gerhard nodded silently.
After Borg left, he set his suitcase beneath the window. When he saw the view, he hurriedly closed the curtains. Then he lay down on the bed and began to think. Why was he in this godforsaken place? He hadn’t been forced to come here; it was just that the alternatives had been worse. But how could anything be worse than this? It was impossible to imagine. He had often felt that he didn’t belong, but this time the feeling was especially pronounced. He would never get used to this place, that much was certain. As soon as the commandant returned, he would explain to him that he didn’t belong here, and then he would immediately request a transfer. Any place would be better than here.
Unfortunately it wasn’t possible to return to the transport division because it had been closed. All the unwanted elements—as they’d dubbed the Jews and gypsies—had been eliminated from Hamburg, and the SS no longer needed von Amrath’s department. The SS now needed people in the camps and on the front lines. Those were the options Gerhard and his colleagues had been offered. They had deliberated over them—concentration camp versus war, disease, or famine—at length. He remembered the advice Karl had given him in a short letter: avoid the eastern front at all costs. That was why he had ended up here. Seitz-Göppersdorf and a few of the others had been sent to the camp at Sachsenhausen, but som
eone must have been looking out for Gerhard, because he was sent to Neuengamme just outside the city. He’d felt lucky until he saw the camp. He could think of only one person who deserved to be imprisoned in such a place: Weinhardt.
He didn’t know how much time had passed when Borg knocked on his door.
The commandant’s house was in the middle of the camp. Surrounded by a well-tended hedge, it looked as if it had gotten lost, as if it had turned down the wrong street and should have taken the turn that led to the nice residential neighborhood.
It was an ordinary white house with a raised brick foundation and windows divided by muntins. The garden consisted of a trimmed lawn, a few trees, and some empty flowerbeds. Smoke billowed softly from the chimney.
Gerhard walked up the steps that led up to the front door. Before he could even knock, a tall, slender woman opened the door. He was struck by how attractive she was, and her scent only heightened that impression. She had shoulder-length blond hair that curled a little at the ends, and he caught himself wondering how soft it was; her facial features were pleasantly symmetrical, apart from a black mole beneath her nose. She smiled warmly, and her eyes sparkled as she invited him inside. They passed through a cozily furnished room where two well-dressed children, a boy and a girl, were playing cards.
She guided him to a double door that led to an office where a man sat behind a desk, bent over some papers. When the woman closed the door, the man laid his fountain pen on the table, looked up, and said, “As you can see, I haven’t forgotten you, Mr. Strangl.” He stood now and came around to the other side of the table.
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