War Brides

by Helen Bryan

  The man fell silent and Bruno waited, silent too. Finally his ears popped, a sign that they were descending. The plane banked and circled over a small island in the midst of an endless expanse of water. The ground was dusted with snow. The man looked out of the window, smiling, craning his neck for the sight of the plane bringing the man to be exchanged for him and take him back to Germany. He was vain and longed to know how the British gauged his importance. A crudely marked landing strip ran the length of the island, but otherwise it was bare and deserted save for rocks, a few pine trees, and a hut. No other aircraft.

  “So we’re first, and they’re late,” he muttered, “which is discourteous, but the bad weather explains it, no doubt.”

  Still Bruno said nothing.

  The Norseman bumped hard as it hit the ground and taxied down the runway to a stop. The prisoner peered again at the bare, empty island and then at the sky. The pilot and copilot got up and stretched. The pilot opened the door, and a blast of freezing air swept in. The pilot and copilot stood on either side of the open door, waiting. “Come on. This way.”

  The man looked at Bruno, the pilots, and the guard. “But the other plane is not here. Where is it?” he demanded. No one said anything. He looked from one to the other. Slowly realization of why he was there dawned on him. His face crumpled in disbelief and shock. The blood drained from his face and his lips formed “No!” but he didn’t say it.

  Instead he turned to Bruno again. “May I have a cigarette?” It sounded like an order.

  Bruno took the packet of Players from his breast pocket, opened it, and tapped one out. The man raised manacled hands to take it. They shook only slightly as Bruno struck a match.

  They all waited in silence as the man smoked. He finished the cigarette and ground the butt under his heel. “I am ready,” he said, standing up straight. The military guard led him down the steps of the plane, and the pilot and copilot walked on either side of him, heading for the clump of pine trees next to the water.

  Bruno followed them down the steps, stretched, and stamped his feet in the cold. He had been present at the prisoner’s interrogation and knew that he deserved what was about to happen. He thought of his mother and the Josephs, the hell they must be enduring. If they were alive. Of Lili and Klara, just a few years older than Johnny, wherever they were. What if Johnny and Anna…no, he could not bear to think of his children in Lili and Klara’s situation.

  That was the reason he could do his job. He had escorted a dozen enemy agents to this bleak island for the same purpose. The next time he came here, how he hoped it would be with whoever sent those clear weather reports to the Germans.

  A volley of shots echoed in the cold silence. The military guard and the pilots returned without the prisoner. They nodded to Bruno. “It’s done.” Briskly they refuelled the plane from the supply in the hut and, with the propellers whirring, turned it to face down the narrow runway. The little aircraft gathered speed and, at the last possible moment, lifted, up and over the bare rocks, climbing slowly. Bruno thought of his mother and the Josephs in some German work camp, wishing he could believe that today’s act of justice would help them.

  22.

  A Training Camp,

  January 1942

  From below no one could see the two men standing in the rain on the castle battlements. They were looking through field glasses, observing the new recruits, who had spent the morning practicing with explosives and now were being put through commando training. They were taking it in turns to recover heavy containers, the kind that would be dropped behind enemy lines with ammunition and equipment, from the icy waters of the lake that had once supplied the castle with fish.

  Both men’s glasses paused on the same recruit. “Ah, Miss Falconleigh!” exclaimed one. “Tudor will be furious, of course, when he finds out. Where does he think she is? And how is her training coming along?”

  “He thinks she’s in Reading on a Land Girl Welfare Committee. Her reports are excellent, and the training’s going very well,” said one, watching a slim figure slithering beneath a muddy hedge. He sounded rather pleased. “Surprising aptitude for it, though you wouldn’t think it to look at her, pretty little thing like that. If they send her behind enemy lines they’ll make her plainer with dowdy clothes and a country girl’s shoes. She convinced us of how useful that might be.”

  “The most unlikely people have a talent for this sort of work. You’d never think it to meet her in the street, but she’s not afraid to handle weapons and runs well. Quick mind too. Observant and keen to do something active.”

  “Fortunately she’s matured a bit since the first interview, but we’re still concerned that she’s a bit young. And she struck us as a bit…a bit…”

  The other man smiled. The first speaker had been the “little man” of Frances’s first interview. That he had committed himself to a pretty girl for a brace of pheasants was a standing joke in the organization.

  “Tudor had quite a time with her. Dreadful school reports! Ringleader, troublemaker, expelled from everywhere. Scandalous photographs in the broadsheets as a debutante. Unsuitable escorts, arrested for madcap pranks…”

  The first man nodded complacently. “Her type is out for adventure. But she has intelligence, determination, and speaks perfect French. Just needs to learn a bit more self-discipline, how to take orders, that kind of thing. She wants a posting to France, but we decided not to send her yet. She’s our youngest recruit, a bit of a firecracker, might get overenthusiastic, endanger other agents on the circuit. The Old Man decided she needs a longer probationary period, so we’ll assign her to the southern Auxi mission after her mock exercise, see how she gets on. She went to Wiltshire for Auxiliary Unit training. Booby traps, sabotage. More explosives. She’s got a cool head, kept her nerves steady.”

  “I hope her hands are equally steady. Auxi Units use those sticky bombs, God help them. Awkward things, enough nitroglycerine to stop a tank, but hard to detonate through the metal cover. Regulars won’t touch ’em.” He thought for a minute and added, “Ought to suit Miss Falconleigh, though.”

  “She’ll go to Beaulieu for the final leg of wireless training, then home for her mock exercise we assign all recruits for their final test. Jerry has plenty of help from this side of the channel, and the Old Man’s worried about whoever is helping the German pilots with their navigating. Not sure how. Perhaps lights in the blackout. Another bugger is sending weather reports to the Luftwaffe on the French coast, signalling the all clear for a raid. Haven’t found him—or her—yet either, but when I think what he’s responsible for, I’d gladly shoot him myself. We call him Manfred. The Auxis down there are looking, but Manfred could be a whole cell, or just one German agent who slipped in.”

  “So you plan to send her back to Sussex to help look for Manfred?”

  “Wouldn’t go quite as far as that. Doubt there’s anything suspicious in Crowmarsh Priors. It’s too small…but still, it’s in a sensitive location, close to the Coastal Defense Zone. They say Lord Haw-Haw has a nephew in Brighton, and the Nordic League always had a lot of sympathizers among the county families down there. Before the war a lot of the country house set there had German friends, Nazi connections. We’re keeping a close watch on them, but nothing has turned up to suggest they’re active fifth columnists. But even if they aren’t personally involved, Intelligence is worried about what mischief their German pals might have got up to before the war, information they might have collected about the area, possible landing places, and so on. ‘Off for an afternoon walk, old chap, just take my camera, amateur photography, so jolly.’”

  “We’re assigning Miss Falconleigh to practice her surveillance skills at the de Balfort place, Grace-something-or-other, for her mock exercise.”

  “She been told yet?”

  “Not yet. As I said, she expects to be posted to Europe. But the Old Man says she should carry on as normal for the next few months, keep her eyes open and report anything that seems a bit off. Something�
��s decidedly fishy down there, and you never know, she might turn up something.”

  The first man exhaled. “If the Auxis do find Manfred, he ought to be taken alive for questioning, of course, but it may not be possible. Anyway, he’s likely to be a nasty piece of work, and he’ll know what the stakes are. So, lessons in silent killing tomorrow. A few tricks from the Shanghai Police.”

  “Jolly good. From what I’ve seen so far, I think she’ll like that almost as much as the sticky bombs. What about parachute training?”

  “In a few months, just in case we have to drop her in France sooner than planned…” He didn’t finish the sentence. The other nodded. And neither mentioned what they both knew: that when a female SOE operative behind enemy lines was betrayed, arrested, or killed, they had to be ready with her replacement. A trained Auxi like Miss Falconleigh could be held in reserve against just such an eventuality.

  23.

  Auschwitz, March 1942

  On good days after work, the guards did not set the dogs on anyone for sport or choose a prisoner to run to death. Instead they drove the inmates back into the compound and tossed in a few loaves of stale bread for them to fight over. Icy winds blew through the cracks in the walls, and the prisoners lay hungry and shivering in their bunks, trying to hang on to life and the last vestiges of their humanity. Some achieved this by retreating into their past lives. For others a happy memory provided them with a respite from hell, but for more it intensified the horrors of their existence.

  Dr. Joseph was one of those who sought escape in his only comfort, that all three of his children were safe in England. He told the story over and over. His eldest daughter was married to a good man, a professor, who had taken her to Britain and safety. He had put his younger children, twin girls, on the Kindertransport and sent them to Britain too, where they lived with that sister, who had always been like a little mother to them. The twins had missed their train in January 1939 through illness but, thank God, they had recovered and by a miracle he had managed the impossible by getting another place on a train that left in the summer of that year. His children were together and safe.

  He dwelt on that to stop himself thinking of his wife in the women’s block. He caught a glimpse of her now and then, her shaved head and gaunt cheeks…he remembered how she had looked on the day he proposed, then on their wedding night, as a pretty young matron in a coat with a fur collar and muff made by Frau Zayman, smiling down at five-year-old Tanni.

  Poor Frau Zayman had been ill with pleurisy, coughing and feverish in the sealed railway car en route to the camp. There had been nothing to eat or drink, and she had not been able to lie down. She had breathed her last crushed into a corner.

  A man who had failed to get places on the Kindertransport for his own children wept. A new prisoner inquired politely if the married daughter had children yet.

  “We heard that my Tanni was expecting,” said Dr. Joseph, dreamily, “just before we were taken away. The baby will be three this summer. We do not know whether it is a boy or a girl.”

  “Congratulations,” several men whispered in the darkness from the crowded bunks. “May the mother and the baby be well and the baby have a long and distinguished life.”

  “Ah, to know your children are together in England, safe, with enough to eat and learning, even playing, perhaps. Milk. Sunlight. It must be a great comfort,” another man murmured. It was unimaginable here.

  Not all of the camp prisoners were lying in their bunks, despite the late hour.

  A work detail was awake in another building, this one brightly lit, where the doctor was still at work. His archrival, Ernst Schafer, had failed in his expedition to Tibet to find a lost tribe of pure Aryans, and now the doctor’s eugenics program had finally been given the go-ahead. It was a great coup for him. He had always thought that Schafer’s theory was rubbish, but so long as Himmler had taken an interest, it had gotten the man out from under the doctor’s feet. When Himmler had finally lost patience with Schafer he had looked to the doctor’s experiments as the best means of assuring the supremacy of the Aryan race.

  But the program was not producing results as quickly as he had promised, Himmler was increasingly impatient, and the doctor was increasingly worried that he was no closer to satisfying Himmler’s demands. For the time being he procrastinated, hiding behind “procedures” and “evaluations,” recording every detail of the experiments in his old-fashioned handwriting, then drawing up specific, lengthy criteria for the next. He insisted that patience and precision would pay off, and it was now a matter of selection of specimens. But the answer had eluded the doctor—so far.

  Meanwhile he kept assuring Himmler that, given a little more time, his proper scientific methods, not madcap adventuring schemes, would achieve the desired result. His aim was beautifully simple: to establish scientifically the preconditions for giving birth to twins, which would enable German women to reproduce twice the number of babies. Aryan reproduction would double at the same time as inferior non-Aryans were eliminated. The doctor hinted to Himmler of the vast breeding camps he envisaged, stocked with carefully selected Nordic women, mothers of the pure master race that would fulfill Germany’s destiny, all bearing two perfect children at a time. So efficient!

  The Fuhrer himself was taking a keen personal interest in the project.

  But hints and promises had to be fulfilled. The pressure was mounting, and the anxious doctor had considered expanding the research to triplets and even larger multiple births, before concluding reluctantly that the undoubted efficiency of such births was outweighed by the risk of weakening the Aryan genes by spreading them too thinly among several babies. Twins were the safest bet. In any case there was a shortage of triplets and other multiple births in the camp on which to conduct satisfactory experiments.

  Tonight the doctor was just finishing. The teenage Gypsy boys, fine healthy specimens and identical twins, lay dismembered on the bloody operating table. The doctor pondered the number of differential tests he had made, comparing how the systems of identical twins dealt with toxic substances, whether one had superior resistance, and so on. He would write up the results in his usual meticulous way once he had examined the organs, but he felt a faint anxiety as to whether he had been able to establish any important new criteria before the specimens had died. Perhaps if he used anaesthetics they would have lived a little longer, which would have allowed him to conduct a wider range of tests.

  He needed to look at what “identical” meant from a different angle. He frowned, thinking, while he scrubbed his hands and changed his bloodstained white coat, leaving the inmate doctors to dispose of the mess. Four thin prisoners in lab coats shuffled forward. When the trains of deportees arrived, doctors were ordered to step forward. They always did so voluntarily, expecting to be assigned medical care of the prisoners. Instead they were put at the doctor’s disposal. They were less trouble and more efficient than ordinary prisoners when they cleaned his laboratories, but more than one had responded badly to his refusal to waste anaesthetics on experiments. One had even killed the specimens. The guards had dealt promptly with him as an example to the others. The doctor sighed over the wasted experiment.

  Perhaps a fresh approach to twin births…he had had a supply of twins made available to him, mostly Jews, culled from displaced persons’ camps and ghettos, schools and hospitals, in every country Germany occupied. The subjects were housed in a special children’s wing of the camp. The supply of twins, however, had now dwindled to nothing, and the majority had been boys. What he needed were twin girls, to study the development of their reproductive organs.

  Then he had a brainwave. It occurred to him that it would be valuable to conduct experiments on the parents of the twin child specimens. Though this presented him with another practical difficulty: the twins in the children’s house had been separated from their parents before they arrived at the camp.

  He felt slightly squeamish about conducting experiments to benefit Aryans using Jewish specime
ns, but even Jews, wily as they were, weren’t smart enough to foil conclusions reached through proper scientific methods.

  The doctor turned to his assistant. “We have reached the next stage in the research, and for that I require twin female children and their parents. It is a matter of the highest priority. Extra bread for any prisoners who can identify parents of female twins.”

  One of the inmates cleaning the experiment room raised his eyes. “Bread,” he whispered to himself. He thought of his fellow prisoner Dr. Joseph, whose bunk was below his. Dr. Joseph had not stepped forward when all the doctors had been ordered to do so.

  The inmate had been arrested at the same time and almost on the same street as Dr. Joseph and his wife. Out of kindness he had not told Dr. Joseph that he knew the June train bearing Dr. Joseph’s twin daughters had not reached Britain before the Germans invaded Poland and war was declared. He knew that because his own son had been on it, and, he had thought, safe in Britain, like Dr. Joseph’s daughters, until, to his horror, his son had appeared in the men’s block at Auschwitz. At Gurs they had selected the men and boys for deportation first, sent them to Drancy, then finally on the cattle car to Auschwitz, the boy had told his anguished father. Two months later his son had died of pneumonia, aged twelve.

  In the unlikely event that Dr. Joseph’s twins had been so fortunate as to reach England, then they were beyond the reach of the Germans until the invasion, when their fate would be sealed. If they had not and were still alive, they must still be in Gurs unless they were already at Drancy. There would be records, of course. The Germans were meticulous.