Nocturne

by Diane Armstrong

  She was a widow when the war broke out, and was proud that her sons were fighting for the Fatherland. Ernst had joined the Luftwaffe while Friedrich had become an officer in the Wehrmacht. While they were away, the local authorities started rounding up the local Jews and taking them away. One night, Dr Hermann came to see her, white-faced. His wife was Jewish. Would the baroness hide her and their daughter? The following night, the Jewish estate manager brought his wife and two small children. By the end of the week, she was hiding eight Jews in the cellar.

  ‘I love my country and believed that the Führer was building a better Germany,’ she said, fingering the gold cross around her neck. ‘I thought Dachau was a place for criminals, but when Jewish people I knew were rounded up, beaten and deported, I knew something was wrong. So when they came to me for help, I couldn’t turn them away. I prayed for guidance and God gave me the strength to do it.’

  Whether it was the surly housemaid who was envious of her employer’s wealth, or the self-righteous cook trying to ingratiate herself with the local Gestapo chief, she never found out. But late one night she was woken by someone banging on the heavy oak door. Two Gestapo officers pushed past her with the flat unseeing stare of dead fish, and started searching the house. Soon she heard screams and scuffles as they dragged the fugitives outside at gunpoint. When she pleaded with them to leave the children at least, they warned her to watch out or she’d be arrested for harbouring Jews.

  ‘I didn’t know we were waging war on our own women and children,’ she retorted.

  They grabbed her, drove her to the station and kept her in a damp cell for a week, threatening to send her to Dachau to teach her a lesson. They only released her because of her position in the village, and the fact that her sons were fighting for the Reich. But every few days Gestapo agents turned up — ostensibly to search the castle but really to threaten her.

  When Friedrich came home on leave from the Eastern front, he was shocked to hear that his mother had been terrorised. From his strained white face, she sensed he was brooding over something, until one evening he told her what he had witnessed in some Ukrainian villages.

  ‘I enlisted to be a soldier to defend the Fatherland, not to supervise death squads that shot women and children,’ he told her. She still shuddered at the recollection of the massacres in the forests he had described.

  The following morning he had visited the Gestapo chief to complain about the way his mother had been treated, and filed a report to the authorities about the carnage he’d witnessed on the Eastern front.

  She paused and stared past Adam as she fiddled with her cross. A few days after Friedrich’s return, there was a military parade in town, which he had attended. Late that afternoon, there was a knock on her door.

  ‘Gnädige Frau,’ the uniformed policeman said, clicking his heels. ‘There has been an accident. Unfortunately your son was run over. We took him to the hospital but it was too late.’

  Something seemed to be stuck in her throat. She stopped speaking and stared at her hands.

  ‘But you don’t think it was an accident,’ Adam said.

  She shook her head. ‘The Gestapo killed him. He was making a nuisance of himself, with his complaints and stories of what was going on in the east.’

  After a long silence, Adam asked, ‘What about your other son?’

  ‘Ernst’s plane crashed over Britain early in the war. I pray for him every night.’

  ‘You’re risking your life having me here.’

  ‘A risk is better than a sin,’ she said. ‘I talk to God every night and listen to what he tells me. I also listen to Dr Hermann. He says there’s a camp not far from here, like Dachau, where they do terrible things. I’m too old to close my eyes and pretend it has nothing to do with me. I can’t allow others to mould my thoughts any more.’

  She looked at him with a steadfast gaze. ‘When I found you hanging upside down in that tree, I made a pact with God. If I looked after you like my own son, He would bring my son home to me.’

  The light had gone, night fell, and they sat in the dark, unwilling to break the silence.

  ‘From what I’ve seen, God doesn’t always keep his part of the bargain,’ Adam said.

  She sighed. ‘That’s a risk I’m prepared to take. It looks as though the war will end soon, so I’ll find out.’

  She was about to go out of the room but turned back and took something from the pocket of her apron. ‘I had to burn your uniform, but I found this inside your shirt.’

  It was the cigarette case.

  Fifty-Eight

  As the jeep lurched and jolted over potholes and craters, past abandoned trucks, overturned tanks and burnt-out cannon, along a road jammed with lorries, carts and barrows that May morning, Judith felt as if every bone in her body was being dislocated. After a time, she gave up trying to brush off the grit or smooth down her hair. She had wanted to make a good impression but resigned herself to arriving bedraggled, dusty and windswept.

  The driver turned off the main road into a region of sturdy farmhouses and neat fields. Occasionally the clouds parted to allow shafts of sunlight to slant over the countryside of Lower Saxony with its picture-book villages and baroque churches.

  The light shining on the mullioned windows of an imposing mansion above the road caught Judith’s eye and she pointed to the stone turrets.

  ‘That’s Schaffenburg Castle,’ the driver said. ‘They say the owner’s a bit of a recluse.’

  Birds twittered and whistled from the branches of beech, spruce and birch trees and the air had the bracing scent of pine trees. The war in this part of Germany was over and, as they drove on, Judith’s thoughts turned to Adam. It was four months since they’d seen each other. Determined not to consider the possibility that something had happened to him, she assumed he had dropped her, to use Nancy’s blunt phrase. She wasn’t surprised. Often when they had been out together, she had seen him eye attractive women, and marvelled that he’d been interested in her at all. But it made her angry to think that he had used her when it suited him and now he’d probably found someone else. Nancy had been right all along. What she had been naïve enough to interpret as deep affection had probably been no more than lust.

  Shortly after their last meeting, she had received a brief letter from Stewart, with a German postmark. She was relieved to know that although he was in a POW camp, he was being well treated. But where was Adam? She reread the letter, searching for some clue, something hinted at or concealed, but found nothing. She supposed their plane had crashed but why hadn’t Adam written? She made desperate calls to the RAF but courteous voices told her that they had no information.

  Uncertainty and dread gnawed at her. The only man she had ever wanted, the only one who had ever cared about her, had disappeared without a trace. She often dreamed about him and woke in despair when she realised that the warm caress she had felt on her skin had been created by her hungry mind.

  She was too restless to stay in London, and, when she read a notice that the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) was looking for nurses to work in the hospital that had been set up in a death camp recently liberated by the British army, she applied at once.

  She spent hours at the UNRRA office in Portman Square attending interviews and undergoing a barrage of tests, but when she hadn’t heard back from them for weeks, she had come to the conclusion that her qualifications and personality must be deficient. Then, out of the blue, she received a call from the director. She had been appointed matron of the hospital.

  That night she had dreamed about Adam again. She was walking through a wintry landscape, past trees pillowed with snow, when she looked up and to her astonishment saw him sitting on a branch high in a tree. When she asked what he was doing there, he gave her that crooked smile and said, ‘Waiting for you.’ Judith had no time for psychics, clairvoyants, theosophists or Madame Blavatsky’s pseudo-mystics, but, for the first time since his disappearance, she woke feeling comforted.<
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  The jeep passed forests that were solid and impenetrable, so different from the pale, airy Australian bushland she knew, and, as they drove along, she imagined shadowy shapes slipping among the dark trees. These were the menacing forests of the Brothers Grimm where wolves preyed on small girls and witches lay in wait for innocent children.

  Don’t let your imagination run away with you, she chided herself. It’s just a forest.

  But knowing what had taken place nearby made it difficult to shake off a sense of evil.

  Past the forest, they bumped over the cobblestones of a little Saxon town whose houses had half-timbered façades and flower boxes filled with bright geraniums. These villagers must have watered their geraniums, tended their fields and prayed in their baroque churches while only three kilometres away, trainloads of men, women and children were being starved, tortured and killed.

  As they approached the camp, a strange odour, sweet and putrid, hung in the air. She pulled a face. ‘What on earth is that?’

  The driver took a few moments to reply. He had been part of the British anti-tank regiment that had liberated the camp four weeks before, and knew that what he had seen would haunt him for the rest of his life. He looked at the woman beside him. She had no idea what she was letting herself in for.

  That was also Judith’s reaction when they reached the camp and she saw the burnt-out huts, the mountains of boots and shoes, and the pyramid of ashes beside the tall chimney. The visions they conjured up were all the more powerful for being imagined. She felt she should offer a prayer for those who had died here in such filth and inhumanity, but the words stuck in her throat. It made no sense to pray to a God who had looked down on these atrocities and been powerless or unwilling to prevent them. She straightened her shoulders. God was derelict in his duty but she wouldn’t be. Her job was to look after the living and there were thousands of walking skeletons too weak to move or feed themselves. The sooner she got going, the better.

  Fifty-Nine

  Judith pushed the typewriter carriage back so vehemently that the machine almost toppled off her desk. Unrolling the sheet of paper, she reread her letter. It was more fiery than the previous ones but she’d given up being diplomatic. In the month since she had taken over as matron, she had sent dozens of tactful, pleading letters that had resulted in promises and prevarications but no action. Now she was demanding that UNRRA send the British nurses that they had promised, not ‘as soon as possible’ but immediately. Thankfully she no longer had to beg for soap, but she desperately needed more drugs, sterilisers, splints and bed-pans.

  She threaded the paper back into the machine and added a biting postscript. She appreciated their faith in her ability to establish a hospital for three thousand desperately ill patients, but her healing powers would be vastly improved with medication, disinfectant and thermometers.

  Until the British nurses arrived, she’d have to manage with the German ones. They were clean and efficient but lacked empathy with the patients, who complained that one lot of Nazis had been replaced with another.

  She set aside the letter. The truck would soon arrive to collect the bodies and she had to record the names and details of patients who had died that day.

  With its Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, Russians, Romanians and Slovaks, the hospital resembled the Tower of Babel. Her best interpreter was Anna Silbermann, a diminutive Polish doctor who spoke five languages. It was Anna’s skills that Judith needed now to check the details she’d recorded about the dead patients. The nurse who had informed her that one of the pulmonary tuberculosis cases had died spoke very little English, and Judith’s German was too basic to be reliable. She closed the ledger, switched off the lamp, locked the door behind her and went in search of her interpreter.

  Dr Silbermann was leaning over an elderly man, listening to his heartbeat. When she saw Judith approaching, she shook her head. ‘His wife died yesterday,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t want to go on living.’

  Judith looked at her with interest. ‘Do you believe people can die of a broken heart?’

  ‘Hearts don’t break,’ Anna said. ‘They harden.’

  Something in her tone warned Judith to drop the subject.

  Back in her office, she pulled out the report and Anna pointed out some spelling errors.

  ‘I’ll never get all those sz’s and cz’s right,’ Judith said. ‘Polish must be the most consonant-heavy language in the world.’

  Anna lapsed into a preoccupied silence.

  ‘You try to keep everyone alive, Matron, but deep inside we’re already dead.’ Her voice sounded dull and remote. ‘I died in Auschwitz two years ago. What you see is a machine that keeps pumping from habit.’

  After Anna had gone, Judith sat for a long time without moving. Probably most of the people in her care had gone through experiences that could add volumes to the annals of human cruelty and suffering. She might succeed in patching up their bodies, but doubted whether their psychological scars would ever heal.

  She had to get some air. On her way out, she passed one of the female wards and looked inside. Three of the patients were sitting on a bed, chatting as they bent over their sewing. Curious to see what they were doing, she walked towards them and saw that they were stitching lengths of blue material. They were Slovakian and spoke no English, so the conversation took place in mime. She pointed to the material and spread her hands in an inquiring gesture, and they laughed and indicated that they were making skirts. They didn’t seem to understand that she was trying to find out where the material had come from. It wasn’t until she walked away that it struck her. They were cutting up the mattress covers. Her initial reaction was anger. With all the thieving that went on in this place, what they needed was a detective, not a matron. The previous week she had been horrified to discover that thousands of sheets donated by American corporations were missing, probably stolen by the staff. As though she hadn’t enough to do, she now issued requisition slips for the linen so the girls had to come to her every morning and sign for the sheets before changing the beds.

  And now the patients were pilfering what was left of their dwindling store of bed linen to make clothes. Standing in the hospital forecourt, breathing in the cool night air, Judith felt her anger evaporating as she smiled to herself. These women, who only three weeks earlier had been more dead than alive, still cared enough about their appearance to raid cupboards and sew new clothes. Their entrepreneurial spirit was probably more therapeutic than any medication.

  Light rain fell the following morning, and, seated at her desk, Judith watched the raindrops threading down the window. She was waiting for Frau Wohlberg, the housekeeper, to tell her that she needed to keep a closer watch on the German and Hungarian cleaners. They made an exaggerated show of scrubbing and polishing whenever she appeared, but lounged around smoking and gossiping the minute her back was turned.

  There was a knock on the door. She looked up, expecting to see the housekeeper, but it was one of the nurses.

  ‘There is a woman here. She wants work,’ she said.

  ‘Can’t the housekeeper deal with it? I can’t interview every kitchen maid myself,’ Judith said.

  ‘Ja, but Frau Wohlberg is talking to the cook, and the woman wants to see you only.’

  Judith sighed. ‘All right, send her in.’

  The door opened and a young woman entered, holding two children by the hand.

  Sixty

  As soon as the news of Germany’s surrender was announced, the foreman had opened the factory gates and told the Polish slave labourers that they were free to leave. Within a few hours, the guards and officials had slunk away like rats, terrified of capture and execution by the Russians. Elzunia was dazed. The end of the war was such a huge, long-awaited moment, but she seemed incapable of grasping its significance. The war was over, she kept repeating to herself as though repetition might create the exhilaration she wanted to feel. She was free. But free to do what?

  While the other women danced around the
factory floor, hugging and kissing each other, she had sat in the kitchen trying to collect her thoughts. Herr Schnabel, who was packing up his implements in preparation for departure, watched her from across the room.

  ‘What will you do now?’ he asked. ‘Where will you go?’

  She shook her head. The moment she had dreamed of for so long had caught her unawares.

  He thrust his meaty hand into his pocket and pulled out a wad of banknotes. ‘Here, take this,’ he said gruffly. ‘You’ve earned it.’

  He was still looking at her. ‘You could come and keep house for me. You’ll be safe there, you and the children. The roads aren’t safe for women any more, with those Russian bastards prowling around.’

  She almost laughed. After all the atrocities the Germans had committed over the past six years, he was warning her to beware of the Russians. She thanked him for the offer but shook her head.

  He sighed. ‘I will prepare food for your journey,’ he said, and before she had time to reply he was already slicing smoked ham and cutting wedges of cheese and packing them into a basket.

  Although the war was over in this part of Germany, the situation in Poland was still unclear. She’d heard that in some areas the fighting was still continuing, while in others there were skirmishes, ambushes and sniper attacks. There were rumours that the communists were now in control, and anyone who had taken part in the Uprising was regarded with suspicion. She didn’t know what to do.

  ‘You are nurse, ja?’ the chef was asking.

  He told her that his niece Ulli was working in a hospital that the British had set up in the grounds of some camp or other in Saxony. Ulli hadn’t finished her training but they were short of nurses, so they’d taken her on. ‘Maybe you could get a job there,’ he suggested, then added, ‘At least you’ll be safe from the Russians. But it won’t be easy work like here, mind you. Ulli says that the matron is like a prison commandant.’