War on the Margins

by Libby Cone

  ‘I see.’ He made her turn onto her back; he moved her head back and forth as if she were saying ‘no’.

  ‘Albert, do you think they will deport the Jews? Even now, they cannot work. They are locked in their houses.’

  ‘I don’t know, dear, but I don’t think it’s out of the question. One hears terrible things coming out of Poland.’ He dug into her sternocleidomastoids; she remained tensed up.

  ‘Yes. I know. I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to be locked in my house. I don’t want to be deported. Someone has to help Edmund. He’s having more trouble getting around, you know.’

  ‘No, I didn’t know that. I’d suggest you bring him round here for a massage, but I know what a stubborn old bird he is.’

  ‘Yes, my Edmund is stubborn. Perhaps he shall outlive us all.’ She tensed up more, undoing Albert’s work. ‘At the rate things are going, it might be easy to outlive me.’

  ‘Oh, dear, don’t say such things!’ He stopped massaging and looked at her. Now his eyes were welling up.

  ‘I don’t know what to do, Albert! What if they take me away?’

  He sat her up and looked into her eyes. ‘Mrs Richardson, look at me. I don’t want you to worry like this. I don’t know what is going on these days. The world is so crazy. The jerries are pigs.’ This he said in a whisper. ‘Look, I might be able to help you. Right now, I need you to relax so that you do not make yourself ill. I don’t think anything is going to happen right now. If something does happen, come straight over here, all right?’

  ‘Thank you, Albert! You are very kind!’

  ‘Not at all, Mrs Richardson. Now go home and give my regards to your husband.’

  ‘Thank you!’

  She didn’t skip down the pavement exactly, but her step was lighter and her neck a little looser. Bedane saw another client, then quietly went down the cellar stairs. He stooped to look around with an electric torch; the ceiling was low, but not too low for someone short.

  CHAPTER 35

  St Brelade, Jersey

  Autumn 1942

  During the day Marlene had a light in the cellar, and could take quick trips to the bathroom upstairs. At night, it had to be completely dark. At dusk, if she had ventured upstairs, she would sadly make her way down the stairs with a hard-boiled egg or some bread and cut-up swede and a flask of water, to sit in darkness. She became expert in listening to the footsteps on her ceiling. She could distinguish Suzanne’s slow tread from Lucille’s brisker one. She could hear their muffled voices and those of visitors. Usually, sleep would come early in the evening because of the boredom of sitting or lying in the dark on her camp bed, though she tried to keep awake in order to catch the BBC broadcast at nine. Eventually, she arranged with Lucille and Suzanne for one of them to stamp her foot on the floor a little before nine to wake her for the broadcast. She would slip the earphone in, attach one wire to the nearby water pipe with a tiny clip, and manipulate the cat’s whisker on the little crystal until the voice came in. As before, when planes kept her awake she would listen to the midnight broadcast. She often found herself waking up in the morning with the earphone in place.

  There was seldom a mention of the Channel Islands’ plight; the BBC probably did not want to antagonise the Nazi occupiers. She did not understand many of the things they reported; she still did not know where half the places they mentioned were. When the announcer sounded upbeat and optimistic, that was good enough for her. She was happy to hear another human voice in the darkness, one that spoke the King’s English, one without a barely concealed undertone of panic. It was easy to believe that these announcers knew of her existence. After all, they were also talking to Londoners sitting in bomb shelters and cellars. She kept wondering which was worse, being bombed or occupied. It was like comparing a quick death with a slow one.

  Somewhere in England a late-twentysomething woman like herself was lying in a cellar or a bomb shelter, thinking the same thing. Listening to Charles Gardner, Marlene wondered if she would ever lie in bed with a man and listen to him talk to her. She hugged her lumpy pillow. Lucille and Suzanne had each other; no matter how scared they were, they could talk to each other in bed, make each other chuckle, hug and kiss. Marlene had nobody but the BBC to keep her company in the long awful nights. She shed some tears, but soon stopped. It wouldn’t do any good. If she fell apart, she was doomed. After the broadcast she removed the sandy earphone, put the set away, and flung herself down to sleep.

  But she couldn’t. She had probably been dozing early in the evening with the darkness coming sooner. She lay on the camp bed, covering herself with the thin woollen blanket.

  A tiny scritch-scratching in the corner signalled the presence of a mouse. This would keep her awake for some time; she hated mice, even though she knew she had much worse things to fear. Mice probably had it as good as they ever had; they could find just as much food as before the war. Now humans were living more like rodents, hiding in cellars, eating bits of thrown-away food, scurrying into the darkness. Perhaps one day she would tune in the BBC and hear squeaking and scratching, heralding the complete transformation of the radio audience into another species. Maybe there would be a special programme for people like her, who were suddenly considered Jews. She knew little about being Jewish; her father’s family had not approved of his marriage to her mother, so she had not got to know a Jewish family. She wondered if they had left in the evacuation before the Occupation, or if they had turned into mice like her. If they all made it through the war, would they want to meet her? Were there ways to learn to be Jewish? She knew about the pebble on the gravestone; she also knew they did many things with candles. She shifted on the flimsy bed; the mouse heard her and stopped scratching. She imagined the BBC Mouse Broadcast, telling listeners how to make beds from lint, how to make a meal from a single pea, and reading the poems of terrified Jewish mice who lit tiny candles in cellars while Nazi boots thundered overhead.

  CHAPTER 36

  La Rocquaise, St Brelade

  November 1942

  The chicken was dead; their days were limned by hunger. Upon awakening, weak parsnip coffee and a small quantity of milk and bread. Lunch: Surrealist swede slices and ‘coffee’ or wine, maybe a potato. Dinner: more of the same. Without eggs, without Marlene’s help in the garden, with the necessity of keeping low profiles, Lucille and Suzanne lacked the means to put more on the table. None of their neighbours knew of the Nameless Soldier work. Mary Drummond had been caught and, when they last heard, was being sent to a women’s camp called Ravensbrück. Marlene read the strain on their faces. She listened more intently than ever to the BBC, cheering on the British forces as they fought the Axis, listening in vain for a mention of the Channel Islands. Early in the month, The British Eighth Army had defeated the Germans at El Alamein in North Africa. Bruce Belfridge had sounded very excited on the wireless. Their spirits lifted, Lucille and Suzanne were shortly clacking away on typewriters, readying the news for the jerries in case their commanders were keeping it a secret. But where was the army to liberate Jersey and Guernsey and Alderney and Sark? Why were they never even mentioned on the wireless? She was happy for the denizens of El Alamein, somewhere in North Africa, but what about Jersey? What about all the deportees? The Channel Islands were being hidden in a cellar just as she was.

  One night, she was dreaming of the past. She dreamt of her mother’s fried potatoes, like little pillows, falling open in the centre. She dreamt of garlicky fish and red wine, of yellow butter and white cream on scones, of rich vanilla ice cream. She dreamt of going to the beach in mid-morning, gingerly walking down the red granite stairs to the narrow strip of sand that widened to almost a football pitch by the late afternoon at low tide. She had had an itchy aqua wool swimming costume and an old quilt her mother had made. She would sit on the quilt, often with her friend Alice Chevalier, and read a book or watch the tourists. In cooler weather she and Alice would take their bicycles and ride west to feed the ducks in their favourite little stream in
St Brelade, or watch the seabirds in the bay. On rainy days they would often sit in Marlene’s flat, doing embroidery (‘For my trousseau,’ Alice would say with a dreamy expression) or playing draughts. Eventually, Alice did marry one of her beaus. Marlene seldom encountered her afterwards. As all her friends married, she found herself befriending the next generation of girls at her office. They were fun for a beach day or the cinema, but she found them flighty and shallow, and she suspected they felt she was a drying-up old maid. Invitations to parties became infrequent, which upset her, though she knew she had always been a fifth wheel.

  She was awakened by shouting and frenzied stomping on the floor with what sounded like high heels. She began to shake. Was this the end? Were they all being arrested? Suddenly, Suzanne came tearing down the stairs.

  ‘Marlene! Come up quickly and help us!’

  Marlene leapt up and took the stairs two at a time with Suzanne in the lead. Suzanne frantically pushed her into the bathroom. Lucille was bending over the tub, covered in blood, shrieking. Like a wild animal, Marlene thought, until she saw the pig in the tub. Screaming, squirming, spraying blood, it was trying to get away from the knife-wielding Lucille.

  ‘Merde! Help me do this!’ she shouted above the screams. ‘I don’t know what to do! Marlene, grab its front legs! Suzanne! Get out of the way!’

  Marlene, shaking violently, approached the tub and tried to grasp its front legs, which were slippery with blood. She finally managed to pin the legs awkwardly against the side of the tub. Lucille plunged the knife into the pig’s throat. It stopped screaming, but thrashed violently with a sickening terminal energy. Towels flew, bottles of pills shattered on the floor, Suzanne vomited into the toilet. Marlene felt faint and sat on the sticky floor. The pig finally stopped moving.

  ‘Get up, you two!’ snarled Lucille. ‘I don’t know how to do this. We have to butcher it. I think we have to remove the intestines first.’

  Suzanne straightened up. Marlene started to cry.

  ‘Marlene, cherie. Please get up. We will get everything cleaned up and then we will have meat. I need you to help me.’

  Marlene stood up and looked into the tub. The pig’s blood was slowly going down the drain. She smelled urine and faeces; she was relieved to realise they were the animal’s.

  Lucille took the knife and slit open the belly. Intestines cascaded out.

  ‘Get me a bucket.’

  Suzanne ran out, returned with a bucket that was soon filled with guts.

  ‘These I think we can bury. I don’t think we’ll be making sausage.’

  They ran a cold shower (when had they last had hot water? They couldn’t remember) to wash off the carcass. They skinned it, saving the skin. Fortunately, it was winter, so spoilage was not an immediate concern. They removed the heart, sliced it, and sautéed it with a tiny onion. It was quickly devoured.

  ‘We are like Bacchantes,’ said a recovered Suzanne. ‘I do not care about the blood. I just want to fill my belly.’

  ‘You cared about the blood in the bathroom, cherie.’ They laughed. Then they went back into the bathroom, pulled out the liver, and sautéed it. They ate it standing over the pan. Reinvigorated, they cut up the rest of the pig, wrapped the pieces in writing paper, put them in a wooden box, and set the box outside the back door.

  ‘The dogs will get it!’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘No, they will! Where will we put it? We can’t put it on the roof!’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It will attract too much attention.’

  ‘No, let’s do it!’

  The box was dragged up the stairs, pushed through an opened window onto a flat part of the roof. They eventually ate every scrap of meat, made soup from the bones, rendered the fat, tanned the skin with lye and gave it to Marlene for a blanket.

  CHAPTER 37

  The Underground Hospital Site,

  Jersey

  April 1943

  The Hospital of Death grew underground. Dynamite blew holes deeper and deeper; if a few slaves died inside, there were always more to replace them. The bodies were put into the food trucks, to be taken away after ‘meals’. The distinction between soldiers and Organisation Todt workers was blurry; either could be monstrous or indifferent. None was kind.

  On the other hand, the distinction between Spaniards and other ‘Aryans’, and the Slavic Untermenschen, was usually followed. The Spaniards got some money and were even allowed out of the camp on their two Sundays per month off. They bought and began wearing ridiculous bowler hats to protect their heads from the falling debris. The Untermenschen grew more emaciated. Most used rags to replace their long-ago-worn-out shoes and clothes. It helped to have a Spanish friend.

  Peter and Juancito lifted rocks with raw, bleeding hands into a trolley. They were quite weak, and worked slowly. They husbanded their waning strength in order to last until noontime, when they were given cards redeemable for ‘soup’, which was a joke, but which at least quenched their thirst. In the afternoon they did the same thing until the ‘bread’ and swede that were supper. Those who had not died were marched back to Lager Himmelman.

  Juancito had not recovered from the sight he had witnessed.

  His hands shook frequently, and he often looked to be on the verge of tears. He was at least able to work; Peter saw to that, trying to whisper the odd word of encouragement. This afternoon, he stacked rocks in the trolley in such a way as to fill up a great deal of space with a smaller mass of rocks and gave this to Juancito to trundle out. He was dismayed when Juancito was unable to push the fourth lightened load of the shift.

  ‘I cannot do this shit, camarada. I don’t know what to do.’

  ‘Try again, Juancito.’

  It was obvious Juancito was having trouble. Tears were beginning to form in his eyes.

  ‘I’ll take it. Start breaking up more rocks, and I’ll be back.’

  Peter handed him the hammer, which he knew he couldn’t lift, and started out of the tunnel with the creaking trolley. He did not want Juancito to see his own tears. This man had been a fearless revolutionary, the scourge of the Spanish fascists; now he was being worked to death and struggling to make it through each day of anguish.

  The trolley bumped over a dent in the track; at the same time he heard a muffled thud behind him, followed by screams. He turned to see that the end of the tunnel had collapsed, crushing some immediately and trapping others in the rubble. The light there had been extinguished; he could hardly see in the choking dust but ran towards the screams. He could hear Juancito screaming and crying, ‘Pedro, Pedro, I cannot get out!’ among the other weak and terrified calls for help. Suddenly a bright torch shone from the tunnel mouth; their shadows were cast on the dust in the tunnel; ghosts of ghosts. A loud voice ordered him and the others to halt. Two officers, one carrying a large torch, both carrying pistols, strode forward into the chaos. They ordered those not crushed by the rocks to leave the tunnel at once. One emphasised the order by striking the nearest worker on the shoulder with the butt of his weapon. Peter stood frozen; others did also, listening helplessly to the screams of the trapped men, watching the strange quivering silhouettes in the dust.

  ‘Mach schnell!!’ screamed one of the Germans. He aimed his gun at the man he had pistol-whipped and shot him in the head. The report of the pistol echoed endlessly, drowning out the pleadings of the trapped slaves. The officers ordered the others out of the tunnel, leaving the dead and the trapped behind.

  Peter walked out on shaky legs. He had pissed himself. He was trying not to cry. The group of surviving slaves was turned over to an Organisation Todt worker who made them sit on the ground while he decided what to do with them. Other workers were already arriving to block up the tunnel entrance with timbers and stones. Juancito was dying inside. Peter sat immobile on the ground with the others. Many sobbed; others stared straight ahead, unable to feel any more, waiting with a sickening patience for the next order. The OT worker regarded them all with disgust
.

  Then it was time to go back to the Lager. His group brought up the rear of the column. He began to tremble all over again, but forced himself to march. They were stopped when a convoy of supply trucks crossed their path. Most of the guards went up to the head of the column to greet their comrades in the trucks; one guard remained behind. They were on an unpaved road with trees lining each side. Some part of Peter’s mind was working, thinking of escape. It worked above his anguish and grief, worked away like a pocket watch in his shirt. This part of his mind ticked away as he eyed a filthy piece of canvas, probably an old truck cover, muddied with tyre tracks, on the opposite side of the road.

  Suddenly, the remaining guard in the rear ran halfway up the column of about two hundred to kick a man who had fainted. Peter drifted back to the end of the column. As they began their slow march he stopped walking and then dropped to his knees and crawled to the side of the road where the canvas was, flattening himself out on the ground and pulling the cloth over himself. Some prisoners saw what he was doing, but the guard had not returned. The men trudged on. The dust and soot in the canvas and on the road mixed with Peter’s sweat, urine, and tears to form a sparse mud, the purest distillation of agony. Racked with exhaustion and pain, he somehow fell asleep; the road was seldom used after dark and the ground held much of the warmth of the indifferent sun of that day. When he awoke, he saw that it was dawn. A tall woman with red hair stood over him, nudging him with her foot. She seemed relieved to see that he was alive. In German, she asked him if he was a prisoner.

  ‘Häftling?’

  He nodded. ‘I speak the English a little.’

  ‘Come with me,’ she said. ‘The jerries will be here soon.’

  She extended a hand and helped him to his feet. He wrapped the canvas around him like a shawl, but she took it from him.