by Libby Cone
‘It will draw too much attention.’
She took him by the hand like a child, walked him up towards the crossroads, turned left, then left again into a street of cottages, and hustled him into a small one. He sat down on a chair, uncomprehending, as his hands were washed with a wet rag and a mug of parsnip coffee and a piece of real bread were placed before him. He looked at them.
‘Eat,’ said the woman. ‘It’s all right.’
He ate and drank in a trance, then started to cry. She patted him gently on the shoulder. ‘It was lucky I was up early and saw you. I know what’s been happening at the building site,’ she said. ‘You can stay here with us.’
Her name was Pauline. She was in her mid-twenties. She walked with a slight limp (my vacation in the French prison, she would joke, but sometimes she appeared to be in pain). She shared the house with Dieter, a German deserter who was her lover, and Jenny Viner, an older Jewish lady in hiding. Pauline and Dieter seemed to be active in the Resistance. Peter did not ask questions. He just accepted their food and shelter, sleeping in the cellar at night, sitting in the kitchen with Miss Viner during the day. Miss Viner had registered, but had quickly gone into hiding when she heard some terrifying early rumours. She knew her nerves would not allow her the frequent trips to the Aliens Office and God knew where else to comply with the regulations. She was terrified of being found and exiled, or worse. She had been a teacher in one of the local schools; when Peter was able to speak without crying, and she was not needed by Dieter and Pauline to help draft circulars, she helped him with his English. She would incessantly peek through the blackout curtains and then return to see if anyone had seen her peeking; the lessons suffered as a result. Except for Pauline, they all had hiding places in the house, which had a small garden but was otherwise in plain view of the neighbouring homes. In times of danger Dieter hid under the floorboards in the bedroom he shared with Pauline, Miss Viner lay under burlap sacks in the garden shed and Peter hid in the cellar. Whoever had a wireless wasn’t telling, in case one of them was arrested. Pauline worked in a hotel in St Helier as a maid; she could bicycle without discomfort and set off early most mornings. It had been fortunate that she had found Peter on one of her days off. She was able to pilfer small amounts of food from time to time; many Nazi officers used this hotel, so it was well-stocked from the black market.
Eventually Peter was able to get through an entire day without crying. The terror of what he had witnessed was replaced by the lower-key, constant fear of being found out. This was the usual state of the people in hiding on the Islands; he had rejoined the ranks of the normal.
CHAPTER 38
La Rocquaise, St Brelade
April 1943
Marlene lay on her camp bed. She was listening to the BBC on the crystal set, keeping her head motionless so as not to disturb the tiny cat’s whisker wire pulling in the signal. The Germans were losing in North Africa, and the RAF was bombing Berlin. More than eighty people, some of them Jews, had been sent to internment camps in February. The diphtheria outbreak was almost over. Where were the Americans? Why was she still hungry? Suzanne and Lucille had located a source of rabbit meat at a nearby farm. It was very expensive, and they didn’t have much to barter for it. A small rabbit meat sandwich twice weekly was the three women’s only treat. The rest of the week it was swedes, occasionally beetroot and potatoes, and potato ‘bread’. For months after Marlene’s mother had died, Marlene had felt a large carved-out wound in her heart, an emptiness that was the main component of her body, the rest of her curled protectively around it. Now the emptiness was a little lower, in her stomach. All her activities were devoted to meeting its needs. What activities could she perform? She was a non-person, a cipher on a camp bed in the cellar, a mouse scratching and squeaking.
She shifted in the bed and a different station came in; the faint accent told her it was a German station. They played good music; you just had to ignore the heavy-handed propaganda. She found herself listening to a broadcast for Allied soldiers in Italy, a show called Gerry’s Front, which she had never heard before. She was astonished to hear Bruno and his Swinging Tigers play a Benny Goodman tune, ‘And the Angels Sing’. It had been her mother’s favourite song! It was a Jewish song! Her mother would always stop whatever she was doing and dance around the kitchen, or sitting room, or wherever she happened to be, when that song came on the wireless; she had loved swing. Marlene continued listening, horrified. Once in a while, when her mother was alive, something surprising would happen (an increase in the price of potatoes), or young Marlene would do something naughty, and her mother would say, ‘Your father is spinning in his grave!’ Her mother was, no doubt, spinning in Almorah right now, aghast that filthy Jew-hating pigs were playing her favourite song while her daughter was a mouse in a cellar! What about her father, with his four Jewish grandparents? Marlene couldn’t remember if the song had been around when her father was alive. Was he spinning in his grave in the Jewish section, or was he happy he was dead? Bruno and the Tigers played on; Marlene thought about the lead musician, a trumpeter, who was playing his heart out. It couldn’t possibly be a Nazi; she had heard enough swing, including Jewish-influenced swing, to know a Nazi couldn’t possibly play it that well. Where had that trumpeter come from? One of the camps? She wanted to send something out to him, to say I know you, I know how sick this makes you, at least I’m hearing you too, and I’m Jewish enough to be hiding in a cellar, please, please be all right. She curled herself around her gnawing stomach, her aching heart, and sobbed.
CHAPTER 39
Ritz Hotel, St Helier
10th May, 1943
Tunis was lost. The officers were failing to keep up an optimistic façade; the men noted this as validation of their own fears, their growing disgust. The shining Aryan knights of the Third Reich were so much cannon fodder.
They sat in the mess hall/ dining room of this, their billet, finishing a meal of chicken, swedes and cabbage. Their rifles rested against the chair rail.
He looked around the table at his sullen fellow guardians of Festung Europa - prison wardens, really. An army of prison wardens, a world of prisoners and slaves and the dead. He had had a letter from his mother; his sister had been questioned by the Gestapo back in Hamburg for making ‘remarks’; she could be put in prison at any time.
The silence sharpened his anxiety.
‘Let’s have a drink, shall we?’ he said.
They nodded, and he and several of his comrades rushed to bring whisky bottles out of their various hiding places.
They poured, stood, and turned to face the Führer’s portrait. Nobody moved, no arms raised in salute. Silence thickened in the room. They looked at one another and remained still. From now on they would always refer to events as ‘before the toast’ and ‘after the toast’. Nobody said anything. A full minute passed; they began to chuckle nervously, make as to sit down. Still chuckling darkly over their audacity, they began to drink in silence.
Franzi started to cry.
‘Franzi, was ist loß?’ they asked. ‘Franzi, wer ist die Fräulein!’
But he knew Franzi wasn’t crying over a romance.
‘It’s not a Fräulein. No Fräulein would want me if she knew what I had done in this war. I don’t want to go back to Germany. I couldn’t face my grandma after this.’
He drained his glass.
‘I don’t want to go back, either. I want to live in a decent country, not a place that tells us to hate everybody.’
“They sent my brother to the Eastern Front. I know he is going to die. I hate them.’ More tears.
He spoke up. ‘Do you remember last year, on the Führer’s birthday, that soldier who shot his sergeant-major while he was lecturing on the Führer this and the Führer that?’
‘Yes. Then he shot himself in the lecture hall.’
‘I don’t want to shoot myself. I don’t want to shoot anyone.’
‘Sometimes I want to shoot myself, especially when I see people afrai
d of me.’
‘What are we doing to these people? They’re just town and country folk like our people in Germany. They’re not monsters. They hate us. The whole world hates us.’
He nodded, picked up his glass, drained it, and hurled it at the portrait, shattering the glass in the frame. Wild with hatred and whisky, he picked up his rifle with fixed bayonet and charged the portrait, aiming for the stupid little moustache. Cheering, others followed suit; they threw the shredded picture out of the window.
They had already started setting fire to the furniture when he slipped out through a back entrance.
They found him a couple of weeks later, getting a little sun on the edge of a field. He offered no resistance. They beat him, as he knew they would. Someone smuggled a bottle of water into his cell. Before sunrise the next morning he was taken outside to the back of the prison and a shovel was placed in his hands. He knew what was coming.
He began to dig, slowly and neatly. They let him set the pace. Some tears for his sister, his mother, mixed with the soil, but his hands did not shake. He worked steadily despite the pain in his shoulder. Oddly, he found himself thinking of something he had seen on one of his infrequent visits to church. A woman, her face suffused with devotion, had sung something by Bach, ‘Ich habe genug’ – ‘I have enough’ – the words of the Virgin Mary after her purification following Jesus’s birth. I have enough, he thought; I know that hate-filled monster is not my True Leader, I got a few days of freedom and sun, which is all anyone could ask for. He continued his methodical digging for a couple of hours as gulls soared in the brightening sky. Finished, he straightened up. He smiled at the guard, unnerving him. ‘Ich habe genug,’ he said. The shots rang out. The body, a severed marionette, tumbled into the pit.
CHAPTER 40
St Helier
June 1943
Clifford Orange and his underlings were in constant communication with the Attorney General, the Bailiff, and the Feldkommandantur’s office. Orange kept updating lists of people who had yet to be photographed; he communicated to Aubin about ‘refractory persons’, urging him to get the police involved.
Late in June, word came to him that someone had evaded his search: a Mary Erica Richardson. He vaguely remembered her name, and then, looking up his office diary from the year before, remembered that he had gone to Mrs Richardson’s home in St Saviour to show her the Ninth Order; she had rebuffed him, saying that she was not Jewish, but he had thought that she was, and evidently the Germans thought so, too. He picked up the phone.
On 25 June, Mrs Richardson was helping her husband wash up after lunch. He was now mostly bedridden due to heart disease and arthritis. He was quite alert, though. Edmund knew of her predicament vis-à-vis the Jewish-registration issue. He wasn’t full of advice, but he was ready to help his ‘little Dutch girl’, as he still called her. He thought Albert Bedane’s offer of assistance was very kind, and told her to consider it.
There was a knock on the door and two men burst in. They did not identify themselves; they could have been constables or plainclothes German police, many of whom were fluent in English.
‘Mrs Mary Erica Richardson?’ they shouted. They did not look in the mood to take anything but a ‘yes’.
‘Yes?’ said Mrs Richardson, gripping Edmund’s hands tightly. He said nothing.
‘We are ordered to take you to be photographed.’
They walked over to her and each took one of her arms, not looking at Edmund, who sat, stunned, in bed. She was hustled into the back seat of a car parked outside. The car headed west into St Helier, over to Scott’s on Broad Street, the official Occupation photography studio. Passers-by tried not to look at her directly as she was pulled out of the car, in shock. She stared blankly into the camera as the flash went off. Her two escorts then took her by the arms again.
‘We will take you to the Feldkommandantur at College House.’
She was bundled back into the rear seat and the car roared off with her sandwiched between the two men, going the several blocks east to Bagatelle Road. All this petrol for one person! At College House, she was ushered into a room; a balding man in a well-pressed uniform sat behind a desk.
‘Mrs Richardson,’ he said. He seemed to have a permanent sneer. ‘You had not gone for your photograph. Why is that?’
‘I, uh, I didn’t want to.’
What was she supposed to say? Look at what they were doing to people with just one Jewish relative! She had wanted to stay out of it.
‘You were ORDERED to, Mrs Richardson!’ he brought his fist down on the desk, making her jump. ‘Where were you born?’
This question put her at ease; she was ready for it. I must think of this as a game, she thought.
‘In New Amsterdam, in British Guiana.’
He sat back and looked at her with narrowed eyes. She looked at his hands. He was wearing a wedding ring. I feel sorry for his wife, she thought. He must have a bad temper at home. He stood, went over to the corner, and picked up a globe from its stand.
‘Show me!’
Fortunately Edmund, who had decided on this fictional birthplace, had shown it to her many times on the map. She pointed it out as the officer looked at her coldly.
‘What were your parents’ names, Mrs Richardson?’ he spat.
‘Mary and Howard.’
‘Mary and Howard WHAT?’
‘Mary and Howard Algernon.’
‘We have no record that we can find of a Mary and Howard Algernon in Guiana or in Jersey.’
‘Well, that is what their names were, and they did not live in Jersey. They left Guiana for Holland.’
To keep from peeing in her chair from fright, she tried to imagine him in his pyjamas. They were baggy.
‘Are you a Jewess?’
‘No, I am not a Jewess.’
He seemed to smirk. ‘We have reason to believe you are. Because you did not register as a Jewess, and because you never had your photograph taken, you give us no choice but to deport you.’
Oh, God. Don’t panic.
‘But, my husband is ill... ‘ Albert. I have to see Albert. He can help me; he said he would.
‘That does not matter. You refused to follow the orders of the Feldkommandantur; now you must accept your punishment.’
‘Can I go home and say goodbye to my husband?’
‘Go home and get enough food for forty-eight hours. You will be going on a trip.’
Two different men, clearly Germans, appeared and bundled her into the back seat of a different car.
Back in St Saviour, they escorted her through the front door. She looked at Edmund, sitting up in bed.
‘Edmund, dear, they are taking me away.’ Her lips contorted and let out a sob. She choked, then continued. ‘I am going to get a few things. Maybe you should make some tea for our guests?’
He looked her straight in the eyes, telling her to be strong. ‘Yes, dear, I’ll do that.’
One of the men went to the rear of the flat with her. She took a blanket off the bed, grabbed two frocks and a jumper out of the closet, surreptitiously picked up her dark glasses and her favourite earrings.
‘Tea’s ready!’ Edmund called.
‘I’ll be there soon!’ she called, as if it were an ordinary day. Then she turned to her guard. ‘Would you mind getting the tea and bringing it here? I still have a few things to do.’
He nodded and headed to the front of the flat. As soon as he had left the room, she was at the window. She opened the screen, threw her handbag out of the window and then stepped out herself. She started down the street as if going shopping, but then turned down an alleyway and quickly, using alleys and side streets, made her way to Albert Bedane’s clinic.
It did not take long for the Germans to notice her absence. Furious, they turned to Edmund.
‘Are you Herr Richardson?’ asked one as the other began tearing around the flat, looking in clothes closets.
‘What’s that, boy?’ The captain affected a blank look, allow
ed a little saliva to run out of the corner of his mouth.
‘I said, are you Herr, or, uh, Captain Richardson?’
‘No, not today, son. Today I am Captain Bligh. What do you want?’
‘Where is your wife?’
‘My what? My wife? What do you mean, where is my wife?’
‘Karl, er ist wahnsinnig!) – ‘He is demented!’ – shouted the other man, ‘Komm!)
Karl left the captain’s side and proceeded to go on a fruitless search. Edmund regarded them with contempt as they crashed around the rooms and prayed that they would leave. Finally, they did.
She tried to slow her steps and put on the dark glasses. No one seemed to be following her. When she got to the clinic she went to the back door and knocked hard; thankfully he, and not a nurse, opened it.
‘Mrs Richardson! What happened?’
‘Please let me in, Albert, the Germans are after me!’
‘Come with me,’ he said and grabbed her hand, pulling her down the hall to the basement stairs before anyone else saw them. He opened the door and revealed three rooms with low ceilings that allowed her to stand erect but made him stoop. He showed her a bed, blankets, water, a slop bucket, and brought down some bread. ‘Stay here for now, dear,’ he said. ‘After a while perhaps you can stay in our house next door.’
Mrs Richardson burst into tears, taking his hands and holding them to her lips.
“Thank you, thank you so much!’
He looked embarrassed.
‘It’s all right, dear. I enjoy having a little company. My wife and daughter are back in Devon, with my wife’s family.’
‘But this could get you shot!
‘Well, better be shot for a sheep than a lamb, I always say. I’ll try to get you more food. My clients often pay me in food, you know, so I don’t think you have to worry. My wife’s clothes won’t fit you, but if you know how to sew, I think you might be able to use some of them. I had better get back now, before I’m missed.’