by Sarah Rayne
‘Come with us,’ said one of them, taking her arm and pulling her across the concrete quadrangle where roll-call always took place.
Alice was extremely frightened, but she said, coldly, ‘I prefer to walk,’ and brushed off their hands. ‘Where are you taking me?’
‘To the commandant’s office.’
‘Why?’
‘Those are our orders.’
The rain-sodden concrete yard and the rows of people blurred, and there was the feeling of something huge and oppressive pressing down on the top of her head, making the blood pound painfully against her eyes. Satan, leather-winged and cloven-hoofed, finally fastening his arms around her? Time for the reckoning, my dear…Don’t be ridiculous!
Inside the commandant’s office the SS guards gave the sharp, heel-clicking German salute, and then went out, leaving Alice alone. The sound of the door closing brought a panic-filled claustrophobia, but she was determined to show no fear. Remember the Let’s Pretend game, Alice…? Remember how you fooled everyone by being Lucretia, and remember how you invoked the old game for the film-makers. When I was a King in Babylon and you were a Christian slave…And now I’m a Christian in a Jewish concentration camp, but the burden of the song’s the same. Fool them, Alice. Play the pretend-game. All right, here I go.
On this note she raised her eyes and looked about her. The office was warm and well-lit, and there was a carpet on the floor and books on the walls. Books, warmth, comfort. Oh God, what wouldn’t I give to have such things back in my life! But one day I’ll be back in the real world and I’ll have them again.
Through a partly open door was a small, rather sparsely furnished bedroom, where the commandant sometimes slept if a new batch of prisoners was due in the early morning, or if there was to be a visit of inspection by some Reich official or important Party member and he wanted to be on hand. Alice could see the bed and a washbasin with soap and towels. Hot water. Scented soap. I’m not bearing this, she thought. I’m exhausted and I’m permanently hungry and I’m bone-cold all the time. I’m wearing this appalling sacking garment and my hair has been shorn to keep it free of lice, and for the past six months the only washing facilities I’ve had are cold water in a stone trough, and a bar of lye soap shared with twenty others.
I will do anything to get out of here…There is nothing I would not do…
The words sang through her mind like a litany, like a prayer or a curse, and at last she looked properly at the man standing by the desk. Buchenwald’s commandant, SS Colonel Karl Koch. He had mean little eyes, set deep into a rather coarse-grained face, and his neck was too thick for the sharply-cut SS uniform.
The little squinty eyes inspected Alice, and after a moment, Karl Koch said, ‘First I should tell you that I know who you really are.’ His voice was discordant and unpleasant, but Alice did not detect any especial mockery.
She said, non-committally, ‘Do you, indeed?’
‘I have seen two of your films, baroness,’ he said. He used the title as if he believed it perfectly genuine. ‘For me it was a great pleasure.’
‘Thank you.’
‘So, I think that for you, life inside Buchenwald must be harsh.’
‘Yes, it is a hard and cruel place, this,’ said Alice after a moment. Her mind was working at a furious rate. He knew about Lucretia. More to the point, he believed in Lucretia. Was this something she could turn to her advantage?
‘Well, some things are unavoidable, I fear,’ said Koch. ‘I think it is six months now since you were brought here, yes?’
‘Yes.’
‘So. I have been thinking that there could be a way to soften things for you, and I have a small proposition to make.’ He moved from behind the desk and came to stand nearer to her. Alice could smell the garlic on his breath and she remembered that he was believed to enjoy rich food and good-looking women.
She said warily, ‘A proposition?’
‘I want you to listen to the talk of the other inmates,’ said Koch. ‘I have watched you, and although you pose as an Englishwoman – Alice Wilson, yes? – still they are attracted to you. You are a very fascinating woman, baroness; even stripped of your rank, it is still so. And you have many admirers in Buchenwald, of both sexes.’
‘I have always had admirers,’ said Alice offhandedly. ‘That is beside the point. Herr Koch – I would have preferred my – my name and title to remain unknown in this place.’
‘It can do so. It can be just between us.’ Koch’s eyes were on her neck and her breasts. Repulsive. But don’t let him see you think that.
‘Because of this attraction you have for people,’ said Koch, ‘you will be welcomed into many discussions; people will talk to you. I want you to listen to these discussions very carefully, and then to bring to me any – ah – information you think might interest me. Anything that might be of value to the Third Reich.’
‘Spying,’ said Alice thoughtfully. ‘That’s what you mean, isn’t it? You want me to spy for you?’
He smiled, pleased at her understanding. ‘There are signs that an underground movement is starting up inside Buchenwald – an organization intending to arrange escapes, or rebellions. It is necessary that I identify the ringleaders and deal with them before they can cause any trouble.’
‘You think I might be able to find out about this organization?’
‘It would be a service that could be well rewarded. You understand me?’
‘Yes.’ Alice studied him for a moment, her expression deliberately blank. But her mind was working at top speed, thinking, considering, planning. She said, slowly, ‘You referred to advantages? To a reward?’
‘There are a number of things we could do to make your life more comfortable.’ He had visibly relaxed now. ‘You must miss such things as good food and hot water for washing. Clean bed-linen on a regular basis. I could arrange for you to have most of those things.’
‘But not my freedom? You couldn’t arrange my freedom?’
He hesitated, and then, as if thinking it over, said, ‘If you provide us with what we need, it might be possible. It could appear to be an escape; I could pretend to transfer you to another camp. Perhaps to Dachau, which is not so very far from here. An escape might occur on the journey. In that circumstance you would be given money and papers to aid you.’
Dachau. Money and papers. Dachau. Conrad. The ache that Alice had tried to suppress all these months returned a hundredfold. I don’t trust Karl Koch, though, thought Alice. I don’t think he entirely trusts me either, but that may be a good thing.
‘Very well,’ she said at last, looking him straight in the eyes. ‘I will do what you wish.’
‘I cheated him, of course,’ said Alice, her eyes full of memories that seemed to be spilling out into the warm safe room, like ghosts from old black and white newsreels.
‘How did you dare?’ said Michael, coming up out of this sinister world where tanks drove arrogantly through city streets, and people were shut away behind barbed wire and threatened by black-snouted machine-guns. But even as he said it, he knew that of course she had dared; she would have dared anything.
‘It was not as dangerous as it sounds,’ said Alice. ‘There was indeed an underground organization being formed in Buchenwald – the commandant had been right about that, although it was so new and so tentative it was as insubstantial as a spider-web. But it was a web that was being spun very determinedly indeed, and even a hint of its existence alerted the SS sufficiently to recruit spies on their own account.’
‘And they thought you would be one of the spies?’
‘Yes. They had assumed, you see, that I would do anything for food and warmth and all the other things. They thought they were dealing with Lucretia von Wolff, who was luxury-loving and pampered, and that was their mistake. They didn’t know that Lucretia was just a smokescreen, or that I was far better equipped to cope with the harsh regime than they could imagine. I had started life as a kitchenmaid in the big house in England – I had been used to
getting up at half past five in the depths of a freezing winter and raking out fires and kitchen ranges, and pumping cold water from a well in the yard. And when I was promoted to be Nina Dreyer’s maid, there was still all the fetching and carrying, and sitting up until three or four in the morning to help her undress after a party or a ball.’ She paused, and then said, ‘Also there had been those months of living rough in Vienna’s back streets. I believed that if I could survive that, I could survive practically anything.’
‘But to deceive the Nazis. The Gestapo—’ The words had been coined long before Michael was born, but they still carried their own dread. Iron armies reaching out their iron talons to victims, inflicting such damage and such suffering on those victims that they would never forget, not for an instant…
‘When it came to it, they were easily deceived,’ Alice said. ‘I enlisted two or three of the other women – people I could trust – and between us we concocted various stories that we thought the Nazis would swallow. The discovery of a planned break-out from one hut or another. False papers being prepared somewhere else. At careful intervals I carried these stories to the commandant, and he believed them. He was a stupid man, Karl Koch. Much of the time he was drunk or gambling, so that made him easy to hoodwink.’
‘Didn’t he find out you were feeding him false information?’
‘Not for a long time. We were very careful not to put anyone in danger with the information we gave him, but we managed to keep attention away from the real plotters.’
‘Tell me about the real plotters.’ Again, Alice had evoked the people of the stories, so that it was easy to see the little groups of ragged women huddling together in wooden huts, planning and whispering, their thin faces intent and serious.
‘They were the ones who really were getting people out to freedom. It was all kept very simple though – mostly prisoners being smuggled out in laundry baskets or disguised as workmen. We didn’t build aeroplanes out of matchsticks like the officers in Colditz Castle, or dig tunnels under stoves or dress up as German officers. And not all of the ones who escaped from Buchenwald made it to safety. But some did. Some reached Switzerland or England. Our successes were pitifully few, but the fact that we had successes at all gave us hope. They gave us something to work for.’
‘Why didn’t you go with them, those people who escaped?’
She took a moment to reply to this. ‘Karl Koch and his men watched me,’ she said. ‘So did the higher-ranking Nazi officials who visited Buchenwald. They used to question me very closely. And twice while I was there Hermann Göering came, although I did not speak to him. But he knew about me – he knew I had been enlisted as a spy. And so I had to play the part of a greedy selfish little gold-digger. As far as the Nazis were concerned, I was Lucretia, you see. Someone prepared to sell her companions for the sake of food and clothes. Once, I remember, I had dinner in the commandant’s rooms with Karl Koch and two of Hitler’s chief of staff.’ She grinned and the mischievous baroness was suddenly and vividly there in the room. ‘For all their posturing and pretence at style and at being part of la belle époque, the wine was dreadful and the food mediocre. And the company was boring. I remember von Ribbentrop was there that night.’
‘I know about him. He killed himself rather than be executed after the war.’
‘He did. He was an unpleasant little weasel,’ said Alice. ‘Nothing more than a jumped-up wine salesman.’ For a moment the baroness’s arrogance surfaced. ‘But I pretended to relish it. I was such a hypocrite, Michael, you can’t imagine what a hypocrite I was. But I gave the performances of my life inside Buchenwald and it worked. The Nazis were so delighted with their scheme to use prisoners as spies in return for better conditions – there was even a suggestion that Hitler knew and approved the arrangement, and the SS officers would have climbed mountains and swum oceans to get Hitler’s approval. But that meant they all kept very firm tabs on me.’
‘Did you get the better food and all the other things?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, there were improvements. And I was permitted to send a letter to my parents in England, and later on to receive two letters from them. That at least gave me news of Deborah, who was living with them by that time – they had taken her and the nurse in, of course, as I had known they would.’
Michael said, ‘But in the end the Nazis found out that you were cheating them? That you weren’t really spying at all?’
Alice paused for so long that Michael thought she was not going to answer. But finally she said, ‘Yes, they found out. And they sent me to another camp.’
‘As a punishment?’
‘Yes. The camp was in a little Polish town in the middle of swamplands. It had originally been a barrack and there was some kind of abandoned factory there as well, but when I was taken there it had just been enlarged and part of the swamps had been drained. But it was still surrounded by huge stagnant ponds, and it was like a stark lonely world, forgotten by the rest of mankind. It stank of human misery.’ She looked across at him. ‘It was known as Auschwitz,’ she said.
Auschwitz…The name hung on the air between them, and Michael felt an icy shiver on the back of his neck. Auschwitz was the deep dark core of all the evil, he knew that, and his mother had known it as well. ‘A bad place,’ she had said, her eyes unreadable. But when the much-smaller Michael had pressed for stories about this place, she had shaken her head and refused to talk of it. ‘It isn’t a place to make stories about,’ she had said. ‘It’s one of the world’s dark places, and I don’t want you to ever know about that kind of darkness, Michael, darling. You and I will only ever make up stories about happy things.’
But the seventeen-year-old Michael knew that Auschwitz was the iron prison of all the nightmares, hemmed in by swamps, surrounded by spiked fences that would tear spitefully into people’s flesh if they tried to get out. And once upon a time inside that iron prison…
He took a deep breath, and said, ‘Is it true that Alraune was born inside Auschwitz?’
This time the silence seemed to descend on them like a thick stifling curtain, and with it came a feeling that somewhere beyond the warm safe house something might be listening, and biding its time…
Michael shivered again and waited, and at last, as if she was coming back from a long way away, Alice said softly, ‘Yes. Alraune was born inside Auschwitz.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
If Buchenwald had been hell’s outpost, Auschwitz was its deepest cavern, and the minute Alice entered it she knew that all the stories about hellfire were wrong. Hell did not burn: it froze, with a deep, despairing bone-coldness.
It was night when the armed escort drove through the gates, and the camp was shrouded in a pouring violet dusk. Discs of harsh white light from the watch-towers moved constantly to and fro; they shone on the rows of barrack huts and the concrete exercise yards, and then swung round to the east, to silhouette several massively tall chimneys jutting up from a cluster of brick buildings on the camp’s far side. Alice stared at these buildings for a moment, and then the searchlights moved again, this time catching the glint of black iron on the ground – parallel lines of railway sleepers. There were several open-topped railway trucks nearby. So Auschwitz had its own private railway line. To bring prisoners in? To take them out?
She got down from the armoured truck, and stood for a moment feeling the place’s atmosphere sink its bony fingers into her mind and her heart. For a moment there was nothing in the world save this coldness, and this utter and complete hopelessness. Dreadful. I survived Buchenwald, but I don’t think I can survive this. Or can I? How about Deborah and Conrad? Yes, for them, I think can survive it.
She clutched the small bundle of belongings she had been allowed to bring out of Buchenwald – shoes, some threadbare underclothes, that precious letter from her parents telling her Deborah had reached them safely – and as the gates closed behind the truck, the guards took her through the compound, towards one of the barrack huts. The door was unlo
cked, Alice was pushed unceremoniously inside, and the lock clicked home once more. Shut in. But with what? And with whom?
It was not completely dark in the hut, but only thin threads of light trickled through the cracks in the window-shutters. Alice could make out only vague shapes – narrow beds with people on them, most of them sitting up and looking questioningly towards her. But she barely took this in, because as soon as the door had closed she had had to fight not to retch from the smell. It was like a solid wall, assaulting her whole being – stale human sweat and other human exudences best not identified too precisely. But she stood still, forcing her body not to rebel and waiting for her eyes to adjust to the dimness. Presently she was able to look about her, and she saw that several of the hut’s occupants had padded across the floor and were standing quite close to her. They’re inspecting me, thought Alice. They’re sizing me up.
She was more exhausted than she could ever remember being in her entire life – the journey from Buchenwald had taken over ten hours – but she summoned up her last shreds of energy, and said in German, ‘Good evening to you all. I’m sorry about the abrupt entrance. I’m a – a new prisoner.’ Hateful word. ‘Is there – have you any means of making a light so that I can see you and you can see me?’
There was a pause, and then the thin scrape of a match or perhaps a tinder. Three or four tiny candle flames burned up, and half a dozen or so faces swam through the darkness, lit from below to hollow disembodied life.
‘What’s your name?’ said one, and Alice realized for the first time that they were all women. So at least there was still a semblance of segregation in this place.
‘Whoever you are, you must be important to be brought here as a single prisoner,’ said a second voice. ‘The guards usually bring people in by the dozen.’