by Ellen Keith
Ritter took a seat and pulled out a cigarette. “Well, we’re all curious what this is about.” He held out the pack in offering, but when Karl responded with a cold look, he stood up again. “I’m sorry, Schutzhaftlagerführer, do you mind?”
“Go ahead.” As the other men lit up, the atmosphere in the room relaxed, and with it went Karl’s sense of his authority over them. He paced back and forth. All week things had been jetting from his mouth faster than he could think. The day before, he’d told Marijke that he loved her. Words that could lead to nothing but problems. He’d only ever said that to Else, and he wasn’t even sure if he’d meant it then. But, try as he had, he couldn’t quash the feeling.
The stinking cigarettes made his nose itch. He let out a cough to seize the men’s attention and began the little speech he’d planned. “I’m bringing this up in private so Brandt won’t get after you, but that doesn’t make it any less important.” His voice escalated with each word, and he gripped the sides of the table as if it were a podium. “It’s about the prisoners’ whores. I know we’ve had some fun and games, but it’s time to end things. From now on, that brothel is for prisoner use only.”
The men shifted. Ritter and Hoffmann exchanged sly looks.
“The Kommandant hand-picked the girls at the SS brothel,” Karl added. “It’s an insult to him if you sneak off and use the second-rate ones. Besides, do you really want to be fucking the same women as criminals and communists?”
Ritter broke a grin. “Not to mention those fags.”
“Right, the last thing you’d want is to catch one of their diseases. Do I make myself clear?” Karl let go of the table and examined the men.
Hoffmann met his gaze. “Does that apply to all officers?”
Karl felt his temper flickering hot. His voice sharpened. “It applies to you—understood?”
Hoffmann’s lips pinched to hide his scowl. Karl could have hit him right then, but then he might have run to Brandt with the whole story. Much as the Kommandant liked Karl, he wouldn’t be happy to hear that Karl had gone behind his back about the brothel ordeal.
“That’s settled, then. If I hear any more reports of visits to the prisoners’ brothel, I’ll have to report it to the Kommandant straightaway.”
The officers nodded. When Karl dismissed them, they gave quick “Heil Hitler” salutes and dispersed.
THE muggy heat of summer and the spike in camp numbers gave rise to a new problem. Death hung around like never before, and the crematorium couldn’t keep up. Flies swarmed the piles of waiting corpses, while the sun went to work on decaying flesh. Karl had started to take a detour to get to the depots. The output of the crematorium proved to be as much of a headache, although it was nothing like the truckloads of ashes the SS at the extermination camps had to deal with, thank God. It took a man with an iron stomach to handle a camp like Auschwitz. Still, something had to be done about all those ashes.
The solution came to him on one of his strolls near the grounds of the falconry. Deep craters formed among the trees there, like the devil had reached up his claws to pull the earth down into hell.
Within a week, they began dumping ashes at that spot. Karl passed by again one morning at dawn. The first pit was already filling up. Even though the sky was still a murky grey and the inmates had yet to leave their blocks, it was far from quiet at the edge of the woods. Squirrels scurried around clucking at one another. A breeze caught the forest canopy like a sail, mimicking the soft roar of the sea. Far below in the crater, the topmost ashes whirled up, refusing to settle in that Devil’s Hole, and for some reason, this disturbed him far more than those rotting bodies, the flies. He stayed there that morning for a very long time, transfixed by this movement, the way the ashes spun like they still possessed life.
SHORTLY after lunch on a hot August day, the type of hazy afternoon that pastes a shirt to your back, Karl was on his way to a meeting at the DAW arms factory at the camp’s eastern border. He kept thinking back to those ashes, the unpleasant feeling the image had left in his stomach. Since that day, he’d adjusted the route of his morning strolls to a different part of the woods.
Now as he neared the sentry line, a pebble scuttled across his path. The ground started to rumble. His chest tightened as he looked up to spot a V of long white slashes across the horizon. One bomber, a mere speck, flew at the head of the pack, approaching closer and closer. Then came a loud roar. Not the uneven wow-wow-wow of Luftwaffe engines, but a deep drone.
There was nothing nearby for cover, the only air-raid shelter ten minutes away. The noise grew deafening, accompanied by a high-pitched whistle. The air-raid sirens started to wail. He broke into a sprint, just in time to see a plume of red smoke appear at the edge of camp. A flare to mark the DAW factory as a bull’s eye. The sight brought him to a halt. Too stunned to move, he watched, dread hardening in the back of his throat.
The planes were right overhead. He pushed on, his feet smacking the pitch. On all sides, prisoners yelled, ran or dropped to the ground. He changed his course to cut away from the factory, back toward the sea of prisoners’ blocks. Marijke. There was no bomb shelter for the prisoners, not even enough for the SS. Something pulled at him, the need to protect her. He hesitated but kept moving in the direction of the gatehouse. There wasn’t time, and he’d be a clear target darting to the opposite end of camp.
Bombs screeched through the air, scattering explosions all around him. Dirt flew into his eyes. Metres from the gate, a bomb landed right behind him. He threw himself against the gatehouse, ducked and covered his head with his arms. The cement wall vibrated against his back while pieces of debris hit his shoulders, narrowly missing his head. Another explosion. The impact slammed him back. Metal sliced his arm. He saw red before feeling anything. Brandt’s briefings on emergency protocol came back in fragments, useless to him now. The planes circled, and the horizon erupted in white flashes. Incendiary bombs. He struggled to his feet, clutching a hand to his arm, blood dripping between his fingers.
He ran on through the gate, alongside the SS barracks. Between some buildings, craters had gutted the lawn. One of the barracks had split open down the side like a dollhouse. Amid a mass of wood and slabs of concrete and metal bed frames lay an SS guard. He was sprawled dead in the middle of the floor, a razor clutched in his hand and half of his jaw still lathered with soap, the other half blown clean off. Karl covered his mouth, trying not to vomit. Somewhere, the wounded screamed—SS men. A nearby bomb detonated in flames, the heat licking at Karl’s hair. He could taste sweat. Ignoring the cries for help, he pressed on. All he could think of was getting underground.
His stomach twisted with cramps by the time he made it to the air-raid shelter, a bulge of stone and earth hidden between trees. He scrambled down the steps, banged on the heavy door and hollered for someone to open up. Another piercing whistle. His arm throbbed. He slammed his weight against the metal and fell inward onto another officer. The door shut behind him. He got up to look around while his vision adjusted to the dim lamplight and found Hoffmann crouched in shadow with a handful of other officers. Seven SS wives huddled together, pale and trembling, children clinging to their skirts. An infant wailed, but nobody spoke. No sign of Brandt.
The sky boomed for another half-hour, the children whimpering all the while. The heat in the shelter grew unbearable. While Karl made a bandage from a corner of a baby’s blanket, he thought of the blast by the crematorium, how it had just missed him. He thought of the streak of flames through the treetops. Of Marijke.
Soon, everything fell still, and his ears rang in the silence. Everyone looked to him for instructions. He cleared his throat. “The women and children should stay here until I send a messenger. The rest of you, let’s go.”
BUCHENWALD still smouldered at sundown. Smoke crept through the camp like a fog, choking out the orange sky. Injured figures limped in and out of sight. Embers kept blazing up in the trees, and they’d put half the prisoners to work at helping control the fire.
Others built makeshift stretchers out of fallen trees, and both the infirmary blocks and the SS hospital overflowed onto the steps outside. Karl and Brandt met by the SS barracks to compare findings on the damage.
The Kommandant noted that a couple of their administration buildings had burned to the ground, along with the isolation blocks where they kept the prominent prisoners, politicians and an Italian princess. A year earlier, they would have gotten flak from Himmler for such losses, but now the Reich’s cloak of invincibility had slipped and reality was setting in.
The factories had suffered the most. Karl informed Brandt that only two buildings from the Gustloff Works were still standing. A long row of tables covered with half-assembled K98k carbines was all that remained of one of the main halls. The DAW factory had fared better, but enough explosions had hit its grounds to leave it filled with broken glass and dented machines and probably close to a million marks’ worth of damage.
Although the Allies had crippled Buchenwald’s armaments production, they’d spared the labour force. Karl assumed they had lost a couple hundred inmates with the destruction of the factories and had yet to determine the number of wounded, but estimated approximately one thousand. To verify this and thwart any escape attempts amid the chaos, Karl ordered an emergency roll call. But no bombs had touched the prisoners’ blocks, the brothel. He noted this with bitter relief; the only one that had landed in the prisoners’ camp was the one that had injured him. No doubt, the Allies had targeted their attack. Which meant they knew about the prisoners in the blocks, about the thousands and thousands of lives the SS controlled there. Their continued advancement would reveal the truth, the crimes the Nazis were committing without any remorse. It would expose them all as murderers.
Brandt folded his arms and sighed. His face was set in a deep frown, his neck smeared with ash. “And then there’s our men. I’ve called in all the doctors from Weimar and the neighbouring towns, but that still won’t suffice. We’re going to lose more overnight.”
Karl recalled the screams, men impaled by splinters of wood. The way they had writhed amid the debris, a foot or an arm lying metres away. He flinched, ashamed of how he’d ignored those cries for help. “What are the numbers at?”
“At least seventy-five killed, a good two hundred wounded. But some are still unaccounted for.” Brandt fixed his gaze on the casern behind Karl, where a crew of men tried to clear away the rubble. They lined up bodies on the road, one or two Karl recognized. The night tasted of iron. “The worst is that we failed to protect their families.”
“They’re safer here than in Berlin at least.” Karl started coughing and waved a hand to clear the smoke between them. “Thank God for that air-raid shelter. Though we’ll need to build a couple more closer to the villas.”
“Have you been back there?”
“Not yet.”
“We were lucky, Müller; others not so much.” Brandt rubbed his forehead, but then his brow hardened with resolve. “They won’t get away with this. We’ll rebuild the factory, of course, but before we start on that, we’ll see to it that the prisoners pay for every life we’ve lost.”
“Of course, sir. Just tell me what I need to do.”
BRANDT’S comment about the villas got Karl worrying, so as soon as he returned to his office, he made his way back. Breathing became easier the farther he got, but dusk had masked the forest with shadows, and the buzz of the rescue squad faded to nothing. Even the frogs had gone quiet.
The stretch leading to his villa was brighter than usual because the house belonging to the head of the political department was missing its roof, and lights from the building behind it shone where its second storey should have been. He stepped up to the edge of the man’s property. The veranda had collapsed, and the mound of bricks and mortar on top of it looked like a mountain slope after a landslide. A bookshelf tilted out of the front window, while books spilled across the garden, the bindings charred, spines split with loose pages caught in the shrubs and fluttering between the leaves like white flags. But some volumes lay intact and their gold-embossed titles caught the light: Don Quixote, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Atlas of the Modern World.
As he moved on to his own villa, he raised his hands to his temples, trying to keep the iron band of his headache from tightening further. But the building’s silhouette remained complete, even up to the stone chimney. Once in front of it, he spotted a couple of broken windows by his study and a small hole in the roof. There was debris strewn across the veranda from the hit to the other villa, but nothing major. He exhaled and closed his eyes.
Brandt’s place didn’t have a single mark. The gardens of two others had been torn up from a nearby blast to the road, which had sunk into a shell hole almost a metre deep. But apart from some missing chunks in the walls, they had survived. These villas also had lights on, but Karl couldn’t see anyone inside.
He had a sudden desire to find Marijke, to hear her comforting chatter, her warm laugh. As he turned around to head back to the prisoners’ camp, something up ahead caught his attention thirty or forty paces down the road from the crater and out of the villas’ glow. He turned on his torch as he neared. There, at the edge of the trees, lay one of the model ships Brandt had given the officers’ sons at Christmas. Its mast had snapped off and hung to the side, the ground beneath it splattered with blood.
HE spotted Marijke crouched along the path that ran between the brothel and the infirmary blocks. Finding her unharmed brought on a rush of relief so strong that it took him a moment to realize he’d never seen her outside before. She leaned over a prisoner with a bandaged head. A couple dozen others were arranged on the ground around her in some haphazard queue to the infirmary, and several other girls attended to the wounded nearby.
“What are you doing out here?” he asked.
She’d rolled up her sleeves, and wisps of hair fell across her jaw. There was something calming and beautiful to her disarray, to seeing her outdoors. For a second, he allowed himself to imagine that she was out tending to their flower garden on a Sunday afternoon.
She stood up, and Karl could have sworn she looked just as relieved to see him. “So many men haven’t had a chance to see a doctor yet.” She nodded toward a guard who lurked behind her. “He’s supervising us.”
Karl straightened up and took a step away from her. “I’m bringing you back.”
Marijke paused, scanning the scene around her, but she bent down to squeeze the wounded man’s hand before following Karl inside. The waiting room hummed with disorder: inmates exchanged celebratory grins, clapped hands and spoke with frenzied gestures. One seemed to be mimicking something exploding. When they noticed Karl, the movement stopped.
“What is this? Why is the brothel even open?” He ordered the brothel supervisor to free up one of the koberzimmers and then turned to the prisoners. “Keep your mouths shut.”
They looked to the ground. The image of the model ship came back to him, the way his neighbour’s son had exclaimed in excitement as the families gathered in the drawing room at Christmas and the boys ripped the wrapping paper from their packages. Whose boat had it been—whose son? Karl studied the prisoners with a glare, searching for those traces of smug joy. Had they no respect for even their own dead?
“All of you, leave,” he said. “Back to your blocks.”
Marijke went rigid as the men filed out. Karl hoped she could see he was doing the other girls a favour, giving them a night off. The brothel supervisor led Karl and Marijke down the hall. The room still smelled of sex, but it was better than the thick air outside. Once alone, they fell toward one another, and the tension in her body relaxed in his arms.
He let out a breath in her ear and leaned to taste her neck. “God, I need you.”
“Karl.” The first time she said his name, it was a whisper, the second a command. “Karl. What happened?” She opened his tunic to examine his arm, and he realized he’d been wincing. “Does it hurt a lot? Did the doctor bandage it? What is this, clot
h?” The knot had slipped undone, and the blanket looked about to unravel. Marijke peeked beneath it and scrunched up her nose. “Let me find the brothel doctor.”
“I don’t need him.” He struggled to refasten the bandage. “Just tie this for me.”
The pain kicked up again when she tightened the fabric. He gritted his teeth and swore, causing her to pause. That spark he hadn’t seen in ages had returned to her face. She wrapped her hand around the back of his neck and kissed him.
“What were you saying before?” she murmured.
That loud whine returned like a headache. The firestorm by the factory, everything shaking beneath him.
With surprising force, Marijke guided him back onto the mattress. She slipped her hand under his shirt, but his mind kept drifting to those cries for help, the ones he’d ignored. The broken rigging on the mast of that ship. Her fingers curled around the hook of his belt, the button of his trousers, and as she slipped them off, he realized he wasn’t going to be able to get hard. When he raised his eyes to find her smiling down at him, he saw those prisoners in the waiting room again, their obvious glee.
He sat up and shoved her off him, biting resentment coating his words. “Since when are you so eager? And why are you grinning like that?”
She leaned back to look at him. “Grinning? I’m just in shock that after all of this, I’m somehow still alive.”
“Men with families were killed, even some of their children.”
He swung his feet onto the floor and bent down for his trousers. She tried to rub his back, but he turned and wrenched her by the arm. “Innocent, good German children. How can you be celebrating?”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “But—”