The Constant Soldier
Page 35
And he was. He didn’t know who the man was waiting for but it must be someone for whom he cared deeply. And everyone had lost someone in the chaos. It wasn’t as bad here as elsewhere, of course. But still.
‘It’s not your fault. A coffee, please.’
‘Of course. Straight away.’
Perhaps the man smiled, it was difficult to tell, and a party of American officers were calling loudly for him, so the waiter had to turn away and make sure they were happy. It was best for everyone if the Americans were kept happy. And the British. And the French. And the Russians. There might be trouble if they weren’t – and no one wanted trouble these days. Everyone had had enough of trouble.
When the waiter brought him his coffee the one-armed man accepted it with a nod. He would sit and watch it until four. Then he would drink it. And then, at four fifteen he would leave. It was always the same.
He was serving the Americans when a woman entered the room. Her hair was short, and completely white – even though she seemed too young for that. She was thin, her cheekbones sharp. She was almost beautiful but it was hard to be sure. Perhaps her sadness made her seem so.
She stood for a moment, looking around the cafe. She ignored the Americans – and then her gaze fell on the one-armed man. The sight of him seemed to fix her to the spot, as though, if she even breathed, she would lose a moment that shouldn’t be lost. Even the Americans stopped talking and watched her. The one-armed man hadn’t seen her, his head was bent forward looking at the table in front of him. The waiter watched the white-haired woman approach the one-armed man. She took the empty seat beside him and reached for the man’s hand. She squeezed it. The man didn’t move – nothing about him changed – and so she leant forward to put herself in his line of sight.
Then she kissed him.
The waiter walked straight through to the kitchen, ignoring the Americans. They could wait one minute. He stood inside the doorway and, when one of the other waiters asked him what was wrong – why he was crying – he could say nothing in response.
He was still soft, that was all. Even after everything. And that was good.
Author’s Note
Sometime in 1945 an SS officer called Karl Höcker put together an album of photographs documenting his service in what was then the German Reichsgau, or province, of Upper Silesia. For sixty years the photographs disappeared until, in 2005, they were acquired by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
At first glance the images the album contains might be considered innocuous – groups of ordinary people, albeit many in SS uniforms, enjoying themselves. There are photographs of men and women picking berries in the woods, relaxing on sun loungers, having dinner together and even lighting the candles on a Christmas tree. But these aren’t innocent images – Karl Höcker was adjutant to the last Commandant of Auschwitz, Richard Baer, from May 1944 until the Russians liberated the camp in January 1945, and these photographs were taken during a period when Auschwitz was at its most lethal. Many of the people in the photographs, happy and smiling, are among the worst mass murderers in history – including Josef Mengele, Rudolf Höss and, of course, Richard Baer.
Perhaps the photographs’ ordinariness derives from the fact that few of them are taken in the environs of Auschwitz – or not the Auschwitz we know. Many of the pictures seem to have been taken at a rest hut near a small village called Porabka, about twenty kilometres away, where Höcker must have gone quite often. It was staffed by a handful of female prisoners who never appear in the photographs, which instead concentrate on the hut’s idyllic location and the apparently pleasant atmosphere. The hut itself was demolished a few years ago – but a house apparently once owned by Rudolf Höss, the first Commandant of Auschwitz, still stands not far away. This novel is set in a fictional version of that rest hut – in fact, none of the characters or places in this novel existed as they are described, although, of course, they often echo real people and real history.
I found two of Höcker’s photographs particularly interesting – one of Höcker lighting the candles on a Christmas tree in December 1944, and another of him, looking cold and unhappy, at a game shoot in early January 1945. Both images are replicated in scenes in the novel. The images are interesting because the Red Army crossed the Vistula River on 12 January, a few days later. The Soviet attack overwhelmed the German defenders, advancing hundreds of kilometres in a few days and reaching Auschwitz and the rest hut on 27 January. The photographs suggest, to me anyway, that Höcker was aware of the imminent Soviet advance. It also seems likely that Höcker, a bank clerk before the war, was probably considering the consequences of his involvement in the administration of several of the most notorious concentration camps, culminating in Auschwitz itself.
It wasn’t only Höcker who was aware that the end of the war would result in a terrible reckoning. The part of Upper Silesia where Auschwitz and the Porabka rest hut are located had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Poland and then Nazi Germany within a period of not much more than twenty years. Before 1939, the area contained a mixed population of mainly Poles and Germans, although other substantial ethnic minorities existed, including Jews. German, and Jewish, settlement in the area stretched back to the early Middle Ages and beyond. After 1939, the region was incorporated into the Reich and Aryanized – with much of the non-German population forcibly removed and the Jews being sent, eventually, to Auschwitz. After the war, the German population was in turn evicted, and by 1949 very few remained, ending a history of German settlement that stretched back at least seven hundred years.
After the war. Karl Höcker was arrested and spent eighteen months in a prisoner of war camp before being released. He returned to his old job with the same bank he’d been employed by before the war. In 1952 he turned himself in for denazification and was sentenced to nine months in prison for membership of the SS, but, because of a 1954 amnesty law, didn’t serve a single day. In the 1960s, however, Höcker was sentenced to seven years for aiding and abetting the murder of one thousand people. On his release he was, yet again, given his old job back, at the same bank, working there until his retirement.
These are some of the most useful and thought provoking of the many works of non-fiction I read while researching The Constant Soldier:
Hannah Arendt. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Faber, 1963.
Christopher Browning. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. Harper Collins, 1992.
Artem Drabkin and Oleg Sheremet. The T34 in Action. Leo Cooper Ltd, 2006.
Mary Fulbrook. A Small Town Near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust. Oxford University Press, 2012.
Karl Hoess. Commandant of Auschwitz: The Autobiography of Karl Hoess. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1959.
Ian Kershaw. The End: Germany, 1944 – 45. Penguin, 2011.
Keith Lowe. Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II. Viking, 2012.
Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer. Soldaten – On Fighting, Killing and Dying: The Secret Second World War Tapes of German POWs. Simon and Schuster, 2012.
Alexandra Richie. Warsaw 1944: Hitler, Himmler and the Crushing of a City. William Collins, 2014.
Duncan Rogers and Sarah Williams. On the Bloody Road to Berlin: Frontline Accounts from North-West Europe & the Eastern Front, 1944–45. Helion, 2005.
Gitta Sereny. Into that Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder.
André Deutsch Ltd, 1974.
Robert Jan Van Pelt and Debórah Dwork. Auschwitz – 1270 to the Present. W. W. Norton & Co., 1996.
I would like to thank John Delaney of the Imperial War Museum for clarifying some key points about T34s, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum for allowing me to use some of the photographs from the Höcker album – in this book and elsewhere – as well as pointing me in the right direction when researching this novel. Ed Murray and Peter Ride were careful and helpful readers of early drafts of The Constant Soldier – their en
thusiasm was generous and reassuring.
My agent, Andrew Gordon of David Higham Associates, was also a tremendous support and help in the writing of this novel – providing incisive input into early drafts and encouragement when it was most needed.
This novel has been immeasurably improved by the team at Mantle – Josie Humber, Sophie Orme, Fraser Crichton, Trevor Horwood, Liz Cowen and, most of all, Maria Rejt. They obviously have my gratitude – but also my admiration for the wonderful job they do.
THE CONSTANT SOLDIER
William Ryan is an Irish writer living in London. His Korolev series, set in 1930s Stalinist Russia, has been shortlisted for the Theakston’s Crime Novel of the Year Award, the CWA New Blood Dagger, the Irish Fiction Award and the Ireland AM Irish Crime Novel of the Year Award. The Constant Soldier is his fourth novel. William lectures on creative writing at City University.
Discover more at
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www.william-ryan.com
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Also by William Ryan
The Korolev Series
THE HOLY THIEF
THE BLOODY MEADOW
THE TWELFTH DEPARTMENT
First published 2016 by Mantle
This electronic edition published 2016 by Mantle
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ISBN 978-1-4472-5649-6
Copyright © William Ryan, 2016
Cover Images © Shutterstock, Mark Owen Arcangel Images & Uilstein Bild/Getty Images.
The right of William Ryan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Images here © United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of an anonymous donor. Reproduced with permission.
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