by Judy Nunn
She lay in the dark chastising herself. She would apologise to him as soon as he awoke, she told herself. He had, after all, been scrupulously honest with her.
Peggy knew that much as Lucky had embraced his new life in the Snowies, he was not ready to embrace a new wife, and he probably never would be.
‘I am unable to let go of the past, Peggy,’ he had said that very first night after they’d made love. And he’d told her about his wife. She had perished at Auschwitz, along with their daughter. He should have perished too, he’d said, except someone else went in his place.
‘My best friend,’ he’d told her. Then he’d smiled humourlessly, and his voice had been tinged with self-loathing. ‘Lucky by name, lucky by nature, that’s me. I am here because my best friend died in my place, and because a Nazi was a lousy shot.’ And, as she had lain silently in his arms, he had told her his story.
‘Samuel. Samuel, can you hear me? You’re alive, Samuel. You must wake up. Can you hear me, Samuel? You must wake up.’
Samuel Lachmann’s eyelids flickered open as he felt himself gently rolled onto his back and his head was propped against someone’s shoulder. He blinked several times, unable to see through his left eye, which was clouded by blood. He flinched and jerked his head away from the beam of light.
‘Slowly. No quick movements.’
He lay propped against the stranger for several seconds, trying to remember where he was and what had happened. His head and his left arm throbbed with pain. He realised he was in the apartment. He could see the legs of the dining table in the low beam of the torch. Puzzled, he squinted at the person who was whispering to him in the dark.
‘It’s me,’ the voice said, and the torchlight was directed upon a face he knew well, ‘it’s me, Efraim.’
Efraim Meisell. What was Efraim Meisell doing in the apartment? Samuel was bewildered. The Meisells and the Lachmanns no longer visited each other, even though they lived just across the square. Young Naomi stole over for the occasional English lesson with Ruth, but the Meisells and the Lachmanns hadn’t visited each other for a whole year – it was too risky.
‘We need to get you out of here. They come back to collect the bodies at first light.’
They! Samuel sat bolt upright. He knew who ‘they’ were and, with sudden and horrifying clarity, he knew what had happened. He could see it. Ruth on the floor, the rifle aimed directly at her head. He staggered to his feet, clutching the dining table for support.
Efraim scrambled up beside him. ‘Slowly, you must move slowly or you’ll faint; you’ve lost a lot of blood …’
‘Ruth. They shot Ruth!’
‘No, they didn’t.’ Efraim said it with force, but Samuel continued to look at him in wild disbelief. The memory was so clear. Ruth, the rifle, then the explosion. But he could not remember anything after that.
‘They didn’t shoot her,’ Efraim insisted. Samuel had the look of a madman. ‘Naomi saw them take her away.’
Swaying unsteadily on his feet, Samuel remembered throwing himself at the SS man with the rifle. That was when he’d heard the explosion.
‘Can you walk?’ Efraim asked. ‘Lean on me,’ and without waiting for an answer, he draped Samuel’s right arm over his shoulder and clasped him tightly around the waist.
Samuel ignored the pain as they slowly made their way towards the door. ‘They took Rachel too?’
‘Yes.’ Efraim was aware that the question was rhetorical, but he knew Samuel needed to ask it and, more importantly, that he needed to hear the answer out loud. ‘They took Rachel. And they took Mannie as well.’
Confusion mingled with Samuel’s pain. His head seemed on fire. Mannie? Why would they take Mannie? He wasn’t a Jew. He opened his mouth to enquire, but they were at the front door and Efraim hushed him as he switched off the torch. Then, silently, they edged out into the darkness of the hall.
Ten minutes later, ensconced in the cellar of the ground-floor flat opposite, Sharon Meisell bathed the caked blood from Samuel’s face and, careful not to start up the bleeding, she applied disinfectant to the open wound where the bullet had splintered his cheekbone and raked an ugly furrow along the side of his head.
‘It will leave a nasty scar but it will mend,’ she announced. ‘You are fortunate you did not lose an eye, Samuel.’
‘An eye?’ Efraim said. ‘He is fortunate to be alive.’
Efraim and Sharon were accepting the inevitability of what had happened and concentrating on the present, but Samuel was not. Despite the pain which threatened to engulf him, he was barely aware of Sharon’s ministrations as he listened to young Naomi Meisell.
When the Nazis had first appeared in the street outside, it had been apparent that the object of their raid was the apartment building opposite, and Naomi had ignored her parents’ orders to go with them to their hiding place in the cellar. She had watched through the gauze curtains of the front room instead, and she told Samuel in precise detail everything she had witnessed. Eighteen-year-old Naomi prided herself on her precision and eye for detail and it had a purpose. When she escaped Germany, she had no intention of fleeing to safety with her parents; she would join the nearest resistance group she could find.
There had been five of them, she told Samuel, one man in plain clothes whom she judged to be Gestapo, and four uniformed SS. ‘One officer and three troopers,’ she said. They had marched Ruth and Mannie out of the building, and little Rachel had been in Ruth’s arms. The three of them had been unhurt, she hastily assured him. Mannie had been carrying a suitcase and he had had his arm around Ruth.
‘Mannie was protecting her, Samuel.’
As Sharon started cutting away his shirt in order to examine the flesh wound in his upper arm where the other bullet had passed through, Samuel continued to fight against the pain, seizing instead upon the shred of hope Naomi had fed him.
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘That’s why Mannie went with them. Mannie will save her.’ Noticing the look that passed between Efraim and his wife, he realised how unrealistic he must sound to them. But they didn’t understand. ‘Mannie is a lawyer,’ he said, ‘a distinguished lawyer from a respected Aryan family.’
As the idea formulated in Samuel’s brain, he started to feel light-headed, possibly from his wounds, or from loss of blood, or perhaps … just perhaps … from the dizzying possibility that there might actually be hope. He felt driven to convince them of his argument.
‘When Manfred Brandauer pleads on Ruth’s behalf,’ he insisted, ‘they will listen!’
The only sound in the room was the slop of the water in the bowl as Sharon started to bathe Samuel’s arm.
They didn’t believe him, he thought, and who could blame them? He knew what they were thinking. Plead for what? There were no grounds to plead on a Jew’s behalf.
‘Ruth’s mother was a Gentile.’ He tried to sound as if he was pulling an ace from his sleeve, but he knew that his voice lacked the ring of triumph. ‘And she looks Aryan …’ he could hear himself sounding more desperate by the second ‘… that will help when Mannie makes his plea.’
Sharon stopped bathing the wound and glanced at her husband, who nodded. Efraim, too, knew it had gone far enough. Both of them turned to their daughter.
‘Mannie was wearing your coat, Samuel,’ Naomi said. ‘He was wearing your coat with the Star of David on it.’
Samuel’s hopes died in that instant. He’d known they’d been implausible, born of wishful desperation, but they’d been something to cling to. Now, with the enormity of his friend’s sacrifice, came the recognition of the inevitability of his wife’s death, and all hope deserted him. Like the hundreds of thousands before him and the hundreds of thousands yet to follow, Samuel Lachmann felt himself drowning in despair.
He didn’t leave Berlin with the Meisells, although Efraim secured him false papers. His head wound made him conspicuous, he said, and he insisted he would pose too great a threat to their safety as a travelling companion. The family had already risked
far too much on his behalf, he told Efraim. In saving his life they had risked their own and he was forever in their debt.
‘You were not intended for death, Samuel,’ Efraim said, embracing him in farewell. ‘It was God’s will you should live. You are a lucky man.’
Lucky? Lucky to have lost his wife and daughter? Lucky to live the rest of his life in the knowledge that the man who had been a brother to him had died in his place? Samuel could taste the bitterness like bile on his tongue as he returned Efraim’s embrace. He wished Efraim hadn’t saved him; he wished that he’d died that night. But he allowed Efraim to believe he still cared about life, it was only fair. He would live secretly in the cellar, he said, and when his wounds had healed he would make good his escape. Then he bade the family farewell.
Samuel did not live in secret. He flaunted his existence, venturing out daily, and his enquiries about the departures from Grunewald Goods Train Station were dangerously blatant. A chain of information existed for Jews seeking loved ones, witnesses surreptitiously passing along the grapevine the names of those they had seen rounded up for transportation. It was advisable to be discreet, however: word could reach the Nazis who were always keen to identify anyone asking questions. Samuel’s lack of discretion yielded swift results and, after several days of persistent investigation, he discovered the information he sought.
Early in the morning after their capture, Ruth and Rachel and Mannie had been seen herded into the cattle trucks along with the hundreds of others who had huddled on the railway platform throughout the night, their destination Auschwitz.
Samuel decided to leave Germany.
The night before his departure, he visited the second-floor apartment across the square, his purpose not one of sentiment but practicality. He needed supplies, most importantly whatever cash he could lay his hands on, and he hoped that the meagre savings Ruth had put aside were still in the tea canister where she kept them.
The door was not locked, but then why should it be? Only he and Ruth had keys to the apartment. He turned on the overhead light, heedless that such advertisement of his presence might be imprudent. Everything remained exactly as it had been, with one exception. There was a large, dark stain on the floorboards beside the dining table. But that was all it was, just a stain. Where was the blood? Who had cleaned it up?
Frau Albrecht, Samuel thought, recalling how, several days previously, as he’d been leaving the Meisells’ flat, he’d looked up at the second-floor apartment opposite to see a figure watching him from behind the living room curtains. He’d known immediately, by the glint of sunlight on silver hair, that it was Frau Albrecht. He’d been surprised. He’d never thought of the Albrechts as pilferers, but why else would Frau Albrecht be in his apartment? War obviously made thieves of even the most respectable, he’d decided, and he hoped she hadn’t discovered the money in the tea canister.
Now, as he looked at the stained floorboards, he pictured Frau Albrecht on her hands and knees, scrubbing away with furious intent. Of course she’d have cleaned up the mess, he thought scornfully, she wouldn’t have been able to help herself. Frau Albrecht was fastidious, and pools of congealed blood were not only untidy, they were unhygienic.
Samuel had always felt disdain for the conservative, elderly couple who’d owned the other apartment on the second floor for twenty years. The Albrechts’ front door was virtually opposite the Lachmanns’, but so assiduously did they avoid Samuel and Ruth that meetings in the hall were rare, and on the odd occasions when they misjudged their timing, they would nod politely to Ruth and pointedly ignore Samuel.
‘Of course they ignore us, Samuel – they have to.’ Ruth’s defence of the couple had been vociferous from the outset. ‘I think they’re very brave,’ she’d added with that edge to her voice that defied disagreement. The Albrechts had been friends of her father’s, she’d explained, and when it had become dangerous to be friends with a Jew, they had distanced themselves. As mere neighbours it would be easier for them to plead ignorance should it prove necessary.
‘And ignorance is bravery?’ Samuel’s reply had been scathing, but Ruth’s retort had been equally so.
‘Yes, Samuel,’ she’d said. ‘In failing to report us they could be accused of harbouring Jews and sent to their deaths, so yes, their ignorance is most brave.’
Samuel had shrugged his acknowledgement, but she hadn’t convinced him. Like his best friend, Mannie, Samuel believed people should stand up and be counted. ‘Too many are pleading ignorance,’ both men agreed.
Now, as he pictured Frau Albrecht scrubbing the blood from the floorboards, Samuel wondered whether playing ignorant had proved too much for the Albrechts. Had it been the Albrechts who had denounced them? he wondered. But as quickly as the thought occurred he put it aside. He would go mad if he tried to allot blame; he and Ruth had been living on borrowed time for so long they had brought about their own undoing.
The money was in the canister. Along with the handful of coins was the neatly folded ten-reichsmark note he’d earned that last day working at Hoffmann’s Garage. The note had been crumpled and covered in grease when he’d handed it to Ruth, he recalled, and he could hear her good-natured chastisement as she carefully wiped it with a warm dishcloth and folded it into a square. ‘Really, Samuel, you are the messiest man I know.’ She hadn’t been able to clean the grease off completely, he noticed, the money was still slightly stained.
Mannie’s knapsack remained on the kitchen bench where he’d left it and Samuel took it into the bedroom. He packed some items of clothing, a torch and his penknife, and then, from the top drawer of the dresser, he lifted out a photograph of Ruth. He would have liked to have had one of Rachel too, but there were no photographs of the child. The past two years had not been a time for taking photographs. What was the point? To have them developed would have been far too risky.
The picture of Ruth that he kept in the top drawer was Samuel’s favourite. It was the one Mannie had taken on campus, outside the library. Mannie had been characteristically methodical, searching for the perfect light, the perfect angle, the perfect composition, and Ruth had made fun of him, posing and pulling silly faces, until finally she’d burst into exasperated laughter. ‘Oh for God’s sake, Mannie, press the button!’ Mannie had, and he’d captured the very essence of Ruth, which, as Samuel knew, had been his intention all along.
Samuel slid the photograph into his pocket. The picture was as representative of Mannie as it was of Ruth, for Mannie’s love was in it. Mannie had loved Ruth, Samuel had always known it. He’d even told Ruth. ‘You do realise that Mannie’s in love with you, don’t you?’ But she laughed, not taking him seriously, and he never mentioned it again. It wasn’t fair to Mannie, he thought.
He went back to the kitchen in search of food supplies, although he doubted he’d find any. He opened the bread box. Bare. He’d expected it. Frau Albrecht. But then he supposed it was sensible: the bread would have been mouldy by now. He opened the cupboards and, to his surprise, the packet of powdered eggs was there. So were the tins and, most surprising of all, the coffee. Then he noticed, beside the small brown paper bag, the money. A neatly stacked pile of coins rested on top of two ten reichsmark notes. He counted the amount. Thirty reichsmarks in all. Not a vast sum, but substantial enough in these straitened times.
Samuel had numbed his mind to everything around him from the moment he’d entered the apartment. He could not afford to do otherwise. But the money unnerved him. The sheer unexpectedness of it had caught him off-guard. He slipped the notes and coins into his pocket, and concentrated on the practical matters to hand, loading the food supplies into the string bag which Ruth kept in the top drawer, wrapping a sharp knife in a tea towel and packing it, together with several other kitchen utensils, into the side pocket of the knapsack. He must not allow himself to be distracted. Now was not the time to question the money, or the donor, or the reasons.
String bag in one hand, knapsack over his shoulder, he crossed through the living
room to the front door, flicked off the light switch and stepped into the hall. He pulled the door to, hearing the click of the latch, and started towards the stairs. Then he heard the click of another latch as a door opened quietly behind him. He turned. Frau Albrecht stood in the hall, the silver of her hair shining in the light that streamed from her apartment. She looked so frail, and so very, very old, he thought. She hadn’t looked that old the last time he’d seen her, surely. The war had aged them all, but Frau Albrecht more than most.
They stood barely ten paces apart, and although not a word was uttered, Frau Albrecht’s eyes spoke to him. A faded milky blue, they appeared huge in the fragile parchment pallor of her face, and all her confusion, despair and helplessness was mirrored in them. How had it ever come to this? her eyes asked, and it seemed they were begging his forgiveness.
Samuel nodded his thanks for the money. We are all lost, he thought as he stared into the old woman’s eyes. The whole world is lost.
Frau Albrecht remained standing in the hall, watching him as he walked away.
He left Berlin the following day.
Samuel’s aim was to reach Switzerland and his father. Recklessly indifferent to capture, he travelled openly, hitching lifts, jumping trains, producing his false papers whenever necessary, anticipating exposure at every turn and sometimes even wishing for it. But it seemed he was charmed. His head bandaged, the dressing which Sharon had applied now grubby and ill kempt, he was certainly conspicuous. Perhaps people presumed he was a wounded soldier returned from the front. How ironic, he thought. Or perhaps his survival was due to the sheer perversity of life: if one didn’t care whether or not the worst happened, then it didn’t. Perhaps it was as simple as that.