by Greg Iles
As the women spoke, Stern learned that the Block Leader’s death and the brutal reprisals that followed had thrown the block into disarray, and that the young Dutchwoman who questioned him had assumed the dead Pole’s position by default. He had made up his mind to ask her the question he had risked his life to come here and ask, when she said:
“How do you plan to get out of the camp, Herr Stern?”
He knew what was coming. Some of the women had begun to dream of escape. He had to discourage them. They could not know that he had no intention of leaving the vicinity of the camp until—until what? Until he had killed them all, of course.
“Herr Stern?” Rachel said again.
“I’m walking out through the front gate. The same way I got in.”
Rachel was silent for some moments. “But that doesn’t make sense. An SS man without transportation?”
Stern shifted uncomfortably. “I told you before, this uniform is SD: Sicherheitsdienst. More feared even than the Gestapo. Not even the SS question the SD.”
Stern saw a flash of hope in her dark eyes. “I have a favor to ask of you,” Rachel said. “A great favor.”
“I can’t take you out,” he said quickly.
“Not me. My child.”
He stared at her. “You have a child here?”
“Two. A boy and a girl.”
“And you want . . . you want me to take only one child?”
The young woman took hold of his hand and squeezed, her eyes blazing with urgency. “Better that one have a chance at life than both die,” she said. “And they will surely die if they stay here!”
Stern saw desperation her eyes, but also a fierce determination. She meant what she said.
“They are very small,” she said in a pleading voice that drove Stern into a rage of shame and impotence. “You could easily carry one—”
Stern jerked his hand away. The realization that this woman had so honestly confronted the impossibility of her own survival that she would give up her child to a stranger shook him to his core. He stared into the ring of faces surrounding him, searching for some sign of censure.
None of the other women seemed shocked by Rachel’s request.
In Anna’s cellar, McConnell had finally found the diary entry he was searching for. It was near the end, dated only two weeks ago.
2-1-44 More and more civilians are being killed by Allied bombs. In case I do not survive the war, I will here speak a little about things almost too painful to face. I know what the world will ask about me. How could this woman have stood by and watched these horrible things? She was a civilian. She was a nurse! She did not have to do these things. No one held a gun to her head. Well, that is both true and false. I am a civilian, but I live in Nazi Germany at war. And I knew enough about Klaus Brandt after one week here to know that a request to be transferred might mean death. Brandt has absolute power in Totenhausen. If he orders your death, you are dead. Only Sturmbannführer Schörner seems unafraid of him. I think Schörner saw too much death in Russia to be afraid of anything.
Some will call me a coward for not leaving this place, for not refusing to participate in these experiments, even at the cost of my life. Am I a coward? Yes. I have lain shivering in my bed with nightmares of Hauptscharführer Sturm beating down the door of my cottage to arrest me and take me to the Tree. I have been close to suicide. But the world’s condemnation means little. Not all the torturers in the world could cause me the agony I have felt when the beseeching eyes of dying children looked to me for help, and I could not give it.
I have an answer for the world, but no excuse. When I first arrived at Totenhausen, I was already severely depressed, due to the fact that my lover had been murdered by the SS in Berlin. When I realized what actually went on here, I believe I entered a state of deep shock. After I regained some perspective, getting away from Totenhausen became my only thought. But then I considered my situation. If Brandt allowed me to leave the camp, I would succeed in distancing myself from the crimes. But the crimes would still go on. They would continue just as before, but unseen by anyone who was disturbed by them, as I was. I felt like a little fish swimming inside a tidal wave. I could try to swim in the other direction, but the wave would thunder on. For many days I hardly spoke. Then I decided I had been sent to this hell for one reason: to be a witness. To record what I saw. This I have done, and continue to do. I have become hardened to things that would shame a murderer. But I no longer think of suicide. Now I pray that I will survive this war. I pray that my diary will be the noose that finally snaps Klaus Brandt’s fat neck. I worry sometimes that I am beyond saving, that I am damned in the eyes of God. But more often I wonder if God even sees this place. How could God exist in the same universe with Totenhausen Camp?
McConnell closed the diary. He had found the reassurance he sought. Even in this crucible of human depravity, some measure of hope—of human integrity—survived. Anna Kaas had rebelled against the madness she described. But her rebellion was not the empty whining of political dilettantes. She had not offered impotent, moralizing words and then retired into the wings of rationalization or self-delusion. Nor had she committed some brave but vain act of self-sacrifice, as McConnell might have done. She had done something far more difficult. She had sacrificed her humanity in order to attempt the only thing that might ever have some real effect on the men who committed the horrors she witnessed each day—to tell the world what they were doing.
When he realized this, McConnell also understood something else. That Anna Kaas had accomplished something no one before her ever had. She had changed his fundamental belief about the futility of violence. All his life he had stood with his father against war. But tonight, simple written words had bred a cold light that revealed to him something worse than war—or perhaps a new kind of war—a war of mankind upon itself. A self-consuming madness that could only end in complete annihilation. His medical experience gave him the perfect metaphor for his new understanding.
Cancer.
The system that had created Totenhausen—and the dozen other camps he had read of in the diary—was a malignant melanoma festering within the human species. It moved maliciously, under cover of a more conventional malady, but it would eventually destroy everything in its path. And like any melanoma, it could not be stopped without destroying healthy tissue in the process.
As he sat with the closed book on his lap, McConnell came to a conclusion inconceivable to him before tonight. If his father—a physician and combat veteran who had preached nonviolence for twenty years—could by some magic read Anna Kaas’s diary, and then come face to face with Doctor Klaus Brandt . . .
He would shoot him down like a mad dog.
“For the last time, I cannot do it!” Stern said. “It will be a miracle if I escape alive. With a child I would have no chance.”
He forced himself to look away from Rachel Jansen’s face. A light had gone out behind her eyes. Where there had been hope, he saw only ashes. “I want to ask you something,” he said. “All of you. Come closer.”
The gray faces drew nearer to him.
“What is it?” Rachel asked.
“I am interested in a particular man. A Jew from Rostock. We received reports that he died at this camp. I want to know if any of you can tell me anything about him. If you remember him. How he lived . . . perhaps how he died.”
“What was his name? Between us we know everyone in the camp.”
“Avram,” Stern said quietly. “Avram Stern, from Rostock.”
Rachel looked at the other women, then back at Stern. “You mean the shoemaker?”
Stern felt a flush of apprehension. “Shoemaker? He was a cobbler, yes.”
Rachel slowly held out her hand and touched his chin. She lifted his face, turning both cheeks to the light. “My God,” she murmured. “You are his son.”
Stern’s body tensed. “You knew him?”
Rachel looked puzzled. “Knew him? I know him. He’s sleeping less than thirty meters
from us right now.”
33
When the door to the cottage banged open above him, McConnell threw down the diary and grabbed his Schmeisser. He heard Anna’s voice, then a man’s voice speaking German. He crept to the top of the cellar stairs and opened the door a crack. Stern was standing in the kitchen in his SD uniform, furiously rubbing his hands. His face was red and his eyes full of tears, as if he had run for miles in a cold wind.
“Kaffee, bitte,” he said to Anna. “Where is the doctor? Sleeping?”
Anna moved to the dented pot steaming on the stove.
“I’m starting to think you don’t really mean to attack that camp at all,” said McConnell, stepping into the kitchen.
Stern’s eyes went to the Schmeisser. “You’d do better to hold that by the barrel and use it as a club.”
“Go to hell.” McConnell took a seat at the table.
“Danke,” said Stern, accepting a hot cup from Anna. “If your Christian Hell exists, my friend, I’ve just been there. And you know what? It’s full of Jews.”
“What do you mean? You went into the camp?”
Stern raised the cup to his windburned lips, watching McConnell over the rim. “Camps are made to keep people in, not out.”
“So how did you get out?”
“Underneath a medical supply truck. A rather odd time to take deliveries, don’t you think?”
Anna said from the stove, “There are as many Christians as Jews in Totenhausen, Herr Stern.”
Stern surprised McConnell by not responding to this statement. The young Zionist seemed preoccupied, his hair-trigger temper nowhere in evidence.
“So why didn’t you attack the camp?” McConnell asked.
“Too much wind,” said Stern, his eyes fixed on the table.
“I see. Did you learn anything useful?”
“Useful how? You don’t want this mission to succeed, remember?”
Anna looked over Stern’s shoulder at McConnell. Her eyes seemed to be asking if this was still true.
“I have a proposition for you, Doctor,” Stern said in a neutral tone.
“I’m listening.”
“It’s obvious that I can’t carry out this mission as planned without your help. So, I propose a compromise.”
Anna set a cup of barley coffee in front of McConnell. He nodded thanks. “What kind of compromise?”
“If you will help me to gas the SS garrison, I will do everything in my power to save the lives of the prisoners.”
McConnell sat back hard in his chair. Had he heard correctly? Anna’s eyes were riveted on him. Obviously she had heard the same thing. “Well hell,” he said, “talk about Saul on the road to Damascus—”
Stern’s chair crashed back against the stove as he came to his feet.
“Whoa!” said McConnell, raising both hands. “Take it easy! Four hours ago you were ready to kill everybody in the place. Now you want to save them?”
Stern felt his hands trembling. When he embraced his father for the first time in eleven years, it was as if a jacket of ice had melted away from his heart. Everything he had planned to say if he ever got the chance—how stupid and stubborn Avram had been to remain in Germany, how cruel to make his wife and son strike out for Palestine without his protection—all went out of his mind the moment he saw the pathetic state his father was in.
Avram Stern had not even recognized his own son. When Jonas spoke his Hebrew name, and the name of his mother, the man known as the shoemaker had nearly fainted dead away. While Rachel Jansen kept the other women back, they spoke of many things, but Jonas had come quickly to the point. In an almost inaudible whisper he asked his father to come out of the camp with him.
Avram had refused. Jonas could not believe it. It was Rostock all over again! Only it was different. Ten years before, Avram had refused to believe that Hitler would betray the Jewish combat veterans. He no longer labored under such delusions, but he remained as stubborn as ever. Now he claimed it was impossible for him in good conscience to abandon his fellow Jews to the fate that awaited them in Totenhausen. Jonas had argued violently—and in fact came very close to revealing his true mission—but Avram had not been moved. The only concession he made was that if Jonas could somehow help the others to escape, he would go also. And so, brimming with anger and frustration, Jonas had told his father to sleep in the Jewish Women’s Block until he came again.
Trekking back across the hills, Stern had calmed himself enough to settle on a plan. Because of his father’s hardheadedness, he now had to try to accomplish something even the chief of SOE believed to be impossible: find a way to kill Totenhausen’s SS guards with poison gas while sparing its prisoners. To do that, Stern knew, he would need McConnell’s help. He hated this new dependence almost as much as he hated himself for being unable to follow through with the original plan. And he had no intention of revealing his weakness to the American.
“I am willing to try to save the prisoners,” Stern said through tight lips. “If you will help me kill the SS men, get the photos the British need, and steal the sample of Soman. But I will still carry out the attack alone if you refuse to help me. Everyone will die then, perhaps even you and Fräulein Kaas.”
“Calm down,” McConnell told him. “Just sit down and be still for a minute. Please.”
Anna righted Stern’s chair and set it behind him, but he did not sit.
McConnell tried to penetrate the crystalline shine of Stern’s eyes, but it was like trying to read through black quartz. Stern’s reasons were his own, and for the time being at least, would remain that way.
“All right,” McConnell said after a moment. “That sounds like a fair bargain to me. You’ve got a deal. I’ll help you.”
Stern was more shocked by this reversal of position than McConnell had been by his. He reached awkwardly for a chair and sat down opposite McConnell at the table.
“Easier sell than you thought, huh?” said McConnell. “Well, don’t look so pleased with yourself. I want to know how you propose to kill a hundred and fifty SS soldiers without killing the prisoners as well.”
“You’re the one who wants to save them,” Stern said, almost too quickly. “You find a way.”
A fleeting intuition told McConnell that Stern’s words had very little connection to what was in his heart. He had no evidence of this, but because Stern almost always said exactly what he thought, his words invariably had the ring of conviction. But his last remark had sounded forced, overdone. And yet, what could he possibly be hiding?
“You’re supposed to be the genius,” Stern went on, filling the silence McConnell had left. “Let’s see you prove it.”
“I will,” said McConnell, his eyes and ears taking the measure of the new personality before him. “I’ll find a way.”
Half an hour and a second pot of coffee later, McConnell still had no answer. The three of them sat around the table like students trying to solve a complex calculus problem. Stern had suggested a couple of desperate commando-style plans to free the prisoners before gassing the camp, but each would have required at least a dozen men and split-second timing. His ideas brought McConnell no closer to a solution, but they did confirm his suspicion that Stern—for whatever reason—suddenly possessed a heartfelt desire to save the prisoners’ lives.
It was Anna who put him on track. Stern was telling them about something his guerrilla band had tried against a British fort, when she broke in and said, “Ach! The E-Block!”
Stern stopped talking. “What?”
“The Experimental Block. It’s the sealed chamber at the rear of the camp, where Brandt’s gas experiments are carried out.”
“What about it?” asked McConnell.
“The SS avoid it like a plague ward. I was thinking, what if we could slip the prisoners into it a few at a time, maybe half an hour before you attack? When the cylinders detonated, the prisoners would be safe inside the E-Block while the SS troops choked to death outside.”
Stern gaped at her ac
ross the table. “That’s brilliant.”
“Just a minute,” McConnell interrupted. “How big is this chamber?”
Anna’s smile faded. “I’ve never been inside it, but you’re right . . . it’s small. From the outside it doesn’t seem so small, but it’s a double-walled chamber. A room inside a room. Let me think. I’ve seen the numbers on test reports. I think . . . nine square meters.”
“That’s only a hundred square feet,” McConnell said. “How high is the ceiling?”
“Just enough room for a tall man to stand. Two meters?”
“Six and a half feet. How many prisoners in the camp?”
She shook her head. “After today’s reprisals . . . two hundred and thirty-four.”
“It’s impossible.”
“You’re right,” said Stern. “You couldn’t squeeze even half of the prisoners inside. Damn! There’s got to be a way.”
McConnell spread his hands flat on the table and sat still for nearly a minute, his mind exploring every possible variant of Anna’s idea. “Maybe there is,” he said finally.
“What?” said Stern. “You have an idea?”
“Anna is right about the E-Block—in principle. The essential problem is exposing the SS to the gas while protecting the prisoners from it. But she’s thinking backwards.”
“What do you mean?” asked Anna. “Get the SS to go into the E-Block and kill them with the gas while the prisoners are safe outside?”
“In theory, yes.”
“But the SS won’t go near the E-Block! Besides, there are a hundred and fifty of them.”
McConnell couldn’t resist a smile. “I’m sure you’re right. But I also feel sure that the architect who designed Totenhausen was thorough enough to include a bomb shelter in his plans.”