The Mask of Troy

by David Gibbins

  ‘That’s four years ago,’ Mayne murmured. ‘Yet you say most of the Jews here arrived from Auschwitz only in the last few months. What was going on here before then?’

  Cameron took a deep breath. ‘All right. It may as well be me who briefs you. This should have come from the intelligence officer with the AA regiment, but I couldn’t see him anywhere when we came through and I haven’t got time to hunt for him. At any rate, he probably wouldn’t be able to tell you any more than I can. When we arrived, he interrogated the camp commandant, the SS-Untersturmführer . I was there, as a witness. The IO was a newly commissioned replacement, been out here about as long as I have, with a smattering of Italian and fluent French. Wrong theatre, wrong war. Typical army foresight. I was the only German-speaker. I said I could spare ten minutes, no more. People were dying as we spoke. I’m supposed to be a doctor. A doctor.’ Cameron rubbed his forehead, suddenly distressed.

  ‘All right. Go on,’ Mayne said.

  ‘The commandant said it had been an Arbeitslager, a labour camp, for forestry workers. There are tracks leading off from the compound into the forest, and he said they were used by work parties. He said the wood-cutting operations wound down last year and after that the camp was used to house rich Jews, the ones Hitler intended to use as bargaining chips with the Allies. According to this man, they seriously believed they could use Jews in this way as recently as a few months ago, only shelving the idea when the Allies crossed the Rhine. God know what other desperate schemes the Nazis had prepared.’

  ‘That’s what we’re interested in,’ Mayne said. ‘Anything you say might help.’

  ‘All right.’ Cameron nodded, more collected now. ‘The SS-Untersturmführer said that for this reason the camp had only ever housed a relatively small number of healthy inmates: first the fit young men selected for forestry work, and then the members of wealthy Jewish families, who were well fed and looked after. He claimed he only arrived as a replacement commandant six weeks ago. His job was to remove the remaining inmates and shut the camp down.’

  ‘Remove?’ Mayne said.

  ‘Remove. You can guess what that means. But we didn’t have time to pursue that. We wanted him to talk, not clam up. That’ll doubtless come up at his trial.’

  ‘So then what?’

  ‘He said they were totally unprepared for the influx of Jews marched here from Poland, and had no way of dealing with them. But take that with a pinch of salt. He seems to have had a full team of seasoned SS guards, including the female camp leader. It wasn’t chaos in here until the final week or so. Before then, they seemed perfectly able to inflict a systematic regime of brutality and sadism.’

  ‘The story seems plausible,’ Mayne said slowly. ‘But it doesn’t account for the extreme secrecy of the place, those signs outside warning of epidemics.’

  Cameron nodded. ‘There’s something else. I spoke to one inmate who claimed to be the only survivor from the earlier phase of the camp, a man the SS used as a cook. Evidently quite a good one, a trained chef. He’d been here since at least ’42. He was some kind of common criminal, a Frenchman from Marseille, not a Jew. I didn’t think he was a particularly savoury character. He said that when the new commandant arrived, the SS shot everyone still in the camp, stripping them naked and throwing them into a ditch over where the Russians are buried. He said that with the new commandant and guards, none of them would have known of his cooking skills and given him special status, so he survived by hiding in the barracks and then commingling with the new influx from Auschwitz when they arrived, disguising himself as a Jew. They were all supposed to be kept alive for the work gangs in the cities, but that never happened. He was one of the healthier inmates when we arrived, and he went straight to me, evidently trusting the idea of a doctor more than a soldier to talk to.’

  ‘Why was he keen to talk?’ Stein asked.

  ‘The other inmates knew he wasn’t Jewish,’ Cameron replied. ‘They were suspicious of him. He knew they’d finger him. He wanted to assure us that he wasn’t a former SS guard disguising himself. He also thought that by showing us he wasn’t Jewish, we’d give him preferential treatment. A bit of an anti-Semite. He had short shrift from me there, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Where is he now?’

  ‘After I put him at the back of the queue for treatment, he disappeared. Gone into the forest and then headed south, I imagine. He claimed he was from Marseille, arrested by the Vichy police and then handed over to the Gestapo. Probably some kind of small-time gangster. A pretty wily character. I doubt whether you’ll find him again.’

  ‘So did he tell you? About this place?’

  ‘Before I went cold on him and he clammed up, he was eager to please. He said the Soviet prisoners in ’41 hadn’t just been used to make this clearing and build the camp. They’d also built something deep in the forest, involving a lot of concrete. It became a feared place. By the time our Frenchman arrived, rumour was that nobody who went there came out alive. He said that every few weeks a truck with a Gestapo motorcycle escort would appear at night at the camp entrance and disappear down a track into the forest. Once he watched the truck become enmired in mud and saw the people inside taken out. He said they were fit, healthy-looking young men and women, some with the Star of David on their sleeves, but of all different races and types - Slavs and Mongolians who were probably Soviet prisoners, fair-haired Nordic types, maybe from occupied Norway and Denmark, darker Mediterranean people, and North Africans like he grew up with in Marseille, perhaps French colonial prisoners of war.’

  ‘Almost as if they’d been chosen to represent every race the Nazis came across,’ Mayne murmured.

  Cameron nodded. ‘The trucks would disappear into the forest, and a few days later there’d be activity at a deep pit beyond the mound where the Soviets had been shot. Our Frenchman said he knew there were fresh burials because of the lime, which was trucked into the camp in large quantities and taken over there. Huge amounts of lime, apparently, far more than you’d need unless the bodies were really contaminated, I thought.’

  ‘Contaminated with what?’ Mayne asked.

  Cameron stared at him. ‘I don’t know. I dread to think. I’ll come to that. Our man also said an SS servant he’d befriended in the kitchen told him a story, about an SS guard who’d lost his temper with the Jews who were used to carry the lime. The guard had said that unless they worked harder, he’d send them to the Geherer in the forest and they’d suffer the fate of all the others who had gone in there. The Gestapo who were apparently always lurking around this camp got wind of his threat and took the guard away the next day, never to be seen again. Whatever was going on was clearly very top secret.’

  ‘Geherer,’ Stein murmured. ‘That means bunker, storage room.’

  Mayne started to take a deep breath, then stopped abruptly. His sense of smell had returned. The stench suddenly seemed to fill his stomach, and he nearly threw up. He swallowed hard. ‘Geherer. A bunker. That sounds like a place for storing stolen art. What you suspected, Stein? That’s what we’re after. But it’s hard to tally with this man’s story, if it’s true. Perhaps the people he saw going in were just more construction labour, fit young men.’

  ‘And women,’ Cameron said.

  Stein turned to them. ‘Two weeks ago, the US 8th Infantry Division stumbled on a sealed-up copper mine at Siegen, near Aachen. Inside they found a huge cache of art treasures, old masters by Rembrandt, Rubens, Van Dyck, as well as priceless artefacts, including the crown of Charlemagne. Some were local cathedral treasures there for safekeeping during the war, but there was also art looted by the Nazis. It was just what the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives section had been looking for. It was our breakthrough. That’s why I was rushed here. We believe there will be many more such places, dozens, hundreds, some of them in mines and other makeshift hiding places, others in purpose-built bunkers.’

  ‘What could hiding art conceivably have to do with this place? With all this horror?’ Cameron asked, gest
uring around them, then letting his hand drop.

  ‘The all-encompassing ideology,’ Stein said grimly. ‘The looting of art, the destruction of art, is all part of the same ideology, the Nazi programme of hate. In 1907, Hitler was rejected by the Vienna Academy of Fine Art. He was a competent artist, but lacked imagination. Two of the academicians were Jewish. Hitler never forgot that, nor the modernist art he never had the flair to create. When he came to power, he ridiculed it, destroyed it or had it sold out of Germany. Art was to be cleansed, just as race was to be cleansed. This - what we see around us, the horror this represents - was Hitler’s ultimate canvas. Absolute ideology. Absolute realism.’

  Mayne looked at Stein. ‘And stolen antiquities?’

  ‘On the way in, you asked about Schliemann’s treasure,’ Stein replied, eyeing him shrewdly. ‘I said nothing. But now I think I owe you an explanation. Heinrich Himmler ran a department known as the Ahnenerbe, the Department of Cultural Heritage. Before the war they went all round the world searching for evidence of Aryan roots, for the origins of the master race. In Europe they excavated sites they thought would reveal Germany’s heroic past. They became fixated on kings, on rulers who seemed to display the characteristics the Nazis most admired, absolute power, absolute ruthlessness. The emperors of Rome were a huge inspiration. But they also looked further back, to the semi-mythical kings of prehistory. Any artefacts associated with those kings had huge lustre in the eyes of the Nazis, and they would do anything to get hold of them, to glorify their heroes.’

  ‘So you’re saying that anything of that treasure from Schliemann would have huge cachet in Nazi eyes.’

  Stein nodded. ‘Huge.’

  ‘It’s time we showed Cameron that drawing.’ Mayne took out a sheet of notepaper from his tunic pocket, unfolded it and held it for the others to see. The sheet had been torn from a German order book, with Gothic typeface at the top, and was thin, almost diaphanous, so the grey sky seemed to suffuse the drawing with depth, with dimensionality. The lines were precise, in crayon. In the centre were simple sketches of a man in a dark suit and a woman, gaily coloured. Between them was a little girl, holding hands with them. Below the adults were two words, Mama and Papa. But it was the object drawn above the child’s head that was so extraordinary. It was golden, luminous, with a silvery interior, and the child was looking up at it.

  ‘Good God,’ Cameron whispered. ‘It’s a swastika. But a reverse swastika. And those colours.’ He looked up. ‘Why would a Jewish child draw that?’

  Mayne looked at Stein, then at Cameron. ‘We assume it’s something she’s seen. What you were saying earlier. Somehow associated with trauma. But we’re putting two and two together and thinking it’s here, somehow associated with that bunker.’

  Cameron looked at them. ‘Have you seen this before? This symbol?’

  Stein spoke quickly. ‘We don’t know what it means. Not yet. But we’ve had it described to us, very exactly. The interrogation of a top Nazi official. The details are top secret. That official is no longer alive. That’s how deadly serious this is.’

  Mayne stared at Stein, his mind in a whirl. It had been seen somewhere before. When should he tell Stein? About the treasure the old foreman had seen under the Mask of Agamemnon? A treasure that had become a dread symbol in Nazi Germany? Stein had spoken of the Nazi fervour for ancient mythical kings, for Aryan roots, and everyone knew their fetish for symbols and secrecy, for codes and decrees. Was that what had happened? Somehow, someone had found this treasure, symbol of Agamemnon, symbol of Troy, secreted away in Germany by Schliemann, and made it instead into a symbol of hate, of some hidden horror that Stein could not bring himself to tell, or did not even yet know. It was suddenly imperative that they find out more. Mayne turned to Cameron. ‘Where is the girl who drew this likely to be found, if she’s still alive?’

  Cameron pointed. ‘That hut ahead. That’s where the children are, the Kinderbaracke. A Red Cross nurse is looking after them. Come on.’ He led them around the hut to a line of stretchers in the shade, facing away from the camp, away from the bodies and the horror. Each stretcher held a small form, beneath a blanket. Two British soldiers with Sten guns slung over their backs crouched among the children, offering cups of water. A woman got up from beside one stretcher, gently raised the blanket to cover the head of the still form beneath, then bowed her own head for a moment. She was wearing dungarees, gaiters and rubber boots like Cameron’s, with her hair tied in a scarf. She looked up as they approached. ‘Helen,’ Cameron said quietly, gesturing back at the two officers and Lewes. ‘Just a few questions. We won’t take up any of your time.’

  Mayne saw that the nurse’s eyes were tired and grey like Cameron’s. She nodded, but remained where she was, turning away from the dead child to the one on the stretcher on the other side, holding the emaciated head in one hand and a cup in the other, dripping water into the open mouth. She put down the cup and gently raised the child’s left arm, showing a black smudge below the elbow. ‘That’s the Auschwitz tattoo,’ she said. ‘They all have it. Their parents are gone, murdered by the Nazis, in the Polish ghettos, in Krakow, Warsaw, in the death camps. According to the adult inmates we’ve spoken to, almost all of the children who arrived at Auschwitz were gassed immediately. These are the ones who survived selection. Some are Dutch children of Jewish families in the diamond trade, kept alive by the Nazis for ransom. Others are children who had arrived in Auschwitz before the gas chambers were built, and had made themselves useful in the camp. They somehow survived the march from Auschwitz a few months ago. We brought them here, away from the barracks, to get them away from the typhus.’

  Mayne showed her the drawing. ‘Do you know who did this?’

  She glanced at it. ‘Several of them have done drawings like that. It’s the first thing they draw when we give them crayons. Images of their parents. Sometimes on the railhead at Auschwitz, where the Nazi doctors separated parents and children. It’s as if . . .’ She paused, just as Cameron had done, at a loss for words. ‘It’s as if that moment lives with them for ever, frozen in time, as if all that’s happened afterwards is a nightmare. They want to wake up and go back. So they draw it, the last image of their parents. It’s as if liberation has allowed them to see an image of happiness that the survival instinct has denied them for so long, and they become fixated on it, see nothing else. It’s heartbreaking.’ She glanced at the picture. ‘Yes. That was the girl with the harp. She’s over there.’

  They followed her gaze. About fifty yards away they saw a figure seated on a chair, with her back to them, in the middle of open ground. Mayne could see her shorn head and thin neck, but not her face. She was wearing an outsized army shirt and trousers, evidently given to her by the soldiers, but she was barefoot. Her hands lay on her knees, and she seemed motionless, staring ahead. ‘She’s about seventeen,’ the nurse said. ‘According to the others, she survived Auschwitz because she worked in a place called Block Twelve. She was a sex slave, used by the SS guards and privileged inmates. Shortly before we arrived here, the female camp leader, the Lagerfüherin, found out what the girl had been at Auschwitz, and took her into the forest one night along with several of the guards. I can’t bear to tell you what they did to her. After the camp’s surrender, several inmates who went after the guards found her in the forest and brought her here. She hasn’t spoken a word, but she did do that drawing. She’s done many like it, almost identical, but that’s the only one I’ve seen with the swastika above her parents. Odd. It’s reversed. But they have seen that hated thing so much, it must be burned into their minds. Who knows why she drew it there.’

  ‘The drawing was taken from her by an SAS patrol who were in here yesterday,’ Mayne said. ‘Their officer took it to VIII Corps HQ.’

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I gave it to him. A Captain Frazer, Hugh Frazer. They’d shot some of the guards, and a German officer who fired at them. Captain Frazer stayed with me for a while afterwards, and tried to help with the children. He w
as pretty frayed. Spent a long time here, on the edge of this bed, just sitting and looking at the girl with the harp. It was strange. It was almost as if . . . as if he’d found peace, just sitting here, looking at her. Funny how it takes men like that, killers one moment, and then just sitting there, broken by it all. I only wish you chaps could cry a bit more easily. God knows, I’m close to it myself after having been here for twenty-four hours.’

  Mayne swallowed hard. Hugh. ‘Frazer’s a friend of mine, actually. Saw him back at HQ. Thought he needed a rest.’

  She nodded. ‘I thought it was malaria. I was in India before this. So many of them coming out of Burma had it. You get pretty good at spotting the signs.’

  ‘We both picked it up in Egypt. Long time ago now.’

  ‘What’s she doing now, sitting out there all alone?’ Stein asked.

  ‘The others said that before she was used as a prostitute, she survived selection at Auschwitz because her parents told the SS she could play the harp. Her parents were taken away to be gassed. The Nazis ran a camp orchestra, the Lagerkapelle. Many of the Jews were accomplished musicians, and the Nazis had them play the music the Jews had loved, the classics, folk songs, especially modern jazz, songs like “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love”, you know? Used to be one of my favourites too. It was meant to calm the arrivals during selection. Some of the people here hum snatches of it, or words from the Shabbat, in Yiddish. But so much of what they sing is anguished, despairing. I wish there was music here. There aren’t even any birds any more, with those awful fires we lit to get rid of the clothes. It’s all death, like the entrance to hell.’ She paused, swallowing hard, then nodded towards the girl. ‘You saw the local German people the soldiers brought in to see all this? I asked if anyone had a harp, and a schoolteacher brought one, a child’s harp. She’s sitting in front of it now.’