by Simon Toyne
Bull spotted the black Audi and watched as it passed. Three people inside. A woman, a child, and a guy who looked like you could snap him in two with a strong sneeze. He picked up the triangle and headed back to the car. Roberto was already in the driver’s seat with the engine running.
They caught up with the Audi and sat back in traffic, keeping a safe cushion of cars between them. The next toll stop was almost an hour ahead, but reaching it was not an option. Bull was hoping they’d pull off soon for a break or to refuel; that way they could catch them out of the car with a minimum of fuss. If they didn’t stop, he would call a friend of his called Iron Mike who owned a scrapyard south of Vierzon. Mike would intercept the Audi in his breaker-truck, get in front of it and slam the brakes on to cause a crash. First on the scene would be Bull and Roberto, full of concern:
We saw everything.
Are you OK?
Why don’t you come sit in our car while we wait for the cops and the ambulance?
Then – Boom. Gagged and bound and on their merry way. The Audi would have airbags up the ass, so they wouldn’t get hurt, not in the accident at least. A bit of whiplash maybe, some bruised ribs.
He’d give them twenty minutes, maybe twenty-five before he called Iron Mike.
Bull settled back in his seat and stared ahead at the Audi, and the road, and dark grey clouds on the horizon.
66
Marie-Claude glanced in her mirror and instantly knew something was wrong.
‘You OK, Léo? You don’t look too good.’ He was pulling a face and swallowing. ‘Are you going to be sick? Hang on. There’s a rest stop up ahead, I’ll pull over.’
Solomon glanced at him. ‘He looks like how I feel in cars.’
‘Not helpful.’ Marie-Claude indicated right and shed speed. ‘Look, Léo, I’m turning off. Hang on for two minutes.’ She pressed a button and Léo’s window slid down. ‘If you need to barf, do it out the window.’
They followed the curve of the slip road up past a couple of parked long-distance lorries with shades over the windows and a car with bikes on the back parked by a picnic table covered with fruit and bread and with a family of six circling it and helping themselves. Marie-Claude pulled into a space, cut the engine and was out of her door and helping Léo out of his seat in a smooth and well-practised move that suggested to Solomon she was well-drilled in the manoeuvre.
‘Are you going to be sick?’
Léo screwed his face up like he tasted something bitter. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘OK, good. Go to the toilet and splash water on your face. You want me to come with you?’
‘No, I’m OK.’
Solomon got out of the car, grateful to be free of it. He watched Léo wander off towards a grey, squat toilet block with a wide gap between the top of the concrete walls and the roof providing the cheapest form of ventilation.
‘Not wishing to sound like your mother,’ Marie-Claude said, ‘but you should make use of the facilities yourself. This will probably be the last chance you get before we hit Dijon.’
‘Thanks,’ Solomon said, retrieving the two books he’d been unable to read earlier from the car. ‘But I think I’ll stay here and do some nausea-free reading instead.’
Marie-Claude nodded. ‘You don’t eat, you don’t drink, you don’t even need to go to the bathroom. Is this going to be like in one of those movies where it turns out I’ve been imagining you the whole time?’
Solomon picked up one of the bottles of water from the carrier bag and took a sip. ‘Ghosts don’t drink water.’
She nodded wearily. ‘The mother and sane person in me is happy to hear it.’ She turned and walked away towards the other end of the toilet block, rubbing her pink-edged eyes.
Solomon moved over to a tree and leaned against the trunk, feeling the same, comforting reassurance he’d felt earlier. He studied the two books, Lansky’s memoir and the anthology of Death Camp Liberation stories. He opened Lansky’s memoir and read that first, soaking up the words and story as fast as he could turn pages and experiencing occasional jolts of déjà-vu, like he recognized some of what was being described. He paused at the mention of the man in the white suit who’d appeared on the final day, searching his lost memory for some stronger recollection. When none came, he read the rest of the memoir then opened the second book, turning to the marked page where the story of Die Schneider Lager’s liberation had been recorded by different eyes. He was so immersed in what he was reading that he didn’t notice the storm clouds blot out the sun, or the picnicking family hastily gathering their lunch together, or the BMW drive slowly past and park up by the grey slab walls of the toilet block.
VIII
‘Sometimes war dreams of itself.’
Carl von Clausewitz
Extract from
THE DIARY OF PRIVATE JOHN HAMILTON, 2ND ROYAL WESSEX INFANTRY
On the Liberation of Nazi Labour Camp Mulhouse
A – Known as Die Schneider Lager
We were about a mile outside the camp when we smelled the burning bodies. We all knew what it was because the day we landed in Normandy we’d had to double past a burning Panzer beyond the beach with the German tank crew still inside. Once you smell something like that you never forget it, and we smelled it on the road into Mulhouse.
A reconnaissance plane had spotted some kind of camp complex ahead but no one had fired on the pilot so we expected minimal resistance. Most of the German forces were either north of us or south at Altkirch. Our job was to plug the gap and flush out any pockets of German resistance that might cause problems on the flanks, a footnote to the Battle of the Bulge and lucky to be away from the main fight – or so we thought.
The main building was a smouldering ruin when we reached it and our approach was cautious. The camp was set back from the main road and surrounded by a high, barbed-wire fence but there were no guards in the towers and when a unit went forward to open the gates they found them unlocked.
We set about securing the place and found plenty of evidence of a hurried exit: dormitories with the beds made; laundered shirts hanging on rails; offices with paperwork strewn everywhere and empty filing cabinets lying on their sides.
I was part of a team tasked with investigating the charred mass where the main building had been. There were a couple of partially demolished buildings to the rear of it, which led me to assume that the factory had been hit by stray bombs or long-range shells, killing the workers inside and burning the building to the ground. But as we approached the smouldering pile of rubble I saw the bones, thousands of bones in the ashes, skulls, leg-bones, skeletal hands, so many that the building must have been filled with people when it caught fire.
There were fire tankers parked around the ruins and I couldn’t understand how there could be that many bodies in the wreckage when they had been fighting the flames. It was only when we inspected the trucks that we realized the Germans had not been spraying water on the fire, they had been dousing it with diesel.
We found a bulldozer in one of the other buildings and used it to scratch a grave in the frozen earth. There’s a memorial there now, a big block of marble with thousands of names carved on it. If we’d known they were going to do that, we would have taken more care where we dug the hole. But this was December 1944, ground frozen solid, so we dug where it seemed easiest and when the hole was deep enough we set about shovelling the dead into it. That was when we found Herman Lansky.
He was buried in garbage in a large wooden crate by a scorched wall. We thought he was dead, bones sticking out of his skin, eyes sunk so deep that his head looked more like a skull. It didn’t seem possible that a man who looked that bad could be living. But when we dragged him out of there the company medic found a pulse and he was carted off to the infirmary. We doubted he would make it through the night, but he was tougher than anyone thought. Within a day he had recovered enough to talk. That’s when they called for me.
I’d been studying languages before enlisting. My mother was
Polish and I’d grown up speaking Polish and English at home. She’d taught me some Russian too and I’d learned French at school. I’d lied about my age to join up because I was worried the war would be over by the time I finished my studies and it would be hard in post-war Europe to visit all the countries I wanted to see. If I’m honest, I also wanted to see what war was like. I was fifteen and had never been outside of West Sussex before landing in Normandy.
I remember listening to Lansky talk, shifting between Polish and French, telling us all the things that had happened in the camp, about the Commandant, Artur Samler, and the grotesque things he’d done. You have to remember that the liberation of Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz and all those other camps had not happened yet, so we had no comprehension that anything like this could even exist in the modern, civilized world – a death factory producing murder on an industrial scale. It was like a dark fairy story, one that couldn’t possibly be real, except we had seen the bodies, all those bodies.
We continued to clean the place up, burning rubbish, burying the dead and waiting for the order to move out. None of us wanted to stay there. It wasn’t only the cooked flesh smell that hung in the air, there was something eerie about the camp, as if the stain of evil clung to the fabric of the place.
Two days after we liberated Mulhouse, an American battalion came through and took Lansky away with them. They had better medical facilities than us and more resources so we were happy to hand him over. He left. We stayed.
The Battle of the Bulge continued to wage, the Allies pushing forward, the Germans pushing back. Our mission had been to secure the camp and await further orders, but its position close to the main road between Mulhouse and the Rhine made it tactically valuable and more units moved in to bolster the flank and our temporary position became semi-permanent. The factory complex became a supply yard filled with fuel tankers, munitions trucks and pallet loads of food rations.
Christmas came and went, 1944 turned into 1945.
One night in early January, waking in the middle of the night and unable to get back to sleep again, I decided to go for a walk. There was fresh snow on the ground and a half-moon behind thin, shifting clouds that made the snow sparkle. There was no artillery that night, no bombardments, no distant rifle fire, just a kind of soft, tinkling silence as frost formed and fell to the ground. It was probably the first time since England that I had heard silence, a proper, deep silence as if someone had simply flicked a switch and turned off the war.
I walked deeper into the camp towards the two partially demolished buildings that lay slumped beneath a blanket of fresh snow. There’s something pure and beautiful about snow at night. It carries light into the darkest of shadows and removes any horror you might imagine there. I stood in the softly twinkling dark and felt a contentment and a calm I had forgotten even existed. I remember turning my face up to the sky and feeling the kiss of the cold flakes on my skin.
That was when I heard the sound, metallic and faint, like the clink of a wedding ring on a beer bottle. I remember holding my breath and listening out until I heard it again, so faint – three short taps, three with pauses, then three short again – Morse Code. An SOS coming from beneath my feet.
I shouted for the guard and men appeared, pulling on uniforms as I breathlessly explained what I’d heard. We couldn’t risk the bulldozer because we didn’t know what state the cellar was in; instead we formed a human chain and began shifting rubble by hand. We had been there for twenty-six days by that time, and we all knew whoever was underground had been buried for at least that long.
We unearthed a concrete stairwell filled with rubble and broken brick and started digging it out while I called out in French and Polish, letting whoever was down there know we were coming. After long minutes of shifting rubble we uncovered a door, the bent key jammed in the keyhole, showing that it had been locked from the outside. Someone fetched a fire axe, handed it to me and I broke through. The smell that escaped from that splintered hole was evil – rotten and human and animal – like I had broken through the door to hell. And when I shone my torch through the gap and saw what was inside, I felt sure we had.
There were bodies everywhere, piled up against each other, all mired in filth and dust and wearing the same striped uniform Lansky had been wearing. The cellar was barely bigger than a hotel bedroom, but thirty or more men were crammed into it. I saw movement on the body closest to me and watched a rat crawl from a gap in the striped fabric, sniff the air with a snout made dark from something I don’t even want to think about, before scurrying away into the cellar.
Then I heard the sound again, metal on metal – three short taps, three long, three short – and followed it with my torch to one of the revenants propped against the wall. He had his eyes closed and his head tilted to one side and looked as dead as the rest, except his finger was moving, twitching as if it was the only part of him living. There was a tailor’s thimble on the end of it and it tapped against a water pipe, the SOS I had heard in the silent night. This was Josef Engel.
We cleared out that cellar as quickly as we could, slipping on a concrete floor mired in ordure and vomit and the various secretions that had leaked from the many corpses. There were thirty-four men inside that cellar, locked up and left to die by someone whose evil I cannot begin to fathom. Maybe the explosions that had part-demolished the buildings were supposed to collapse the cellar on top of them, murdering and burying them at the same time. If so, they had failed. But only just. Thirty-four men had been buried in that cellar and only twelve were still alive when we carried them out. A day later, despite the best emergency medical care we could give, there were four.
Four men out of thirty-four and God knows how many countless thousands before them. These were the men who came to be known as Die Anderen – The Others.
67
A raindrop smacked on to the open page of the book and Solomon looked up into the flat grey sky. Some of what he had read felt so familiar, like his own memories written down, but there had to be more. Josef Engel had never told his story, but Otto Adelstein might. Solomon wanted to look him in the eye and watch for the flicker of recognition as he asked him who’d locked them in that cellar, and about the man in the pale suit.
The rain grew heavier, pattering on the dusty ground and hissing in the leafy canopy overhead. Solomon closed the book and looked up to see Marie-Claude running toward him, head down against the rain. She glanced at the closed book. ‘Finished already?’
‘I’m a fast reader.’
‘Both books?’ He nodded. ‘No way. OK, what regiment was John Hamilton in?’
‘Second Royal Wessex infantry.’
‘That was easy.’ She moved to the driver’s door and opened it. ‘What month was the camp liberated?’
‘December 1944, snow on the ground. Hamilton thought they were going to be a footnote to the Battle of the Bulge. He was wrong. Ask another.’
Marie-Claude dropped into her seat to escape the rain then turned and looked in the back. ‘Where’s Léo?’
Solomon stared at the empty booster seat. ‘I don’t know.’ He looked across at the concrete toilet block, saw the BMW parked next to it. It bothered him that he’d not noticed it arriving. There was no one inside and that bothered him too. ‘Maybe he’s waiting for the rain,’ Solomon said. ‘I’ll go tell him it’s time to go.’
He closed the door and moved towards the block, breathing deeply and smelling ozone from the storm, garlic and yeast from the picnic table and the astringent burn of toilet disinfectant. There was something else there too, something feral and predatory, testosterone mixed with adrenaline and the faint smell of aniseed. He listened through the rapidly building hiss of rain and heard the faint drip of a tap inside the toilet block, the thrum of raindrops on the roof – nothing else. He breathed in again and caught the cidery apple scent of Léo mixed with the metallic tang of fear. Solomon unbuttoned his jacket to allow movement then stepped out of the rain and into the building.
Léo stared right at him, the fear in his eyes made huge by his glasses. A dark whip of a man crouched behind him, one hand clamped over Léo’s mouth, the other holding a six-inch hunting knife to his throat. A bigger man stood by the sinks, inspecting his teeth in the mirror. ‘About fucking time,’ he said. ‘How long do you normally wait for a little kid to take a piss?’
Solomon shrugged. ‘I don’t hang around toilets as much as some.’
The man turned and smiled. ‘Funny guy.’ He was huge. A foot taller than Solomon and twice as wide. ‘Turn around, cross your hands behind your back and don’t try and be a hero. My orders are not to hurt you, but I’m happy to improvise if you piss me off.’
‘Whose orders?’ Solomon said.
‘You see now, questions are exactly the kind of thing that piss me off. Turn around, give me your hands. You get two warnings, then it gets painful – and not necessarily for you.’
Solomon smiled at Léo, winked at him, and turned. He felt air displace as the huge man moved up behind him. Something hard and thin looped over his wrists and bit into them with a plastic, ripping sound.
‘Good boy,’ the man said, slapping the side of his face with a hand the size of a tray. ‘Stand over by the sinks. Don’t move. Don’t speak.’
Solomon did as he was told and turned to face the room again. The big man moved over to Léo next and lifted his glasses off his nose with a daintiness his thick fingers did not look capable of. ‘I’ll just go have a word with Mama, show her these to make sure she doesn’t get nervous and start calling anyone. Then we can all go quietly on our way.’ He moved to the door and stepped outside, his heavy footsteps rapidly dissolving in the hiss of rain.