The interrogation began. I was resigned to what Nuttgen would say. No, he had never seen me in his life. He had no brother-in-law. He had escaped from a lorry somewhere in the hills near their previous camp in Argyll, not from a police station in Fife. They had picked up a dirty, exhausted British man, a deserter, and Wuttke had made the man give Nuttgen his clothes.
He answered more questions about where he had found the rowing boat, and what he had intended to do when he got to southern Ireland. I noticed that he was sitting on his hands to stop them trembling.
Eric said: ‘You are perfectly safe in here, my friend. The guard is outside the door and his rifle is loaded. Now tell us what is really going on in this place. What is Wuttke up to?’
Nuttgen drew a shaky breath. I offered him a cigarette, but he stared at the floor and muttered, ‘Ich bin Nichtraucher – I don’t smoke.’
Then he went on, almost whispering: ‘There is an SS group. I told you all this already. Wuttke runs it. They meet every night, and have lectures – the history of the Movement, racial hygiene, the ways to solve the Jewish problem, how Germany will deal with the Polish area after victory. They take oaths. More and more people are joining them.’
‘Because they are afraid of Wuttke?’
‘Yes, he orders punishments. For defeatist talk, for stealing – everything. But not only fear. Many people believe him now. They see that Hitler is winning the war.’
‘And do you think he will win the war?’
Nuttgen looked at the floor again and murmured something.
‘What?’
‘I think he is saying something from the Bible. That God will spare the city, for the sake of a few just men.’
Eric shrugged. He began to write in his notebook. After a few minutes of silence, Nuttgen asked if he could go to the lavatory. ‘Guard!’ shouted Eric, without looking up. ‘Don’t take too long,’ he added to Nuttgen as he was led out. I noticed that the soldier had fixed the bayonet on his rifle. He looked worried.
‘That wasn’t much good to me,’ Eric said. ‘I need more details to get Wuttke put away. Maybe I’ll get what I want when he comes back. Not too good for you either, Major. But we’ll come to that later.’
I turned away. There was a British daily newspaper on a stand near me, and some British propaganda leaflets in German. I began to read the newspaper, but there was little I hadn’t heard on the BBC. Eric was still completing his notes. I wandered up to the window, and pulled back the curtain.
On the other side of the camp road there was a knot of four or five men. Unexpectedly, as I watched they lurched together and began to fight. There were screams and shouts and a prisoner fell to the ground, kicking his legs dramatically. From the left of my view a Polish soldier came running towards the brawl, the same guard who had taken Nuttgen to the latrines.
Eric, standing behind me, suddenly howled in English: ‘Fuck! Oh, fuck!’ He burst past me and raced out across the camp, ignoring the struggling men and heading for the long shed of the latrine block.
Nuttgen was dangling from the roof pole. He was naked below the waist, and his trousers trailed down from his feet. His hands had been tied behind his back and, as well as the wire under his chin, there was another wire sunk tightly into his neck. I had time to glimpse blood as well as shit on the concrete. Eric was shouting: ‘Get a medic! A fucking ladder, a wire-cutter!’
I ran out. Eric began to follow me, then impulsively turned back and tore open the door of a broom cupboard by the latrine entrance. I was outside by now, maybe ten yards away, as Wuttke stepped in a quite leisurely manner out of the cupboard. He seemed to bump into Eric by accident, putting out a hand to the other man’s shoulder as if to steady himself. Eric lowered himself to his knees. A geyser of blood jumped towards the ceiling, then subsided into small gouts and pulses. Wuttke pulled the weapon out of the base of Eric’s neck, raised his eyes and noticed me.
I was close enough to see that he was holding one of those fancy SS daggers – had nobody searched him? He came towards me on tiptoe, almost dancing rather than running. How slowly he moves, I was thinking, when the soldier with the rifle crashed into me from behind, knocked me over, spun his weapon round and struck Wuttke full in the face with the butt.
11
The trial took place in Perth, a few weeks later. I was a witness, the star witness in fact, for I had seen the murders, or, to be accurate, one of them. Eric was quite dead, his carotid artery professionally severed. Poor Hans Nuttgen was still technically alive when they cut him down, but died that night without regaining consciousness. It turned out that Wuttke had not quite finished with Nuttgen when we appeared. In his tunic they found a sheet of paper which Wuttke apparently intended to fix to the hanging body: ‘I betrayed my comrades and my Führer. Loyalty is our honour.’
Wuttke was hanged by the British. So were four of his fellow prisoners, on the slender evidence of an informer who named them as the other members of an SS Femgericht, a Teutonic vengeance tribunal. I went to Nuttgen’s funeral, which was attended by only three other people. The camp chaplain was there, and a priest from Perth, and a small, brave man – a German Jew, like Eric – who had just been posted to the camp with the task of persuading the prisoners to renounce Hitler and embrace democracy. They let him live, I heard after the war, but I don’t believe he made many converts.
The funeral, like the trial, had been done with a bleak rapidity – cut to the bare essentials in a very British way which left me uneasy. When I woke in the mornings, I kept remembering the tight smile on Wuttke’s black-bruised face as he stood to attention to hear his death sentence. I remembered the way Nuttgen’s dark hair had fallen over his face as he leaned forward and murmured words from the Bible.
Everyone else had spoken of retribution and justice. Nobody but Nuttgen had spoken words of mercy or pity, the words which ghosts need if they are to cease their restless walking to and fro. When I heard the news of the executions, I found my way to a Catholic chapel in Kirkcaldy and arranged a requiem Mass ‘for the intention’ of Hans Nuttgen’s soul. I told nobody else about that. It was done as much for me as for him.
*
The telephones had been repaired in Greenock, but for several days there was no answer from Union Street. Finally, somebody lifted the receiver. There was a silence, but in the background I could hear little Francis crying.
‘Hello? Is that Jackie? It’s Mike, Uncle Mike.’
‘Granny says I’m not to talk to anyone on the phone just now.’
‘Is she there? It’s okay to talk to me. Tell her I have some good news.’
‘Are you coming to see us again?’
‘No, Jackie, but I want you to give Granny a message. Tell her that the man she was worried about, the man who was talking to her and me the other day, has gone away. In fact, he’s suddenly died. She doesn’t need to worry about him any more.’
‘Is that good news? How, was he killed in the war?’
‘Yes. Yes, he was. Just tell her that, and say I will ring again tomorrow morning before she goes out. And how are you, Jackie?’
‘Fine. I got top in history yesterday. Fine.’ She hung up.
Next day, I telephoned again and talked to Mrs M. When I had finished the story (careful about what I said, for who else might be listening in?), she sighed.
‘Jackie gave me your message last night. What did I do? Well, I felt like a walk by myself would be the right thing. I walked along the Esplanade and up the Lyle Hill to the top, and sat for a while. It’s a long time since I did that. You can get your ideas back into shape up there.’
She paused, then went on: ‘You’ll get a shock when I say this. But there was good in that wee man as well as bad. Last year, after Johnston – after the funeral – we got to talking a lot when he came round. He had a dirty job to do, but at first I didn’t know that I was going to be part of his dirty job. He wanted to see my old photograph albums, talk about Johnston as a boy. So he comforted me. He was kind of warm, in a
way folk here don’t know about. I didn’t know Germans could be like that.’
‘You knew he was German?’
‘He told me, when I asked. He talked that chatterbox perfect English, like a comic off the Light Programme, but I picked up just that bittie of foreign in his voice. You know, before he started setting those traps for me like “had I heard from anyone?” and all that, we had real conversations. We used to talk about books, music, things I hadn’t bothered with since I was a girl. There was a while I looked forward to him calling.’
‘It was pretending, Mabel. To make you trust him – an act.’
‘An act? Well, all refugees need to be actors. But what he was saying to us the other day, what he’d do to me and Jackie, that was no act. That was his duty, and he was enjoying it right enough. Some folk, you never get to the true end of them. Nevertheless, to die that way – I’m sorry for it.’
I wanted to ask her if the big Atlantic liner was still in the river. But that was not for the telephone. ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives.’ Careless talk – questions, confidences, words overheard or suspected or betrayed - had already cost three lives under my eyes. And now Helen was about to set off among the U-boats again, was probably at sea already. ‘Time for me to ring off and do my own duty, Mabel. I think we are three very lucky people. I’ll call when I have any news for you.’
12
I took the brown suitcase with Johnston’s possessions – the best suit, the gold watch – back to Pitnechtan House. It was conspicuous in the corner of my office, so after a few days I stowed it under the bunk in my sleeping quarters. But Johnston did not ring. Several weeks passed. Once I went down to St Monans and walked up and down the quay of the fishing harbour, a futile proceeding as I had forgotten to ask him the name of his boat.
Men were busy unloading boxes of haddock and herring, and the pubs were full. But I avoided them. An officer in Polish uniform asking after Alex Ketling – that would be too intriguing to be forgotten. There was no sign of Johnston around the harbour, and I went away without speaking to anyone.
I was vexed and puzzled. I had hoped that handing over the suitcase to Johnston would break the circuit of my complicity with him, switch off his presence in my life. But that circuit still lay there live. From time to time, in the next days, his sullen face and flat red hair came uninvited to mind. What was he waiting for?
*
On a clear Sunday morning in late June, I switched on the nine o’clock news (‘...and this is Alvar Liddell reading it’). Nazi Germany had invaded the Soviet Union.
I hurried over to the mess, and ran into our British liaison officer coming out of the door. He grinned at me and made a thumbs-up sign. But I gave him a chill stare. Yes, that little corporal at Ladybank had tried to warn us. But I had paid no attention and clung to my altar-boy faith that this would remain the Armageddon war – the hosts of the just against the hosts of evil. What an idiot! I hated – still hate – being so wrong; I fancied that the British officer knew my mind and was laughing at me. For him, Stalin was just another foreigner. And now, all of a sudden, an ally – why not? But for me there was only shock, then foreboding.
Inside the mess, the Polish mood was excited, almost merry. ‘The Russians can’t fight. The Wehrmacht will just drive over them. They will be in Moscow in a few weeks, wait and see.’
Round the wireless, a group was shouting for silence. Don’t imagine for a moment that we supported the Nazis. But almost all of us came from the Borderlands, the regions into which the Germans were advancing. We listened, hoping to hear the names of Polish towns freed from Bolshevik occupation.
I found myself standing next to our Colonel, the shrewd ex-procurator.
‘So what do you make of it, Szczucki?’
I thought again of the corporal at Ladybank, adjusting his pince-nez in order to prophesy.
‘Perhaps, sir, it won’t be so easy for the Germans. Think of Napoleon, sir. Didn’t we think that he would restore a free Poland for us by invading Russia? Excuse me, but what will happen to Poland this time if the Russians win?’
‘Major, you are supposed to be an intelligence officer! Look at the facts. This Red Army is an untrained rabble; in Finland they let themselves be slaughtered. This is not the old Russia, Major. Believe me, I knew that Russia; I was born in Petersburg and my father, a university professor there, taught military law to cadets in the old army.’
He lit a cigarette, and smiled at me as he made a show of smoking it in the ‘Russian’ way: holding it upright between finger and thumb. ‘These are not real soldiers, Major. They are no more than starving peasants terrorised by commissars. As Hitler advances, they will throw their rifles away. And the Ukrainians will rise and join the Nazis – you can expect that. As for the rest... when they have the choice, they won’t die to defend Bolshevism.’
‘But, Colonel, perhaps they will die to defend Russia.’
The Colonel considered for a moment. He nodded slightly. ‘The Russian people... who knows? They have never been our enemy, only their leaders. A Russian can never be quite foreign to us, in the way that the Germans are. Yes, like you, Major, I am not sure of my feelings today. Mostly I rejoice, because now Stalin will be sent to burn in hell with all the Bolshevik comrades he murdered. And yet when I think of what the Nazis will do to that people who have already suffered so much, who will be buried under the ruins of Bolshevism – when I think of that...’
He shook his head. He allowed two ribbons of smoke to drift from his nostrils towards the floor and form a dissolving wreath around his boots. Then he turned away.
The German tank armies drove eastward, and a moving sea of Soviet prisoners flowed westward. For many weeks, it seemed that the Colonel had been right. But for us, the game of the advancing arrows on newspaper maps was not just ‘war news’. Our families, the families of most of the officers I knew, were among the million and a half Polish civilians deported to the Soviet Union in 1940.
The Germans might liberate them. Or their Soviet guards might ‘liquidate’ their captives as the front approached. Nobody doubted that they were capable of that. Already, enough stories had reached us about the casual shooting of deportees, about dead children flung out of the trains, about mothers and grandfathers dying in the snow as they hauled logs. As for the officers taken prisoner by the Soviets in 1939, most of them reservists, nothing but particles of rumour had reached us for over a year.
A thick, nameless depression settled on me. I felt out of line, stranded at an angle to what was happening around me. In the Pitnechtan pubs, cheerful Scotsmen unnerved me by patting my shoulder and assuring me that ‘you’ll be right glad that your pals are back on our side!’ Many, all too clearly, still assumed that Poles were a sub-species of Russian.
Some of the older men were Communist Party members, relieved to be allowed to support the war effort now that it had changed from ‘an imperialist struggle irrelevant to the working class’ to ‘proletarians of the world against Fascism’. They were hurt and puzzled when, having been bought a beer, I refused to raise the glass to Comrade Stalin. Puzzled partly because they knew I enjoyed drinking. I had begun to drink noticeably too much. Most nights now, I was unsteady on my feet on the long walk back to Pitnechtan House.
A month later, we were informed that General Sikorski, our Supreme Commander, had signed an agreement which made the Soviet Union formally our ally. The Polish deportees and prisoners of war in the USSR were to be ‘amnestied’, and a Polish army would be formed on Soviet territory. The Nazi–Soviet Pact of 1939, under which Hitler and Stalin had abolished and partitioned my country, was cancelled. But there was only murky generality about where the frontiers of a free Poland would lie after the war.
In our mess there was angry confusion. Above all, the word ‘amnesty’ was so outrageous – as if over a million men, women and children had been guilty of crime, rather than their kidnappers. And Sikorski had failed to extract any assurance that the Russians would give up the Polish territories
they had seized in 1939.
We heard from London that our government-in-exile had split over the agreement. Some of us urged the Colonel to hold an open meeting, a free debate.
‘Are you crazy? You are in an army, not a student society. This is a moment for unity, whatever our feelings. Anyway, the Supreme Commander is coming to Scotland to address us.’
He looked us over, as we stood in his office, and shook his head. ‘Do you suppose Poland is in a position to dictate terms to Stalin? The prisoners liberated, a free Polish army allowed to form over there – we are lucky to have won that much. Children, this is nasty medicine. So swallow it!’
General Sikorski came and spoke to us in the rain. I had not seen him before and his bearing impressed me: stiff, bleakly determined. A few people had muttered that they would not salute him, or would interrupt his speech. In the event, we all behaved proudly and properly as he strode along our ranks. But his speech made me uneasy. He went on too long about his own heroic experiences in eastern Poland. ‘Would I therefore give up those territories, or overlook their importance?’
Rhetorical questions like that were imprudent, I thought. And it was about now, as I remember, that a sort of schizophrenia began to affect us which was to last to the end of the war. As long as one thought about fighting the Germans – in North Africa and later Italy and France, in the air and at sea – it was easy to feel the required emotions: purpose, urgency, hatred. But if one allowed oneself to think about our ‘gallant allies’ in the east, those simple feelings became hard to summon.
So we tried not to think about it, to hold it in a separate mental compartment. For a time, that worked. But later, as we began to meet some of the Polish survivors (‘amnestied’) who had left the Soviet Union, and later still as mass graves were opened, the bulkhead of that separate compartment began to leak. If we let ourselves think, the thoughts were bitter.
The Death of the Fronsac_A Novel Page 11