by Chris Ryan
‘In fact, most of those executed that day were Serbs. Although there were Croatians who resisted, there were many who were desperate to collaborate, and proved their loyalty to the Third Reich by turning against the Serbs who lived among them. They burnt and looted our schools and churches, banned our Cyrillic script, and forced us to wear patches saying who we were. And that was just the beginning of it – the early days.
‘The man set up by the Nazis as the head of the ISC government was one of the most evil, degenerate creatures who ever lived – a monster called Ante Pavelic. If you go to the second picture – there – that’s him with the SS officers.
‘Pavelic styled himself the Poglavnik, or Führer, and his followers called themselves the Ustashe. A policy was decided on – probably at that desk there, in the photograph — whereby a third of Serbs would be forcibly converted to Catholicism, a third would be expelled, and the rest quite simply killed. Permission was given, in effect, for Serb men, women and children to be murdered at will. And hell came to Yugoslavia.
‘That summer, after my father was taken away, terrible stories began to reach us. Orthodox priests were being murdered – often tortured to death – Serbian mothers and their children had been thrown over the cliffs at Jadovno, Serbian corpses were hanging from scaffolds all the way from Kutina to Banja Luca. We were petrified – frightened beyond belief – but we didn’t know what to do. We had nowhere to go; to take to the roads would have been suicide. So we stayed where we were, and mourned my father, and lived on the food we grew, and hoped that people would forget we were there.
‘Then one afternoon in August we saw smoke coming from one of the fields, and heard strange sounds. My sister Drina and I went out to see what was happening, and from the smell we thought someone was cooking beef. But when we got near we saw . . . something I cannot describe. It was a naked man, tied to pegs in the ground, and a fire had been lit on his chest. He was still alive.
‘We ran away. We didn’t dare go near. But when we got near the house we saw that we had been followed by six men in uniform. They caught up with us, told us to stay where we were, and went inside.
‘It took them two hours to finish with my mother and my oldest sister Milla, and then there were shots. The men walked me and Drina to a truck. We were told we were going somewhere we would be looked after. A camp – not far away – where we would be safe. There would be other children there. It was called Jasenovac.
‘If Yugoslavia under the black legions of the Ustashe was hell, Jasenovac was the inmost circle of that hell. The cruelty there was bestial, unspeakable, far beyond anything you would think human beings were capable of. They burnt prisoners alive, they cut their heads off with saws . . . There were children there – thousands of children – but they received no mercy either. The opposite, in fact.’
Slater stole a glance at Aleksandra Marcovic. Any trace of emotion or expression had been ruthlessly wiped from her face.
‘The camp was in the south Croatian marshlands where the Una and Sava rivers join. We were put in wooden shacks without even straw to sleep on, fed on potatoes, and put to work building the guards’ quarters. The wire had gone up at Jasenovac a fortnight before, but by 1945 there would be a whole network of camps from Krapje in the west to Stara Gradiska in the east. About six hundred thousand Serbs, Jews and gypsies would be killed there, one way or another, and the deepest hatred and the worst torture was reserved for the Serbs.
‘If I just tell you what I saw with my own eyes . . . Exactly a year after I came to Jasenovac, a competition was organised to see which of the Ustashe men could kill the most prisoners with his own hands. The winner – a young Catholic lawyer, I think he was – managed to cut the throats of thirteen hundred people in one night with a specially sharpened butcher’s knife. He won a gold watch and the title “King of the Killers”.’
Slater, speechless, shook his head.
‘Even the Nazis protested at this kind of behaviour, but then the Ustashe were animals, not humans. How can you regard as human people who feed children caustic soda, or beat them to death with hammers and axes, as happened to my sister Drina? I saw all of these things at Jasenovac.’
She was silent for a moment. The wind pressed at the double-glazing. Beyond the net curtains the sea was the colour of galvanised steel.
‘But you asked about the pictures, so let me tell you about this . . .’ she smiled bleakly, ‘. . . this handsome young Ustashe knight on his horse. His name is Dinko Sakic, and at age twenty-one he was made commandant of Jasenovac. They said – although I never saw it – that his favourite weapon was a welder’s torch. When I saw him he was always carrying this whip and a pistol. As the photo shows he was a great friend of the Guja, the snake. They used to walk around the camp together as if they were in the grounds of some beautiful mansion, admiring the lawns and the statues and the views. People said that they were . . . you know.’
Slater nodded.
‘At the same time there were women prisoners – I can’t expect you to understand this – who thought that they were in love with one or other of them. Dinko and the Guja knew this too, and I think it amused them.’
Seeing Slater’s disbelieving face, Marcovic smiled faintly. ‘You have to understand that this was a world without rules, sense or logic. A world of blood, butchery and chaos. The Guja was a German SS officer, as you can tell from the uniform, and usually when there were German or Italian officers around the Ustashe made an effort to behave like human beings. Believe me, we welcomed the sight of a Nazi uniform – even an SS uniform.
‘But no one bothered to moderate their behaviour when the Guja was around – quite the opposite, in fact, because they knew that he liked what he saw. He came to the camp so often I think he must have been stationed somewhere very close, perhaps at Kostajnica. He couldn’t keep away, and though I never saw him so much as touch a prisoner I think he was in some way . . . addicted to what he witnessed here.’
Slater pulled down the next image. The hiking party.
‘Right. The man eating the bread is Andrija Artukovich, the Poglavnik’s minister of the interior. Artukovich was also responsible for the Ustashe – he was a kind of Croatian Himmler. And there again is the Guja in the foreground. Could you go to the last picture?’
Slater nodded.
‘I don’t know where this is. It could be Jasenovac, or Stara Gradiska or one of the smaller camps, but I think the point of this picture is the necklace worn by the man in the apron. I heard about this, but I never saw it.’
‘What is the necklace?’ asked Slater.
‘Human eyes,’ said Marcovic flatly. ‘The Ustashe were always gouging out eyes. I heard years later that the Poglavnik liked to have baskets of Serbian eyes delivered to his desk. If you were an ambitious young Ustashe knight it was a good way to get ahead.’
Slater slowly shook his head, appalled. ‘I had no idea about any of this.’
‘Well, perhaps it’s time that your eyes were opened. Next picture.’
The snow-scene by the river.
‘This is definitely in Jasenovac, at the south end of the camp by the river. This is the Guja, clearly, but I don’t know who these two are. This man, however’ – she took a deep breath and pointed to the robed monk – ‘this man I do know. This man I will remember for all eternity. Can I get you some more tea?’
‘Thank you, said Slater. ‘That would be kind.’ He didn’t want the tea, but he sensed that Aleksandra Marcovic needed a break, a chance to rally herself. For five minutes, as she busied herself, he stared out of the window, trying to make sense of the horrors she was recounting. When she came back her voice was quieter than it had been before. At times it was almost inaudible.
‘We called him Fra Sotona – Brother Satan. I think his real name was Filipovic. He had joined the Ustashe from a monastery at Banja Luca, and was promoted to commandant of Jasenovac around the time of the killing competition in the Autumn of 1942. He was a brutal-looking man with a lisping, almost
feminine voice, and of all those Ustashe monsters I would say that he was the most terrifying. He was only commandant for four months – Dinko Sakic rode in on his white horse at the end of the year — but the ferry across the river to the execution place at Gradina was busy for all of that time.’
‘And this SS officer Wegner was a friend of his too?’
‘Wegner came to the camp when Fra Sotona was there, yes. But I’m not sure if they were friends. Sotona was a very coarse man, and I remember him as being much older than the Guja. Sakic and the Guja – I can’t call him by that other name – must have been about the same age.’
Out of politeness, Slater addressed his tea. Outside, the brightness had gone from the sky, and the first flicks of rain were spattering the window. ‘So what do you think these pictures prove?’ he asked Marcovic. ‘Why do you think they have been assembled?’
She frowned. ‘These people like Sakic, Artukovic and the priest – other pictures exist. To those who need to know them, they are known. But I have never seen a photograph of the Guja before, and these pictures link him to all these men. Perhaps their purpose is to disprove SS and Wehrmacht claims that they did not realise the full horrors of the Ustashe camps – after all, here is a uniformed SS Hauptmann looking very much at home at the heart of Jasenovac. Anyone who was there could identify the place from these pictures. Otherwise’ – she shrugged – ‘I don’t know.’
Slater nodded. Privately he considered that there had to be more to it than that.
‘Why did you call Wegner by that name – the Snake?’
Aleksandra Marcovic folded her hands tightly on the table in front of her. So tightly, Slater noticed, that the knuckles showed white. ‘Let me . . . paint you a picture. Imagine a line of children sitting on a bench outside a shed. A shed like the one in that picture there, of the man with the knife. One by one the children are being taken into the shed, and their ears are being cut off. The children waiting outside on the bench can hear everything that is going on inside the shed. They can hear the screams and they can hear the smooth, silky voice of Fra Sotona. The last two children waiting in the line are called Goran Nikolic and Aleksandra Marcovic. Watching these two children as they wait is a German officer in a black uniform – a young man, not more than twenty years old. His cap badge, however, is the death’s head insignia of the SS. He is a connoisseur of terror, and as the children wait, listening to the screams coming from the shed, and the sudden silences as the victims faint, he moves his face close to theirs. He looks into their eyes and he smiles, a broad almost rapturous smile, and his head seems to sway from side to side like a snake.
‘And I, Aleksandra Marcovic, am hypnotised with fear. I cannot move, I cannot speak, I cannot think. But beside me Goran Nikolic is not hypnotised. Even though he is only eight or nine years old he sees the Guja for what he is – a man. And in that moment he makes himself a sacred vow. That he will live, and he will fight, and that his children and his children’s children will avenge this day.’
Urgently, she leaned forward towards him.
‘I have not asked who you are – I have been a British citizen for almost half a century now, so it is best, I think, if you do not tell me – but if you are a friend of Branca, I can guess easily enough. As I said, you have the look of death about you.’
Slater said nothing.
‘If you see Goran, will you tell him that I have thought about him often over the last few years. He wanted many sons to avenge those children who never returned, whose bones lie beneath the execution fields of Gradina, and God sent him a single daughter. How is Branca?’
‘A brave soldier,’ replied Slater gently. ‘Her father has every reason to be proud of her.’
And it was at that point that Aleksandra Marcovic finally broke down.
When Slater finally drove away from Philomena Avenue it was late afternoon, the rain had cleared and the sun was making fitful attempts to redeem the day. Rather than returning to London, he drove into Brighton. After the horrors of Marcovic’s story he felt the need to surround himself with people — with noise and laughter and bustle.
Buying a copy of the Sun, he took a seat in a striplit fish and chip shop – he had had nothing except tea and biscuits all day – and quite deliberately emptied his mind of all that Marcovic had told him. When he had finished his meal, read up on the latest immigrant scare-stories, absorbed the facts concerning the Awayday Bonking Vicar, and dwelt at some length on the silicone-free charms of Bethany from Hunstanton, Slater wandered out into the Lanes – an attractive tangle of antique shops near the city centre. In one of these he discovered a small cloth-bound volume entitled The Gentlewoman’s Guide to Old Rose Varieties, which he bought as a present for Eve and slipped in his pocket.
Driving back to London, his mind whirling, Slater attempted to make sense of what he had learned from Aleksandra Marcovic. Why were those half-dozen photographs, taken over sixty years ago, so important? The purpose of collecting them together was clearly to incriminate Wegner, but why had so much effort been made to prove his association with Ustashe murderers? Why had it been Branca Nikolic’s dying wish that he make this connection? If Wegner was still alive, surely the fact of his former SS membership would be sufficient to disgrace him in the eyes of the world.
The point about these pictures must be that they incriminated Wegner both as a Nazi and as a friend of the Ustashe, and that was why the Serbs wanted them so badly. But who was Wegner – assuming that he was still alive, sixty years after these pictures were taken? Some pillar of the European community – a business leader perhaps? If the Serbs could prove that a former Nazi and Ustashe supporter was growing old in Germany it would represent a huge propaganda coup for Belgrade. Any linkage between their bombing by Nazis in 1941 and by Nato in 1999 would be immediately exploited. Was that what MI6 was so keen to prevent? And if so, why had they lied to Slater and his colleagues?
Was it, he wondered, because they wanted to use the photographs for some purpose so disreputable that it had to be kept secret even from insiders? Were they to be used to blackmail or apply leverage to some ‘friendly’ power? Certainly the fact that Manderson had wanted the CD returned rather than destroyed on the spot in Paris suggested something of the sort. But if so, why had they gone to such trouble to weave this elaborate deception about the Khmer Rouge training teams? Why had they bothered to tell Slater and his fellow operatives anything at all? Why hadn’t they just handed them their Eurostar tickets and their expenses float and told them to get on with it?
Eventually, his head spinning, Slater gave up. Whatever the truth behind Operation Firewall, and whatever the purpose of the photographs of Hauptmann Wegner, he had proved to his own satisfaction that his new employers had lied to him – and worse, had used his loyalty to his former Regiment to underpin the lie. Well, he thought dispiritedly, at least he knew how it was going to be.
He was at his lowest ebb as he drove through Croydon, the sad lace-curtained suburb in which it appeared that Aleksandra Marcovic had spent most of her adult life. The roadside villas, grimly individualised with their concrete statues and their privet hedges, seemed to go on for ever. And then the phone on the passenger seat rang, and it was Eve, and the sound of her voice and the anticipation of the week that lay before them drove everything else from his mind.
SEVENTEEN
Eve owned a flat in a pretty Georgian square off Kennington Lane. It suited her, and it struck Slater as they drank Guinness and picked at a packet of crisps at a table outside the pub, that the other residents all looked as if their parents might be friends of Eve’s parents.
‘The men have all got that Rupert look,’ he explained to her. ‘That weekdays in the City, weekends in the Cotswolds look. And the women all have hair like you and borrow the men’s Jermyn Street shirts and turn the collars up.’
She nearly hit him for that. ‘When have you ever, ever seen me in a man’s City shirt?’ she demanded, aiming a swipe at his head.
‘I’m sur
e you’ve got some upstairs,’ he replied, ducking. ‘I’m sure a quick check of your wardrobe would throw up a striped shirt or two.’
‘Well, you’ll never find out. Because if you think you’re climbing the stairs to my flat after making suggestions like that you can think again. I didn’t save your life just to be accused of turning my shirt-collars up, you big ape!’
‘Well, just to prove me wrong, tell me that your father didn’t work in the City.’
‘He did work in the City, as it happens, but not in the way you think. He was a gunsmith, and worked in the back room of a shop near the Monument. He could mend anything – shotguns, stalking rifles, handguns – and if he couldn’t get the parts from the manufacturers he’d make them himself. He travelled to the shop every day by bus from Dalston, which is where I grew up and went to school. So you see I’m not posh in the least.’
‘But you do give that impression.’
‘Oh, I certainly know how to play the games that posh people play. I worked in the shop in the school holidays, and later, while I was at university I had a job with a firm that did shooting lunches. I kept my eyes and ears open, sure, and when I came to join the civil service I was glad that I had. It’s still a pretty old-school organisation.’
‘That’s true enough,’ said Slater.
She shrugged. ‘If I’d gone into night-club management I expect I’d have played my hand differently. The point is that these days we can all reinvent ourselves. If we don’t like the hand we were dealt we can discard it and pick up another. That’s what I’ve done. That’s what everyone does.’