Say what it is you’re thinking, she thought, just say it, and then we’ll see where things go from there.
“Which one of us is supposed to be going out to the beach at night?” Helene cried. “None of us is that crazy! I’d die of fright!”
“I actually can’t imagine seeing you display this kind of behavior either, Helene,” Erich said. “Helene, climbing the cliff path down to Petit Bôt Bay at night, sitting herself down in the sand and eating chocolate … Wouldn’t you agree, Beatrice, that this behavior doesn’t fit her in the least?”
“It doesn’t fit her,” Beatrice agreed, her voice hoarse.
“But Beatrice wouldn’t do it either,” said Helene. “Why should she?”
“It can be quite the romantic rendezvous point down there,” Erich mused. “A warm August night, the sky is full of stars, the ocean roars … a soft wind blows … My God, Helene, we were young once too!”
It was clear to look at her that Helene had lost the thread. She had no idea what her husband was talking about.
Erich looked at Beatrice. His smile vanished in an instant.
“So. Enough talk,” He said coldly. “A lot can be said against you Beatrice, but slow on the uptake you are not. You know when there’s no use trying to talk yourself out of trouble. Whom did you meet down in the bay last night?”
It’d been such a stupid, damn fool, idiot mistake to bring the chocolate! She should never have taken the risk.
Erich was convinced that only she could have taken the chocolate to the beach and that the man whom the soldiers had taken for an enemy was her lover, whom she secretly met with at night. At any rate, he now called off the search for the unknown man, as he no longer had any doubt that they were dealing with a local who had long since made it home and thus couldn’t be found. From Beatrice, however, he wanted to know two things: Who was the man, and how long she had known him.
It had been a full-on interrogation, and had dragged on into the late hours of night. Beatrice had sat on a chair in the dining room, the wet dress still in her arms, which she held to her body like a kind of security blanket. For whatever reason she kept thinking that the dress would dry and be awfully wrinkled, and that later it would be hard to iron it. This was of course the tiniest and least important problem she had to overcome at that moment, but she clung to it, probably, as she later thought, in order to be able to have at least something to latch on to.
Erich paced back and forth, sat down, stood up again, resumed his pacing. He spoke softly, he screamed, he became dangerously gentle, then threatening and aggressive. He raged and he screamed; he whispered and brought his face so close to hers that she could feel his breathing. She tried not to shrink back. She tried not to show any fear. And in fact, fear was not the predominant feeling. She was too numb to really be frightened. She thought of her wrinkled dress, and she thought that she had to hold her tongue, no matter what happened.
Helene came into the room a few times, bawling, and it really looked like she would suffer a nervous breakdown. The situation must have shaken her down to the core: she wasn’t at all up to dealing with a full-out conflict inside the family, and she didn’t know how far her husband would go to get the truth out of Beatrice. On top of this, it actually did seem to be the case that her foster daughter had for some time now had a boyfriend whom she met for intimate trysts without her or Erich having a clue. Helene was distraught and terrified and helplessly asking herself how Beatrice could have managed to pursue this relationship without anyone finding out about it.
Beatrice kept stubbornly silent, hour after hour. After awhile she had grown used to her silence; she buried herself deep within it as if in a dark hiding hole and would allow neither Erich’s voice nor his hot breath in her face to get to her.
“You will talk,” he said that night. His voice sounded rough and exhausted. “You will talk, sooner or later. I have the means for making anybody talk.”
Beatrice wondered if he planned to hand her over to his SS-henchmen, and if she would emerge from their questioning black and blue, beaten like Pierre had been. But some instinct told her that Erich wouldn’t do this. He had done everything he could to intimidate her, but he hadn’t once hit her. Something held him back; he couldn’t bring himself to do it, and neither would he be able to let others do the dirty work. He seemed intent on using subtler methods. Insistent, incessant questioning. Slow extraction. A gradual wearing down.
Eventually he sent her up to her room with a hand gesture. There she spread the half dry, fully wrinkled dress over a chair and crawled into bed, exhausted and dazed. But as tired as she was, she couldn’t get any sleep. All night long she pitched restlessly from side to side, and when the morning came she knew she had to prepare herself for the second round.
The questioning lasted for almost three weeks. Erich did not allow Beatrice to go to school, and he barely left the house himself. If he had to go, not just Helene but also the two soldiers on watch had strict orders not to let Beatrice set foot outside the house. There was no chance for her to make contact with Julien — which of course would only have been possible if he had been lucky enough to flee back to the Wyatts, and she couldn’t even find that out. She assumed that Mae asked about her, but she was not allowed to come see her, and Beatrice didn’t find out what reason Mae was given for her staying home from school. Were the Wyatts worried? Was Julien worried?
She realized what Erich’s strategy was: he was keeping her isolated. He was keeping her away from everything that was a part of her life, of her day-to-day existence. From her friends, from her classmates, from the duties and demands that shaped how she spent her days. She was cut off, alone, without information, without a link to the outside. And on top of this, she was subjected for hours each day to his hammering, persistent questioning. She was — and Erich must have seen that this had to weigh on her most heavily — not capable of making contact with the man she loved.
“I cannot understand,” said Helene one day, deeply hurt, “why you didn’t tell me anything. It’s unfathomable to me. I always thought you had confidence in me!”
“There’s nothing to tell,” Beatrice said mechanically. She had responded to Erich many times with these words.
Helene let out a deep sigh. She didn’t believe it of course. No one believed it. But to tear Beatrice’s secret from her seemed practically impossible. Erich’s calculations were off: Beatrice didn’t wear down the more time passed, she only withdrew deeper into herself. She closed herself off completely. Nothing seemed to reach her any more. She didn’t rebel, she didn’t struggle, she didn’t look for excuses, didn’t look for ways to end the situation or to make it easier to endure. She endured everything that happened. It was as if she had sought out her own, faraway world where no one could follow her.
She grew very skinny and very pale. There were dark rings under her eyes. Her hair looked even more tangled than usual. There was no brightness in her eyes. Her movements had lost all the lightness, all the briskness that had characterized them before.
In the end, Erich surrendered. He realized that Beatrice would not give in and that in the long term he wouldn’t be able to keep her locked up and away from school. He himself couldn’t always be using his time to question her and to ill-treat her. She had won this round, and he, with a good deal of teeth-grinding, had to come to terms with it.
“There’ll be no chances for you to see him again,” he said. “There won’t be a single minute, day or night, when you can sneak away. You might think you’ve won, but the truth is you’ve lost. From now on, you’re a prisoner.”
An aide took her to school and picked her up again after. The soldiers on patrol around the house had orders not to let Beatrice pass for any reason. A soldier sat in the entrance hall of the house at night; it would have been impossible for Beatrice to get past him.
The house had turned into a fortress.
At least Beatrice could see Mae again, who had been very upset and full of worry. From her she learned that Julien had come back to the Wyatts’ house after days of anxious waiting; he had hidden in horse stalls and hay lofts and then struggled back to the doctor and his family. He had told them of a nighttime swimming outing and about how he had almost been caught.
“My father was horribly furious,” Mae reported. “Because Julien put us all in the biggest danger. He’d most have liked not to have taken him in again, but then he might still have gotten caught and might have told everything.” She added, curious “Were you with him that night?” Beatrice was silent again, which Mae took for a yes.
“Well,” she said, and there was a certain self-satisfaction in her voice as well as in the expression on her face. “You won’t be able to see him anymore now. They’re watching you around the clock. Seems like this affair is over and done with.”
GUERNSEY, JUNE 1944 TO MAY 1945
“Operation Overlord” began in the night and early morning of June 5th and 6th, 1944, ushering in the end phase of the war and presaging the end of the Nazi dictatorship. Allied troops landed in Normandy on June 6th. Over half a million American, Canadian, and English troops arrived on the continent, and three weeks later the French city of Cherbourg was in American hands. On the western and eastern fronts, the Germans were forced to swallow one defeat after another. The weaker their armies grew, the louder the government’s slogans to continue the fight became. Hope was now stirring even among the islands’ biggest pessimists. It looked as if an end to the horror might really be in sight.
In landing on the European continent, the allies had deemed the occupied Channel Islands not important enough to capture and thereby risk losses before commencing their immediate assault on Hitler’s troops in Normandy. They sat in the Atlantic as if forgotten, the last small bastions of the Nazi regime, to the rear of the invaders, suddenly cut off from the “Greater German Reich” from which they had up until that point been receiving their supplies. Since 1943 there had been much that had no longer functioned quite right. The numerous submarines off the French coast had ensured that the transport of foodstuffs and other goods had no longer been able to proceed without disturbance, but ships had still arrived, and individual planes had still been able to land. Now nothing moved anymore. Only the English could have sent food, but Churchill prohibited all help for the Channel Islands. He knew that everything he sent would be distributed among the enemy first. So he sent nothing. He let his countrymen and countrywomen starve, in order to not give support to the enemy.
The situation was getting tighter as the year 1944 neared its end. People were drinking coffee made of acorns or tea made from parsnips or blackberry leaves. There was hardly any bread still. There was no cheese, no meat. Too many people had left the islands before the invasion for agricultural production to really have been sustained. And with fall and winter setting in, things got even worse.
Occupied and occupiers went hungry together. They froze, they suffered; they tried to make do on their meager homegrown supplies, which would leave them unsatisfied and, worse, with upset stomachs. They shared their hunger and the feeling that they had been forgotten. The war was happening elsewhere, would be decided elsewhere — but they would not be playing a part. They lay behind an invasion that had rolled past them without touching them, and were sentenced to waiting. They could do nothing, not fight, not win, not lose, not die. Or in any case, not with a weapon in their hands.
They might, however, die of hunger. Those who had it the worst were the prisoners vegetating in the concentration camp on Alderney and the captive laborers. Their already meager rations were the first to be cut back. This meant that they received just about nothing to eat and, sooner or later, depending on their individual constitutions, died. Englanders and German soldiers were making efforts to hold their heads above water, and found themselves facing the bizarre situation of sitting in the same boat, so to speak, both having to struggle with the same difficulties and both — in one way or another — left in the lurch by the governments of their respective countries. The Germans cursed the leadership of the Reich, which did nothing to rescue them from the islands or to stand by them in any other way in their difficult circumstances. And the English cursed Churchill, who was not afraid to sacrifice his own people in order to literally starve out his foes. Since the cursing was no use, it was clear to all that they had to try and make do with the circumstances, such as they were. They were all bound by the same fate. Together they tried to survive somehow.
The relationship between occupied and occupier on the islands had always been a different one than in the other countries conquered by Hitler. The Germans had shown up arrogant, aggressive, and tyrannical, but no violence had taken place at the level of the mass executions in Poland, Russia, or France. On the other hand, a resistance movement had also never emerged on the islands, and thus there had been no assaults on the opposing power. Throughout the entire span of the war they had been holed up on an island, cut off by the ocean all around them from all other goings-on, in most respects a closed-off society, in which everyone involved was almost forced to make different arrangements than they would have had to make in countries where it was possible — at least for the victors — to freely come and go. They were penned in with one another more closely, and neither could avoid the other — and so they had had to get along somehow. Without anyone wanting it or being able to control it, there emerged a certain feeling of community.
In the last months of the war, under the influence of hunger and fear, this feeling began to develop into one of astonishingly pronounced solidarity.
In September ’44, Beatrice had turned sixteen years old, and she was convinced that this was the last birthday that she would have to celebrate under German occupation. The change in the enemy’s fortunes could no longer be overlooked.
“Maybe half a year more,” people whispered, “then it’ll all be over.”
It was a strange feeling for Beatrice, knowing that she would soon see her parents again. Four years had passed since their separation, it would soon be five until they could again be in one another’s arms. Now that she found herself in the home stretch, as it were, Beatrice’s impatience grew. She was feverish, she couldn’t wait anymore. She couldn’t bear her imprisonment anymore, the constant surveillance, the need to account for every step she took. In all this time, only once had she been able to see Julien again. It had been in March, when Mae had her birthday. Erich had been over in France at the time, and Beatrice had been able to talk Helene into letting her go to the party that Mae was throwing. Helene had consented after long hesitation and an endless back and forth. At the party, Beatrice had at one point broken away from the crowd of giggling young girls, all of whom seemed childish and immature to her, and had climbed up to the attic, where she hadn’t set foot since summer of last year. Julien sat in an armchair under the skylight, he was dressed warmly and letting the first cold sun of spring shine on his face through the opening. He looked at Beatrice as if she was a ghost.
“Is that you? I thought they’d never let you back here!”
“And they don’t, either. But they made an exception for Mae’s birthday.”
He lifted himself out of his chair and came up to her. He was very pale and wore a pained expression on his face that before, in spite of everything, had not been there. He seemed as if he’d finished with his rebellious and angry phase and had fallen into a state of resignation that left him quiet and depressed. He was no longer in revolt. He had retreated far within himself, and was now waiting for the end, whatever it might look like.
“It’s nice that you’re here,” he said, but there was little enthusiasm in his voice.
“What did the Wyatts tell you?”
“What Mae told them. That you practically can’t leave the house any longer and aren’t permitted to come here any more eith
er.”
“Do they know that we were … together that night?”
He nodded. “They were able to figure it out. It got around that you had been seen on the beach with a man that night, and since I was gone too …” He shrugged his shoulders. “They certainly don’t know how far our relationship went, but it sure became clear to them that at the very least more was going on than they’d first thought. They’re rather angry with me.”
“At least they’re still hiding you.”
“Yes. And I’m very lucky because of it, even if I can’t really feel that way.”
“You’ll get through it all,” said Beatrice, and he responded with a vague “sure, sure.”
Then they stood mutely apart from each other for a while, and neither knew what to talk about. Somehow it seemed like there wasn’t anything more to be said, as if it had all been spoken between them, as if all they could do now was to wait for what the future would bring.
“I have to get back to the others, then,” said Beatrice finally, and he said again, “Sure, sure.”
They had not touched each other, there had been no gesture of tenderness between them, nothing that would have recalled their former intimacy and trust.
And he didn’t even ask how it had been for me later that night, thought Beatrice as she climbed down the ladder, no word about the danger he’d put me in, no remorse that he’d landed me in the situation I’m stuck in now, where I’m almost as trapped and immobile as he is. And all of it just on account of his foolishness.
Later there wasn’t any further opportunity for her to visit Julien, but really she didn’t want to either, had no inclination to do so. He had let her down, and besides that her day-to-day life began to become more of a struggle, and it didn’t seem like the time for love.
New Year’s Eve 1944 she spent at home alone with Erich and Helene. Erich had first announced that they would go together to an officers’ club in St. Peter Port, where there was to be a party, then he spoke of an invitation from the commander of armed forces for the islands, and finally he wanted to take part in neither of these events and decided that they would all stay home. Beatrice guessed that the parties he had originally planned to attend would be in no way particularly festive; that he knew this, and thus had lost interest in advance. Who still had the option of throwing a party? Hunger and the acute lack of food didn’t spare even the highest-ranking officers. There was nothing left, not even for privileges. An end-of-days mood was spreading among the Germans, especially since the radios brought news only of allied advances on the continent and rearguard battles fought by Hitler’s troops. Among the British population on the island, tension and expectation were mixed with fright: what if the allies continued to forget about them? What if the war came to an end everywhere else and they were still sitting here with the enemy, abandoned to a slow death by starvation? In general they were all inclined to speak exceedingly ill of Churchill. No one would ever really forgive him for the iron severity with which he turned his back on the islands and forced increasingly unbearable privation on his own people.
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