by Gee, Maurice
It was not certain that he had leprosy: the suspicion was enough. They took his body away and buried it secretly.
Willi was healthy in his body but excitable, even violent, in his mind. He seemed to have grown inches taller, and had lost the fat that used to soften him at the waist and plump out his hips in a way that was almost feminine. His skin had turned the brown of light-tanned leather. He was leathery and bony in his hands. It was mid-December when I arrived but already Willi had the colour that people lie all summer long on beaches to acquire. His muscles shone and looked as hard and supple as an athlete’s. Some of the puffiness was gone from his face. (Willi was not handsome and it always puzzled me that he attracted women so easily.) His great horse teeth were yellow not white – because, he said, he could not get soda to clean them on the island – and his blue eyes, always prominent, seemed to have an added pressure making them bulge – the pressure of ferocity and contempt.
He was full of contempt for Somes Island as a prison. ‘I could swim ashore any night,’ Willi said. He was contemptuous of the discipline. These Nazis are their enemy yet they do not punish them. They let them sing “Horst Wessel” as though it were “Jingle Bells”.’
‘Who are all these brown men?’ I asked.
‘Nazis from Samoa. At least they suffer. In the winter the cold makes them cry.’ He grinned at me. ‘Wait until you see a southerly storm. The wind will freeze your balls off. Little Moser has to creep on the ground.’
I told him I was in a dormitory with Italians and asked him what they were like.
‘Italians are the same everywhere,’ Willi said. ‘It is Mama mia all the time. But some of them are old men. Sixty years. They are crazy, these New Zealanders. They must have spies, they must have a prison or else they are not properly at war. Hoch and von Schaukel, those ones should be shot, it would be cheaper. The rest should be put in jobs somewhere. They do not know economy in this country. They would rather salute and say God save the King.’
He told me the Italians did not like sharing with the Jews. ‘But it is better than at first,’ he said. They put you with the Nazis in the same hut and could not understand why there was trouble. They are still in nursery school. Listen, Josef, the Italians will make it hard, but soon I will have you out. I am making an Internationals group and we will have our own hut, wait and see. Then we can go to war with the Nazis. They are more than a hundred and we will be ten, but we will make their life for them hell on this island.’
What did I feel for Willi? Admiration. I was always pleased, always a little excited, when I was with him. Love? I suppose so, of the sort that is friendship taken to that extreme. But I found, in my first few days on Somes Island, that I did not believe him any longer. Too many of the things he told me were distorted by his wish that they were so. He would not allow me to disagree with him, so I did not disagree. I needed Willi. But I stood on my own feet and looked my own way, unknown to him.
I saw how things were: men struggling to survive. Others competing for a little importance. The mad ones – and Willi, I came to see, was a little mad – were those who thought the war could be fought here. The mad ones remained in the grip of their idea. They collected followers; but following was, for most of us, just something to do. (I leave aside those who would murder Jews. I leave them outside all description.)
Occupations had to be invented. Pastimes too. Braun, a fellow Austrian, was a lucky one, using his sport, rock-climbing, in a hunt for seagull eggs, which he sold. (They did not have the salty taste I had expected. Their yolks were rich and red, like little suns.) Willi had his ducks and sometimes let me have an egg free. Sargoff jagged herrings and soused them in vinegar. The Italians hunted birds with horse-hair snares, and smoked fish in a smokehouse by the shore. They asked for rabbits to be released so they could hunt them too, but Dowden turned down that request. They (the Italians) were the best fishermen, but everyone tried netting and we all caught a few flounder and snapper. Sometimes we pulled a penguin in by accident. Nobody cared for the taste.
The vegetables we grew would have satisfied a professional gardener. I spent a good deal of my time in the gardens, but in winter my chief occupation was polishing paua shell, which I sold to the men who made ornaments. For recreation I tried my hand at painting but I have no colour sense – strange in a Viennese. I admire Klimt and Kokoscha, and love Egon Schiele, but the artist I should like to have been was the Berliner, George Grosz. He would have found men to draw on Somes Island.
Working parties cleared the maze of tracks about the island, and when they were finished cleared them again. They painted the huts, they laboured for the man who ran the farm, they built cow byres and chicken coops, repaired fences, they kept the little quarantine cemetery tidy, they scoured the rocky shore for driftwood for the stoves, they unloaded stores from the Cobar on its visits, they dug an underground tunnel to a waterhole until the engineer gave it up, they cleaned the pond, and cleaned and shifted cattle troughs – but still there was not enough work to keep us busy. We cooked, we scrubbed the kitchens, scrubbed the tubs and benches and the meat block. Not enough. We scrubbed the latrines. We counted days and marked off weeks and months and wrote our endless appeals for release; and read the reply, which we knew by heart: ‘I am directed by the Minister to inform you that he has considered your case and is not prepared to release you from internment …’ It was signed R. Bartram, Under-Sec. None of us ever saw this man but our hatred for him became as personal as our hatred for Dowden and Pengelly, whom we saw every day.
Willi was often punished, often locked up, but he almost always had his way. He set up fights with the Nazis – the first one that I saw was provoked by young Steinitz taking the paper swastika off the bean row and pretending to wipe his arse with it. Willi gave the signal. He wanted a fight that evening so he could convince Dowden that the Nazis and the Internationals must be kept apart. (Or perhaps just to impress me.) Two men, then three, then four, rushed at Steinitz, but if we had had a boxing tournament on Somes Island Steinitz would have been the champion. He knocked the first man flat on his back with a single punch. It was only when the others pulled out stakes to attack him that Willi gave a nod, sending several of his men to join the fight. Two guards arrived a moment later and knocked the sides apart with rifle butts.
‘So you see,’ Willi grinned at me, ‘we have our bit of fun.’
Apart from the half dozen who sided with Willi, the Germans in the camp fell into two groups: the Nationals, who were simply Germans interned, and the hard-core Nazis, the Vaterländische. While the war was going well for Hitler the Nazis were strong. Later their numbers fell away.
Hoch had made himself leader. The camp was not a place where von Schaukel could thrive and Geissler, for most of the time, was dispirited or sick. (He was released in 1942, for what reason I do not know, and perked up enough to give the Nazi salute before getting on Wishart’s launch.) Hoch made impromptu speeches and sometimes broke into song. Moser, who knows about music, told me his voice had been trained. He stood in the moonlight outside his hut and sang arias. But usually it was:
Heute gehört uns Deutschland,
Morgen schon die ganze Welt!
He organised a rebellion of sorts – smashed beds, smashed tables, and sent a stove his men were shifting tumbling down the cliff into the sea. He led a hunger strike that Willi predicted would not last more than a day. (It lasted two.) He refused to let his Nazis work until Dowden signed a declaration that nothing they did helped New Zealand’s war effort. He was clever at small acts of sabotage and expert at harassing the guards. Hoch fancied himself a hero of the Reich.
What heroes must do is persecute Jews. But the worst of it was over by the time I reached Somes Island. Moser, who had more courage than Willi gave him credit for, had taken his blankets outside and slept wrapped in them on the grass – ‘under the stars’. It was this demonstration, he claimed, that persuaded Dowden to shift the Jews out of the Nazi barracks. I arrived only a week after the chang
e and perhaps have Moser to thank for avoiding the worst of the bullying.
Hoch spotted me straight away and bared his teeth. He had his thugs rough me up several times, and he knocked me into the sea himself, in mid-winter, while we were unloading stores. (But that was nothing, I mention it in no personal way.) He had swollen in confidence and importance in those days when the war was won, and could not restrain himself. He was always saluting and looking for occasions to put his swastika on. We heard them Sieg Heiling in the German barracks on Hitler’s birthday and after news of victories, which came thick and fast in 1941 and ’42. They cheered when Geissler read New Zealand casualty lists from the paper. Hoch started up ‘Horst Wessel’ and ‘Deutschland über Alles’, which he had told Dowden were folk songs, although it was plain to anyone what they were. (The Italians, from their barracks, replied with ‘Giovinezza’, and sometimes we struck up the Internationale, standing outside the German door, behind Steinitz armed with a lump of four by two.)
‘Come with me,’ Willi said one day when he and I were confined to the compound. It was in the late spring of 1941, before we escaped. We had strolled up from unloading coal and had squatted for a smoke in the bracken above the graveyard: having matches was our crime.
‘Come with me. I’ll show you a comedy.’
He took me upstairs in one of the empty huts and beckoned me to a window.
‘A seat in the gallery,’ he said.
We looked down into the Nazi end of the main German barracks and there was Hoch, confined for sabotaging coal. He had pinned up his photograph of Hitler and was busy saluting it, practising salutes that grew more violent and correct.
‘Wait,’ Willi said.
We watched, he with huge delight, I with a feeling of nausea, as Hoch moved from worshipping his Führer to being Führer himself. He had hung a mirror beside the photo and he began to practise faces in it, determined, thoughtful, lofty, visionary, trying for Hitler – but looking more like Mussolini to me, il Duce of the ludicrous poses. Then he took a smaller mirror, ready on his bed, and studied his profile. He made more faces, using his mouth especially, pushing out his lips with his tongue. His eyes did not please him (he was plagued with styes on the island, but had no stye at this time) and he pulled an upper eyelid out, delicate with his fingers, and let it snap into place. I wanted to stop looking. I could not see the game Willi saw. He held me still; must have watched many times and knew the entertainment to come.
‘How can they win the war, a party of Hochs?’ But I knew (and Willi knew) it was not as simple as that.
Hoch laid his small mirror aside. He took the larger one from the wall, arranged it slanting on his pillow, stepped back to give himself more room, and began to do poses, from simple hands on hips, addressing the rally, to enunciating the Vision, with eyes wide, fingers splayed on breast, fist raised to the sky. It was his favourite, he returned to it several times, stepping back to get as much of himself in the mirror as he could. It was too small and he had to pull his arm down, which spoiled the effect.
‘He likes to make a big cock,’ Willi said, showing his own fist.
‘I’ve had enough of this. I’m going.’
‘No. He gets a big cock in his pants. See the lump. He likes to have one of his bum boys standing by. How sad for him he will only have his hand today.’
‘You can watch.’ I went away and later tried not listen as Willi entertained his Internationals by describing Hoch bare-bummed and doubly at attention, offering his Führer the tribute of his seed.
I wanted to know nothing about Hoch. He was never a joke tome.
‘I have a surprise for them next time they sing,’ Willi said.
‘Not before we go’ – for we were planning our escape.
‘I have the stuff. It should not be wasted.’
The ‘stuff’ was some chemical or other, and I must say how he came by it, if only to show how insecure Somes Island was. Visitors came once a week – three for the Italians, three for the Germans. Willi had a woman whose name I forget. She was middle-aged and had a crossed eye, but Willi cast his net wide and was not put off by plain looks. He must have pleased her mightily for her to take the risks she did. This woman – it comes to me that her name was Joan – worked in a chemist shop. And let me digress – there was other ‘stuff’ she brought him and I can name it: strychnine. Willi procured it for the Norwegian, Strand, who, though a rabid fascist, had grown depressed at the German invasion of his country and, he said, wanted to kill himself. He must have meant it (or perhaps he wanted strychnine for some more sinister purpose), for he paid Willi three pounds, all the money he had, and a wooden longboat he had carved, a clumsy thing. (Joan took it away as a present the next time she came.) Willi would not hand over the strychnine until he had the money in his pocket, then Strand became suspicious at the colour. He exchanged a pair of shoes for a sparrow caught in a snare. The Italian held it while Strand forced a few grains of strychnine down its throat – and now I take ‘strychnine’ back, for the sparrow did not die. The Italian killed it quick enough and threw it in the pot. He would not give Strand back his shoes, and Willi, pulling himself up to his six foot two, would not return the money or the longboat when screaming little Strand came for them.
‘What was that stuff, Willi?’
‘Who knows? I asked for something to make him shit his pants. I am not mad. Strychnine for fascist scum like that? He would kill us all. It is a pleasure to swindle him.’
Strand could not complain to Dowden, or to the Nazis, who would not like Will’s victory. He became more and more withdrawn, uttering no words at last, but lying on his bed curled in a ball. They took him off the island and put him in a mental hospital somewhere.
Is this a memory that enhances Willi or dulls his light? Sometimes it is one, sometimes the other. I must leave it and get back to the other ‘stuff’.
The prisoners met their visitors in a cabin on the top deck of the Cobar. They faced them over a table, with one guard at the door and another circling. Joan passed the chemicals in little tightly sealed paper packets. As she and Willi smiled and chatted and looked each other deep in the eye, she slid the packet down her thigh and let it fall – and Willi gave a great laugh as it hit the floor. She slipped off her shoe and found the packet with her foot, and picked it up and fitted it – clever toes – into his fly, where he had left a button undone. Willi told me this. But when did they work the system out? And how, for that matter, had he told her what he wanted while a guard was listening?
They yawn. They sleep,’ Willi said. ‘Besides, we have a way of whispering. With women you must learn everything.’
After she had passed the chemicals they had sex. Again she used her naked toes. And Willi eased his shoe off and gave her pleasure too. They laughed, exclaiming loudly, as they came. So Willi says. If all this activity disturbed the packet of ‘stuff’, it slid into his trouser leg.
That is why I wear my trousers in my socks,’ Willi said.
Did he? I can’t remember. All I know is that Joan brought him two packets of chemicals. The second came in a little bottle which, wrapped or not, must have made a clunking sound as it hit the floor. He used it late in November. The Germans were singing again. Watching from the Italian door, I saw Willi and his half-dozen anti-Nazis slip out the far end of the German barracks and stand in the shelter of the wall. They scattered, and Willi strode off with a small open-topped can held at arm’s length and his head turned away from the smell. Steinitz ran ahead of him to open the main door. The Nazis sang ‘Horst Wessel’, Hoch leading in his tenor. Perhaps they cheered themselves up, for the Russians had stopped Hitler’s drive on Moscow and the winter snows had set in. Moscow by year’s end, Hoch had boasted, but they saw it was not to be.
Steinitz threw the door open, Willi flung the can in, shouting his message. They both ran. I could not hear what he said above the singing, but he told me later it was, ‘Here is Joe Stalin’s present to Adolf Hitler.’ The Germans boiled out shouting and
found the compound empty. Some tore off their stinking shirts while others set out on an aimless hunt. Guards were running up, and Willi, clever Willi, emerging from the dark, set Steinitz on one of Hoch’s bully-boys, and wrestled on the ground with one himself. Separate fights. More guards. Dowden himself. Half-naked men ran looking for water to wash themselves. Others rolled in the grass. Will’s aim must have been good, for von Schaukel had taken a splash. He ran in circles, tearing at his clothes. He screamed like a girl. By the time Dowden had control he no longer cared about reasons, punishing everyone who made a move was all he could do. He was so angry, shrieking like a soprano, like von Schaukel, that I don’t believe he smelled the chemical.
‘I did not do it just for fun,’ Willi told me next day. He claimed it was tactical. But he could not stop grinning and gleaming. Recollecting all this, I am reminded how important he was to those of us who stood against the Nazis. He kept us moving, thinking, on Somes Island; and he gave them for a moment their proper smell, those ones who would kill me for being born.
I’ve always wondered why Joan did not smuggle in a packet of soda for Willi’s teeth.
Moser was angry with me for joining Willi’s escape in the caretaker’s dinghy. It was a waste of time and energy, he said, but I had plenty of time, and nothing to spend my energy on. It is something to do, I argued, and I can be free for a day or two, outside this wire and off this island.
‘You can get shot,’ Moser said. ‘Or you can get drowned. Can you swim?’
‘I learned to swim in the Danube,’ I said.
He agreed to answer for me at the 10 p.m. roll call. He was not afraid of that. Kuhn answered for Willi and Riedl for Steinitz. By that time we were through the potato garden, which we had planted down the gully to hide us as we crept, and over the wire. We squatted on the beach, halfway between two duty posts. A guard had just passed on his round and the next was not due for thirty-five minutes. On a warm night such as that they would yawn, they would sleepwalk, and perhaps even lie down in the bracken for a snooze. Steinitz had retrieved his improvised oars from their hiding place. He had made a pair of wooden rowlocks and muffled them with cloth and I carried those along with my rucksack of food and spare clothes. Willi was ahead, scouting on the beach. We should have brought some Italians along to signal with bird calls, I thought. The night was dark, no moon, and only a few stars showed through the cloud cover.