Into the Darkest Day: An emotional and totally gripping WW2 historical novel

by Kate Hewitt

  “Sir.” His tone was neutral as he saluted.

  Betts looked at him unhappily. “Sergeant, I’m afraid I’ve discovered something I believe you should see.”

  Matthew kept his face expressionless. “Sir?”

  “I took the liberty, after you returned from Fraustadt, to ask some higher-ups about your family.”

  Matthew tensed, a stillness stealing through his body that left him unable even to breathe.

  “Weiss,” Betts said, as if asking a question, and Matthew forced a nod. “The Nazis destroyed many of their records, and looking for a name is like looking for a needle in a haystack. I don’t think we’ll ever know everyone who…” He paused to clear his throat. “But I found this.” He pushed a piece of paper towards Matthew; it was a mimeograph of a typed list of names.

  When Matthew took a step closer, he saw it was a deportation list, and the names of his mother, brothers, and sister were all on it. It was dated October 1942.

  “From Dresden,” Betts said quietly. “To Treblinka.”

  Matthew’s head jerked up as he looked at his senior officer, his rapid blinking the only sign that he understood what the man was telling him. Treblinka… one of the extermination camps that had been destroyed by the Nazis, a desperate cover-up of their unbearable evil. A place utterly without hope.

  “I’m sorry,” Betts said.

  “You know what happened?”

  “Your mother and sister died upon arrival. Cause of death was noted as heart failure.”

  “They were gassed.” He spoke flatly, unemotionally. “And my brothers?”

  “They were transferred to Auschwitz, after the uprising at Treblinka. They died in August 1944, the same way.”

  Matthew nodded slowly, saying nothing. He felt as if nothing in him was working properly—muscles, lungs, heart. It was all mechanical, a series of contractions and jerks that only just kept him alive.

  Betts cleared his throat. “I am sorry, Lawson. Weiss, I should say. I’m really very sorry to give you this news.” A pause, as if he expected something from Matthew, some sort of response or emotion, but he had nothing to give. “Take the rest of the day off,” Betts said at last.

  Matthew shook his head. “I’m fine.”

  “Take it off,” he repeated firmly. “You need it. I’ll see you here at eight hundred hours, sharp, tomorrow.”

  Outside the military headquarters housed in the Rathaus, or town hall, Matthew didn’t know what to do. People walked down the street; the sun was shining. Boizenburg had escaped the worst of the bombing, despite a shipbuilder’s right in the town, and the summery scene was disconcertingly pleasant: a child holding her mother’s hand, her steps light and skipping; two women gossiping. One of them laughed.

  He took a few steps towards the center of the square, and then stopped. He did not know where to go. He felt as if he were both shrinking and expanding, the world coming in and out of focus, so he could see with extraordinary clarity in one moment, and then only a troubling blur the next.

  A cold cattle car rattling east… He’d heard that they’d had to scrape the ice from the sides because they were so thirsty. And when it had stopped at the gates of Treblinka, with its fake timetables and its big clock, the grossest, most evil parody of a rail station…

  An SS guard, smoking, indifferent. “Take off your things. We’ll hold your valuables for you.” Almost kind, in his reassurances, perhaps, knowing what was next. Had his mother known? His brothers? Franz and Arno would have been taken somewhere else with the other healthy young men and women, to work, often to death. But Mutti… and Gertie… dear, little Gertie with her black button eyes and her curly hair…

  Matthew closed his eyes, fighting the images that came anyway. Gertie unbuttoning her dress, carefully folding it. She’d always been so neat with her things. Mutti, her hand on her daughter’s shoulder, a comforting weight.

  His mother had not been an unintelligent woman. She must have known what was going to happen. Did she try to comfort Gertie? Or did she jolly her along, take part in the horrible pretense because it was better than having her only daughter, just twelve years old, facing such unimaginable fear?

  Matthew squeezed his eyes shut tighter, hard enough to hurt, yet he could not block it out. Don’t worry, mausi. There’s nothing to be afraid of. Think of it, we will finally get nice and clean after all this time…

  A sound escaped him, like an animal in its death throes. He started striding down the street, faster and faster, until he broke into a run. He did not know where he was going, only that he could never run fast enough.

  At eight o’clock the next morning, Matthew reported for duty. Despite Betts’ doubts, he assured his commanding officer he was fit and ready for service, his voice as flat and unemotional as ever.

  Half a dozen low-ranking Nazi officers had been rounded up the night before, and were waiting in their cells to be interrogated. Some of them had been involved in running the camp in Boizenburg, one of the small Neuengamme subcamps. Without a flicker of an eyelid or a tremor of emotion, Matthew assured Betts once more he was fine and perfectly capable of conducting interrogations as necessary.

  And he was fine; his head felt remarkably clear as he read the brief and then came into the room where a prisoner waited, a short, red-faced man in a cheap suit, doing his best to look composed. Matthew had interrogated dozens of men like this—men who had been shoemakers or butchers before the war, and who had become puffed up by their own importance, their SS status, only to then tremble and stammer in fear when they were cornered, attempting denials, and then absurd justifications, and finally squealing for mercy. Mercy. The idea was an insult.

  “Guten morgen.” He kept his tone civil, which gave the odious little man a flicker of hope. He had squinty eyes like a pig, and a wide, wet mouth.

  “Guten morgen.”

  Matthew leaned against a desk and folded his arms, keeping the man’s gaze as the silence spun out. The man licked his lips, his gaze darting nervously around the room.

  “I don’t know anything,” he finally said. “I told them before, you’ve got the wrong man.”

  Matthew’s expression did not change. “You are SS-Unterscharführer Heinrich Henck,” he stated, “director of camp labor for Boizenburg, a subcamp of the Neuengamme concentration camp.”

  “My name is Henck, but I did not have that position. I was never in the SS. I never even knew about the camp.” The man’s chin quivered.

  “You were seen. You have been identified.”

  “By one woman?” Clearly Henck was aware of the source of their information: a near-hysterical woman who had seen him on the street, a loaf of bread tucked under his arm. “She is clearly demented.”

  “No.”

  “She’s mistaken me, then.” He straightened. “How can I be SS? I’m an accountant.” Like Matthew’s own father. “Besides, I don’t have that tattoo they all have—”

  “The blood type tattoo?” Usually on the underside of the left arm, near the armpit. A status symbol as well as a practical sign, in case they were wounded and needed a blood transfusion. “Not every SS has it,” Matthew returned coolly, “especially those who were drafted in at the end of the war.”

  Henck deflated slightly, before he puffed up again. “It’s my word against hers, that of an unstable woman—”

  “There are others.” They hadn’t found them yet, but they would. There were survivors, as well as other camp personnel, who would rat this little man out. Matthew was sure of it.

  “Who are they, then?” Henck asked, thrusting his chest out, a moment of bravado.

  Matthew smiled. “It doesn’t matter.”

  Henck stared at him in wary confusion. “What is that supposed to mean? You are meant to be the law, now, aren’t you?”

  “Do you really wish to talk about the law?” Matthew lit a cigarette and blew the smoke out in a steady, contemplative stream. “At Boizenburg, you were in charge of implementing the directive Vernichtung durch Ar
beit.” Extermination through labor. One of the survivors of Neuengamme had told them as much as he could. Ten- to twelve-hour days of forced labor under unimaginable conditions, little food, arbitrary beatings and other cruel punishments. Even though it hadn’t been a death camp like Auschwitz or Treblinka, it was estimated that half of the inmates there had died.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Henck said firmly.

  They continued for another hour, Matthew remaining calm and controlled, Henck veering wildly between determined denials and blustery bravado, even as his story began to change. Yes, all right, he’d known about the camp, of course he had, but he’d never been. Then: he might have been once, very well, who could remember? He didn’t keep track of every place he went. He wasn’t aware of what was going on there, who had been? Well, yes, everyone knew it was something. But no one could possibly realize…

  His forehead was shiny with sweat, the armpits of his shirt dark and damp. He kept glancing at Matthew’s cigarette with a look of naked longing.

  And then he began to break. A single slip, made when he was tired.

  “You should question someone important,” he said crossly, thoughtlessly, after Matthew had asked him a dozen questions in a row, rapid-fire. “Someone like Pauly. He was in charge of the whole thing. Or what about that lunatic, Trzebinski?”

  Matthew merely raised his eyebrows.

  “I’ve heard of them,” Henck blustered quickly. “Everyone has. Their names were bandied about.”

  Silence, as he sweated. Matthew smoked.

  “Look,” Henck finally said, and his voice broke along with his resolve. “I wasn’t anyone important. I was second in command of the labor, not even the Unterscharführer. She had that wrong, you know. I was just obeying orders. That’s all I did.” Another long, uneasy pause. “I’ll tell you what I know,” Henck said, wheedling now. “I can be helpful. I can give you names. But you must realize I didn’t make any decisions. I just carried them out. There are so many others you could—”

  “Who was Trzebinski?” Matthew asked as if it were a matter of passing interest. “Why did you call him a lunatic?”

  “He was the camp doctor, although one would hardly call him that. It wasn’t as if he made anyone better.” A slight guffaw, quickly suppressed.

  Matthew eyed him coldly. “You called him a lunatic.”

  Henck shrugged, caught between discomfort and indifference, battling a cautious hope that information might be the way out for him. “He did experiments on some of the prisoners. I never saw. I just heard.” He gave a little shiver as he grimaced. “It didn’t seem right to me,” he added with an absurd self-righteousness. “I never thought anyone should do that sort of thing.”

  “Experiments,” Matthew said tonelessly, and waited.

  “All sorts. Like I said, I never saw. But… all sorts.” Another self-conscious shiver, as if his discomfort somehow united them. “You heard things. Injections, prisoners made to stay in ice water until they’d died… I know he took twenty children, some as young as six, from one of the extermination camps, for experiments with tuberculosis. When he was finished with them, he had them hung in the basement of the Bullenhuser Damm school.” This was recited matter-of-factly, with no shiver, no moue of disgust. The man wasn’t bothered at all.

  Matthew stared at him without any emotion. When he was finished with them. He stubbed out his cigarette.

  “I’ve been here for hours,” Henck said plaintively. “I need to relieve myself.”

  Matthew gestured to the door. The hallway and bathroom were guarded; Henck could not escape. He rose from his chair, straightening his cuffs as he gave Matthew a pointed look down his nose.

  “At the end of the day,” he said with a sniff, “they were only Jews.”

  Matthew did not reply. Alone in the room, he smoked another cigarette and tried to keep his mind empty. Don’t think of it. Don’t think at all.

  Twenty children, perhaps like Gertie. Perhaps Gertie. As young as six. When he was finished with them.

  A perfunctory knock on the door thankfully startled him out of his thoughts. “Hey, Lawson, where’s your prisoner?”

  He turned to see Cardenas, one of the new military intelligence recruits, standing in the doorway, chewing a wad of gum.

  “Relieving himself,” he said shortly. “But I’m done for now. I’ll do the paperwork and he can be returned to his cell.”

  Cardenas raised his eyebrows. “How long has he been in there? Because you know some SS bigwig killed himself yesterday, while he was supposed to be taking a piss? Betts was spitting bullets. The bastard cut his wrists while he was on the john.”

  Betts hadn’t told him any of that. Matthew stared at Cardenas for several seconds. Then he strode out of the room, down the corridor to the toilets. A new fury was building in him, rising like a tidal wave, or perhaps an avalanche, overtaking any thought. It had been there all along, of course, but Matthew had always controlled it, kept it down. He’d had to, for his own sake. His own sanity. Now he felt it unleash, a wild and uncontained thing, overwhelming him with its intensity.

  He threw open the door to the toilets. “Henck, you fucker,” he demanded, “where are you?”

  He pushed open the door of the first stall—empty. The second was locked and Matthew kicked it in, so full of rage now he could barely take in the sight before him—Henck hunched over on the toilet, his trousers about his ankles.

  The Nazi looked up, startled, as the door swung open. And before Matthew even knew what he was doing, before he could so much as think, he had his hand around the man’s throat.

  Oh, but it felt good to have his hands there. To squeeze hard. It felt so very satisfying, so very right, to watch Henck’s eyes bulge and his face go red as his pudgy little hands clawed uselessly at Matthew’s own. He was going to kill him, and he was glad. He wanted it to happen; he welcomed it.

  “Lawson, don’t kill the bastard!” A hard hand on his shoulder threw Matthew back, and he fell against the doorway of the stall as Henck doubled over, choking and gasping for air. “We want him alive, not dead,” Cardenas reminded him matter-of-factly, seemingly unperturbed by the grim scene that had just played out. “They’re no good to us dead. Not before they’ve all sung like canaries.”

  But I wanted him dead, Matthew thought as he stared at Henck’s reddened face, his fingermarks livid on the man’s throat. I needed him dead. I still do. And I want to be the one to kill him, to get revenge.

  The former SS Unterscharführer, he saw, had pissed all over the floor.

  The next day, he received his Distinguished Service Cross, given by Captain Betts with an understanding smile.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  ABBY

  Abby watched the fields blur by as Simon drove across Wisconsin under a hazy sky, back towards Ashford. They’d been in the car for several hours already, and neither of them had said much at all. Abby didn’t know what there was to say; her head felt full, her heart empty. It was a strange sensation.

  Last night, when Simon had said the words “my daughter”, she’d simply stared. They’d bounced off her brain, not making sense, because he looked so sorrowful, so resigned, and she didn’t understand why, just as she didn’t understand how he could possibly have a daughter he hadn’t told her about.

  Except he did, obviously he did, and she realized she shouldn’t feel surprised—never mind betrayed—by it, because surely this was just another reminder that they really didn’t know each other well at all.

  “Your daughter,” she’d finally said, testing the words out, feeling their strength, and Simon had nodded, more of a hanging of his head than anything else.

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me.”

  And so he had, as haltingly as she’d told her own tale of complicated grief, about his divorce, which hadn’t been as simple as he’d made it out to be, because there had been—there still was—a child involved, a little girl.

  “Maggie,” Simon
had said, with an ache in his voice.

  “How old is she?”

  “Twelve.”

  “And when you separated…?”

  “Five.”

  Abby was silent, absorbing these unexpected revelations, unsure what to make of any of it. Somehow it changed things, and yet she couldn’t even articulate why or how. “Why didn’t you mention her before?” she had asked finally.

  “Because I felt guilty,” Simon had said. He’d looked wretched, and she had wanted to comfort him, yet somehow she couldn’t, even though he’d comforted her. He’d put his arms around her, he’d held her while she’d cried. And yet somehow she couldn’t do the same; she had leaned back against the headboard, her arms around her knees.

  “Guilty?” she’d repeated after a moment. “Of what?”

  “Of failing my family.” He’d paused, each word drawn out of him like a poison, with both reluctance and healing. “Of… of being a bad father.”

  “Why… why would you feel that way?” Asking the questions felt like edging through the dark, tiptoeing, not sure what she might bump into. “What happened?”

  Simon was silent, his gaze moving despondently around the bland room as if looking for answers he knew he wouldn’t find. “Nothing happened,” he’d said at last. “There’s no big moment I can point to and say ‘that’s when I should have done x’ or something like that. I wish there was. If there had been, I hope to God I would have done it.”

  “Then…” She had stared at him, confused. “I don’t understand, Simon. I think… I think I feel a bit like you must have, when you knew there was this big thing I hadn’t told you about, and you kept coming up against it like a brick wall I pretended wasn’t there. What happened with your daughter? With… Maggie? Because something did, obviously.”

  “Well.” He had shifted on the bed, trying to look composed and practical when Abby suspected he possessed as deep a wound, a grief, as she did, or almost. “Sara had sole custody, for a start. It didn’t feel quite like that at the time—I didn’t just sign away my rights to my child. But I was the one who moved out—Sara asked me to—and it just seemed like the right thing for Maggie to stay in her family home, with the parent who had been at home with her the most. Sara was a stay-at-home mum for four years, while I’d worked. And I told myself I still had summer holidays and the rest of it. We agreed on—well, visitation is the wrong word, because I was more than a visitor. At least at the start. But I’d have Maggie for weekend afternoons—we both agreed she should sleep in her own bed every night—and Sara had her the rest of the time. That’s how it began.”