by Kate Hewitt
He let out a shuddering breath as he stared at the ceiling. “I wasn’t a bad man, you know, before this,” he said. He turned to look at her, and after a second’s pause, Lotte turned her head so she could see the bleakness in his eyes. “I wasn’t,” he said again.
She hesitated, having no idea how to reply. “What is your name?” she finally asked, and his mouth opened and closed silently for a few seconds.
“Oskar,” he said finally, his voice a throb of surprise and sorrow. His eyes glittered and Lotte thought he might actually cry. Then she saw anger enter his eyes, like iron into the soul, and he rolled up from the bed, reached for her ragged prison dress, and hurled it at her. “Get out,” he told her, and his voice was cold.
When Lotte slipped into the barracks just a short while later, several of the women gave her narrowed looks.
“Why is your hair wet?” one of them demanded, and she had no answer.
“Is Birgit all right?” Magda asked, hurrying up to her, and Lotte nodded. “Yes, they’ve agreed to take her into the infirmary.”
The woman who had asked her about her wet hair pursed her lips.
The next day Lotte managed to slip out to the infirmary after the evening meal. At the front door, she was turned away as she knew she would be, but what she really wanted was information.
“Please… is my sister here? Prisoner 66482? She was brought here last night, by one of the guards. He said she would receive medicine—”
The nurse frowned at her, one hand already starting to close the door. “Yes, I think I know who you mean. She’s here.”
“Has her fever broken?” Lotte asked eagerly, relief flooding through her. Birgit was safe; she would get better. It was going to be all right.
“How should I know?” the nurse demanded in a surly tone, and closed the door.
That evening, while Lotte was praying with the others, the Aufseherin shouted her name and jerked a thumb towards the door.
“You’re wanted,” she said, and it felt as if every woman in the room froze, understanding trickling icily through them as they all stared at her. Lotte rose from where she’d been kneeling and walked on unsteady legs to the front of the room. A few women hissed as she went by.
Again? Already? she thought numbly as she made her way to the guards’ enclave, wondering if she would be stopped, beaten, maybe even shot. She wasn’t allowed here, yet new rules existed now for women like her. A few of the guards loitering about glanced at her but said nothing.
Oskar—could she even think of him as Oskar, like a person, someone she knew?—was waiting outside his barracks, his arms folded, already looking impatient. Lotte stood in front of him, unsure how to greet him. She wanted to ask him how long he would summon her for, but she knew it was a question she didn’t dare ask. Besides, she realized she already knew the answer. As long as he wanted.
He remained silent as he turned to go inside, and she followed, longing for the sense of surreality she’d felt the night before, cloaking her in its comforting numbness. She didn’t feel it now; she was all too aware of her hard-beating heart, the soreness still between her legs, the sense of inevitability, the terror lurking at the fringes of her mind, the resolve that stole through her bones.
The moment she crossed the threshold of his room he grabbed her, slamming the door shut and then pushing her against it so her cheek hit the wood hard and her ears rang. She opened her mouth to say something—she knew not what—but he was already yanking at her dress, tearing the thin cloth, his body against her back as she closed her eyes. She could feel his hot breath on her cheek.
Afterwards he fell onto the bed as if exhausted, one arm thrown over his eyes. Lotte pulled her dress down, her legs trembling so much she feared she would not be able to stay upright.
Lord, give me strength to stand. She put one hand against the door to steady herself.
“I’ve told them your sister has to stay in the infirmary for at least two weeks,” he told her, his arm still over his eyes. “And when she’s released, she’ll be put on knitting duty. So will you.”
Lotte opened her mouth, closed it. Knitting duty—knitting socks for soldiers—was the easiest of duties in the entire camp, reserved for women who had been singled out for favor or who were too ill to do anything else. Some women were even able to use the leftover wool to knit themselves sweaters. The room was barely supervised, and the women had more freedom than any of the other prisoners.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
Oskar lowered his arm from his eyes to give her a fathomless look. “I was a bookkeeper before the war,” he said. He seemed to be waiting for a response.
“Do you miss it?” she asked after a moment, and he let out a choked laugh as he lay his arm back over his eyes, as if he couldn’t bear the sight of her.
“Yes,” he said, his voice muffled. “I do.” He turned away from her, his shoulder hunched. “You can go.”
Lotte stared at him for a moment, having a strange yet strong urge to comfort him—him, her attacker, a man capable of evil that she’d experienced and more she didn’t even know of—for heaven only knew what he’d done, what he was guilty of—and yet, a man. A man who could, perhaps, be forgiven.
“God loves you,” she said impulsively, wondering if she was mad to say such a thing in a moment like this.
Oskar was silent for a moment, and then he let out a huff of weary laughter. “No, he doesn’t. He can’t.” He flung an arm out towards the door, his back still to her, his voice hardening. “Now, go.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Johanna
Mauthausen Granitwerke, January 1945
Johanna had been passing on messages to Ingrid for a year, written in a code she didn’t understand but knew must be important. Almost every month she dutifully went home and passed the messages on; she could no longer visit Salzburg so often, thanks to longer hours and fewer buses.
Some months back Ingrid had told her to stop going to the coffeehouse for it had become too obvious; she’d arranged for Johanna to leave messages folded and pushed under the slats of a bench in Mirabellgarten, always at three o’clock on a Saturday afternoon.
Johanna refused to think about what it meant—that it had become obvious—although that in turn was obvious enough. They were being watched, or at least Ingrid suspected they were being watched. Every time the unnamed administrator dropped a file on her desk, Johanna wondered if it would be his last—and hers. If they were discovered, they would both be shot. And as the days bled into months, she thought it likely they would be discovered. Surely it was only a matter of time.
Still she continued to type the letters and lists, and pass on the information as regularly as she could. She longed to return to the camp to see Franz, but she knew she couldn’t take such a risk again, and in truth a small, shameful part of her didn’t want to see him like that again, or in an even worse state, just as she knew he wouldn’t want to be seen. It saddened her, that knowledge, but it also filled her with determination. Somehow they would survive all this. Somehow…
By the new year, the mood at Granitwerke and indeed throughout the whole Reich had become even more dangerously desperate. Day by day, as Johanna continued to type, doors slammed and footsteps sounded in halls, and she heard urgent whispers and sudden shouts. Supervisors were short-tempered. Everyone was tense, silent, alert to danger. The other secretaries had stopped taking lunches to gossip and smoke, and stayed at their desks, hunched over their typewriters, meeting no one’s eye.
It all spoke to Johanna of a horrible futility; Germany was losing the war, of that there could be no question. The American and British Allies had already liberated France, the Netherlands, Belgium. The Soviets were approaching the borders of Germany itself. Planes strafed the skies on an almost nightly basis, and the photographs of their devastation—“the Allied atrocities”—showed just how effective they were. No matter how the newspapers liked to couch the German Army’s “strategic withdrawals,” the fact
remained that the Wehrmacht was in near-constant retreat.
Johanna and her landlady had listened to Hitler’s broadcast on the thirtieth of January; she had tried to keep her expression neutral as he had railed against Bolshevism and Jews with a shrill, manic desperation. When he had spoken of the sacrifice everyone would be called to make, her gaze had flitted to the landlady’s, who had quickly looked away, neither of them saying a word, yet both of them knowing Hitler’s cry for victory was really an admission of defeat.
Meanwhile the smoke stacks above the camp belched thick black smoke into the sky more than ever before, filling Johanna with both bitterness and fear. Even now, when the Nazis were surely on the cusp of surrender, they continued their reign of terror. It was so incredibly unfair, so utterly evil, that she felt as if she were constantly screaming inside, even as she typed so sedately. Sehr geehrte herren… Dear Sirs.
And then, on the second of February, everything changed. Johanna sensed the weirdly heightened mood as she walked into Granitwerke on the Friday, the tension and more bizarrely, the exultation, that seemed to tauten the air as she went to her desk. She heard a burst of hard laughter, and as one of the SS guards left his office, he tossed a joke over his shoulder about “joining the hare hunt.” Something about his tone, the callous cruelty of it underscored by unmistakable relish, made her tense even as she strove to seem natural.
“What are they talking about?” she asked one of the other typists in a low voice, doing her best to sound casual. She sat at her desk and pulled her typewriter toward her, as if she didn’t much care about the answer.
“Didn’t you hear the sirens last night?” The typist, Anna, raised her eyebrows. “There was a breakout from the camp.”
“A breakout?” Johanna couldn’t keep the sharpness from her voice. “You mean, prisoners escaped?”
Anna rolled her eyes. “Who else? About five hundred of them, apparently.”
“But how?” Had Franz…?
Anna shrugged, already bored. “How should I know?”
Over the course of the morning Johanna gleaned the details: five hundred prisoners, armed with nothing more than paving stones, fire extinguishers, or even just pieces of coal, had rushed the watchtowers and thrown wet blankets over the electric fences to short-circuit them.
“They were desperate, of course,” another of the typists, Else, told her in a low voice. “They were from Block 20, Soviets and political prisoners. No one gets out of there alive.” She looked away quickly, as if she’d said too much.
“All of them were from Block 20?” Johanna asked, hearing an urgency in her voice that she knew she shouldn’t reveal. Else nodded.
“And did they… did they escape? I mean—”
“No, they were too weak, of course. Most of them were rounded up right away. The rest…” She swallowed, looking around furtively. “Didn’t you hear the shots?”
Johanna shook her head. She’d become so used to noises at night—noises she didn’t want to think about—that she’d trained herself to sleep through them.
“They’re still hunting them down,” Else said, lowering her voice even further. “Some of the men in town have joined in, to look for them. The Hitler Youth and the old men. They all want their turn.” Else’s mouth twisted as Johanna vaguely recalled doors slamming, a shout in the street, before she’d rolled over and gone back to sleep. She had long ago reconciled herself to the fact that if they came for her, there would be nothing she could do about it. “They’re calling it the ‘Mühlviertel Hare Hunt,’” Else finished with a grimace. “They’ve told everyone involved not to bring back anyone alive.”
Johanna’s stomach cramped and she nodded quickly, looking away. It shouldn’t surprise her, not after everything she’d seen and heard, and yet it did. It always did.
She spent the rest of the day trying to focus on work, but her mind was spinning uselessly. Franz wouldn’t have been involved, she felt sure of that, and yet she also knew such acts of rebellion led to reprisals. Severe reprisals for everyone, even those who had not been involved.
It might not matter. He is most likely dead. You haven’t seen him for nearly a year, and those smoke stacks are working nearly every day…
She bit her lip, hard enough to taste blood, so she would not cry out.
Her mind was still spinning, her heart heavy, as she left for the day. Already the sky had grown dark, and a bitter wind, metallic with the promise of snow, blew down from the mountains. Were the men still out there somewhere in the woods, hiding, hoping, fighting for their lives, or were they already dead, rounded up and shot in the head? She’d just crossed the street to head back to her boarding house when someone bumped into her, hard enough to make her cry out.
“They know.” The voice was low and urgent in her ear. “Don’t go back to your lodgings. You must leave at once.”
For a second the words didn’t penetrate. Johanna was still rubbing her shoulder, feeling ridiculously aggrieved, as the person who had bumped into her—a man in uniform, someone she didn’t recognize—walked past her.
They know. She stilled, her arms dropping to her sides. Was it a trick? Were they waiting to see if she ran, so they could indict her? Or did they really know? Had this attempted breakout exposed a weak link in the chains of resistance?
Her heart felt as if it were being squeezed in her chest. She thought she had reconciled herself to the possibility of discovery, but in that moment she knew she hadn’t. She took several breaths to calm herself, scanning the street, relieved to see that no one was paying her attention… for now. The man who had whispered to her had already disappeared.
Slowly, so as not to attract notice, she turned around and began walking towards the train station. She had no idea when the next train to Salzburg would be, or if there would even be one that day. Trains had become notoriously infrequent and unreliable. Even if she did get on a train, she would almost certainly be asked for her papers at some point. If they really did know she was involved in the resistance, it could be as good as a death sentence. What could she do? Where she could go?
Johanna kept walking as she tried to think, her mind racing down blind alleys and finding only dead ends. She could not go back to her boarding house. She could not get on the train. If it was a trick, so be it, but she could not take the risk that it wasn’t. But where could she go? Salzburg—home—was nearly one hundred and fifty kilometers away. Linz was only fifteen kilometers, but it was still a long way to walk as night was coming on, when the weather was below freezing and she had no food or shelter.
Johanna’s steps slowed as the impossibility of her situation slammed into her. This wasn’t a puzzle where she simply had to find the missing piece, or a game where she just needed to know the rules. This was her life, and she could see no way ahead.
She jumped as she heard a car coming up behind her, and as she pressed herself against a building, a Jeep roared by. She glimpsed several SS, rifles resting against their shoulders. They were going on their hare hunt.
She took a deep breath and then she kept walking. Somehow she would have to get to Salzburg, or at least to Linz, where she might be able to find a place to hide. But until when? What if the war wasn’t over for weeks or even months?
She couldn’t go home, Johanna realized, because she did not dare implicate her parents. Nor could she go to Ingrid, because she might already be implicated. But where? There had to be somewhere, some safe place.
Then an address fell into her head; she had not gone to 22 Traunstrasse in Aigen since Werner had asked her to, nearly a year ago. She should have, Johanna knew, but caring for her parents and delivering messages to Ingrid had taken up all of her mind, all of her time. But she would go there now. At least she would try.
As she left the town, Johanna veered onto a dirt track that ran alongside a snowy field. Night was falling, which gave her some protection, but she was all too aware that they must still be looking for prisoners, and they would undoubtedly shoot at anything th
at moved.
Oh God, what if she was being stupid? What if that man had been teasing her, or maybe he’d just been wrong? Wandering out here in the woods on a winter’s night was a suicide mission, and that wasn’t even taking into account the SS patrolling the area, and who knew who else.
She walked west for an hour, aligning herself by the hills that ringed the horizon, her fingers numb in her thin gloves, her coat little protection against the arctic winds, the temperature dropping steadily as night drew in.
Finally, finally, she stumbled upon a farmhouse—and a barn. Johanna skirted the farmhouse, making sure to give it and any barking dogs or nosy people a wide berth. Then she crept into the barn, blinking in the gloom. Slowly she made out a pile of hay, several cows snuffling in their stalls—and two men half-collapsed on the floor.
She let out a soft gasp, and one of them looked up, his eyes seeming to blaze into hers.
“Bitte,” he said, but he sounded angry rather than pleading.
“I’m a friend,” Johanna said quietly. She closed the door behind her. One of the cows lowed, making her jump. She was not used to animals. The men, she saw, were filthy and gaunt, their striped prisoner uniforms ragged and stained. Here were two rabbits that had escaped that damnable hunt, she thought with a savage sort of satisfaction. If it was at all within her power, she would not let them be caught. “You are safe with me,” she told them, hoping they understood, for they were undoubtedly Russian.
Slowly the one who had spoken nodded.
“The SS are still out there, looking,” Johanna said as she came towards them. She wished she had some food or water to offer, but she had nothing. “You should stay here until it is safe.”
“Da,” the man said gruffly. “Spasiba.”
Johanna nodded and eased herself down on the pile of hay, pulling her knees up to her chest. It was warmer in the barn, but only a little, and the rustling of the cows was an unfamiliar sound. Her stomach growled; she hadn’t eaten since lunch, a sandwich of black bread and meat paste. She did not know when she would eat again. And how would she get all the way back to Aigen?