The Prisoner

by Robert Muchamore

  Before eight the only people around were usually Marc, a German caretaker and two Ukrainian cleaning girls. So Marc was surprised to hear Commandant Vogel already in his office, shouting furiously into his telephone.

  Marc didn’t want to get on the wrong end of the Commandant in a temper, so he grabbed prisoner record cards from a tray marked To be Filed and hurried off. His aim was to quickly wash his face and bloodied hands in the bathroom and then hide out in the archive room upstairs filing the cards.

  But Marc only got a couple of steps before Vogel charged to his doorway, with a telephone receiver at his cheek and the cord stretched across the room behind him.

  ‘Here,’ Vogel shouted, as he waved his arm. ‘Put those down, get over here.’

  The prettier of the two young cleaning girls gave Marc a smile and a good morning nod as he waited in the office doorway, listening to Commandant Vogel deal with an angry factory boss.

  ‘Bloody Gestapo!’ Vogel shouted, after slamming the receiver down. ‘Have you seen those Jews downstairs?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Marc said.

  ‘Gestapo brought them in for immediate deportation to Poland. I had enough of a headache when they took all the Jews doing excavation work. But this batch are skilled men: chemists, doctors, engineers. The factory bosses are up in arms. They’re irreplaceable!’

  Vogel thumped his desk before raising his voice to a new level of fury. ‘I’m supposed to be in charge of the RLA for the whole of this area, but the Gestapo chops my legs off. How can we win the war when skilled workers get sent to do farm work in Poland?’

  Marc thought it was best not to mention that fact that he didn’t want Germany to win the war and mumbled, ‘I don’t know, sir.’

  ‘I can’t get a phone call through to our headquarters in Berlin. I need you to run to the main post office and send this telegram.’

  Marc took the handwritten note from his boss. ‘I’ll be there as soon as they open the doors, sir.’

  ‘What?’ Vogel spluttered, as he glanced at his watch then backed up to his chair. ‘Apologies, I keep forgetting that it’s early. I’ve been kept up half the night by factory bosses begging to get their Jews back. It feels like lunch, but it’s not even breakfast.’

  ‘I can go down and fetch you something to eat from the canteen, sir.’

  Vogel smiled. ‘Yes, I’ll give you my military ration card.’

  As Vogel reached into his desk drawer, his swivel chair bashed his desk, knocking a mound of papers to the floor. Marc bent down to pick them up, but a painful spasm erupted in his back.

  Vogel was startled. ‘Are you sick?’

  ‘Just stiff,’ Marc explained, as he restacked the papers and placed them back on Vogel’s desk. ‘They had us out half the night moving logs off the main line.’

  ‘You work for me,’ Vogel said, as his posture straightened with irritation. ‘I need you fit, not stiff and covered in blood. Why didn’t you tell them that you worked for me?’

  ‘People try to get out of extra work,’ Marc explained. ‘I did say, but the guard didn’t believe me.’

  ‘Then you should have asked to speak to the area supervisor.’

  ‘Fischer is the area supervisor, sir,’ Marc said.

  ‘That thug,’ Vogel said contemptuously, as he half stood up and studied the shape of the wound above Marc’s eye. ‘That was his rifle butt, I’ll bet.’

  Marc knew there might be consequences to snitching on a hard case like Fischer, but if he lied Vogel would only ask for another name. Marc’s mistake had been letting Fischer’s name slip in the first place.

  ‘It was, sir.’

  ‘Right,’ Vogel said furiously as he picked up his phone and raised it halfway to his mouth. ‘You clean up that face. I want you at the doors of the post office when it opens. Get that telegram off to Berlin the second they open, then take my ration card. I just want coffee. But you use it to get yourself something decent to eat.’

  When you’re hungry food is the only word you hear. Marc beamed at the thought of German military rations: processed cheese, bread and maybe even a hard-boiled egg if he was lucky.

  As Marc stepped towards the door, Vogel aimed his hand towards the private bathroom at the rear of his office.

  ‘There’s soap and hot water,’ Vogel said. ‘But don’t touch my towel. I can live without body lice or scabies.’

  Laurent’s comment about never grovelling to Germans flashed through Marc’s head, but soap and hot water was almost as big a treat as the offer of decent food.

  ‘Thank you so much, sir,’ Marc said, as Vogel brought the phone the rest of the way up to his mouth.

  ‘Osterhagen?’ Vogel told the handset authoritatively. ‘Is Herr Fischer still on duty…? Excellent. Tell him he’s required in my office when his shift finishes.’

  Note

  2 KG – an abbreviation of Kriegsgefangener, which means ‘war prisoner’.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Marc felt better with the blood scrubbed off his face and military rations in his belly, though feeling good was still some way off. As a minimum it would have required better fitting boots and a good delousing to stop his constant itching.

  After sending Commandant Vogel’s telegram, Marc translated in a short meeting with a French volunteer worker, who wanted to return home to look after his three children following the death of his wife.

  When that was done, Marc stepped into a secretarial pool that was now filled with the chatter of typewriters. He went around all the secretaries asking if they had any prisoner records to file and took the resulting mound of cards up to the sixth floor.

  The layout was identical to the offices below, but rows of file cabinets were lined up in front of the windows, blocking most of the light. The room was stuffy, so Marc propped a fire door open with a waste paper basket.

  The door led out on to a balcony overlooking the River Main. It was a bright day, and from up here the world looked serene: barges steaming along the river, tall buildings in the city centre with their tops engulfed in the smog rising off dozens of chimneys in the industrial belt beyond.

  Marc didn’t linger outdoors, because while most of the younger secretaries pitied him, the office was run by two elderly sisters who treated the grubby French teenager in their office with the same regard that they might show a diseased rat.

  Marc’s stack of cards was twenty centimetres high. Every foreign worker and prisoner in Germany had a Reich Labour Administration record card. The rows of file cabinets surrounding Marc contained cards for more than three-hundred-thousand men and women controlled by the RLA’s Frankfurt district.

  There were green cards for French prisoners, pink for Poles, blue for Jews, yellow for Russians and Ukrainians and so on. Cards had fingerprints and photos, names, prisoner/worker numbers and details of past and current work assignments.

  Cards were filed by prisoner number. Marc’s job was to replace cards that had been taken out by secretaries, mostly to write on details of new work assignments, hospitalisations, or disciplinary measures.

  He began with sixty Russian prisoners, who’d all been quarantined following an outbreak of typhus in their barracks. The next batch were all deaths. If a German or West European prisoner died, their card was marked with a red X and sent to Berlin, where relatives would be sent notification.

  If they were East European or Russian, Marc logged the dead prisoner’s name and number in a register and the cards were put in a stack for incineration.

  One of the many personal items that prisoners didn’t receive was toilet paper, and Marc often tore these surplus cards into quarters and slipped them into a pile behind one of the cabinets. When he had a good stack, he’d smuggle them back to the Oper.

  Marc would give the papers to his cabin mates – Laurent always excused himself to the toilet with the phrase, off to wipe my arse on a dead Russian – or traded them with dock labourers on the upper deck, who’d swap a three-centimetre stack of cardboard squares for carr
ots or a couple of medium-sized potatoes.

  While Marc filed, a young secretary named Ursula came in and started pulling cards for the Jews waiting downstairs in the market hall. She wasn’t exactly beautiful, but glancing at her when she bent over to put something in a bottom drawer took Marc’s mind off the tedium of filing and the bugs partying under his grubby shirt and trousers.

  Commandant Vogel caught Marc staring when he stepped in, but instead of rebuking him Vogel took his own longing gaze up Ursula’s skirt and gave Marc a nod as if to say, not bad.

  ‘I’ve just had the pleasure of Herr Fischer’s company,’ Vogel announced. ‘You’ll not be sent out to do manual labour again and Fischer will let the other guards know the same thing. He’s also got orders to find you some better boots and clothes. I know it’s not your fault, but some of the girls downstairs find your odour offensive.’

  ‘I try, sir,’ Marc said. ‘But we never get any soap. I’ve only got one set of clothes and there’s nowhere to wash them.’

  Marc appreciated the fact that Vogel looked out for him, but it was a double-edged sword: most prisoners were older and bigger than Marc, there was already a lot of resentment about his cushy job and getting better boots and clothes could easily set off a thug like Alain.

  Vogel failed to notice Marc’s wariness because he’d spotted what Ursula was doing and threw a fit.

  ‘Who gave you permission to pull those records?’

  ‘The Standartenfuhrer called from the Gestapo offices downstairs,’ Ursula explained. ‘He wants all their cards transferred to his office. There are already Jewish women at the perimeter making a fuss and asking to see their men. They’re adding cattle wagons to the next train east so that they’re out of our hair before it turns into a scene.’

  ‘Damned Gestapo,’ Vogel snapped.

  ‘Shall I stop, sir?’ Ursula asked.

  ‘I suppose not,’ Vogel said bitterly, as he ground a palm against his forehead with frustration.

  Ursula stood rigid, cleared her throat and spoke nervously. ‘Herr Commandant, I don’t wish to speak out of turn. I know you’re determined to keep up factory production, but you’ve voiced your opinions about the Gestapo and the Standartenfuhrer rather loudly. He’s a powerful man. I’m not the only one who worries that being so vocal might not be good for you.’

  Vogel broke into a big smile. ‘It’s sweet that you care, Ursula.’

  ‘You’re a considerate boss,’ Ursula said, slightly embarrassed. ‘All us girls enjoy working with you.’

  This little conversation intrigued Marc: the more he dealt with the Nazi state, the more he saw how their racist policies and tangled bureaucracy worked against them. They were desperate for electrical engineers and vehicle mechanics, but Marc had seen men of both professions shipped off to mining districts because they were Russian. Jewish doctors got stripped of their medical licences and were sent to Poland, while German troops died on the front lines because the army lacked good medics. It was all quite mad.

  ‘When you’ve drawn the files, give them to Marc,’ Vogel told Ursula. ‘He can deliver them to the Standartenfuhrer with my compliments.’

  *

  ‘Good evening, Your Majesty,’ Herr Fischer purred, doffing his cap sarcastically as he let Marc through the dockside gate. ‘There’s a present on your bunk. I hope it’s to sir’s liking.’

  ‘Right,’ Marc said awkwardly.

  ‘One other thing,’ Fischer added, when Marc was halfway up the gangplank. ‘Should you ever fall out with your chums in high places, I won’t forget that you gave the Commandant my name when he asked for it.’

  Marc shuddered, though luckily it was dark enough that Fischer didn’t get the satisfaction of seeing it.

  A late meeting between Vogel and the French foreman at a new engineering plant had kept Marc out past nine and the other prisoners were all back from work before him. To get to his bunk below deck, Marc had to interrupt several card games being played in the narrow gangway and got sworn at for his trouble.

  Marc jolted when he saw Alain and his boys at the bottom of the stairs playing dice. Alain didn’t speak, but even in the gloom below deck his busted nose and swollen lips weren’t pretty. Marc had wanted to escape since the day he’d reached Frankfurt, but making two powerful enemies in one day paid off any lingering doubts.

  ‘Evening, boys,’ Marc said, as he stepped into his cabin.

  Most of his cabin mates were half asleep, though Richard and Louis – a ginger fifteen-year-old serving twenty years for distributing communist literature – were squinting over a two-week-old French newspaper that had come their way via a convoy of French coal barges.

  Marc’s share of the evening rations was congealing on the upturned tea chest, but the package on his bed was more interesting. Wrapped in brown paper and tied with string, its presence was novel enough to attract everyone’s eyes as soon as Marc touched it.

  ‘What you got, golden boy?’ Laurent asked.

  Laurent was Marc’s closest friend, but his sarcastic tone was another sign of how preferential treatment caused bitterness.

  Undoing a shoelace knot and peeling back paper revealed a small, dark-brown man’s suit and a pair of recently-resoled leather shoes. They looked too big, but that would be less painful than Marc’s present boots which were two sizes too small.

  ‘The commandant must have really put the frighteners on old Fischer,’ Marcel laughed. ‘I’d have loved to see his face.’

  As Marc unravelled the jacket, he was surprised to see a Star of David patch sewn on the breast pocket. His brain instantly connected dots between the brown suit and a small Jewish man he’d seen squatting on his luggage in the market hall that morning.

  Marcel laughed. ‘I’d unpick that star before the Hitler Youth stop you on the street.’

  Two thoughts sprang into Marc’s head. First, was a mental image of his suit’s former owner, riding a train to Poland in his underwear. Secondly, for Fischer to get one of the Jews’ suits, he must have visited the Gestapo office downstairs after being told off, and Marc doubted that Fischer would have had good things to say about Commandant Vogel.

  ‘You’ll look like a little Jew businessman in that,’ Marcel said, laughing. ‘You just need the big hooter and thick glasses.’

  ‘Smart threads will earn you an arse kicking too,’ Vincent, the eternal optimist, added.

  ‘I’ll only wear it for work,’ Marc said. ‘Maybe even leave it at the office so it doesn’t pick up too many bugs.’

  Marc grabbed his mess tin and started to eat, acting hungrier than he really was. Your stomach shrinks when you’re always hungry and he didn’t want his friends knowing that he’d scored bread, synthetic jam, cheese and scrambled egg at the Großmarkthalle earlier on.

  ‘There’s something I have to talk about,’ Marc said, as his spoon scraped out his tin. ‘Come up this end, I don’t want anyone in the passageway hearing.’

  Marcel made everything a joke and found Marc’s grave tone amusing. ‘You didn’t finally get your tiny dick inside a German secretary, did you?’

  As his five cabin mates shifted towards him, Marc pulled the green card from his trouser pocket.

  ‘This is a Reich Labour Administration record card,’ he began. ‘Every foreigner working in Germany has one. Ours are all stored in the massive filing system above the office where I work.’

  ‘So what?’ Vincent asked.

  ‘I’ve been studying the system,’ Marc explained. ‘Which documents you need for which process: transfers, hospitalisation, repatriation. Which signatures you need, which stamps go in which boxes. I think I can get paperwork that will get us all back to France.’

  ‘Escape?’ Richard asked, recoiling at the thought.

  Marc shook his head. ‘Escape is when the guards miss you at the next roll call and the Gestapo hunt you down. This is different. French prisoners and volunteer labourers sometimes get sent home on compassionate grounds. They get issued with release papers and tr
avel warrants for their home town in France.’

  ‘I see,’ Laurent gasped, as he jumped down off his bunk to examine the green card. ‘But how do you get all this paperwork?’

  ‘I can do a signature that looks enough like Commandant Vogel’s to fool the girls in the office. The blank forms are lying around all over, and I can use the rubber stamps and do my own sneaky bits of typing, because I usually arrive at the office before anyone except the cleaners.’

  ‘You say you think you’ve worked it out,’ Vincent noted. ‘What if you’re wrong?’

  ‘I’ve done most of the work already,’ Marc explained. ‘I’ve got two sets of paperwork sorted for all of us. It’s prepared and hidden between two filing cabinets back at RLA headquarters.’

  ‘Two sets?’ Laurent asked.

  Marc explained. ‘Repatriations are rare. If we all try getting out of here with paperwork sending us to France, the guards will smell a rat. So we’ll leave this barracks with orders transferring us to a new work detail in Cologne. But when our train gets to Bonn, we dump that set of paperwork and produce release documents and travel warrants enabling us to board a train to France.’

  ‘This is my third barracks in Germany,’ Louis said. ‘You can’t just hop off the train. Prisoners always travel long distance with armed escorts, or locked in cattle trucks.’

  ‘I’ve got that covered,’ Marc said. ‘We’re prisoners when we leave here. When we get to the Frankfurt Central, the paperwork will say we’re volunteer workers, with travel permits for regular trains.’

  ‘And if someone at the station sees the switch, or recognises us?’ Laurent asked.

  ‘No plan is perfect,’ Marc said, sounding frustrated. ‘It’s a risk to go, but so’s staying here. In this filth we could easily pick up TB or typhus. They can transfer us to a mine or some factory where you choke from all the chemicals. Horses get more respect than the Germans show us.’

  ‘That Dutchman who went under the logs died,’ Marcel said.

  ‘That could have been any one of us,’ Marc said.