The thought of the British coming to their rescue now seemed further away than ever, and his compatriots on the island would take this as yet another victory. The Islanders wept over the dead as if they were their own children, lost at sea in this great, terrible war. Henrik felt only sympathy in that moment. No one deserved to die like that.
1944
Chapter 38
March 1944
It was the first time Jack had ever seen a train that wasn’t a picture or a model. As a child some of his friends had been interested in trains, but he had never really understood it. They were something odd and alien to him, as the islands didn’t have their own railway until the Germans had built a narrow gauge to move supplies up to the building sites for the fortifications. He had what he approximately described as a year in a small camp in France. There had been some other Guernsey folk there, but he had withdrawn into himself, refusing to talk to them. They reminded him too much of a life before. But now he was being moved, he wondered where they were, what had happened to them.
His mother had once told him about the time when after his father had died, the two of them had caught the train south to Weymouth to get the ferry to Guernsey. That had been the only time before now when Jack had travelled by train and he had been too young to remember it. He wasn’t sure how he felt about the steam-fuelled beast. It was loud and something about it seemed on the verge of exploding any minute. He wondered whether if he understood better how they worked he might feel a little less apprehensive about them, but the most disconcerting thing was not knowing where they were taking him. Like everything else, the train was run-down and barely operating. Those who seemed to know how to fix it had disappeared. It gave Jack no comfort that the situation in occupied France was no better than it was in the islands.
He hugged his knees closer to his body, trying to force some warmth into them. It was cold in the cattle cart they were moving him in, colder than anything he had experienced before, even the cold island winters. His new uniform chafed more than his police uniform ever had, and not just because he was forced to wear it. He knew what he was doing was right this time, that he had finally chosen the correct path. He still hoped to find Johanna here somewhere in the camps. He couldn’t give up that hope. Even if they were imprisoned, they would be together. They had to fight against the Nazis, fight them every step of the way to stop what they were doing to the world. He would never forget and never forgive them for what they had done to his home, and to Johanna. He had thought he would find David out here, or someone else, but that had proven a false hope. He felt a pang in his stomach then, a deep sickly feeling that quickly turned to anger.
Jack wondered what could have happened to him had the Germans not started the war. Would he and Johanna have got married, had children? Would they have just been allowed to be happy together? On the other hand, he would never have met Johanna and come what may he would always be glad for that.
A few soldiers came and closed the door to the box carriage he was sitting in and the press of bodies pushed against him. His sense of smell had numbed, but he still gagged at the scent of humanity, that raw unwashed stench that covered them all. He couldn’t remember the last time he had washed.
He could have gone with the Guernsey militia in the beginning, gone to join the army, but then his relationship with Johanna would never have progressed as far as it had. She may have been sent to the camps earlier, and his mother and grandparents would still have died. No, in that way this was better than having a rifle in his hand. He had known since the initial evacuation of the island that he had made the right decision not to join the army. Even though he had now seen first-hand what the Germans were capable of, had now seen the labour camps, the so-called evacuations, he knew he was right. He couldn’t run away. He would fight the Germans on his own terms, by finding Johanna and surviving. The Germans wanted to change the world and rebuild it in their image.
His mind rocked as the steam train chugged away from their camp, taking them further into the Reich. The thousand-year Reich. In his mind he was fighting an idea, not a nation.
*
Jack pushed himself through the new camp, like a fish through water. Everywhere he turned there was another person pushing back against the tide. He had been moved through a number of camps now, passed from one livestock carriage to another. At first they had been refugee camps, small and temporary, but this place felt more permanent. Its walls were taller, the look of its inhabitants more sullen. It had the air of a small town, the solidity of purpose. They were somewhere in the north of Germany, and here he hoped he would find Johanna.
He looked through the crowd of faces to see if there was anyone he recognised, anyone he could cling on to. There were faces of people he recognised, but as he drew closer to them they were either swept away by the crowd, or his mind realised his eyes had been deceiving him. He searched and searched until he finally had to accept that he was on his own. He had been assigned to a hut, but he would not go in there. He couldn’t bring himself to believe that even amongst all these evacuees there were none of the people who had been taken from Guernsey.
He looked at the other inmates and wondered whether he looked as they did. He put his hands to his thick black beard and felt the lice wriggling underneath. His clothes were no better than the ones he had been wearing when he had arrived in France, thin and threadbare. He had the postcard his mother had received in his pocket. It was dog-eared and well read. He kept it there alongside the letter she had written him. They were his only possessions. He felt for another letter, hidden in the stitching of his shirt, a letter that Johanna had once written him, telling him how much she loved him. He didn’t need to see it to read it. He knew its contents by heart, and he recited them to himself as a sort of mantra. He could hear the voices. Johanna’s voice. Once comforting. Now only a haunting memory. She was there somewhere in this world, if only he could find her.
There was a fire across the compound, and he shuffled closer, ignoring the smell of smoke and something else, something bitter he couldn’t put his finger on. He was thankful for the warmth and for the first time in over a year he felt energy in his limbs. Even though the fire was dying down, it comforted him and reminded him of the fireplace at home. Oh, how he longed to be sitting in that room now, with the clock he had hated, wasting away the seconds as if they weren’t precious.
There was a shape in the edge of the fire. He reached out thin, pale fingers for it, not caring that the heat burned his hands. They were weak and useless, covered in blisters and sores, so what difference would it make? The shape was wooden, carved from a larger piece but now charred and blackened around the edges. The density of the wood had kept its shape, but it had diminished in size as it had been forgotten. It was the shape of a horse, a wooden horse. The horse he had carved for Johanna on that Christmas so many years ago.
He dropped onto his knees next to the fire, crying out a curse. A pair of guards dragged him away as he was too weak to kick and scream. He never once let go of the horse, that last precious remnant of a life once lived.
The Island
December 1944
The SS Vega glided its way into the harbour in St Peter Port, its light grey hull reflecting the struggling winter sun. The giant red cross painted on its prow was a welcome sign to the Islanders who still struggled to live in Guernsey, but not so for the German soldiers who were still stationed there. Even after all this time they had not come to live together in harmony. Even though they were all cut off from the rest of the world by the war that had passed them by.
In a way Henrik was thankful for that. He and the other Wehrmacht soldiers who waited on the pier for the arrival of the Red Cross ship had been given what had initially been an ideal posting. Some had been angry at being kept from the glorious victory of the Reich, but he had understood from early on exactly what it meant; it had kept him from the fighting, and for the time being at least, it had kept him breathing. Call him a coward, he didn’t ca
re. Life was too short, and he had already seen too many friends die to care about anything like glory or honour. Those words were cheap in the face of mortality. He was just a man and like so many others he wanted to live.
As the Vega slid against the pier and the crew called down to the mooring points, he thought of what the ship contained and what it meant for them. Despite being an ideal posting, things had become increasingly difficult on the island and both his fellow Germans and the natives were on course for the worst winter yet. Rations had helped make what they had last longer, but it hadn’t been enough. Both governments had resisted help while the war was going on, but the situation had grown perilous, the more isolated the islands had become. His uniform no longer fitted him and there was no thread with which to take it in. It hung loosely on his arms as he followed his compatriots to the Vega’s lowering gangway to help unload the ship.
When they had been given the order to unload the ship it had struck Henrik as cruel. And now, faced with the reality of the situation, it felt even worse. The supplies on the Vega were needed for the Islanders, but none of them would be given to the Germans. As his superiors had refused to surrender, the Red Cross had decided that they were still at war, and these supplies were only for the other Islanders. The soldiers would have to starve. He wasn’t sure there was even any ersatz coffee left. They had almost given everything and for what? Hitler’s ridiculous idea was in tatters and it wouldn’t be long before the Allied forces came to the island to take them all.
*
Henrik had been coming to the church for a few years now, on and off when his duties would allow him to. He had never been particularly religious, especially after the efforts of the National Socialists had forced many religions underground and his parents had stopped talking about their beliefs, but coming here gave him some sense of comfort. Maybe it was the comfort of being close to people. Maybe because they were all equal here, all suffering together, closer than in the confines of their billets and homes. Many had come and gone in his time on the island, and his billet at the Collinette hotel now seemed more deserted than ever. He only saw the other Germans who lived there when they were on duty together, and they were sullen and quiet. Here in the church everything seemed different.
At the end of the service the locals gathered together at the front of the church and joined hands. Then they started singing. He recognised the words but didn’t know their meaning. ‘Should auld acquaintance be …’ At first he was unsure, but the Islanders at the front of the church were holding their hands out for him and the others. His countrymen looked about awkwardly. But something made him jump up from the pew and step towards the singing group. In between words they smiled at him at beckoned him to them. His feet took him willingly, finally embracing the Islanders.
A tear threatened to fall onto his cheek, but he didn’t care. They were all together in this, both German and Islander. The war had affected them all and through it they had found some common ground.
1945
Chapter 39
15 April 1945
He had lost track of how long he had been in the camp. The days merged into one seemingly endless world of torment. Even the nights brought no relief, only the cold realisation that they were doomed there, to die from starvation, forgotten like animals. At first the pain had grown, but it had reached its crescendo and there was nothing else left to feel, no more pain to add to that which he already felt. It brought about a sense of numbness, as if he were seeing the camp through external eyes. He no longer had a capacity to empathise with his fellow prisoners. When one shadow of a man fell in the dirt before him, the wheals visible through the scraps of curly hair that still clung to his scalp, Jack simply stared. The man he had been would have knelt in the dirt if only to provide comfort, but that man had gone.
He had thought that the island had been isolated, lost in the middle of the Channel. But this was something worse. The surrounding sea had given some sort of hope, hope that whatever happened there was a chance of escape. In the camp they were caged, like animals. There was no hope of escape. The only way Jack would ever get out of there was if the war ended and they decided that he was no longer a threat to them.
Without work to occupy his mind, Jack had fallen into a stupor. Days would go by without so much as movement, as he lay on a pallet and forced his mind to ignore the torment. If he had thought that the guards would drill them; he had been wrong. They no longer cared for the inmates, nor did it seem the prisoners cared for themselves. They had lost all hope.
Now even most of the German guards had gone. They had heard the sounds of fighting in the distance, the rumbling of war machines carried by the wind. Jack had thought it might have been his stomach protesting for food, but the sound had been enough to scare the Germans, or force them to join up with their compatriots. Only those who truly believed in their cause had stayed, the cruellest of their captors, with a crew of slave labourers who, like Jack and the others, had no choice but to stay.
With no one to feed them, they would surely perish. A part of Jack welcomed it, the end to his suffering. He longed for an end to the pain, so that maybe in the afterlife he might feel something again.
He sat as he always did, near one of the fences looking out at the line of trees.
The trees that surrounded the camp were crooked, turning away from the sun as if in disgrace, weak and fragile. The whole place felt like the island when the Germans had occupied it, the sense of oppression, a cloud hanging over everything even in the brightest sun, but much more pronounced. The war had broken everything, even here in northern Germany, almost at the heart of the beast. He wondered if he would ever get a chance to see Berlin, to see where all the evil had started, to maybe try to understand what had gone wrong. But he knew that would never happen. He was close to the end now. There was no turning back.
*
The gunfire was incessant, far from the controlled sound of the hunting rifles he had heard on Guernsey. It sounded angry, as if the very bullets themselves wanted to cause damage. An explosion boomed somewhere off to his right, the whoomph of a high explosive round from an artillery piece or tank. For a moment his hearing blared at him, a distortion that was every bit as painful as it was disorientating, then it came back to be filled once again with the chatter of machine guns and the occasional crack of a rifle.
It had taken all this time for the war to actually reach Jack. The area around the camp was usually so quiet, as if they were in another world, cut off from reality. The guards, those who were left, looked around themselves for some form of command or instruction. The camp inmates shuffled towards the gates. One of the guards shouted for them to get back but his shouts were drowned out by further sounds of gunfire. Then it fell silent. All Jack could hear was the hum of the assembled people, those who had once been men and women and now were reduced to nothingness.
Vehicles emerged from the tree line, their hulls blending into the green and brown landscape. They didn’t rush towards the camp, even though Jack willed them to hurry. He was standing near the fence, but his body swayed, threatening to pull him down to earth again.
Shots rang out as the soldiers attacked those few defenders who were left. Then the rest of the guards dropped their weapons and raised their hands in the air, signalling that they were surrendering. Jack stumbled towards the nearest guard, noticing the tears in his eyes. With trembling fingers, Jack picked up the rifle. He didn’t know what he was doing, but it felt good to find some control, to take charge again. The rifle was heavy in his hands, but as he racked the bolt back, he realised the cartridge was empty. The guard shrugged at him.
There were shouts as soldiers came nearer. It was the first time in a long time that Jack had heard a British accent, shouting orders, rather than the cries of desperate fear. It warmed his heart to know that his countrymen still had strength out there. He pushed himself towards them, willing his frail and beaten limbs to obey his commands. With stumbling steps he reached the fence, once a
symbol of fear and now an object of hope.
Jack fell to his knees as he saw the khaki uniforms. It had been around five years since he had seen anything like it and he knew immediately what it meant. Tears fell down his cheeks as he looked on, unable to tear his eyes away from the soldiers in case when he looked back they had gone, a figment of his imagination. His knees hit the dirt, but he no longer felt pain as the ground came up to meet him. Somehow, far away from his home, he had finally found his freedom.
Chapter 40
His head stung with a pain he hadn’t felt before. It was intense and cloying, making it difficult to think. Everything was a blur, like a dream, and he could never be entirely sure whether he was awake or asleep. The times when he thought he was awake were the worst; they were painful as his aching body protested. There were voices speaking to him. While they spoke English it wasn’t with the accent he was familiar with – they were from somewhere else, or he was somewhere else. The room around him was awash with colour, bright like a migraine and just as painful. He couldn’t lift his head in those waking moments, as if he no longer had a body, was just encased in some kaleidoscope of being. Thoughts came to him, but he didn’t have the energy to pull on them, to help them manifest. Then he would sleep again, lost in the worlds of his dreams where, strangely, reality was more pleasant, and the pain was only a deep hollowness in his stomach.
Sometime later, he couldn’t tell how long it had been, he came around and realised with clarity for the first time that he was in a small room lying on a bed. He was vaguely aware of the space he had been occupying for some time as if he had seen everything that had happened to him over to past few months as an outside observer. He tried to sit up, but couldn’t. Jack sank back into the pillow.
The German Nurse Page 30