‘She hardly looked Jewish at all,’ he said. ‘She knew she was going to be shot.’
‘When you slept with her?’ his dormitory companion said.
‘No. Not then. But later.’
‘Did she think you’d save her?’
‘I don’t expect so. She was in a crowd on the road and she saw me and called out. So we stopped. She said she was going to be shot. She knew how they were going to do it, with the pits and everything. Line them up, a spray to the left and a spray to the right and into the pit they’d fall.’
‘How did she know?’
‘I don’t know. She’d been working at our barracks for a time, forced labour. That sort of thing.’
‘What did you do?’
‘We went down there to see. She was right. When one row went down, the next group would chuck in chloride of lime and ashes on top of them. God, the screaming. It was terrible. They weren’t all dead, you see.’
‘Did you see her being shot?’
‘No. One of them remembered her. She was wearing this chemise, gas blue. When they took their clothes off he saw it. It was a shame. She was really pretty. But you had to be careful. There was all hell to pay for sleeping with Jews.’
‘If they were shot, they couldn’t tell.’
‘Exactly. Nearly eight thousand were shot there.’
It was almost as if the soldiers saw the murders as a natural destiny for these people and why should the death of one pretty girl matter once it had been diluted by ten of thousands?
The soldiers spoke of the burden of the work, the physical and emotional strain that killing this number of people put on the men who had to do it. They were witnesses, never perpetrators, and they had more sympathy for the physical and emotional exhaustion experienced by the men with the guns than for the Jews shivering on the edges of the pits.
When Lukas lay in bed at night, unable to rid his mind of the horrors he’d heard, he resolved to beg Joseph to let him move on now and work on the land; if he was forced to stare any longer into the dark heart of the Wehrmacht soldier, he would surely go mad but he didn’t ask. He knew that if he turned away for his own sanity, he was no better than the soldiers who complained of the burden of their work. But still he clutched onto the hope that the accounts were exaggerated and embellished.
‘How much of this do you think is rumour?’ he asked Joseph.
‘It’s not our job to work that out. We are here only to listen and translate.’
‘Have you read my translation of the conversation about the train?’ Joseph nodded. ‘Can that really be true? That hundreds of men, women and children climbed onto a train, imagining they were being transported east, and gas was piped into the carriages?’
‘We cannot tell. But we have similar accounts from prisoners who witnessed the same thing happening in Riga with trucks.’
‘It’s unthinkable. The boys I heard discussing it didn’t believe it themselves.’
‘That doesn’t mean it isn’t true. You forget, my dear Lukas, that we Germans are an efficient race.’
Chapter Seventy Two
Mrs Adamson turned the wireless off. ‘It’s too depressing,’ she said. ‘Whatever’s the matter with the human race? We’ve been fighting this war for years and just when it looked like we had Germany on the run, Japan decides to have a go.’
‘Look on the bright side, Ma,’ Hugh said. ‘If it wasn’t for the Japs, the Americans would never have joined. We’ve got a chance now.’
‘That’s what we said last Christmas.’
They were in the sitting room, having a nightcap. The room was unlit and they had the French windows open, the scents of summer wafting in from the garden. Mrs Adamson nursed her glass of sloe gin on her lap and looked out at the darkening sky.
‘You’re never going to marry that girl at this rate,’ she said.
‘I’m happy to wait.’
He wasn’t. He was fed up with waiting. Bill Russell’s attack had been dreadful in so many ways but it had advanced his relationship with Millie more successfully than years of careful wooing. He’d gone to bed that Christmas night the happiest man in the world. For six whole months afterwards, he ignored the faint bat-squeak of hesitation in Millie until he could stand it no longer and pushed her to set a date and she said she wanted to wait.
Hugh nearly bellowed, ‘Wait? I’ve been waiting for years’ but he didn’t, he tried to look understanding when all he wanted to do was get her upstairs and take her there and then.
‘If she won’t marry you until the war’s over, it’s going to be one hell of a long wait,’ his mother said, ‘especially if little countries like Japan keep pitching in. Who’s going to have a go next? Switzerland? Portugal? Perhaps the Vatican. I mean, everyone’s at it.’
‘Now you’re just being silly.’
She gave him a wink and took a sip of her drink. ‘Perhaps you’re like rabbits, you and Millie.’
I wish we bloody well were, thought Hugh.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘There was an article in The Journal the other week, about breeding rabbits. Apparently they did an experiment to find out why they don’t breed with their brothers and sisters. They think it’s all to do with recognising their smell. If they separated a litter at birth and put them back together as adults, they started rogering each other like mad…’
‘Mother.’
‘Well, they did. But if they grew up together, they didn’t. It stands to reason it’s going to be the same for us humans – if you’ve spent lots of time with a girl, known her all your life, you’ll never be able to see her as a mate because deep down, at a subconscious level, you think she’s your sister.’
‘I don’t think of Millie as a sister.’
Quite the opposite, Hugh thought.
‘Perhaps she thinks of you as a brother. Ever thought of that?’
‘Of course she doesn’t. It’s the war. It’s hard to make plans when we don’t know what’s round the corner and besides, she’s very proud of the way she’s turned Enington Farm round. She says she doesn’t want to be Mrs Hugh just yet because everyone will forget how well she’s done since Jack died. They’ll say it’s all down to me.’
‘A lot of it is.’
‘A lot of it isn’t. Anyway,’ he said hurriedly to stop his mother rattling on about Millie, ‘I bumped into Morney the other day and he was singing the praises of the Germans.’
‘What? Morney Beswick? Never.’
‘He was, really. He’s got a few working on his farm. He says they’re a hundred times better than the Italians. They keep themselves to themselves, they do exactly what he asks them to do and they’re polite and hardworking.’
‘Well, we’re not having any of them here.’
‘These are ordinary German boys, Mum. They’re not Nazis.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because they’re vetted. Morney knows all about it. They haven’t got any Nazis in the camp at Shawstoke. Those are all sent up north or shipped out to Canada. These are boys who’ve fought just like our chaps and simply hate what Hitler’s doing to their country. We really ought to think carefully about it. Morney says even his Land Girls prefer working alongside the German prisoners.’
‘They prefer them to the Italians?’
‘Absolutely. They don’t whistle at them and try to grab them.’
‘I thought the girls loved that sort of thing.’
Hugh shook his head and smiled. His Mum was in one of her kittenish moods. ‘We’re going to need all the help we can get; if it’s not the War Ag on my back, it’s the ruddy food ministry. Anyway, I’ve decided. I’m going to look into it.’
Chapter Seventy Three
Thalhaüser eventually released Lukas from his duties at the listening house. It had taken him longer to pull strings than he’d hoped but finally Lukas was to be moved to Camp 693 on the borders of Berkshire.
‘What’s the name of her farm?’ Lukas said.
‘I can’t tell you that,’ Joseph said. ‘This arrangement is… unusual to say the least. There can be nothing that alerts my superiors to this manipulation of the system. Nothing.’
‘What harm could there be if I know the name?’ Lukas said.
‘You would escape.’
‘I would not.’
‘I don’t believe you.’ Lukas laughed, despite himself. ‘I made it clear, my dear Lukas, that I can try to get you interned in the right part of the country and I have,’ Joseph said. ‘Volunteer to work and with your mechanical experience, you’re bound to be picked as foreman of a team. It’s a good arrangement. The tide of the war has turned. You can wait out the rest of it in comparative comfort. I wish I could do more for you but I can’t.’
* * *
Life was better in Camp 693. He was living, eating and working with a gang of lively Germans. Each day they left the camp to work on farms in the area with all manner of specialised machinery.
At first, his heart was full of hope. He was out on the land, working in the open air. He felt freer than he had since the outbreak of the war but as autumn chilled, he began to feel more and more despondent. Joseph Thalhaüser wouldn’t have tricked him, of that Lukas was certain. He must be near the place, but they covered a twenty-mile radius from the camp and it dawned on him that, as Millie’s farm was a dairy, she may never need the services of any of his team’s machinery.
He reassured himself that he would surely recognise landmarks if he worked on an adjacent farm but so far, he’d harvested the flat fields of the plains and run the threshers in barns in the valley. He scanned the horizon as he worked, trying to recognise the gentle rise of hills leading up to the Downs but that first year, as winter closed in, he began to doubt he was any closer to his goal.
He flirted with the idea of escape but what would that achieve with so little information? Most likely capture and transportation to Canada.
He was still haunted by the stories from his time at the listening house. His fellow prisoners no longer had sympathy for the Nazi regime and yet they had little idea of how corrupt and inhuman it had become. His knowledge of the brutalities, the mass murders, the horror of German atrocities in the East, polluted him. He felt cursed by it.
Three years ago he was proud to fight for his country, convinced that Germany’s struggle was an honourable one. Now, when he sat down to supper in the mess and listened to the men’s naive chatter, he knew they would all be damned when the world discovered the truth.
Then Erich Zoller arrived with that fresh scar across the bridge of his nose, slicing down into his cheek. When you looked into his eyes, an old man stared back.
Lukas first noticed him when he was driving a spinner along the tops of the ridges in a huge field, pushing clay and potatoes out of the ground. Zoller was one of the pickers following the tractor with a bucket. Lukas could see he was strong but he worked with a soulless determination. Hour after hour he followed the spinner, never stopping, never straightening up, never stretching.
In the camp he only ever answered with a single word. The others quickly gave up on him, left him alone to sit on his bunk and stare at nothing at all. They thought him aloof. Lukas understood; the man was broken.
‘Do you know anything about that chap, Zoller?’ Lukas asked his friend Willi Meurer.
‘Odd fish. A communist they say, arrested by the Gestapo before the war. He was released from a concentration camp to fight but was captured and sent here.’
‘How do you know all this? The man never speaks.’
Willi leant nearer and said, ‘Poor old Gerhard over there…’ – he indicated a prisoner with large, translucent ears playing cards near the stove – ‘was held in the London Cage with him. They put them in a cell together. Zoller’s a madman.’
‘Why was he sent here?’
‘I don’t know. Perhaps they thought the country air would do him good.’
When they were decorating the dining hall for Christmas Eve, Lukas found himself with Gerhard, sticking paper scraps together to make streamers.
‘The man’s gone in the head,’ Gerhard said as he worked. ‘He told me the SS are killing millions.’
‘Millions?’
Gerhard shrugged. ‘I told you, the man’s loopy. It’s fiction. His stories are crazy.’
Christmas Eve dawned cold and bright with a thin covering of snow across the camp.
‘Snow is wonderful stuff,’ Willi said. ‘It makes even the ugliest camp look beautiful. Is that why Christ was born at Christmas, do you think? Because everything ugly is covered with snow?’
‘I don’t think it snows in the Holy Land,’ Lukas said.
The German cooks had been saving food for weeks and the British authorities had been persuaded to let them buy a few turkeys as extra rations. There was even an issue of red wine. When the meal finished, a group of prisoners crowded around the piano and sang songs from home. The voices were so powerful, the songs so familiar that Lukas felt a pressure rising in his chest, a combination of nostalgia and longing.
He saw Zoller sitting alone in the shadows at the back of the mess, his hands clasped on his lap, the bony fingers weaving around one another in a constant, repetitive movement. He looked cowed, like an animal that had been whipped, a great sense of depression surrounding him. Lukas felt such pity, not so much for the terrible things he must have seen but for the insult of being branded a fantasist, a madman. He went over to him, sat on the bench beside him.
‘Erich,’ he said.
Zoller turned towards him. Tears glistened on the ragged edges of his scars. Lukas reached out, placed his hand on those writhing fingers to still them and said, ‘I believe you.’
1943
Chapter Seventy Four
As the nights shortened and the farm work increased, Lukas made sure that Zoller was in his team whenever he went out. Like winning the trust of a dog, he kept him close and treated him well, sharing his rations with him, sitting beside him in silent companionship when the team stopped for lunch. At first Zoller turned away, but slowly, as the days warmed, he began to talk.
‘I was no communist,’ he said. ‘Before the war, I was a medical student. My sponsor worked at the General Foundation for Welfare and Institutional Care in Berlin. Part of his work was deciding who should be sterilised.’
Lukas knew something of this; he had heard it discussed among his aunt’s friends but it made him feel uncomfortable. He hoped his silence would discourage Zoller. It didn’t.
‘Do you think it’s right,’ Zoller said, ‘for the physically or mentally unfit not to breed?’
Lukas shook his head.
‘You must have known,’ Zoller went on, ‘that Hitler believed in the theories of Darwin – the survival of the fittest. The Genetic Health Court was active for six years before the war and it had little to do with sterilisation. They escalated it. Called them “mercy killings”. It was the beginning. People needed to know. I was arrested.’
When Lukas was at the listening house, he could insulate himself from the horror by imagining that the speakers exaggerated or embellished; sitting beside Zoller at the back of a barn or in the gloom of the bunkhouse, the very rawness of the man brought the truth crashing down on him.
One evening, when the rest of the prisoners were reading newspapers and playing cards, he sat with Zoller in companionable silence on a bench by the pot-bellied stove. The wind whispered around the edge of the loose casement windows, rolling pieces of dust across the floorboards. A sudden gust slammed dully on the side of the hut, forcing smoke down the chimney, filling the room with the scent of wood smoke.
Lukas was transported back to the sitting room at Enington Farm. He remembered how the wind pushed bulges of smoke into the throat of the chimney, leaning the occasional plume into the room before the fire inhaled and drew it back.
He shivered. The small stove was inadequate for heating the Nissen hut. He looked across at Zoller who was staring at the dull glow coming from it. The w
ind and the scent of fire must have triggered a different thought in him because he said, ‘We are lucky to be here, you and me.’
‘I don’t feel lucky. I’m cold and I’m bored and I’m perpetually hungry. We never seem to get enough to eat, not for the amount of manual labour we have to do each day.’
Zoller made a dismissive grunt at the back of his throat and said, ‘You have no idea how lucky we are to be here. Every day, I’m glad I was captured and sent to England. At Buchenwald, they break your spirit and then your body. You think we don’t have enough to eat? Ha! In Buchenwald, those that did not die from exhaustion or disease within the first few months were taken by starvation. If you fell, you were beaten. If you were too exhausted to work you were killed.’
‘I prefer to work than hang around the camp all day.’
‘What we do isn’t work. In Germany the work was heavy – road building, moving rocks, dragging equipment. Summer and winter, we wore the thinnest clothes. The clogs we were forced to wear made walking difficult, cut our feet to pieces. Do you think we were allowed to sit around a stove in the evenings and play cards? No. All day and long into the night, they whipped us to make us work, beat us when we paused. You may think there is no better way to kill a man than through work, but you’d be wrong. They created so many ways to kill us.’
‘Hey!’ Willi Mueller called out from his bunk. ‘Can’t you two chat about something more cheerful?’
Zoller hung his head and mumbled, ‘Tomorrow. What is it that we do tomorrow?’
‘Tomorrow we’re back topping sugar beet,’ Lukas said.
‘You won’t feel so lucky then,’ Willi said. ‘Come on, Lukas. Come over here. Let me beat you at chess again.’
As he laid the pieces on the board Willi glanced across at Zoller and said, ‘He’ll never forget all that stuff if he keeps wallowing in it. We’ve all seen some pretty awful things. Christ, I saw friends burn to death in their tanks in Egypt and bodies that had lain in the sun for days. When those images hit me, I think about something else.’
A Dangerous Act of Kindness Page 33