‘It’s not the same,’ said a voice, low and cracked with emotion.
‘Christ, Zoller. I didn’t think you were listening.’
He’d stolen across the room and now stood over them, his fingers weaving around one another.
‘Every day the corpse carts were full. Emaciated people squatted in the dirt, lay on the ground exhausted, struggled to their feet to save themselves from a beating. I look at them and I don’t know how they can be alive and I look at my own body and I ask the same question.’
‘It’s a war,’ Willi said. ‘People die.’
Zoller raised a warning finger and said, ‘But here’s the thing: you have to ask what happens to someone’s humanity when the person in front of them no longer looks human. I know what happens. You lose it and then it’s easy to use prisoners for experiments, to infect them with typhus and watch them die. You find out so much. Try a vaccine and see if it kills them. Inject the disease into them and see if the vaccine works. Give them a drug until they die, and then you will know how much is a fatal dose. They injected people with all types of things, even petrol, just to see what happened.’
Willi sat back in his chair and folded his arms across his chest.
‘When you’ve quite finished,’ he said, ‘Lukas and I would like to get on with our game of chess.’
Zoller melted back into the shadows, climbed into his bunk and pulled the blanket across his shoulders.
‘Why do you listen to the man?’ Willi said, setting out the pieces again. ‘These are stories. Ravings of a madman.’
‘I don’t think they are, Willi,’ Lukas said.
‘Then he should keep them to himself. How does he think it makes the rest of us feel, hearing stuff like this?’
‘I don’t listen for myself. I listen for him.’
‘Then you’re a better man than me, Lukas.’
Chapter Seventy Five
There were days when Lukas felt particularly lucky, especially when his team were out scavenging for scrap metal. Security at Camp 693 was relaxed and Lukas knew their Home Guards well: Sergeant Copeland, a stout, plain man who’d seen action in the first war, and Corporal Swift, a retired chemist. Neither enjoyed excessive exercise and were content to wait by the truck while the prisoners hunted along the lanes, peering into the thick vegetation on the verges for abandoned farm machinery to reforge and adapt. This temporary freedom reminded Lukas of the power of hope.
Today the team were doubly lucky. Willi spotted the metal rim of a wheel in a thicket of brambles. After half an hour of hacking and swearing, they pulled out an old chaff cutter with a wrought iron axel.
‘The local blacksmith can make a subsoiler out of that,’ Willi said. ‘Save us digging drainage channels by hand.’
Zoller and Becker, the young man with the large, translucent ears, hiked it onto their shoulders and carried it back to the truck. They arrived at the local blacksmith’s and Sergeant Copeland and Private Swift settled down in the spring sunshine. They were content to leave the blacksmith in charge.
When the smithy whipped the axel out of the furnace and held the bucking metal fast with huge, blackened tongs, the prisoners took turns hammering the metal into shape with sledges. They sang Westerwaldlied in time with the hammering. Prisoners weren’t allowed to sing when they marched through the town but here no one seemed to mind. Even the smithy bobbed his head in time to the song. Lukas felt a rise in camaraderie overwhelm him in the hot shed as the sparks flew from the metal.
Then Zoller’s hammer slipped and he caught the inside of his forearm on the white-hot mole. Lukas grabbed him by the hand and plunged the arm into the quenching trough. Zoller stared down into the water, hissing through his teeth with the pain. After a couple of minutes his breathing calmed and he said, ‘In Buchenwald they wanted to find out the best treatment for incendiary bomb burns.’
‘The camp doctor’s going to have decide how to treat this one,’ Lukas said.
‘They put white phosphorous on prisoners’ skin.’
‘For the love of God, Zoller,’ Willi begged, ‘Keep it to yourself.’
‘It burned them so badly. You could hear them screaming from inside the huts. The wounds were dreadful. They rubbed things into them to see what happened. Then they shot them.’
Sergeant Copeland came in to see what the commotion was about. He peered into the water and screwed up his face. ‘That looks nasty,’ he said. Then he turned to Lukas. ‘I’ll take him back to camp. You three stay and finish here and come back with Corporal Swift.’
The blacksmith stood by the bed of coals, slowly rotating the iron in the embers as he waited. When they got back to work the atmosphere had changed. The smithy worked silently, clearly longing for them to leave.
* * *
Within a month the team were moved on to forestry. They worked on heavily wooded slopes above a large river, helping the lumberjills to load the cut and cleaned trees and take them down to the sawmill in the nearby town. Fraternisation was strictly forbidden but, depending on which Home Guards they had with them, Lukas turned a blind eye if one of his team took the end of a cross-cut saw to give a girl a hand. Mueller knew a smattering of English, Zoller none at all and Becker was far to shy to even make eye contact. It was hardly fraternization and besides, Lukas felt hypocritical disciplining them.
The team had arrived back from the sawmill before sufficient logs had been skidded through the forest for loading. The afternoon was late and hot, the slopes where the prisoners waited with the trailer, cleared of trees. The skin on the back of Lukas’s neck pricked where the sun had burned it and taking his flask, he climbed up the slope to find some shade.
Zoller was sitting at the foot of a pine tree, looking out over the tops of the trees. Lukas offered him the flask and sat down on a patch of rough grass a few yards away.
Above the sound of axes, chopping in the distance he heard the distant drone of engines. Three Spitfires, flying in formation high above them, crossed the blue sky. As they neared, he could pick out the different notes of each plane, their perfect pitch.
He longed to fly again, to ease the throttle until his ear caught the purest of purrs that told him she was beautifully trimmed. When he heard that note, he became the machine, shedding his earthly shackles and soaring, every movement subconscious, natural. The power of the engine lifted him, buoyed him higher and higher.
That’s what he’d felt when making love to Millie, the vibration of that perfect note that let them plunge and soar as one entity; powerful, delicate, overwhelming. It was if he had dropped a seed and found himself in a meadow of flowers.
As the planes faded to a distant murmur he was aware of the sound of birds layering through the air; the coo of pigeons nearby, a wren clicking a warning from the brambles, the flap of clumsy rooks in the canopy above. Further away he caught the echo of a woodpecker drumming a tree and the clear song of a blackbird, a melody so sweet it made him want to weep.
On and on, over towards the shimmering horizon, he could hear singing in every hedge, on every branch, calling across the countryside, bidding farewell to the weakening light of the descending sun.
‘We are in a singing forest,’ he called over to Zoller. When he didn’t reply, he moved his gaze from the beauty of the landscape and looked across. Zoller stared back, his nostrils flared, his fingers back to their perpetual motion.
‘There was a Singing Forest at Buchenwald,’ he said and Lukas’s heart fell. With a sigh, he got to his feet and braced himself for what was to come.
‘It used to be a forest,’ Zoller said, ‘just like this one, but now it is tree trunks, bare of branches. They take the prisoners out and tie their wrists together behind their backs and they hang them by their arms from the trunks. It pulls the shoulders from the sockets. Their pain cannot be described.’
Zoller didn’t need to describe it to Lukas; this was one torture he could imagine all too vividly.
‘In the camp we hear the prisoners scream where they h
ang, day and night. That’s why they call it the Singing Forest.’
Lukas trudged back to the trailer and waited with a heavy heart. He had such compassion and sympathy for Zoller and yet he resented this steady drip of poisonous revelations. He wished that he could dismiss them as the ravings of a madman, like Willi did, but he had come to believe that his countrymen had abandoned their humanity and become murderers.
It was becoming harder to hold on to hope in the face of such barbarity. He had lost faith in everything Germany meant to him and was filled with a profound and bitter despair.
Chapter Seventy Six
‘Gentlemen,’ Lagerführer Böhm said. ‘May I present to you the Allen scythe, courtesy of the British Ministry of Agriculture?’
Lukas’s team gathered round the machine, peering at the wide blades, fiddling with the petrol lines.
‘The Home Guard are taking you over to a village called Merewick. There’s a large area of uncut grass in the churchyard over there. They need every bit of hay they can get their hands on and it’s your job to get it cut.’
As they bounced along in the back of the truck, Corporal Swift shouted over his shoulder from the front, ‘There should be some fun and games today. That brute’s lethal. If you can get it started it’s got a mind of its own.’
The corporal was right. It eventually rattled into action, gouting clouds of fumes and exhaust. Willi released the clutch. It raced away, Willi pulling back on the handles for all he was worth, cursing it at the top of his voice as he desperately tried to control it. Loose stones flung up by the blades pinged like bullets against the gravestones. Willi disappeared into a pall of smoke, leaving Lukas and Becker weak with laughter.
Becker dug his elbow into Lukas’s ribs and pointed. Zoller was smiling.
They took it in turns to manhandle the machine, the odds of injury increasing when a group of children from harvest camp turned up to help rake the hay. When it was time to take a break, the children ran in and out of the prisoners and Zoller twisted bunches of long grass into rough Kornmütter. He laid them on the ground for the children to collect and went back to work.
When the clock in the church tower showed four, a group of women arrived with food for the children. A woman in her forties with a weather-beaten face brought sandwiches across to the prisoners, doorsteps of bread coated with tinned salmon.
‘You do not have to feed us,’ Lukas said.
‘We have sons out there fighting. You remind us of them.’
A younger woman came over with a jug of homemade ginger beer, lukewarm and peppery on the tongue. She was slim, like Millie, but not nearly as attractive. Lukas smiled to himself when he saw Willi wink at her, recognised the coy look she gave him in return.
At the end of the day they loaded up the Allen scythe and climbed into the truck beside it. Lukas was washed by a profound physical exhaustion and the pleasurable prospect of a deep and well-deserved sleep. The smell of the bruised grass still clung to the blades of the machine and mixed with the scent of petrol. Pieces of grass stuck to his clothes and prickled his skin.
Willi and Becker sat opposite, their noses red and freckled from the sun. Becker closed his eyes and rested his head against the canvas; Willi had a slight smile on his face.
‘That was a great day,’ he said.
‘Even you enjoyed it, Zoller,’ Becker said, leaning across and giving him a jocular push on the knee.
‘I can’t believe how kind these people are to us,’ Willi said. ‘Sometimes I honestly think that when the war ends, I wouldn’t mind settling here.’
‘In England?’
‘I’ve got no one to go home to.’
Zoller’s expression had darkened. He leant forward on the edge of the metal seat and pulled at Willi’s sleeve.
‘We can never stay here,’ he said. ‘Don’t you understand what’s happened over there.’
‘Don’t, Zoller. Please. It’s been a wonderful day. I don’t want to hear your terrible stories.’
‘You must not think about staying here. Ever. The world will never forgive us.’
‘What are you saying?’ Becker said. ‘That we started this war?’
‘That’s not what I mean. It doesn’t matter who started it. What matters is that we’re German, and Germans are efficient. In Poland we needed better ways to kill people, lots of people. And we found it. The truth can’t be hidden forever.’
‘The truth about what?’
‘A Pole came to the camp. He’d seen work going on in a place called Auschwitz. They’d built concrete enclosures around the basement windows of one of the blocks to let light in from above but stop the prisoners seeing out. They packed one of these concrete bunkers with earth to seal the window and they herded hundreds of prisoners into the room. Then they threw in handfuls of crystals, slammed the door shut and sealed it. It was the pesticide used to kill the lice in the camp. It becomes a gas but they were not good at using it then and some of the prisoners took days to die.’
They rumbled on through the lanes, the green countryside streaming away behind but none of the prisoners looked out of the back of the truck. They all stared at Zoller.
‘The work detail moved to a new camp and they worked on another building. They bricked up the windows and took out the inside walls so that it was one huge room and there they began gassing them on an industrial scale.’
Zoller clutched at Willi’s jacket and pulled him closer.
‘Hitler was right about the Thousand-Year Reich. It’ll take a thousand years before the world forgets what we have done.’
1944
Chapter Seventy Seven
All morning the team had been toiling along the country lanes, manoeuvring the harvester underneath low-hanging trees and through narrow railway bridges. Lukas kept a lookout from the top platform, calling down to Becker whenever he saw a place at the side of the road to pull in and let the line of traffic, building up behind them, pass.
He was continually surprised by their courtesy. Clearly he and his men were prisoners, the circles on their clothes were unmistakeable, but cyclists and drivers alike raised a hand or a hat as they passed. Even the army vehicles tooted their horns, the soldiers bellowing a thank you. Only the American troops jeered at them.
The Home Guard truck turned off the main road. The harvester lumbered round, Lukas ducking low as they passed under the branches of a large beech tree overhanging the road. After a few minutes they broke out into sunshine and the road began to climb. They were moving up a steep hill.
His heart gave a thud of sick excitement. He could see the hedges ahead snaking up the side of the track. He looked down on the tractor pulling the harvester and saw Gerhard Becker push into a lower gear as the incline increased. Could this be it? The hills leading up to those fertile Downs, high above the valley, the one place on earth he longed to find?
The journey seemed interminable. The track narrowed then widened, they had to navigate deep potholes in the chalk. He wanted to leap down from his perch, run ahead to the top of the hill and hunt around. Surely he would recognise something? He longed to see a pasture filled with cows, black and white Friesians, whisking their tails, lying down and chewing their cud but there was nothing but fields on either side, swaying with crops, corn on one side of the road, acres of flax, as blue as an ocean, on the other.
Up they climbed, the smell of the exhaust pouring from the tractor pipe, filling the air. Finally they reached the summit and he looked from left to right, behind and ahead – but no. There was nothing familiar here. Or was it all familiar? Did his eye recreate his paradise from every acre of English countryside? Was that why he felt something magical stirring in him, a feeling he couldn’t quite grasp?
He saw the roofs of a large farm ahead, knew it couldn’t possibly be hers and a great rush of disappointment invaded him. He almost heard his bones tightening, squeezing his heart in his chest. He watched the Home Guard truck turn into the yard, saw a group of men waiting. The tractor came to
a halt.
Sergeant Copeland climbed out, his Home Guard uniform tight across his portly stomach. The farmer strolled over and greeted him. The sergeant beckoned to Lukas. As he approached, the farmer gave him a broad smile. Most of the landowners Lukas worked for were too old to fight but this pleasant looking man was young, probably still in his twenties.
‘This is Schiller,’ the sergeant said. ‘He’s in charge of his men. We’ll be back this evening to take them down to the camp when you’re done.’
‘I was expecting you earlier,’ the farmer said. ‘We won’t be finished today.’
‘You have the harvester for as long as you need it,’ the sergeant said, ‘but we still have to take the prisoners back this evening.’
‘I understand. Start earlier tomorrow? Yes?’ the farmer said to Lukas.
‘Yes, sir. The equipment will stay up here tonight.’
‘And I’ll make sure they’re back here bright and early tomorrow. Now,’ the sergeant said, turning to Lukas, ‘I’ll leave you with Mr Adamson,’ and Sergeant Copeland went to organise the unloading of the truck before leaving.
‘Well,’ Adamson said, looking up at the harvester, ‘this is some contraption.’ He walked around the edge of the machine, Lukas following. ‘I imagine it takes some looking after.’
‘It does, sir.’
‘I’m excited about today. I’ve waited long enough. That neighbour of mine, Mr Beswick, has hogged you for weeks. I was worried I wouldn’t get you before the weather changed.’
‘It looks set fine at the moment, sir.’
‘It does.’
The farmer, Adamson, turned and put his hands on his hips, surveying Lukas with a smile on his face. There was something disarmingly cheerful about him, his skin bronzed from working outdoors, his eyes lively and engaging. This English farmer was such a contrast to the sallow faces of Lukas’s fellow prisoners. Here was a man who, in spite of this war, seemed genuinely happy and Lukas hadn’t met anyone like that for years.
A Dangerous Act of Kindness Page 34