by Anne Emery
The man let go of the handle and brought his right fist around to hit Brennan. Brennan drew back, and Terry grabbed the man from the other side and said, “You’re coming with us.”
Brennan took up the conversation in German. “Don’t even think about drawing attention to yourself. Take hold of the bag again and keep pulling it. You can’t get away, so keep moving.”
Up close, it was obvious that the man was muscular and strong but well into old age, with his white hair and a face lined as if he had spent a lot of time in the sun. He must have been seventy-five at least. Brennan slowed the pace to accommodate the man’s pained walking. Not another word was spoken until they got him into the little park with a few tall trees, empty garden plots, and benches. Brennan brought the three of them to a bench that was nearly hidden behind some thick tree trunks; it was barely visible from the street. “Sit,” he commanded, and the man let go of his suitcase and dropped onto the bench with a muffled cry of pain. Terry sat on one side and twisted around to prevent their captive from getting away. Brennan adopted the same posture on the other side.
“All right. You obviously know who we are. So, who are you? Explain yourself.”
When the words came, they were not German. Nor were they British-accented English. It was a Canadian voice, and Brennan thought then that he looked vaguely familiar. The man tried to bluff them by saying he had no idea what they were talking about or why they had waylaid him. But his heart wasn’t in it; the threats to bring the law down on them sounded hollow, Brennan suspected, even to the man himself.
“What is your name?” The man merely shook his head. “We’ll know everything we need to know about you before this is over. So, get on with it. Why were you following us? Don’t waste our time denying it. ”
“I have a plane to catch. I —”
Terry said, “The sooner you come clean with us, the quicker you get to the airport. And the cheaper it is for you to get out of Germany, without having to pay for a missed flight and whatever you can scrabble together to replace it.”
Their prisoner seemed to relax into his seat, and Brennan made the mistake of relaxing in synch with him. Instantly, the man was on his feet, suitcase forgotten. He was surprisingly fast for a man with a limp, and he headed for the edge of the park. But he was no match for his captors. Brennan caught up and shoved him to the ground, pinning him there with both arms. Terry stood over him, hands out, ready for whatever move the man might make next.
“The Ides of March have come,” Terry told him.
“Is that a threat, or are you merely giving me the date?”
“It was your destiny to meet with us. You have no options here.”
Reality set in at last. Brennan could tell from the hopeless expression on the fellow’s face that he had surrendered to the inevitable. That was borne out when a young couple came by, jogging through the park. “Help you there?” That much German he understood, or intuited. This was his chance, but he didn’t take it. In English, he said, “I’m all right. Thank you.”
Terry smiled at them. “Thanks! We’ll get him sorted.” And the couple went on their way.
Brennan helped the man to his feet and over to the bench again. He grimaced with pain as he dropped onto the bench. “Twisted my knee getting off the plane,” he said. Making conversation now? Or making them think he wasn’t mobile enough to risk another attempt to flee? Terry and Brennan sat even closer to him this time, making another attempt next to impossible. By this time, there was no belligerence left; the man seemed to have collapsed in on himself. His demeanour was one of sadness, even despair.
“I’ll talk to him,” the man said to Terry, while pointing at Brennan.
“You’ll talk to both of us. If you think you can take us on separately —”
“No. I’ll talk to him because I know who he is. He’s a priest. Father Burke. And I have a confession to make.”
What?! “This is a bit sudden, isn’t it?” Brennan asked him. “Seconds ago, you were denying you knew us. Now you want to make a confession?”
“I’ve been living with this far too long. Being here in Germany again, it . . . I’m a Catholic. Not a very faithful one for much of my life, but it’s never gone away. So, if I can speak to you alone . . .”
“I’ll go off over there,” Terry said. “Speak quietly and I won’t be able to hear. But I can get to you in seconds flat.”
So, Terry moved off and leaned against a tree, ready to spring at a moment’s notice. Brennan sat on the bench waiting for whatever was to come.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. Do they still say that?”
Brennan nodded. “Sometimes they do.”
“And it’s still the case that the priest can’t repeat anything he hears in a confession?”
“Of course. Anything you say to me is covered by the seal of the confessional.”
The man stared into Brennan’s eyes, searching for a sign, something that would give him confidence in Brennan’s word. He seemed to find it, because he nodded and took a deep breath.
“Take your time and get it out,” Brennan said. “My brother there is a pilot; he can smooth things over for you at the airport.”
“All right, then. This isn’t easy. It all arises out of my own guilt, something I’ve been living with ever since it happened. I’ve never told a soul, and it’s eating away at me. My wife thinks I’m sick. I’m not: I’m guilty. And I have to get it off my chest. I doubt I can ever get it off my conscience.”
The story had an unexpected beginning. “It was 1943. I was flying bombers out of England during the war. I was a bomb aimer, part of those thousand-bomber night raids over Germany when we blasted the hell out of German cities. We were fighting Hitler. Our cause was honourable. The courage I witnessed in our men was almost indescribable. Especially in the early years when we were losing men and aircraft at a horrifying rate. We had young men who had been shot down, managed to escape, some of them badly injured, and made their way back to England against incredible odds, and what did they do? Sit around at the base or in the bars and tell their war stories and thank the heavens above that they wouldn’t have to do that again? No, they climbed aboard their planes and set out again. And again. Some of these fellows were twenty-one, twenty-two years of age. That’s what our boys were made of. And that’s what we were. Just boys.”
Ireland had been neutral during the war, not surprising perhaps, given that the country had just emerged from its War of Independence against Britain eighteen years before. The Second World War was known in Ireland as the “Emergency.” But Brennan, like so many of his young friends in Dublin, had heard the stories about the airmen of World War II and was in awe of their courage and daring exploits. And he had always cringed when their children, growing up in peace and prosperity, got into typical parent-child disputes and sneered at them, “What do you know, old man?” Here was one of those men who had lived it and was now reliving it more than fifty years later.
Brennan heard footsteps and turned in their direction; two young businessmen were cutting through the park, one of them showing a sheaf of papers to the other and explaining their contents. When they had gone by, Brennan’s captive returned to this story.
“My luck ran out over northern Germany in July of 1943. I was part of Six Group, of RAF Bomber Command. You may know about our airmen flying with the Brits.”
Brennan nodded but did not want to interrupt the flow.
“I remember this as if it was yesterday, that warm summer night, being transported out to the airfield, to our Lancaster, having one last cigarette with the other six crewmen before we boarded. Our tail gunner, Mackie, pissed on the tail wheel. They all did that before a raid. Good luck somehow, never quite figured that out! And we got on board and lumbered along the runway and up into the sky with our hundred-foot wingspan and four big Merlin engines — and our thousands of pounds of bombs. Imagine
that we were just one of hundreds of bombers making their way across the channel in the night sky. You’ve seen the newsreels, the war movies, but you probably can’t really picture what it would be like to look up and see waves of massive bomber aircraft flying over your city.”
Brennan couldn’t help but think how much Terry would appreciate hearing this story, but he never would. Seal of the confessional. Brennan could not so much as hint at it.
“On this particular night I was dropping our bombs on the city of Hamburg. We knew we were targeting densely populated areas. Of course we knew. The objective was to destroy the German workforce and to destroy the people’s morale. To make Hitler’s war so cataclysmic that the Germans would give up and surrender. So it was us and the Brits, the Commonwealth, bombing them by night, the Yanks by day. Shortly after dumping our load, we turned and commenced our return flight to England. But a German fighter got us. Ironic, isn’t it? We gave the Luftwaffe something honourable to fight for! Not Hitler now, not glory, but their cities, their homes, their families. Anyway, we were hit, we were on fire, and I managed to be the first to parachute out. I was one of only two of our crew who survived. The other fellow jumped later. That was Mackie. He spent the rest of the war in a P.O.W. camp. I landed with nothing more than a few scrapes and bruises. I thought, ‘How in the hell am I going to get out of here?’ I was in the countryside, fields and pastures. I started walking. Of course I was in Air Force kit, what else? So, nobody was going to take me for a local. But after I’d been out there for an hour or so, I saw a farmer. He was outside staring at the smoke coming from the burning city. I figured he’d kill me, but I had to take the risk. I couldn’t survive without food and shelter. And God bless him, he took me in. Got the wife out of bed. He and the wife were terrified. They weren’t unsympathetic, it was clear — of course they wouldn’t yet have known just how much destruction had been visited that night on Hamburg. Anyway, there were no swastikas or anything in the house, so I figured they might not have been fans of the Führer. And it turns out they weren’t. They fed me and stashed me in the cellar of the farmhouse. Gave me shelter for three days.
“Then early one morning, my heart nearly stopped; there was a strange man standing at the foot of the cellar stairs. But he was a friend of the family, a member of the underground. A Communist. His name was Dieter. He had been in the resistance against Hitler since the 1930s. The farmer’s wife gave me civilian clothing to wear, typical work clothes for a farmer. And my resistance man said he’d try to get me out.”
Brennan marvelled as the storyteller’s voice grew younger and stronger as he told his painful tale. Stronger, in spite of the circumstances he was in, here in a Berlin park fifty-three years later.
“But there was something Dieter wanted me to see. He took me into what was left of Hamburg. An old city, a trading centre since the time of Charlemagne in the early ninth century. Huge swaths of it were now just rubble. What I saw that day has seared itself into my memory, and my conscience, and will haunt me until the day I die. You know what we called it? Operation Gomorrah! This was beyond destruction of ports or shipbuilding facilities. This was firebombing of the centre of the city, heavily populated working-class areas. Many people had come into the area after the previous nights’ bombing raids by our boys. More than forty thousand people were killed in the bombings. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps a million, survivors fled, leaving the city to the rats and the flies.”
The man’s voice was tinged with bitterness now. “This wasn’t a case of some civilian casualties as collateral damage in attacks on military targets. This was the deliberate, strategic bombing of cities. Where the population was clustered. Terrorism, wouldn’t you say? Hamburg of course was one of the many places destroyed by our campaign. Dresden, Lubeck, Cologne. Our cause was just, yes; we were fighting Hitler. We were fighting a fascist, racist dictator, a mass murderer, who had started the war and overrun much of Europe. But this was the mass murder of civilians by the Allies, including Canada. And I had been a part of it.
“My contact, my rescuer, wanted me to see it, smell it, feel it. We walked through the devastated streets, still smoking from the inferno, some fires still blazing, and saw human beings who had been roasted, turned brown and shrunken to only a third of their size! And Dieter would point to each of the grotesque remains, saying, ‘Not Hitler, not Hitler.’
“Then — it seemed like a lifetime later, and in a sense it was — he took me to a safe house out on the coast. After some terrifying moments, including another bombing raid from across the channel, he put me in touch with another man, another member of the resistance, and he arranged for me to go to Denmark, and I was eventually able to get to neutral Sweden. And then, long story, I made it to England.
“So, Father Burke, I never got over my guilt about the firebombing of Hamburg. Never got over . . . Do you know what I saw, Father? I saw a puddle of greenish-brownish liquid on the ground with bones sticking out of it. Large bones, and a set of smaller ones up next to it. A child with its mother. Or father. Impossible to tell. These were human beings who had melted! This was what happened in the firestorm that raged through the city of Hamburg.”
Brennan struggled to take in what he had just heard. Finally, he managed to say, “I can hardly imagine what you witnessed there. But there is no question in my mind that you are remorseful, and you were carrying out the orders, the policy, of the commanders back in London, so your confession here today —”
“Oh, you haven’t heard anything yet. My confession goes way beyond what I did in ’43.”
What on earth was Father Burke going to hear next? “All right. Take your time.”
Brennan glanced over at Terry. He was still leaning against the tree, his arms crossed over his chest. Brennan knew that his brother was practically vibrating with impatience. He was not a man to be standing still — after all, he spent much of his time flying through the sky at five hundred miles per hour — and not a man to be missing out on the conversation. But he would have to wait until the scene played itself out.
The elder airman peered about him, at the park, the trees, the buildings beyond, as if fearing that even today it would not do to be overheard. “I owe my life to the man who led me to safety in 1943. Dieter. And he tried to save other lives, countless lives, through his resistance to the Nazis. Probably didn’t succeed. Futile resistance, you might say, but he tried. Sure, he was a Communist, but so were a lot of the people in the underground. I told Dieter that someday, somehow, I would repay him for what he had done for me. And that ‘someday’ came in 1974.”
Brennan gave a start at the reference to the date. It was of course the year Meika Keller had crossed over from East Berlin to the West.
“The Canadian military had bases here in Germany, as you probably know. At Lahr and Baden-Soellingen. It wasn’t unusual to be posted over here, to the Air Force base at Baden. If I hadn’t been given the posting, I may have requested it; I don’t know. But when I got here, I made a point of following up snatches of information I’d heard over the years about Dieter. Intelligence reports, briefings we were given about the East German regime. He had worked his way up to a fairly powerful position in military intelligence. But, by the 1970s, it sounded as if he was falling out of favour. I thought maybe because he was too much of a humanitarian, too soft for the regime. Or at least that’s what I wanted to think. And that inspired me again to try to repay him for saving me from torture and death at the hands of the Nazis. And perhaps at the same time boost the fortunes of a decent man in the East German regime.
“So I decided to pass some information across the border, information I knew would reach him as an intelligence officer working in Berlin. And with it, I inserted a little memento that he would recognize. Nothing that identified me to anyone else, God knows, but a photo I found of a street corner in Hamburg, where we saw some of those roasted human bodies. That, and the fact that the information came from Canada, wou
ld telegraph to him that it was from me.”
In spite of himself, Brennan interrupted the confession and started to ask, “What sort of information . . .”
The man leaned in and said in a voice Brennan could barely hear, “I handed over information about Canada’s war-fighting capabilities at that time. Specifically, our nuclear capabilities.”
There was no screen separating priest from penitent here on a park bench in Berlin, and no filter that could have hidden the priest’s shock at the penitent’s revelation.
“Yes, you may well be jolted by that news, Father. We tend to forget that good old Canada had nukes on our soil for twenty years; of course, we were deploying them for the Yanks. At home and in West Germany. And I can understand your dismay upon hearing that a loyal Canadian would give up such sensitive information to the other side.”
A cloud passed over the sun then, and Brennan heard a clacking noise above the place where they were seated. Their heads jerked up at the sound, but it was merely the bare branches of the trees rattling in the wind. The man resumed speaking.
“I was able to obtain and compile classified information about our Voodoo jet fighters and the Genie rockets they would carry, rockets armed with nuclear warheads. You know where they were stored, don’t you?”
Brennan of course had no idea. He was far out of his depth here.
“No, you didn’t grow up in the Maritimes, did you?”
Brennan shook his head.
“Next province over from Nova Scotia. Well, I’m sure you know the provinces. We had American nuclear weapons at the base in Chatham, New Brunswick. For years. So, I gave over a bit of information about that. And about the arrangement Canada had with the U.S. about this whole system. I eased my conscience somewhat by telling myself that the Soviets would have had much of this information already, maybe all of it. But I could still make a gift of it to Dieter. Can’t remember now whether I included the information about the bomb the Yanks blew up over the Saint Lawrence River!”