“I was finally released by the British after the war and I couldn’t wait to return to my home in Berlin. I could visit my friends in Wedding and I even started working there at a hospital. My mother lived in Treptow and I told her when they started building that wall that she needed to move out of there. She should have moved in with me in West Berlin. But she was adamant that she wouldn’t leave her home. After nineteen fifty-five I never saw her again.”
The old man is now in tears, hunched forward with his head in his hands. I rub the old man’s back, his coat is sticky. I want to take my hand away but I keep rubbing, the man is so upset.
“She died, she died, she died,” the old man says, “And I never saw her again.”
Again, I don’t respond. I think if I speak I will cry and maybe never stop crying. This man must be in his seventies now and his life is wasting away. Returning home after the war with positive hopes and then things not working out how you want. Some people are able to deal with these problems. Others find a way of blotting it out such as this guy drinking away his demons night after night.
“It’s a dangerous city, little girl,” the old man says.
“I can protect myself,” I reply.
“Even the doctors here try to hurt you. They hide us away in their tunnels and do the most unspeakable things to us.”
The drunken shenanigans have calmed down now and everyone in the station who doesn’t work here has sat down and started drifting off. A heavy feeling falls over my eyes and I sense I am drifting away far, far underground.
Tragic Overture
Sunday, 4 May 1986
One last slug of scotch before bed. Today has been a strange day. My head has been swirling with past remembrances. I knock back the whiskey and it catches the back of my throat and I stifle a gag. Dark memories poison my mood.
Oh my, I must be drunk. It’s not often I am in this state. What was it that set me off today? I can barely remember but something infiltrated my thoughts and has been causing ruminations ever since. A phone call? I’m not sure. Oh, my accursed brain is once more letting me down.
I catch a smell of cooked meat and for a few moments I think I’m having a stroke. Did I cook Brathendl today? I try and remember, I close my eyes and my head spins. I’m trying to piece together my day and recall what I cooked for dinner.
Instead, a memory stirs from my final days before I left Germany, in the final knockings of the Greater German Reich. It was a muggy late autumn day and the air hung heavy with the threat of rain and the stench of burnt flesh. Most days I wouldn’t notice the malodour after a morning scotch or two followed by a brisk walk to my office.
This day was different, the camp itself was strangely quiet. The numbers being pressed into work parties had declined over the last few months. News was flying around the officers’ quarters about the Russian recapture of Tallinn.
My research assistants Werner and Klaus had failed to turn up to work on time yet again citing illness. A hangover was more likely, they spent more and more days in a state of inebriation with the SS guys. The stench would not escape my nostrils. I knocked back a couple more drinks and felt myself beginning to drift away to sleep.
To prevent this, I stood up, downed another scotch and walked back out into the camp. I saw Werner walking in to camp and ordered him to follow me to find the girl I had worked with last week. After the last experiment had finished, the young girl I was testing had the impertinence to speak to me. A little, filthy gypsy girl dressed in clothes that were no more than rags. I ordered Werner to bring her in to the treatment room and tie her down and cover her mouth.
He asked me to repeat what I said. I lost my temper and shouted at him that if he didn’t do what I asked, I would personally arrange for him to return to the Eastern Front. Werner finally tied the girl to the trolley using soiled gowns. The miserable little creature was constantly muttering “Proszę nie, proszę nie,”. I still couldn’t evade the smell of cooked flesh, it was clinging to my nostrils and sending me crazy.
I told her to shut up and not to speak her backward language in my presence. I demanded Werner tell me what she was saying. He spoke Polish and I am sure his mother was a Pole but he never admitted it except for one evening after we had been drinking. Ever since that night, he avoided being in my presence as much as possible. I had Werner in the palm of my hand and recently it had taken all of my energies not to bring the Gestapo in to have a quiet word with him.
“She is saying ‘please, no’, Herr Doktor,” Werner’s face was pallid. I ordered him out of the room and he was reluctant to leave until I once again bawled in his face. I could see tears in his eyes as he failed to summon the courage to defy me. Werner left the room wiping his eyes.
I was alone with this quivering, feral child. My recent experiments had failed to yield any results regarding the shapes of brains at different life stages. My theory had disintegrated in the last year. After my tests at Dieselstrasse, I was sure that Jews had a much higher frontal bone than other races. I was also convinced that a much smaller occipital bone was a gypsy trait, a sign that they were nearer to our simian ancestors than other races.
But my tests at the camp had shown absolutely nothing to indicate my aspersions were correct. I had examined living people and the bones of the dead and nothing indicated that I was right. In the last few months I had been examining children’s skulls with an almost religious fervour. However the lack of viable subjects was severely impacting my work.
My frustration at the army’s constant murder of the prisoners was at its peak. If they donated more people to my studies we could have made some real breakthroughs. Instead those damn ovens were being used constantly.
To me, it always seemed such a waste of manpower and resources. I didn’t become a doctor to butcher people like cattle. I had no problem with the Poles or the Jews having their own living space like the Americans did with their native populations. Once the Germans had reclaimed our rightful lands there would be plenty of room for the lesser races to live and breed in controlled communities.
I was astonished by the logistical resources that went in to transporting whole populations from Eastern cities to the camps. The war in the East was going terribly and the Führer was continually compounding his errors on the battlefield. Scores of troops were being injured every minute yet thousands of soldiers were involved in moving thousands of Jews across Europe simply to slaughter them.
Idiots like Werner worshipped Hitler and hung off his every word. I recognised straight away that he was a jumped-up prissy fool. I was surprised that his coarse rhetoric struck such a chord with middle classes, in addition to the proletarian masses. The man had no statesmanlike gravitas. He was simply an angry rabble rouser. I never knew fury could be harnessed to such a powerful effect.
Although I have to admit that I had never been so happy at being German when the word arrived that our glorious armed forces had taken Paris. My spine shivered watching those newsreels of our heroic troops parading past the Arc de Triomphe. Like many others, I accepted Hitler’s common schtick in return for bringing the glory back to Germany. I didn’t think he would achieve what he did but like all megalomaniacs what he had was not enough to satisfy his gargantuan ego.
Hitler overstretched and the Soviets, Americans and British were attacking from every angle. The SS were moving hundreds of prisoners a day out of our camp to other camps within Germany. It was inevitable that the Red Army would be at the gates of Auschwitz within weeks. Thanks to Dr Mengele and my new friend Paul, I had a little escape planned. I had to leave this godforsaken place as soon as I could get away with it.
The little girl’s face will haunt me forever. She was repeatedly saying ‘nie’, her eyes were streaming. The tears cleaning a valley down her grimy cheeks. She had a large scar running from the entrance to her right ear down to her collarbone and another circular gouge in the base of her skull. That was the only way I could accurately measure her occipital bone and the size of the foramen m
agnum. The experiment has once again proved my theory needed more work.
She was a pitiful sight. Her existence was an exercise in futility. It was then that I realised that my work in the war years was a complete waste of time. Ineffectual experiments on subhuman peasants masquerading as serious research.
The girl sat in front of me on the table like a poor imitation of Pinocchio. Her sobbing would not cease. This couldn’t go on, I had to stop the noise. It was almost like someone else had taken control of my body. I didn’t want to hurt the girl but I was affronted by her. I have no idea what perturbed me so much. Her innocence, her courage? I caught a glimpse of my reflection in a mirror behind the girl. At the time, I didn’t recognise the man. Now, I can see that I simply refused to acknowledge it was me staring back.
The girl had stopped sobbing and was looking up at me. I lifted my hands and wrapped them around her tiny throat. My fingers easily interlocked and her neck was very warm and slightly wet, the texture of kneaded bread. A cough barely escaped from her chest and I pressed my thumbs deep into her throat and increased the pressure.
The little girl slapped my arms in a pitiful gesture of defiance. Her eyes transformed from sadness to determination. I maintained my grip, my brain was devoid of all thoughts except that this girl needed to die. I could feel her body going limp and seconds later her eyes froze and her life was extinguished.
For a few moments I was unable to remove my hands from around her neck. Gradually I was able to relax my grip. I don’t know why but I stroked some hair away from her eyes. I laid her lifeless body on the table and picked up a white sheet and covered her up. I sat in the chair at the desk and poured myself a large scotch. I drank it in one and then repeated the pouring and drinking process two or three more times.
My mind was blank. I sat for hours in a trance. A little Roma girl lay dead across the room from me. Another death in a camp where life has virtually no value. Is the girl’s mother already dead? Most likely she has already been incinerated. Her memory extinguished by walking in to a gas chamber. Her offspring killed by me, surrounded by the machinery of daily death.
There was nothing left for me here. My mind became clear once I knew it was time to set my plan in motion. A couple of times in the last year I had visited Salzburg with my old friend Marcus Reutlinger who I knew from university. He had a contact who bought and sold artwork, a South African named Smith.
If rumours were to be believed certain high ranking officers were helping some disillusioned comrades relocate to South America. I knew it was no coincidence when I was sharing a meal with Reutlinger in Salzburg a couple of months and the commander of Auschwitz arrived in the same restaurant. There was an uncomfortable moment as we both greeted the commander. I was puzzled about how they knew each other.
Reutlinger never admitted he was at the heart of the ratline in all our conversations but following the mysterious midnight departure of the Auschwitz commander three weeks ago I realised our mutual friend was definitely involved. I knew he would help facilitate my escape.
I walked to my desk and telephoned my friend Reutlinger:
“Reutlinger speaking,” his gruff Swabian accent came through the line clearly.
“It’s Tremmick,” I said, staring across at the covered body of the little girl, “It’s time for me to leave,”
“OK, we can meet in Prague in two days,” I could almost hear the cogs whirring in Reutlinger’s brain, “You know the hotel we need to meet at?”
“Yes, I’ll be there,”
“Good,” he hung up the phone and my time as a tool of the Nazis was over.
The ratline rumour was true.
It was on that previous trip that I called in to Smith’s shop in Salzburg and took the painting of what I was virtually certain was of Venice. Smith confirmed that it was by Canaletto and its value would be very high if sold on the open market. This was great news and I relayed the information to Paul via a telegram later that evening.
Following the phone call, the onus was on me to gather my belongings and leave the camp. Paul and I had been planning our post-war plans ever since he arrived. Now he was back to full fitness and eating copious amounts of my food. We had purchased a bakery in Munich in the name of Paul and Horst Beckermann. Horst was Paul’s late brother who had been killed at the start of the war in the invasion of Poland. Wilhelm Horst von Reichardt was an infantry officer and one of the first Nazi soldiers to be killed in the war.
Paul travelled back to Munich to run the bakery which was paid for by the inheritance received by his young nephew. Paul took the Canaletto with him for safe keeping. I didn’t tell Paul the details of how valuable it was. I kept hold of the modernist painting for my passage out of the Third Reich.
Remembering the day I left Auschwitz, my work and my legacy makes my stomach roil and I have to stumble to the toilet to be sick.
As I hang my head over the toilet boil, feeling partly ashamed and partly exuberant for expelling the sickness, I recall the telephone call from Schwarzer earlier this afternoon. I stated today’s code word and he seemed to take an age in responding with a stammer and the next day’s code. At the time I thought nothing of it but for some reason it didn’t sound like the Michael Schwarzer I know.
Tiredness strikes me and I hobble back to my bed with a bitter taste in my mouth and a pounding headache. I lay in my bed and bring my bedsheet close to my face and I know that I need to reassess that phone call when I’m back to sober tomorrow.
Sanctification
Monday, 5 May 1986
I wake to a pair of rough hands shaking my shoulders. I open my eyes and instinctively bat the hands away.
“Hey, you need to leave,” a gruff female voice says.
I attempt to gather my thoughts. My head is hurting from all the beer last night. A woman in a dark uniform is stood in front of me. At first, I assume it’s a cop but I then realise she works for the railway.
“It’s time to go, sleeping time is over,” she says.
“OK, OK,” I reply and stand up and walk out of the station. I anticipate a blinding, blazing sun as I walk out rubbing my eyes. Instead the skies are grey and the air is thick and muggy. A few seconds of walking and I can feel myself sweating.
I double check the map and Moritzplatz isn’t too far from here. I can’t face seeing Gunari or Janko but I have to tell them about the IMFG clinic. I don’t know what to do. I amble around and find a small bakery where I pick up a coffee and a pastry. I sit on the kerb consuming my food and I decide I have to return to Schwarzer’s apartment.
After I finish eating and drinking, I follow the elevated U-Bahn line back towards the big roundabout at Kotbusser Tor and head up to Oranienstraße and in a few minutes I am outside Schwarzer’s block on Sebastianstraße where the door has been wedged open with a package. I climb the stairs and reach Schwarzer’s front door.
I knock three times against the door, heart hammering in my chest. There is no answer. I wait for one minute, counting the seconds and fearing a cardiac arrest. I knock again, three more times. They probably think it’s the police. It is times like this I wish we had agreed a secret knock.
Finally, the door opens a crack and I see Janko’s grey hair and an eye pop in to vision. His eye stares at me, through me and the door opens. I instinctively harden my body ready for an attack.
I am ambushed, not by violence but by love. Janko grabs me and hugs me tightly. I don’t respond, in shock at his response.
“Come in, girl,” he says and he grabs my hand and pulls me inside Schwarzer’s flat. The apartment smells strongly of bleach and I start to cough. Janko grabs me again in a bear hug and this time I reciprocate and hold him close.
I bury my head in his neck. Janko smells of sweat and bleach, his hands are stroking my hair. We hold each other for a while and let go, my eyes had been closed the whole time. When I reopen them Gunari is stood in the doorway with a serious look on his face.
“Hi Gunari,” I say, feeling foolish. Gunar
i strides over and places me in a bear hug, he relents and holds me by the shoulders, bringing his calloused right hand up to my cheek and stroking it gently.
“I’m sorry Ana,” he says and once more puts me in a big hug resting his chin on the top of my head and he keeps apologising. I don’t know why he is apologising when it was me who walked out of here. After a few minutes, Gunari finally releases me from his animalistic grip and we all stand around awkwardly.
“Welcome back, Ana,” Janko says, “We weren’t sure if you were going to come back,”
“Neither was I,” I say and I can tell Janko has a lot of questions ready. Now is not the moment to answer interminable questions about my disappearance, “Where is Schwarzer?”
Janko and Gunari look at each other, neither saying anything.
“I’m guessing he didn’t come back to life as a zombie Nazi? I’m back, you need to tell me,”
“I dismembered his body which is now wrapped up in the bath in bed sheets,” Gunari says. He’s not one for poetry or euphemisms, I appreciate that now more than ever.
“That explains the smell of bleach,” I say, I consider visiting the bathroom for a cheeky pee but I decide against it.
“You did the right thing, Ana,” Janko says, putting on his ‘avuncular grandad’ voice.
“Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t,” I don’t need sympathy, I need clarity, “Has the phone rang?”
“Yes,” Gunari responds, “I answered the telephone. Presumably it was Beckermann who confirmed today’s code. I replied with tomorrow’s code as Schwarzer said to do and the phone was hung up. I sincerely hope I did it right,”
“Did they both call up?”
“Yes, Beckermann initially. Tremmick phoned up at exactly half twelve,”
“You spoke to him? What did he say?”
The Wind and the Rain Page 17
