by Richard Ayre
In a strange way, I was pleased the place horrified me. Surely that meant I still had some form of human emotion inside me and the memories of Madeleine were perhaps safe. I had not yet descended into total callousness. As we went into the next building, I wondered how many more years that would take.
The door to the museum’s barrack hut led straight into a long corridor lined with old photographs of men and women in the now-infamous striped uniforms. The men had shaved heads and the women wore scarves. They stared out at me from the past: victims of the monstrous acts that mankind can perform. Their lifeless eyes reminded me strangely of Pfumpf. They were dead eyes in faces still alive. I caught up with the group and followed them into the room at the end of the corridor.
And it was in that room where I first came upon a photograph that was to change my life. Where fate, which I didn’t believe in, took me once again by the hand.
The photograph was huge, covering an entire wall and it showed the unloading area at Auschwitz II. The infamous arched gateway was in the distance, and in the foreground a train was disgorging onto the platform people who would soon be corpses. SS guards stood with Alsatian dogs that barked silently and eternally at the prisoners. One man, in the uniform of a high-ranking SS officer, stood with his hands behind his back. He seemed to be talking to the crowd, no doubt telling them the lies about having to go for a shower before being admitted into the camp.
But it was not this man who held my attention. It was another figure, standing near to him.
He wore the uniform of a sergeant, I believed. His Death’s Head badge glittered and he seemed to be smiling at the officer. I could make out his features clearly as he was turned towards the camera. He looked to be somewhere in his late fifties and his nose was bent, as if broken in the past. On the right cheek of that dark face was a line that could have been a scar.
I had seen a photograph of that face before, in the hospital the night Madeleine died, and I had seen a younger version hovering above my ruptured body in a church in France in the summer of 1916.
From beneath the cap of a Nazi Death Camp guard, the Medic smiled out at me.
*
I must have stared at his face for quite a while, because the guide touched my arm and made me jump, telling me it was time to leave Auschwitz I and make our way to Birkenau. I asked her about the people in the picture, but all she knew was that the officer in the foreground was Josef Mengele, the so-called “Angel of Death”. In a daze, I followed her back through the camp, and we boarded the bus for the short drive to Auschwitz II.
I’m afraid to say I didn’t take in much of the camp, apart from the loading bay where the Medic had stood fifty-odd years before.
In the end, I said I felt ill and waited impatiently beside the bus until the group came back and we set off for Krakow once again. The guide asked me if I was alright, probably thinking I’d been sickened by the atmosphere at Auschwitz.
I had, but it wasn’t just because of what had happened at that cursed place. That evening, as I sat outside a café in the main square of Krakow, the face of the Medic burned through me.
What the hell had he been doing in the SS? Liebnicht was a Jew, for God’s sake. The general feeling at the French hospital was that he’d perished in one of the camps, not worked at one! It made no sense at all until I thought about my own existence. How many different identities had I gone under over the years? What made me think it had been different for the Medic? How did I know what his real name was? He’d already had two identities I knew of and could very easily have had more.
Maybe he had been some sort of spy, with a myriad of different identities to use. I cursed myself for thinking that he was Liebnicht and not Valin. I didn’t even know whether he was French or German or Austrian or any other nationality.
And he was definitely not the same as me. He was plainly just an ordinary man. Maybe he had nothing to do with what had happened to me. Maybe he had just been at St Theresa’s that night only because he was a crazed German spy and was being hunted for murder. That made sense as he’d obviously been a member of the SS later as an older man.
But what about his work at the French hospital in the thirties? Why would an obviously nationalistic German pretend to be an Austrian doctor? Or maybe he really was Austrian? Hitler had been, after all.
My head spun with the thoughts tumbling through my mind. I had come to Krakow to search for the little that remained of my own human compassion, and instead I had stumbled upon a new mystery of that constant man in my life.
But then realisation hit me. It didn’t matter anyway. Whoever the Medic was, he must be dead by now. The man I’d seen in St Theresa’s had been in his late twenties or early thirties. The face in that photograph from Auschwitz had been that of a man somewhere in his late fifties, taken more than fifty years ago. Whoever the Medic had been, he would be long dead. He could not help me or explain anything about my condition.
Despite this immovable truth however, the next morning I started searching through the records. I might find out something about him. I might at least discover who he had been, where he had come from. It may have been enough to extirpate his damnable memory from my mind and, if nothing else, the quest to find out about him at least helped me to think and behave as a human being once more. If only for a while.
There were plenty of files on Auschwitz and I found a copy of the photograph easily enough, but the man in the records department could give me no more information. He indicated that it was in Germany where most of the records were now kept. At the German Historical Museum, Berlin.
I had no choice. If I could find out anything about the Medic, I would.
I caught the next flight.
XXII
‘Hans Holmann,’ said the young man.
‘Are you sure?’
He nodded. ‘Yes, definitely. Hans Holmann. Stabsscharführer Hans Holmann. You can see him here in another photograph. The one you have is from June forty-four. This one is from October 1947, when Holmann was taken to Spandau Prison.’
I had gone straight to the museum, and the young man I was talking to had been very co-operative. He seemed genuinely interested in my questions and had shown me to a room containing several microfiche machines. He’d sat me down at one of them and had then gone through some microforms, slowly honing in on the man I was after.
‘He wasn’t executed?’
The young man flicked through a few more frames. He shook his head.
‘No. According to this, he was put on trial at Nuremberg, but it was never proven he had anything personally to do with the deaths at Auschwitz.’ The young man’s lip twisted momentarily in distaste.
‘But he’s there,’ I insisted. ‘In a photograph. At Auschwitz. In an SS uniform, standing beside Josef Mengele! He must have had something to do with it. Surely no one got away with it.’
The young man laughed, humourlessly. ‘Oh, plenty people got away with it. Mengele himself got away with it. He managed to escape to South America. He didn’t die until 1979. That was proved when his body was dug up for identification in eighty-five. He lived a very nice life.
‘The top brass were sentenced to death, of course. Himmler and Goering were captured but killed themselves before they could be executed, and of course Hitler and Goebbels were already dead, but some of the minor figures were given prison sentences rather than execution. The commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolph Hoess, was executed—at the camp actually—but yes, some of the guards and what-have-you got away with it. Claimed they were “just following orders” and, unless it could be proved categorically that they had intended to kill those poor people, they were sent to prison instead of to hell where they belonged.’
I looked at him.
‘Did you have family who were killed?’
He was quiet for a long time, but eventually he said, ‘No. It was a member of my family that did the killing.’
I kept quiet. The generation that took part in the Holocaust had a lot to answer
for, but it seemed the shame of their deeds still stung with the German population, even years later. The young man was about thirty years old. Probably a grandparent had been involved. I changed the subject.
‘So were they all sent to Spandau?’ I finally asked. ‘Those who weren’t executed?’
‘Most of them,’ he said, seeming to rouse himself. ‘Let’s see what happened to your Stabsscharführer Holmann.’
He wheeled the knob on the machine and whizzed around the microfiche with aplomb.
‘Here we are,’ he said. ‘Yes, sent to Spandau in 1947 and released in 1965.’
‘Released?’ I was shocked.
He nodded. ‘They had done their time,’ he said, sarcastically and with a cold smile. ‘Paid their debt. Your Holmann did eighteen years and was then released to live the rest of his life as he saw fit. That’s the beauty of the law.’
I slumped. Released! So how the hell would I ever find out when he died? I needed to know. I wanted the Medic gone from my life for good, but it seemed I had failed again.
‘Is there anywhere I can search records for deaths?’ I asked.
He nodded. ‘Spandau was demolished in 1987 after Hess killed himself; but yes, we can do that here. We have computers!’
I followed him to a little office where he typed Holmann’s name into the national births, deaths and marriages register. I shook my head at the computer’s boxy little screen. What would they come up with next?
‘Can’t find anything about his death, I’m afraid. Although that’s not too unusual: not all the records have been put in yet.’
He saw the look of disappointment on my face.
‘However, I do have an address. Maybe it’s where his surviving relations live?’
He wrote the address down and I thanked him, exiting the museum onto the Unter Den Linden: not far from the address the Medic had written on the telegram Ducos had given me in Paris, and beside the little house I had rented in the 1920s and 1930s. Strange how things work out.
I was desperate to find out what had happened to the Medic, but I was curious as to how the area where I’d lived for six years had changed. I wandered the streets, in my mind’s eye seeing the swastikas hanging from the balconies and hearing the cheering of the crowds. I walked past the grey stone apartment block. There was still a restaurant on the ground floor. It hadn’t changed that much really, and I wondered idly what had happened to the old woman I had spoken so briefly with.
I went to where my house had been, but the street was completely different to how I remembered it and the house was no more, a modern block of flats in its place. Maybe the street had been rebuilt after being flattened in the war.
Eventually, though, I steeled myself and caught a tram to the address the young man had given me.
It was in Hohenschoenhausen, in what had been East Berlin: now an industrialised and pretty rundown area. Blocks of anonymous-looking, Soviet-era flats littered the skyline, and the shops on the main street sold mostly shoes or work clothes. I walked down the road, past the old Stasi prison that was also now a museum, until I came to the street I wanted.
I was confronted by a squat, concrete building with what looked like a large garden to the rear. I walked through the rusting gates and up some steps, finding myself in a foyer-like room. An unshaven and grubby looking man in his forties was behind the counter.
‘Yes?’ he asked me, in a bored voice.
I wasn’t really sure where to start, so I just dived in.
‘I was given this address from the German Historical Museum. I’m trying to find out about a man called Hans Holmann and this is the only address on record. I thought it may have been the address of his family, but I can see this is some sort of hospital?’
‘It’s an old people’s home,’ said the man. ‘Not a hospital.’
I nodded, waiting politely for him to continue, but he just stared at me, breathing through his mouth.
I sighed, pointedly. ‘Do you have anyone here by the name of Holmann?’
He begrudgingly bent to get something from under the desk and pulled out a ledger with an alphabet running down the front of it. He opened it at ‘H’ and ran a finger down the page and then nodded.
‘Yes, we have a Hans Holmann here.’
My blood seemed to freeze in my veins, but I forced myself to calm down. It couldn’t be him. It must be his son, that’s all. Or a nephew?
‘Can I see Herr Holmann?’
‘What’s it about?’
I considered telling this oaf the truth. That I was immortal, searching for the man who may have made me that way. It would have been funny to see the look on his face, but I was too eager to see this person by the name of Holmann and, anyway, I believed he was so stupid he wouldn’t understand a word I said.
‘I believe he might know someone I met once. I wanted to ask him about that person.’
The man continued to breathe at me stupidly. He stared at me like a cow; all he needed was some cud to chew on and the picture would have been complete.
‘I don’t see why not,’ he eventually muttered. ‘I’ll get someone to take you to him.’
He indicated to a row of plastic seats by the wall and I sat down, purposefully not thinking about anything.
Presently, a young woman appeared. She conversed briefly with the man and then turned to me, again with an open mouth. She seemed to be as stupid as the man. The place was a long way from the comfortable retirement home of Longwood, back in the 1970s.
She buzzed me through a glass door and I followed her down a corridor, with rooms either side. The carpet was dirty, with bits of old food lying around on it, and the whole place had a vinegary smell about it, the stench of old people and air-fresheners. Under this was the sharp, electric smell of urine.
Some of the doors were open as we passed and I glanced into the cell-like rooms at the sagging, hollow faces of the inmates, their shoulders narrowed and hunched, their mouths bereft of teeth.
Even though it was late afternoon, a lot of them hadn’t been dressed and, by the smells emanating from their rooms, it seemed they hadn’t been washed either. They reminded me of the Death Camp victims. Their eyes were just as dead, that was for sure. Their bodies lived on but their souls had already perished, simply waiting for their used-up carcasses to follow them. They were the complete opposite of me. I quickly averted my gaze and hurried after the young girl.
She led me through a sort of communal room with a TV playing away to itself. More skeletons sat in there, staring at each other in a desultory way. The smell almost made me gag. Didn’t anyone do anything for these people?
We went through some double doors and I found myself in the large garden I’d seen from the outside. I breathed in the clear air deeply, to wash away the awful smell of the home itself.
The girl led me halfway across the lawn and then stopped, as if she couldn’t be bothered to walk the rest of the way. She pointed to a lone figure who sat in a wheelchair with his back to me. All I could see of him was a bald, wrinkled head.
‘Herr Holmann,’ the girl intoned and then walked back through the double door. I saw one of the old people inside ask her for something, but she shook her head and went out the far door. The old woman who had stopped her stared after her, forlornly. I turned back to the figure of Holmann.
There were others there in the garden and their wheelchairs were set in a circle, like a wagon train in one of the old Westerns I’d seen at the movies, but Holmann sat by himself as though the others wanted nothing to do with him.
I slowly made my way towards him, my heart banging with suppressed hope, but also fear at what I would soon find. If this was Holmann’s son, he may not have known anything about his father or, perhaps, knowing that his father had belonged to the Nazi Party, he wouldn’t want to talk about him. It may be another dead-end, but it was the closest I’d come so far in my long quest to find out who the Medic was and, at the very least, I might discover when he had died and be allowed to put his me
mory to rest.
I had to know. I needed this eighty-year search to have an end. I needed to know who Hans Holmann really had been and what, if anything, he had done to me to make me so different to other people.
I stood in front of the old man.
His head was totally bald, as I’ve said; not a hair remained. He was small and brown and wizened, innumerable wrinkles thrown hither and thither across his face. The creases were everywhere; there was not one centimetre of skin without lines criss-crossed over it.
His hands, folded in his lap, were the same: the skin covering the bones seemingly paper thin. He looked like he was made of crumpled wet card that could tear at any moment. His eyes were closed, as if sleeping and, as I took in his face, my world swayed. My hand scrabbled behind me for the small wall of a raised flowerbed and I sat heavily, my eyes never leaving that ancient face.
Although incredibly old, his skin was still swarthy. The nose was still bent to one side and, on his right cheek, a deeper wrinkle than the others was plain to see.
His eyes snapped open and I gasped at their depthless blackness, my hand unconsciously raising to my mouth. He stared at me for a long, long time until a hideous grin split across his face.
‘You’ve found me at last, eh, Mr Deakin?’
I couldn’t speak. I just stared at this man whom I had met only once, but who had been a part of my life for so, so long.
‘Now that you have,’ continued the Medic. ‘What are you going to do about it?’
XXIII
It took a long time for my racing heart to slow. For me to stop just staring at this man and start listening to what he had to say. For me to be able to question him about his influence in my life.
