‘Paul wanted me to give him the plan for this oven. He said he could get it to the right people. He cannot do that now. But I can. I can get the plan. Show the world what the SS were doing. What they planned to keep doing. Last summer over five hundred thousand Jews went into Auschwitz. I have been there. None of them were getting out again.’ I had drained the cigarette. Another one volunteered, lit for me.
‘If you know where the nearest Americans are I promise you I will take this plan to their command. I cannot right anything, I know that now, but you know that the SS will destroy any evidence of anything they can. Wherever they go they leave only fire. But I can do this. And the world will know.’
I stepped back to Etta. She took my hand and we waited as the men of the group counselled. Only Bernie came forward.
‘Auschwitz was liberated two weeks ago,’ he said. ‘By the Russians. You would not know that. I am sure your chiefs do. There’ll be paper burning soon enough. Covering their tracks. But if you can get this plan, get to Kassel,’ he said. ‘Kassel is safe. Wait up in a hotel. A month. The invasion of Germany has begun. They’ll cross the Rhine. That’s the front now. You’d never make it further west past the road-blocks.’ By further west he meant Frankfurt, Wallendorf, anywhere east from Luxembourg and the Siegfried Line. He took a breath in thought.
‘But who knows how long they will take? A month. Two. Maybe not succeed at all.’ He touched both our hands. ‘They are throwing everything they can at them.’
‘I am sorry,’ he said. ‘But they are not as close as you hope they are.’ He looked at me. Understood. ‘We know about Etta. Get her out. Before there won’t be trains to do so. Take your plan to Kassel and wait. Hide.’ He walked back to the group. Etta and I alone.
Kassel. North-west from us. With my small motorcycle, if I could get fuel, I could make it in a day. It did not seem far enough. Hardly worth it. But not Erfurt. Etta safely on a train. I away from Topf and the SS.
They are not as close as you hope they are.
We thanked them and left, hollow inside. Maybe the Americans months away, the red-jackets even further. So it was not over. The radio right. His last speech right. We walked home in the blackout without a word.
I had thought I was becoming a hero. Instead no better than them. A boy in a café with grand plans, sentiments only as strong as coffee and cigarettes. There was nothing in my power, my control. Except the one thing every voice agreed on, even the dead. The dead that day. Almost Paul’s last words. The woman on my arm.
Get her safe.
They are not as close as you hope they are.
Chapter 39
Saturday,
10 February
We did not talk about Weimar. What I had seen. I was fortunate. That was all. Thoughts of Paul’s body, his fate, not for us. The authorities would contact his father. In death secrets will out. Papers would be gone through, affiliations discovered. Our distance for our own protection. Mourning only for widows and parents with a world at war. I thought on his headstone, the one he laughed about to break the ice at parties. The last date to be filled now. Waiting. A bomb and a lift shaft. Politics not a part of his end. Death had become ridiculous. You could die lighting an oven because a main leaked miles away, decapitated crossing the street because a bomb hit while you were walking. People hiding in their homes, wiping their children’s jam-dried mouths, reading bedtime stories in candlelit cellars. They won’t have a day of remembrance for them. The people in the maps. Paul killed in a lift shaft for corpses.
We kept the radio on all the time for warnings, one ear cocked for the sirens. The whole of Erfurt no doubt the same. I told Etta that I wanted to see my parents. I did not have to explain why. You remain children until your parents die. You want to see them when you almost die.
As we walked to the bridge Etta said she had written to her parents with our telephone number, saying she did not know why she had not thought of it before. A telephone still a strange device for us.
She wrote to them every month but we only ever received a handful of replies over the last year, unsure of how many of hers they had read. The postal service mostly for war use now. I told her that the telephone was probably just as limited. That international calls would be non-existent for civilians.
‘You don’t know that, Ernst,’ she said.
‘No. Just assuming it’s as bad as everything else. Strange how you get used to it. The newspapers still get posted up in the square yet they tell you to reuse envelopes to save paper. The radio preaches victory but you can’t even buy an ice-cream.’
‘Who wants ice-cream in February?’
The streets quiet. We lowered our voices to not wake the sleeping houses. Talk eventually rowing with one oar round to us getting away from Erfurt.
‘Could we not take the plan to Zurich, Ernst? You with me. It would be safer from there.’
‘And if something went wrong on the way? Both of us caught with stolen SS plans. Shot in a railway siding.’ She squeezed my arm in hers. Not against the cold. ‘It would be better for you to go on your own, Etta. No-one knows what you look like. They have my face. As soon as the plan is discovered gone my description will be everywhere.’
This was true, an advantage. In all my months at Topf no-one had met her. I might as well have created her. Fortunate. Lucky idiot. But it meant that one of us could get past the station, on at least one train. Maybe that would be enough, maybe not. She would be resourceful enough, with enough money. She did not need to hold my hand.
‘I do not want to leave you.’
‘Don’t say that. It’s not that.’ We were at the bridge, on its threshold. On the cusp of time. An AA gun behind us pointing to the sky, the medieval timber and stone in front. Two different worlds. Like the moment I walked into Paul’s crematorium, and the moment I staggered out. Two different worlds.
‘I want us to go together, Etta. But I must do this alone. No-one will be looking for a single woman on a train, a woman they cannot describe. But they will be looking for me.’
‘So we shall sit in different seats. Take different trains. Just hours apart.’
‘But then I am not getting the plans out. I am in Zurich. I am running away. Not running to. Who am I helping then?’
She took my gloved hands.
‘Me, Ernst. You are helping me.’
‘You were the one who made me think of them. Me, Klein, Sander, Prüfer. Just doing our jobs, our work. Not seeing the end. A hundred German companies, banks, doing the same. Even Zurich doing the same. The Swiss supplying electricity and coal to Berlin. Not seeing. And seeing. But they do not think of the Ernst Becks. I am nothing, Etta.’ I walked her onto the bridge. Into a different time.
‘That is how I can beat them.’
I felt in her soft touch of me that she believed. Trusted. But I was still the boy. I only wanted my mother to hold me, my father to pour me his Madeira or schnapps. For one more time. And because I had come from the bombing of a town, had lived, when thousands would only have wanted that one thing, two things. Once more. Schnapps with their father. Their mother’s hot stew too hot. No son should say goodbye to their parents. The millions who never got to do so. Lucky idiot.
‘Besides. I do not have a vanity seat for the motorcycle. My backside is raw from it. Even with a saddle. It’s for picnics, not distance.’ I swung her along. ‘I like your hide as it is.’
Gallows humour. Trench humour. Humour of those waiting to be bombed.
*
My father was bent almost double as I told him, as if I had put a wagon’s load on his back.
‘Paul Reul? Your friend from school? Aker Reul’s boy?’ This is how Germans remembered sons and daughters. By remembering their fathers’ names or their fathers’ scandals.
‘Yes, Papa.’ I coaxed him into his armchair. ‘It was a terrible thing.’
‘What about Weimar? What does it look like? Why bomb such? Homes and churches.’
‘There is an NS square. But they did not bomb that.’
He sat, scratched his head and the arms of the chair.
‘So. They wanted to kill people?’
I sat on the sofa. Said nothing on this and he waved me to remain quiet.
‘I am glad you got out, Ernst. This family. Never with the luck. From my father to his. God is changing his mind on us at last.’
He never asked why I was there and I would not have known what to say. I had a diamond in my pocket as small as an October peach pit, weighted like a millstone.
There was almost an annoyance from them both when we first arrived. It was Saturday evening. Their supper was sandwiches and pickles and the radio and a private time for them. Old people become like that. Even when you are their children Saturday is still like it was when your father used to work.
‘I have seen people all week. I will see you all in church on Sunday and work with all of you on Monday. Saturday is when I undo the top button of my trouser and wear a vest and I have no meat for you.’
‘There was no mention of it in the paper?’ he said.
The ‘paper’ to my father was Der Sturmer, ‘The Attack’. A rag, but the only one still regularly pinned up in the street notices. These were glass-fronted frames that held the sheets of the paper in a long line so that anyone could have access to the ‘news’. It was anti everything and appealed to the basest reader and the young boy seeking a pencil-sketched frilly glimpse of cleavage. Our leader read it religiously.
My mother was crying in the kitchen while Etta consoled. Crying because I had been at the bombing, crying gladly because I had survived. Great racking sobs that men do not understand because they swallow them with schnapps and roll their eyes at the wails, convinced that the world would stop spinning if they did the same.
‘So,’ my father reaching for pipe and tobacco bag, ‘perhaps it is not so long before we are bombed.’ The end of his conversation on it. ‘Is your job still safe, Ernst?’
‘I am leaving,’ I said. It came natural to say so. Decision made. I was not judging or weighing it any more and he did not need to understand. He forgot about the loading of his pipe.
‘What for? Your first work? Are you mad?’ His conclusion made in one sentence. One exasperation tumbling over another, the pipe-loading resumed like a task begrudged.
‘Things have changed,’ I said. ‘With the work Topf has been doing. Etta and I are not comfortable with it.’
‘Pah! Who is “comfortable” with their work? Work is work. Nothing would happen if everyone thought like that, Ernst. What have they been doing that makes a young man quit his job?’
‘I am not quitting. They won’t allow that. I am leaving without their say. It is the ovens, Papa.’
My mother had stopped wailing, Etta hushing her into her bosom.
‘What ovens? Almost a year now you have worked for them. What difference?’ His voice a beat, as fathers do when they can no longer beat you with their open hand. Angry at his fool of a son. The son who was cutting away his years with foolishness. The son who might have kept him furnished for old age.
‘They kill Jews, Papa. Poles, Roma, Russians. They need the ovens to dispose.’
‘Yes. For the typhus.’ Still that beat. Delivered with hand-strokes and pipe-puffs.
‘No, Papa.’ I rubbed my nose against the harshness of the pine cones mixed with coke in the burner. The habits of the old in winter. He probably still broke ice on the river to store for water. ‘I have been in Auschwitz. They have more ovens than water tanks. Yet they build showers for hundreds. For water tanks that cannot feed them.’
‘Nonsense.’ He slapped away the air of my words. ‘And for what matter anyway? Jews. Roma. Parasites all. You are too young to understand.’
I stood. Looked down over my father for the first time since I was sixteen and had declared that I disliked the pipe smoke in our house.
‘Etta is Jewish,’ I said. ‘I am married to a Jew.’
The muffled sobbing from the kitchen stopped.
‘They would take away our marriage. Take her away.’ I let that hang. My mother in the kitchen doorway. It never had a door. There were still hinge marks where one had stood. Painted over. The nicks of a penknife that charted my growth chipping the paint.
‘My wife – your daughter – would be on a cattle truck to prison.’
I sat back down, looked to the window, through the lace curtain to the timbered house over. Wondered what conversations went on within. Done with mine. Etta behind my mother in the kitchen, her eyes on me, my mother moving into the room. Away from Etta, to my father’s chair.
My father said nothing, took his pipe from his mouth and reached to his shoulder for my mother’s hand. They were still. As I was. As Etta was. She had been holding my mother to her bosom moments before. I could not read her face. A laugh came up from the bridge below, broke our statues.
‘Get out of my house,’ my father said. Then repeated it louder when I stared back at him, as if I had not heard, as if he were answering an echo with a louder call.
‘Get out of my house!’
My mother said nothing, her tears brimming. She gripped my father’s hand. He would speak.
‘How dare you!’ His face red. ‘How dare you. My own son! Wed to a Jew!’
He dropped my mother’s hand, struggled from his chair. I did not expect this. I had hoped that if all went wrong with getting Etta on a train she might stay here. Here in the house I was born. Where we all come back to. I stood with him, over him, no longer the giant of my childhood. But still his boy. Spittle on his lip.
‘We would all be taken! How dare you do this to your mother. What I have sacrificed for you. The years, the money I have spent on raising. On your education. And this is how you repay in my old age! My son. Married to a whore!’
I did not understand his anger. I could reason. Say I did not know she was a Jew when I married her. But then I would be him. As Etta had said. An old man shouting at the dark. His affairs of the world came from newspapers of the gutter. The press extolled that Jews would marry German women for their money. Eager German youth would marry Jewesses for their easy virtue, the paper carrying a cartoon to prove it. Always a cartoon. Always letters to the editor to prove.
Etta closed her arms about her in the kitchen, her head down, making herself smaller, crawling into herself. My mother tried to touch me as I passed, withdrew as if I were made of flame. I swept Etta out of there. She kept her head down. My father shouting all the while.
‘Out! Out! No son have I!’ His arms waving, my mother sunk into her corner chair wailing into her sleeve. ‘Take your whore! Try to kill your parents why not? I would rather a soldier for a son. Look at your mother. See what you have done!’
We were at the door, the door to the stairs above a camera shop. The stairs I had ascended thousands of times. Never again. Not while I breathed. Not while they breathed. And maybe not even after. Let rats have them.
I held the door open, looked back into the room. If I said something it would only empower him more, hurt my mother more. The look was enough. He saw it. The last look from his son. I went to close the door behind us but Etta stayed my hand.
She straightened her dress, picked up our coats and hats from behind the door. Addressed them together.
‘Father.’ She bowed. ‘Mother.’ Her goodbye. I was not there. Only Etta. And she left with me. A thousand times I had clicked that door closed. The last time.
We went down the stairs, left the door open to the street. Let him crawl down and shut out the wind.
‘I am sorry, Etta. I did not know.’
She took my hand.
‘I did.’ Her face away from me, watching the river under the bridge. Both of us getting used to just us, used to walking empty streets in silence. The only shadows in a city.
Chapter 40
I was up before the dawn on Sunday. I percolated coffee, burned toast, cursed at it and our pale butter. But you cannot waste bread and so coughed on the dust of it. I sat in the garden, smo
ked and drank coffee until the sun crept over the tiles of the houses beyond.
We made love last night. The kind that comes from sadness; when you know it might be the last, are thankful for the first, when you could see the future of it, the different beds you would own, the different walls watching. All before you. And then someday, this day. All behind you.
We had a plan that we did not speak of. A plan of stages. Each stage could be the final one, the rest never coming, so we did not speak of them, only the first. I would get our money from the bank during my lunch on Monday, give the money to Etta and then try to get a travel permit from Klein. Try. Try. A word only slightly larger than ‘No’. The smallest words the heaviest.
I doubted I could get the permit stamped from the Gau even if I got it. But maybe that could be bluffed at the station, chaos everywhere, the rules were for yesterday, and, as Paul had said, demonstrated, you could buy anything now. I was sure that a good number of ticket officers and policemen’s wives owned good jewellery collections lately. And I had a diamond. A diamond that would do or not do. As I said. Stages. Each one needed a plan B, and almost every one of those came down to the motorcycle I had set in the hall. Running. Running away. I had a petrol ration that I never used but the tank on the motorcycle only good for eighty kilometres at best. Work on that when it came to it. As I said. Stages. Get Etta to Stuttgart. Get the plan and get to Kassel. Stages. Thinking beyond that pointless. Getting past Monday and Tuesday would be difficult enough. Dwelling on further days pointless. And what was the point of any of it anyway? What point running?
I could just as well carry on working for Topf, forget it all. That KPD bearded pup said that the Russians had liberated Auschwitz. I could not imagine that ‘liberation’ was the word. A winter in Erfurt a pleasant season. In Poland I imagined fingers froze black. But if that city of a prison was gone surely all of our enemies knew. What difference would one plan for an oven make? They would find enough in Berlin. I was deluding myself that the little efforts of Ernst Beck able to enlighten anybody to anything.
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