The Survivors

by Kate Furnivall

  ‘Have a good evening, sir,’ Davide said as Colonel Whitmore headed for the door. ‘Enjoy the party.’

  ‘I’ll do my best.’ He laughed, his long face lighting up for the first time that day.

  Davide was aware that the evening would still be work for the colonel. It was a drinks party organised by a local member of the CCG – that is the Control Commission Germany, which was now governing the country – to bring together the various bodies involved in keeping Graufeld Camp running. These included the newly established UNRRA, as well as the Red Cross, the Salvation Army and even the Quaker Society, all of which provided the camp with desperately needed weekly handouts of food and clothes for the inmates. The trouble was that there were too many people wanting to have the final word, and resources were stretched beyond breaking point. Tempers ran high.

  But Colonel Whitmore didn’t shirk his duty and left the office with a ramrod straight back. Davide hoped he would at least enjoy a decent whisky. Instantly Captain Jeavons was packing away the files on his desk.

  ‘C’mon, Davide, let’s go to our own party.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘In the rec room, I hear. Music and a splash of dancing.’ His boyish eyes opened clownishly wide and he whirled an imaginary dance partner around the room, swaying his hips. ‘Leave those endless piles of paper of yours, mate, and let’s get dancing cheek to cheek with the nurses.’

  ‘Nurses?’

  ‘Yes, a bunch of them are turning up to get everyone on the dance floor.’ In the air he sketched with both hands the curves of a woman’s figure. ‘The delectable Nurse McKinley awaits,’ he laughed.

  ‘No, not for me, thanks.’

  ‘Invite that blond friend of yours, the one with the beautiful blue eyes that crawl right inside your head. Carla, isn’t it?’

  ‘Klara.’

  ‘That’s her. Bring her along for a spot of jitterbugging.’

  Davide could not stop a smile. Just the thought of Klara bopping and kicking up her heels on a dance floor, instead of laying life and limb on the line in a burnt-out city, made his heart twist.

  ‘No. Her daughter is sick.’

  ‘So come anyway. There’ll be a piano to get us in the mood.’ As he pulled on his jacket he started to hum the first bars of Glenn Miller’s In the Mood.

  Something made Davide hesitate. It was the mention of the piano. His daughter used to play the piano every evening before bed.

  He closed the file of Fragebogen on his desk.

  The moment he walked into the smoke-filled rec room he regretted it. It wasn’t just the fumes. It was the fact that Klara wasn’t there. The room full of people was dreary without Klara to share it. Her teasing cool-eyed comments on her fellow inmates always amused him and he was aware that she liked to make him laugh.

  But he wasn’t laughing now. He should not have let her leave Graufeld Camp on her own in the ambulance, but she wasn’t someone who would back down easily once she’d made up her mind. She relied on herself. She didn’t trust others. Not even him. Not completely.

  Davide submitted to one slow dance and two quick drinks, just to keep Percy Jeavons happy, but by then not even the piano playing could hold him. He started to weave his way through the pairs of hopeful women and huddles of rawboned men all looking for an hour’s colourful escape from the grey reality of the camp.

  ‘Where you off to, mate?’ Percy called after him.

  ‘To Hut W.’

  ‘What for? They play rough down that end of the camp.’

  ‘Percy, mon ami, have you ever lived in an underground cave for month after month with ribs sticking through your skin and friends dropping dead at your feet?’

  ‘Bloody hell, mate, no.’ Jeavons’ brow creased into deep furrows and Davide could see what his cheery friend would look like in years to come with his pipe and slippers. ‘Of course not,’ Jeavons muttered uneasily.

  ‘It teaches you how to deal with rough.’

  ‘Got any smokes to spare, mein Herr?’

  The voice was polite and well spoken. Davide had only just stepped outside the Recreation block into the chill night air, where light from the windows cast two large amber rectangles on to the black roadway. In the middle of one stood the figure of the man who had addressed him. He was tall despite being hunched in on himself and he was standing sideways, as if to present the thinnest possible target.

  Sideways also meant he was no threat. It was important that, in this camp. To offer no threat in the dark.

  ‘I don’t smoke,’ Davide informed him.

  ‘But you carry them in your pocket.’

  Cigarettes were the currency of the camp. Most people carried a few stubs in their pocket. Normally Davide would not give one away but this evening did not feel normal. So he drew a small flat tin from his pocket, extracted half an army-ration Players cigarette and approached the stranger, who accepted the offering with a grateful smile.

  ‘Danke.’ He struck a match, watched the flame burn a hole in the darkness and took a long drag with satisfaction. ‘Where would we be,’ he laughed softly, ‘without the British Army?’

  It was said without irony.

  ‘Well, that’s not something I care to think about too often.’

  ‘You’re French, aren’t you? So you’d be at the Moulin Rouge in Paris with the dancing girls, n’est-ce pas?’ That soft laugh again.

  ‘No, I’d still be in Peenemünde, or Mittelwerk.’

  Davide regretted it the moment the words were out of his mouth. He rarely mentioned those places. Peenemünde and Mittelwerk. A death hole underground. The words slipped out because he was not thinking straight tonight, too busy trying not to think about what the hell Klara was doing right now.

  ‘You were at Peenemünde?’ the German queried.

  ‘I was.’

  ‘And in the Mittelwerk underground facility?’

  Davide gave a reluctant nod. In the sulphurous yellow light that spilled over them, the German studied him for a long moment.

  ‘Yet you survived,’ he commented with respect.

  ‘As you see.’

  Peenemünde and Mittelwerk were the sites of the Third Reich’s infamous rocket weaponry – the V-1 flying bombs and the lethal A-4 that terrorised London, later termed the V-2. These were the ambitious brainchild of Hitler and the visionary scientist Wernher von Braun. It was put into research and production by the dedication of the Armaments Minister, Albert Speer, and by the excessive zeal of SS Brigadier General Kammler. He ran the whole programme on the bones and blood of slave labour gleaned from concentration camps like Buchenwald.

  There was an extended silence that neither man felt inclined to break. Just the seductive notes of Take the A-Train trickling into the night, liquid as moonlight.

  ‘I survived,’ Davide murmured. ‘Survived that place of terror. I was not one of the thousands of bodies that ended up stacked into stinking heaps. You cannot imagine the stench. Corpses of nothing more than skin and bone. We were randomly beaten and clubbed. Starved, hanged and shot. Our lives hung on the slightest whim of our SS Nazi overseers. They regarded us as worse than cockroaches.’

  ‘So tell me. How did you survive?’

  Davide gave him a slow smile. ‘I guess God owed me. He had already taken my family.’

  The German leaned back against the wall into deeper shadow. ‘That’s tough on a man.’

  ‘And on a woman.’

  Their gaze hardened on each other, their outlines growing sharper, more stiff-legged.

  ‘We cannot help but hate each other,’ the German said sadly, ‘for years to come. You Allies march in here as victorious conquerors of Germany and carve our country up between you, so of course we hate you. But you have every right to hate Germans in return for the evil that Hitler did in our name. The terrible crimes against humanity that he committed. I do not blame you.’

  The honesty of the German took Davide by surprise. But when the friend working beside you in the gigantic underground rocket
-complex gets a bullet in the brain just for going to the lavatory once too often, it’s hard not to take those crimes against humanity personally.

  ‘Do you realise,’ Davide said, ‘that more men died building the V-2 rockets in Peenemünde and in the Mittelwerk caves than were killed by them as a weapon? Ironic, isn’t it?’ He paused and his voice seemed to sink deeper into the shadows. ‘Twenty-thousand workers died there.’

  ‘So you were lucky.’

  ‘That’s a matter of opinion.’

  He heard the German’s intake of breath. ‘I’m sorry. You will carry your own survival guilt to your grave. Just as we in Germany will carry our nation’s collective guilt on our backs for the next fifty years. It is our tragedy, Herr Bouvier.’

  ‘You know my name?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I see things that go on around me. I see who your friends are and what they do.’ He spoke in a quiet undertone.

  ‘What are you talking about? Which friends?’ But a chill gripped Davide’s spine. ‘What is your name?’

  ‘Jan Blach.’

  It was a blow. He stepped forward. To examine this man who knew too much. He scrutinised him closely in the gloom. A strong face. No spectacles. Large features, intelligent grey eyes and a calm controlled manner. A firm but respectful way of speaking. A man who, in other circumstances, Davide would choose to trust. But these weren’t other circumstances.

  ‘Oskar Scholz, you mean,’ Davide said.

  The German continued to smoke. He paused. ‘So she has told you about me.’

  ‘Klara mentioned your name, yes.’

  Scholz nodded. Sharp and brisk. ‘It saddens me. Klara Janowska is a fine woman. But I can guess that she will have told you that I am a danger to her here in Graufeld Camp.’ He drew on the last of the cigarette and the glow of its tip highlighted the sincerity in his grey eyes. ‘But she is wrong. Completely wrong. I am her friend.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Hatred is something that can eat you alive.

  I know. I’ve felt its teeth. Tonight in Hanover it had taken a bite out of me by the time I scratched on the ancient oak door. Bruno Fuchs had made his Rottweiler release me and whispered an address in my ear.

  No answer.

  I thumped with my fist but no one came. It was well defended. Long metal strap hinges, as well as iron bars for reinforcement. No one would be opening this in a hurry from the outside, that was certain. It was part of a three-storey terrace of houses in the city on the edge of the Jewish quarter, though Hanover’s Jews had long since been shipped off to Buchenwald and Auschwitz concentration camps. Around me the shops were black and roofless from when they were burned out in the destructive fever of Kristallnacht. The only movement in the street was from a clutch of urchins scavenging among the ruins and they scattered into the night like rats at the sight of me.

  I stood back from the door and stared hard at the upstairs windows, which were heavily shuttered. But was that the faintest hairline of light along a crack? I cupped my hands to my mouth and shouted.

  ‘Hello! Ist jemand da? Is anyone there?’

  Except it didn’t come out as a shout, more a croak. Pain shot across my damaged throat and I tied my scarf tighter around it before going back to thumping the oak door, but I had only raised my fist a couple of times when I heard a bolt shoot back on the inside. The door opened no more than the width of an eye.

  I could see no one. The interior was pitch black.

  ‘Hello?’ I said again. ‘I’m looking for—’

  A long pale arm reached out and dragged me inside.

  ‘Sit still.’

  I sat still and allowed the wound on my throat to be bathed. Small olive-skinned hands dabbed iodine on the wound and bound it with strips torn off a clean white pillowcase.

  ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Why do this for me? You don’t know me.’

  The young woman tending to my cut crouched down on her heels in front of me. She was as tiny as a bird. Her large black eyes widened and her huge smile went some way towards easing the pain in my throat.

  ‘Because you need help,’ she said simply. ‘We can’t go on hating each other forever. The fighting is finished. It is time to start helping each other. It doesn’t matter what happened before. It is time to embrace each other, to forgive and forget, and plan for the future.’

  I looked at her, baffled by her words.

  I could not forget. And I certainly couldn’t forgive.

  She came to me as if she could see my thoughts like knives in my hands, and wrapped her arms around me, embracing me. As good as her word. I could feel this woman’s genuine warmth seep into me, but it was not nearly enough to melt the ice that sat like a rock in my chest. Just a trickle of it reached my eyes.

  She kissed my cheek and drew back. The room was excessively purple – purple curtains, purple rug, purple cushions, a purple-painted cabinet and her purple dress.

  ‘Why purple?’ I asked.

  ‘It is the colour I see in my head when I have my happy dreams. What colour do you see?’

  ‘I don’t have happy dreams.’

  ‘You will.’ She ran both hands through her dense thatch of black hair so that it stuck out at odd angles as through trying to escape. ‘So,’ she said, ‘you want a passport.’ Her name was Salomea Kohn.

  She was probably the last surviving Jew in Hanover and was an expert at forging documents. I didn’t ask how or why she became one, but I did wonder. It was the greedy Bruno Fuchs who gave me her name and address and for that I was thankful, though it meant agreeing to hand over to him a carton of two hundred Players cigarettes. The passports were so close I could smell the chemicals Salomea used. It was like alcohol fizzing through my blood, making me giddy with excitement, my ears popping as tensions were released.

  Hope, that faithless whore, started to lure me to her.

  ‘Choose,’ Salomea instructed as she laid out on the pine kitchen table about a hundred small photographs and arranged them in neat rows. All were of girls of around ten years old. Some with short hair, some with long; curls, waves, straight or spiky. Faces that were pretty or plain, freckled or scrubbed. Eyes that shone out at you or were dull and thoughtless. Mouths that were mean or generous. Whole worlds contained within every photograph.

  I examined each one minutely. And then I chose.

  From the kitchen Salomea led me through a door hidden behind a dresser and down a flight of stone stairs to a basement. The first thing that struck me was the smell. Not damp and fetid. But warm and musty and leathery, like my husband’s riding boots used to smell. I felt the ends of some tight knots start to fray inside me.

  It was a beautiful room that sent a shiver of pleasure through me. It was a long time since I’d seen anything beautiful. From floor to ceiling books lined all four walls, books with embossed leather covers that glowed richly in the lamplight. A huge Persian carpet softened the flagstone floor and tasselled lampshades cast odd shadows over two cushioned sofas in maroon leather. I could imagine this unusual woman living in this unusual room. As if the outside world didn’t exist.

  ‘I collect rare books,’ she explained and gave the antiquarian volumes the kind of smile you give your children.

  ‘May I look at one?’

  ‘No.’ She shook her head to emphasise the point. ‘Come,’ she said.

  I followed her. She swung open a section of the shelving and vanished into a small white-tiled room behind it. Photographs of faces were everywhere. Pegged on lines across the room, on the walls, in racks, in piles. It was clearly her workroom. Two developing baths stood on a shelf.

  She inspected the photograph in her hand, the one I had picked out in the kitchen. ‘So this is like your daughter?’

  ‘No.’ I smiled at the small black and white face with shoulder-length hair and wide-set eyes. She was a pretty child. ‘Alicja is far prettier but it is the closest.’

  ‘Good. Let us begin.’

  Salomea becam
e brisk and businesslike. First she took a flash photograph of me with a very complicated-looking Zeiss folding plate camera, then she measured my height.

  ‘Now,’ she said, pen in hand, ‘personal details.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Name?’ she asked.

  ‘Mrs Klara Jones.’

  She raised one black eyebrow but passed no comment. ‘Maiden name?’

  ‘Parker. It was my grandmother’s surname.’

  ‘Number of children?’

  ‘One.’

  ‘National status?’

  ‘British.’

  A small puff of laughter escaped her. ‘Profession?’

  ‘Engineer.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. I was working as an engineer on the tunnels of the new underground railway in Warsaw when war broke out.’

  She looked at me with a bright fixed stare, smiling broadly as if I had just given her a gift.

  ‘We need people like you,’ she said earnestly, ‘to show us what to do. Engineers will be at the forefront of creating our new world. Whereas I’ll be trailing behind, dragging my books and my nettle tea along with me.’

  I smiled back at her. ‘No, you will be right at the very front, lighting the way with your books.’

  It pleased the woman in the purple dress, that thought. I could see it.

  ‘Is your daughter like you?’ she asked suddenly.

  The question shocked me. ‘I don’t want her to be like me.’

  We left it at that and went back to the standard questions – date of birth, height, eye and hair colour. When it was finished, she hesitated, as though arguing with herself about something, but in the end came out with it.

  ‘Your daughter does not need a passport of her own, you know. As she is under sixteen she can travel on yours. It would be cheaper for you.’

  ‘No.’ It came out too quickly. ‘No, I want her to have her own passport. In case . . .’ I halted. I did not want to voice my fear.

  ‘In case you don’t make it?’ she said softly.

  The words hung in the white-tiled room, refusing to go away.

  Have you ever touched an object and known in that instant that it would change your life?