He was, however, still puzzled by one thing, and afterwards he whispered to Malacou, `As you can do this sort of thing far better than I can, why do you wish me to do it too?
'Because the stars decree that you are to be my partner,' the occultist replied, `and I have need of one. I am highly skilled in my special arts, but I lack the ability to put them to the best purpose. I need a resolute man like yourself to talk to others on my behalf, and with a practical mind to plan how we may best use my gifts to our advantage.'
`I see that,' Gregory agreed; `but every plan should have an object. What is to be ours?'
Malacou shook his grizzled head. `I don't quite know. I think mainly to impress those over us. If we could succeed in becoming soothsayers to the Commandant of the camp it is certain that we should be given better food and special privileges.'
For a few minutes Gregory thought this over, then he said, `Just reading hands won't get us far. What we need is some startling prediction. You told me that while you were last at Sassen you consulted the stars on the course of the war. If you have real faith in the results of your endeavours could you not predict some major development that you expect to take place in the course of the next few weeks? A German victory somewhere would be best, although that seems unlikely.'
`That is an excellent thought,' Malacou smiled. `In fact, it is just the sort of idea I hoped that you might produce. For your suggestion, it so happens that there are two things we might use. As the Russians have callously refused to go to the aid of those gallant Poles who rose against the Germans in Warsaw, I feel certain that very soon now they will have to surrender. The Germans will also achieve a triumph over the British, and that within the next few days. No news has yet trickled through about it, but at this moment there is a desperate battle going on in ‘ Holland, I think in connection with the bridges over the Scheldt, and the British will get the worst of it. Tomorrow I'll predict those two items to as many people as I can.'
`No,' said Gregory promptly. `We can do better than that. We'll hold a stance in the evening and invite the Blockfьhrer in to it. I will act as though I were putting you into a trance, you can mutter a few meaningless phrases of gibberish, then I'll pretend to interpret and announce your predictions. If only they are on the mark that will really put up our stock.'
Malacou willingly agreed and the sйance proved as successful as they could have hoped. Their fellow prisoners showed great interest and, although the Blockfьhrer regarded the performance with cynical amusement, he was obviously intrigued.
The sйance took place on September 10th. During it Gregory gave out a fuller account of Malacou's prediction. It concerned a great number of British parachutists being dropped too far behind the German lines for support from ground troops to reach them, so that they remained cut off and those of them who were not killed being forced to surrender.
Some days later the prediction was fulfilled by the failure of Montgomery’s rash use of airborne troops at Arnhem. Then Goebbels announced in vindictive triumph that after many weeks of desperate resistance the Poles in Warsaw had surrendered and that, as saboteurs, those who survived were to be shot.
As Gregory had foreseen, this double achievement of Malacou's made a great impression on all who knew of it, and S.S. men from all over the camp began to come to the hut in the evenings to have their fortunes told. But there was no reaction from the Commandant.
Meanwhile Gregory found that his new situation had both its advantages and disadvantages. He certainly fed better and lived in slightly greater comfort, but he found mixing cement and carrying hods of bricks for eleven hours a day so exhausting that he had difficulty in concentrating sufficiently in the evenings to do his best when reading hands.
Nevertheless, he drove himself to persevere with it and after a time became quite expert at reading character without having had any previous information from Malacou. He had, too, mastered the meaning of finer lines-little crosses, stars, squares, islands, offshoots and breaks-that indicated marriages, children, accidents, salaciousness, self-consciousness, a crooked mentality and other traits. On some points his subjects declared him to be wrong, but in the main they usually agreed that he was right about them; and he was interested to find that he could always do better with some guard or newcomer to the hut whom he had never previously seen than with a man whom he had come to know quite well and about whom he had formed an often erroneous impression from hearing what the man had said about himself.
With regard to the future, as a matter of principle both he and Malacou always endeavoured to cheer their subjects up by predicting their survival from the harsh life they led and better times ahead, with a safe return to wives who were remaining faithful to them and loved ones who had them constantly in their thoughts.
But one evening towards the middle of October Malacou took a very different line with one of the Capos. He told the man frankly that he was in grave danger of death by violence and, after obtaining from him his astrological numbers, that the third day hence could prove his fatal day unless he secured a release from duty. The man was one of the more brutal Capos and a cynic. He ignored the warning. On the third day one of the prisoners went mad, attacked him with a pickaxe and before he could protect himself had bashed in his skull.
As this prediction had been made in the hearing of two S.S. men who had come to have their fortunes told, it enormously enhanced Malacou's reputation as a seer; and from this episode there arose two developments.
It so happened that the man who had gone off his head was a bricklayer. Next morning he had been first flogged then hung from a portable gibbet in front of the whole section after roll call, after which Gregory had been given a trowel and ordered to take the place on the building site of the dead man. Having spent over three weeks as a labourer there Gregory had had ample opportunity to watch the bricklayers at work so he found no difficulty in putting up an adequate performance, and he was extremely thankful for being given this more skilled but much lighter task. Then, in the afternoon three days later, the Camp Commandant sent for Malacou.
That evening the occultist gave Gregory an account of the meeting. The Commandant was Oberfьhrer Loehritz, a gutterbred brute with a rat-trap mouth and eyes like stones, who had forced his way up to the rank of an S.S. Brigadier by the ruthlessness with which, under Heydrich, he had cleaned up the Jews and subversive elements in Czechoslovakia. Although the slave-workers were reduced by semi-starvation to a general state of servile obedience, at times small groups of them, driven to desperation, mutinied. Having learned of the warning Malacou had given the murdered Capo, it had occurred to Loehritz that the occultist might be made use of to give him warning of such outbreaks.
Malacou had replied that, though he might be able to give warning should a large-scale mutiny be contemplated, it would be next to impossible, owing to the vast number of prisoners in the camp, to predict attacks on individual Capos, which in most cases arose spontaneously as a result of some special piece of brutality. He had then offered to read the Commandant's hand.
Loehritz had consented and had been very impressed by Malacou's insight into his past; but the occultist had cunningly said that he could tell little about the Oberfьhrer’s future unless he drew his horoscope, and for that he would need sidereal tables. Like most primitive types, the Commandant believed in every sort of superstition and ways of attempting to foretell the future; so he had agreed to send for several works on astrology, a list of which Malacou had given him.
A week later Loehritz sent for Malacou again and gave him the books. Malacou then said that he would need time off to prepare the horoscope and that as he was not good at figures he wanted Gregory as his assistant, to check his calculations. This led to their being allowed to remain in the hut during the afternoons; so they had achieved their first objective of getting an easier life for themselves. But Malacou did not give much time to drawing the horoscope, and they employed themselves on a new suggestion made by Gregory.
His idea
was that, during their dual act when Malacou pretended to go into a trance, it would be a great advantage if he could supplement the thoughts he conveyed by, instead of muttering gibberish, giving straight tips in Turkish. Malacou agreed that this would be a big help; so during the week they were supposed to be working on the horoscope they spent most of the time in Gregory memorizing certain Turkish phrases.
Early in November Malacou reported the horoscope to be ready and spent an afternoon explaining it to the Commandant. Now that winter was about to set in it appeared certain that the war would go on into the spring and this was confirmed by further astral calculations that Malacou had been able to make after receiving the astrological textbooks. He told Loehritz this and that he would not be Commandant at Sachsenhausen when the war ended but would soon be given another post. This was in accordance with the horoscope but he did not add that Loehritz would be sacked from Sachsenhausen and hanged for his brutalities in the following August. Instead, as Himmler was the Commandant's Chief, he predicted that the Reichsfьhrer would succeed Hitler and that after a period of difficulty, which should not last more than three months, Loehritz would be given an excellent job under Himmler supervising the return of displaced persons to their own countries.
Loehritz, who had been dreading the end of the war, was naturally delighted. Then, in order to secure a continuance of an easy time for himself and Gregory, Malacou suggested that the Commandant should get for him the birth dates of his senior subordinates and, by means of drawing their horoscopes, he would check up on their reliability. As the S.S. leaders habitually spied on one another Loehritz thought this an excellent idea; so the afternoons in the hut continued and Gregory was able to make good progress in learning Turkish.
But mid- November brought them a nasty setback. Malacou's prediction that Loehritz would, be removed came about. Rumour had it that Himmler had learned that he was diverting a part of the funds-received from the brick fields to his own pocket and had reduced him to the rank of Sturmbahnfьhrer any case he went, regretted by none, except Malacou and Gregory, because with his departure the easier time they had secured for themselves abruptly ceased.
The new Commandant's name was Kaindl and he held the lower rank of Standartenfьhrer. They saw him when he made an inspection of the camp. He was a very different type from Loehritz-a fat, jovial-looking man with shrewd eyes and a not unkindly face. But Gregory and Malacou regarded him gloomily, with the thought that if they were to regain their afternoons off they had all their work to do again.
During the month that followed they had good reason for their depression. Winter was upon them; for much of the time the sky was leaden and often it rained for hours at a stretch, while when the sky held only drifting clouds a bitter wind blew from the north-east; but, rain or shine, they were herded out to work as usual.
Gregory had never given up racking his brains for a possible way of escaping from the camp and he thought out a dozen wild schemes, but had to abandon them all as suicidal. The least desperately dangerous ones all required the help of a companion; but he dared trust no-one except Malacou, and the occultist flatly refused to join him or become involved. Having deliberately had a sentence passed on himself as a criminal in order to escape the Ersatzgruppen, the last thing he meant to do was to prejudice his chances of remaining where he was till the war was over. But he stoutly maintained that another opportunity would arise to better their situation.
Throughout this period the prisoners woke every day in darkness. By the light of half a dozen oil lamps they wolfed their Linden tea and thin porridge, then were marched out to the building site… Their only protection- from the cold was torn and bloodstained Army greatcoats, taken from casualties,, with which they had been issued; their faces became a greyish blue and their hands and feet throbbed madly from chilblains.
When frost and snow made bricklaying no longer possible they were put on to carting heavy tree trunks and sawing them into logs; but whatever the labour the days seemed interminable.
When darkness fell they were marched back to the hut and huddled round two small wood burning stoves, which was all the heating provided. Then, at seven o'clock, the oil lamps were put out and, suffering the pangs of hunger, coughing and spitting from colds and sometimes moaning from the pains of frost-bite, they somehow got through another long, miserable night. Every week one or more of them was taken to the hospital to die, and those who survived had become gaunt from privation and hardship.
Yet they were infinitely better off than the political prisoners; for these had no lamps to give them a little light during a few of the long hours of darkness and no stoves to give them any heat at all. Even in summer, owing to starvation and brutality, few of them survived life in the camp for more than six months, and now a thousand or more of them were dying every week. And Sachsenhausen was only one of the Nazi murder camps. Auschwitz was much larger. There were also Buchenwald, Dachau, Belsen and some twenty others in which the Devil inspired Hitler had decreed a terrible death for so many men, women and children that, had their corpses been stacked in a pile, they would have made a mound higher than St. Paul 's Cathedral.
The grim life Gregory led had made him leaner than ever, but his wiry frame was extraordinarily tough and he took all the care of himself he could; so, although he suffered severely from the cold, he managed to keep in good health and he endeavoured to buoy up his spirits with Malacou's prediction that his chances of living out the war were good.
It was on December 17th that there occurred the new break for them that Malacou had so confidently predicted. To their surprise, at half past seven that evening their Blockfьhrer roused them from their bunks and said that the Commandant had sent for them. As they slept in all their clothes they were already dressed, so at once left the hut and were marched to the Headquarters building. Since discipline up to any punishment short of death could be inflicted on the prisoners by the
S.S. Lieutenants in charge of each section, it seemed obvious that Malacou had been summoned in connection with his occult activities; but Gregory had never been sent for by the previous Commandant, so why he had been included in the order he could not imagine.
Standartenfьhrer Kaindl was still in his office. Having run his sharp grey eyes over them he said, `When Oberfьhrer Loehritz handed over to me, he happened to mention that among the convicts in E Section there were a couple of mystics.'
Fixing his glance on Malacou he went on. `I gather that you, No. 875, told him about his past with surprising accuracy. I also understand that with the aid of No. 1076 you give sort of sйances, during which you predict the course the war will take. Personally, I do not believe in such nonsense, and am convinced that it is done by some form of trickery. But on Christmas night I am giving a party and it occurred to me that it would be amusing to have you over as a cabaret turn. You have ten days to polish up your way of putting your stuff over, and I shall expect a good show or it will be the worse for you.'
It was Gregory who replied at once. 'Herr Standartenftihrer, we shall be honoured to entertain your guests; but permit me to remark that the predictions made by my friend No. 875 are not nonsense. For example, he foretold the defeat of the British airborne landings at Arnhem several days before it occurred; and if you can spare a few minutes now I am confident that we can convince you of our bona fides.'
The chubby-faced Commandant suddenly smiled. `All right. Go ahead then.'
Malacou sat down in a chair, Gregory made passes at him, he closed his eyes, his head fell forward on his chest and, after a short period of silence he began to mutter. As they had come unprepared for this session Gregory could only hope for the best and concentrate with all his might on reading Malacou's thoughts. To his surprise and consternation, for he could not believe it to be the least likely, the occultist conveyed to him particulars of a great German victory in the coming week. Yet while he was still hesitating whether to risk announcing it, Malacou confirmed the thoughts he had sent out by a few phrases in Turkish.
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Seeing nothing else for it, Gregory turned to the Commandant and said, `Great news, Herr Standartenfьhrer. The Wehrmacht is about to launch a major offensive. It will break through the Allied front in Belgium and inflict great losses on the Americans.'
The Commandant grinned. `That seems highly improbable; but I hope you are right. Anyway you have committed yourselves. If you are wrong I'll have you put on special fatigues for a month; but if you are right you shall enjoy as good a dinner on Christmas Day as I have myself.'
Swiftly, Gregory seized on the possibility of reward. He said that they would be able to give a far more interesting demonstration on Christmas night if they were given the names and birth dates of several of the guests, and that time to make a study of their astrological significance was essential. He added that Malacou and he were half starved and half frozen, so could not possibly give of their best unless they had better food and a warm place in which to work.
At that the Commandant laughed and said that they were a typical pair of confidence men with wits trained to seize on every chance of getting something for nothing. But apparently it amused him to humour them. He said that he would provide them with certain information and that he would have them put in a heated prison cell where, for the next eight days, they could work things out. Decent food would be sent in to them, but if on Christmas night they failed to produce the goods woe betide them.
The interview resulted in their spending the following week in what was, for them, unbelievable luxury. They were taken to be deloused then given a cell in the headquarters used for S.S. officers who, having committed some misdemeanor, had been placed under arrest. There were iron beds with mattresses to sleep on, a table at which to work and meals were brought to them which, although plain, were of the sort that during the past months they had spent hours dreaming about.
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