‘And there’s the difference,’ Steve said, as he and his mates parked the Jeep and joined the promenade. ‘They kill their prisoners and torture them to death, we live and let live.’
‘Maybe they don’t know what’s been going on,’ one of his new mates suggested.
‘They couldn’t be off knowing,’ Steve said. And as if to prove him right, the wind suddenly changed direction, the scent of magnolia was blown away and the park was full of the ghastly stench of the camp. ‘Oh God yes. They knew. And they didn’t do anything about it.’
Pity and anger again, stirring in him like something alive and struggling to be free. ‘I can’t bear this,’ he said. ‘Let’s go back and have a drink.’
The next morning they all had sore heads but there was still work to be done and that day the reporters started to arrive. It was almost a comfort to the army to see somebody else being shocked. They watched with satisfaction as men from the BBC prepared to film the burial of the dead, for the huge pile of corpses was only half cleared and another mass grave had been dug to accommodate the rest.
Dusty and two of the cooks came out to watch the cameras at work.
‘It don’t seem fair to film them, poor buggers,’ one of the cooks said, as the bodies were shovelled towards the grave. ‘Ain’t they suffered enough?’
But Dusty understood the necessity. ‘They got to film them,’ he said. ‘Otherwise no one’ll believe it’s happened. I wouldn’t’ve done, if I hadn’t seen it for mesself. Would you? No. Well then. People have got to see with their own eyes, like we’re doing. There’s got to be a record.’
‘I seen enough,’ the cook said, turning away. ‘Come on, you lot. Let’s be ’aving yer. We got people to feed.’
That morning Steve and the Prof started work in the hospital huts. ‘Start with the women’s hut,’ Captain Kennedy instructed. ‘Some of them haven’t been interviewed. It’s getting a bit complicated now the MO’s shifting them about.’
For a hospital, it was pretty basic. But at least it was cleaner than the other huts had been – there was even a faint whiff of disinfectant – and at least the patients had a bunk to themselves and a blanket to lie on and were obviously being kept clean. But they were very sick and it took almost as long to coax information from them as it had done in the filth of the men’s hut.
It wasn’t until he’d patiently filled in seven or eight forms that Steve saw the significance of the date he’d been writing at the head of each paper.
‘I’ve just realised something,’ he said to the Prof as they walked on to the next bunk. ‘It’s my birthday. I’ve come of age.’
The Prof knew the right English response. ‘Many happy returns,’ he said.
And as Steve was thinking how incongruous it was, another English voice suddenly spoke from the next bunk. ‘May the next one be in peacetime.’
It was one of the prisoners and this one was sitting up, with her back propped against the upright between the bunks and her knees bent to accommodate her length. She was a tall woman and, even in her present state, they could see she was young and had been pretty, with high cheekbones and large well-spaced blue eyes.
‘I am Hannah,’ she said to Steve, still speaking in English and she smiled at the Professor. ‘Him you vill not need.’
‘She speaks better English than I do,’ the Prof agreed, patting her hand but he spoke to her in German to ask if she was well and she answered him in the same language, coughing into a piece of rag.
Her fragility worried Steve. She seemed too gentle to survive in this gross place. But he asked her name and religion, wrote down her last address, and then ventured to discover how she had learnt English.
‘I vas teach,’ she explained. And corrected herself, ‘Teacher. I am sorry. It is a long time I do not speak your language.’
There was so much he wanted to know about and he sensed that she might be willing to tell him, if he didn’t tire her too much. The Prof had moved on to the next bunk, so he stayed where he was, perched on his uncomfortable stool and asked if she wouldn’t mind talking to him.
No, she would not mind at all. What did he wish to talk about?
So much, he hardly knew where to begin. ‘Have you been here long?’
Again that sweet smile, lighting her blue eyes. ‘For ever, I think.’
‘It must have been dreadful.’
Sadness clouded her face. ‘Yes. It has been dreadful.’
‘Did they starve you deliberately?’
The answer was calm and all the more terrible for that. ‘Oh yes. They meant to kill us all, you see. It vas planned. There vere to be no more Jews. Did you not know?’
He was impressed by her composure and horrified by what she’d just said. ‘We heard rumours,’ he told her. ‘I never imagined it could possibly be anything like this though. I mean, this is beyond belief.’
‘This is peaceful,’ she corrected him. ‘Now ve are fed. Ve have medicine. Nobody beat us.’
‘Beat you?’
‘Oh yes,’ she said patiently.
‘Who beat you?’
‘The SS. The girl, Irma Grese. She especially.’
The commandant’s plump female, Steve remembered. ‘But she’s young. I mean she’s not much older than me.’
‘You think the young are not cruel,’ she said, coughing again. ‘I tell you about Fraulein Grese. She kick us and hit us mit clubs. A dog she had. You have seen it, jal. If ve fell, she say to the dog, “Bite. Bite. Bite the dirty Jews.’”
Steve thought of the plump, pink cheeks of Fraulein Grese, the thick fair hair, the bright smile. ‘She’ll pay for it,’ he promised grimly.
But Hannah shrugged her thin shoulders. ‘Vhat payment could she make’, she asked, ‘that vould undo one blow? Vould ve come back from the dead because she is killed?’
‘You don’t forgive her, surely?’
‘I vill not play their game of hatred,’ she said. ‘Hatred hurts the hater.’
‘But to be so cruel. That was evil.’
She considered for a long while, leaning back against the post. ‘She is ignorant,’ she said at last. ‘A foolish girl. She is poor, probably. A poor, ignorant, foolish girl, and to her they say, “Come mit us. Good uniform ve give you. Good food ve give you. Important ve make you. You guard the dirty Jews.” And here she comes and ve are dirty Jews. You see how dirty ve are. No vater to vash, rags to vear, no hair. Inhuman you are mit no hair. Dirty Jews. So naturalich, she hit us.’
It was impossible to believe that she could be so forgiving, so understanding, after all she must have seen and endured.
‘I’ve got to move on now,’ he said, and his voice revealed how regretful he was. ‘May I come and talk to you again?’
‘That I should like,’ she said.
It was an extraordinary way to spend a twenty-first birthday.
In the next few days, Steve discovered that it doesn’t take long to become institutionalised. By his fourth day in the camp, he had developed a curiously lethargic patience, as if nothing mattered except the work he was doing, as if there were no world beyond the gates of the camp, as if he no longer had any will of his own. On the fifth day, the last of the 11th Armoured pulled out and he and Dusty were left behind with the military police and the medical teams, to work on and wait for orders. But the days passed and the orders didn’t come and although he should have been concerned about it, it didn’t worry him. From time to time he remembered his mother’s hurtful letter and Barbara’s glowing account of the pre-fab, and knew that when he was back with his unit again he would have to write to them and let them know what he thought, but for the moment they were no more than echoes, and trivial compared to the daily reality of what was happening in the charnel house of the camp.
The obscene pile of corpses was cleared and buried but there were still other burials every day for, as the MO had predicted, most of the prisoners had gone too far to be saved. The place still stunk but the survivors were fed, the sick made marginal i
mprovements, the huts were gradually cleaned, new latrines dug, new medicines delivered, and they could all see that order was gradually being restored.
Routines were a necessary comfort. Steve got into the habit of visiting Hannah twice a day. Her good sense and kindness sustained him and it encouraged him to watch her gradually getting better.
Sometimes she was too tired to say much and then he simply sat beside her and told her the latest news of the war. But sometimes she spoke at length about her family and friends and the school she’d taught in and what a reward it was to see children learn. He told her he’d gone straight from school to the army.
‘So young,’ she sighed. ‘Your life you have before you.’
But he couldn’t think about the future. The present was too pressing. ‘I still can’t understand how this could have happened,’ he said. ‘I see so many things, every day, awful, sad things, and they don’t make sense to me.’
‘You should write them down,’ she advised. ‘Writing makes clear.’
So he scrounged a notebook from one of the orderlies and began to jot things down – the number of people buried, the grief of the rabbi reciting the Kaddish at the graveside, the German proverb ‘one louse, one death’, the discovery that there was no grass growing in the camp because the prisoners had eaten it. But the thing he returned to over and over again was Hannah’s refusal to seek revenge.
‘I cannot understand her,’ he wrote. ‘If it had been me I would have been screaming for revenge. That vile commandant should be shot and so should Irma Grese. Evil should be punished. I used to think we were born good but the longer I stay in this camp the more I doubt it. Tomorrow I shall ask Hannah what she thinks.’
But the next morning, when he strolled across to her hut, he found another patient lying in her bunk. He was quite annoyed to find she’d been moved and went off at once to look for a medical orderly.
There was one down at the far end of the hut, washing a very old lady and when he saw who was standing before him, he looked embarrassed and ducked his head.
‘Ah yes,’ he said. ‘Hannah. Look I’m ever so sorry about this. She died in the night.’
Died? She couldn’t have. She was getting better.
‘She had TB,’ the orderly explained. ‘It was a haemorrhage. There was nothing we could do.’
Grief rose in Steve’s throat like a tidal wave. He had to get out. Now. Anywhere. Or he’d be crying in front of this man, weeping in front of all these people. He ran from the hut, blindly, his boots kicking the supports, hurled himself into the sunshine, ran and ran, away – he didn’t care where – until he reached the wire and had to stop because there was nowhere else to go. By then he was crying aloud, weeping for all the deaths he’d seen and endured and never mourned – for Taffy gunned down on that first day and for all the other mates he’d lost, good men, cut to pieces and gone for ever – for the tankies burnt to cinders – for Betty and all the others in that rocket – for Hannah who forgave her enemies and was dead because of them – hot, terrible tears that made him groan with the anguish of too much grief held in check for far, far too long. He was out of control but too wild with weeping to care. When Dusty came wandering over to see what was going on, he was beyond speech. But his old mate was a sensible soul, despite his rough ways, and had seen enough grief in the long campaign to know when to make himself scarce. He simply patted his oppo on the shoulder and left him to get on with it.
The afternoon wore away, the shadows lengthened, and at last the weeping was done. He dried his face on his sleeve, lit himself a cigarette and, after the first few comforting drags, stood up. He felt totally exhausted.
Dusty was walking across the compound towards him and there was a redcap with him.
‘We got a message,’ Dusty said, but checked before he passed it on. ‘You all right?’
‘Yes,’ Steve said wearily, and asked, without much interest, ‘What is it?’
‘You’re in luck,’ the redcap said. ‘You’re getting out of here. Your lot are at Fallingsbostel. We’ve just got through to them. There’s transport coming over for you at 09.00 hours tomorrow.’
‘Back to the real world,’ Dusty said, when the MP had marched away again. ‘An’ about time too. My ol’ lady’ll be wondering where I’ve got to. I ain’t sent her a letter for three weeks.’
Nor have I, Steve thought. I haven’t written to anyone. But he was too numb with grief to be troubled by conscience about it. I’ll write and explain when we’re back with the division, he thought. She’ll understand.
‘I shall be glad to get shot of this place,’ Dusty said.
Steve looked round at the awful compound, at the mound where so many pitiful corpses were buried, at the hut where Hannah had died. ‘I don’t think I shall ever get shot of it,’ he said. ‘It’ll be with me till the day I die.’
Chapter Thirty-One
The last three weeks had been the longest and most anxious that Barbara had ever known. As the days passed and the letter she worried for didn’t arrive, she withdrew deeper and deeper into herself. She went to work, as usual, and did her best to be cheerful to her passengers; she took her share of the housework; and true to her vow, she was polite to her in-laws and answered her mother’s letters religiously. But her heart was a lead weight and there was little joy in her world.
After the first shock of the official notification had passed, Bob endured the long wait in his usual patient way but that was because he was afraid that a second letter would tell them the news they didn’t want to hear and he preferred to go on in ignorance for as long as he could. At least that left him with a little hope to cling to.
Heather had found a kind of hope too, but hers was superstitious and private. It would be his twenty-first birthday soon. If he was alive – and he had to be alive, she simply wouldn’t accept the possibility that he could be dead – then that would be the day he’d write to her. The letter would come that morning. ‘Dear Mum, Just to say I’m thinking of you …’ the way he’d written last year when he was on Salisbury plain. The belief kept her going. Even if he’d received that last awful letter of hers – and oh she did wish she hadn’t sent it – he would write to her on his birthday. He was bound to. But the hope was too flimsy to prevent her from being miserably jealous of any letter that was sent to Barbara.
‘Two more again this morning,’ she said to Bob, when the third pair arrived. ‘Nothing from the War Ministry and she gets letters from everywhere else, every damned day.’
‘Every other day,’ Bob corrected mildly, as he put on his cap.
‘Nothing from the War Ministry,’ Heather went on. ‘Every day that damned postwoman comes up that damned path an’ every day I think maybe this is it, maybe they’ve found him.’ Her eyes were glistening with tears in her fierce, taut face.
He put an arm round her shoulders. ‘I know.’
She was thinking of her Dear John letter again, and that made her too irritable to respond. ‘No you don’t. Nobody knows. Day after day. It’s not right. Why should she have letters and we don’t?’
‘They’re from her mother and her aunt,’ he said. ‘You don’t begrudge her that surely. A bit of comfort.’
But in fact, although Becky Bosworth wrote briefly and more or less to the point, Maudie Nelson’s letters were no comfort to Barbara at all. After the kindness of the first one, they’d degenerated into gossip – Jimmy had been ‘ever so bad with the croup’, Mrs Cromer’s bunions were worse, Vic Castlemain was ‘working for a jewler and doin ever so well’. Now they were simply a regular reminder of how far apart they’d grown. We got nothing in common no more, Barbara thought sadly. I hardly know what to say to her. She don’t even follow what’s going on in the war.
If it hadn’t been for Aunt Sis and the General Election, it would have been an impossible time. But Aunt Sis was a life-saver. There was plenty to do and she made sure that Barbara was involved in all of it, calling for her after work and leaving notes for her at the garage. Ba
rely a day went by without a job being found. There were letters to write, leaflets to draw up, agendas to compose, and on the first Saturday in April there was a public meeting in Bellington South at which she had to make her first speech as parliamentary candidate.
Mr Craxton looked out a booklet on how to compose such a speech and walked to her flat to deliver it in person. It was his first outing since his heart attack and he still looked frail, so she thanked him for it very kindly and said she was sure it would be invaluable. But when she came to read the thing, it was worse than useless.
‘I can’t write a speech this way,’ she said to Barbara later that evening, and quoted, ‘Opening proposition. Development. Further development. Concluding paragraph. It’ud end up dull as ditch water. No one’ud listen to a word of it.’
Barbara’s mind was still sharp, anxious though she was. ‘What do you really want to talk about?’ she asked.
There was no doubt about the answer to that. ‘The welfare state. That’s what this election’s going to be about. The welfare state an’ the five giants we got to conquer.’
‘Well thass it, then,’ Barbara told her. ‘You’ve written the opening proposition already.’
It took them until two in the morning to write the speech and even then Sis wasn’t completely happy with it. But it had taken their minds off their worries and it turned out to be a huge success, unfinished or no. After the meeting she and Barbara and the Bellington South management committee went cheerfully off to the nearest pub trailing half the audience with them. The debate continued until closing time, and Barbara was in the thick of it and glad to be there.
It was only on the rare occasions when she was at home and on her own that her misery was too much for her. Sometimes she took out her precious shoebox and reread some of Steve’s letters, so that she could hear his voice again. But the comfort they brought was complicated by an underlying anguish, because so many of them led her straight to the situation she was in now.
Avalanche of Daisies Page 38
