“He got the message,” one of the others added.
When Aachen heard that, he stopped running and walked naked into the bunk area. Every single prisoner was wide awake because of the escape alarm and in the commotion no one really paid him much attention. When he finally got back to his bunk, he collapsed in it. Knowing he was safe, at least for tonight, he let the darkness take him.
20.
Aachen only got out of his bed over the next three days to piss and shit. His piss was bloody for the first day but cleared after the second. Once, he pressed his hands against his body, checking to see if there was anything broken. Nothing was. Corporal Knaup, who bunked several feet away, brought Aachen food and drink. He also covered for him during the count, telling the Canadians Aachen had relapsed into some kind of disease he had caught in North Africa. Knaup didn’t specify the disease only to say it could be contagious to those who hadn’t been exposed to it. A scout came the first day to double-check but didn’t approach Aachen’s bed. He seemed satisfied with the story and the Canadians left Aachen alone.
On the third day Knaup tried to get Aachen to leave his bunk and told him not to feel sorry for himself, but Aachen waved him away.
“Thanks for the food, Knaup, but leave me be. I need to sleep.”
Knaup tried to argue further but Aachen snapped at him. “I said leave me be!” A wave of pain rolled through his body when he shouted and he fell back in his bed, groaning.
Knaup sat on the bunk across from him. “I should get the doctor. He’ll help.”
“Please, Knaup. No doctor. Not now. Just let me sleep and I’ll be fine.”
Knaup nodded and stood up. “Okay, I’ll let you sleep. But if you don’t get up tomorrow morning, I’m bringing Doctor Kleinjeld.”
Aachen shut his eyes. He could feel Knaup still standing over him, watching him. So he pretended to fall asleep. And soon he stopped pretending.
When he awoke the next morning he felt a bit better apart from sensing that Knaup was hovering over him.
“Please, Knaup. I’m fine.”
“You look like shit,” Sergeant Neumann said.
Surprised, Aachen opened his eyes, a headache throbbing behind them. He moved to sit up but groaned with pain. There were yellow, black, and purple bruises all over his back, sides, and chest, as well as a rash of rope-burn around his neck and spots of dried blood on his face.
He stared at the sergeant. “I thought you were with the Canadians.”
“They let me go this morning since I had nothing to offer them.”
“But they put you isolation, didn’t they?”
“Only for a few nights. They wanted to make a point about me not having enough information about Mueller.”
“How did you sleep? Good?”
Neumann smiled. “It was glorious. The Canadians may think isolation is some kind of punishment but having my own room and my own bed to myself for the first time since I was born it seems gave me some of the greatest nights I’ve had in a long time. Even better than that night in Berlin before I shipped out to North Africa.”
“You don’t say.”
“I’m telling you, boy. A night that would make your innocent mind shocked beyond all comprehension. Still, it was nothing compared to the sensational nights I had sleeping alone in the Canadians’ cooler. Even with all the alarms going off the first night, it was still wonderful. If I die tomorrow, I’ll be happy.”
“I’m glad you had a good time off. My past few nights have not been so … entertaining.”
“I can see that,” Neumann said with a nod. “You better get cleaned up before this count. They’re not going to buy you being too contagious for much longer. Especially due to the escape.”
“Who made the run?” Aachen asked.
“I’ll tell you later, but first let’s get you cleaned up and dressed.”
Neumann leaned forward, grabbed Aachen around the shoulders, and pulled him up to a sitting position. The corporal groaned in pain, but managed to get up. A few seconds later, the sergeant pulled him to his feet.
Aachen wavered for a moment, almost passing out, but the sergeant hung onto him. “You’re not going to throw up, are you?” Neumann asked.
“I should be fine, just get me under a shower.”
“Right,” Neumann said. Slowly, he guided Aachen to the latrine area. There weren’t many prisoners around at the moment—most of them were at mess. The few that were left behind didn’t dare say anything in front of Neumann about Aachen’s condition.
“So what the hell happened to you?” Neumann asked as Aachen started to undress. The corporal moved his limbs and body gingerly, wincing in pain as he did so. While he removed the rest of his clothing, he told the sergeant about the attack in the shower and how they tried to hang him.
The sergeant whistled. “You get any looks at the men while you were fighting back?”
Aachen shook his head. “They masked their faces.”
“What about their voices? You recognize any of them that way?”
“They only spoke with their fists. Except for their commander, that is. Big bastard though. Kind of like you, except meaner,” Aachen said.
“I can be mean, you know.”
“Not this kind of mean. This guy was a total assface. He acted like I was some kind of mouse and he was a cat who had brought me home to play with.”
“But the mouse fought back, I’ll bet.”
“I got a few hits in. And I managed to get his name,” Aachen said with a small smile forming on his face. “A Sergeant Konrad. He’s the one who replaced Heidfield as hut leader.”
Neumann whistled. “Are you sure about that? We’ve never met this Konrad fellow.”
“I made an assumption and called him Konrad,” Aachen said with a shrug. “It was obvious by his reaction that I was on the mark. He didn’t like that and gave me this.” Aachen pointed to his split cheek.
“You didn’t happen to notice anything else about them?”
“A few also had tattoos,” Aachen added.
Neumann’s eyes went wide. “What kind of tattoos?”
“Mostly they were SS tattoos, the blood type under the arm,” Aachen said.
“That’s not good,” Neumann shook his head. “And some had other types of tattoos?”
Aachen nodded but waved the sergeant away when he pushed for more answers. “Please, Sergeant. Let me take a shower. I’ll answer more of your questions later.”
“Okay, Aachen, get yourself cleaned up. At least get the dried blood off your face. You look terrible.”
Once Neumann got Aachen settled in a shower, he went back to get the corporal’s uniform. By the time he had returned, Aachen was getting up from his knees, shoving one of the wooden pallets back against the wall.
“You lose something, Aachen?”
“Not me, someone else.” Aachen said, opening his hand to show the sergeant the object he picked up off the shower room floor. “I believe one of them dropped it when they were beating me.”
Neumann leaned closer to look at it. It was an oval piece of gold about two centimetres in width and resembling a laurel wreath. At the top of the badge was an eagle standing atop a swastika. Below the swastika was a cast of a submarine that lay across the length of the oval.
“Whoever dropped this might as well have been wearing a sign,” Neumann said. He paused and then looked keenly at the corporal. “This is the other tattoo you were talking about. A sailor tattoo.”
Aachen nodded.
“You know who this person is.”
Aachen nodded again. “Sergeant Konrad I can understand because of the type of person he is,” Aachen said. “But I did not expect it from this person. I thought he was honourable, and…” Aachen trailed off, the anger welling in his voice and face.
“Excellent. Anger and revenge are us
eful ways of dealing with this. Use them when you need them,” Neumann said, his eyes staring straightforward. “But at the moment, let’s just focus on what’s going on here.” Neumann stepped back after finishing the buttons on Aachen’s shirt. The corporal looked exhausted and the bruise on his face would be questioned by the Canadians if they saw it. He could say he got it in a sparring match that got out of hand, and if he wrapped a handkerchief around his neck, the way many of the tank crews from North Africa did, he could hide the rope burn without looking out of place.
“Did you learn anything else while I was gone?” Neumann asked.
Aachen walked over to the sinks and then drank by cupping water in one hand. “Doctor Kleinjeld is afraid.”
“Afraid? Why would you say that?”
Aachen told the sergeant about his conversation with the doctor and how Kleinjeld refused to go with him to confirm Aachen’s report.
“So the man has a healthy respect of the Gestapo—nothing wrong with that.”
“True, but I think there might be something else. I don’t know, he just seemed a little too frightened for my taste.”
“Okay, maybe you have something there. We’ll file it away. Anything else?”
Aachen told Neumann about how Sergeant Heidfield just happened to run into him on the track and how he started asking about Mueller.
“Why would he care about Mueller?”
“He said he could profit from the information, although I can’t figure out how that could happen.”
“People will buy schnapps from Heidfield, as well as information for gambling, but I don’t see why they would buy information about Mueller. It makes no sense.”
“That’s what I thought. That’s why I told you.”
“Good catch, Aachen. We’ll keep that information on file as well, and a little closer to the surface than the Kleinjeld information. Heidfield may be friendly and a good supporter of the men in many ways, but he always seems to be out for himself and can’t be completely trusted.”
Neumann rubbed his hands together. “Okay, Klaus, I think we’re ready for this morning’s count. If the Canadians ask about your face—”
“—I’ll tell them it happened in a sparring match that got out of hand.”
“Excellent. And good work on the doctor and Heidfield. Whether they have anything to do with Mueller’s death is to be determined yet.”
“So we are still investigating what happened to Captain Mueller?”
“Of course. That hasn’t changed. In fact, the case has expanded into new territory.”
“New territory? I don’t understand. Where has the case expanded?”
“Ahh, you were mostly unconscious for the last couple of days and you have no idea what has happened.”
“I do know that someone escaped. The alarm distracted my attackers, which is why I was able to get away.”
“But you have no idea who escaped, do you?”
Aachen shook his head. And when Sergeant Neumann told him, Aachen almost passed out.
“Holy shit,” was all he could say.
21.
Even though it was several days after the escape, there were more Canadian guards than normal during the count and they weren’t in a happy mood. They kept the prisoners in formation for much longer than usual, double-, triple-, and quadruple-checking to ensure that no other prisoners had escaped. It didn’t help matters that in every hut there was a group established whose job it was to harry the Canadians as they counted.
These prisoners had a variety of strategies to annoy the Canadians. They gave incorrect names when asked, pretended they couldn’t speak English, and moved around in their lines, appearing at another location in the group after they were already counted. And since the Canadians were already frustrated because of the escape, these prisoners put a little more into their efforts.
So when a guard walked past Aachen during the count, he gave a hard stare at the injury on the corporal’s face, the spot where he was struck by the hangman’s fist.
“What the hell happened to you?” the Canadian asked, looking at his clipboard. “Says here you were sick the last few days, but looks like it was something else.” This guard was smaller than most, only an inch or two taller than Aachen. He also seemed older, somewhere in his mid-fifties rather than mid-forties, which was the average age for a Veterans Guard. Still, the Canadian looked tough, his nose bent at several angles as if it had been broken many times. One of his eyes seemed to be made of glass, his hands had scars all over the knuckles and backs, and both his ears looked like tiny pieces of cauliflower.
Aachen looked confused for a moment, and then looked at Neumann. The sergeant leaned over to speak for him.
“My colleague was training and got injured when one of sparring matches got out of hand,” Neumann said in English.
“He looks like he got the shit beat out of him, if you ask me,” the guard said, checking off his count on his clipboard. “What kind of match was he training for?”
“My colleague is a wrestler. He has an upcoming match in the next few days. Very important, but then the training got out of hand.”
“Yeah, you said that.” The Canadian leaned left and right to look at Aachen’s ears. They too were like cauliflowers, but not as pronounced as the older guard’s. “Okay, you’re a wrestler all right, I can tell by the ears, but that’s not a wrestling injury by a long shot. Don’t bullshit a bullshitter. What really happened to him?”
“Well, when I mean the sparring match got out of hand, I mean my colleague was training with someone he had beaten earlier and this person was still angry about that. So during the training, he struck my colleague here. No harm done, though.”
“Looks like plenty of harm done to me. You sure you don’t want to file some kind of complaint?”
“No, no,” said Neumann. “No complaint is necessary. We wish to file nothing.”
“Gonna handle it yourself?”
Neumann and Aachen said nothing, so after a moment, the Canadian shook his head. “Okay, if you’re not going to file a complaint, I can do nothing for you. However, I would recommend he get that checked out.”
“Yes sir, we are going to the doctor’s right after the count. Thank you for your concern.”
“Fuck off with the niceties, Fritz, I work for a living,” the Canadian said sharply. Then he tapped his clipboard on Aachen’s chest and lowered his voice. “And if you are going to handle it yourselves, don’t go overboard. Just give him back what he gave you and leave it at that, you hear me? And next time, don’t have someone lie about you being sick or I’ll stick all of you in the cooler for two weeks.”
Neumann nodded. Aachen as well. Even though he didn’t understand English, he got the gist of what was said and knew a nod was expected. The Canadian continued on with his count. By the time the prisoner tally ended for Neumann and Aachen’s hut, they were an hour late for their time at breakfast. And though they could still get fed, Neumann suggested they skip it. Considering the identity of the prisoner who had escaped that night, Aachen was highly inclined to agree.
Aachen made to move towards the legionnaire hut because he assumed that’s where the sergeant wanted to go but Neumann held him. Instead, they made their way out of the barracks towards the fence and the path that encircled the interior perimeter of the camp.
“Is this really necessary, Sergeant?” Aachen asked.
“I just want to see,” replied Neumann.
“The Canadians will have the holes in the wire repaired already.”
“I am quite aware of that but I just want to see where he escaped.”
Aachen sighed but walked beside the sergeant as they made their way around the track. It was a bright, beautiful day, the sun shining in a sky of blue that stretched on seemingly forever. Light clouds drifted here and there and even the wind decided to take a break today.
Yet, due to the escape four nights ago, most of the German prisoners remained inside after their counts, in or near their bunks, at the mess, or in workshops and classrooms. There were only a few who walked about as well as a couple of groups playing a game of football at one of the makeshift fields.
Most of the people outside were Canadians. Patrols on the outside of the wire had doubled and the scouts roaming around the camp now patrolled in groups of two or three, rather than by themselves. Germans who were found outside were questioned repeatedly, sometimes in a belligerent manner. The escape had angered the Canadians and pissed off Canadians were very unpleasant folks to deal with.
Neumann and Aachen were stopped by guards a number of times, questioned, and then released when they explained that they were only out walking the trail for exercise. Deliberately, they did not stop, nor even slow their pace at the point where the wire had been cut. They did however turn and look at the scene. As Aachen guessed, the fence had been repaired with new wire. There was a small group of Canadian guards gathered on the outside of the fence by the repair. They glowered at Neumann and Aachen as the two passed by.
About twenty metres from where the hole had been cut in the fence, the sergeant made a small hum in his throat.
“You noticed something, Sergeant?” Aachen asked.
“I’m not sure. Obviously this was the location of the escape but something about it bothers me,” said Neumann.
“The escapee?”
“Yes, that bothers me, of course. But there’s something else. Something about the landscape around where he escaped.”
“It’s nothing but an empty, open field. A seemingly endless open field.”
“That’s the problem. There’s really nothing out there in that field, absolutely nothing. So why haven’t they caught him already? It’s been three days; he should have been found by now. They should have found him a couple of hours after the sun rose the day after he escaped. His trail would have been plain to see. And there really is nowhere to hide,” said Neumann, stroking his chin.
The Traitors of Camp 133 Page 17
