by Sarah Rayne
‘I’ve been brought here from Buchenwald,’ said Alice. ‘I don’t know why I’m here on my own, though.’ She paused, aware of them studying her, trying to decide whether to give them her real name. Would the Buchenwald officials have sent her here as Lucretia von Wolff or as Alice Wilson?
Then the one who had spoken first, said suddenly, ‘I know who you are. You’re that rich baroness – von Wolff, that’s your name. Lucretia von Wolff. You make films – I’ve seen you on them.’
Well, at least that decision’s made for me, thought Alice.
‘In that case,’ said the voice who had asked where she was from, ‘we know all about you. You’re a spy, Madame von Wolff.’ She spat the word out as if it was poison. ‘You spied inside Buchenwald for the Nazis – we heard all about you.’
‘We have our own ways of hearing what goes on in the other camps,’ said a third voice, and there was a murmur of assent, threaded with hostility.
‘We have our own ways of dealing with spies, as well.’
Alice flinched at the angry hatred in their voices, and took an instinctive step backwards before remembering that the door was locked.
‘Are you here to spy on us?’ said a new voice, hard and accusing.
‘I’m not here to spy. I never have spied. I was working against the Germans in Buchenwald—’
‘Oh yes, of course you were,’ said a younger voice sarcastically. ‘Don’t you know all spies say that? “I did it for my own country…I was a double spy, working for Poland, or Czechoslovakia or the Ukraine.” That’s a load of shit, baroness. You had a very profitable little game going on in Buchenwald – we heard about your cosy dinners with Karl Koch and your sherry parties with von Ribbentrop.’
‘And now,’ said the first one, ‘you’re here to spy out our secrets and then go running to the Gestapo with them.’
Fighting to speak calmly, Alice said, ‘You’ve got it all wrong. What can I do – what can I say – to convince you?’ But even if she had not been recognized, her instincts were warning her not to disclose her real identity. She might one day be very glad to have Alice Wilson’s identity to escape into. ‘Truly, I never worked for the Nazis,’ she said.
By now the small flames had burned up a little and she could see the hut more clearly. The narrow beds were arranged in rows along both walls, and at one end was a squat iron stove with a metal cup carefully placed on its surface as if some liquid was being warmed. Several of the dimly seen figures seemed to be huddled around the stove, their thin hands held out to it. Alice, trying to take in as much as she could through the sick waves of exhaustion, had the fleeting impression of some kind of organized grouping, as if turns might be taken to sit around the stove for warmth.
‘I’m here because I cheated the Gestapo,’ she said.
‘How? What did you do to cheat?’
The voice was still hard and uncompromising, as if its owner was prepared to dismiss as lies any kind of answer given, but Alice said as levelly as possible, ‘I supplied false information about escapes from the camp. Several of us did so – we fooled the commandant and made it possible for others to get out.’
‘I say she’s lying,’ said a woman from the stove, who had not spoken yet. ‘Leave her to her own devices. That’s what we do with jackals who snoop for the Gestapo, don’t we?’
There was another murmur of assent, and they turned away, leaving Alice standing helplessly inside the door. Panic swept in again, this time at the prospect of being an outcast in this place. Shunned by the prisoners, and certainly the focus of the guards’ enmity, since they would know what she had done at Buchenwald.
The thought had barely formed when there was the sound of footsteps outside. The hut door was unlocked and the violet dusklight slanted in, showing up the bare floorboards and the sparse furnishings. But even before that happened, the tiny comforting candle-flames had been quenched and the accusing faces had melted into the darkness.
Four men stood in the doorway, all of them in the dark uniform of the Gestapo. The tallest of them stepped across the threshold, his lips thinning into a fastidious line as the smell of unwashed bodies reached him. A thin scar puckered the skin of his face from the cheekbone to the corner of his mouth. Sabre scar, thought Alice, as the searchlights fell across the man’s face. The duelling scar that was once a mark of honour among German officers. It gave his mouth a twisted, snarling look, so that just for a moment it was as if a wolf had donned a human mask, and as if the mask had slipped a little.
His eyes rested on her, and then in a terse clipped voice he said, ‘Baroness?’ It was not quite a question; it was more as if he was identifying her to himself, but Alice lifted her chin challengingly, and said, ‘Yes.’
‘I am Rudolf Mildner, chief of Gestapo at Kattowicz and head of the political department at Auschwitz. You are to come with us.’ He nodded to the men with him, and two of them grabbed Alice’s arms, so that she was forced to let go of her small bundle of belongings.
‘Where are you taking her?’ demanded the woman who had seemed to be the leader of the hut’s occupants, and this time there was an unmistakable note of protest in her voice. Alice could see now that she was younger than the others, and that she had the distinctive high cheekbones of an Eastern European.
‘She will be punished for her behaviour and her deceit,’ said Mildner. ‘She is an arrogant bitch who attempted to make fools of the Third Reich.’
‘It was not very difficult to do so,’ said Alice softly, and this time there was a definite wave of warmth from several of the women.
But Mildner’s eyes snapped with fury and he came closer, his thin lips twisting into the wolf-snarl again. ‘Tonight, baroness,’ he said, ‘you will be taught a lesson. It will be a lesson you will not forget, and from it you will learn that those caught trying to deceive the Führer receive no mercy.’
Alice was never to know exactly where in the camp the Gestapo took her that night. Auschwitz was too alien for her to work out its layout, and too big. In any case, the world had shrunk to a hopeless misery where time had ceased to exist or even to matter, and where all paths looked the same.
The months inside Buchenwald had taught her that to struggle against the SS or the Gestapo was useless, but she did struggle, although it was a hopeless sobbing struggle and she knew she would not escape.
Mildner’s men took her to a low brick building and pushed her into a long room that looked as if it might be some kind of officers’ mess. There were tables and chairs, and the semblance of a bar at one end with drinks and glasses set out. The curtains were drawn against the night, and an iron stove stood in one corner, roaring its iron-smelling heat into the room. Four Gestapo officers were seated at a table; they turned as Alice was pushed through the door, inspecting her with their eyes.
With a fair assumption of anger, she said to Mildner, ‘Why have you brought me here?’
He gave the smile that only lifted half of his mouth. ‘I told you that you were to be taught a lesson, baroness,’ he said. ‘And so you are. For my men it will be a very pleasurable lesson.’ He paused, and two of the men laughed in a horrid jeering way. Alice hated them.
And then a figure seated in one of the deep, high-backed chairs stood up and walked towards her. The light from the iron stove fell across his face, and there was a moment when one eye caught the red glow, and seemed to swell and to grow to monstrous proportions. Alice stared at him, a wholly different horror rushing at her.
Leo Dreyer. Leo Dreyer here in Auschwitz, as cool and as in command as ever. He was again wearing a monocle, the black silk string lying across his face like a sleeping insect, and even through her fear Alice could feel the authority that radiated from him.
‘So,’ he said, softly, ‘you thought you would escape the realities of Buchenwald by making that devil’s bargain with the fool Karl Koch, did you, baroness?’
‘It took you a long time to realize how much of a fool he was,’ retorted Alice.
‘It does not
matter. He is being suitably dealt with,’ said Dreyer. ‘You were more the fool to think you could double-cross us. But you, also, will be dealt with.’
‘How, precisely? And what is your idea of suitable? I ask out of a sense of involvement rather than vulgar curiosity,’ said Alice, and thought: well, that came out more or less all right, although there was a hint of a tremor towards the end. Damn.
If Dreyer had heard the tremor he gave no sign. He said, ‘Tonight, my dear, you are going to pay for your naïve arrogance at Buchenwald. Tonight Mildner’s men are going to draw lots for you.’
At these words the men moved forwards, and while two of them held her arms behind her back, two more undressed her. They took their time, laughing when she aimed a kick at them, laying each item of clothing on a chair, considering her body at every stage.
‘A bit too thin for my taste,’ said one of them, and the other said, dismissively, ‘But that’s the camps. They always look half-starved.’
They carried her to a long deep sofa, and one of them stood guard while the others grouped themselves around the table and took it in turns to cut a pack of playing cards set out by the youngest of the officers.
‘Highest to go first,’ said one of them, glancing at Mildner, who nodded carelessly. The men paused to refill their glasses: Alice thought they were drinking schnapps or perhaps kümmel. Some of them were clearly becoming a bit intoxicated, but none of them seemed incapable. Neither Dreyer nor Mildner took part in the card-cutting, and when it was done Mildner moved detachedly to the door, as if to stand guard, but Leo Dreyer remained where he was, one arm resting lightly on the high narrow mantel over the stove.
‘Try not to impregnate the bitch,’ he said offhandedly, and for the first time Alice saw a flicker of embarrassment on some of the faces and understood that while most of them felt no particular awkwardness or guilt about raping this traitor, they were uncomfortable at the idea of doing it in front of one another.
During the hour that followed Leo Dreyer scarcely took his eyes from Alice. He stood facing the deep old sofa, one hand leaning negligently on the high mantel over the stove, unobtrusively sipping his drink – except that there could never be anything in the least unobtrusive about him. Once he gestured to the young officer to refill his glass, but other than this he hardly moved. The light from the stove washed over him, and Alice knew that when the worst of tonight’s memories had faded a little (and please God they would fade), this was the image that would have burned itself indelibly into her mind. Leo Dreyer standing watching her, the hideously magnified eye behind the monocle washed to living fire by the stove’s light.
But what you don’t know, you vicious cruel creature, she said to this hateful image, is that after you threw me out of your house I lived among Vienna’s back streets and alleyways, and I survived by selling my body. And if I could cope then with being fucked by half a dozen men in one night, I can cope with it now.
The small private obscenity helped to steady her, and it brought the defiance flooding back. I can’t escape this, but I can try to disconcert these animals. How? Well, perhaps by reminding them who I am and what I have been. Leo Dreyer knew the truth about her, but for reasons Alice had not yet fathomed, he seemed to be letting the legend stand. So to these German officers she was still the infamous baroness – the decadent aristocrat whose lovers were said to be legion, and whose private entertainments were whispered to be Bacchanalian in the extreme. Lucretia von Wolff, rumoured to have committed every sin in the calendar, and whose sexual proclivities had been unfavourably compared to those of Messalina…
As the first man approached her, Alice smiled at him and held out her arms.
The small unexpected act did not stop them, of course – Alice had known it would not – but it certainly gave them pause. They glanced furtively at one another as if each of them needed to check his colleagues’ reactions before doing anything on his own account, and this brought Alice a small shred of courage and self-esteem. You see? she said silently to Leo Dreyer. You thought I would be beaten and humiliated but I’m neither of those things and I never will be!
Even so, what followed was an appalling ordeal. The men were all relatively clean, and most of them had clearly bathed or showered in the last forty-eight hours – Alice knew from those long-ago black days that this was something for which to be grateful. But the enforced and brutal intimacy inflicted a mental uncleanness on her mind that she feared might never wash away.
Only one of the men displayed any degree of sensitivity, and that was the very young officer who had poured out drinks. He was fourth in line, and as he approached her he avoided meeting her eyes as if he found the whole business shameful. But his excitement was stronger and more frenzied than the others, and when he finally shuddered in climax Alice cried out in pain from the uncontrolled thrusting. As he withdrew he put out his hand to touch her face as if in apology, and their eyes met. But then he seemed to recollect his surroundings and he got up quickly, turning away, embarrassedly fastening his trousers.
The lower half of her body felt as if it was one massive bruise, and she thought she was bleeding as well, although it was impossible to be sure because the sofa on which she was lying was a wet squalid mess from the men. ‘Try not to impregnate the bitch,’ Leo Dreyer had said, and most of them had withdrawn before reaching orgasm. One – a heavy, fat-jowled man – faltered after a time, and Alice felt him slide flaccidly out of her. But he reached a hand down, guiltily and furtively, and fumbled frantically between his legs until there was the sudden wash of hot stickiness on her stomach. A wave of nausea engulfed her. Dreadful! This man is a Nazi murderer – he probably took part in the massacre of Kristallnacht – and he’s masturbating on to me!
She had expected Mildner to take his turn, but he did not; he remained near the door, the wolf-snarl strongly evident, and when the men had all finished, he rapped out a terse order and went out with them, closing the door behind him.
Leaving Alice alone with Leo Dreyer.
She had thought he had not been physically aroused by the rape, and she had thought that like Mildner he had obtained his satisfaction simply by watching.
But he walked slowly to the sofa, and looked down at her, and said, ‘And now it is my turn, baroness.’
The pain was threatening to swamp Alice’s whole body by now, but from out of its clawing depths, she said, ‘Why do you still call me that? Why did you maintain that identity with Mildner and the others?’
‘Because tonight I am settling an account with the arrogant creature who double-crossed the Führer,’ said Dreyer. ‘It was Lucretia von Wolff who played her arrogant game inside Buchenwald so tonight it is Lucretia von Wolff I am punishing.’ As he unbuttoned his trousers and lowered himself on to her, Alice realized that far from being unaroused, either the sight of his officers raping her or his own burning hatred – or perhaps both of these – had brought him to an almost unbearable pitch of hungering excitement. And that he was about to slake that hunger.
He was far more brutal than the others had been, and he was vicious and pitiless.
Alice, already in more pain than she could have believed possible, finally slid into a semi-conscious state, where she was no longer fully aware of her surroundings but where the pain was still a monstrous black and crimson swelling tide hammering with rhythmic insistence against her body. On and on and on, until you wanted to die…On and on and on, until at last you knew you were dying, and you welcomed it, because once dead you would feel nothing…
And then swimming back to the surface for a moment and to realization again – oh God, yes, I’m in this dreadful place, and I’m being raped…Oh, for pity’s sake, reach your horrid climax – for the love of all the saints in the world, just come and let me fall back down into this uncaring darkness…
There was a final unbelievable wrench of agony, and she heard herself cry out, and then the darkness closed over her.
A slightly harsh, but vaguely familiar voice, somewhe
re beyond the darkness, said, ‘I think she’s coming round now,’ and another voice, also vaguely recognizable, said, ‘If only we had a drop of brandy – or proper bandages.’
‘No, she’s all right. She’ll recover. She’s a very tough lady.’
Alice opened her eyes to the thick-smelling atmosphere of the hut, and the concerned faces of the women who, a few hours earlier, had denounced her as a spy. She was lying on a narrow bed; two of the women were sponging her face, and there was a thick comforting pad of something between her thighs. Someone had wrapped blankets around her – they were thin and not very clean and the surface was scratchy, but Alice did not care.
‘You’re still bleeding a bit,’ said the woman with the slanting cheekbones. ‘But we’ve cleaned you up as well as we can, and we don’t think you’re in any danger.’
Alice sat up and her head swam. She started to ask a question, and then said, ‘I’m sorry, but I think I’m going to be sick—’ and at once the woman put a tin basin under her mouth.
‘Thank you,’ gasped Alice when the spasms had stopped. ‘I’m sorry – this is disgusting for you.’
‘Not in the least. My father was a doctor, and my brother was training with him. If the Nazis had not come to my village I would have studied medicine as well. My name is Ilena,’ said the woman. ‘Do we call you baroness, or my lady, or what?’
And again there was that flare of warning that came not from within but from without. Don’t give away any more than you have to. On the crest of this flare, Alice said, ‘Lucretia. Just Lu, if you like. It’s quicker.’
‘And it doesn’t have the Borgia ring to it,’ said Ilena, and Alice caught the dry irony of this, and suddenly liked Ilena very much.
‘We’ve managed to brew some coffee,’ said one of the others, carefully carrying a tin cup from the stove. ‘It isn’t very good, but it’s hot.’
Alice said, gratefully, ‘I don’t care what it is. Thank you.’ She sipped the coffee gratefully, and then said, ‘You’re being very kind to me.’
