‘I congratulate you on this wine,’ the guest said suddenly. He lifted his glass and waved it at Schmidt. ‘Austrian? Hungarian?’
‘French,’ Schmidt told him. ‘The cellar downstairs is an Aladdin’s cave of fine wines, Bormann, enough to last us for many happy years.’
‘Then I shall come back again and again,’ Bormann promised, and Hannah saw Conrad’s mouth twitch.
After the soup and a fish cake lying on a bed of mild pink sauce, there was a little wild bird on toast, its bony legs ending in white paper caps, like the socks her patients’ wore when they walked in the hallway. The officer on her left picked up the bird and chewed noisily, while everybody else peeled its small bones with knife and fork. They were drinking too much wine and laughing at Schmidt’s and Bormann’s jokes, storing them up to repeat to friends who were never going to be invited to dinners like this.
‘Our future lies in industrialization,’ Bormann told them, putting down his knife and fork and looking at them seriously. ‘We have the technical and managerial genius, all we need is a steady supply of workers. For that we must colonize the rest of Europe. We have already five million foreigners at our disposal and more will come.’
‘Bormann,’ Schmidt asked, ‘surely you agree that we don’t want the dregs of Europe among us? Now that we’ve eliminated such undesirables from the fatherland, why replace them with people who are no better than slaves? Our dear leader recognized long ago that the most important problem facing our Aryan culture,’
‘Is the purity of our blood.’
‘Exactly. A great culture can be destroyed from within by intermarriage, he wrote. By the breeding of inferior children, it poisons its blood, especially with the blood of Jews. But that disaster will not befall us. Every able-bodied Jew now goes east to work for as long as he can, and natural causes eliminate him when he is no longer useful. The women, the children, the old, who needs them? Mouths to feed!’ A finger curled under his chin and drifted across his neck.
The slice of lamb on her plate was warm, but the vegetables were cold. Hannah imagined the tiled kitchen in the basement, and the long walk from there to the dining room. If they’d sat around the table downstairs, and the poor little birds, the roast lamb and its rich fat gravy had gone from the oven straight onto their plates, how delicious everything would have smelled and tasted. But that was not what happened in grand houses. Or perhaps the food was served cold when the cook and servants were Dutch and the guests were German?
‘In this country,’ Schmidt said, ‘there have been many marriages between Jews and Aryans, more even than we have located. We have offered to sterilize the men, but the doctors are not cooperative, and in the end most of these men drag their wives and mischling children, their half-breeds, with them to the camps.’
‘Well,’ Bormann sighed, raising his glass to them all, ‘We have given our best to the Führer,
and he appreciates it. That is our glory, so let us drink to him.’
There was a long wait, after the plates had been taken away and before the dessert arrived. Hannah sat with her hands in her lap, her eyes on Conrad, who ignored her. Like everybody else, he seemed to be listening intently and approvingly, but she knew that slight frown that meant he was thinking of something else.
‘You know, Bormann,’ Schmidt said, turning to accept a dish of red current jelly from the maid, ‘our mission here has been to give the Dutch an opportunity to join the fatherland. Most have, willingly, and we are successfully eliminating that small number who resist, the Jews we deport, the criminals we execute. The rest, the Aryan, pure-blooded Dutch, are as sensible and as disciplined as any German, and they are learning that our regulations are for their good as well as ours. Pease return to Berlin and tell them we are succeeding.’ The guests nodded agreement, spoons clinked, Bormann asked for a second helping, ‘My favorite dessert,’ he explained, and the young officer topped-up Hannah’s wine glass and smiled.
Bormann’s car was announced just as they finished their coffee, and everybody stood up and went with him into the hall. When the door had shut behind him, Schmidt called out, ‘Iden!’ and Conrad, who had his hand on Hannah’s shoulder, moved away and clicked his heels. ‘In the sitting room, please,’ Schmidt ordered.
‘Come, Hannah,’ Conrad said, pushing her gently into a nearby room and over to a small chair near the window. She could hear laughing from the hall, auf wiedersehens and danke schöns, and then the front door slammed shut and Schmidt appeared.
‘Go away,’ he ordered, waving his fingers vaguely at Conrad. ‘Now, Hannah, here we are again.’ Pulling up a chair, he sat down with his knees almost touching hers and took her hands in his. ‘You are looking well, no, more than that, fetching! Conrad has good taste in clothing as well as in women.’
When he stopped talking, it was so quiet that Hannah heard the match he struck to light his cigarette, and the breath he took when he started to smoke it. He leaned back and blew a cloud of smoke up past their heads. ‘Tell me how you are,’ he murmured.
‘I’m fine, thank you,’ she began. He smiled as if to say he could see that, and it didn’t interest him. ‘I’m still at the hospital.’
‘And how is your friend? What’s his name? Oh yes, Adrian. And his sister?’ When she didn’t answer, he said, ‘Never mind, she doesn’t interest us. Ah, but the noble Adrian, what has he been up to? Come, my little spy, at least tell me something to pay for your dinner. It was the best meal of the week, wasn’t it?’
He was teasing her, not smiling and not expecting her to, and she looked at him cautiously and waited for him to become angry. She knew he would, Conrad did when he criticized her, and she didn’t say sorry and beg him to be nice to her.
‘Give me your hand,’ Schmidt ordered and, when she held it out, he turned it palm up and held his cigarette close to her skin. ‘Do you suppose this will hurt?’ he asked and, when she tried to pull back, he laughed. ‘What do you know about Adrian?’
‘He doesn’t tell me much, but I’ve been to his house.’
‘Where he makes radios? Hannah, one doesn’t need copper pipes to make radios. One doesn’t need drills and saws and packages of dynamite. Oh yes, my men have seen all this for themselves, we don’t need you to tell us what goes on in that apartment. What we need you to tell us is what he does when he goes out and disappears from our view.’ And when she only stared at him, he said, ‘Now!’
‘He told me he shot somebody. I don’t know who.’
‘Yes, you do.’
‘He said he didn’t want to shoot him, he only wanted to steal some records,’ she hesitated, felt the pressure on her hand increase and said, ‘His name was Cooper, I think.’
‘Do you? Well now, that’s another little case we can close. Not that we miss Cooper, but we arrested twenty other young men for that, too bad.’ He lit another cigarette and leaned back. ‘Was he alone?’
Hannah shook her head. She knew he’d taken somebody with him, but he hadn’t said who it was, only that it was a girl who got the door opened for him. Pam? She couldn’t believe he’d put his sister in danger. Schmidt was waiting for her to tell him something, make up a story, give him a name, lie, but she didn’t dare to.
‘He took a girl with him,’ she began and she told him how they got into the house and what Adrian had said about making it look like a robbery. When he asked how they had gotten to Muiden and back without being noticed, she said they’d gone by boat and no, she didn’t know whose.
‘And there were others? Other murders?’ She shook her head. 'You don’t know? Well, leave it.’
‘There’s a new group,’ she offered, ‘couriers, I think, all over the country.’ He leaned forward slightly at that. ‘Adrian said they need to pull everyone together. The messages from London don’t get to everyone otherwise, he said.’
‘Is he one of them?’ She shook her head. ‘No, or you don’t know? You don’t ask enough questions, do you, Hannah. Perhaps you need a lesson in interrogation technique.
We do these things much better, we Germans.’ He was threatening her, she understood that, and he stood up without looking at her and left the room.
When Conrad came in, he stood just inside the door looking at her, until she stood up and walked over to him. They went out into the empty hall, he opened the front door and they walked down the few steps to the sidewalk. ‘Go back to the apartment and change your clothes. I have business to take care of. I’ll see you next week as planned, Tuesday, yes, but now you should go back to the hospital.’ Without waiting for her answer, he lifted her hand, kissed it lightly and turned away.
In his bedroom, she took off the beautiful suit that had been stolen from somebody who was probably dead by now, and threw it on the bed. She would never wear it again, she would never go to a party again. She would do whatever Conrad wanted except that. She looked down at her hand. Schmidt hadn’t burned it. He knew he didn’t have to, he knew she was a coward. If he had, she would have screamed, he would have laughed, and she would have told him everything she knew about Adrian. But he didn’t have to, she told herself again, he didn’t have to. She’d told him anyway.
Halfway home, she remembered her anatomy book and almost turned back, but she had to get into the hospital before the doors were locked, and she hurried on. She could go back for it tomorrow at lunch time, Conrad would be up by then, and he wouldn’t mind if she just came in, got her book and left again. She wouldn’t stay to talk. He hadn’t asked about Schmidt, he’d sent her off as if he didn't want to know what his boss had asked and what she’d answered.
She loved him, but she didn’t know who he was. He was the masterful Gestapo officer wearing a gray uniform with the silver-embroidered runes that stood for the SS on his collar, the playmate with his shirt tails flying who taught her to Charleston, the man across the breakfast table in a frayed plaid bathrobe from London, yawning and reading her poems by Heine or Rilke. How could there be so many Conrads? Were there others she hadn’t met yet? And if she did meet them, would she love them?
The next morning, she opened her eyes to early morning sunlight, a cloudless blue sky, and a sun the color of an ancient gold coin. The enormous old oak that stood in the center of the otherwise scruffy hospital garden flourished leaves that, already in August, were marred by insect bites, their edges curling as they dried out and prepared to be blown or washed away by an autumn storm.
She folded back her blanket, shivered and coughed. She’d slept only a few hours and, when she did, had dreamed of Schmidt’s dining room table cluttered with dishes and glasses, everything gray with dust and the food rotting, and she was sitting in darkness surrounded by men smoking cigarettes and laughing softly, laughing at her.
In an hour she had to be dressed and ready to work, but she couldn’t fall asleep again. Best to start early and get it all done before lunchtime. In her half-hour off-duty, she would rush over and fetch her book, see Conrad, say sorry, though she didn’t know why she had to.
19 Pam, September 1943
Just before Mrs P was taken away, she told Sieny it was a good idea to get married, she would be safer if she had Harry to help her. Sieny loved him, he was a good man, and he agreed she should stay on to help as long as possible. He had permission to work for the Jewish Council and didn’t have to worry about being sent to Westerbork, at least not yet. If they had to, they could disappear, he had an address in Haarlem where there was room for them both.
Without Mrs P, Virrie did her best to keep the nursery running, the children fed and the staff calm. Sieny and Fanny went on bringing children out of the theater. When Pam offered to go with them, Fanny said, ‘It’s horrible there, you don’t want to, honestly you don’t. Anyway, there don’t seem to be so many children as there used to be.’
They were eating breakfast, and Virrie had her eyes on the three babies she’d anchored with diapers to their highchairs. ‘Mr Süskind told me yesterday that the SS are stopping the transports,’ she told them. ‘They’ve got all the Jews they can find, they’re boasting that Amsterdam is Judenrein, the Jews have been cleaned out! Truth is the rest are too well-hidden. He says they’ll close the theater as soon as the last ones go.’
‘What about us?’
‘We’ll be closed down too. He said we should get as many kids out as we can, and I should send you girls away as soon as that’s done. When they come to close us down, it will be too late to run.’
‘Is it definite?’
‘Oh yes,’ Virrie said. ‘Süskind says end of the month. That gives us ten days.’
‘It’s not possible,’ Pam said. She looked around the dining room, counted the children, added the three in the infirmary with sore throats and said, ‘We’ve got fifty-two children here!’
‘That many?’ Fanny asked. ‘We’ve been getting three or four a week out safely, but fifty-two? How can we do that?’
‘Süskind’s already talked to the student who coordinates the couriers. They can take every kid we give them, but they want the babies first, they’re the easiest to place.’ There had been trouble in the past with families who wanted to give back older children who looked so Jewish they weren’t able to leave the house. It made them restless and moody. And that made the people they lived with angry. If you were risking the lives of your family, shouldn’t the child be thankful?
‘He wants somebody to come and get some papers from him. He wants to get his secret administration out of there before they see what he’s been doing. Could you go, Pam, you can tell the guards he asked for you.’
‘Can I just walk out with papers?
‘If he thinks you can, you can.’
It was raining, and there was nobody guarding the door. Pam ran across the street with her coat up over her head, pulled open one of the doors and went into the foyer. After the fresh rain-washed air outside, the smell in the hall of food, sweat, urine and cigarettes made her gasp. Sieny had told her all the windows had been boarded up. The doors at the back of the theater were only opened to let small groups of prisoners in and out for their daily fifteen minutes of fresh air and daylight. Three or four hundred people used four toilets and four washbasins, people couldn’t wash themselves or their clothes, and Sieny said, ‘Can you imagine what it’s like if you’re menstruating?’ There was no chance to wash your baby’s diapers, either. She thought that was one reason why mothers were more likely to give her their babies than their older children.
‘Mrs P told us always to ask if the parents would let us find a safe place for their kids,’ Sieny said. ‘She said never never use the word disappear, because they’d misunderstand. Lots of people say no, because they have no idea what’s going to happen to them. Whatever happens, I guess, they think they’re the best people to care for their own children. I guess I’d think that too.’
‘What could possibly be worse than being over there?’ Fanny added. ‘That’s what they think, not that they might be murdered or starved to death!’
Pam stood with her back against the door, ready to push it open and run back to the nursery. She wouldn’t, of course, she could do what Sieny and Fanny had been doing every day for months. She could ignore the smell, the dim light of unshielded bulbs hanging where chandeliers had once been, and the noise coming from behind the double doors of the auditorium, the sound of many voices talking, arguing, crying, a sound like angry bees caught in a box.
Two SS guards were leaning against a wall of the lobby, one with a bottle of beer in his hand, the other reading a newspaper. ‘Halt!’ one of them called out. ‘What are you doing here?’
She took a step forward, then stopped and smiled at him. ‘Mr Süskind asked to see me.’ They looked at each other, the one with the beer bottle shrugged, and the other one waved his newspaper toward a door next to a ticket booth. It opened into a dimly-lit hallway with several closed doors along its length.
‘Pam?’
Before she saw who it was, she knew it was Marcus. He’d gone to work for the Germans after all, and somehow it didn’t surprise
her. She turned to look at him, expecting to see a uniform and a hand she wouldn’t shake.
He came down the hall, his arms out to embrace her. He wore a shirt far too big for him, the sleeves rolled-up above his elbows, shabby khaki trousers and shoes without laces. ‘I know, I look like a beggar,’ he said, ‘but then I am. Come on, let me hug you!’
They stood for a moment holding each other, then Pam stepped back and laughed. ‘I expected a smart uniform,’ she admitted.
‘Did you? Well, why not? I could be anything! But I’m not, I’m just Marcus! Where did you come from?’
‘Across the street. I work in the nursery, have done for months. Why haven’t I ever seen you?’
‘I don’t get out much, there’s too much to do here, and no place I want to go, except home to bed when I can.’
‘You work here?’
He grinned, ‘I do look like a prisoner, don’t I? No, I mean yes, I work for Mr Süskind. So far so good!’
‘I’m supposed to get something from him, do you know what it is?’
‘Come on, he’s waiting for you. Wait till you meet him! He’s incredible, Pam, honestly, I’ve never met anybody like him!’ He took her hand and led her down the hall and into a small room. ‘Walter, a visitor!’
The window of the office had been boarded up and the room was lit by a single dim lamp. Behind a desk on which account books and stacks of paper left only a small space to work, a man wearing a suit, a striped shirt and a neatly knotted tie, looked up and smiled. Without getting up, he put out his hand, and Pam leaned across the desk to shake it. ‘I’m Pam,’ she told him, ‘Virrie said you have something for her.’
‘For her kitchen stove,’ Mr Süskind said. ‘Papers to burn. I can’t throw anything away without the guards seeing it. Marcus, here, thinks he can take things home with him, but they watch him too.’
The Time Between Page 22
