by David Fraser
It was true that the roads had been cluttered with columns of mixed character, a few motor vehicles, exhausted horses and even more exhausted men: and every enquiry about the enemy had been received with shrugs. They were, they uneasily felt, not moving covered by the Wehrmacht so much as fleeing with it.
‘I believe,’ said Sister Brigitta flatly, ‘that we should try to get back as soon as possible not to where the Director told us he hopes to re-open our hospital, south of Brandenburg, but west of the Elbe. That is over seventy miles.’
‘Sister Brigitta, we have no authority –’
‘The Director did not know the circumstances we would find on the roads. It has been obvious throughout these last hours. We must keep moving westward. We must move at least to the west of the Elbe. We cannot stop except when absolutely necessary. If we are overrun we know what will happen. We cannot defend ourselves. There will be no mercy.’
She spoke dispassionately. All knew that she had little fear for herself. The wounded men, limbs aching, nodded. Fear lends strength. They muttered among themselves. The Elbe, as Sister Brigitta had said, was probably seventy miles away but east of it they could all scent the imminence of death, at best.
And so the little column became not a party ‘redeploying to a new location’ as Doctor Winckelmann importantly expressed it to various military police encountered on the way, but a group of refugees seeking personal safety and bent on escaping not only the enemy but the harsh measures of their own side taken against all, even at this last, terrible hour, who were less than absolutely obedient to authority. They moved as best they could and rested only when they could go no further. The sounds of battle, heavy gunfire, now rumbled on every horizon. And by night, every horizon was red with fire.
On the sixth day, Sister Brigitta said,
‘One more good march and a night’s sleep and we’ll see the Elbe!’
‘What happens the far side? How do we get across? There’ll be check points on every bridge, if it’s not blown. Where are the Americans?’
Nobody chose to discuss these questions, muttered without great concern. To keep going westward was to them the road to salvation and it was best to think no further. They knew that if they could reach territory which the Anglo-Americans would no doubt soon overrun they might – they just might – survive. Marcia’s heart beat faster at the thought.
‘We must cross the Elbe,’ said Sister Brigitta, ‘somehow.’ It had been a shorter journey than they had first calculated, agonizing though they had found it.
But late on the afternoon of the sixth day, as they moved along a small road running northwestward, they encountered a disturbing sight. A gaggle of country people, wagons piled high with possessions, fear rising from them like gases from a manure cart, met them coming the other way; moving not west but southeastward. A few words showed why. These refugees were trying to escape from the menace nearest to them, and Russian troops were already approaching their village from the south-west, while to the north more were, at that moment, moving rapidly toward the Elbe itself with nothing in their path. So the refugees said, desperate, incoherent, as they crowded round the little hospital column, each with new tales of horror spread like singed paper caught on the wind, tales of terror, burning villages, raped farmsteads, everywhere corpses, corpses. The eyes of the children were bright with fear and fatigue.
East of the great river, it now seemed that there were few pockets of territory to which the Red Army had not penetrated.
‘They are all around us,’ said Lise to Marcia. ‘All around us.’ They pushed on for a few miles and that night Sister Brigitta held conference in a low voice with Doctor Winckelmann. Thereafter she summoned the nurses.
‘We’re going to try to get the wounded, the ones that can’t walk, into villages. They’ll have to make out they’re sick members of the population. Everybody else will try his luck in getting away individually. We’ll divide bandages and medicaments between them, give them all we can. You girls stick together, hide, try to get west. You can do no more for these fellows.’
Marcia took Lise’s hand.
‘We’ll start right away. Now.’
‘You’ll start after we’ve done the evening dressings, given the patients as good a send off as we can manage,’ said the Ward Superintendent implacably. ‘Not before.’
‘And you, Sister Brigitta,’ said Lise timidly. ‘What will you do?’
They were standing in a clearing in a small wood. They had, as usual, hitched up as cover some tarpaulins carried on the carts. It was raining lightly but less cold than previously. There was already a touch of spring in the air.
‘Oh, me,’ said the gruff Prussian with something nearer a smile than Marcia had ever seen on her face. ‘I’ll stay with old Winckelmann. We’ll manage somehow. He’d be utterly lost without me!’
As they got ready to move off by themselves, Lise took Marcia’s hand and shook her head with great sadness. She whispered, even now haunted by the universal fear of the penalties of disloyalty,
‘Ah, Marcia, this is the end for Germany, you know. Of course these people have brought it on all our heads, they are evil, they deserve it. But I can’t help – although I hate them, I can’t help suffering deep at the heart for Germany. You can’t feel that, in a way you must feel happy. I can understand that. The Germans have been beaten! But it’s different for me, to say “The Germans have been beaten.”’
‘But dearest Lise,’ said Marcia, with a small touch of her old irrepressible self, ‘dearest Lise, to tell you the honest truth it has never – never, ever, ever – occurred to me that they wouldn’t be!’
Anna Langenbach moved slowly and aimlessly along the inner perimeter wire of the camp. For the hundredth time she wondered why she had not already been tried and condemned by some sort of court. She was under no illusions about the penalty for her offence – a penalty it would carry in any country, she acknowledged, with the extraordinary, fair-minded detachment which made such a mark on all who knew her. But it had not yet happened. She lived every day with death, but yet she lived. Every morning she imagined that there would be a harsh cry, ‘Prisoner Langenbach!’ And she would be summoned, a charge read, a perfunctory enquiry as to whether she had anything to say – and then? To kneel in a ditch perhaps, to receive a bullet in the back of the neck? To be strung up, ankles bound, on some rough gallows? It could not go on long. Every hour she died.
And yet she was still alive. After her arrest she was told she would ‘in due course’ face criminal charges. Meanwhile she was to be confined, and would ‘probably face further interrogation’. That had been in February. And since that February day, that day of agony when she had tried to say goodbye to Franzi, had seen him pushed away from her with a surly policeman’s hand on his shoulder, watched him looking back at her, trying to break free, starting to cry – since that day, now seventy-eight days and seventy-seven nights ago, she had indeed been confined. Confined for the most part in this terrible place. And she had indeed been interrogated, as they had promised she would be.
The confinement was worse than the interrogation. The camp was a place of internment, not for those awaiting trial. Her proper place, she supposed grimly, was a prison – in theory, at least, a prison for those under examination rather than for the condemned. But after a few days, and without explanation, she had been moved under the care of a sour-faced wardress by a train from Kranenberg – her own Kranenberg! By an irony the local prison was served from Kranenberg station. And from Kranenberg she had been taken northward, crammed into a horse-wagon with many others. Ultimately, she had reached the camp. At no time had anybody told her what was happening, what would happen, what had been decided. Once she tried to ask one of the camp guards.
‘I believe my case is being investigated. Can you please tell me
She was almost stunned by the flat of a hand once, twice, thrice across the face. The woman yelled –
‘Shut up!’
Anna turned away. Another in
mate had been watching.
‘You asked for it! They aren’t allowed to talk to us.’
‘I only wished to find out what is happening to me, I’ve not been condemned, I’m awaiting trial.’
‘Well, who has been condemned?’ said the woman with a snarl. ‘Do you think we’re all criminals here? We’re here without explanation, just like you.’
Anna realized that her situation was a matter of indifference to her fellows in the camp. Their concern was, somehow, to remain alive. This had now gone on for ten weeks. It was late April, 1945.
On arrival she had been given a striped prison suit to wear. Her head was shaved and she was ordered to scrub herself with carbolic soap in cold water. Shivering, she was then pushed into a hut where sixty other inmates existed from day to day, fearful, foul-smelling and enfeebled. And, above all, famished. In some camps, the prisoners told each other, there was work – you were made to work until you dropped, and then beaten until they tired or you died. In some camps you hadn’t a chance, nobody ever reappeared. This was an easy place. No work. You were left alone. The only difficulty was that everybody, quite quickly, was starving to death.
For as the weeks had passed, as Anna drew on her reserves of spirit to believe that all might one day be well with Franzi, even with Anthony, hoping nothing for herself, she realized that the most immediate enemy was hunger. It might, she thought, be best to try to die from starvation, since death must anyway be imminent. But she could not do it. She could not abandon the will to live, the struggle to exist for a further day, week, month, futile though the struggle might be. Supplies of food, cruelly inadequate as they had always been, were now barely reaching the camp at all. The guards looked well fed but the inmates (and she reckoned there must be several thousand of them, for the place stretched as far as the eye could see) were receiving only a tiny share of an evil-smelling hogs will every day. And for that tiny share they had to fight at the trough like beasts. In this part of the camp only women were confined, and Anna realized, with sickened pity, why so many of these women lay like skeletons in corners. They had, quite simply, been beaten in the fight for food.
At first Anna – strong and well-nourished by the standards of wartime – had instinctively tried to help some emaciated creature. She was roughly disabused.
‘Don’t try that! You can’t keep them alive. Let them go.’
It was a large, gaunt woman speaking, a virago with a grim, ravaged face. Somehow this woman had retained strength. Her name was Ilse Meier. Anna looked at her steadily.
‘Can one believe that? Believe that one shouldn’t try to help?’
‘Of course one can. One must. If any of us get out of this place it’ll be because we’re more determined and a bit stronger than the others. You’re strong. You’ve got a good body. You might survive. They’re giving us rations now for about one-fifth of the people here. That means four-fifths will die. It’s just a question of when.’
Indeed, large numbers were already dying. By the middle of April Anna had herself taken part in over twenty different burial parties. These consisted of gangs of prisoners ordered to drag corpses to a large open pit, a mass grave. At first, efforts had been made to cover it, and some lime had been spread. Now the numbers made this impracticable. The grave was open. The stench was foul. At first, Anna had been horribly sick at burial duty. Now she acknowledged it as part of existence. The dead could not lie in the huts. It had to be done.
There was no ordinary work carried out by the camp inmates. Camp routine was almost non-existent, except for the morning roll-call, hideous travesty of a ceremony, where rank on rank of skeleton-like, pyjama-clad figures stood in all weathers to be ineptly counted by the guards, stood for hours until they fainted – or, on several memorable occasions, actually died – on the parade itself. Apart from roll-call there was feeding time. And, for the rest, there was monotony and despair. At first, Anna’s old impatience flickered at the idiocy of it all. What did it concern the authorities who had created this hell, whether a few more wretches had died in the night? To what was the number relevant, the subject of such protracted counting and calculation, when only one person in five could be fed? There was no attempt that Anna could see to separate the prisoners by category or account for them. They formed one large, shapeless, suffering mass of sick humanity, unrecognizable as individuals, rough order kept by wardresses armed with long whips. Only death could bring release, or so it seemed for most of the time.
Only once was Anna reminded that she was a person, Anna Langenbach. Ironically, the occasion was her recent interrogation. She had already been in the place ten weeks, and she was very feeble. A wardress yelled her name on roll-call one morning, and she found herself being pushed along the central roadway which ran through an inner perimeter wire to the administrative compound of the camp. It was, she calculated, 21st April.
A man was sitting at a desk in the wooden hut. She stood in front of him, shaven-headed, pallid, legs threatening to give beneath her, hating the smell she exuded like them all. From somewhere she tried to summon the strength to face this man. She had prayed a great deal in the camp. She prayed now.
‘Lord, help me to find courage, to remain devoted to truth, to remember that they are all – the interned, the guards, this man sitting at this desk here – all are loved by You.’
The man looked at her as at some mildly repellent animal.
‘Your name is Langenbach. Your case is to come before a People’s Court.’
Anna heard herself saying, ‘I wish to ask why, if I am not yet tried or condemned, I am confined in this place.’
The man looked at her as if the question were self-evidently absurd as well as insolent.
‘You are interned here because you have, on a previous occasion, acted with criminal disregard for the fundamental laws of the Reich. You falsified the fact about the true paternity of your child. For that you have deserved internment.’
Anna had always expected this. She said,
‘You have no proof whatever to support such an allegation.’ She had always been determined to protect Franzi from – from what? She had confided in nobody except – once – dearest Frido.
‘No proof whatever!’ she said firmly.
The man at the desk grunted. To tell the truth, he said to himself, this accusation didn’t rest on firm ground. The only evidence came from the remarks of a self-confessed and now executed traitor in a pretty wild letter. The man had clearly been unstable, anyway; and you could hardly invent a more poisoned source. In enquiries around Langenbach he’d met astonishment –
‘The little Langenbach? That’s right, his father was a Luftwaffe officer, killed before he was born.’
‘The widow was heart-broken. No, I’ve never heard anything against Frau Anna, to tell you the truth.’
He had bullied, suggested, but been met by a wall of loyalty to Anna Langenbach and belief in her. Even when he’d broached the subject of the ‘very serious charges’ he’d found sheer incomprehension.
‘It’s hard to believe Frau Anna would help an enemy of Germany! Perhaps there was a mistake, she didn’t know who he was!’
Idiots! But on the question of paternity he was less sure. He continued,
‘Furthermore, serious charges of treason, of helping the enemy, are still being investigated. When they are ready they will be preferred against you. You may be sure of that.’
‘When will that be?’
‘In due course,’ said the man indifferently. He shuffled some papers and said,
‘Meanwhile, there are various points on which I require answers. The English prisoner you are alleged to have helped escape, Marvell – he has a sister. You know her.’
Anna nodded.
‘I want to know whether you communicated with her and told her that her brother was hiding at Schloss Langenbach.’
Anna’s limbs ached horribly. ‘Mein Herr,’ she said softly, ‘I have not seen Fraülein Marvell for a year, at least. I have written no let
ter to her in that time. And I supposed that this man’s alleged hiding in my home was to be the subject of an accusation. I can, in that case, hardly be expected to admit now that it took place.’
For Anna, useless though the attempt presumably was, had decided that she would do her damndest to brazen matters out if she ever came to trial. She would say that she had known nothing of anybody breaking in and hiding at the Schloss. She would say that Fraülein Wendel must have misunderstood her. She hoped for nothing, but she would go down fighting. She would certainly not admit the matter in response to irrelevant suggestions about Marcia. If this man lost his temper at her defiance, beat her, killed her, so be it.
Then the questions had come thick and fast, put to her with angry, bored impatience. Anna looked at him and knew that in his eyes she was an object, a number, an obscenely clad, noisome, female creature who could at any time be snuffed out at the whim of the Camp Commandant for some fancied act of insubordination, who had no right whatever to life and who yet was wasting time, wasting his, the interrogator’s valuable time because she faced serious charges and serious charges, affecting security, had to be dealt with scrupulously, exhaustively, according to exact procedure. Anna could see all this in his face as he snapped, shouted, yawned. He did not strike her. The questions did not bother her. She guessed – rightly – that they were directed at implicating the von Arzfeld family, including Marcia, with anti-State conspiratorial activities, as evidenced by her own actions and Frido’s. No other member of the family was remotely concerned with her own conduct, nor, she suspected, with Frido’s. But she guessed – again rightly – that the attempt to involve them was the reason for postponement of her own trial. The German authorities were pursuing every lead, scouring the shrinking Reich for the smallest stain of treason until the very end. After an hour he let her go.
When she shuffled back to the women’s camp she saw Ilse Meier.
‘Did they beat you?’
‘No. Just questions. And there’s no point. They’ll hang or shoot me when they want to. They go on probing and investigating for all the world as if they had time, as if it mattered. And we’ll all die soon, anyway.’
