Empire Day

by Diane Armstrong

  It was a steamy day and the air shimmered with heat. Under his grey felt hat his head began to perspire, and he had to stop several times to wipe the perspiration beading on his forehead. This oppressive humidity was the only thing he disliked about living in Sydney. Unlike Marija he didn’t miss the snow or the church choirs. There were far more important things to be thankful for, things she had no idea about.

  Australia had turned out to be a brilliant choice in every way. Australians were polite, trusting and ingenuous, and seemingly devoid of guile, which made life much easier than he’d expected. He still couldn’t get over the naive Australian selection officers in Berlin who had believed everything he’d told them. He’d been on edge when he’d arrived for his interview, and he’d come well prepared with a fabricated story and forged documents, explaining that he was afraid to return to his native land because his anti-Communist activities would put his life in danger. This was true, but luckily the selection officer hadn’t tried to find out why he was wanted by the authorities. Looking back on it, the interview had been a joke.

  It was almost too easy, like training hard for a sporting event only to discover that your opponents were kindergarten children. He could see that what appealed to the Australian authorities about him was his hatred of Communists, and he harped on that, emphasising that he was willing to do anything to expose their subversive activities.

  It was true. His abhorrence was closely linked with his patriotism. He’d been seven years old in 1918 when Latvia had been freed from the yoke of the Russian Empire. He could still recall the rejoicing in the streets of Riga as everyone waved flags and cheered at their nation’s new freedom. His usually taciturn father had had tears in his eyes as he’d hoisted him up on his shoulders and told him never to forget this historic moment, and he never had.

  While studying law at Riga University during the 1930s, Paulis met Viktors Arajs, a fellow student whose deep-set dark eyes and charismatic personality made a profound impression on him, especially when he spoke so eloquently about Latvian heritage and nationalism, and the need to protect it from foreign elements.

  Latvia’s independent days came to a brutal end in 1940 when the Bolsheviks invaded and shot or deported tens of thousands of Latvian dissidents, intellectuals and government officials to Siberia. Paulis remembered hearing the dreaded banging on the door at midnight. Two armed NKVD agents in long trenchcoats and hats pulled over their faces dragged his father and grandfather from their apartment because they were government officials and were considered enemies of the state. They never returned.

  When, after two years of Soviet oppression, the Germans attacked the Soviet Union and entered Latvia, Paulis, along with many of his countrymen, greeted the Nazis as liberators. Delirious with joy and relief, thousands of Latvians lined the streets and welcomed them with flowers.

  Not long afterwards, Paulis read a notice in the Teviya newspaper which called on patriotic Latvians to join a group that would help cleanse the country of Jews and Communists. He signed up at once. He couldn’t wait to wreak revenge on the Communists, and he was delighted to discover that the leader of the new militia was his former university colleague Viktors Arajs, after whom the militia was named.

  Paulis knew that many of the members of the Kommando were in it either for the money, the vodka, the plunder or the unbridled violence, but he had joined with loftier motives. The Germans had lost no time letting Latvians know that all Jews were Bolsheviks, and that they were their country’s real enemies. They said Jews had been responsible for the repression and massacres during the Communist regime, and had to be eliminated.

  At first, the Arajs Kommando played an auxiliary role. It seemed to Paulis that initially they displayed a lack of discipline: going on rampages, beating Jews and ransacking their homes, and setting fire to the main synagogue with a few hundred Jews inside. He didn’t approve of them storming the Riga ghetto and shooting all those children and old people, then leaving their bodies in the streets. He preferred disciplined behaviour befitting a quasi-military group.

  Paulis, who soon became the commander of one of the Arajs Kommando units, prided himself on the orderly way he organised the elimination procedure. First they lined up the Jews, then they loaded them into open lorries, claiming to be relocating them to a better place to prevent panic and hysteria. They drove them into the woods outside Riga where they pushed them towards pits that had already been dug. Then they formed a cordon to make sure none of them escaped while the German soldiers started firing. It was all done in a methodical, efficient way, although the Germans kept complaining that the killing wasn’t going fast enough.

  At first the Arajs Kommando’s role was rounding up, escorting and guarding Jews, and to kick them into the trenches if they resisted, but eventually they, too, got their chance to shoot the naked men, women and children they pushed into the pits. Paulis’s zeal in killing Jews and Communists sometimes exceeded even that of the Nazis, and he was proud that his enthusiasm was noticed and rewarded by his SS masters.

  When the job of the Arajs Kommando was done, and Latvia was what the Germans called Judenfrei, Paulis was put in charge of a unit that was sent to Byelorussia where they carried out punitive operations against partisans. This entailed killing the inhabitants of entire villages as reprisal against suspected Communist sabotage.

  What had spurred Paulis on during his unit’s activities on foreign soil was the conviction that, in getting rid of Communists and their sympathisers, he was helping his nation regain its independence because the Germans had promised that as soon as the Jew-Bolshevik menace was eradicated, and Germany had won the war, they would make Latvia independent once more. The bitter irony of that promise enraged Paulis to this day. Unfortunately, Germany had lost the war, and Latvia was in the iron grip of the Bolsheviks once more.

  Of those long days spent in the dappled forests, he remembered very little. It all seemed unreal now, as though it had happened to somebody else. And in a sense it had. He was no longer the soldier who had done those things. What he did remember was his shock when he realised how easy and meaningless it was to kill people, how hard it was to stop firing once you started, and how exhilarated you felt afterwards.

  He didn’t dwell on the inhuman shrieking of the women trying to protect their children, or their pleas to spare their lives. He was carrying out his nationalistic duty and was never swayed by their tears or entreaties. Some of them offered him jewellery but he wasn’t tempted. He’d already amassed plenty of gold and jewellery from the houses of the Jews they’d rounded up, and it was thanks to some of this booty that he’d been able to buy forged documents and, later, to set himself up in Sydney.

  It all seemed so far away now, as though it had happened to someone else, in another lifetime and in a different world. He didn’t waste time shining a torchlight into those dark, unfathomable recesses of his soul. The past was past and couldn’t be changed. But what he avoided thinking about in his waking hours often came back to haunt him at night, and he’d sit bolt upright in bed in the darkness, his heart pounding as he heard a woman begging him to spare her baby, or saw the pit heaving and oozing blood after it had been filled in.

  Sometimes he dreamed that God, a bearded, white-haired patriarch, pointed an accusing finger at him and consigned him to eternal hellfire. Paulis was panic-stricken. He was a good person, a caring son and a devoted husband and father. He’d only done his patriotic duty as any soldier would have done.

  People didn’t seem to understand that war sanctioned violence, and once it began, it couldn’t be controlled. If it hadn’t been for the war, he would have finished law and fought for the rights of the poor and the downtrodden. He would never have become involved in such violence or discovered the godlike sense of power that war had given him.

  Marija, who knew nothing about his wartime activities, had no idea why he so often woke up shaking and screaming. She thought he’d been an ordinary soldier and that his nightmares were the result of the t
errible things he’d witnessed in the army.

  He’d even lied to her about the Kriegsverdienstkreuz decoration he’d been awarded by the Germans. She and Lilija thought he was a war hero because he’d told them that he’d earned a War Cross of Merit for bravery in battle. Although he knew he should have left the German medal behind because it was incriminating, he hadn’t been able to part with it. He’d brought it to Australia and kept it at the back of a drawer in his desk where he was certain Marija and Lilija would never find it.

  As Paulis pushed open the door of the post office, he reflected that his only fear was that someone from Riga might recognise him, but as the Communists were still in power in Latvia, and most of the Jews had been deported to camps or killed on the spot, that wasn’t likely.

  Chapter 44

  When Ted came into the newsroom the day after his beach date with Lilija, his mind was on the photograph in his coat pocket. Perhaps he’d been mistaken about the uniform. As soon as he could get away, he would drop into the Anti-Fascist Society and check it out.

  He was brooding about it when a booming voice cut into his reverie. Norm Bell, the court reporter, was regaling the journalists with one of his court stories.

  ‘You should’ve seen her, peeling vegetables in the front row of the gallery in her fur coat while the case was being heard,’ he was saying.

  ‘How come the judge didn’t throw her out?’ someone asked.

  ‘He tried to shut her up a few times but she said there was no law preventing anyone from peeling vegetables in court!’ Norm was laughing so much that his flabby stomach wobbled. ‘“I’m just an innocent housewife and I’ve got to get the veggies ready for dinner!” she says in this genteel voice she puts on, and all the time she’s flashing her diamond rings and bracelets around, practically blinding everyone. Of course the whole courtroom cracks up, and the judge is banging his gavel, trying to restore order. And then the accused, a sinister cove you wouldn’t want to run into on a dark night, takes the stand. Whenever he opens his mouth, she yells out, “You tell ’em, love. Don’t let ’em bully you!” It was better than a three-ring circus.’

  Norm, who had worked on the Daily Standard longer than anyone could remember, understood the legal system and was well acquainted with those who regularly featured on both sides of it.

  He was a big bloke with a fleshy face, a nose the shape of a parsnip and a florid complexion that matched his colourful writing style. He pulled no punches, and after reading the front and back pages of the paper, most people turned to his column for inside information about crims, cops and lawyers.

  It was around two o’clock and Norm’s face was more flushed than usual, no doubt the result of yet another boozy lunch. Sometimes in the afternoons he sat hunched over his telephone, as though engaged in an intense and secret conversation, but they all knew this pose was designed to conceal a much-needed nap to sleep off the alcohol.

  Curious to hear more about the case, Ted edged closer.

  Being the youngest reporter on the paper, he didn’t like to reveal his ignorance by asking too many questions, so it took him some time to figure out that Norm was talking about Trixie Slattery, who was usually described in the tabloids as ‘the Queen of the Underworld’.

  The case Norm was referring to involved the bashing murder of a notorious hitman, and for once Trixie was in court as a spectator and not as the accused. With his talent for colourful details, Norm described the scene outside the court as the portly woman lumbered out of a white Studebaker driven by her boyfriend and climbed up the steps of the Central Criminal Court in Darlinghurst, pursued by an eager mob of reporters and photographers. Pausing dramatically at the top, she had adjusted her silver fox cape with a flourish and, while the large-format cameras flashed like lightning during an electrical storm, she held forth with a straight face about the evils of violence and the wages of sin.

  Norm turned to Ted. ‘You’re too young to know about Trixie,’ he said, putting his legs up on his desk American-style as he puffed on his cigarette. ‘In her heyday, she and her gang were the scourge of Sydney. Razorhurst, we called that part of town, because of all the slashing that went on. Old Trixie has been mixed up in everything — sly grog, prostitution, drugs, the lot. Her boyfriend used to get the girls hooked on cocaine to make sure they kept working.’

  Ted jotted something in his notepad and looked up. ‘Is she still in business?’

  ‘Is she ever! She’s got a string of brothels around Darlinghurst. Naturally she looks after the cops so they don’t raid her premises unless they warn her beforehand.’

  Jabbing Ted playfully in the chest, he said, ‘Planning to pay her a visit, are you? Make sure you take a rubber!’

  Ted flushed and wandered back to his desk. He was thinking about the callgirl known as Scarlett whose body still lay unclaimed in the morgue. He didn’t know why the girl’s murder haunted him. Maybe it was pity, or a sense of injustice, because no one else seemed to care. Or maybe because somewhere out there a mother needed to know her daughter’s fate so that she could end the agonising uncertainty and finally mourn for her. But he suspected that it had as much to do with curiosity as compassion.

  As soon as Ted filed his story that afternoon, he rushed from the newsroom and jumped on a tram to the city. At the Anti-Fascist Society, his impatient fingers leafed through the folder labelled Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. When he came to a photograph of a member of the Arajs Kommando, he took out Lilija’s photo and compared them. Despite the heat in the stuffy office, he felt cold. The uniforms and the armbands with the skull and crossbones were identical.

  The folder contained two translated interviews with Latvian villagers who had been questioned after the war about what they’d witnessed in the woods. They said they’d heard lorries arriving, and heard crying and yelling. They’d seen hundreds of people being pushed along a path by men with rifles, then they’d heard screams that made their blood run cold, followed by machine-gun fire, and had seen bodies falling like stones into the open pits.

  Ted’s hands were clammy and his heart was thumping too fast. He poured himself a glass of water and gulped it down, trying to calm himself. Perhaps not all members of the Arajs Kommando were cold, vicious killers. Perhaps among them were ordinary men like Lilija’s father, who had joined up mistaking it for a regular fighting unit, not suspecting that their duties would involve murdering innocent people, but were unable to back out when they discovered the true nature of their duties. As he read on, however, he realised that this possibility was very remote.

  As he waded through the file and tried to absorb the stupefying scale of the massacres, and the cold-blooded planning that had made them possible, he came across an article from a 1946 Riga newspaper. In the margin, someone had translated the headline: WAR CRIMINALS FLEE TO THE WEST. Although he couldn’t understand the text, he noticed the words Arajs Kommando repeated several times.

  The last item in the folder was a letter, and from the date at the top of the page he saw that it had been written by a Mrs Anna Vestermanis about five weeks before. Mrs Vestermanis wrote that while walking down a lane near the Hotel Australia, she’d caught sight of a man she recognised instantly. He was in charge of an execution squad in the woods outside Riga in 1942.

  I was shocked to see this man in Sydney, she wrote. He is a criminal and he should be in gaol. Please do something about him.

  For a long time Ted sat in front of the open file, staring numbly into space. While noting down Mrs Vestermanis’s address, he was wondering how to tell Lilija that the father she loved and admired had been a member of a death squad that had killed women and children. Even if she believed him, she would despise him for destroying her lifelong trust. Ted knew that he was about to confront the biggest challenge of his life, and that nothing would ever be the same again, for him or for her.

  Chapter 45

  A few days later, with the help of Norm Bell, who’d pulled in a few favours from his underworld contacts, Ted got in touc
h with Trixie Slattery. Gambling on her huge ego, he’d written to her saying he was planning a feature about the wild women of Sydney. She was his first choice, but if she couldn’t talk to him, he’d have to interview Babs O’Neill instead. Babs was Trixie’s sworn enemy, and she’d fallen for his ruse.

  As he walked past the row of old terraces in the quiet Darlinghurst street, the only sign of life was a middle-aged businessman in a grey suit and hat glancing around furtively as he emerged from one of the old terraces with a red light in its window.

  The bodyguard who loomed in the doorway when Ted pressed the buzzer wore dark glasses, a long black leather coat and a menacing expression. From his cauliflower ears, broken nose and massive hands it was obvious that life had given him plenty of opportunities to indulge a taste for violence. Ted sensed that this was a man who would beat you to a pulp in cold blood and then resume eating his lunch.

  He was glaring at Ted as though considering whether to bash him now or later when, from inside the house, a woman yelled in a voice altered by decades of smoking, drinking and carousing, ‘Let the bugger in and shut the fucking door!’

  No sooner had he entered the lounge room than he was beset by three Dobermans that jumped up at him, snapping and growling.

  Ted was backing away when the woman yelled, ‘Hey! Down! Stop the bloody racket, and get out before I take the whip to youse!’

  The dogs slunk from the room.

  The big-boned woman who fixed Ted with an intimidating stare of her cold hard eyes sent a shiver down his back, and he knew he was in the presence of someone who wielded unforgiving power. The Queen of Sydney’s Underworld wore a close-fitting toque over her elaborately coiffed hair, and a fox-fur jacket over her kaftan-style dress. Bracelets glittered on both wrists, and each plump finger flashed with diamonds or precious stones as big as knuckledusters.